Exploring a brave new Jewish underworld
‘The Incorruptibles’ traces crime from Polish shtetl to East Side ghetto
Most of us vaguely know that there was a Jewish criminal underground, centered in New York, at around the turn of the last century, and then a few decades into it, but most of us know very little about it.
We might know a few names — Bugsy Siegel, Dutch Schultz (né Arthur Flegenheimer), Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, for starters, and yes, not all of this batch were New Yorkers, and Lansky didn’t die until 1983 — but few of us know any details.
Dan Slater does, and in his new book, “The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld,” he tells them in great, occasionally gory detail, often in the slang of the time.
And there are so many stories there!
We tend to romanticize life in the shtetls and then on the Lower East Side; we know that they were dirty and dangerous, but we also tend to think of them as bustling, vibrant, and colorful. We think of the shtetl as the embodiment of traditional Jewish life and of the LES as the crucible where successful American Jews were formed.
We don’t concentrate on the danger or the dirt. We don’t think much about the criminality, despair, and early death that accompany them.
And the corruption! So very much corruption.
We know that “Fiddler on the Roof,” which probably gives most of us our most soul-deep understanding of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, showed that life was marred by political violence and real poverty, but it focused more on personal relationships than sociological trends. And even if its ending is bittersweet, the music’s too alive and wonderful to allow many people to leave the theater unhappy.
People fled Eastern Europe deeply unhappy, and not infrequently with experiences not only of vulnerability — that we knew — but also of criminality, because often that was necessary for survival.
“In a way, my story is about the rise and fall of the Jewish underworld,” Mr. Slater said. “It came out of ghetto life, and in some ways it was an extension of Jewish ghetto life in the Pale of Settlement.
“A lot of the vice that the ghetto refugees brought here were things that they’d been involved with back there, and for similar reasons: marginalization, antisemitism, poverty. The Pale itself was a ghetto, where people lived under restrictions.”
The Jews who lived there did what they had to do, Mr. Slater said.
“Most of the prostitutes in Russia were Jews, and Jews controlled the liquor trade, going back probably to the 16th century. It’s about marginalization.”
Before the Pale was controlled by Russia, its overlord was Poland. “The Polish people were able to sell a lot of alcohol to peasants in places like Ukraine, but the alcohol destroyed those communities. What the Polish nobles and politicians wanted to do was to continue to make money off alcohol, but they no longer wanted to be associated with it.
“They needed middlemen,” people through whom money would flow and to whom the stench would adhere.
Call in the Jews!
“It goes back to the moneylending laws from the 12th century, that were codified in the 13th century. That was the first vice that was offloaded onto Jews.
“The monks who made Christian law were saying that we want to expand our religion, and we need some laws that everyone abides by. That means that if you were a Christian, given the ban on moneylending, you couldn’t do it. But it was a funny time to ban moneylending, because that was the start of capitalism, and for capitalism you need moneylending. So yes, they could ban moneylending, but then what?”
Ta-da! The Jews!
“The answer was to offload it on the Jews. They’d already sold their souls anyway, and they already were pariahs. The Christians thought that it would get them out of the bind they had made for themselves.”
It did.
In the Pale of Settlement, “it was a minority of people who were involved in vice, but they knew how to organize. They had done it for generations and generations. Americans had never seen it before. Jews were the first in organized crime.
“The Italians came later. They hadn’t known how to organize at first.” The Jews were very, very good at it. “There was an organization of Jewish pimps” — Mr. Slater explains the group, how it was founded, and how it functioned in his book — “called the Independent Benevolent Association. It was incorporated in Albany.”
The IBA gave kickbacks to Tammany Hall, the corrupt organization that controlled New York City Hall.
The heart of Mr. Slater’s book is the struggle between organized crime and the reformers who wanted to clean up the ghetto. It was in part a class struggle — the rich reformers versus the poor criminals, the uptown WASPs versus the downtown ethnics — but it also was a Jew vs. Jew face-off — the uptown German Jews, rich, complacent, eager to assimilate, versus the downtown Jews, poor, edgy, eager to get ahead.
It’s a story of deep-seated corruption and criminality.
“There was a Yiddish horse-poisoning ring, called the Yiddish Black Hand,” Mr. Slater said. “They went around extorting business owners with the threat of poisoning their horses” — and remember, this was before car ownership was much of a thing, and those horses were not to race but to depend on for business — “and they poisoned lots of horses.”
