CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
In Cleveland, Ohio, on the southern shore of Lake Erie, during the first half of 1938, the primary tool used to combat Nazism was the boycott. An organization called the League for Human Rights Against Nazism, led by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, organized the tactic, and German-American businesses took a measurable hit.
In that city, rather than fights and riots, it was more a matter of dueling rallies. The Silver Legion had their events, which drew an audience in the hundreds, but the League’s rallies drew in the thousands.
Nonetheless, Judge Perlman put together a small Nazi-busting squad that covered the turf along the southern edge of Lakes Erie and Ontario. Perlman’s first call went to the number one Jewish gangster in the Cleveland region, Morris Barney “Moe” Dalitz, who shared the power in the region with three others: Morris Kleinman, Sam Tucker, and Louis Rothkopf.
Dalitz was born December 25, 1899, in Boston, but grew up in Detroit. As a youth, he had deep-set and well-shadowed eyes over a beak of a nose and an easy smile that could go cold as ice in the blink of an eye. He was all nose and Adam’s apple as a kid but in adulthood grew into his face. He never grew tall, however, stunting at five-three.
As a young man, he worked in his parents’ laundry and first turned to crime when he was nineteen, after the Volstead Act went into effect. The family business made a quick transition. Box trucks formerly used to haul laundry now hauled booze.
He worked his way up the syndicate and was a member of the Purple Gang—the notorious Jewish mob of bootleggers and hijackers who terrorized Detroit throughout Prohibition—while still in his twenties. He accrued a huge chunk of a booze empire that encompassed Canada and Mexico and a large portion of the United States. You couldn’t drink in Galveston, Texas, without Moe getting a slice.
When Prohibition transitioned with a thump into the Depression, Moe again shifted gears and went into gambling. He knew that in tough times men became desperate and fixated on get-rich-quick schemes—and where better to flex that muscle than over a roulette wheel?
He opened a parlor in Detroit. Moe was afraid of nothing, but there was too much competition in Detroit, so he relocated in Cleveland. As had occurred during his booze days, his business grew and grew. He expanded into Cincinnati, Ohio, and Covington, Kentucky, across the river.
In 1938, when it came time to beat up Nazis, he was operating a chain of parlors in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. Plans were in the works for a new one to open in West Virginia. Moe was still married to his first wife, Edna. Two more wives and a live-in girlfriend would follow.
First to be volunteered for Dalitz’s Nazi-busting squad was Alex “Shondor” Birns, the Cleveland racketeer. Birns was once called Cleveland’s “Public Enemy Number One.” You can’t buy publicity like that.
Birns was born in 1907 as Alexander Birnstein in the town of Lemes, which was in Austria, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia, depending on when you looked at the map. Of all the Jewish hoods, Shondor was the one most apt to be mistaken for a gentile. He looked Irish, with light hair and a flat face, small eyes, and shell-like ears. When he was angry, his face reddened to the point that it glowed. When that happened, somebody was in big trouble.
His nickname, Shondor, was short for Alexander, but with a thick accent. He came to America with his parents as a child and lived in the Jewish section of Cleveland, which flanked Woodland Avenue. He was athletic, a swimmer and baseball player. When he was thirteen, his parents operated a ten-gallon still out of their home, making rotgut. His mother died horribly when their still exploded and she caught fire. She ran into the street—a human fireball—and died the next day.
After a brief stint in an orphanage, he quit school and joined the US Navy, but he was discharged after half a year when they discovered he was underage. He returned to civilian life an angry kid and developed into a vicious street fighter, a skill that would serve him well in his 1938 patriotic endeavor.
He was caught stealing a car in 1925 and served eighteen months in the Mansfield Reformatory. Days after he was released, he was back in trouble, charged with assault after breaking some schlub’s jaw in a road-rage incident.
In 1933, he joined Maxie Diamond’s gang and worked his way up the mobster ranks. He was charged with manslaughter in a drive-by shooting incident but was quickly acquitted by twelve jurors who knew what was good for them.
When Dalitz gave him his new Nazi-busting assignment, he was working protection for Cleveland’s whorehouses and was by all accounts popular with the ladies. These were high-class joints with clients who were judges and politicians. Birns was perfect for Moe Dalitz’s purposes.
