CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
David Berman was born in 1903 in Odessa, Ukraine. Berman moved to the United States with his parents as an infant and had no memories of the Old Country. When Davey was a small child, the Bermans lived in Ashley, North Dakota, and then Sioux City, Iowa.
When he was old enough, Berman became a newsboy, selling papers on a street corner. He experienced intense anti-Semitism and routinely busted bullies in the chops, so successfully, in fact, that he quickly became the safety guard for all of the Jewish newsies.
As a teenager, he helped bootleggers truck booze into Iowa. There were reportedly two hundred bootleggers killed in a booze war in and around Sioux City, and Berman’s gun was quick. His survival was evidence of that. Though he was still a kid, his power grew until he ran twenty stills, many hidden in the false ceilings of Jewish living rooms throughout Minneapolis.
Booze might have been how he made his money, but gambling was his fascination. He dreamed of becoming a pro gambler. That crowd hung out in the Chicago House Hotel, so Berman hung out there, too, running errands for successful men and absorbing like a sponge all of the trade talk he overheard.
He sidestepped the truancy officer until he was old enough to officially quit school. Book learning he lacked. Street smarts he had plenty. What he learned was how to rig a game so that it wasn’t gambling at all. He could mark cards while his opponent was watching. He carried loaded dice in his pockets. He had skills, too, and could hustle at the pool hall at a tender age. His only arrest during his youth was for playing poker in South Dakota, which earned him eight months in jail.
For a time, he was a bank robber, knocking off banks in Laporte, Indiana, and in Milwaukee and Superior, Wisconsin. The Milwaukee bank resulted in his largest haul, more than a quarter of a million dollars.
He lived in New York for a while, became an ally of Vito Genovese while still was in his early twenties, and made big money kidnapping gangsters and collecting ransom. It was an incredibly dangerous game, but he went about it fearlessly. (It was probably during this time that Berman showed up on Judge Perlman’s radar.)
Berman got popped for his last kidnapping, and despite the fact that his captive refused to identify him, Berman drew a dozen solid in Sing Sing. He behaved himself and was sprung after seven and a half.
In 1934, he moved to Minneapolis, where his brother Chickie lived. There, he opened a series of gambling parlors that not only catered to Jews but also were next to Jewish restaurants, so a fellow and his date could make a night of it.
By 1938, Berman was accruing power even faster than he was losing his hair. As his hairline receded to the crown, he gained control of all gambling in the Twin Cities.
Davey’s biggest competition, largely a friendly one, came from Isidore “Kid Cann” Blumenfeld, who ran the area’s other Jewish rackets. Blumenfeld was born in Romania in 1901 and became known as the “Godfather of Minneapolis.”
Blumenfeld didn’t like bad press. Well, no hood did, but usually reporters were considered off limits for violence. Keep them in your hip pocket, and there would be no bad ink. But Blumenfeld didn’t follow that rule. In December 1935, when a publisher named Walter Ligget ran a series of articles in the Midwest American about Minneapolis’s Jewish mob, Blumenfeld didn’t just have him whacked, he whacked him himself, right in front of Ligget’s family, which was returning home after Christmas shopping. Ligget’s wife identified Blumenfeld as the killer, but a jury took less than four hours to acquit him.
All in all, Judge Perlman preferred to deal with Davey Berman, so it was he who received the phone call.
“Operator, get me the Hotel Radisson in Minneapolis,” the judge said.
Berman ran his bustling bookie operation out of the Radisson. The hotel was state-of-the-art at the time, built in 1909 and named after the seventeenth-century Great Lakes explorer Pierre-Esprit Radisson. The hotel’s construction changed the face of Minneapolis. The city’s downtown area, originally alongside the Mississippi River, moved because of the new hotel to its current location, centered on the corner of Seventh Street and Nicollet Avenue. The “old downtown,” renamed the Gateway District, quickly deteriorated.
The Radisson was also on Berman’s turf, which included everything from central Minneapolis to the west bank of the river, from the plush to the desolate.
Berman told Perlman it would be his honor to slap those Silver Shirt assholes around, and his first move was to call his competitor Blumenfeld to see if he wanted to join forces for a good cause. Blumenfeld was in, and together the men assembled an anti-Nazi crew.
