CHAPTER SEVEN
Judd Teller, a reporter for a New York Jewish daily, had had his earnest eyes on Europe ever since the name Adolf Hitler had first appeared in American newspapers in 1923. (Hitler’s first attempted power grab, the Beer Hall Putsch, came in November 1923 when Hitler and his associates got themselves a belly full of beer at the Bürgerbräukeller and marched in Munich against Germany’s Weimar Republic government. A riot ensued in which sixteen protesters and four police officers were killed. Hitler was injured in the fight, a dislocated shoulder, and was arrested and charged with treason, but the incident made splash headlines and put Hitler on the map. Beer and revolution went hand in hand in the Nazi myth.)
Teller was one of the first American journalists to note that Hitler was using Jews in Europe as scapegoats to launch a revolution, one that grew from a local revolution to a national one and an attempt at a global one.
Journalism was Teller’s day job. At night, he wrote poetry about anti-Semitism. He was born in Ternopol in the Ukraine in 1912 and came to America when he was nine. In the meantime, he had survived the First World War, during which he witnessed horrible things that showed up in analogous form in his verse.
He earned his bachelor’s degree at City College of New York and then studied psychology at Columbia. He published his first book of poetry at age eighteen and was still a young man in his twenties when Judge Perlman and Meyer Lansky went to war against the Nazis.
Teller had returned to Europe a few times to cover stories, witnessing the aftermath of the pogrom at Brisk, which triggered in him post-traumatic stress. He twice interviewed Sigmund Freud. For the Jewish community, Teller became a vivid new voice—describing anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic violence, and the psychology of being scapegoated as a people.
Like many journalists, then as now, Teller was never quite kempt. His bow tie was a little crooked, his suits slightly crumpled, but he had eyes that told stories of the pain he’d seen, the hope he held, and the future he feared.
And that was pretty much the way he looked when Mendy Weiss and Blue Jaw Magoon from Midnight Rose’s back room showed up at Teller’s newspaper office, looking like they were going out of their way to be on their best behavior. They took their fedoras off, revealing well-combed hair. Magoon’s jaw wasn’t all that blue, which meant he must’ve shaved in the last five minutes.
“Who are you?” Teller asked softly, tapping his meerschaum against a huge glass ashtray on his desk.
“I am Emanuel Weiss, and this is my associate Seymour Magoon.”
“Pleased to meetcha,” Magoon said.
Weiss continued: “We have been assigned to take care of the Nazi bastards who march in Yorkville.”
“Assigned? Who sent you?”
“We are with an organization called Murder, Inc. We are looking for the list.”
Teller knew what Murder, Inc. was, but he tried not to show his concern as he thumbed fresh tobacco into his pipe.
“Which list? I have no list.”
“It is a list of Nazi bastards who need rubbing out. We were told you had a list.”
“No.”
As Teller later recalled it, the men were wide-eyed, out of their element, and held their hats against their chests as they asked. Teller didn’t much like having these guys in his office, but his sixth sense for news was going berserk. Gangsters versus Nazis. What a story.
“I’ll tell you what. I’m a reporter, as you know, damned good at finding things out. If there is a list, I will find it. How do I get in touch with you?”
“We’ll be in touch. Thank you, Mr. Teller,” Weiss said.
“Pleased to meetcha,” Magoon added.
So Teller went to the bearded “Jewish communal leaders” to ask about the list. Those leaders didn’t like the Murder, Inc. angle at all. They were embarrassed by the fact that some of the best-known—and respected—Jews in New York were criminals, professional killers.
“Children idolize these men. It brings every Jew down,” they said. The second a gangster smacked around a German, the police would be notified and the anti-Nazi effort would be shut down.
Teller left the meeting feeling rejected and dejected.
A few days later, Teller’s phone rang. It was Meyer Lansky himself.
“We ain’t going to ice the bodies, only marinate ’em. Just watch. No one will shut us down.” Only a few attacks would be needed, Lansky maintained, and the attendance at Nazi rallies would shrink and shrivel. They were cowards, bold only in numbers. Individual Nazis would be afraid to walk the cracked sidewalks of New York with their uniforms on.
“I’ll get the list,” Teller said.
Again, the journalist got on the horn, made a few phone calls of his own—the Anti-Defamation League may have been one of them—and the following day, in the afternoon mail, Teller received “the list.”
Soon thereafter, Weiss returned to Teller’s office, this time without Magoon. “You have it?”
“I have it.”
Teller handed Weiss a sheet of flimsy paper on which was a carbon copy of a typed list. It consisted of the names of Bund members in the city of New York, with home addresses.
“Thank you.”
“Do me a favor, invite me along. I’d love to observe.”
“You would have to ask Mr. Lansky about that,” Weiss said. The men shook hands, and Weiss was gone.
In the days that followed, the boys set up almost daily operations, staking out Nazi homes in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.
And when they caught these guys out on the street alone, mugging them.
“Hey, Fritz!” they’d say, approaching hot and with a slight crouch.
It wasn’t as much fun as murder, but it was close. What it lacked in finality, it gained in glory. They were beating up krautheads for a cause. It wasn’t like they didn’t know how to beat a guy up. They’d been doing it since they were kids, collecting debts. A dead man never pays his debt.
They braced a Nazi and left him bent over, puking on his shoes. As a parting gesture, they’d kick him in the shin and tell him he was fish food if he called the cops.