Dalitz next recruited Hyman “Pittsburgh Hymie” Martin and one of his primary competitors, Louis Rothkopf. Unlike Pittsburgh Phil in Brooklyn, Pittsburgh Hymie had actually been to, had even killed in, the Steel City. His most noteworthy facial feature was his schnozz, straight as an arrow and pointy as an arrowhead at the tip.
Rothkopf came to Cleveland via Brooklyn and had been a member of the Bugsy and Meyer Gang as a kid. He was wide and tall, with a widow’s peak hairline. Too cumbersome to be a boxer, Rothkopf could have made a living grunting and groaning in pro wrestling had he chosen to. Fighting Nazis, that grappling body would serve him well.
Martin, Rothkopf, and Dalitz had worked together before and were suspected to be the triumvirate behind the assassination of Cleveland City Councilman William E. Potter in 1931, back when everything still had that new-Depression smell. Hymie was the only one of the three arrested, however.
Here’s what happened:
Potter was under investigation regarding corruption in a land deal when he disappeared. After five days missing, he was found dead in a recently rented apartment, a single bullet through his head. The landlord at the death scene said someone calling himself “M. J. Markus,” a fellow who looked a lot like Hymie, had rented the apartment—so Hymie was the one arrested. As Hymie was being cuffed, he wore a light gray fedora with the brim turned down low, a brown suit, a long blue chinchilla overcoat, a white scarf, and “highly polished” pointed shoes.
He denied everything. In fact, he was offended at the very notion of his guilt.
“How could you think me a killer?” he asked, placing blunt fingertips on his vest. “I’m a rumrunner, a gentleman,” he said, chin up.
Rum was the key to his alibi. He claimed he was moving a load of whiskey and was with several people who would alibi him.
Hymie was convicted at his first trial on the jurors’ eleventh ballot and sentenced to sizzle at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown. An appeal earned him a new trial, at which he was acquitted after Martin’s defense attorney—William Minshall, later a congressman—successfully argued that Potter killed himself.
Rothkopf, the third member of the alleged team, was also a bootlegger who’d moved onto other scams—gambling, real estate—since the end of Prohibition. He did not operate a series of stills like many gangsters. He operated only one, but it was the largest in the United States, perhaps the largest still ever in the United States.
As had occurred in other U.S. cities, Rabbi Silver placed spies inside Cleveland’s local Silver Legion lodge. When the Jewish gangsters disrupted “secret” meetings, the Germans looked around for the mole who was ratting them out. The internal distrust was more harmful to the Nazis than the actual attacks. Now everything was shrouded in suspicion.
Dalitz’s crew was familiar with protection rackets, so the first phase of their operation was simple. They made bad things happen to businesses owned and operated by Nazis.
The most violent encounter between the Cleveland gangsters and the Silver Shirts occurred at a meeting held in a private home, the Martin Gall home on Riverside Avenue in the Brooklyn Centre section of the city. (The house is still there and now rests on the south bank of the Medina Freeway.)
To remain surreptitious, the Silver Shirts crammed as many people as they could into each automobile, so the number of cars parked outside would not indicate that something was going on. Cars arrived holding so many Silver Shirts that you would have thought they were clowns in the circus.
This meeting had about forty-five Silver Shirts in attendance. All of the curtains were drawn. The two front rooms were emptied of furniture, and rows of chairs were set up. The gangsters, who knew all about the time and place of the meeting because of Rabbi Silver’s spies, did not enter the home, but rather stayed outside and “accosted” the Nazis as they came in.
One Nazi, a fellow named Hugh Stanley, arrived at the meeting disheveled and bruised. He told the others that the men who had smacked him around outside were the same ones who were attacking German businesses in Cleveland. Stanley explained that he knew what he was talking about because he’d served in the US Army Intelligence Service inside Germany during the First World War and knew a little something about infiltration.
Again, the Nazis looked at each other. Who was it? Who was the man who was betraying them?
