PART TWO
They should know that being a Nazi is dangerous.
—JUDGE NATHAN D. PERLMAN
The stage was decorated with a swastika and a picture of Hitler. There weren’t that many of us, but we went into action hard. We threw some of them out the windows. We wanted to show them that Jews do not always sit back and accept insults.
—MEYER LANSKY
CHAPTER FIVE
The judge who thought outside the box was former US Congressman and now Special Sessions Judge Nathan David Perlman. Born in Prusice, Poland, in 1887, Perlman was four when he and his mother came to the United States and settled in New York City. He was public school educated, and after graduating from high school, he attended the City College of New York in Harlem. He earned his bachelor’s degree and was accepted to New York University Law School in 1907. Two years later, he was admitted to the bar and for three years practiced law. As a twenty-five-year old, Perlman was appointed a special deputy New York attorney general, a position he held for three years, then served a three-year stint in the New York State Assembly.
When future New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia resigned from his seat in the US Congress in 1920, Perlman ran for his seat in a special election and won, and he served as a member of Congress from 1920 to 1927. Afterward, he returned to his law practice until 1935, when he began serving as a New York magistrate. He was active in Zionist affairs and was chairman of the American Jewish Congress.
Perlman was a barrel-chested man, bald with comb-over and a double chin. He could appear jolly when he wanted to, then menacing at the drop of a hat. But mostly jolly. He loved people, life, food, and drink. He was a popular guy who had no trouble winning over friends. All he had to do was mention that he’d helped repeal Prohibition and everyone wanted to buy him a drink. Because of his career path, he knew people in both high and low places.
By 1938, Perlman took a good long look at the Nazi problem in America and saw where it was headed. The Nazis were growing bolder. Just the other day, they’d marched in storm trooper uniforms to the US Customs house at Bowling Green, at the southern end of Manhattan. The National Maritime Association had been holding their memorial services on the steps of the historic building when the Nazis arrived—uninvited and unexpected. American Legion officials refused to send their colors outside until the Nazis left, but the Germans stood their ground. It looked like a full-fledged riot might ensue until the ceremonies were moved inside. Good Americans had been terrified and forced to hide.
Perlman brooded on the matter over a drink in a Manhattan saloon and then snapped his fingers. “What the Nazis need is a good ass whipping,” he said.
But how?
He needed an army—better yet, a Jewish army. He didn’t have one, so he’d have to borrow one. He pondered the matter overnight, and the next morning in his chambers, he picked up the phone.
The judge called Meyer Lansky, who was a Jewish organized crime boss. Lansky was not just a big-time hood, one of the biggest, but also a human slide rule, a guy who would have a dream—like a crime syndicate takeover of the world, for example—and he’d turn it into a math problem that could be solved.
The boys from the press called him “the Mob’s Accountant,” but that was insulting and greatly undervalued the man. He was a man of details, a man who could organize the most confusing chaos. Once he’d formulated a plan, he would whisper in Lucky Luciano’s ear and the world would change.
In fact, Lansky should get partial credit for the Five Family system of the New York mob. He also taught the mob bigs like Luciano and Ben “Bugsy” Siegel the value of well-manipulated books and Swiss-based bank accounts. What organized crime needed was consolidation, which turned out to be Luciano’s forte. He consolidated by bumping off Joe “the Boss” Masseria and Salvadore Maranzano in 1931. Lansky’s power grew exponentially.
Lansky was born Maier Suchowljansky on the Fourth of July 1902. The meaning of July 4 was absent at Lansky’s birth, as it took place in Brodno, Bellarus. He came to America (i.e., the Lower East Side of Manhattan) with his parents in 1911.
He’d grown up with Luciano and Siegel as his friends, three kids from New York City who plotted world conquest. And, second maybe only to Dwight Eisenhower, they almost pulled it off.
The Mafia has become a generic name for all mob activity, but in reality that secret society, exclusively Sicilian, made up only a fraction of organized crime in twentieth-century America. There was a Jewish mob and an Irish mob, too, and they all did a pretty good job of sticking to their turf and staying out of each other’s hair. The Jews and Italians in particular worked well together.
The thinking at the time was that their perceived skill sets complimented one another, brains and brawn.
Lansky was not just the son of immigrants, he also was an immigrant himself and bore witness to the horrors of rising Nazism in Europe, specifically the burning, raping, and looting pogroms that swept through his home village.
He was initiated into the underworld early on, before Prohibition. As a teenager, he worked briefly at a tool-and-die shop before telling himself that there had to be a better way to make a living.
Lansky was best known for his brains, but he was tough, too. He had two fists, and when the call came for someone to be hurt, Lansky didn’t need to farm out the duty. If he was in the mood, he took care of it himself.
The Jewish gangsters all had chips on their shoulders. Jewish kids were bullied, and they believed a Jew needed to be tough and stand up and fight.
Lansky attributed the philosophy to an elder who once told him, “If you are going to die, die fighting.”
