SIX FOR FIVE

2011-05-22T13:11:00.009-04:00

Here are some photos and short write up for the show currently on display in Los Gatos, California... just click on here for a quick glance.

In preparing for this exhibit I thought I would contribute some newer portraits that I completed the last few months leading up to this current exhibit.

They include new versions of Irving 'Big Gangy' Cohen and Meyer Lansky, and the un- cropped version of Dutch Schultz, which was used in the publicity materials.
I realized they hadn't been posted here as of yet so here they are...

These new portraits were done partly due to the fact that some original artwork from past exhibits are no longer in my possession, but also, this, and past exhibits, are not just the portraits hanging on walls, but also represent the historical arc of the Jewish Gangster from the turn of the Twentieth Century up until the mid 1940's in the way it's displayed. So, it's important that key players are included in the exhibit.
Also it's a continuous strive on my end to come up with stronger artistic representations when I feel its needed. These three, among the couple of others that were completed for the show..

From Underdog To Underworld

2011-03-21T17:07:00.008-04:00

I'm happy to announce that another comprehensive exhibit, which will feature a selection of over 40 original pieces has now an official opening date.
From Underdog to Underworld: Jewish Gangsters and the American Dream is third curated title, following Real Machers in Washington, DC (2009) and Wise Guys: Mobsters In the Mispacha last year in San Francisco.

This exhibit will be held at the Addison - Penzak JCC Levy Family Campus in Los Gatos, California - which is nestled in the Silicon Valley about 90 minutes out side of San Francisco.
The exhibit dates are from May 2 - June 30 2011.
There will be a selection of new portraits that I've added for this show and I will update with more details as I have them in the near future.
My thanks to Lisa Ceile - curator and coordinator for her help in getting this show together.

The ballad of Waxey Gordon and Gypsy Rose Lee...

2011-02-16T12:11:00.018-05:00

Had Gypsy Rose Lee shimmied her way to a ripe old age, she would of turned one hundred years old this past January 8.

It wasn’t an easy road for the preeminent first lady of Burlesque to get herself to the top of the heap when she landed top billing at Minskys’ Republic Theatre in 1931. The Minsky brothers ran a string of theatres of what would be considered by some as the poor man’s version of the Ziegfeld Folies. These were New York’s first in a string of ‘variety’ theatres that the Minksys excelled at; part vaudeville, part striptease, with a good dose of Paris’s Le Moulin Rouge thrown in by instituting the runway leading out from the stage into the seated crowd - a first for American theatres.

It was a big part of live entertainment’s growing pains following the quick demise of vaudeville and the rising competition of the talking picture. A trip to Minskys always guaranteed at least a shimmer of exposed skin and lowbrow laughs, keeping patrons queued up on the sidewalk on any given night.

Gypsy Rose Lee, born Rose Louise Hovick, knew vaudeville well, having endured hard scrabble years on the circuit with her domineering stage mother and playing second banana to her seemingly more talented curly haired younger sibling Ellen, who later changed her name to June Havoc.

At the age of thirteen, June, who was the star of their act, had had enough and ran away with a boy, leaving her mother and older sister to fend for themselves. Gypsy reinvented herself as a means to take center stage as she wasn’t really the typical beauty of her time, or the kind theatre owners looked for in a headliner. Constantly fighting with her weight, she towered at five feet – nine inches and had a pair of small breasts and an unassuming caboose. She had legs though - long and elegant in stride, and through strict dieting her teenage body morphed into womanhood. It was during this metamorphosis that she officially renamed herself Gypsy Rose Lee as a proclamation of her rebirth.

And there was something about her.

Billy Minsky noticed it when he spotted her act across the Hudson River at the Empire Theatre in Newark in 1931, where her run was starting to garner enough media attention for Minsky to raise an inquisitive eyebrow. She handled the crowds well with a coy yet domineering attitude on stage mixed with a razor sharp sense of humor. Something about her crackled, and with a little bit of grooming from Minsky, she would eventually conquer the Empire City.

Gypsy Rose Lee’s act swooned a depression-era New York and her star rose quickly within the first year of working for the Minskys. She charmed the likes of Mayor Jimmy Walker and noted columnist and radio personality Walter Winchell among many others including the literary set. It was a combination of smarts and just enough tease to keep audiences clamoring for more and she understood the power she held under the spotlight.

Prohibition was still in play and with popularity came numerous invitations to clandestine parties and passwords into the peepholes of speakeasies around town. It was on such an outing to a private party on Eight Avenue that Gypsy, with her mother in tow no less, made the acquaintance of Irving Wexler, better know in underworld circles as Waxey Gordon.

Irving Wexler’s upbringing was a far cry from the one Gypsy Rose Lee had, though both knew struggle. Lee spent much of her childhood years on the road with her mother and sister in a long string of motels, and when finances were so low they even resorted to staying in tents.

Waxey Gordon came from a wretchedly poor Polish-Jewish family on the Lower East Side and endured the tough tenement life. He earned the nickname of Waxey from some who said he was able to remove a victim's wallet 'as though it was dipped in wax', while others claimed as a kid would stick wax to the end of sticks to poke through subway grills to collect the loose amounts of dimes and nickels. Its also claimed it was as well a play on his last name

His police record started relatively early with the first arrest in 1905. He spent time as a strong-arm man for Benjamin ‘Dopey Benny’ Fein who led one of the last pre-WWI Jewish gangs of considerable strength in numbers. The Dopey Benny gang specialized in labor disputes and strike breaking during a particularly intense wave of labor unrest in New York’s manufacturing sector, especially in the garment industry.

Waxey came up through the ranks and had a considerable amount of talent for schlamming despite his unassuming size, making him an asset on the frontlines. He spent some time at the Elmira Reformatory as a result of his wilder younger and delinquent days and eventually his crooked path led to a two year term in Sing Sing, which kept him behind walls until 1916.

Upon his release he spent the next few years drifting and hired himself out as a labor goon and whatever else would come along that didn’t involve an honest moment of work. He had lost a benefactor with the leadership demise of Dopey Benny, whose place of prominence on the street had vanished and Jewish gangs had become fractured and fragmented. New rivals like Nathan ‘Kid Dropper’ Kaplan and Jacob ‘Little Augie’ Orgen’ were vying for power and control for much of the East Side with no consideration for, or want, of ethnic alliance.

1920 and Prohibition changed everything for many including Waxey. It enabled Gordon to take himself off the street and behind a desk realizing how profitable smuggling whiskey in from Canada and the United Kingdom could be. He set up a Central Park bench meeting with Arnold Rothstein to layout his plan and asked for a $175,000 start up loan. By the time Gordon eyed Gypsy Rose Lee across the room in the smoky haze of the Eight Avenue speakeasy he had banked nearly two million dollars and owned a ten-room apartment on the Upper West Side.

Gordon sent over four bottles of champagne to Gypsy’s table. The lucrative years were evident on his physique - the once trim labor slugger now had put on considerable weight due to complacency and financial comfort as he slightly waddled over to introduce himself. Whispers at her table explained that he was a big shot gangster but Gypsy thought the now middle-aged Waxey looked more like an unassuming banker than a feared underworld figure whose jacket buttons were at the breaking point over a considerable paunch. Flanked by bodyguards Gordon exchanged pleasantries briefly and offered them anything they wanted “ on the house” before tipping his hat in a departing gesture of gangster grace. Gypsy flashed a thankful smile, and Gordon seemingly winced on the inside as he turned on his heel.

Gypsy Rose Lee, despite her numerous psychical attributes, unfortunately had a set of sadly crooked front teeth. As Gordon made his exit he was rumored to have commented to those close by that she was “ a great looking broad but those chompers have gotta go”. And he made good on his word.

The next morning her phone rang and a Gordon underling who never identified himself explained that her ‘friend’ from last night had set up on appointment for her at the dental office of Dr. Sam Krauss at 1605 Broadway for 10:30 AM and that she should get over there. As a confused Gypsy Rose heard the phone click dead on the other end she couldn’t quite understand what had just happened and never showed up for the appointment.

Another mysterious but now irate phone call followed her performance that evening, demanding to know why she never showed up for the dental appointment. A bewildered Lee let her mother finally interject and saying they couldn’t afford the dental work, nor did they even know the dentist. Reassurance came from the other end of the phone line that the fee was not to be worried about and “ if the boss wants you to get your teeth fixed you get your teeth fixed if you know what’s good for ya…”.

How much of that conversation rings true is perhaps debatable as it reeks somewhat of scriptwriter scribe; but under Waxey Gordon’s insistence Gypsy Rose Lee did spend close to two weeks of return dental visits before the procedure was over. It ended up that Dr. Sam Krauss had grown up with Gordon on the Lower East Side, and his childhood friend whom he still called Irving, had paid to put him through dental school in order to make a better life for himself as Gordon’s bootlegging empire grew.

And so began the web Waxey Gordon had woven to lure in Gypsy Rose Lee and use her to his compliance and at times, human accessory, during their short years together.

She had felt compelled that she owed him by accepting his first gift of dental repair and though the murky new world she had now entered had probably left her somewhat uneasy at first, she understandably was unwilling to take a stand due to the fringe element of lawlessness.

But she was also strong, fiercely independent, and intelligent, and quickly adapted to these new surroundings and learned to use her position as an appendage within the underworld to her advantage. Gypsy was whip smart even if she felt intimidated, and read through much of the underworld façade of materialism and ego that pervaded these fedora cladded roosters.

Her fees from Minksy’s Republic had steadily risen, allowing her to buy a home in the Rego Park section of Queens. Gordon sent over an elaborate dining set as a housewarming gift. In turn, he requested her by his side at certain events as a ruse to impress his gangster compatriots - the towering jewel of burlesque and gangland’s ugly duckling. He would bed her when he felt the need and Gypsy was able to become emotionally disinvested, allowing Gordon and at times others from his circle to have their way as long as there was a possible benefit of career or social advancement as a reward.

One of those rewards were Gordon’s Broadway connections that eventually landed her a top spot in a Ziegfeld production called Laid In Mexico, though the title was eventually changed to Hot Cha! at Gypsy’s insistence. Gypsy had quit Minksys in lieu of the chance to work with Ziegfeld.

Florenz Ziegfeld had fallen on hard times, and as his health was failing by this period he resorted to borrowing money from Gordon and other gangsters in order to mount his next show. The show closed after only twelve weeks as a big fat flop.

She scoured Broadway for weeks, and in the interim lost her home in Rego Park and in her scuttle went back to work for the Minksys at a lower rate. Strapped for cash she was close to asking Waxey for a loan but the timing wasn’t on her side. Gordon’s illegal enterprises had caught up with him.

He had been on the federal radar all through the ‘20’s but lack of evidence eluded a formal indictment over and over. By the early 1930s, the sentencing of Al Capone had marked a new way of capturing gangsters with accountants rather than G-Men. New York’s Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey along with the FBI placed him on a most wanted list as Prohibition was on the road to repeal in 1933. Easily convicted of income tax evasion due to huge holdings in a variety of trucking firms, buildings and processing plants with no proper paperwork to back up his assets, he was fined $80,000 and sentenced to ten years in jail.

Even behind bars Waxey requested Gypsy Rose Lee’s company and had her come up to visit him (and impress his fellow inmates) at Northeastern Penitentiary before he was to be transferred to Leavenworth in Kansas.

Gypsy complied one last time with Gordon, knowing that she had no use for him after this visit. Enduring catcalls and whistles from inmates on all sides, she vowed to herself that this was to be the last time the two were to share the same room.

While Gypsy Rose Lee’s life had its fair share of ups and downs she did manage to build an impressive legacy and passed away from cancer in 1970.

For Irving Wexler however, ten years of rehabilitation seemed to have done him no good.

During World War II, he was caught selling 10,000 pounds of sugar to an illegal distillery during a time of rationing, and he served another year. By 1950, the narcotics bureau had built a hefty file on him and sentenced him to twenty-five years to life for heroin trafficking.

On June 24, 1952, while sitting in a doctor's office at Alcatraz, Waxey Gordon suffered a massive heart attack and died.

Select bibliography for Gypsy Rose Lee:

Gypsy - Memoirs of America's most celebrated stripper
by Gypsy Rose Lee
Harper 1957

American Rose
A Nation Laid Bare - The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee
by Karen Abbott
Random House 2010

...and finally an update!

2011-01-22T16:31:00.014-05:00

I've been a little behind on posting lately with other responsibilities on the go and time seems to slip by quickly and before you know it a new year has arrived.

First off - the Six For Five showing at the Exhibition of the American Gangster officially closed last December 20 - my thanks to the organizers for hosting the show.
Seems they were not quite ready to let these portraits leave their walls completely, and now a set of framed gicleé prints are on permanent display for the indeterminate future, so if you are in New York City you can still drop by and check them out.

On the subject of the Empire City, I am happy to announce that a set of limited edition prints are now available at the newly inducted MOB Scene Gallery. Curated by noted archivist and historian Arthur Nash, the gallery is located at 396 Broome St. in the heart of Little Italy between Mulberry and Centre Market.

With an unobstructed view of the Old Police headquarters, the MOB Scene gallery sits beside the former NYPD evidence vault from which the heroin seized in the 'French Connection' case mysteriously vanished. And serendipitously, in 1912 the gallery was a pool hall called the Little Rock, a hangout for some of the underworld's notorious figures.
For some more info visit www.mobscenenyc.com

Of course this is not the only option to buy some prints, the Six for Five shop on Etsy has now re-opened with a selection
of 15 different prints.

Also, there will be another major public exhibition coming this spring in northern California and I will have more details in the near future regarding all that.

Finally, just so you know I haven't been sitting idly on my hands, here are three of the more recent portraits that were finished in the last little while - all re-workings of Big Jack Zelig, Monk Eastman, and Dopey Benny Fein, who seem to always lurk me back to the drawing table to discover new ways to capture their collective essence.

Six For Five exhibit extended in New York

2010-11-02T21:22:00.007-04:00

I wanted to pass along a quick post to inform that the Six For Five exhibit at the Exhibition Of The American Gangster will now run until December 15. There is a selection of thirteen original portraits on display with accompanying biographical material.
My thanks to all those who have dropped by to check it out so far, and also those who have purchased prints, your patronage is much appreciated...

2010-10-17T22:37:00.010-04:00

Posts have slowed down (again) considerably due to outside freelance work, but while I prepare a proper new bio to post in the very near future, I wanted to just pass along some information about related news happening around New York and of an interesting new book that has recently been released.

This coming week author Neil Hanson will be making a couple of stops, reading from his book, the first full length biography dedicated to the life of Monk Eastman, entitled Monk Eastman: The Gangster Who Became a War Hero. Five years of research went into telling the tale of Eastman, and it’s also the first time his war experiences with the 106^th Infantry during WWI are described in great detail.

I must admit my bookmark is still only at about the halfway point, but since these readings are coming up I figured I’d post about it as Hanson does have some revelatory new information to add to the colorful life of one of Gotham’s most fascinating turn of the century’s gangsters. I suppose perhaps the most vital, at least in accordance with this project, was that it may seem that Monk Eastman wasn’t Jewish at all, a fact also brought forward by Ron Arons in his book The Jews Of Sing Sing a couple of years ago.

It seems ol’ Monk has been looped in and hardwired into the history of Jewish Gangsters for so long, from Herbert Asbury to Albert Fried, primarily because he was the first great leader of a predominantly Jewish gang of almost 1200 strong when he was at the peak of his power. Also, subsequently his leadership was taken over by Jews in his own gang who learned much from him, first with Max 'Kid Twist' Zweifach and then Big Jack Zelig, before the Eastmans finally petered out into different fractions in the aftermath of the Rosenthal/Becker affair and disappeared as dominant force.

Whether Eastman was Jewish or not, he is still a major part of the entire history, a key player much like Big Tim Sullivan was and he's a crucial part to understanding the rise of Jewish gangsterism at the turn of the 20th century. Much more of Monk's early life is brought to light as well in this much welcomed new addition to continuing information that seems to come to the surface even as the years between grow wider.

Neil Hanson will be reading from his book this Tuesday, October 19 at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and will also be on hand at the Exhibition Of The American Gangster the following evening of October 20 for a reading and discussion as well.

I've also wanted to re- plug for awhile the Jewish Mob walking tour that happens every Sunday in New York, which is now curated by pal Franklin Abrams in conjunction with The Lower East Side History Project.

To partly quote from the guide:

"Trace the steps of pre-Prohibition era gangsters like Monk Eastman, Max “Kid Twist” Zweifach, “Big” Jack Zelig and Benjamin “Dopey” Fein – pivotal figures in the organizing of crime in New York City; paving the way for men like Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky and "Bugsy" Siegel. Learn about the Jewish immigrant experience on the Lower East Side and the conditions that led to organized gangsterism; visit the sites of gang headquarters, shootouts and assassinations, and learn how the Jewish Mob expanded out of the slums and into a contemporary organized crime syndicate."

For more info, follow this link

New York City Gangland

2010-08-24T20:42:00.026-04:00

"Within every photograph, in every American city, are stories to be told."
Such reads Arcadia Publishing's mantra.

I'm sure you've come across one of their publications at some time while browsing at your local bookstore
Their catalog is an impressively exhaustive collection of photographic essay books that range far and wide; from collections of vintage railroads in Yosemite to old time baseball teams from Chattanooga to Wichita. They are the infinite documentaries printed and bound that filmmaker Ken Burns will never get around to making. They have also been brave and bold enough to peer into Americana's underbelly for a closer look.
I had first commented on their bravura when they published "Detroit's Infamous Purple Gang" by Lepke biographer Paul R. Kavieff a couple of years back, and now comes Arthur Nash's New York City Gangland.

Nash is a freelance archivist who resides at the Chelsea Hotel and has accumulated one of the most impressive private organized crime collections, lending his archaeological talents to various institutions, researchers and filmmakers. His most prized possession perhaps is the actual barber chair Albert Anastasia sat down in 1957 for his last hot towel wrap and close shave before being gunned down at the Park Sheraton Hotel's barbershop. Ask him about it sometime and maybe he'll let you have a peek...maybe.

Arcadia's mantra rings true, but these may not be the kind of stories everyone wants to hear or see.
His collection of photographs assembled for New York City Gangland is a nicely arced timeline of Gotham's gangster history, and many have never seen publication up until now.
Its peppered with many gems; from a press manipulated photo of Arnold Rothstein (to make him look more menacing by painting a fedora on his head), to family photos of Al Capone and Charles "Lucky" Luciano. The book is broken into six sections, covering much of New York's organized crime story from Prohibition to the wild days of the 1960's and the Gallo brother's anarchic approach to an old tradition.
Nash also rightfully balances it out with Blood On Velvet, a chapter on some of the 1930's top crime busters in the city, including numerous photos of the ever photo-op-happy Mayor Floria LaGuardia dumping countless slot machines and armoury into the cold waters of the Long Island Sound. LaGuardia's and Police Commissioner Lewis J Valentine's enormous bounty of confiscated items of lawlessness makes one wonder just how much rusting scrap metal with stories to tell of an era may still sit quietly on that ocean floor to this day.

In case any regular followers of this blog may wonder, there is indeed a chapter that is devoted to hardboiled Hebrews in Guns and Gelt - La Kosher Nostra. Nash's focus is mainly the late 1930s and the torpedos mostly based in Brooklyn, including the freckled face Sam "Red" Levine and gunsel gone bit Hollywood player Irving 'Big Gangy' Cohen.
Included as well are gruesome crime scene photos, haunting images of Joe Rosen, gunned down in his candy store by Lepke's henchmen, and the burned corpse of the ill-fated Irving "Puggy" Feinstein. Such photos become a shocking and needed reminder that however gangsters may be glorified in historical and nostalgic context, their actions were very real and one must not forget that crucial aspect of the overall bigger picture.

Photo of the infamous Midnight Rose's candy store, located at the corner of Livonia and Saratoga Avenues in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and defacto headquarters of Abe 'Kid Twist' Reles and his troop during the heydays of Murder Inc. Photo courtesy of Arthur Nash.

Nash's real treat in this section are the photos he took of Kings County star prosecutor Micheal F. Vecchione and his unveiling of the actual knotted bedsheets that Abe 'Kid Twist' Reles supposedly used during his 'escape' and fall to his death at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island. Housed in Reles' actual suitcase, these significant artifacts have only seen the light of day once and Nash was there to photograph them. That alone may warrant the price of admission to the book. One also wonders perhaps if archived in some dusty box in an underground corridor somewhere as well, sit the countless notebooks stenographers filled with Reles' accounts when he sang to the Brooklyn District Attorneys for days on end, waiting for their own unveiling...

Brooklyn star prosecutor Micheal F. Vecchione unveils Abe Reles' knotted bedsheets recovered from room 623 at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island on November 12, 1941. Photo courtesy of Arthur Nash.

Overall, Nash's collection proves to be a real treasure to any aficionados of New York City's gangster story; its colorful characters that inhabited it and those that lurked in the city's darkest corners.

There is a giddiness that may be hard to describe to some when one unearths a photo lost to time, shedding new light to the person in question, but its one I encounter every time, especially since taking on this project.
Take his photo of an 18 year old Arthur Flegenheimer, where the future beer baron of the Bronx known as Dutch Schultz seems almost like an innocent doe (well, kinda); there is an indescribable look in his eyes that almost commands a new perspective on a man who has been painted by historians as crude and as cold blooded as they come. And for the most part they were right. But, with each new photo unearthed like this one, sometimes another piece of a historical puzzle is found and put in place.
Much of the old gangster world is voiceless. Their stories passed on, shared, elaborated and exxagerated. What we have to breath from are faded snapshots, crinkled mug shots, and controlled circulated press photos, the rest we have make up in our head.

Eighteen year old Arthur Flegenheimer aka Dutch Schultz. Photo courtesy of Arthur Nash.

New York City Gangland on Facebook

Six For Five on facebook

2010-08-16T21:12:00.006-04:00

Just a quick note to mention I've set up a companion page to the blog on facebook .
This will initially tie into the portraits on display currently on display at the Exhibition of the American Gangster and the short abbreviated bios that accompany them.
If you've dropped by and seen the exhibit and would like to post any comments please feel free to do so to make the whole thing a little more interactive. Of course if you are not in New York City, or plan to be in the next couple of months, you are still more than welcomed to participate as the page will grow expediently as times goes on.

Previews in the Big Bad Apple...