A Western Reserve University professor at the meeting stood and openly accused another attendee of being a spy. The main speaker at the meeting was William Pelley’s adjunct, Field Marshall Roy Zachary, who laid out the future plans of the Silver Legion, and sure enough there was a spy in the audience.
We know because details of the meeting appeared, including verbatim quotes from Zachary’s speech, in the next day’s Cleveland newspapers, including Zachary’s conclusion that it was inevitable that one day Nazi Germany would conquer the world.
In the meantime, the Bund took a quick look at Cleveland, saw how Pelley’s crew was struggling there, and decided to pass the city by. Fritz Kuhn ordered his traveling Nazi circus eastward, setting his eyes on other medium-sized Great Lakes cities in New York with notable German-American populations: Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse.
In Buffalo, a group of 150 agitators infiltrated a Bund meeting. This included Dalitz’s crew, who, like Meyer Lansky’s crew in New York, donned American Legion and VFW hats as disguises.
Also filling the back rows were Jews from the legitimate world and gentiles who didn’t like Hitler just because. In fact, joining the cause were American patriots of all stripes who thought that flying a swastika next to an American flag was a good reason to get your nose busted.
According to contemporary reports, this was no sneak attack. The outsiders pushed their way into the hall and immediately began to heckle the main speaker, Kuhn’s second-in-command, William Kunze, who had just reached the podium.
Kunze had managed to say nothing more than danke schoen when the trouble began. The heckling intensified each time Kunze started to speak, and he never really got a sentence out. The speech went undelivered.
Assemblyman Frederick Hammer of Buffalo ran down the aisle, rather athletically leaped onto the stage, and began to deliver a speech of his own. As Hammer was a man with iron lungs, his words rang clear throughout the auditorium without amplification.
“I have relatives who fled Germany because they did not like the military aggression,” Hammer said.
There came a German-accented voice from one of the front rows: “Coward!” it said.
“Come outside with me, and we will settle that right now!” Hammer exclaimed, putting up his dukes.
The voice in the crowd fell silent, and fists still clenched, the assemblymen turned to the podium.
“I demand Mr. Kunze that you recite the preamble to the U.S. Constitution,” Hammer yelled.
Dalitz, Rothkopf, Pittsburgh Hymie, Shondor, and a handful of the other boys from Cleveland shouted to Kunze that he had better salute the American flag if he knew what was good for him. Kunze refused, and that lit the match.
A scuffle began in the back, and there were the sounds of female screams, then a commotion as several women near the back headed for the exit to get out of harm’s way.
In the blink of an eye, all of the agitators had found a dancing partner and were unleashing haymakers. A full-fledged riot broke out. As always occurred, the gangsters had an appetite for violence that overwhelmed their Aryan foes. Germans fled and cried and covered their faces with their hands.
A United Press reporter inside the hall at the time of the fight said he was amazed that no one was killed. Eyes were blackened, noses broken, lips split, and skulls well lumped, but no one stayed unconscious for long, and everyone was more or less ambulatory by the time the police arrived.
There had been a puny police presence at the Bund meeting, fifteen cops outside the hall, and when they heard trouble inside the hall, they were unsure what to do.
According to Buffalo police Lieutenant Alfred O. Gardner, the policemen concentrated on getting the top-rank Nazis off the stage and out of the hall safely. Kunze objected to leaving, but a pair of cops took him each by an elbow and escorted him off the stage and out a rear exit.
The fight was allowed to exhaust itself before police reinforcements arrived, five squads strong. The Buffalo police were pleased to find that their work was easy. All they had to do was blow their whistles a couple of times and everybody who could walk left the hall without complaint.
The Nazis were slower to leave the scene, many of them looking down at bloodstained shirts. There was a lot of blood and blackened eyes, but according to an Associated Press reporter, “No great damage was done.”
The hall emptied, and the show did not go on.
Just outside on the sidewalk was a small pile of Legion and VFW hats. The gangsters had slipped away. An Associated Press reporter grabbed one of the now hatless infiltrators and asked who they were, who did they represent, what was their beef with the Bund?
“We’re Jewish war veterans, but we are not from any organization. Our activities are private,” the man said. He wiped his knuckles on his pants and was gone before the reporter could get out another question.