Lansky, Siegel, and Lepke had watched as Irish, Italian, and Polish gangs beat up yeshiva bochers, the good and obedient Jewish boys. They hated the fact that Jews were considered timid and weak. So they formed a gang of their own, the Bugs and Meyer Gang, and they recruited into their fold teenagers and young men who were neither timid nor weak. They dished out a lot more than they took, telling anyone who would listen that “Jews are tough.”
They fought to send a message, and they fought to survive.
Lansky got his feet wet in a crime world that was barely organized—only organized in the most hyperlocal way. All you had to do was cross the street and you were dealing with a new and different organization.
The gangs owned street corners and floating crap games. Lansky envisioned a world in which they owned entire industries.
Once the US government made alcohol illegal, the mobs took over alcohol sales. In the Jewish sections of New York City, gangsters became heroes of the streets. It was survival of the fittest out there, and powerful men frequently usurped lesser men, until only a handful of guys ran the NYC rackets.
Lansky became a very rich man during Prohibition, and when the Volstead Act was repealed, he seamlessly moved that fortune into gambling. Again, he was a man of vision. He didn’t see smoky back rooms with a poker table, two sad one-armed bandits, and a roulette wheel. He didn’t hear the noisy phones ringing in a sweaty bookmaking parlor. What he saw were huge luxury hotels and casinos, where all of man’s indulgences could be acquired in oxygen-rich air and under a stimulating bath of neon. He heard the sound of money running down a pipeline into his ravenous coffers, and all he had to do was turn on the tap.
In the parlance of the hoods of that era, he replaced the sawdust-floor dives with “carpet joints.” His carpet joints in the US, of course, were illegal. They were built in Saratoga Springs in New York, near the racetrack, in Hallandale, the first suburb north of Miami, and in the crossroads of Council Bluffs outside Omaha. The idea was to put the casinos near population centers but outside the jurisdiction of those centers’ law enforcement. Each joint came with its own intricate system of payoffs to police, politicians, and churches, so that it was in just about everybody’s interest to look the other way. No one wanted to carefully scrutinize Lansky’s new fun houses.
Lansky was married a couple of times. The first wife knew what Lansky did for a living and hated it. He had two sons, the first an invalid and the second strong and tall (who in 1950 was accepted to West Point).
In a world of thieves, Lansky was an honest man. He’d make a deal and then stick to it. The deal might not have been legal, but it was honest. He wouldn’t cheat you, and he didn’t cut corners. He did what he said he was going to do, a tremendously valuable asset in a world of backstabbing rats. He lived to be old because of that integrity. It was the Pall Malls that ended up killing him.
So it was this man—who was in the process of building and operating a strip of fantastic casinos and clubs in Havana, Cuba, with his millions of dollars in bootlegging money—who answered the phone one day and it was Judge Nathan Perlman on the other end. The judge said he needed a face-to-face meeting. Lansky said sure, and Perlman went to him. He brought Rabbi Stephen Wise with him so he could lay on some guilt if Lansky gave him a hard time.
“These fucking Nazis, they are becoming bolder with their shenanigans. They march in the street, and they are anti-Semites, and they think we are soft, Meyer,” the judge said.
“I hate that, too,” Lansky said.
“It is a movement,” Perlman said. “Powerful men are openly making anti-Semitic remarks. Some of the newspapers and magazines are backing them up. Nazism is flourishing in the United States.”
“It’s no good,” Lansky agreed.
“You got some boys who might want to punch a Nazi?”
“I do. Judge, Rabbi. Respectfully, you understand we can do better than punch? We could give somebody a deal. Very deterring to the survivors.”
“I’m sorry, we cannot condone killing. There must be no killing,” the rabbi said. Perlman nodded in agreement.
Meyer saw the wisdom in this and told them so: “It’s always better not to shoot, right? But there will be violence, am I correct?”
“Oh, yes, let me rephrase. I want you to do anything but kill them. You have the men . . . ?”
“I know just the crew—in Brownsville. The boys in the press call them Murder, Inc.”
“Good. I understand you are professionals. I will arrange to have you paid. I . . .”
“I need no pay, Judge. I am a Jew, and I feel for the Jews in Europe who are suffering. They are my brothers.”
“Okay,” Perlman said. “No money. But if you guys get in trouble, I’ll make sure there is legal assistance for you.”
“I appreciate that, Judge,” Lansky said. Of course, that meant Perlman now owed Lansky a favor. Well, so be it. This was important. When the rabbi stepped out of the room for a moment, Lansky asked, “Pipes okay? Baseball bats?”
“Yes, yes, just don’t kill them,” Perlman replied. “Broken bones, I would think, are to be encouraged. They should know that being a Nazi is dangerous.”
Meyer thought the no-kill rule took a little bit of the fun out of it, but leaving a bigmouth Kraut wailing in pain was satisfying, too, so he agreed to the terms.
As the rabbi returned to the room, Lansky had one more request.
“I assume you have some influence with the press, Judge.”
“Some.”
“The Jewish press?”
“More.”
“If we get caught, please, no bad ink,” Lansky said. “I don’t want anything in the Jewish papers that my wife shouldn’t read.”
“Deal,” Perlman said as the men shook hands. “Mazel.”