The Jewish underworld eventually was brought down, in large parts through the efforts of a Jewish man from the Lower East Side who was both intrigued and revolted by it. “That vice crusade is the narrative spine of my book,” Mr. Slater said.
It’s the story of the sort-of-hero, Abe Schoenfeld, against the definite-if-human villain, Arnold Rothstein, aka the Brain, who was the mastermind of the underworld until he was gunned down, took his time dying, but refused to tell the police who killed him.
(He’s said to be the prototype of Nathan Detroit, the charming if undependable second lead in “Guys and Dolls,” although it’s hard to see the lovable rogue in the actual monster. But echoes of the musical, and of Damon Runyon, are inescapable when you read “The Incorruptibles,” and its characters’ search for the platonic ideal of the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New Yo-oh-oh-ork.”)
It’s also the story of the women in their lives, who had even fewer options than the men did, made the most of them, and on the whole lived unenviable lives, despite their occasional wealth.
It’s odd that we don’t know this story in any detail, given how dramatic it is.
“I can’t be sure why that is, but I can speculate,” Mr. Slater said. “Reason 1, I think, is that World War II and the Holocaust have taken up all of our historical breathing space. We inevitably live in the shadow of that.
“Which is crazy. We are the people with the oldest history on earth, and yet for a lot of us our historical awareness boils down to the Holocaust and nothing else. And the newest generation doesn’t always even know that much.
“The other reason is that a lot of the documentation about this, which is part of the story I tell in the book, was later moved to Palestine, and housed in the archives of the Hebrew University. I was lucky enough to be able to spend a few weeks there, working with them.
“It’s because Rabbi Judah Magnes, who was the most famous and most controversial American rabbi before World War II, played a big role in the story. He was almost like a spy handler. He was the one who dealt with Abe, who would report information to him.
“He became a pariah in World War II because he opposed the war. He moved his whole family to Jerusalem and became the founding dean of the Hebrew University, and he spent the rest of his life there.
“He brought about 100 boxes of archival material with him, and a lot of it was about the Jewish underworld in New York City.”
Mr. Slater’s book is profusely illustrated. That’s because “I got lucky,” he said. “There was an old photo news service in New York, called Brown Brothers, that opened in 1904 and went strong for four decades, supplying photos to newspapers and magazines. When it closed, all the images went into a large warehouse, and ownership was passed down from generation to generation.
“A few years ago, the family decided to sell the whole collection to an auction house in New Jersey that specializes in sports memorabilia and also has a photography department. And the auction house decided to sell the images off individually; it put up a batch of 300 to 400 images every week on eBay.
“I purchased about 700 images, and about 70 of them are in the book. So I was able to get images of the world of the story. Of boys having their first cigarettes, or girls walking to their jobs in the garment industry. I was able to get images of poisoned horses, and of the horse poisoners. I got images of some of the people in the book.”
It’s a rare trove and illustrates the book perfectly.
Mr. Slater — who is not trained as a historian but as a lawyer and journalist — stumbled into this story when he was working on another story that he was sure would become a book. It was about the “gang of rabbis in Brooklyn, the Jersey Shore, Rockland, and Lakewood who beat up husbands who refused to give their wives gets” — Jewish divorces — he said. The rabbis had begun their work, in the early 1980s, as a public service, but they’d been offered money to go after recalcitrant husbands, and soon the profit motive took over.
“It was a big story, and one of the angles I researched was the history of violence in the Jewish community,” Mr. Slater said. “I kept coming back to New York City prior to World War I, and to crime in the ghetto on the Lower East Side. I kept coming across a young private investigator who produced a lot of writing and reportage about the Jewish gangster world, and I got really interested in it.”
That man, he said, was Abe Schoenfeld.
The story about the rabbis beating up husbands ended up as a long magazine story; Mr. Slater couldn’t get enough material for a book. Many people didn’t want to talk.
But the archives were another story. They offered another story. The story that makes up this book.
Who: Dan Slater
What: Will talk about his new book, ““The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld,” with Professor Thorin Tritter
When: On Thursday, October 10, at 10:45
Where: At the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly
Why: For the JCC U
Furthermore: The talk is the first part of the JCC U’s session that day, which starts with coffee and conversation at 10:30. After a break for lunch, which is not included in the program, there’s a second session, where:
Who: Gary Negbaur
What: Talks about “The History of American Song”
When: At 12:45
How much: JCC members pay $38; non-members pay $45
For more information or to register: Go to www.jccotp.org, click on Adults, then Lectures and Learning, then JCC U, then Fall Term 2024. Or call 201-569-7900 and ask for the JCC U.
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