A no-brainer for the crew was “Ice Pick Willie” Alderman, who prided himself as the greatest ice pick man in pro-killer history. Ice Pick Willie had worked out of Minnesota for years, but as a kid he’d been a New York boy, and he knew Meyer Lansky from those lucrative Prohibition years. He ran a bar up a flight of stairs in Minneapolis, and when in his cups would brag of his ultraneat kills. He would have fit right in playing cards in the back room of Midnight Rose’s in Brownsville.
Getting Ice Pick Willie to use his fists in a fight was going to be difficult. He wasn’t a big guy, and what there was of him was soft. He looked like a cross between Edward G. Robinson and Larry Fine, with an emphasis on the Stooge. Someone was going to have to keep an eye on him or else, sure as shootin’, there’d be a dead Nazi on the floor with his face in the sawdust and the tiniest of all possible holes behind his ear.
Other fighters included Davey’s brother, Chickie Berman, and a friend, Nathan Gittlewich, who operated a gambling parlor out of the Eagles club on Fourth Avenue South. Chickie didn’t mind a good fistfight now and again, but he liked to have advance notice so he could change into a fighting shirt. At most times, Chickie was a bit of a dandy, smoking expensive imported cigarettes and wearing silk shirts and French cologne. But once he changed into his fighting shirt, he’d roll in the gutter.
The Bermans and Gittlewich worked hand in hand with the legit leaders of Minnesota’s Jewish community, the Anti-Defamation Council of Minnesota—later known as the Minnesota Jewish Council and today as the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC). It is this organization and their carefully maintained records that are largely responsible for our three-dimensional understanding of the war between the American Nazis and the tough Jews of Minnesota.
Step one was to map and monitor all Silver Shirt activities. In charge of this intense intelligence gathering was Charles I. Cooper, former president of the Jewish fraternal organization B’nai B’rith. Cooper was also one of the founding members of the JCRC of Minnesota. Cooper’s man inside the Nazi movement was an undercover agent known to this day only as “SLW.”
SLW worked his way deep inside and reported back daily to Cooper. Cooper and his team gathered a list of names, obtained from the license plates of cars at Silver Legion meetings. The list was terrifying in that it included the majority of the congregation of the First Baptist Church in downtown Minneapolis, including William Bell Riley, the church’s pastor, who was a local Silver Legion leader. Riley gave sermons in which he advised his seven thousand followers to vote only for Christians.
The Silver Shirt movement in Minnesota leaped forward in 1938. William Pelley was acting less and less like a religious preacher and more like a war general. There were indications that the violent portion of Pelley’s campaign was on its way. He now traveled with forty armed bodyguards. Members were advised to keep sawed-off shotguns and two thousand rounds of ammunition handy when it came time to defend their homes, to defend “White Christian America.”
The rift between the Jews and the anti-Semites grew, largely because of the news from Europe. In March 1938, Hitler invaded Austria, and there appeared in every newspaper in the world photographs of Jews being forced to scrub the streets of Vienna with toothbrushes. Hitler annexed the Sudetenland section of Czechoslovakia in July. Jews in that area were forced to change their names to Israel so they could be more easily identified. Jewish passports were declared null and void. Hitler’s power grew in leaps and bounds, and this in turn caused the popularity of the Silver Shirt movement to skyrocket. Newspaper articles reflected that meteoric rise and the subsequent concern it caused with Jews and Jewish sympathizers. The strong connection between the Silver Legion and the KKK was noted. An editorial in the Minneapolis Journal read, “The spirit of the old Ku Klux Klan is being revived in Minneapolis, with a new name and a new kind of shirt.”
Minneapolis mayor George E. Leach reacted by banning pro-Nazi parades in Minneapolis. The mayor said, “It is my desire to prevent Silver Shirts, Black Shirts or any other anti-American organization from gaining a foothold in Minneapolis. I have asked the chief of police to enforce this ban. If you are pro-fascist and you want to parade in this city, you will be arrested.”