2010-08-08T13:15:00.010-04:00

For the last few months I've been discussing the opening of the Museum Of The American Gangster in New York, and I can formally announce that thirteen portraits are now on view while the museum exhibit space is in previews in preparation for an official opening.
Due to some legal procedures requested by the state of New York in regards to by-laws and what constitutes a 'museum' (too complicated to get into here) there had to be a name change to the institution, which is now officially called Exhibition Of The American Gangster.

Twelve originals are on exhibit until October 31 as well as a framed gicleé print of Meyer Lansky (the original has been sold to a collector and is not in my possession anymore).

I also have a selection of high quality gicleé prints available from their gift shop and purchase of original artwork can be worked out privately with the museum.

The exhibit space is situated above the Theater 80 St. Marks in the East Village, and was once the former apartment occupied by non other than Leon Trotsky.
Also on site includes a collection of prohibition era materials and other gangster ephemera and wares, and also includes tours of the former speakeasy bar and it's underground network which was discovered in 1964.

Currently the museum's website is under re-construction but the opening hours for previews are 1PM - 6PM except Sundays and Wednesdays for the time being until the museum officially opens it's doors.

Exhibition Of The American Gangster
80 St. Marks Place
New York, NY
1 (800) 603-5520

2010-07-13T18:08:00.016-04:00

Boy oh boy times flies.
I seem to apologize every so often for the slow down in posts but maintaining the blog thing can prove to be a challenge sometimes.

Here are a couple of photos of the current exhibit at the Katz Snyder Gallery in San Francisco which seems to be going well and getting a good amount of attendance and reaction. My thanks to all who have dropped by so far.

While the exhibit continues until September 15, there's another good reason to be in the Bay Area this summer.
The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival has programmed a series called Tough Guys : Images Of Jewish Gangsters in Film.
Screenings will include Warren Beatty's Bugsy - his loosely adapted bio of Ben Siegel; but the little gems are screenings of the rare Lepke (1975), starring Tony Curtis, and King Of The Roaring 20's - The Story Of Arnold Rothstein (1961) starring David Janssen. Both films have yet, and may never see, the DVD treatment - so if you get a chance to see these do yourself a favor. I can't vouch for King Of The Roaring 20's, as I've never seen it, but I do have an old VHS copy of Lepke and though the film feels a little dated, it holds up.

Also screening will be Howard Hawk's classic Scarface (1932) starring Paul Muni - and the reason for this screening is Muni, along with Edward G. Robinson, were Jewish actors and graduates of New York Yiddish theatre who played Italian mobsters on the screen during the height of the gangster film genre. Though actual newspaper headlines of the times splashed the prominent names of Dutch Schultz, Louis Buchalter and others, film audiences of the '30s were not ready for the representation of Jewish mobsters on the silver screen, nor were the studio chiefs, most of whom were Jewish.

Missing from the programming but easily viewable on DVD is Murder, Inc. (1960), whose script and pacing is rather plodding, but a young Peter Falk makes for a convincing Abe 'Kid Twist' Reles. Also, and possibly the quintessential Jewish mobster film, is Sergio Leone's sweeping and epic Once Upon A Time in America, starring Robert De Niro and James Woods as two Lower East Side kids who rise up in the underworld on their own terms.
The film festival runs from July 24 - August 9.

The SFJFF has also been nice enough to support the ongoing exhibit and will screen these following promotional graphics that I put together for them prior to films screenings.

My thanks to Nancy Fishman, who curated 'Tough Guys...' for all her support and help in making all this happen.

Jewish Mobsters cross the Golden Gate

2010-05-31T21:37:00.016-04:00

I am happy to announce the opening of the exhibit 'Wise Guys: Mobsters In The Mishpacha', which will be hosted by the Katz Snyder Gallery and the JCCSF in San Francisco, Ca.

The exhibit dates are from June 15 to September 15 and over forty-one portraits will be on display. For those not up on their Hebrew (which at most times includes myself), Mishpacha translates to 'family' and will be similar to The Real Machers exhibit held in Washington, D.C. last year. There are a few new portraits that have been added to this particular show.

Big thanks goes out Nancy Fishman, whose was instrumental in getting this exhibit off the ground in San Francisco. She is also curating this year's San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which is celebrating it's 30th anniversary this year. Part of this year's programming will include Tough Guys: Images Of Jewish Gangsters In Film (are you starting to see the connection!?) and there will be some cross promotion between the exhibit and film festival.

Thanks also goes out to Katz Snyder Gallery curator Lenore Naxon in helping putting this show together. There may be plans for an official reception for the exhibit closer to the start of the film festival in mid- July so stay tuned for details. If you are in the Bay Area, either as tourist or local in the next three months, please drop on by.

KATZ SNYDER GALLERY /JCCSF
3200 CALIFORNIA STREET,
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
415.292.1200

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Sneak Peek : Museum Of The American Gangster Poster

2010-05-11T22:21:00.010-04:00

Posts have slowed a bit in the last little while but with good reason, as this has been one of the results:
Here is a peek at a poster I've illustrated and designed especially for the Museum Of The American Gangster in celebration of their inauguration.

There will be announcements soon about the Museum's official opening in New York City, which is slated in the near future and I will have an update on my involvement as well.

In the meantime you can sign up at their official facebook page to receive regular updates: MOAG

I will also announce within the next couple of weeks of yet another exhibit I will be involved in once the official press release is set loose upon the world, but for the time being I've been asked to be hush hush about it...so stay tuned.

Letters from Purgatory

2010-04-11T12:53:00.029-04:00

Ninety –six years ago on the morning of April 13, 1914, Harry Horowitz, Louis Rosenberg, pictured in the illustration above, and Jacob Seidenschmer along with Italian co-hort Frank Cirofici, were led down the hallowed halls of Sing Sing prison to meet their fate in the electric chair.
All four men, none barely a quarter century old in age, were found guilty of murdering gambler Herman Rosenthal, who was killed in front of the Café Metropole on a hot summer evening in July of 1912.
The men were tried as a group in November of that same year, and the hearing had lasted only a week; their verdict and fate took only a mere thirty minutes before the jury reached a decision. The four were stunned but stood stoic as the death sentence was handed down.
The case against the gunmen was overshadowed in many ways by the highly publicized trial against Charles Becker, the former Police Lieutenant implicated and charged with ordering Rosenthal’s murder. The end result rang almost as a judicial afterthought in the wake of all the attention Becker’s case had gathered, and possibly at least two innocent lives were extinguished, that of Jacob ‘Whitey Lewis’ Seidenschmer and Dago Frank Cirofici’s, as its shadowy legacy.

Harry Horowitz, underworld moniker: Gyp The Blood, and Louis Rosenberg, aka Lefty Louie, were no angels, with arrest records and buoyed street reputations to prove it; but in the sixteen months spent in Sing Sing following their conviction they filed numerous appeals in an attempt to reverse their collective fate. Influential members of the Jewish Community tried to have the executions stopped and appealed for clemency. It was the first time such highly publicized criminals of Jewish descent were to be executed, and feared the effect it would have on a community that itself already felt like it had been put on trial in the aftermath of the Rosenthal / Becker affair. The scheduled executions marked a new heightened awareness and sense of shame of the serious criminal problem the Jewish community in New York, especially on the Lower East Side, had on their hands.

With the execution date finally set, Louis Rosenberg wrote one last statement, which was signed by all four men and delivered to the office of their attorneys, Wahle & Kringle, at 230 Broadway.
The tone is obviously somber, but it does take into question how much public scrutiny, press bias, and municipal political motivation (especially for District Attorney Charles Whitman) had influenced their fateful outcome.
While Rosenberg is at times hazy in his appeal (the New York Times printed it verbatim), it also points directly at what most writers and historians have since concluded; that gamblers Bald Jack Rose, Louis ‘Bridgey” Webber, Sam Schepps and Harry Vallon were actually the men behind Rosenthal’s killing, not Charles Becker, with Vallon himself as the triggerman while Horowitz and Rosenberg possibly stood by. And that the gambler’s sworn testimonies were perjuriously a well-woven tale of conspiracy and frame up of all those convicted.

On March 29, the New York Times published Rosenberg’s statement in full. It read as follows:

Correspondence Department
Sing Sing Prison

Public Opinion:

I. We ask the public to answer to themselves these questions. Did public opinion convict us?
II. What created public opinion?
III. When Jack Zelig was arraigned for trial before Judge Malon in June 1912, charged with an offence for which the penalty is fourteen years in State prison, was there one person who read his case at the time who did not believe he was guilty and who not have voted for his conviction?
IV. What created belief that Jack Zelig was guilty of that crime?
V. What created that mental attitude in those from whom would have been drawn the jury to try him? Not even the public officials charged with the care of his trial believed him innocent. What do the officials and the public say now about the opinion and belief they had formed on the basis of rumor and misleading inferences gathered from wherever they did?

Zelig was innocent, public officials announced that he was innocent; a Grand Jury said so when they indicted those who falsely accused him. It was only an un-looked for event which enabled him to prove his innocence and escape fourteen years.
We have been accused by persons what of whom the Court of Appeals said is now well known by the public. Whatever we have said and what we now say we ask the public to please believe us that we in no way mean to criticize the court of judicial administration. As we have always said we are not lawyers. We have our records and briefs on appeals and opinions in our case and naturally in the quiet moments we have read and reread the testimony in our case and the opinions of the Court of Appeals.
We are still at a loss to understand why Rose, Schepps, Webber and Vallon are persons not to be believed under oath in the (Charles) Becker case and yet as persons whose testimony in our case should be taken as true and from whom should be accepted in our case the version as the true version of the whole Rosenthal affair and of the motive for this terrible crime.
Of (Morris) Luban the Court of Appeals states that in the Becker case that he is unbelievable and bases such conclusion on the fact that his story is improbable and that he had a motive in testifying for the prosecution, and that motive was his release from prison in Jersey; that he was placed in the company of Rose, Schepps, Webber, and Vallon so as to enable him to talk matters over with Rose, Schepps, Webber, and Vallon, so that his story would dovetail with theirs. Yet in one case, Luban is believed.
(Willie) Shapiro, another one, was the first one arrested and accused of the murder and afterward indicted on the same blanket indictment with us, and in City Prison (The Tombs) with us boys for a long while and could not identify any one of us until he was placed in that same Fifty-fourth Street jail (where Rose, Webber, and Schepps were held after being transferred from The Tombs upon Charles Becker’s arrest and arrival at the notorious holding facility), for the same opportunities for meeting and arranging their harmonious stories, which was condemned by the Court of Appeals in the Becker case?
The same reasons that made Luban unbelievable in the Becker case and more so, as his motive was to save his own life, Shapiro.
Harry Horowitz, Jacob Seidenshner and I swore on the stand we seen Vallon, Webber and a stranger shoot (Rosenthal). Bridgey Webber says he does not know this man, yet it is a fact that this man was in Bridgey Webber’s gambling room and left with them for the scene of the shooting.
We simply ask people who know of the real conditions in New York City if a man had spent his whole life in the gambling business and who was as shrewd and careful like Webber to allow a perfect stranger to enter his gambling room and take midnight trips with him?
Now in the records, on Page 452, Folio 1,354, Schepps states that “ he was told to go as far as he could and not to stop until he got there” He also states that he got $100 from Webber, and from a man he did not know by name $150. Why could it not be that Webber also wanted to get this stranger out of the way?
There is no attempt or intention on our part to create the idea that we are over-brave or any kind of heroes, for our lives and liberty are just as dear to us as anyone else, yet we do not believe we should be the victims to save men who on their own sworn testimony are concerned in the crime. We ask the public to please judge the facts for themselves.
Respectfully
Louis Rosenberg
Frank Cirofici
Jacob Seidenshner
Harry Horowitz

This last statement written a couple of weeks before their deaths contrasts sharply with the seemingly jovial tone of the letters they had sent to Big Jack Zelig in the early fall of 1912.
Jack Zelig had been shot and killed on October 5, 1912 while riding a Second Avenue street trolley. He was due in court the next morning to appear for the prosecution on the opening day of the Charles Becker trail, and quite possibly his statements may of been able to clear the accused gunmen’s names in the Rosenthal murder (though that wasn't Charles Whitman’s intention).

When Zelig’s body was searched at Bellevue, letters from all four alleged gunmen were found in his pockets. They are surprisingly light-hearted in nature, not something you’d expect coming from hardened street toughs; pleasantries exchanged between gentle chaps and not words that emanated from someone who broke people’s backs over his knee on a two-dollar dare in Gyp The Blood’s case:

Tombs Prison, October 3, 1912
Dear Friend Zel: A few lines letting you know I am feeling fine and in good health.
Also Louie and Whitey and Frank. I hope you and your wife are the same. Well, old boy, things look fine. They could not look better. I read your letter and Louie and myself were tickled to death to read it. We have a hell of a time here all by ourselves; do nothing but fool around and kick one another.
Gee, did you see that piece about Louie in to-day’s Journal. We laughed ourselves sick over it. You remember that fellow who said he was stuck up last week on Second Avenue? Well he is up here with us, and we kid the life out of him. Well Zel, take care of yourself and I know you are one who can do that. So I’ll close with regards and best wishes to yourself and your wife.

From your true friend,
Harry
Regards and best wishes from W and F, Answer as soon as possible if you have time.

Lefty Louis Rosenberg’s letter carried the same kind of optimism. It’s quite obvious that the men had faith in Zelig, a much heralded and respected gang leader, who would clear their names and get them out of prison, so kept up a positive front for Zelig’s sake who was reportedly quite depressed about the entire situation his men were in.

Tombs Prison, October 3, 1912
My Dear Pal: I received your letter and I was certainly glad to hear from you, and you certainly know how I more than appreciate what you are doing for me. Zel, old man, I ain’t worrying a bit; I eat good food and sleep good, and also having a little fun up here and will certainly be ready for that big Christmas dinner.
Zel, you tell me you are going to stick to me and to the boys to the end. I know that Zel, as I as know what you are made of, having full confidence in you, old boy, that you will stick to the end. I know that, Zel, as I know what you are made of, and Zel, to tell you the truth, I have got it better than a lot of them bum millionaires have got it outside, and was up last night until 3 A.M. in the morning playing cards and eating lamb chops, but who do think was in our party? But George Richman, that famous jeweler from Second Ave.
He came up here to identify Frosby, and he failed to identify him, he changed his mind and thought he could keep me company for awhile, and I can assure you he is SAFE. My father and his lawyer called me down to the counsel room yesterday and I had a cheerful chat with him. And after I got through with him he said he was convinced that I really have nothing in this case, and he went away feeling much better. Now old pal let me know you are, and how things are on the outside. I will also tell the boys to write to you. I will now close, trusting this will find you in the best of health, as I am present; also hoping this will cheer you up as your letter cheered me up.
I remain your sincere friend and pal,

Louie

Dago Frank Cirofici’s letter, undated, seemed slightly more desperate than those of his cellmates. Cirofici’s predicament was justified; guilty more by association it seemed and was apparently not even present the night of Rosenthal’s murder. But the Italian hood stood by his Jewish comrades with a gangland sense of loyalty though underneath his penned words one could almost sense a shuddering lamb being sent to the slaughter.

My dear friend Jack: I read your letter and Jack I tell you it made me feel kind of bad to think you are taking it so hard on our account, but I know what a true pal you are, so I know what about how you feel. I know the night I heard Gyp and Lefty were arrested I cried like a little baby. I had the blues for a week, before that – the day you turned your pockets inside out – was enough for me.
Do you remember it? Dear pal, I have more faith in you than in any living man in this whole country. I tell you the truth right from my heart. I don’t know you long Jack, and I think if it weren't for you I don’t know what would happen to me. Being a Dago, of course, you don’t know what I know. But time will tell, old pal. Even at that, I was always ready to take anything they handed me and say nothing.
Dear Jack, I ought not to be writing you my hard luck story. Don’t mind it. I am as happy as a lord otherwise. Well, old boy, don’t worry, we will have a grand time up at mother’s house as soon as we all get out.
Let us hope they rush things along. The sooner the better. Be cheerful, Jack. There is not a bit of worrying with the four of us. If I have so much faith in you, I am sure the rest of the boys have the same. I have thought many a time how you and your good little wife, God bless her, have worked making up food for us. Tell her I prayed to-day that I can meet her and shake her hand, with ever so much thanks for her great kindness. I think I write you a nice long letter, and hope to get one in return. I would of written long ago, but I did not know your address. Hoping this will find you and your wife happy, and with my best wishes, I remain your true friend.

Frank Cirofici Room 328
P.S. – Regards to you and Jack Wolf
Better days coming, dear. Good-night.

Big Jack Zelig's death, only two days after these letters were written, had dashed all possible hopes of the four men ever finding their freedom in the wake public outcry and pressure, resulting in the fervor of justice that was to come.

Despite all last minute appeals and reflective editorials in the Yiddish press, nothing could be done to change the minds of authorities in Albany leading up to April 13.
Rabbis were sent to their cells to pray with them in their last hours, and a priest was summoned for Cirofici.
It was determined that Dago Frank was psychologically the weakest of the quartet, and it would be even crueler punishment to have him sit through any of the executions and wait his turn. He blubbered like a baby on his way to the chair. Whitey Lewis and Rosenberg only said a few words, reiterating their innocence and the gross injustice befallen upon them.
Horowitz was the last to go, and kept mum until the end.

Our Gotham's 'Changing Of The Guard'

2010-03-22T22:45:00.011-04:00

Here is a sneak peak of Our Gotham's latest project "Changing Of The Guard"

The short feature will have it's premiere at The Museum Of The American Gangster in April. I've had a sneak peak myself and its a doozy so kudos to all those involved and more Our Gotham news will be forthcoming...

Also speaking of the MOAG, as they gear up for their official opening in the coming weeks, they will be starting a new walking tour on April 1st.

Here are some details:

The Museum of the American Gangster (MOAG) begins its neighborhood tour offerings on Thursday, April 1, 2010 with a daily tour focusing on the Jewish-American criminal community on the Lower East Side at the turn of the century.

MOAG's Jewish Mob tour traces the steps of pre-Prohibition era gangsters like Monk Eastman, Max "Kid Twist" Zwerbach, "Big" Jack Zelig and Benjamin "Dopey" Fein – pivotal figures in the organizing of crime in New York City; learn about the Jewish immigrant experience on the Lower East Side and the conditions that led to organized gansterism; visit the sites of gang headquarters, shootouts and assassinations, and learn how the Jewish Mob expanded out of the slums and into a contemporary organized crime syndicate.

The MOAG Jewish Mob tour was prepared with the direct input of the families and estates of the crime figures discussed on tour, as well as consultation by leading authors like Rose Keefe (The Starker, Guns and Roses, The Man Who Got Away) and Patrick Downey (Gangster City), to provide a one-of-a-kind experience for tour-goers using original source documents, images, firsthand accounts and family stories previously unavailable elsewhere.

MOAG's Jewish Mob tours are conducted by Eric Ferrara, Seth Franklin Abrams and Max Weissberg.

MOAG's Jewish Mob walking tour will run daily, Monday through Saturday, at 5:00pm, beginning Thursday, April 1, 2010. The fee is $15pp, which does not include entry to the museum. Reservations are not required. Meet at MOAG, 80 St. Marks Place, New York, NY 10003 (between 1st and 2nd Avenues). Closest subways are the L to 1st Avenue, F/V to 2nd Ave, or the 6 to Astor Place.

For more information visit http://moagnyc.org

Big Tim at Tenement Talks

2010-03-18T20:26:00.019-04:00

A quick note to let those in the NYC area that author Richard F. Welch will be at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum this coming Monday, March 22 at 6:30 PM as part of their Tenement Talks series.

Welch's recently published book 'King Of The Bowery - Big Tim Sullivan, Tammany Hall, and New York City from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era' (now that's book title!) is the first long-overdue biography of one of New York's most colorful and controversial politicians from the turn of the century and proved to be an enlightening read.

As I've mentioned before, the tall Irishman known for his twinkling blue eyes, was a key player in shaping the roles Jewish gangsters would play early on. While painted by some as the epitome of the crooked politician, Sullivan, who was also known affectionately as 'The Big Feller', was truly a walking contradiction; giving as much to charity as he took in from an endless bounty of graft. He was also unquestionably progressive and responsible for early women's rights movements and pushing proper labor practices.

Despite both the lives of Arnold Rothstein and Herman Rosenthal ended in bullets, each had taken different trajectories in success and failure, and both owed much of their start to the patronage offered by Sullivan. But Sullivan didn't just help Jews who walked the crooked line. Big Tim knew that Jewish patronage was of key importance, especially since so many lived in his district, and he had more foresight than most of his fellow sachems when it came working with them. According to Richard Welch, Big Tim was one of the first Democrats to bring Jewish professionals into his fold as advisors at a time when most Jews were still frowned upon aand objectified as socialists. Sullivan's helping hand extended to include Max Steuer, who became one of Tammany's, and New York's, most successful lawyers, and as of 1909 - Henry Applebaum, who served as Sullivan's personal secretary and close political operative up until Sullivan's death.
Big Tim Sullivan's life ended tragically in the fall of 1913, in the wake of the shooting deaths of Herman Rosenthal and Big Jack Zelig the previous year. His passing also marked the end of an era of shaky but reliable alliances between Gotham's Jewish gangs and Tammany Hall.

There is much more to Sullivan's life so those with any interest should pick up Richard Welch's book and if you are not geographically challenged, drop by the Tenement Museum this coming Monday.

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I will have more news coming soon in regards to my involvement with the Museum Of the American Gangster. While the Museum is now open for previews, the exhibit space will only be ready in the coming weeks so stay tuned for updates.

The Museum Of The American Gangster

2010-02-19T13:47:00.023-05:00

Below is the official press release for the new Museum of the American Gangster, located at 80 St. Marks Place in New York City, and which is set to open its doors next month.
This promises to be an exciting new venue and venture for all those who share an interest in the subject matter, as well as an entertaining and educating experience for the curious.

I am also happy to announce that plans are currently in the making to display a selection of my original portraits from this project at the Museum for an extended period of time. I will have more details on all this forthcoming.
I must humbly admit there will be something nicely gratifying that the portraits will hang mere blocks away from where many of these men strolled the streets so many years ago and this feels a bit like a homecoming for the artwork. I will post more details as they come in.

