PART ONE
Once evil is invited in, tremendous effort is required to show it to the door and kick its cloven hoof off the threshold.
—E. A. BUCCHIANERI
CHAPTER ONE
The Jewish migration to the United States began in the nineteenth century, largely from central Europe. Jews arrived alone or in families, speaking a variety of languages (German, Yiddish, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, etc.), dressing in the Old World style and retaining their Orthodox piety.
The largest number came from Russia, where they had grown increasingly unwelcomed in their own villages, in their own homes. In 1881, laws were passed that limited the Jewish population’s access to rural areas, forcing them into overcrowded villages in the western provinces. Even then, they fled the shtetls as government-stimulated pogroms (the Russian word for “devastation”) flattened their homes and turned their eyes to the New World.
In 1882, there were about a quarter of a million Jews in the United States. By 1924, that number had grown to four million.
With each generation, Jews in the New World modernized and Americanized, both in dress and style of worship, until the fourth decade of the twentieth century, when they were as much in search of the American Dream as were the blue bloods that could trace their roots back to Plymouth Rock. That dream was most in focus when it was projected onto silver screens inside palace theaters built by Jewish moguls like Marcus Loew and Adolf Zukor.
As a centerpiece of Jewish communities, however, the cinema remained for most Jews only a distant second to the synagogue. Temple was the primary gathering place, providing both spiritual and social services.
For most Jews. But not all.
While some Jews’ lives were dominated by Old World religious practices—services twice a day, strict dietary laws, separation by gender, abstinence from labor on the Sabbath, Hebrew classes for the men, ritual baths for the women, and such—there were also teenaged boys of the 1920s who sought to avoid a life of shopkeeping or factory drudgery and planned to go into other fields—like crime. They caused their fathers to pray for their lost souls and broke their mothers’ hearts.
They ran wild, became rebellious to the bone, played hooky, and snuck into the movies. They formed gangs and fought over turf sometimes as small as a lone street corner.
They rebelled for a reason. They were observant and saw how things were. Jews in America were not free to pursue happiness to anywhere near the extent that gentiles enjoyed. Christians blocked many pathways to prosperity, so Jews became shopkeepers, butchers, tailors, and so on, for the simple reason that these were the jobs they were allowed to have. They worked hard and they remained poor.
Rebellious young men decided not to follow in their fathers’ footsteps and rather took up career paths via which a Jew could become rich: show business, boxing, and, of course, the rackets. Teenaged Jewish gang members graduated into organized crime. During the 1920s, that meant bootlegging. When Prohibition was repealed, they moved into other rackets: policy banking (also known as “the numbers,” an illegal lottery), extortion, murder—sometimes losing their Jewish accents in favor of a cheap imitation of movie gangsters like Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson.
Like all boys, they kept their heroes close to their hearts: baseball players, fighters, but especially Jewish gangsters. To borrow a phrase from historian Rich Cohen, Jewish boys had “a favorite gangster the way Catholics have patron saints.” They imagined the Jewish hoods to be just as cool as the Hollywood actors who portrayed them, and they were often right. Jewish gangsters did not cower from danger; they were the danger.
The prototypical Jewish gangster was Edward Osterman, whose cowlicks rendered his hair comb-resistant, sticking up in the back like Alfalfa’s no matter how many glops of Murray’s Superior Pomade he applied. His cratered face was an homage to the smallpox he’d survived.
Even as a young man, Osterman was jowly, with thick lips pulled into a perpetual sneer. His nose was flat, or had been flattened so it was difficult to see in profile. He was known on the street as Monk Eastman, born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, son of a restaurant owner.
His dad had tried to set up Monk in business, but Monk had other ideas and took a bouncer job at New Irving Hall. The establishment would later clean up its act and become known as the Yiddish Art Theater, but when Monk worked there, it was a rough joint, and he made a name for himself by wading into fights and tossing the combatants on their ears into the bricked street out front.
Tough guys tried to take him on, bigger men, but Monk had fists of lightning, threw short and accurate punches to damaging effect. He was so tough that, despite his unruly hair and pocked face, women loved him one-two-three.
Ah, but even the toughest men are not bulletproof. Monk mixed with ambitious criminals and didn’t live to be old, shot five times, and killed in front of a Fourteenth Street café on December 26, 1920.