The Silver Shirts weren’t showy about it, but they defied the ban. One local Silver Shirt leader was Roy Zachary, and he gave well-attended speeches in Minneapolis on July 29 and August 2, in which he filled the air with unsubstantiated claims and bizarre conspiracy theories.
Zachary told the crowd that “the Jews” had kidnapped and killed the Lindbergh baby. He said that “the Jews” were attempting to take over the US monetary system. It was a problem that needed to be ripped out by the roots, he said. Zachary was fiercely anti–labor union, as he felt that this was part of the Jewish attempt to turn America communist. In particular, he criticized Teamsters Local 574, saying, “The alien forces that are seeking to undermine our constitutional government will take away our right of free speech and deprive us of our liberty.”
The mayor tried to put pressure on the Nazis by leaning on the owners of the arenas and halls where they gathered. Two such meeting places were the Ark Lodge Auditorium and the Royal Arcanum Hall, which were on the same block of First Avenue South off of Lake Street. (Both sites are long gone, replaced by the parking lot for an outdoor shopping plaza.)
The managers of those halls allowed the Nazis to use their auditoriums in July and August of 1938 but later claimed they didn’t know the nature of those meetings. They were shocked, shocked to learn that pro-fascist subjects were being discussed.
The Minneapolis media produced many editorials condemning Pelley’s army, but not all of them leaned that way. Some said that the press and the Jews’ “witch hunt” to dig out and expose the city’s Silver Shirters was even more frightening than the stuff the Silver Shirts themselves were saying.
The press fought back by exposing successful local businessmen who’d worn silver shirts, such as George K. Belden, the president of Associated Industries of Minneapolis.
Albert I. Gordon, who was both a rabbi and a union negotiator, wrote an open letter to Associated Industries, asking them to come clean regarding their attitude toward the Silver Legion and anti-Semitism. The firm said no dice.
Today, the Minnesota Historical Society is in possession of a typed document from October 1938 on Silver Legion of America stationery, with Pelley’s signature at the top printed as part of the logo. The document addresses the Minnesota gubernatorial race, then a month away, and made the most dramatic threat of violence so far against the state’s Jewish community.
The document reads:
FLASH! Confidential. SILVER SHIRT operatives, high in Government service, to-day (October 3) released a shortwave message for the benefit of Minnesota patriots. Decoded the message reads: “Governor [Elmer] Benson of Minnesota, yesterday secretly informed Dictator Baruch that Minnesota positively will find employment for, or otherwise take care of, 5,000 of the 77,000 Jews who will get the bum’s rush for criminal communistic and anti-Christian activities, in new German territories, in the event of his (Benson’s) reelection. Baruch, as we all know, is the Jew dictator who has controlled three national administrations.” No, you won’t read about that criminal plot in the Jewish-controlled daily newspapers of Minnesota. But it’s a fact! And what are you going to do about it? Listen, loyal Silver Shirt, I’ll tell you exactly what can be done. Get out this evening, and every evening till election day and expose Benson’s plot to trusted relatives, friends and acquaintances. With Jews in control of all-important business, almost [paper torn] on the State pay roll, and probably 10,000 being supported by the taxpayers of this State, we already have a Jewish problem that probably cannot be settled by peaceful means. If you don’t want Jewish Communism with resulting violence, blood-shed and civil war (and, of course, nobody does) get out at once and help defeat Benson and his criminal cohorts—with Ballots. If it can’t be done with ballots, no, there must be bullets later! Get busy!
The document was signed only with the typed letters “H. G.”
Governor Benson was running for reelection as part of the Farmer-Labor party. His opponent was Republican Harold Stassen. The threat from the Silver Legion was clear. If Stassen didn’t win, there would be violence and bloodshed. Shooting a Jew would become every decent citizen’s patriotic duty. It’s impossible to tell how much influence this campaign had on the election, but Stassen was elected governor of Minnesota, and the Silver Legion threats did not need to be carried out.
In the meantime, Charles I. Cooper’s list of known pro-fascists grew and now included several Minneapolis police officers. One cop was a Silver Shirt recruiter.
At the Radisson downtown, Berman’s crew was ready for action. All they needed was the word of when and where the next Silver Legion meeting would be held, and they were eager to go to work.