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The Museum Of The American Gangster - Press Release

The Museum of the American Gangster (MAOG) presents an opportunity to gain insight into the hidden, inside world of the American gangster through artifacts and stories told by those involved. We are working with a team of criminal authors, historians and related institutions, as well as family members and estates of pivotal crime figures, to create a museum that both casual fans and invested scholars could enjoy and benefit from. Beyond exhibits and artifacts, MOAG will offer dedicated research facilities, access to original source documents and articles, oral histories, workshops, walking tours, live performances, historic reenactments, lectures, movies and presentations.

The MOAG at 80 St. Marks Place features a full gallery space with gift shop, as well as an authentic speakeasy and a maze of hidden rooms and artifacts in the basement left over from Prohibition (which are all part of the exhibit). Frank Sinatra was a singing waiter in our restaurant as a youth (yoot?), and our gallery served as living quarters for Leon Trotsky in 1917. The 160-seat, professional Off-Broadway theater on site premiered You're A Good Man Charlie Brown in 1967 and is the site of Lord Buckley's final performance before his death in 1960. (And that is just the tip of the iceberg.)

MOAG's goal is to objectively and authentically present the role that crime has played in shaping the politics, culture, myth and lore of New York City. Criminals will not be glorified or sensationalized, nor will they be vilified -- rather, this institution intends to allow visitors insight into how and why criminals (on both sides of the law) chose the life they did. Where did they come from? What were their options? What was their relationship to the community? This is a chance to dig deep into the lives and minds of some of the country's most successful crime figures.

Where better to explore the influence of criminality in America than in the neighborhood where such heavyweights as "Lucky" Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and "Bugsy" Siegel planted the seeds of modern organized crime? Where their predecessors, men like Jack Zelig, Monk Eastman, and Paul Kelly paved the way for future mob influence over labor, politics and entertainment in NYC? Where Tammany Hall headquartered their century-long stranglehold on politics with the assistance of local gangs? Where the most powerful Prohibition-era bootleggers lived, operated and fought for control over an underground empire? Where the infamous Irish-Nativist wars paralyzed Lower Manhattan in the 19th century? Important American history is in our own backyard and MOAG is dedicated to presenting this very important aspect of it.

The MOAG daily preview hours of operation are Monday through Saturday, 12:00pm to 5:00pm, for a reduced admission fee of only $10.

Museum previews begin with a special Sunday, March 7, 2010 event, from 12:00pm - 5:00pm.

For more information, visit http://moagnyc.org

Thanks to the Knickbocker Village blog for posting the video.

Sholem Bernstein

2010-02-04T21:31:00.027-05:00

Apologies for the slowing down of posts since the beginning of the new year but as I have mentioned earlier I've been busy with other projects. As most people who freelance surely know, work schedules can be far from concrete and routine.

In that time though I have managed to finish up another portrait to add to the series. This time around is the lesser known Sholem Bernstein, a low level operative of the Brooklyn / Brownsville troop of Murder Inc. soldiers.

Bernstein was a talented car thief whose services were instrumental in procuring getaway cars that would later trace to a dead end in an investigation. Nothing of much importance was ever given to Bernstein further than placing his hands on the ten o'clock and two o'clock behind numerous stolen steering wheels, and pushing down on the gas. Sholem, who some called Sol, drove the getaway car at the fateful murder of candy store owner Joseph Rosen in 1936. Rosen was a former garment industry worker whose trucking business had been forced into retirement by Louis 'Lepke' Buchalter's powerful influence over labor racketeering in New York. Rosen was set up with a small candy store in Brooklyn by Lepke in order to try to help the man support his family. This was after a few missteps Rosen had working for a couple of other trucking companies under Buchalter's control. The candy shop faltered and Rosen, understandably embittered towards Buchalter, demanded financial reprimand and rumors flew that the candy man was looking to blow the whistle on Lepke's empire with one quick visit to Thomas Dewey's office.
Emanuel 'Mendy' Weiss was one of Bernstien's passengers on the Sunday morning of September 13 when Rosen was face down on the floor of the candy store, his body host to seventeen bullet holes. Joe Rosen's murder seemed perhaps inconsequential at the time to Lepke, who had overseen and ordered numerous syndicate hits, all calculated carefully, but this one would later prove to be the foundation of his downfall, and lead to his trip to the electric chair in 1944.

Inevitably Bernstien's minor stature in the underworld of Kings County manifested him into an easy pushover for the borough's District Attorney William O'Dwyer and prosecutor Burton Turkus. Looking at an extended trip to Sing Sing, Bernstein folded like an old accordion and was holed up in room 622 of The Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island soon after; his neighbor in room 623 was Abe Reles. He was one of the four important turncoats under police protection, along with Allie 'Tick Tock' Tannenbaum and Mickey Sycoff, who were across the hall in room 626.

Tannenbaum and Bernstein were key figures in Buchlater's trial for the prosecution. Tannenbaum's corroboration of the Rosen murder, and the eye witness account from Bernstein, sealed Lepke's fate along with Mendy Weiss.
Amazingly enough, court transcripts from the trial detailed that Bernstein's attempted an extortion racket while passing the sometimes agonizingly long hours under lock down at the Half Moon (he, along with the others were there for over a year). This was done through threatening letters sent out to potential victims who shady past he was acquainted with in the old neighborhood. These paper threats passed through the hands of the policemen on duty who were unaware of their content, onto their intended mark. The scam however proved unsuccessful.

Like Allie Tannenbaum and Abe 'Pretty' Levine, Sholem Bernstein disappeared from sight and was never heard from again following the fall out of the trials and subsequent string of executions.
He and Tannenbaum did make court appearances in 1950, when Abe Reles' case and a probe into police corruption was reopened by the serving District Attorney Miles McDonald (O'Dwyer had gone on to be New York's 100th Mayor in 1945). Appearing like hoodlum ghosts out of the past, Bernstein and Tannenbaum made their statements and answered questions then quickly faded away once again, their post-Murder Inc. days still remaining a mystery to this day.

Bullets at The Blue Bird Café

2009-12-26T20:25:00.016-05:00

Eighty-nine years ago…on December 26, 1920, Monk Eastman was found face down on the cold winter sidewalk near the 14th street subway entrance facing Union Square in the early morning hours following Christmas day.
The two policemen had counted a total of five .38 caliber bullets entry wounds in Eastman’s stocky, battle scarred body. After a life of so many violent close calls - a man whose life long love of cats may of attributed to an inherited fabled nine lives - these final bullets had found their mark.

A native of Williamsburgh, Brooklyn, Monk Eastman was born Edward Osterman in 1873, and was Gotham’s first great Jewish gang leader.
His life was a storybook affair of pugilism and violence, blood and broken noses, and as a result inadvertently created the turn of the century gangster archetype. Through pure brawn and probably very little brains he had reached the highest levels of power available to him through the closing years of the nineteenth century up until 1904. He also had hit the lowest lows upon his release from Sing Sing in 1908, unable to reclaim his throne in the underworld and idling in small petty crimes and lost in an opium haze most of his waking hours.

It wasn’t until he reached the age of forty-four was he able to regain some semblance of gregarious grace among comrades when he offered his services to the US Army in 1917. He proved to be one on of the most courageous troopers ever enlisted with the 27th Division of the 106th Infantry, known as “O’Ryan’s Roughnecks”, saving countless lives on the battlefields of France through bravery and brash.

He had encountered no runs in with the police after his return from the Great War, and was even granted full citizenship, which was restored in 1919 after a his fellow doughboys drew up and signed a petition and sent it to Governor Alfred E. Smith along with tales of his bravery in order to let him participate in the scheduled victory parade along Fifth Avenue. Initially Eastman, who had enlisted under the name of William Delaney, was going to be denied his place in the victory march after his checkered and violent past was uncovered.

But it seemed old habits were hard to break and the straight and narrow was a difficult trail to stay on after his discharge. In the early morning hours of December 26, Eastman had been spending the evening cavorting at The Blue Bird Café at 62 East Fourteen Street, near the corner of Fourth Ave. An argument had ensued with a Prohibition officer later identified as Jerry W. Bohan. The disagreement, which became quickly heated, was apparently over the tipping amount for their waiter.

His affiliation with Bohan was unclear but obviously the Prohibition officer’s moral stance was possibly a dubious one since Bohan was after all enjoying the illegal swills of a speakeasy and keeping company with Eastman and others. Alcohol fueled misjudgment had played key roles in Eastman’s life in the past; most notably his drunken uptown spree in 1904 where he fired six bullets (all missing their mark) at two Pinkerton detectives following an attempted mugging gone wrong. No longer under Tammany Hall protection, the incident had landed Eastman a Sing Sing sentence for five years, this ending his reign as gang leader and the street glory and respect he would never again regain.

High levels of alcohol were noted in the autopsy report done on Eastman. After some further investigating however following his death, detectives found out that Eastman had been involved in some small time dope peddling and bootlegging, and was also under Arnold Rothstein’s employ as a loan collector.

Jerry Bohan, who turned himself in on January 4 of the following year, claimed self-defense in regards to the shooting. Eastman was apparently quite inebriated and aggressively mouthing off insults and threats as he reached into his inside coat pocket while approaching him outside of the Blue Bird Café near the 14th street subway’s southern entrance. Bohan was quicker on the draw. He was eventually charged with manslaughter and was sentenced to a minimum of three years at Sing Sing.

Though his public profile in the recent years had dwindled considerably, his killing had the newspapers’ full attention of the front page upon his death.
EX-CONVICT, WAR HERO, SHOT DEAD and REFORMED GANGSTER SLAIN trumpeted The Daily News.

Speculative articles ran about how his rehabilitation was perhaps not so genuine and how you couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks, taking the expected moral high ground editorial approach.
The newspaper stories outraged two particular army buddies from the 106th, Hank Miller and John Boland, who put up funds for a military burial after Eastman’s family didn’t come forward to bury their own. Eastman‘s sister Ida had identified his body but never came back to reclaim it. One can only assume that family relations between the former gangster and his blood relatives were strained to the point of disownment.

Coming to Eastman’s defense and extolling his battlefield bravery, Boland announced to the papers a highly colored quote perhaps not so deserved of a man who had at one time had sent so many men to Bellevue Hospital's accident ward that orderlies started to refer to it as the Eastman Pavilion:
“Mr. Eastman did more for America than Presidents and generals. The public does not reward its heroes, now they are calling him a gangster instead of praising him as one of those who saved America. But we’ll do the right thing by this soldier and give him the funeral he deserves.”

On December 30, thousands of mourners showed up for Monk Eastman’s funeral procession including soldiers, women, children, and aging former members of the Eastman gang. He was dressed in full military regalia and laid in a shiny black coffin draped with the Star and Stripes, on which a silver plated inscription read Our Lost Pal, Gone But Not Forgotten.

As a result of his family not being involved in the interment arrangements, a pastor from the South Third Street Methodist Church read the committal service of the dead. Eastman’s sordid and turbulent life had denied him Kaddish and a Jewish burial.

Six polished black cars and twenty horse drawn carriages made their way to their final stop at Cypress Hills Cemetery. With a bugler sounding taps and three volleys of fire, the life of Monk Eastman was over, and Edward Osterman was laid back down into the Brooklyn ground.

Red Levine Redux

2009-11-21T21:53:00.007-05:00

I haven't posted in a little while as I've been busy with a variety of freelance assignments and, well, life - but I thought I would share a recent "reworking" of a portrait of Samuel 'Red' Levine.

I posted about Red Levine quite awhile ago and currently don't have much more to add as far biographical updates. However, for those who have followed this project with a keen eye may of noticed the artwork has gone through some changes over the course of time. Nothing too substantial or radical mind you, but the line work has become more delicate and the painting process coming forward more so than in the past. My original attempt at this kosher killer was done quite earlier on when I started this series, where line work was bolder and the watercolor almost as a secondary thought.
With the amount of portraits that have been accomplished since then, the self- critical side of me wanted to give Red another go. I was also fortunate to locate a reference photo which has not been circulated or appeared in any known publications to make this new interpretation all that fresher, plus he seems to have a grumpy disposition in this one that just adds to it all....

The Demise of DUTCH SCHULTZ

2009-10-23T16:35:00.013-04:00

Seventy- four years ago today, Dutch Schultz, neé under the very unthreatening name of Arthur Flegenheimer, was shot down at at The Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey a couple of months after his thirty-third birthday.

Schultz still remains one of gangland's most infamous figures in the general public mind.
Bronx born in 1902 to German-Jewish parents, he
remains one of the more undesirable characters in the dark, sometimes blemished legacy left by some of the Jewish crime bosses.

Dutch Shultz’s character traits were nefarious at best, despised yet respected by most of the underworld, and considering the bevy of bad apples that lurked in that netherworld, it was a notable achievement. While the Manhattan syndicate, headed and organized by Charles Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Ben Seigel, Joe Adonis and Louis Lepke Buchalter ran their business like boardroom shareholders; Shultz remained an outsider partly by choice. His position and power as a Bronx bootlegger and a highly lucrative numbers racket in Harlem gave him leverage with the higher ups and he knew it. Shultz was smart enough early on cutting them in on the Harlem slot machines and lotteries as a way of paying tribute.
He only had one rule. “I don’t make money off women or narcotics.”

Still something wasn’t quite right with Arthur Flegenheimer. He lacked the dignity and grace that the new mob bosses were trying to instill after tutelage from the late and powerfully influential Arnold Rothstein. Schultz was a overly paranoid and narcissistic jitterbug at the best of times. Despite his growing wealth he still dressed in cheap twenty-dollar suits and two-dollar shirts as he believed clothes were not worth spending money on. His crew was a ragtag of associates of mostly Bronx bred Jews like himself, non of whom he really trusted except for maybe his numbers man, George Weinberg. He was also quick tempered and complex, running his mouth without impunity of repercussion more times than the downtown boys cared for, but they couldn’t deny his impact and the money that he brought in and he was quietly tolerated. Headstrong and careless, Schultz ran into trouble on numerous occasions with the syndicate in its burgeoning years. He also never shied away from conducting personal violence himself when needed and didn't quite seem to grasp the notion of the boss behind closed doors. His renegade ways harkened back to the wilder days of New York gangland than to the current new order proposed by Luciano and Lansky.

In 1932, Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll, a notorious underworld figure in his own right, was also a former partner of Shultz’s who started hijacking the Dutchman’s beer trucks after the two had a major disagreement about profit sharing. A street war ensued and reached its apex when Shultz lured Coll into trap, sending his number one enforcer Abe ‘Bo’ Weinberg, sibling to George, to rid of the Mad Dog problem for good. Weinberg, who was possibly accompanied by other gunmen, cornered Coll in a drug store telephone booth while he was making a call. Trapped in the cubicle of glass and wood with no means of escape, Coll faced the hail of bullets and so went his demise. Dutch was apparently was nearby to ensure the hit was a success, shook off the incident and claimed, "Just another punk with his hands in my pockets."

Shultz was gathering more heat as well as more newspaper ink as his empire expanded, ignoring Lansky’s rule to stay out of the press. Schultz however seemed to revel in the media attention, feeding his power hungry persona, but it was all catching up with him as he caught the attention of Federal officials. In wake of the highly ballyhooed lock up of Al Capone, law officials were now realizing that tax evasion was a substantial, surefire measure of getting mobsters into a court room without any violence or chase. A simple subpoena proved to carry more weight than a handful of .38 calibers and a carload of G-men. Schultz was finally charged with income tax fraud, and the trial was cunningly moved to the small town of Malone in upstate New York at the request of Schultz’s lawyers to avoid character profiling by a New York City based jury. While awaiting trial, he hired a public relations firm to spread his money and give to charities, all throughout Malone, glad handing and baby kissing like a politician on a crooked campaign trail. He built up his profile as a government scapegoat, a family man just trying to make an honest living and the big city huckster charmed his way into the hearts of small town America. The scheme worked. The hayseeds were hoodwinked and the Dutchman was acquitted of all charges. However, more legal troubles awaited him back in New York. Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey was appointed to break up the rackets by Fiorello LaGuardia, the diminutive Jewish –Italian Mayor whose heart beat to the pulsing rhythm of mid – 1930s New York through a nine year tenure. His inaugural year included a gang-busting crusade with the Dutchman as his first priority, declaring him the city’s top public enemy on radio and to the press. The syndicate shuddered at all of the sudden attention.

During Shultz's time away in Malone, Bo Weinberg had been secretly making arrangements with Lucky Luciano and others to have Schultz's empire taken over, betting that Dutch would be found guilty and never come back. His philanthropist payouts and mounting legal expenses were draining all profits and Weinberg though best that the entire operation should be handed over to a more even-tempered board of directors. Returning to New York, Shultz soon realized he was outnumbered and overpowered by the syndicate, who had given him ample warning to stay out of the press, which he had failed to do and was now faced with a collected cold shoulder from the mob. Feeling betrayed by associates and squeezed out of his Harlem policy games and restaurant rackets, now in the hands of Luciano, Schultz mentally fidgeted about his next move.

With Thomas Dewey still on his tail, Schultz went across the river to Newark, New Jersey to get out of jurisdiction, lick his wounds and plan his comeback. But revenge burned brighter and his first order of business was specifically Bo Weinberg. Lured by the possible prospect of reconciliation with his former boss, Weinberg agreed to a meet. The most common story, though clichéd and cinematic, was that he was taken for a boat ride on the Hudson and fitted with cement shoes. Shultz apparently broke the news to Abe’s brother George, explaining in colorful underworld hyperbole:
“ Sorry George, we had to fit Abe with a cement kimono.”
Abraham Weinberg’s murder was never solved nor was his body ever found.

Thomas Dewey continued his pressure tactics, proving to be the proverbial hair up Schultz’s ass. Shultz reached a point of breakdown and vowed to have Dewey assassinated, pleading with Luciano and co. to support him in this endeavor. For a brief while the hit was even considered as men staked out Dewey’s daily routines and try to determine the possibility of that deadly scenario. In the end, the Italians, along with Meyer Lansky and Ben Siegel, said it would be bad for business. Lepke Buchalter and Jacob ‘Gurrah’ Shapiro were a little more cold blooded in their opinion but were out-voted. Decidedly, Dewey was too high profile political a figure, and the heat would prove to be too much. Schultz, frothed at the mouth and became incensed, walked out and said he would do it himself, thereby sealing his fate.

On October 23, 1935, Shultz was in the Palace Chop House in Newark, with the only loyal remaining associates Bernard ‘Lulu’ Rosenrantz, Abe Laundau, and Otto Berman at his side. Shultz had been at the Chop House’s backroom every night for the last three weeks, using it as his temporary meeting place, unaware that he was being watched. New Jersey boss Abner ‘Longy’ Zwillman got word of Schultz’s locale to the boys across the river. At around 10PM, the hulking figure of Charles 'The Bug' Workman walked into the back room, guns blazing, while Emanuel 'Mendy' Weiss watched the front door and a driver only known as Piggy waited outside in the getaway car. Schultz’s co-horts were shot down, but the Dutchman, who went to relieve himself minutes before and wasn’t present to witness the initial carnage . Workman stormed into the mens room, catching Shultz in rather unflattering and compromising position and shot him.

Schultz was rushed to the Newark City hospital, where he lay dying and raving for a couple of days, slipping in and out of a coma while police tried to question him about his killers. Strangely enough he asked for a priest for his last rites instead of a rabbi. Two women showed up, each claiming to be his wife. Only one, Frances Flegenheimer, actually was.

Schultz began rambling incomprehensible confessional monologues, all of which were transcribed by stenographers who were by his deathbed in rotations day and night and and filled numerous pages of what seemed art first like underworld babble. Investigators tried to find out who shot him through various question periods but with infection setting in and being in a highly fevered state, most of his responses left detectives baffled.

Dutch Schultz’s deathbed ramblings have become the subject of many curious literary scholars ever since, scrutinized for possible hidden meaning and even seen by some as an untended precursor to the Beat literature movement fifteen years later. Disjointed and at times poetic, they are a curious last exit of words from man not exactly known for any scholarly attributes but someone possibly facing his demons at death’s door.

His final rant lasted a couple of hours, ending with:

"…Look out! Mamma, mamma! Look out for her. You can't beat him. Police, Mamma! Helen, Mother, please take me out. Come on, Rosie. O.K. Hymes would do it, not him. I will settle...the indictment. Come on, Max, open the soap duckets. Frankie, please come here. Open that door, Dumpey's door. It is so much, Abe, that...with the brewery. Come on. Hey, Jimmy! The Chimney Sweeps. Talk to the Sword. Shut up, you gotta a big mouth! Please help me up, Henny. Max come over here...French Canadian bean soup...I want to pay, let them leave me alone..."

Shultz then fell into a coma, and passed away quietly two hours later.

Meyer 'Buggsy' Goldstein before and after...

2009-10-11T21:10:00.008-04:00

Every so often I like to give a little 'behind the scenes' as to how some of the artwork is approached and how it arrives to its final stroke, as I did here awhile back.
Most artists don't really like to completely reveal their process in order to maintain a little artistic secrecy and keep a little magic in the mix, and rightly so. However, to change things up a little from a regular biographical post - I thought I'd reveal a before and after on this one...

The subject here who has gone from black outlines to final colors is Meyer 'Buggsy' Goldstein, close childhood pal of Abe 'Kid Twist' Reles and a cog in the machine that was Murder Inc.

Goldstein was the lesser know 'Buggsy' in Jewish gangland, obviously overshadowed by the more infamous Seigel; perhaps with the addition of another g to his moniker he hoped to set himself apart from his Manhattan counterpart, but it was rather unlikely anyone would mix up the two hoodlums as Seigel was mob royalty and Goldstein court jester. Born in 1905, he was an original founder of the Brownsville troop and shared second in command duties with Harry 'Pep' Strauss under Abe Reles. He kept close ties to the neighboring Ocean Hill mob led by Louis Capone, to whom Goldstein had originally suggested they reach out to when they were looking at expanding their underworld operations across Brooklyn, and allied themselves with the Italians when they decided to put the Shapiro brothers, Brownsville's original enfants terribles, out of commission for good and share the rewards.

Goldstein was kidded on numerous occasions that actor Edward G Robinson based his on screen gangster persona on the real life Buggsy from Brooklyn. The physical features and stature similarities aside, he also had the same quick quip way of talking and moved along in a duck like walk wrapped in the same tough-guy attitude that Robinson portrayed on screen. Goldstein it seemed started to believe the talk as well - boasting to strangers and family alike that Robinson patterned himself on Meyer from Pitkin street. The probable reality however was when Robinson's (neé Emanuel Goldenberg) star had started to rise in the early 1930s, Goldstein's street success was moving along the same, though vastly different trajectory. The backlots of Warner Bros. studios were along way away from Midnight Roses candy store at the corner of Livonia and Saratoga, and chances are Robinson never popped in for an egg cream and discovered his gangster muse sitting in a corner.