The reporter continued trailing combatants until he found an agitator who was more eloquent regarding the politics of the matter. This one said that the Jews were there because they objected to Kunze’s denunciation of the Committee for Industrial Organization and objected to the swastika flag on display and to the fact that Bundists gave each other the Nazi salute.
Kunze later was cornered by the same reporter and gave his usual public relations bullshit answer: “Our job is to fight subversive influences in the United States. We want to make sure that no small racial minority gains control of the U.S. government. We are also opposed to the CIO and to marriages between Aryans and Asiatics.”
No, he went on, they were not Nazis, but they thought the fake news was giving the Nazis in Germany a bad name. Hollywood movies and radio programs were spreading false information regarding events in Germany. The US, he said, lacked a free press.
“The newspapers determine what policies should be adopted,” Kunze concluded.
A few days later, on a Tuesday evening, the Bund tried it one more time and held a rally in Syracuse. They quickly learned that trouble was following them. The leader of the Bund’s Syracuse branch was Max Haas. An estimated one hundred legitimate American Legionnaires were in the hall as Haas spoke, while outside was a gang of toughs, no doubt Dalitz’s boys. The Legionnaires inside disapproved of the Bund’s message. They heckled but remained peaceful.
Some of the thugs outside wore Legionnaire hats too, but theirs didn’t fit as well, and their commitment to keeping the peace was dubious.
Haas was heckled off the stage with shouts of “Go back where you came from!” and “You’re just a dirty Nazi!”
When Haas was escorted out of the arena to his car, the boys outside took over and smashed his headlights.
(Haas subsequently went into hiding. The next day, when reporters sought him for a follow-up story on the riot, Haas was nowhere to be found.)
When the hall emptied, the “protesters” hungrily lit into the exiting Germans. The cops showed up noisily and, to the gangsters’ delight, used their batons to lump up a few Nazi heads of their own.
Standing over a fallen Nazi, one hood was overheard to say, “Next time we ain’t gonna be so nice.”
That was food for fascist thought, as the Bund was scheduled to hold a meeting down the road in Rochester in just three days.
After the Syracuse riot, the leader of the local Legionnaire branch, Ronald Brown of Fayetteville, New York, said he had no idea who those men outside the hall were, but they weren’t Legionnaires. (Judge Perlman, reading that in the New York papers, must’ve laughed.) The Legion, Brown emphasized, had used no violence in Syracuse. They were using the Law not their fists. They were petitioning the county district attorney to have Bund leaders brought up on sedition charges. His men were going to meet and formulate a plan for rapid assembly, just in case a situation came up in which they “were all needed at once.” The district attorney, Donald Mawhinney, said his office was investigating the violence outside the hall following the Bund meeting.
In Rochester, on the south shore of Lake Ontario, there was no local branch of the Bund, but there were German Americans, so Kunze thought it might be a good city in which to recruit. Kunze was scheduled to speak in Rochester in a large conference room in the Powers Hotel on Main Street West. The hotel, considered one of the Flower City’s finest, had opened in 1883.
The Bund event in Rochester turned into a major flop when only a couple dozen people showed up. This may have been because people were afraid of the violence that had marred Bund events in Buffalo to the west and Syracuse to the east, or it might have been simple lack of interest.
The Bund announced to the press that the meeting had been canceled because of phone threats. This was a complete falsehood. There had been no phone threats, and the meeting wasn’t canceled as much as moved to a cozier space where the handful of attendees would be more comfortable and within arm’s reach of a fresh beer. The meeting went on, but in the back room of a bar and restaurant on Clinton Avenue North.
Asked for comment, representatives of the Powers Hotel said they were relieved to be rid of the Bund. Hours before the meeting was to start, they revealed, fifty “shifty-looking men in American Legion hats” had begun cracking their knuckles and flipping silver dollars in the plush hotel lobby, crystal chandelier above and tessellated floor below, making management extremely nervous.
Kunze, some other Bund members, and the estimated twenty-five attendees were escorted out the hotel’s back door onto Fitzhugh Street and, via a convoy of Fords and one Packard Twelve, moved two miles northward to the Nazi-friendly bar.