The next famous superstar Jewish gangster to come down the pike was Arnold “the Brain” Rothstein, who grew up rich on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His father, Abe, was a successful businessman known for his kindness and called by his neighbors “Abe the Just.” That kindness didn’t wear off on his son. Arnold had cold, dark eyes that made all in his company feel inferior, insignificant perhaps. He had I’d-rather-kill-you-than-look-at-you eyes, flanking a hawk’s nose, downward pointing and sharp. He wasn’t much of a smiler, but when he did smile, he grinned as if appreciating his own sadistic joke.
Rothstein could have been a lazy pretty boy but instead became a lone wolf seeking adventure and profit, slumming as much as he could, hanging with the tough-guy Jewish boys of the ghetto.
In 1909, he married a shiksa, a cooperative actress named Carolyn Greene. His wealthy dad disowned him—freed him, in essence—and Arnold never looked back. He became a professional gambler, opened a series of backroom gambling parlors. Eventually, he opened a palace casino on Forty-sixth Street in midtown Manhattan, ornate in the same fashion as the Loew’s State and Paramount Theaters in nearby Times Square. Opulence was very hip back then. Customers were more apt to empty their wallets if their very surroundings made them feel rich.
When Rothstein had sufficient funds, he became the underworld’s number one financier, offering loans with an outrageously large vig, making him the most powerful Jew in America.
One of the ways he made so much cabbage was fixing games—small games like roulette and big games like baseball. He fixed the 1919 World Series in what came to be known as the Black Sox Scandal. Rothstein was already flying pretty high when the Volstead Act tried to dry America out, and he was quick to hop the bootleg whiskey train.
When it came to running and enforcing his empire, Rothstein proved to be a remarkable judge of criminal talent and recruited a veritable future mob hall of fame—Jewish gangsters and their Italian cousins, too. Rothstein hired on Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Lepke Buchalter, men who will be among the heroes of our story.
Later, when Lansky advised Lucky Luciano as “Looch” designed the Five Family system, not everyone was thrilled with a Jew having the ear of the capo di tutti i capi. Boss Vito Genovese didn’t like it, didn’t like to mix. Frank Costello, on the other hand, looked at Lansky and all he could see were dollar signs. Lansky recalled the first time he ever locked eyes with Luciano. They were just kids at the time, face-to-face in Little Italy, a tiny enclave in Lower Manhattan tucked between Chinatown and the East Village. Lansky and Luciano both felt it, the shared attitude. Fuck the world. Fuck the whole fucking universe. They were gangsters among gangsters. Later, when they worked together in the casino biz, they were like an old married couple, finishing each other’s sentences, sometimes understanding without speaking at all. It was funny. Other than running the rackets, the two men had nothing in common.
Rothstein was a powerful man—he was the model for the character Meyer Wolfsheim in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby—but he still had his private peccadillos and was no more bulletproof than Monk Eastman. On November 4, 1928, Rothstein received a phone call at Lindy’s restaurant telling him to come to the Park Central hotel, catty-corner from Carnegie Hall. Rothstein strode confidently into the hotel okay, but he came out on a stretcher with a bullet in his guts. (Murder, Inc.’s Albert Anastasia was shot in the same building a generation later, dead on the floor of Grasso’s Barber Shop off the hotel lobby.) Rothstein survived for two days before succumbing to his wounds. He was forty-six and was buried in the Union Field Cemetery in the Ridgewood section of Queens.
The year after Rothstein was killed, the stock market crashed, unemployment went sky high, and the Great Depression covered America like a smoky blanket of despair. In that atmosphere, more Jewish boys than ever turned to lives of crime.
Jewish gangs ruled their turf and fought rumbles with rival gangs. In the gangs, many Jewish boys found a brotherhood that they couldn’t find at home or school. In the gangs, boys met others who were the same, Jews who were unafraid. They grew to be adult gangsters, who in turn became the idols of the next generation of boys who were tired of being bullied by thick-necked gentiles.
As the fascist menace grew to crisis proportions in New York City, Meyer Lansky became the nation’s top Jewish gangster and would be the one to lead the anti-Nazi effort there.