While Robinison's career continued on for many years, Goldstein's star was snuffed out by June of 1941 when he went to the electric chair for the murder of Irving 'Puggy' Feinstein following damning testimonies from former associates Seymour 'Blue Jaw' Magoon and Abe Reles.

2009-10-07T23:31:00.002-04:00

I have been away / out of town taking care of other responsibilities outside of gangsterland for a bit...but a new post is on its way soon...

Not so Lil' Abner

2009-09-10T21:20:00.021-04:00

Here is the latest artwork which has rolled off my drawing table.

At the Real Machers exhibit earlier this year, many had pointed out that Abner 'Longy' Zwillman was missing from the rogues gallery, a fact that I had pre- acknowledged but wasn't able to complete in time for the exhibit opening.

Born in 1899, 'Longy' Zwillman earned his sobriquet rather easily, as the Newark native and eventual boss of New Jersey sprouted to the height of 6' 2 by the time he was pushing pushcarts at the age of sixteen. Like his Manhattan counterpart Meyer Lansky, Zwillman built his empire on smarts more than muscle while managing to stay out of the spotlight for a good part of his career. The foundation of his fortune was built on the early successes of winning the bootlegging wars of the Garden State as well as constructing a significant gambling empire during the 1920's. Zwillman was also a member of what was to be known as 'The Big Six' during the 1930s, comprised of Meyer Lansky, Benjamin Siegel, Charles 'Lucky' Luciano, Frank Costello and Joe Adonis. His influence over the underworld rumblings of Newark led to tipping the Manhattan syndicate on the location of Dutch Shultz which ended in a hail bullets at the Palace Chop House in October of 1935.
Zwillman rolled big for a good part of his life, with a handful of influential politicians and policemen in his pockets. New Jersey has had long history of political corruption to this day, and its genesis may be attributed to this lanky Jewish crime boss. He was also instrumental in organizing the infamous 1929 Atlantic City summit, a who's who of national top ranking crime bosses and regarded by many as the birth of American organized crime.

Zwillman's career was a colorful one; a life that included ties to the burgeoning career of Jean Harlow, a reward offer in the Charles Lindbergh baby case, and also as a renowned philanthropist when it came to matters of his beloved Newark with a long list of charity donations in his name.

The Estes Kefuaver hearings in the early 1950s were hard times for top guns like Frank Costello and eventually exposed Zwillman's checkered past, and his legitimate facade soon crumbled in the following years.
The IRS proved once again mightier with its pencil pushers than a handful of G-men could achieve as Zwillman fought off tax evasion charges. His trial ended in a hung jury, but the trial would return to haunt him. Through wire taps and an unnamed informant, evidence came to light that a jury member was bribed to lean in Longy's direction and deadlock the verdict. The FBI prepared a new case against Zwillman with J. Edgar Hoover's personal blessing to forge ahead, but they would never get their man. By January 1959 Zwillman became increasingly withdrawn and depressed due to pending indictments that he knew he could possibly not squirm his way out of. On the morning of February 27, his wife Mary found him hung in the basement of their West Orange mansion, her departed husband still in his striped robe and silk pajamas as a half empty bottle of bourbon sat nearby. Though ruled as suicide, much has been whispered that Zwillman may of perhaps been been murdered under mob orders who suspected Zwillman may of tried to work out a deal in exchange for exoneration of his charges as to not face the remainder of his life behind bars just as he was turning sixty years old.

As a side note : I would like to encourage more comments from everyone! Sometimes it feels a little like I'm working in a vacuum here (though I know you're out there) so feel free drop in with some thoughts or just to say hello! Thanks.

The Real Inglourious Basterds....

2009-08-20T22:39:00.032-04:00

" My friends and I saw some good action against the Brown Shirts around New York. I got my buddies like Bugsy Siegel – before he went to California – and some other young guys. We taught them how to use their fists and handle themselves in fights, and we didn’t behave like gents.” - Meyer Lansky

Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Inglourious Basterds, is being marketed and publicized by some as a ‘Jewish revenge fantasy’ film – a ‘what if we could turn back time’ scenario where an elite squad American Jewish soldiers kick a whole lot of Nazi ass. Why this squad requires a gentile leader is still remains an open question... and I have yet to see the film so I will reserve judgment. Critics seem divided on the film (you can read an interesting New Yorker review here) and as like most of Tarantino’s films, they rarely garner reactions of polite fence sitting. Tarantino seems to relish in the idea of being Hollywood's enfant terrible regardless of some of the public's reaction to his body of work so far.

While the tale of Inglourious Basterds is obviously fictional – the idea of Jewish tough guys fighting Nazi oppression is far from fictitious. Not only did the brave souls of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the forest dwelling partisan groups take action, National Socialist ass kicking was also happening on the streets of New York as well.

Meyer Lansky’s family had come to America from Grodno, Russia in 1911, and they like many Jews who fled the pogroms, were no strangers to anti-Semitism. While the new world lauded its fair own share of bigotry towards the great numbers of migrating newcomers that landed on US shores during the opening decades of the twentieth-century – the threat was rarely beyond verbal and obtrusive. The slow climb on the social ladder to a prosperous and more importantly, free life was still within their grasp. By the early 1930s however, as a larger threat loomed across the ocean, it became slowly evident that the same persecutions Jews had fled from, were once again on the rise in their new world.

In 1933, when Adolf Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany, a Nazi presence was growing in Uncle Sam’s backyard as well. Hitler had hypnotized a nation with devilish oratorical skills and his influence had also reached North American shores, giving birth to America’s own storm troopers, branding itself the German – American Bund.

The Bund was built out of former German-American societies who pined for the motherland though still relished and reaped from America’s rewards. Originally backed with Nazi – funding, over ninety-three local chapters sprouted across the country with membership estimated at 100,000 or more. By the mid 1930s, while Hitler built autobahns and edged Germany towards re-armament, the American Bund published four weekly German newspapers, started German language schools and even opened twenty-two Hitler Youth camps.

Fritz Kuhn, who was a former employee of non other than Henry Ford (head of the Ford Motor Company and America’s predominant anti- Semite) led the New York chapter of the Bund up until 1936, after which he was put in charge of the entire American division.

Kuhn was ambitious; campaigning on behalf of Republican presidential candidate Alfred Landon, backed senators and members of Congress and did radio interviews alongside Dr. Ignatz Griebel, leader of the ‘Friends of New Germany’ movement who was eventually uncovered as a Nazi spy. Kuhn peaked in late 1937 by rallying over 1,150 Bund members decked out in brown shirt uniforms doing the Hitler stomp inside the walls of the old Madison Square Garden at 50th Street and 8th Avenue.

These were indeed scary times.

Not long after the Madison Square Garden rally, the Jewish community in New York, clearly unsettled by such activity, reached out to Meyer Lansky. These were not factory owners or the corner grocer looking for protection, but prominent members of Jewish society. Rabbi Stephen Wise, who led the Federation Of American Zionists, approached Lansky to ‘do something’ about the rising trouble. So did New York State Judge Nathan Perlman.

“Nazism is flourishing in the United States.” Perlman told Lansky,

“We Jews should be more militant. Meyer, we want action taken against Nazi sympathizers. We will put money and legal assistance at your disposal, whatever you need. Can you organize the militant part for us?”

Though Meyer Lansky stood only five feet – four inches, what dangled between his legs were bigger and bolder than men twice his size. Lansky was delighted by the request to crack a few Nazi skulls and he responded to the request with Jewish and American pride:

“I’ll fight these Nazis with my own resources. I don’t need your cash. But I will ask you one thing, that after we go into action you’ll try and make sure the Jewish press don’t criticize me.”

The object was to break up Bund rallies but Pearlman and Wise stressed there was to be no killing, which undoubtedly disappointed Meyer’s merry band of misfits. There were provided with addresses of leading Bund members as well as locations for secret meetings. One particular night Lansky, with a beaming Bugsy Siegel at his side and backed by other Jewish gangsters arrived at a location in Yorkville, the center of the German community in Manhattan, to breakup a rally that was underway. Lansky described the incident:

“We got there that evening and found several hundred people dressed in brown shirts. The stage was decorated with a swastika and pictures of Hitler. The speaker started ranting. There were only about fifteen of us, but we went into action.

We attacked them in the hall and threw some of them out the windows. There were fistfights all over the place. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up, and some of them were out of action for months. Yes, it was violence. We wanted to teach them a lesson. We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults.”

Rabbi Wise and Judge Perlman were ecstatic with Lansky’s results, as was noted radio personality Walter Winchell, whose anti-Hitler crusades were well known on the airwaves and boasted of Lansky’s achievements. Winchell also had a reporter's ear to the ground and would provide Lansky with numerous addresses of scheduled Bund meetings. Little Meyer was energized and led campaigns throughout New York and New Jersey, bumping as many Bund heads as he could. Lanky’s results also influenced other Jewish toughs to follow his lead.

Max Hinkes was a member of Abner ‘Longy’ Zwillman’s inner circle who joined a Newark based Jewish resistance group known as the ‘Minutemen’. Hinkes recalled a particular Bund meeting breakup at Schwabben Hall on Springfield Avenue in Newark:

“The Nazi scumbags were meeting one night on the second floor. Nat Arno (the Minutemen’s leader) and I went upstairs and threw stink bombs into the room where the creeps were. As they came out of the room, running from the horrible odor of the stink bombs and running down the steps in to the street to escape, our boys were waiting with bats and iron bars. It was like running a gauntlet. Our boys were lined up on both sides and we started hitting, aiming for their heads or any other part of their bodies, with our bats and iron bars. The Nazis were screaming bloody murder. This was one of the most happy moments of my life.”

While secretly pleased with the end results, Lansky’s benefactors did not keep their end of the bargain. The violence answered with violence did not please the city’s biggest Yiddish newspaper, the Morgen Journal, condemning his actions and labeling him as a Jewish gangster, and other Jewish newspapers followed suit. Rabbi Wise and Judge Pearlman had inadvertently exposed Lansky and left him to battle off the predatory press.
Lanksy had always avoided exposure in the press (at the advice of Arnold Rothstien) and managed to keep a legitimate front as a prosperous businessman up until this point. This sudden public interest and being pegged as a gangster unsettled him as it did Rabbi Wise, who asked him to stop his anti-Nazi activities as public moral rumblings were getting too delicate to handle.
Lansky was reluctant but agreed, however he remained committed to the cause and his patriotism got a chance to shine a couple of years later, when he brokered deal between US Naval Intelligence and the jailed Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano to protect Manhattan’s harbor front from Germany’s infamous wolf pack of prowling U-boats.

Tales At the Tenement Museum

2009-08-07T10:16:00.020-04:00

Those with an interest in tales and anecdotes of New York's notorious gangland history of the early Twentieth Century descended upon The Lower East Side Tenement Museum this past Monday, August 3, to listen to writers Rose Keefe and Pat Downey who gave informative presentations on the subject and hosted the evening.
This is the second time this year the Museum has hosted an evening dealing with themes of social historical perspectives on crime and gangsterdom - something they seem to have shied away from in the past.

The evening also included a performance from Franklin Abrams (of Monk 1903 fame) with a couple actors who brought the past to life - renacting a scene featuring Abrams as Max 'Kid Twist' Zweifach - some of Zweifach's actual descendents were in attendence as well.

Partners in crime:
Rose Keefe (left) is busy working on a couple of books at the moment - a biography on Monk Eastman (which will also encompass the short life of Max Zweifach) and is also digging into the life story of Benjamin 'Dopey' Fein.

Pat Downey is tapping the keyboard on the life of Legs Diamond, whose colorful underworld exploits intertwined on numerous occasions with Jewish gang bosses like Jacob 'Little Augie' Orgen and Arnold Rothstein among others.
They are pictured here with author Allana Atterbury, who herself is working on new book about Dutch Schultz.

Thanks to Franklin Abrams for sending along these photos as I was personally unable to attend the evening.

2009-07-29T23:10:00.006-04:00

A quick notice for folks in New York City that this upcoming Monday, August 3rd, author Rose Keefe (The Starker: Big Jack Zelig, the Rosenthal - Becker Case, and the Advent Of The Jewish Gangster) will be on hand once again at The Lower East Side Tenement Museum for another appearance in their series of Tenement Talks.
The evening is called Dead Guys in Suits: Gangsters in NYC and Rose will be accompanied by Gangster City author Pat Downey (whose blog shares the same name as the evening). Should prove to be a fun, engaging and eye opening affair.

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is located at 108 Orchard Street.

The illustration above is an early piece I did a few years back of an amusing and mysterious character named Chowderhead Cohen.

Charles 'The Bug' Workman

2009-07-19T22:36:00.013-04:00

Charles Workman
aka The Bug,
1908 – mid 1970s

Charles Workman was the second child to Samuel and Anna Workman, both whom lived up to the family name as hard working parents juggling six children on the Lower East Side. Obviously with such a numerous brood of children, it wasn’t easy to keep a handle on them all and little Charlie soon strayed from the pack and became the requisite black sheep. Trouble found him early and he quit school before reaching high school level. During his teenage years Workman quickly developed a hard exterior shell from the daily challenges that life offered on the East Side, and his reputation grew as one of the neighborhood’s tougher kids. His first arrest came at the age of 18, a petty theft of a $12 bundle of cotton off a truck and was served probation. It was just the beginning though as further trouble loomed for Charlie in the coming years.

As the 1920’s were coming to a close, the strong-arm twins of Jacob Shapiro and Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter had become notorious figures in the neighborhood; especially in the wake of the shooting death of their former labor slugger boss Jacob ‘Little Augie’ Orgen on Norfolk Street in 1927, conveniently by their own hand in a grab for power.
Much of 1920s gangland’s financial foundations were built upon the prosperities of Prohibition, but New York City’s long history of labor wars was also a lucrative affair and Shapiro and Buchalter excelled at it through union payoffs and protection rackets. On occasion they would call up on freelancers and teenage toughs who looked like they could defend themselves to help with the strike lines in exchange for a quick buck. When they spotted Workman he fit the bill.

His freshman year with Shapiro and Buchalter taught him the inner working of the garment business, and Lepke was impressed enough with Workman to take him under his wing and put him on his personal payroll. This made Workman available to Lepke at all times – and as extra muscle to the Brooklyn based combination under his command when needed. Suffice to say Workman’s straight ahead bravado and strong, silent demeanor was a breath of fresh air for Buchalter, who generally found himself surrounded by too many dimwitted torpedoes and egos much of the time; all clamoring for the position of top tough guy in order to please the boss He developed quite a fondness for Charlie, and that affection at times roused a little jealousy among the ranks. Buchalter claimed Workman had more guts than the rest of his men put together, so much so he was “bugs” - hence his underworld sobriquet was cemented.

Despite his preferred standing with Lepke, much of the remaining troop couldn’t hold their envy for Workman for too long as he was genuinely like and respected all around. Handsome Charlie was a stand up guy and the Brooklyn triumvirate of Abe Reles, Buggsy Goldstein and Harry Strauss regularly invited Workman to a fair share of family weddings and Bar Mitzvahs; they considered him family, especially after Workman decided to start one of his own and moved to the borough. His reputation as hit man grew considerably as well, and was at one time, not only on Lepke’s payroll, but also moonlighted for Meyer Lansky and Dutch Shultz.

In October of 1935, when the syndicate decided it was time for the Dutchman to go, Workman was the unanimous choice. Lepke sent his second in command Emanuael ‘Mendy’ Weiss as his back up, while a man only known as Piggy was the designated driver. Workman didn’t even flinch at the prospect of rubbing out a former employer as he headed over the Washington Bridge.

After the smoke had cleared in the back room of The Palace Chop House in Newark, NJ, and Dutch Shultz lay on the bathroom floor with five bullets in his body, Workman exited the restaurant to find Weiss, Piggy and the car gone. Fuming, Workman later claimed he followed the train tracks and walked back into Manhattan, irate over Weiss abandoning him in the Garden State. Words flew and tempers raged between the two men for quite some time and Lepke had to step in and maintain the peace, sending Workman down to Florida to cool off.
Mendy Weiss’s reason for abandoning the scene was he poked into men’s room after Shultz was shot and saw Workman pilfering his wallet. In his mind, the hit was over. Nothing was ever discussed about stealing money and wasting valuable time. He ordered Piggy to take off and not wait for Workman. The job was over and if Charlie wanted to stay behind and pinch his wallet that’s a whole other business. And so goes gangster logic and perhaps a sting of jealousy on Weiss’s part in hopes the cops swooped down in time to handcuff the boss’s favorite boy.

In early 1940 Workman was picked up in Brighton Beach on a vagrancy charge. The real motive for the police was that Abe Reles was in custody and was starting to talk. A lot.
Reles was feeding the Brooklyn District Attorney some important facts slowly as he was building up his deal and immunity demands in exchange for testifying. When he told them he could tell them who had shot Dutch Schultz back in ’35, he knew he had their full attention. It had been an open case for five years.
Workman faced a $75,000 bail that he couldn’t pay. The amount was intentionally high as the rounds up in Brooklyn were continuing and the authorities wanted to make sure all suspects in custody were to remain in place as the prosecution stacked their decks and prepared their cases. Workman had no idea at the time he was not to see the outside again for many years. When finally formally charged with the Shultz killing, Charlie pleaded frame up.

Allie ‘Tick Tock’ Tannenbaum, was also ratting on his former colleagues and taking the witness stand, and had been chummy with Workman when the Palace Chop House rift made the underworld gossip column. Workman had supposedly told Tannenbaum, who was also a soldier for Buchalter, the details of the Shultz hit and his side of the story. Charlie had always wanted to make sure he got full credit for it, as it was the highest profile gangland hit since the St. Valentines Day Massacre. Tannenbaum recounted the incident to his captors, in essence corroborating Reles’s testimony, and Charlie’s outlook at liberation was not looking good.

Charlie Workman's trial in June of 1941 was one of almost impossible odds to beat.
His case was formally heard and judged in New Jersey since that was the jurisdiction of Shultz’s killing and so ended up out of the very busy hands of Brooklyn DA William O’Dwyer and prosecutor Burton Turkus.
A man named Louis Cohen, who ran a funeral parlor, was brought in to testify that Workman had been on his payroll and was working for him the night of the shooting. Cohen, perhaps secretly bullied by the prosecution, had an unexplainable change of heart the next scheduled day in court and admitted he was lying and the Bug was squashed.
Unlike some of his co-horts like Buggsy Goldstein and Harry Strauss, who were recently executed in Sing Sing, Workman got off 'easy' - staring down at life-hard labor at Trenton State Prison.
He was 34, and took it without flinching.

Workman took his straight-ahead bravado and strong, silent demeanor that he carried on the streets and applied it to his prison life. He was a model prisoner, and was paroled twenty-three years later in 1964.
Charlie Workman returned to the world as a gray-haired grandfather; sustained during his long period of incarceration by the love and support of his wife Catherine. In a brief statement to the press he claimed he regretted his younger wayward ways but knew there was nothing he could do to change it.
One of the first things he did was address his new grandchildren to stay out of trouble no matter how bad things may look or seem, and that they come to him first if there was anything troubling them.
He took a job in the garment industry ironically enough in the same district where Lepke Buchlater presided over many years before, and never discussed his past life again.

Bye Bye Bernie

2009-06-30T19:49:00.014-04:00

Bernie Madoff's sentencing yesterday of a 150 years came just as I was putting the finishing touches on this caricature illustration which was intended as a promotional portfolio piece.
The timing was a little eerie to be honest as the idea had been sitting as a half finished pencil sketch for a couple of months before I decided to buckle down and get it finished.
While the nature of this blog obliviously focuses on the Jewish gangsters of years gone by - I thought this was too topical and coincidental to not to include here.

Historical fact and gangland folklore generally finds itself blurred between the lines when discussing larger than life figures of the past like Arnold Rothstein or Meyer Lansky - probably the wisest and sharpest of all of the Jewish gangsters. Perhaps time has been kind to them and are held in nostalgic regard because they had reached their heights without ever pulling a trigger and were admired for bucking the system.
However, the worlds of Rothstein and Lansky were insular, their victims lurking within the confines of its own walls with choices made by people who understood the risk they took by entering its labyrinth. It was an invisible box, seen only by specific eyes, and in which the general public was seldom involved or victimized.

History will not be so kind to Bernard Madoff however, as his victims were not naive gamblers, hotheaded hitmen or rival bootleggers. Madoff's victims were innocent people who had put their lives (financial and otherwise) into his hands and saw their worlds crumble.
Madoff was not obviously a 'gangster' in the traditional sense - but perhaps something even worse.

Stick 'Em up!

2009-05-31T21:31:00.017-04:00

During the Real Machers exhibit, curator Wendy Fergusson had the great idea of providing sticky notes next to the guest book so people could write their comments and post them on the glass door dividers between the gallery and the lobby.

The question asked was :
“What is your Jewish Gangster story?”

Now that the exhibit has closed, the following is a selection of some of those sticky note comments, some of which I had a hard time deciphering the handwriting and unfortunately couldn't include at the present time.

I thought it would be entertaining to share these here on the blog (verbatim) as they prove to be interesting and at times amusing anecdotes. They also open a different kind of window onto the history of Jewish Gangsters as it seems a good number of close and distant relatives out there feel comfortable in sharing these family tales...

In order to respect people’s privacy, I’ve omitted the names signed to the notes.

If anyone out there has similar anecdotes to share, please feel free to post a comment (a cyber sticky note so to speak).

........................................................................................................................................................................

“My mother’s cousin Betty Wasserman was reportedly married to Lepke Buchalter. Would love to know more about her…”

“Where is my Uncle Abe Zwillman? He invented Organized Crime, funded Columbia Pictures, and organized the crime convention in Atlantic City that started Murder Inc. “*
*This is a comment of my not including Zwillman in the show....

“My dad’s uncle was ‘whacked’ because of his gambling debts in the ‘50s. Him and my aunts almost totally refuse to talk about it.”

“Irving Holtzman was a cousin, who was an assassin for Murder Inc.
He married Dutch Schultz’s daughter and walked out on her after a few days. A “contract” was out on him. When Schultz was murdered the contract expired…and a few years later got an exclusive franchise from the mafia for jukeboxes as a reward. Irving lived in Brooklyn.”

“My father, Isadore Wexler, was a doctor at Sing Sing 1944 – 1951.
He pronounced many of the executed as “Dead after electrocution”
One of the Murder Inc. families left a case of liquor on the porch of our Ossining home so my father would take ‘extra care’ with the family member.”

“My mother dated Lepke’s nephew”

“My father’s business associate knew Lepke and Gurrah Shapiro, with whom he regularly played cards and remarkably, use to insult (jokingly) to their faces. This gave him a certain cache in my eyes. Also, the word in Brooklyn always was that Reles was pushed.”

“ My grandfather, Isadore Ducker, was in a ‘roller skating gang” in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He was called “flash”. Probably not so tough.”

“My grandfather Abe Samuel Belsky was a detective for the NYPD. He was a “tough jew” who busted mobsters and helped take down Murder Inc.”

“Samuel ‘Red’ Levine was a cousin to my great-grandafther, Abraham Levine, that immigrated through Ellis Island.”

“Abe Reles used to come into my grandfather’s bakery for free rolls. He came in to say hello to my grandfather the day before he was arrested and then tossed into the street 10 stories by the cops when he was talking.”

“My uncles were involved in the gambling ring in Brownsville – My father in jail for running cars and liquor in the ‘30s. Tiny Benson was a close family friend and a gentle giant (over 400 lbs).”

“My mother lived in a Brooklyn apartment. Two nice men from upstairs helped her with the baby carriage everyday bringing it up and down the stairs. She found out later that their nicknames were Lefty Louie and Gyp The Blood.”

“My grandfather had a shop in Brooklyn. At times Jewish gangsters would come by with a machine gun in a violin case and tell my Zahde to “stash it”!”

“My father was a dentist in Brownsville for 50 years and told us stories of having to cover for Jewish gangsters running from the police in hot pursuit. They ran up to his office on Sockmore St. pretending to be patients.”

“My grandfather was Gurrah – I am a successful physician / teacher. I was born ten years after his death. His son, Nathan Shapiro, was an outstanding citizen and philanthropist”

“We are from Brownsville. Born Stone and Riverdale. My father saw them all. He was an honest truckman and once saw Meyer Shapiro in the street. He called to my father “Hey Yearnis (sic) over here, let’s have a beer.” May father said “You stay on your side of the street Moishe”. Shapiro laughed, the next day was found riddled with bullets in Arnarsie (sic). Those guys were such brutal killers they made the Sopranos look like choir boys.”

..........................................................................................................................................................................

Abe 'Pretty' Levine

2009-05-24T21:30:00.015-04:00

Abraham ‘Pretty’ Levine
1916 - unknown

The first generation of Brownsville's bullies, who had laid down the foundation for The Combination, kept their eyes open in search of young street kids to trap into their web with promises of easy money and street stature. The criteria simple: look for drifting, aimless kids who’ve quit school and perhaps had a tempestuous relationship with their parents, and whom, despite being hard honest people, were trapped in a cycle of low income opportunities. When Harry Strauss spotted the wayward fifteen year-old Abraham Levine, he fit the bill.

Levine was one of the young recruits the Jewish division of Murder Inc. lured into their snare, alongside the likes of Sholem Bernstein, Oscar ‘The Poet’ Friedman and Mikey Sycoff. To kids like young Abe, men like Strauss, Abe Reles, and Meyer Goldstein were neighborhood giants in size seven shoes who were respected and feared. While they saw most of the neighborhood adults as cowering and sheepish, these romanticized hoodlums towered in mistaken idol worship from these misguided teens. This type of hero worship even rivaled the like of baseball’s ‘Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg by many young Jewish kids at the time, depending on what side of the street you were from.
Surrounded by broken nosed mugs and thugs only a mother could love, it wasn’t hard for Levine to earn the moniker of ‘Pretty’. Graced with inviting blue eyes, soft features and wavy black hair, Abe may have quite likely made many a girl do a twirl while strolling along Pitkin Avenue in search of an egg cream.

Strauss put the teenage Levine to work and gave him a partner, Anthony ‘Dukey’ Maffeatore. Dukey came from Brooklyn’s neighborhood of Ocean Hill, the district nudged in as a sub-section of Bedford-Stuyvesant, and where resided the Italian delegation of Murder Inc. whose members were under the supervision of Louis Capone. Dukey’s spoken English was broken at best, and Lil’ Abner and Buck Rogers were his literary accomplishments.
Time passed as Levine and Maffeatore bonded and grew close as friends as well as being criminal colleagues, and handled most jobs thrown their way - running errands, small time extortion, collecting graft, stealing cars and license plates - low level gigs but crucial to the big wheel of operations. They were also the ones who matinee-ed in September of 1939 at the Lowes Pitkin Movie Theatre when the missing Irving ‘Big Gangy’ Cohen’ was spotted on the silver screen in Golden Boy almost two years after his disappearance into the Catskills’ forest.

Levine was picked up and booked on numerous occasions over a period of five years though charges never seemed to stick. According to 1938 NYC Police arrest records, Levine had strayed away from Brownsville and settled in Williamsburg at 104 India Street. His bertillion card listed his occupation simply as a clerk. By that year at the tender age of twenty-two, Levine was becoming a simple family man at heart, marrying young and starting a family now that his wife was pregnant. Fatherhood probably caused him to ponder more than once the implications of his criminal career more seriously and the possible fateful road he could find himself on.

The anxiety of leaving behind a pregnant widow was severe enough that he approached Abe Reles about getting out for good at some undetermined point. In pleading his case to the Brownsville chief, he argued that he had actually never murdered anyone and was really just a glorified chauffeur more than anything else. Reles, not generally know for his ‘warmth’ but still a family man himself, seemed moved enough by Levine’s plea to broach the subject with his colleagues. He was met with fierce resistance, especially from Strauss. Levine had been present at enough jobs to do considerable damage in court if he flipped; case in point the Walter Sage killing in the Catskills. Reles tried to assure them the kid would never sing, and just wanted a better life for him and his new bride while there was still time. The answer was a resounding NO from Goldstein and Strauss, and Reles should know better than to even ask. The discussion wedged a slowly ascending rift between Reles and the rest of the crew from that point on, and Levine was backed into a corner as a result and continued to soldier on despite his dilemma.

By 1940, the Brooklyn District Attorney would take care of the problem for Levine. The mobs of Kings County came under fire once William O’Dwyer opened the books on the countless unsolved murder cases that plagued the borough. Along with prosecutor Burton Turkus, a clean and sweep of Brooklyn’s undesirables and hoodlums included Pretty Levine, after his pal Dukey was picked up and broke down under interrogation and named him as his partner. Levine had recently been rather irked with Reles at the time he was rounded up for questioning. In hopes to get some help with medical bills incurred from his wife and young daughter, Levine went to Reles for a loan. Reles agreed but at the same rate of interest he passed along to anyone else on the street – which left Levine fuming at Reles’s insensitivity to his financial woes after years of loyal service though he had no choice but to accept the offer.
Surprisingly – he held tight-lipped under hot lights without playing stoolie at least for awhile, as he feared Reles more so than he started to loathe him. Eventually he gave in after his wife was jailed as material witness; a simple but effective chess move on the part of O’Dwyer and Levine started to talk. His fears were lessened and his loyalty to the Brownsville mob crumbled once Reles started to sing louder to the law than anyone else in the following weeks.

O’Dwyer knew he only had a small fish in Levine – but he was a step to catching the inner-circle, and he also proved to be a key factor in closing the case of the missing Walter Sage in Sullivan County. At his offering to ante up his plea bargain, he took the authorities up to Loch Sheldrake in the Catskill Mountains to point out where Sage’s body, ice picked and tied to a pinball machine, was dumped into the lake by Harry Strauss. Allie ‘Tick –Tock’ Tannenbaum, also playing pigeon at this point (and the coop was getting empty), corroborated his story. Levine was eventually handed a suspended sentence and shown the door for his collaboration.

In the end, after Abe Reles, under witness protection, was thrown out a seventh story window of the Half Moon Hotel, and all Brownsville’s top brass were singed at Sing Sing, but history has lost its link to what had happened to Abe ‘Pretty’ Levine.
Civilian life was more than likely incognito and whose to know if he pulled up roots from Brooklyn and seeked a better life somewhere else. He was only just twenty-five years old by the time the dust settled, plenty of time to start all over and stay on the straight line.

Real Machers closes this Sunday

2009-05-14T20:50:00.010-04:00

Just a quick note to mention that the Real Machers exhibit will be closing this coming Sunday, May 17 after close to three months of exhibition time.

A BIG thanks goes out to curator Wendy Fergusson for doing a great job on the entire preparation and presentation.
A thank you is also in order to the Washington DCJCC for hosting the show in their Ann Loeb Bronfman gallery.
To all those who went and saw it, and to those who emailed me afterwards with their thoughts, a big thank you goes out to you as well.
I hope you found it interesting and enlightening.

There are plans brewing for the future that will hopefully see the show travel to other cities as well and I will update you with more info as it comes in.

2009-04-19T21:46:00.008-04:00

I wanted to post a just a little reminder that a variety of prints are available for sale.
They are printed in 12 x 18 or 11 x 17 formats and are high quality Giclee prints on 100 percent acid free white cotton rag, acid free 308 gram width paper for the best possible reproduction values.

These are signed and numbered limited editions and are available here at the Six For Five Shop , where you can see the current selection, and will also be made available through my website in the coming days.

Your support helps this project stay on its legs somewhat and my thanks to all who placed orders so far.

Abe Attell - The Little Hebrew

2009-04-14T17:36:00.019-04:00

With the onset of the new baseball season upon us, 2009 will mark the 90th anniversary of the infamous Chicago White Sox World Series scandal.

Also, in case you've been wondering who that fellow in the top banner is, I thought a brief overlook at one of the possible conspirators behind the scenes of what was dubbed 'The Black Sox' scandal in its aftermath, was due.

Abe Attell
1884 - 1970

Abe Attell’s place in Jewish Gangster history is more of a peripheral one.
As a young Jew living in a predominantly Irish neighborhood in San Francisco, he found himself on the defense on more than a few occasions.
Little Abe soon became adept with his fists as a result.

At the age of 13, his father left the Attell household to never return. Abe went out and sold newspapers to help support his family and it was then that world of boxing opened up to him.
His street fighting skills were put to use in the gym and Abe showed talent as featherweight class fighter. He won his first fight in 1900 in two rounds and quickly gained the nickname of "The Little Hebrew", complete with a Star Of David stitched onto his shorts.

In a mere three years, Attell won the Featherweight Championship at the age of only 18.
He lost his crown after only his second defense but regained it quickly thereafter and and held off 18 challengers in a row, a record held until 1983.
The Little Hebrew was also now known as The Little Champ.
His boxing career extended, though checkered at times, until 1917 when he took his gloves off for the last time at the age of thirty-three.

There’s a good chance back in New York, Arnold Rothstein made a few well-placed bets on Attell’s fight and made substantial amounts money off the results. The two eventually met and became quick friends, not such an easy thing with the notoriously private and solitary Rothstein. Rothstein had had a succession of bodyguards and employed Attell to be at his side when needed. Though Rothstein oversaw much of the Manhattan underworld and was respected on all fronts, enemies in the shadows were always a hazardous part of the equation.

Attell still had his ear to the undercurrents of the sports world despite his new gainful employment, which led to his involvement one of sport's largest scandals, the allegedly fixed 1919 World Series involving players of the Chicago White Sox.

Known as the Black Sox scandal, Attell was accused of being in on the planning stages, relaying money back and forth and getting word and funding from Arnold Rothstein. Rothstein’s name has become synonymous with the scandal ever since, that the fix was his doing, though he was never actually proven guilty of the deed.

It made for great newspaper headlines however and Attell, Rothstein, along with the eight White Sox players involved were dragged through the mud from commission hearings. The players didn’t fair so well, all booted out of the league and blacklisted, keeping star players such as "Shoeless" Joe Jackson out of the Baseball Hall Of fame to this as day.
Attell and Rothstein walked relatively unscathed with nothing more than a little bit of bad newspaper ink. Attell’s true involvement is not known, and of course he pleaded his innocence in court, though he seemed to have enough insider knowledge to let Rothstein know who to place his bets on.

After Rothstein met his end at The Park Central Hotel in 1928 Attell was direction-less and floated without knowing where to land for awhile, perhaps feeling somewhat lost without his old boss.

Sports remained in his blood but for some reason he remained on the wrong side of the line.

In 1929 he was arrested for scalping fight tickets but beat the rap.

1931 saw his name in connection with $100 million a year bootlegging operation in New Jersey.

He soon however found the straight line and opened Abe Attell’s Steak and Chop House at 1667 Broadway.
He even made an appearance on the quiz show, The $64,000 Question, along with a few other boxing old timers, with the irony being that the overall game show was eventually exposed as fixed.

Despite his connection to 1919 World Series scandal, Abe Attell, who passed away at the age of eighty-five, was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1983, and the International Boxing Hall Of Fame in 1990.

2009-04-02T20:39:00.006-04:00

I've been meaning to drop a line about the recently released book on the case of Abe 'Kid Twist' Reles entitled The Canary Sang But Couldn't Fly by Edmund Elmaleh. This is the first book to take an in-depth look at the case following Reles' plunge out of room 653 at The Half Moon Hotel and has some very interesting new insights.
While quite a bit of Reles' story has been pressed into ink and paper over the years, not many have followed up on the investigations of the incident aside from some possibly vague assumptions as to who actually may of clipped his wings so to speak.

While the first quarter of the book delves into the background and upbringing of Reles' rise in Brooklyn's underworld, it's the remainder of the book where Elmaleh really gets going and sinks his teeth into the material. He reveals how little the NYPD actually did as far pursuing the case and shrugged off responsibility that their number one snitch was killed off under their watch and bungled up the crime scene like a posse of Keystone cops.

Brooklyn District Attorney William O'Dwyer, responsible for much of the Murder Inc. roundups and disposals, falls prey to Elmaleh's poison pen as well. With shades of Manhattan D.A. Charles Whitman and the Becker /Rosenthal case coming to mind, he comes across as another power hungry D.A. whose actions were only a step up the political ladder, to which its top rung he almost reached.

He also looks into the re-opening of the case in 1951 by then residing King's County (Brooklyn) D.A. Edward Silver after O'Dwyer embarrassed himself at the Estes Kefauver hearings when grilled about the case. Silver smelled cover ups on all sides of the 1941 administration and managed to drag out some dirty laundry. Silver even managed to bring Reles' widow, Rose, out of domestic hiding for the investigation, but she only proved unwilling and infantile in her responses. Fellow stoolies and Half Moon Hotel residents Allie 'Tick Tock' Tannenbaum, Sholem Bernstein, and Mickey Sycoff were also called out secretly after ten years in mob witness exile.

Without giving much more away, Elmaleh's theory as to who actually killed Reles is a very interesting and probable one, and one I can agree with (and the notion of it came to me while reading the book as well).
Anyone at all curious on the case of Abe Reles should really seek this out.

A sadder fact of this book is Elmaleh did not live to see his work get published.
After almost ten years of research for the book, he passed away in December of 2008 before seeing all his hard work bound and distributed.

2009-03-16T20:39:00.015-04:00

Last Wednesday, March 11, authors Rich Cohen, Rose Keefe and Ron Arons held a talk called 'Jews Behaving Badly' at the Lower East Tenement Museum on Orchard Street in New York City.
The event was ironically held just around the corner from 286 Broome Street (left), the former home of Big Jack Zelig, and the subject of Rose Keefe's book.

Drawing a large crowd, the three authors offered their own views on the history of Jewish Gangsters, read from their books, and fielded many questions in a clear and articulate manner. It seems the entire era still held a fascination with the many in attendance, as their inquisitivness was nice to behold - kudos to the Lower East Tenement Museum for organizing this event.

A stranger irony to the evening however was that it was coincidentally held on the eve of the guilty plea and sentencing of Bernie Madoff the next morning just a few blocks away. While the interest in gangsters past is partly embedded in the lure of colorful characters, larger than life personalities, and the safe, comfortable distance of history; the likes of Madoff and his inexcusable white color crimes are nothing to be glorified or revered. Madoff deserved every year of the one-hundred and fifty that were handed to him and may they pry every dollar out of every corner of his dirty little world in hopes of restitution to those affected by his actions.

Jews Behaving Badly

2009-03-09T13:43:00.005-04:00

For those in the New York City area, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum is hosting an evening called 'Jews Behaving Badly' this Wednesday, March 11 as part of their Tenement Talks series.
Writers Rich Cohen (Tough Jews), Rose Keefe (The Starker: Big Jack Zelig, the Becker-Rosenthal Case, and the Advent of the Jewish Gangster), and Ron Arons (The Jews Of Sing Sing) will round-table the discussion of the history of Jewish Gangsters, and include a Q & A session with the participating attendees (which will include myself).
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is located at 108 Orchard, just below Delancey. For more info, or to RSVP, click here.

Puggy Feinstein

2009-03-08T22:33:00.021-04:00

Irving ‘Puggy’ Feinstein
1910 – 1939

Puggy Feinstein’s small time ways, a double-cross, and a mere fifty dollars owed to a character named Tiny Benson, proved to have a huge ripple effect and end the lives of violent men who thought themselves untouchable.

Feinstein was an ex-prizefighter and not a very successful one. After his nose was broken for the final time, Feinstein exited the ring and found his trouble on the streets of Brooklyn.

Feinstein was mostly a low-level operative; working outside the stranglehold of the Brownsville and Ocean Hill troop with small time racketeering and gambling operations loosely connected to Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter. He was considered a weasel by most who knew him, roaming back alleys, scraping up leftovers and had no real prominent place in gangland.

Puggy’s street sensibilities were not sharp enough to survive; perhaps one too many boxing blows to his noggin dulled his judgment when he decided to double- cross the wrong man - Vincent Mangano. The Brooklyn press had dubbed Mangano "The Executioner" when he was head of a powerful family which later morphed into the Gambino mafia ring. He had held a tight alliance with Albert Anastasia. Anastasia, who lorded over south Brooklyn and the borough’s lucrative docks in Red Hook, was also looped in the triumvirate of Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Buchalter. For undecernable reasons Mangano was incensed at Anastasia’s close ties to Luciano and the Manhattan syndicate, but he let word out about Feinstein’s miscalculated mischief towards him and sent the word out that he wanted the hook-nosed Jew snuffed through the syndicate's Brookyln strong armed schtarkes.
Under the orders from Anastasia, and relayed by Buchalter, Feinstein was put on the wanted list for liquidation and the Brownsville Murder Inc. troop got the job.

The only problem for members Harry Strauss, Buggsy Goldstein and Abe Reles was no one knew what Feinstein looked liked. They had never even heard of him until they took Anastasia’s call. On the night of September 5, 1939, fate drew them a hand.
Feinstein happened to walk into Midnight Rose’s candy store at 779 Saratoga just near the corner of Livonia, a hangout and de-facto backroom headquarters for the crew. Feinstein was looking for Tiny Benson, a behemoth of a man from whom Puggy had borrowed fifty dollars and was looking to re-pay his debt. Unaware of the price on his head, he spotted three men who looked like characters Tiny would associate with and who were too busy sipping on egg creams to look up, and proceeded to introduced himself. Strauss, Goldstein and Reles, quietly reeling in their luck, said they hadn’t seen Benson but could probably take him to where he was. Feinstein, either fearless or clueless, agreed to take a ride.

An hour later Feinstein was in Abe Reles’ kitchen (while his mother-in-law was asleep in the next room) tied up in a manner that any struggling would tighten the rope around his neck, eventually strangling its victim. Puggy’s prizefighter instincts had come in handy, albeit briefly, as he fought back valiantly and managed to bite into Strauss’s hand significantly before succumbing to successive stabs from an ice pick and self-strangulation. Feinstein’s body was then driven to a vacant lot by Goldstein and set on fire.

A lobster feast dinner in Sheepshead Bay following the murder of Feinstein proved to be one serving of shell fish too many for his killers.

Seymour ‘Blue Jaw’ Magoon, Goldstein’s protégé, had become a man of all trades for the Brownsville crew by the age of 28; stealing cars, racketeering and strong-arm union jobs mixed with the occasional turn as hit man. The trust he gained made him privy to some rather darker dinner conversations, and which would prove to be undeniably damaging to Feinstein’s killers when Magoon eventually joined the singing choir of Reles, Allie ‘Tick Tock’ Tannenbaum, Sholem Bernstein, and Abe ‘Pretty’ Levine who flipped on their crew in the coming year.

Though Magoon wasn’t present at the actual murder and fiery disposal, Goldstein, whose eyebrows were apparently singed, had called upon Magoon right after looking for a ride to return to a garage and pay for the empty can of gas used to ignite Feinstein. Magoon suggested to Goldstein not to return the gas can at all and simply pay for it and tell the owner of the garage it was lost in order to avoid any suspicion from possible prying detectives once Puggy’s crispy remains were discovered. Proud of Blue Jaw’s forethought, Goldstein asked him to come along to the dinner date. They both soon joined Reles and Harry Strauss and the men discussed openly the night’s earlier murderous events over buttered bits of scampi as casually as yapping over a Brooklyn Dodgers game. Strauss was still in a foul mood apparently over the chunk of flesh Feinstein managed to extract from his finger, now bandaged and throbbing, and couldn’t finish his meal. That evening’s morbid repartee would prove lethal in court in less than a year, after Goldstein and Stauss were picked up for Feinstein’s murder following Abe Reles’s song to Brooklyn's DA, William O'Dwyer.

Magoon had no choice but to flip and coroberate Reles’s story. No one had seen him for awhile, especially during the Brooklyn round ups after indictments came down hard and fast with many running for cover. He had been picked up and held in the Bronx for months prior in connection with the killing of Irving Penn, whom Lepke Buchlater had given the go ahead. Blue Jaw was staring at life and or the chair if he didn’t co-operate in the trial against Goldstein and Strauss.

Apparently Buggsy, his ol’ pal and mentor, shook with grief and disbelief when Seymour, unseen for months, walked into court to take the witness stand. He pleaded with Magoon in front of the entire courtroom to “…tell the truth Sey, tell the truth. My life depends on it!” before collapsing back into his chair. Magoon turned white as a sheet, hunched down in the witness chair in a manner where he wouldn’t have to face Goldstein and proceeded to lay out all the grisly details of Puggy’s demise overheard at dinner in Sheepshead Bay. Goldstein stood up in the middle of all this with tears strolling down his cheeks. “For God’s sake Seymour, that’s some story you’re telling...You’re burning me Seymour.” Blue Jaw wept as well and was dismissed after his damning testimony. Goldstein and Strauss, were quickly found guilty and eventually executed on June 12 1941.

My thanks to the Lloyd Sealy Library /John Jay College Of Criminal Justice (NYC) - Burton Turkus Papers, for providing me with source photograph of Irving Feinstein.

How The Other Half Lives....

2009-03-04T12:57:00.016-05:00

I've finally managed to put together my website.

This should give you an idea of some of my other work - and that I don't just live and breathe Jewish Gangsters...though this blog may seem to prove otherwise.

It features a portfolio of the variety of work I've done outside of this project - much of it enabling me to earn a living while pursuing this one. Give it a little tour when you can. Its still in its early stages and I will be adding more artwork and designs soon.
I also promise to post a new profile within the next couple of days and get back to business after all the preparation and post - exhibit activity that has been going is now easing up a little.

2009-03-03T13:43:00.002-05:00

A couple more reviews / overviews of the exhibit:

A very nice one from the Mad In The District Blog which is a refreshing review of the artwork itself, and it sounds like the writer has been snared into the net of the era's history!

There is also something in The Washington Diplomat - simply scroll down a bit to read the text.

2009-02-27T22:33:00.004-05:00

The Washington City Paper has extended its coverage of the Real Machers exhibit as a weekend pick, and posted some video of the opening reception as well.
Thanks for that!

2009-02-26T17:09:00.010-05:00

Some press is starting to come in for The Real Machers exhibit:

The Washington Post Express has nice piece which you can view HERE

There is also something in the Washington City Paper,

and also another article in the Washington Jewish Week.

Prints are now available.

2009-02-21T14:40:00.013-05:00

After numerous requests, I am now offering prints for sale via the
SIX FOR FIVE Shop on Etsy.

These are high quality giclée prints on acid free 308gm cotton rag paper.
I have attempted to make these as affordable as possible while maintining a high level of reproduction values.

They will be limited edition runs of 100 each and will be signed by yours truly.
I will also give the option of including the name of the gangster on the print, or not, depending on how you prefer it.
I'll also be adding a few more different prints in the coming days and weeks.

You can view the shop HERE

Real Machers Opening Reception

2009-02-20T11:13:00.007-05:00

Here are a few photos from the opening reception of The Real Machers exhibit in Washington DC on Febuary 18, which was a great success. My many thanks to all who came out.

An extra special thanks goes out to curator Wendy Fergusson, and all at the Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery/Washington DJCC for going such a great job on the opening and hosting the exhibit.
The show is on until May 17 so if you are in the Washington DC area please come by as admission is free...

Franklin Abrams, the man behind the Monk 1903 webisodes, came out dressed to the nines and added some color to the opening as the spirit of Monk Eastman hovered....

Getting close....

2009-02-09T20:12:00.009-05:00

With the opening of the Real Machers exhibit just over a week away, all the artwork has arrived and is currently being prepared at the Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery / WashingtonDCJCC.
Many thanks to curator Wendy Fergusson for sending me these photos...

Packed and on their way...

2009-01-30T21:06:00.007-05:00

Forty five originals are now packed and on their way to Washington, DC !
There is also six high quality reproductions headed towards the National Museum Of Crime And Punishment as teaser exhibit for the Real Machers.

The Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery / Washington DCJCC has also set up a facebook page for the event for those inclined to make 'friends'.

Preparations begin...

2009-01-23T20:25:00.010-05:00

As the opening for The Real Machers in Washington DC gets closer, I'm going to attempt to keep a little diary here on its progress.

The artwork is in the matting and framing process at the moment, and three more pieces are left to be completed for the exhibition in a way I'd like to see it.

In conjunction with the upcoming show, I will also start offering in the next few weeks high quality limited edition signed and numbered reproductions of a selection of the artwork. These will be available at the exhibit and also can be ordered online.
I will have the gallery of images up soon.

Mickey Cohen

2009-01-17T21:40:00.015-05:00

In preparing for the Real Machers exhibit opening next month, I decided to add the 'loveable' Mickey Cohen to the show to round out the selection a little, and this one is fresh off the drawing table...

A little background...
Meyer Harris (Michael) Cohen was born in 1913 in the rough and tumble section of Brooklyn known as Brownsville before the little guy was whisked away by his parents and landed in Los Angeles by the age of six. While Cohen's contribution to Jewish Gangster lore doesn't really fit into the framework for this particular project, his exploits and ties were still wound tightly enough with the New York based mob early on.

Cohen was pint-sized at 5' 5", but stood tall and had bigger matzoh balls than most. After a brief foray as a semi-pro boxer, his fists and Star of David stitched shorts led him to small time thuggery, racketeering, robbery, and bootlegging by the time he found himself in Chicago during Prohibition and operating with outside satellites of the Al Capone gang.

By the mid-30s Meyer Lansky sent Cohen back home to Los Angeles to keep an eye out on Bugsy Siegel when the syndicate sent the blue-eyed one out west to set up shop. Cohen was at Siegel's side as de facto bodyguard for a good part of Benny's west coast days and partnered in the building of the Flamingo Hotel. After Siegel's bullet riddled demise on a warm night in June of 1947, the city of Angels' underworld was suddenly in the Mickster's hands.

Meyer Lansky's number one rule was to stay out of the papers. Mickey Cohen was not so fond of that rule. His exploits in Los Angeles read like the best headlines taken from the pages of Hush Hush and Confidential magazines. He hobnobbed as easily with movie stars and strippers as he did with the oily haired slicksters of the LA underworld, becoming Hollywood's first bona fide celebrity gangster while dodging bullets and bombing attempts. The mainstream press was fascinated as well. Life magazine in 1950 ran a photo essay on him at his Brentwood home, depicting him as 'just a, albeit colorful, normal post war suburban' to middle America.
Despite his size and former boxer mug, he still managed to be an impressive catch when it came to the ladies as well; for those looking for a little spice in their love life the dangerous little bulldog seemed to be the most exciting thing on the Sunset Strip. The real deal.
Cohen eventually served time for tax evasion twice; once at the hands of the Kefauver Commission hearings and again in 1961 where he was sent to Alcatraz.

In later life, he made the rounds of the talk show circuit as the old time mob's (unwanted) mouthpiece. Mickey couldn't help himself as he loved the limelight and attention, and by then the ol' hucktser's hands were relatively clean enough to not do any real damage at top levels, just another aging gangster with tales of the good ol' days of bullets and broads.
The great crime fiction writer James Ellroy also immortalized him in his LA Trilogy of novels as a major character alongside Ellroy's fictitious
He quietly slipped away in his sleep in 1976.

The Other Mr. A

2009-01-12T23:33:00.038-05:00

Julius ‘Nicky’ Arnstein
1879 – 1965

With all the recent news on the woes of Wall Street and the arrest of Bernie Madoff and his 50 Billion Ponzi scheme, a modern day ‘Jew Behaving Badly’ if there ever was one, the incidents in question made me think of the colorful and charismatic Nicky Arnstein and his own Wall Street caper.

Arnstein was not completely kosher.
His father was a Berlin born Jew, while his mother was Dutch, and who from Arnstein possibly may of inherited his 6-foot plus lanky frame, a rarity in vertically challenged Jews of the time. Young Julius earned his nickname of ‘Nicky’ from the nickel-plated bicycle he raced during the 1890s, when the sport was all the rage. While his long legs pumped him to his fair share of finish lines, Arnstein was lured away from sports by the dawn of the new century and started to chart more deviously criminal waters.

Nicky Arnstein spent a good part of his mid-to-late twenties as trans-Atlantic shark preying on the unsuspected and gullible. He was charming crook who earned himself the title of ‘confidence man’, a term later shortened to ‘con man’. Hopping aboard luxurious ocean liners with glamorous European destinations, Arnstein swindled and cheated his way through the upper and lower decks hosting various card games and gambling tricks. His one of many advantages was that he was no rough and tumble scallion from the Lower East Side; he came from New York upper crust middle class stock; articulate, well mannered, dressed and read. His wealthy victims were seduced by his toothy grin and sharp wit, and one such traveler, warned of Nicky’s wayward ways, was quoted:
“I don’t give a damn. He’s better company than anyone else aboard ship.”
Arnstein managed to stay out of trouble as long as his sea legs held up, but when he decided to dock into Manhattan’s harbor for the last time, his luck it seemed had remained lost at sea.

By the early 1910s, Arnstein was involved in minor clumsy swindles but nothing much ever panned out. His newfound alliance with Arnold Rothstein during this period made complete sense however. Both were from same side of the street and similar privileged backgrounds. While Rothstein was as shrewd as they come and distrustful of most, the charm and intelligence brimming from Arnstein must have been most welcoming to him in a business riddled with thick- necked thugs and narrow mindedness. To what extent Rothstein employed Arnstein is vague, but The Big Bankroll probably enjoyed having him around.
During this period, Arnstein also met Ziegfeld Follies' top star Fanny Brice (née Fania Borach), with whom he fell head over heels in love, seemingly forgetting he had a wife at home already. Brice’s ragged edges, Yiddish street-wise sensibilities, and biting wit completely charmed the charmer, and the two became quickly inseparable. She was also drawing large salaries at this point as well from her touring schedule and spotlight on Broadway, and being a 'kept-man' probably suited Arnstein just fine.

Arnstein spent most of 1916 behind bars at Sing Sing on a swindling conviction. Brice would visit him on a weekly basis, despite the newspaper stories of her torrid jailbird romance. Arnstein’s ‘bon-vivant’ character continued up river as well, where he was given light duty and appointed prison librarian. In 1918, Arnstein became Mr. Fanny Brice, after his former wife. Claire, granted him a divorce (and whom sued Brice for ‘alienation of affection’).

In the fall of 1919, $5,000,000 in bonds was stolen through a series of holdups of Wall Street messengers carrying securities from one brokerage house to another. As the investigation followed, somehow along the way, Arnstein was pegged as one of the ‘masterminds’ behind the act. When word reached Brice, she chortled loudly:
“Mastermind! Nick couldn’t mastermind an electric bulb into a socket!”

When word reached Arnstein of the possible charges, he was a little more nervous than what his dear Fanny alluded to the papers. With the underworld whispering into his ear that the police was looking for him, he went into hiding. It seemed, according to the Wall Street gunsel when finally picked up, that a mysterious ‘Mr. A’ was behind the holdups, and picked out Arnstein’s photo from a rogues gallery. Arnold Rothstein was also known as Mr. A in some circles, so in there lays the possibility of mistaken identity and or cover up by all involved.
Perhaps looking to protect Rothstein, and whether guilty or not, Arnstein went into hiding. Not even Fanny Brice knew where her man laid his head at night. Arnstein secured the services of lawyer Bill Fallon, known as "The Great Mouthpiece" for his unbreakable streak of winning cases and orator skills. Fallon made arrangements for Nicky’s surrender, who would give himself up only as a gentleman and not as scoundrel. Arnstein insisted not to be taken away in cuffs, to have food sent to his cell from his favorite restaurants, allowed to dress in his own clothes, and would show up to the steps of the police precinct of his own accord. The papers relished in Arnstein’s comedic arrogance, and the NYPD fumed but agreed since they had no luck finding sly Nicky on their own.

Arnstein’s surrender was one of movie magic. He had picked the day of the annual Fifth Avenue police parade, and there was no way he was walking into Headquarters with only a few low level policemen on duty who awaited his arrival. With a reporter from the New York World and Bill Fallon in tow, he hired a top down town car with chauffeur. With pitch perfect timing, Arnstein’s car turned down Fifth Avenue and followed the last platoon of the parade, waving and smiling that infamous toothy grin to the throngs of people lining both sides of the street, most of whom had followed his story with relish in the papers, and joyfully cheered him on. Mayor Cadwallader D. Colden, the Police Commissioner, and other city officials were not amused, angered beet-red by Arnstein’s showmanship, disregard for procedure, and offhanded candor of the serious charges. With a final bow to his fellow New Yorkers, Arnstein ordered his chauffeur to drive to police headquarters.

Arnstein, along with four others (including an inside man) were eventually found guilty of organizing the robberies in a trial that took place a year later in Washington D.C. and ended on May 4. 1921. It was the first of two trails involving Arnstein and the scattered paper trail of stolen bonds. Arnstein was finally sentenced to Leavenworth prison on Federal charges.
Fanny, who stood by him through all of it, and sang “My Man” at all her shows in his honor, divorced him upon his release in 1927. Seems Fanny found out that despite his grand love for his Broadway baby, Nicky couldn’t help sidestepping on regular occasions and was unfaithful.

Arnstein disappeared from public view shortly after his release and subsequent heartbreak. Perhaps the murder of Arnold Rothstein in 1928 sent big enough signals to get out while he could as well.

*************************************************************************************

In 1964, a year before passing away, a possibly frail yet still dandy 84 year-old Arnstein may of attended the opening night of ‘Funny Girl’ on Broadway, the story of Fanny Brice and Nicky Arnstein, and smiled that famous grin all over again. Produced by Brice’s son-in-law, it reached even wider audiences on celluloid in 1968 with Barbara Streisand as Fanny Brice and Omar Sharif standing in as ol’ slick Nick.

Fanny Brice - "My Man" 1921

Real Machers

2008-12-20T11:30:00.028-05:00

Pronounced MOKH-er; be sure to use the German kh, as in "Ach!" From the German: machen, "to make", "to do."

Someone who arranges, fixes, has connections; a big wheel; an "operator."

- From The New Joys Of Yiddish by Leo Rosten

I am happy to announce that over forty of my original works (a real rogues gallery!) will be on exhibit at The Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery in Washington , D.C.

The show is entitled Real Machers, and the opening reception will take place on February 18, 2009, and the exhibit will run until May 17, 2009.

There will also be a 'teaser' exhibition running at The National Museum of Crime and Punishment, also located in Washington, D.C., which will include five works.
In conjunction with the opening reception, author Ron Arons will be speaking on his book, The Jews Of Sing Sing that same evening.

Here is an official link for the gallery

The Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery
1529 Sixteenth Street NW
Washington, D.C.

The National Museum Of Crime And Punishment
575 7th St. NW Washington , D.C.
(202) 393-1099

http://www.crimemuseum.org/

Stay tuned for up to date info on the exhibit.
In the meantime, I gotta get back to the drawing table!

Blame It On Brownsville

2008-12-08T22:51:00.022-05:00

“He was vicious as a Gestapo agent, as casually cold-blooded as a meat-grinding machine in a butcher shop”

- Brooklyn Prosecutor Burton B. Turkus

Harry Strauss, aka ‘Pittsburgh Phil’ aka 'Pep', was only thirty-three years old when he was walked down the hall to face his end in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison. June 21, 1941 was the day Strauss exhaled for the last time. His execution also marked the passing of probably the most vicious and violent period in Jewish Gangster history.

A shift had seemed to occur in some Jewish criminal behavior with the onset of the Great Depression. With certain character traits leading down in darker and more violent places, the sociopath ante was raised by a few degrees. While no street gangster was a saint by any means, a certain sense of social responsibility to their community seemed to have guided the likes of Big Jack Zelig and Dopey Benny Fein from time to time, and gave thought that a heart did lay underneath the tough exterior and street wise antics.
Perhaps the surroundings in which they were raised had something to do with it. The Lower East Side still echoed much of the daily struggles of its population and therefore bestowed early leaders with a sense of pride in the protection they provided to the street.

However, across the East River in the tough section of Brooklyn called Brownsville, where many Jewish families settled after escaping the narrow streets of lower Manhattan, a meaner, more selfish Jewish thug had emerged.
Some were first or second generation American born.
Some were mere toddlers when The Herman Rosenthal affair had made headlines and threw the Jewish community into a social dilemma.
Some were barely educated.
And some grew to be some of the most brutal hit-men on record.

The Brownsville troop earned top spot by killing other Jews who were led by three brothers named Shapiro. There were no ethnic allegiances in Brownsville – just territory and dollars. A three-headed beast named Abe Reles, Meyer Goldstein and Harry Strauss led this violent and victorious troop of new soldiers for almost a decade during the dirty ‘30s. Of the three, Strauss, was known in certain circles as ‘a piece of work’.

Strauss was an intimidating figure in his camp as his hulking figure towered over most around him who only hovered in at the 5’ 5” zone even with lifts in their shoes. His background leading up to his days at Midnight Roses’ remain as mysterious and his sobriquet is misleading.
Pittsburgh Phil had apparently never been to Pittsburgh.
But Pittsburgh Phil loved his work.
Reports like to claim that Strauss had taken over 500 'contracts' willfully during the heydays of ‘The Combination’, dubbed ‘Murder Inc.' by the press. That unbelievable figure was probably exaggerated by the nation wide media frenzy that ensued once the boys from Brownsville were in court during the second half of 1940 and their dirty laundry displayed.

It seemed however that the actual act of killing didn't bother him at all, and he approached the ordeal in the same casual manner as a butcher hits a fresh side of flank. Without being tied down by family responsibilities like many others in the gang, Strauss criss-crossed America on assignments like a salesman with suitcase full of ice picks and rope. Apparently only one contract failed in the hands of Strauss while on duty in Florida.
Following his victim into a movie theatre, with plans to do him in with the theatre's handy fire axe, his target kept changing seats so often during the film that Harry quit out of disgust and frustration. Most others however were not so lucky; like poor Walter Sage, who was ice picked over thirty-six times, tied to a pinball machine, and dunked into Loch Sheldrake Lake in the Catskill Mountains.
It was however the murder of Irving ‘Puggy’ Feinstein that would prove his undoing when Abe Reles decided to sing to the Brooklyn D.A.
Under the orders of Albert Anastasia relayed by Louis 'Lepke' Buchalter, Strauss, along with Goldstein, tied up Feinstein in Reles’ kitchen while his mother-in-law was asleep in the next room. The rope was fastened and tied in a manner that any struggling would tightened the rope around his neck, eventually strangling its victim. Feinstein’s body was then dumped in a vacant lot and set on fire.
Any possible grace of the old world order in the days of the Eastmans, Zelig, and Fein, was definitely gone.

Harry Stauss was arrested, along with Buggsy Goldstein for the murder of Puggy Feinstein after Reles said a mouthful to the D.A.’s.
Without much to build up a defense on and little hope in beating the trip to the chair, Strauss decided to play the ‘nut card’ during his time leading up to the trial. He stopped shaving and grew out his hair. His ulcer acted up as well and he requested milk on a regular basis. In court he conceded to pleading insanity, playing out the role with courtroom antics such as chewing on his lawyer's briefcase continuously until the prosecutor ordered him to stop and also sent him to a barbers chair before further proceedings. In desperation, Strauss offered to turn state’s evidence in exchange for five minutes in a room with Abe Reles (long enough to cut his throat one could only assume). The authorities didn’t buy it, and neither did the jury buy his instability plea. Strauss, who was tried alongside Goldstein, was found guilty and sent up to Sing Sing to meet his fate. Despite his success as Murder Inc.’s top torpedo, Strauss died penniless, having spent his entire wealth on legal fees and a bounty for Reles's head.

Half Hour At The Half Moon

2008-11-11T21:32:00.046-05:00

November 11, 1941

At about eleven PM, Rose Reles closed the door behind her as she left room 623 of The Half Mood Hotel, located on the Boardwalk at West 29th Street, Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York.
Her eyes, circled dark and discolored from the stress of the last year, were rimmed in red with tears. She shuffled past policemen on duty at the end of the corridor as she buttoned the top of her dark coat and prepared to brace herself for the late autumn chill and cold breeze blowing in off the Atlantic Ocean, which seemed somewhat larger and particularly menacing this evening. Six floors below, as she exited the hotel preparing to return home to Brownsville, she looked up at the Half Moon one more time and wondered: “How could I ever have married such animal…? ”

Back up in room 623, Abe Reles simmered with anger and spittle still gathered in the corners of his mouth from the last forty-five minutes of arguing with his wife. Rose had asked for a divorce.
“A fuckin’ divorce!” he yelled to no one in particular and everyone.

Outside of a few visits to the hospital, court and testimonial appearances, and a trip out to Los Angeles with Allie Tannenbaum, he had been in this damn hotel and the occupant of room 623 for almost a year. The reason he was here in the first place was because of Rose and the kids. He also wanted to protect Pretty Levine.

He was good looking kid, confused is all, and shouldn’t be part of this “life” he told himself.
“So I turned on my friends, went stoolie, entertained DA William O'Dwyer with pages and pages of confessional mumbo jumbo. All the news that’s fit to print, like that fancy New York Times paper likes to say. Now she wants out? No way, not after all this…they’re all I have left”

Allie and Sholem Bernstein were down the hall, in the same squeeze he was, doing the same time, singing the same song. Tick Tock and Sholem were playing cards. Again.
Not tonight thought Reles.
“I’m just gonna lie down for while and listen to the radio...”

Abe Reles sprawled on his back as bedsprings of the single bed squealed and creaked underneath him. He threw his disproportionately long right arm over his eyes and thoughts begun to tumble in circles; about how he found himself in this room, and what he had done to his pals since he made his decision to turn rat while sitting in that “stinking awful Tombs prison” back in March of 1940.

“ They would of done the same…” thought Reles.

“What was I suppose to do? The DA had me backed into a corner; my nuts were in a vice and it just got tighter. Rose got so delirious and hysterical on me; and she was pregnant with another kid. I was only 33, still a lot of time to restart a new life, something legit – even that lunch counter was starting to do OK and turn a little profit. I gotta good memory as I kept them DA secretaries busy night and day filling up notebooks and documents with details on various hits and missing bodies. I knew enough legal jargon with all the time I’ve spent in the court and in the clink – corroboration – that’s all you need.”

“Lookit Gangy *..., that crazy son of a bitch scrammed to Hollywood, he knew this was no life. It’s exhausting being tough guy twenty-four hours a day; being the boss; dealing with nutjobs like Pittsburgh Phil.”*
“Heh, I heard the hothead wasn’t too happy about my squealing, and some cop down the hall whispered to me that he’d spent all his money on legal fees and to put up a bounty on my head. I still can’t believe he grew a beard and stopped cutting his hair to convince folks he was ‘crazy ‘ and ‘unfit’ for trial. Well, he was right about the crazy part. Hard to believe they already cooked him at Sing Sing back in June…the same day as Meyer”*

“Ah Buggsy, when we were kids nothing could stop us. We flipped the bird to the eighth grade and never looked back. When we had trouble with Shapiro brothers, we really took ‘em to the mattress huh? Those Amberg brothers got a lesson as well. Thanks to you we linked up with the wops in Ocean Hill and then Lepke and downtown Manhattan came knocking at our door thanks in part to Louis* and Albert A.**”
“There was a time I would of done anything for Lep, but we gotta look out for ourselves. He was the big man, we were loyal, and the money rolled in. He was always amused at your insistence that Edward G. Robinson stole all his movie mannerisms and talking out of the side of the mouth from you. Kids in the neighborhood always thought you were he as well. You always said: “He’s a kike like us and all he plays is wops in the pictures. That ain’t right!”

“I’m sorry pal that I ratted you out.”
“It wasn’t easy for Blue Jaw* either when he took the stand against you. He told me after that you had tears in your eyes, but he couldn't tell if it was from rage or sadness”

“What can I, or Allie, or Bluejaw; Sholem; Pretty; and others say that would make it any better? We jumped ship like rats to save our own skins. We had no choice. They even nabbed Oscar The Poet*. Cripes, that guy was just a driver and dumb as a bag of nails”

“And they got everybody rounded up: Mendy*, Charlie The Bug *, Louis Capone, the Dasher, Happy, - a regular Brooklyn sweep up. Midnight Rose’s must be awfully quiet these days…”
“But we are prisoners too, just in different kinds of prison. I know how many wanna see me dead! Sliced, diced, and served for lunch on Lansky’s desk.”

“I ain’t seen my kids in over a year. I’m fat, unhealthy, and bored.”
“I play pranks on these cops guarding me just to keep amused. They are complaining I smell and should shower. Fuck ‘em”

“And it ain’t over. Next up I gotta testify against Albert A and boy, that’s gonna be a doozy…”

Abe Reles then turned on side, flatuated and feel asleep.

Just a little after 7 AM, a policemen poked his head in to check on Reles and saw he was asleep, a light snore rising from beneath the sheets. The cop then wrinkled his nose at the smell emanating from the small hotel room and closed the door again.

A short time later, with early morning light pouring through the window on an overcast day, Reles, in a slumbered haze, half-heard a distinct click as the doorknob turned left and the door opened. He could barely make out the shape before him through half closed eyes…

Sixty-seven years ago at around 8AM on the morning of November 12, Abe Reles lay dead forty feet, five stories, below his hotel window. Knotted bed sheets hung from the window connected to a wire that was tied to the inside radiator. The bed sheets stopped at about halfway the length of the fall. He was fully dressed. His back was broken in two places and vital organs ruptured. His face was cut from the impact of hitting the pebbly roof that extended out from the hotel’s second floor. His body was over twenty feet from the wall. It was surmised later by investigators that he landed butt first and bounced forward like a 150lb ball in a cheap suit.

On the sixth floor of the Half Moon, six policemen were on ‘duty’ when word got out.
“What happened?”
asked one arriving for the morning shift.
“Abe Reles went out the window”

William O'Dwyer got a phone call at his office. He slammed the phone down, put his head in his hands, and proceeded to rub his temples.
Allie Tannenbaum, a few doors down from room 623, couldn’t keep his hands from shaking.

In Los Angeles, Benjamin Siegel was still in his silk housecoat and slippers trying to focus on that morning’s Los Angeles Times when a phone call came in from the east coast. Minutes later, he hung up the receiver in his study, smirked to himself, and reached for a Cuban cigar.

* Irving 'Gangy" Cohen
* Harry Strauss
* Meyer "Buggsy' Goldstein
* Seymour 'Bluejaw' Magoon
* Oscar 'The Poet' Freidman
* Emmanuel 'Mendy' Weiss
* Charles 'The Bug' Workman
* Louis Capone
** Albert Anastasia

Arnold Rothstein and the 1928 Election.

2008-11-03T13:34:00.018-05:00

Eighty years ago, on the evening of November 4, 1928, Arnold Rothstein sat at his favorite table at Lindy’s, a delicatessen located between 49th and 50th on Broadway. It was a modest, almost unassuming place, even with its renowned world famous cheesecake. But it held a certain allure with the varying denizens of the Great White Way, and some of its more popular customers included Al Jolson, Harpo Marx, Walter Winchell, and stage performer Fanny Brice, who went so far as to have the cheesecake flown or driven to her during her out of town appearances. The 1920s was known as the ‘Deli Decade’ in New York, mostly Jewish owned, and Lindy’s, which opened in 1921, was the place to be. Rothstein held court there and used it as a defacto office; conducting business over coffee and cake, jotting down numbers in his famous little black books, and took his calls. If he wasn’t at Lindy’s, his table would sit vacant, rarely occupied by anyone else, and never after 9 pm.
It was A.R.’s.

Rothstein spent part of the evening taking bets on the Presidential election, which was two days away. New York’s famous and beloved reformer State Governor, Alfred E. Smith, Democrat, was up against Hebert Hoover, Republican.

Rothstein had his money on Hoover.
The 1920s had been a boom decade of economic upswing and prosperity for Broadway and the rest of America, and much had to with President John Calvin Coolidge and his Republicans in office. They rode the momentum of an already invigorated post-war America that quickly rose to world leadership and power. Coolidge stepped aside, and Herbert Hoover stepped in.

Rothstein always had an eye for a winner.
He knew America was not ready for someone like Al Smith; a gruff voiced son of the Lower East Side; a cigar-chomping Roman Catholic who was soft on Prohibition, who leaned a little to the Left, and has some loose ties early in his political career to Tammany Hall. He was a product of New York City, not America, and Rothstein knew that that fundamental difference went far in the political arena. He was one of us, and he doesn’t have a chance.

Recent events in Rothstein’s life prior to that evening had led to a shaky last couple of months. Things had just not been right. His mind, once sharp with an uncanny memory for numbers and percentages, had grown fuzzy. His slick demeanor and appearance took a turn. He seemed unkempt and sickly, his hands shook all the time, and his confidence faded.

Up until then, Rothstein's criminal career had been a meteoric rise to the top. His powerful influence and notoriety reached far and wide - from the Lower East Side to Harlem and most points in between as well as beyond city limits.
Early on, his father, Abraham Rothstein, a well – respected and religious man whose philanthropic interests earned him the moniker of 'Abe The Just', was troubled by his son's wayward wanderings into the underworld. He tried to have him follow in his good son's Harry's footsteps of academic achievement and rabbinical studies. Arnold shunned it all, apparently claiming,
"Who cares about that stuff. This is America, not Jerusalem. I'm an American!"

He is perhaps most famously remembered in allegedly having a hand in fixing the 1919 World Series with the loss of favorites the Chicago White Sox to the Cincinnati Reds, something never proven and more possibly untrue, but makes for great folklore and newspaper copy.
He saw beyond the rough and tumble ways below 14th Street, using his sharp mind instead of his fists. He always looked ahead of the curve and was one step ahead.

Gambling and numbers were his biggest strength and he had a true talent for it. He made early connections with Monk Eastman and used his muscle as collector on debts owed back to him. Tutelage from Big Tim Sullivan and other political connections allowed him to manage secretly run city casinos that attracted Manhattan socialites and others including Joseph Seagram, the Canadian Whiskey baron. High rollers would lose upwards of $250,000 to Rothstein in a single night.
He watched the Rosenthal – Becker affair like a stage play from the cat walk, never getting his hands dirty but pulling important strings.
He bankrolled early Prohibition operations and speakeasies all over the city, and even financially backed a couple of Broadway plays. One was called Abie’s Irish Rose, whose story revolved around an inter-faith marriage much like his, between a Jew and Irish girl. It was a smash hit. The second, Shuffle Along, was the first Broadway play with an all African-American cast, which nobody else wanted to touch.
He moderated and arranged truces between warring gangs all over town. His ability to move within both the Lower East Side and uptown white-collar criminals was an advantage no one had before and by the age of 46, he was the underworld's golden boy and his orders were obeyed by almost everyone.
He was never arrested and rarely photographed.
He was respected, and reviered.
He taught, tutored, and tolerated.
They called him A.R., The Brain, The Big Bankroll, and he was the original Mr. Big.
Picture early 20th Century New York as the Land of Oz, and Broadway as the yellow brick road.
Rothstein was the man to see behind the curtain.

The evening of November 4, 1928 however did not find Rothstein, a notorious hypochondriac, in the best of mental states. Those endless bags of figs he kept in his suit pocket and consumed daily as supposed brain food, were not working.
And his luck seemed to have changed as well.
He took a call at his booth in Lindy’s from George McManus, who wanted to see him at the Park Central Hotel.

Back on September 8, he had sat down to a poker game organized by McManus at the Park Central Hotel.
The game ended on September 10.
No one seemed sure what happened to Rothstein during the course of that marathon poker game. His judgment was off, he fumbled like an amateur and he raised very high stakes without sure bets in his palms. His edge had dulled somehow and the card sharks in the room noticed as they circled him, waiting for the kill.
He lost $50,000 on a single high- card draw.
His total loss amounted to over $320,000.
Rothstein, livid, slipped them an IOU. and left, promising them a pay off in a day or two, which included the winnings to west coast gambler ‘Nigger Nate’ Raymond, who took Rothstein on that hefty high-card draw and who was showing him very little respect through the entirety of those fateful 48 hours.
While a staggering amount to lose at poker, Rothstein could afford it, but he never intended to pay up. He convinced himself and others around him that the game was rigged and announced he would refuse to pay up.
Whispers and hyperbole now traveled up and down Broadway on how the great A.R. had suddenly welshed on a bet, the one trait he had always despised. Rothstein paid the gossip and back alley talk no heed, and for the following couple of months, sidestepped their demands of payment.

Half an hour after taking his phone call from McManus, Rothstein leaned against the wall next to the service entrance of the Park Central. Blood, which had trickled down the stairs leading from Room 349, was now streaming between his fingers as he clutched his mid - section, his face ghostly pale as he struggled for breath. He asked the service elevator operator to get him a cab, but an ambulance arrived instead.
Rothstein spent two days clutching for life at Polyclinic Hospital.
Detectives urged the dying Rothstein to name the shooter. Rothstein stayed mum, claiming he would take care of it himself.

On November 6, Herbert Hoover took the Presidential Election with a 58% landslide over Alfred E. Smith’s 40%. Hoover even took New York State from Smith, which left him rather devastated.
At the Polyclinic Hospital, Arnold Rothstein let out his last dying breath, winning his final bet, and the lights at Lindy's and along Broadway, dimmed.

2008-10-17T13:51:00.009-04:00

I was recently commissioned by filmmaker and actor Franklin Abrams, who is also a Monk Eastman aficionado and scholar, to illustrate and design a logo for his upcoming Our Gotham project. Abrams is behind the Monk 1903 website of which I posted about on September 16. Our Gotham will be an ongoing series of webisodes focusing on Eastman and his pals Lollie Meyers and Joseph Brown in a modern setting as well as of times past, and the first episode should be up online in November.
I will have more details as they become available to me.
With very little photo reference of Monk Eastman out there, I had to imagine a three quarter view of the old gangster boss and believe I've managed to capture his essence.

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Some blog sides notes:

I just recently added a counter to the blog as my curiosity was peaked as to how many visits it actually gets. I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of visitors in the short time so I thank all of you who have, and keep dropping by.

Future posts may be a little sporadic as I am gearing up for something for which I will announce soon, and in turn will keep me quite (happily) busy.

I also should note that it seems this blog, for some reason, is best viewed through a Firefox browser as when looked at in Safari, certain elements are actually missing !?

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2008-10-03T21:32:00.006-04:00

Sunday, October 5 will mark the 96th anniversary of the death of Big Jack Zelig, so I thought it would be rather appropriate to plug Rose Keefe's The Starker, Big Jack Zelig, The Becker - Rosethal Case, And The Advent Of The Jewish Gangster, which has finally been released, and I must say it has been worth the wait.
I'm currently only halfway through but felt the urge to spread the word in the meantime...

Keefe's book expands on what has really been in essence a supporting subplot of the entire Herman Rosenthal / Charles Becker affair. The Starker now brings Zelig to the forefront, with great new insights and information on his early days leading up to his guiding the scattered Eastman gang back on track after a life changing and violent incident in Chicago; his utter disdain for gamblers and drugs; his actual involvement in the Rosenthal case; and to that fateful trolley ride in October of 1912.

Zelig Lefkowitz’s legacy remains a rare one. Not only had he the outmost respect from his gang, but also was considered as a patriarchal figure by the Jewish community of the Lower East Side at the time, the only leading Jewish mobster to do so.
Zelig vowed to protect his neighborhood from menacing Italians who preyed on weak willed business owners, tauntingly pulled on old men’s beards hovering outside of Shuls, solicited young women into the snares of prostitution, and generally bullied the Jewish immigrant populace.
Zelig kept his promise with vigor and affirmative force. Under Zelig’s command, his gang single-handedly extinguished outside oppression experienced by Jews on the streets from the roving band of Italian hoodlums, petty thieves, and pimps. Zelig was hero to most of the people whose old world distrusts of law enforcement and authority had carried over with them to the new land. They had Big Jack as their own protector instead. Even legitimate businessmen who knew of Zelig’s illegal interests couldn’t help but be impressed.
They had created their own East Side Golem in a way.

Anyone with an interest in not just pre-World War I, but overall Jewish Gangster history, and to get a better understanding of the seeds from which it all grew, should seek this book out.

2008-09-20T21:42:00.050-04:00

I've just recently returned from a week long trip in New York, partly to do a little research, partly for a little r & r (if that's possible in such a city).

Even way before this project came to be, I've had an on going love affair with New York, ever since I can remember. I still find myself awed by the city every time I visit, and I have been there over the years more times than I can remember. Its monumental triumphs of ego, grandeur, greed, and capitalism never fail to still leave me breathless at times. Perhaps one can only have this perspective by being an outsider, but I'm sure many native New Yorkers feel the same way. Its a city of extremes, and its far from perfect or idyllic; no urban center is or ever will be. But, there is a magical, chaotic beauty to its ebb and flow that is its own.

One of my plans on this trip was to go on a little hunt for historical locations of gangster days gone past - but not really to my surprise, not much is left standing from close to one hundred years ago. Changes come quick in the city and so does the wrecking ball.

The Bluebird Café on 14th Street, where Monk Eastman finally met his end: a Whole Foods presently resides.

At Herman Rosenthal's gambling house, a three story
brownstone at 104 West 45th St., stands (somehow fittingly) a CitiBank, which takes up a good quarter of the block.

The Tenderloin's fabled 16th Precinct on West 47th above Eight Avenue, where Charles Becker worked out of, and Rosenthal's body was taken to, has gone the way of the ghost as well.

I was happy to see the six story building that was the Hotel Metropole was still standing, located about 50 yards below Broadway on 43rd St. It's now the Casablanca Hotel, and adjacent is Tony's restaurant. This was the location of the Café Metropole where Rosenthal spent the last few minutes of his life before being gunned down outside in July of 1912. Something told me I should go inside an order a grilled chicken salad. So I did, and gave thought to Herman.

The last place Big Jack Zelig was seen alive by his friends was at Segals Café located at 76 Second Avenue, before hopping on that fateful trolley heading towards 14th Street. A building still stands, but has given away to religious order.

The corner of Rivington and Allen was a lot noisier the night of September 16, 1903 when the Eastmans and Paul Kelly's Five Pointers were ensconced in major street and gun battle that lasted long into the evening hours. Police stood by helpless with just nightsticks until finally after midnight, with sufficient officers from surrounding precincts assembled, they were sent into the melee and finally managed to break things up.

Eastman earned himself a headline in the next morning's New York Times:

“ MONK EASTMAN‘S GANG RUN RIOT WITH PISTOLS AND KNIVES. “Monk Eastman” and his gang broke their own bloody record for revolver fighting early yesterday when they spread terror through part of the east side governed from the Fifth Street and Eldridge Street Police Stations”.

Time didn't permit much more however but I hope to return soon and continue these wanderings and see if any ghosts continue their whisperings from the past.

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Besides some gangster haunts, I also made my way over to the Society Of Illustrators, a place I had always meant to see and finally got t0 this time around. I also had the chance to participate in one of their life drawing sessions which they hold weekly. There's a nice feeling to be sketching in such an institution whose walls contain a rich history of American illustrators past (and present). Original works by Dean Cornwell, James Montgomery Flagg, J.C. Leyendecker and many more hang on the walls; and there's nothing like ordering a drink at a bar over which hangs a seven foot wide Norman Rockwell painting. It was a special night for me to be there and thought I'd share a few drawings done there and spare you a gangster for now...

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What You Do, Is What You Do... I Do, What I Do...

2008-09-16T13:33:00.018-04:00

Filmmaker Franklin Abrams has put together a great site called Monk 1903 which has just recently gone up. I met with Franklin last week in Manhattan, and besides being a fine fellow, has some very interesting plans in the near future with regards to keeping the spirit of Monk Eastman and New York's early 20th century Jewish criminal history alive and well and continually reaching a new audience.

The site will also serve as the future home for "Our Gotham", a upcoming bi-monthly webisode series depicting Monk Eastman and his loyal cronies, Joseph Brown and Lollie Meyers as they are plucked from life as they know it, 1903 Gotham and are thrown in the modern day reality of what is 2008 New York.

Abram's first short is up now on his site and youtube; an imagined scene between a down and out Eastman, fresh from his release from Blackwells Island Prison, and Big Jack Zelig in early 1912.
As a side note, Big Jack Zelig's great great nephew, Jan Lefkowitz, portrays his infamous great uncle in this scene, and the family resemblance is rather spooky.
The Starker's author Rose Keefe, provides the introduction and background.

Honest Abe

2008-08-27T23:02:00.034-04:00

Up until now, the entire focus of this project has been on the criminals; the thugs and the bosses; the schtarkes and the schmucks; and other slithery and slippery hard-boiled Hebrews. While the law and the Jewish community of the time did its best at wrangling up these miscreants and misfits, with whom we can’t help and be fascinated with, a tip of the hat is long overdue to one man during this particular period – Abraham Shoenfeld.

Abe Shoenfeld was the original Shamus – a detective and investigator hired on by The Kehillah (Hebrew for ‘community’) to head up The Bureau Of Social Morals in 1912 following the now infamous murder of Herman Rosenthal. The Kehillah was set up initially by well to do uptown Jews of mostly German descent as a means of unifying New York’s quickly expanding and diverse Jewish community, and to help ease the social and economic challenges they faced.

Founded in 1908, The Kehillah set up an impressive number of bureaus that included education, philanthropy, industry, religion, and eventually and reluctantly, social morals. Crime had been a growing problem since the turn of the century, but was kept and controlled at street level and confined to the Jewish quarter of the East Side. The aftermath of the Rosenthal murder in mid-town near Times Square, brought the simmering problem to a boil through much, unwanted public and press attention, and The Kehillah needed some damage control.

Born April 24, 1891, Shoenfeld worked for the NYPD as a secretary to a deputy commissioner, and was a member Mayor Gaynor’s clean and sweep administration that were trying put a spit and polish back on a very tarnished Big Apple. It was during this period he became involved with The Kehillah. Noted philanthropist and wealthy banker Jabob Schiff hired him directly to delve into gambling and prostitution on the Lower East Side as well as other dark haunts in the city. Schiff may have assumed a Jewish investigator would of assimilated more easily incognito into those surroundings than a detective named Fitzpatrick or O’Malley. We’ll deal with our own, so to speak.

He reported his findings and sent tips straight to the Mayor’s office and the NYPD who then proceeded with numerous raids and arrests. While organized gangs were a little harder for him to back into a corner, he did seem to hold begrudged respect for bosses like Big Jack Zelig, of whom he couldn't deny the impact the leader had on the community as a defacto protector of the neighborhood. The undeniable affirmation of Zelig’s infinite legacy and influence among the downtown Jewish population proved evident in the impressive attendance for his funeral in October of 1912, of which Shoenfeld observed and reported on.
He was personally impacted the most by the state of prostitution carried out by many young Jewish women, and the dangerous conditions and unhealthy lifestyles they lived which appalled Shoenfeld to no end.

Shoenfeld’s detailed reports since then have proved repeatedly to be invaluable source of research for all crime historians who have unearthed the stories of the Jewish criminal class. His papers are now archived at The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem.

While much of the historical attention of Jewish crime generally focuses on the gangsters themselves due to their colorful lives of lawlessness and social abandon of the norm (I also share in that guilt), I believe it’s important not to forget Shoenfled’s work and contribution to the betterment of the cause as an important counterbalance to all these gangster tales. He remains an unsung hero of the time, though the impression I get from some documents provided to me by family members would be that he would probably shrug that honor off; humble and hardworking in hopes of simply making a difference his only agenda. There is much more to share of his life and work however, of which I will hang on to for the time being and wait until pending publication as to not give everything away.

I must send out my sincere thanks to author Rose Keefe who put me in contact with Abe Shoenfeld’s great niece, Ellen James.
I would also like to thank Ms. James and her mother, Thelma Sickles, Abe's niece from his sister Rebecca, for sending me reference photos and documents to work from, so we can finally see what the man looked like and give him his due.

Unearthed From The Vault - The First Illustration

2008-08-13T22:44:00.011-04:00

Well, here it is.

This is the first, ever, illustration of the runaway train this project has become.
It was done with no real motive in mind, other than enjoying the simple pleasure of drawing the unforgettable mug that was Abe 'Kid Twist' Reles, whom at the time, I didn't know much about other than when I gazed at his simian-like features, I was stopped in my tracks. If I only knew then, where it would all lead to....

Dating back almost six years, almost three years before the project hit the current momentum, I was somewhat a little hesitant in posting this image. When I look at it now, my inner critical eye has many issues to raise, but, that's something I can wrestle with on my own and see no need to involve you with minor mundane details.

I posted some initial sketchbook drawings awhile back and thought it would be fun to include this one as well just to show the genesis of this entire affair and see how the work has evolved.....

Becker, Bridgey, and the number 30

2008-07-30T21:42:00.030-04:00

By mere coincidence I’ve been working on completing an illustration of Louis ‘Bridgey’ Webber when I
noticed that Webber died on this day, 72 years ago in 1936.

Webber was another devious performer in the theatrics that the murder of Herman Rosenthal was to be. Webber had long, venomous history with Rosenthal, going back to the days when he ran the San Souci (French for ‘without worry’) Music Hall. After the finale of his undoubtedly perjured testimony in the first Charles Becker trial, and that of the four gunmen, Webber hightailed it to Havana, Cuba; when he returned in June of 1913, he was stabbed in the shoulder from behind while strolling along Elisabeth Street but escaped serious injury.
Seemingly, underworld reprisals were in the air.

The incident was enough to shake Webber out of the gambling life, realizing his good luck couldn't last. He headed across the Hudson to Passaic, New Jersey, where he worked his way up to vice president at the Garfield Paper Box Company.

Coincidental or criminal karma, Webber was 59 when he died on July 30 at Passaic's St. Mary’s Hospital of peritonitis while undergoing an appendectomy; the exact day, twenty-one years later after ex- Lieutenant Charles Becker shuffled his way to the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison.

Becker’s execution on July 30, 1915, became almost as mythical as his street reputation. It took three separate jolts, almost a full eight minutes, for two thousand volts to finally stop his large heart. His bonds had slipped three times, and the execution staff had underestimated his strength and tenacity.
The stoic, blindly loving Helen Becker, took it upon herself to have her husband’s tombstone temporarily and somberly
engraved with

CHARLES BECKER
Murdered July 30, 1915
By Governor Charles Whitman.

HEEB!

2008-07-22T18:42:00.050-04:00

The Summer Issue of Heeb is now out on news stands and includes a nice full page on yours truly and this here blog and book project.

It's the appropriately themed 'Notorious' issue which is guest edited by director Brett Ratner, the man behind the Rush Hour films, X-Men 3, among many other achievements. Apparently Mr.Ratner was neighbors with Meyer Lansky as wee lad in his formative days in Miami so there is a nice connection to all this as well.

You can view the online version (which contains a couple more illustrations)
h ere.

..my many thanks to publisher Josh Neuman and managing editor Jessie Bodzin for including me in this latest issue.

Bald Jack Rose

2008-07-15T11:31:00.017-04:00

The morning, of July 16, at around 2.A.M. EST, will mark the 96th anniversary of the killing of gambler Herman Rosenthal in front of Metropole Hotel on Forty Third Street, which was located between Broadway and Sixth Avenue in 1912.

In a nod to a very important turning point in early Jewish crime, I thought I would post an illustration of Bald Jack Rose, a key player in the entire affair.
I had hoped to finish one up of Bridgey Webber, but a minor case of stomach flu got the better of me....

Jacob Rosensweig, known as Billiard Ball Jack in early newspaper reports, but better known as Bald Jack Rose, was a Times Square legend. A masterful poker player who suffered from a rare disorder which left him virtually hairless right down to eyebrows and eyelashes. His very pale complexion also led him to powdering his head to cut down on the bouncing glare of the summer sun.
There was no mistaking Bald Jack Rose when he strolled down Broadway.

Rose was also a bagman for Lt. Charles Becker, the notorious corrupt policeman who was the first (and possibly only) member of the NYPD to be executed at Sing Sing Prison in aftermath of the murder of Herman Rosenthal. Becker supposedly instructed Rose to conduct and see through the arrangements for Rosenthal's execution.

However, many believe to this day that Rose, along with partners Louis 'Bridgey' Webber and Harry Vallon, were the actual men behind the murder plot, and concocted an impressive and layered frame up that sent Becker (and four gunmen) to the electric chair.
Their court testimonies for the prosecution in exchange for immunity were more than likely a very tall pile of perjury, fables, and poppycock.

It's a complicated case, and Rose is just one, of an unbelievable cast of characters of criminals, politicians, city administrators, journalists, and shamed Jewish community members, that would do a Hollywood script proud. It continues to fascinate historians and writers alike as so many questions are left unanswered.

There are two really great books out there at the moment that cover all aspects in detail: Satan's Circus by Mike Dash, and Against The Evidence by Andy Logan. Logan's book, published in the '70s, is out of print, but still possibly found on used book sites.

Bald Jack Rose returned to a life as Jacob Rosensweig in the wake of the trials and executions. He cleansed himself of sins as a born again Christian, and was in high demand on the criminology lecture circuit.
And he probably had a good laugh to himself.

Riding his minor celebrity status, he was also credited with creating the ‘Jack Rose’, a very popular cocktail of its time.

Ingredients
2 ounces applejack
1 ounce lime juice
1/2 ounce grenadine

Glass Type: cocktail glass
Instructions: Shake the applejack and other ingredients well with cracked ice, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

and according to Esquire's The Wondrich Take, the resident cocktail historian:

"-- the drink is based on applejack, and it's rose-pink. Play on words. In any case, the Jack Rose is an effective testament to its namesake: It's smooth and sweetish and deeply deceptive."

I couldn't of said it better myself.

Motor City Machers

2008-07-05T21:38:00.009-04:00

Time for just another quick book release worth plugging.

In a somewhat surprising move from Arcadia Publishing, comes Paul R. Kavieff's Detroit's Infamous Purple Gang.
Arcadia is generally know as a publisher of lost Americana, essayed through period photographs with a strong focus on communities, regions and towns in their 'Images Of America' series. While the series usually wax nostalgic of the good old days, it makes this recent release a (welcomed) surprise considering its subject matter

Paul R. Kavieff authored The Purple Gang: Organized Crime In Detroit 1910 - 1945 in 2000, and more recently the first biography on Louis 'Lepke' Buchalter (The Life And Times...) in 2006.

In Detroit's Infamous Purple Gang, Kavieff has gathered up his impressive collection of photographs that trace the violent times of this Jewish collective of prohibition misfits and machers. There's wide variety of great mugs and shlubs; gonifs and gangsters; as well as some artfully composed crime scene photos that await you within these pages. It's worth seeking out for anyone with interest in the Purple Ones' potent contribution to Prohibition-era's kosher crime wave.

Lights Out for Mama Siegel's Blue-Eyed Boy

2008-06-19T21:46:00.026-04:00

On June 20, 1947 Benjamin Siegel was seated on a flower patterned divan in a spacious living room whose front door address resided at 810 North Linden Drive, Beverly Hills, California.

Looking around his opulent surroundings, and skimming through the evening edition of the Los Angeles Times, Ben Siegel realized he had come a long way from his snot-nosed days in tenements in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the rough streets of the Lower East Side. Despite the ongoing troubles with The Flamingo; the boys back in New York; and a harrowing last few days of mysterious phone calls and whispered threats, he was feeling pretty good for the first time in weeks. Seated next him was his friend Allen Smiley, known as 'Smiley the Russian' to his pals. The two were relaxed and making small chitchat since returning from a seaside meal earlier that evening.

It was the eve of summer and calm warm winds passed through the windows tickling the drapes. Upstairs, 19 year old Chick Hill, was entertaining one Miss Jerri Mason. Siegel glanced over at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was 10:20 P.M.
His thoughts turned to Virgina Hill. Their last squabble had sent Virginia scuffling off to Paris for a little while until things cooled off between them again. Sure, she was a handful, and sometimes more than not, a pain in the ass. But Benny also knew that she was the only woman who was able to keep up with his ways. And Benny had known a lot of women.
The French called it ' L'Amour Fou'.

Sixty-one years ago, nine bullets crashed through a ground floor window of Virginia Hill's rented mansion, and ended the life of Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel.

Much has been written and said about Siegel. He’s by far the most famous Jewish gangster in popular culture. He’s even been the subject of a major Hollywood film.
And he was definitely the most handsome.
Yet, despite the flash and bravado; the money and the power; the women and the wine; only five people attended his funeral.
Actor and childhood friend George Raft wasn’t there.
Long time partner Meyer Lansky wasn’t there.
Los Angeles right hand man Mickey Cohen wasn’t there.
Even his pal Smiley, who watched him die, wasn’t there.
Neither was Virginia Hill.

Siegel, who had been such a presence and force in many of these and other’s peoples lives, legitimate and otherwise, had been granted the ultimate insult upon his demise.
No flower filled procession of black Cadillac Sedans.
No glowing eulogies.
No show.

Guess Benny’s old crowd had nothing to say.

Only his ex-wife Esta, daughters Millicent and Barbara, and brother Maurice were there to put him to rest. The fifth was Rabbi Kert who recited prayers and the Twenty-third Psalm.

Getta outta here!

2008-06-16T22:39:00.019-04:00

A brief overview of the life of Jacob 'Gurrah' Shapiro. The final book text will go into more details. Hey, I can't giveaway everything here!

Jacob 'Gurrah' Shapiro
1899 - 1947

In much of the annals of Jewish criminal history put to paper, much has been made of Jacob Shapiro’s sobriquet. The nickname of ‘Gurrah’ conjures up images of a rough and tumble fellow, and the word closely resembles ‘gorilla’ as well if spoken quickly. That would have been appropriate as well, as Shapiro filled out the gangster mold rather well with his thick frame, long arms, hunched composure and mandatory broken nose that sat between two, almost gentle pale blue eyes. Sidewalk stories and street legend has it that more than likely, he earned it from his incomprehensible mumbling in his attempt at saying "getta outta here" through a thick tongue that first spoke Russian upon his family’s arrival from Minsk in the early 1900s.

He began his criminal career as a teen like most, robbing pushcarts, which were an easy target before growing to being one of the most feared labor racketeers not only on the Lower East Side, but also throughout most of New York. His partner was Louis 'Lepke' Buchalter, whom Shapiro first encountered during their teenage years when they both tried to rob the same pushcart. With a little nudge and wink from Mr. Arnold Rothstein, the two came up through the ranks and learned the slippery ropes working for number one labor boss Jacob ‘Little Augie’ Orgen. Orgen, a former member of Benjamin ‘Dopey Benny’ Fein’s gang, had won the longstanding labor slugging wars with his ‘Little Augies’ against Nathan Kaplan aka Kid Dropper and Johnny Spanish. Kaplan met his end in front of the Essex Market Court House in 1923 by a friendly little torpedo that went by the name Little Louis Cohen, despite the numerous detectives and policemen in the vicinity. Little Augie kept his guard up from that point on, with one inquisitive eye especially on the salient Lepke Buchalter, by hiring the notorious Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond as his personal bodyguard.

Buchalter was the dangerous and scary type of hoodlum, whose clear eyed, methodical forward thinking was combined and laced with cold-blooded cunning and greed. Shapiro was the brawn to Lepke's brains, and the two made quite the duo. It wasn’t long before Buchalter was convinced he and Shapiro could run Little Augie’s business better than he ever would.
On the 16th of October, 1927, Shapiro and Buchalter went into business for themselves after leaving on the corner of Norfolk and Delancey the bullet riddled body that once belonged to 26 year old Jacob Orgen. Legs Diamond earned his nickname due to his quick long legged running stride, which failed him that day and left him severely wounded but alive.

The old days were gone. Shapiro and Buchalter’s new order put fresh standards and practices to work, expanding their racketeering empire to bakery trucking, the clothing trade, narcotics and much more. The results shot Lepke to the top of the New York City crime world, aligning himself with the Bug and Meyer mob, Brooklyn chief Albert Anastasia, Lucky Luciano, and brought forth the birth of ‘the Combination’ which the press colorfully termed ‘Murder Inc.’ They acquired the dubious tag of ‘The Gold Dust Twins’, pulling in millions, but ‘Gurrah Jake’ Shapiro's aspirations stayed at street level and he remained out of the office chair while Buchlater ran his operations like a Wall Street CEO.

Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey had been a thorn in the side of much of New York’s underworld ever since he chased after Dutch Schultz in the mid 1930s. With sights set on the Governor’s chair, and eventually the White House, he had Mayor LaGuardia’s blessing to take on the rackets. New York’s round table of knights of disorder had decided against assassinating Dewey when the Dutchman had first put the idea on the table. Shapiro and Buchalter had been the minority in voting yes, and that loss of vote and the crime boss committee’s decision against hitting Dewey would soon haunt most of them.

Dewey focused on the duo’s labor practices, and soon had them busted and convicted of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and they suddenly faced two years behind bars. Even with this sedentary period for the two while they were off the streets, Dewey worked up more evidence up his sleeve on a variety of different charges to have them sent right back into the clink after serving their present term. Word reached Shapiro and he immediately went into hiding, while Lepke, well, his was another long story altogether of almost two years of incognito and games of hide and seek.

Wanted posters had appeared by the thousands across the country with a $5000 reward for information on his whereabouts. ‘Gurrah’ Shapiro first went to Newark, perhaps hidden under the wide umbrella of New Jersey boss Abner ‘Longy’ Zwillman, before heading to the Midwest. The isolation of underground life proved to be too much for him after a couple of months and he started showing up in nightclubs, bars, and making phone calls. He wanted his old life back, and to see his old friends. His health was deteriorating as well. The good life capped by two years of sitting in jail had rounded out Shapiro’s features considerably, and he suffered from chest pains and shortness of breath. Finally, on April 14, 1938, tired of running and too sick to go on, he turned himself in to the FBI.
Charges against Jacob Shapiro included extortion and conspiracy, and he was handed 15 years to life to be spent at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. He only served nine of those years, during which he’d witness life long partner Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter take a seat in the electric chair, before a heart attack took his life in 1947.

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The Jews Of Sing Sing

2008-06-03T22:57:00.010-04:00

I just recently returned from a couple of entertaining and informative appearances by author Ron Arons, who was in town for two nights in conjunction with the release of his new book The Jews Of Sing Sing.

The book was initially sparked when Arons was researching his great grandfather, Isaac Speirs, who, to his surprise, spent four years in Sing Sing Prison for bigamy. Intended originally as a family memoir, and a good part of the book details his search for his great grandfather's story, it also morphed into a more complete overview of some of the more infamous, and not so infamous Jewish inmates of the notorious penitentiary. Ron's book is the final result of ten years worth or research.
The Jews Of Sing Sing is now available, and for more details you can go to his website here

Also keep an eye out for appearances by Ron in your area code as they are a fun and informative romp on Jewish criminality and its history.

Lost and Found New York: Looking For Lansky

2008-05-24T19:39:00.003-04:00

Today's New York Times featured illustrator James Stevenson's ode to Meyer Lansky. Seems Stevenson trekked around New York with sketchbook in tow, documenting the Little Man's old haunts with present day sketches of the locations, proving us with a charming, brief look at his life.

For some reason the New York Times permalink doesn't to jive with Blogger, so here it is, scanned and posted the old-fashioned way. Jus

t click on the images below.

Lost and Found New York - Looking For Lansky

2008-05-24T18:58:00.018-04:00

Today's New York Times featured illustrator James Stevenson's ode to Meyer Lansky. Stevenson trekked around New York with sketchbook in hand documenting the Little Man's old haunts with present day sketches, providing us with a charming brief look at his life.

Looking For Lansky

The First Gangster Film - Inspired By True Events.

2008-05-02T17:49:00.020-04:00

DW Griffith's 16 minute film, 'The Muskateers of Pig Alley' was produced in 1912, and is credited as being the first gangster film ever committed to celluloid. It was apparently influenced by the nationwide press attention of the murder of gambler Herman Rosenthal, and the subsequent trials of Harry Horowitz (Gyp The Blood), Louis Rosenberg (Lefty Louie), Jacob Seidenschmer (Whitey Lewis),Dago Frank and Liet. Charles Becker. Griffith was intrigued enough to take his camera to the Lower East Side and cast, apparently, actual street hoods and gangsters from the neighborhood as extras to authenticate his footage alongside his principle actors. While thematically has very little to due with the Rosenthal case, it was the first time the Lower East Side became a central backdrop to a story on film. It's a fascinating window into the past regardless if the use of actual criminal types was just early studio marketing savvy or the truth.

98 Years Ago - Not Such A Funny Day For Spanish Louie

2008-03-30T21:14:00.016-04:00

April 1st is generally associated with April Fool's Day, a day of pranks and put ons for some (and my kid brother Marc's birthday!). But the day was not so funny 98 years ago for John 'Spanish Louie' Lewis, when he met his end on the corner of Second Avenue and Twelfth Street. His street career was brief but colorful and he was also somewhat of an anomaly as possibly the only Jewish hood with Sephardic roots....

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The long heritage line of New York’s Jewish gangland has generally been tied to the descendent roots of Eastern Europe, Germany and Russia. It’s the pre-dominant Jewish American denomination known as Ashkenazim, whose ancestors started pouring into New York and beyond in mass numbers starting around 1880. But while Ashkenazi Jews quickly came to define the American Jew simply because of their sheer numbers, they weren’t the first to arrive.

In September 1654, the first twenty-three Jews to ever set foot on North American soil had made their way up from Brazil by ship to settle in then New Amsterdam. They had found themselves refugees once again, spill over results of the Spanish Inquisition already one hundred and sixty-two years old. When the Portuguese re-conquered Brazil in that same year, they were expelled from another continent yet again, the perennial wandering Jew. They were Sephardic, Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent that during the initial inquisition had spread out to the rest of Europe with a high percentage stopping in Holland. With language as impetus, many others braved an Atlantic crossing and made their way to South America with a majority choosing Argentina as the final stop.

Upon their New Amsterdam arrival, the twenty-three were not received with the open door policy that was to take place two hundred years later. Governor Peter Stuyvesant looked at expelling these new strangers almost immediately, but The Dutch West India Company, with the help of a few well place Jews in Holland, denied his request. It would take another ten years, in 1664, after the British took over and re-christened the town New York, would these Jews be given some standard civil rights, and foundations in building new lives were laid. By 1700 well over three hundred Jews had arrived in the country, and by 1706, they established their first Synagogue, the Spanish – Portuguese Congregation Shearith Israel, which still stands today at 8 West 70th St.

It’s a long shot to say if John ‘Spanish Louie’ Lewis’s descendants were among those three hundred, but he is an anomaly as possibly the only known Jewish hoodlum of Sephardic descent. Lewis was a lone wolf, working independently with just a few men under him. His early street training came as a member of Humpty Jackson’s troop, another incredible gangland character from the first decade of the 20th century. Besides Lewis, Jackson led a band of about fifty men with names like Lobster Kid and The Grabber, and was a lover of Voltaire, Darwin and gunplay. He had a violent streak and a hunchback that deformed his figure and naturally exaggerated his feared presence among his men. By the time Jackson was jailed for the last time in 1910, Lewis had already set out on his own. Tall tales abound about Lewis, weaved colorfully first by Herbert Asbury in The Gangs Of New York. Lewis played up his noble Spanish – Portuguese bloodline by prowling the streets dressed in all black attire, crossing two Colt revolvers under his belt and backed up his arsenal with a couple of eight inch blades at either side of his hips. To accentuate his prowess and mystery he supposedly pulled up a sweater up to under his nose as to be unrecognizable under a supposed black sombrero; he knew how to draw attention for potential clients in the underworld. With no real ties to the existing Jewish criminal community, his olive complexion and dark swarthy looks set him apart from the rest of the East Side mobsters and made him a bit of an enigma.

Because of his considerable size he freelanced his bouncing skills on many occasions until Herman Rosenthal hired him on regularly for his East Side gambling parlor by 1909. His fists were swift, he was a crack shot with a pistol and Spanish Louie’s notoriety spread quickly as the mysterious figure that regularly thumped Rosenthal’s misbehaving patrons with brutish ease. Running a gambling establishment been a fierce game of competition on the East Side and no one disdained each other more than Rosenthal and rival Louis ‘Bridgey Webber. Violent exchanges and vandalism were the norm in the means of gaining the upper hand and stealing clients away by temporarily disabling the other’s operation. Lewis used the continuing feud to his advantage and decided to steal $400 after raiding Webber’s gambling parlor with a couple of men. To everyone’s surprise, an enraged Webber turned to the police, and Lewis and his men found themselves standing in line up of scoundrels and rogues. The underworld code was breached, but pressures to make amends were met when the $400 was returned to Webber along with an extra $300 for his troubles in order to not press charges and keep the misunderstanding at street level and not involve the police. Though Lewis was freed, a grudge ingrained itself deeply within him. Webber was jumped and blackjacked a couple of months later by unknown assailants who left him on the curb with a broken jaw.

On April 1, 1910, John ‘Spanish Louie’ Lewis lay dead on a street just off Second Avenue, with two bullets in his head.
In the months leading up to that first day in April, Bridgey Webber’s broken jaw healed up slowly over the cold winter as revenge burned into his thoughts. He hired Big Jack Zelig’s crew for payback on his assault and the trio of Gyp The Blood, Lefty Louis and Whitey Lewis were presumably given the assignment. They ensnared Spanish Louie after someone claimed a friend wanted to speak to him and had led him off Second Avenue down Twelfth Street. Lewis’ street smarts kicked in quick as he drew his revolvers but the ambush was lightning fast and he had no chance against the three men. Beat patrol officers came running after hearing the two shots and discovered Lewis’ body as a gray touring car roared off. Somewhere, Bridgey Webber smiled.

Some may have quickly disregarded any mysterious street legacy Spanish Louie hoped he had attained after his body was claimed by a family in Brooklyn to be given a proper Jewish burial. Seems the mysterious stranger clad in black was just another lost kid from across the river with misguided lawless ambitions that left him dead on the streets of the East Side.

Walter Winchell and Murder Inc.

2008-03-11T21:58:00.022-04:00

Here's a little treat from the vinyl vaults...!
Walter Winchell had a huge impact on early 20th century journalism with his ability to translate the tempo and staccato rhythm of 1920s New York into the printed word, and then translating that talent onto radio. He was the 'King of the Scoop', his reports colorful and more than likely exaggerated, reaching over 89 % of the American public through his columns and radio show. Winchell broadcasted his actual involvement in the surrender and capture Louis 'Lepke' Buchalter to the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover in 1939.
Some of Lepke's henchmen contacted Winchell personally in order to co-ordinate the hand over to Hoover, whom he knew personally. Winchell could smell a great scoop a mile away, and agreed to play the middleman, solidifying his huge cultural influence at the time over the general public.

Walter Winchell: The Story Of Murder Inc. was released by Dot Records during the mid-1960s and is rather hard to track down these days. Its a unique and fun aural artifact, giving you a real sense of Winchell's old New York patter and storytelling, accented by a dramatic horn section. Give these tracks a listen if you have a moment, as its doubtful a CD version or ITunes download is on its way....

I had to find an online host for the MP3s so forgive the gaudy player that is attached....