Damon Runyon was there when the conference was going on and wrote about the meeting in one of his short stories, “Dark Dolores.” There is a belief that some of the reported events of the conference—the men being pushed in rolling chairs to the end of the boardwalk where they would get into the water and have their meeting—may have been, if not outright created, at least exacerbated by Runyon. And while the gathered gangsters ate, drank, and partied with hookers supposedly supplied by Johnson, there was no doubt they were also there to talk business. But the combination of press reports, Runyon’s story, the passage of time, and the fact that none of the actual attendees ever talked about what was said at the meeting created a lot of speculation in the ensuing years. In fact, the exact list of attendees is up for question.
But there definitely was a meeting, and Al Capone was in Atlantic City at the time. The police first got a report of Capone in a nightclub, telling the newspapers that, if “Capone is found he will be given the choice of leaving the resort or going to jail.”[12] Capone told the director of Public Safety in Chicago that “I met Bugs Moran and two other men in Atlantic City after we previously determined to declare a truce. We talked things over for a week and finally agreed to certain conditions.”[13] Capone confirmed that the men had stayed at the President Hotel and that they had worked on a deal for six days, adding “The gang war, or at least the feud between Moran and myself, is ended for all time.”[14]
With uncertainty regarding the exact attendees, it is likely that Nucky Johnson was there. One of the main pieces of evidence is the famous photo of a smiling Enoch Johnson walking arm-in-arm with Al Capone down the Atlantic City Boardwalk. The photo appeared in the Atlantic City Daily Press. Johnson assured everyone within earshot that the photo was a fake, that he had been superimposed on the scene. But the fact was that Capone had been in Atlantic City that week in May, and the newspapers were reporting it. And Nucky Johnson was a major power in town and would certainly have been the go-to resource for Capone and Torrio.
The Atlantic City Conference certainly put the city on the map for exactly the wrong reasons. The availability of liquor made the area infamous and its participants rich, but it also fell under closer scrutiny by the US Coast Guard. The old smuggling routes were now being shut down, and Atlantic City was not as easy to get into for the Jersey skiffs as it had been in the past. Rumrunners started creeping down the coast to the town of Wildwood, located just above Cape May at the southern tip of the Jersey Shore. This location, right near the entrance to Delaware Bay, provided ample back bays and coves, like Ottens Harbor, for smugglers to hide in while unloading from the supply ships off the coast. The back roads and rural towns just outside Wildwood were home to moonshining.
Since Wildwood, like Atlantic City, hosted visitors during the summer, speakeasies and drinking clubs sprouted up to quench the thirst of daring visitors who braved secret passages and scrutiny by local police. However, some of the businesses in Wildwood openly advertised beer for sale, while raids from police were not too common. One local legend concerns a nightclub proprietor, Louisa Booth, who owned the club Lou Booth’s Chateau Monterey. The story goes that, during Prohibition, Louisa wanted to get in on the action and so set up business deals with smugglers. She feared, however, they wouldn’t do business with a woman, so she shortened her name to Lou. There currently is a Lou Booth Amphitheater in Wildwood, memorializing her.
As the booze was flowing into South Jersey, the coast guard was looking to the sky—and Washington, DC—for help in thwarting the smuggling operations. In 1926, Congress approved funding for the US Coast Guard to purchase Loening OL-5 seaplanes. These two-seat seaplanes, first made in 1923, were some of the earliest amphibious planes and were made specifically for the US Navy and Air Corps. “The flying enforcers focused on stopping the liquor traffic at sea along the northeast and southeast coasts.”[15] The flights originated out of the Cape May airbase. Also at the US Coast Guard base in Cape May were eight seventy-five-foot ships that patrolled up and down the coast.
But South Jersey did not boast the only drop-off point for liquor along the shoreline. The borough of Atlantic Highlands, located on the south shore of Raritan Bay, became a hotbed of rum-running activity throughout Prohibition (mob boss Vito Genovese would later call the Highlands his home). Larger vessels would park offshore, and smaller boats, with shallower draft, would speed out to the ships, load up on cases of booze, and zip back to shore, all under the cover of darkness. Atlantic Highlands boasts the highest points on the eastern seaboard south of Maine, looking out far and wide over the bay, giving an advantage to rumrunners keeping an eye on ships coming in with cargo and any approaching law-enforcement vessels.
On the night of September 21, 1923, the relative calm of Atlantic Highlands was shattered as a gun battle erupted between a group of bootleggers and a gang of hijackers out of Newark who had been pilfering the locals’ liquor shipments as they had come in to either the port area of town or nearby Wagner Creek, itself a busy route for small boats with smaller loads of illicit alcohol. The Newark hijackers were led by the LeConte brothers, Joe and Frank. They had been caught in a gun battle with a local bootlegging operation run by Walt Keener. The battle took residents by surprise. “Gangsters took cover behind cars, doors, trees and light poles, while residents hugged the ground behind cars, horse troughs, barrels, and buildings.”[16] The Keener gang shot Frank LeConte in the stomach, the bullet lodging just under his back. Though LeConte was dropped off at a local hospital, he died the following Monday morning. Both sets of gangsters were arrested, but because none of them would talk and the shooting happened in the cover of darkness, murder charges were dropped against two of Keener’s men, Ralph and Edward Bitters.
But that hardly stemmed the flow of liquor into the Highlands. Just a couple months later, after the shooting, the day after Christmas, the Asbury Park Evening Press reported that “twice as much liquor was landed for yesterday’s Christmas celebrations than last year.”[17] That was in part due to another extensive operation run by two local brothers.
Al and William Lillien controlled a bootlegging gang that extended from Montreal down to Virginia and was based out of Atlantic Highlands. The Lilliens’ operation was raided in October of 1929. Federal agents estimated that his operation had taken in over two million dollars over the course of six months, based on figures they found in a notebook taken from the Lillien headquarters in the Highlands. Al Lillien was indicted with thirty-eight others in 1931 but was acquitted of smuggling. But the Lilliens’ rum-running operation came to an end in March of 1933 when Al was found in his spacious mansion in Middletown Township, three bullet holes in the back of his head.
But there was more. There was the Napeague, a boat carrying fifteen hundred cases of whisky (thirteen hundred cases of Durand rye, two hundred of Canadian Club), which was raided by the US Coast Guard off the coast of Sandy Hook in 1923, the eleventh raid that year alone by the Sandy Hook station. On the western end of Raritan Bay, in Perth Amboy, the four Mikkelsen brothers (also relatives of the author) would gas up their boat on Saturday morning and head out into the bay to meet the supply ship offshore and bring the booze back into the city.
The complicity in bootlegging with politicians was not relegated to simple corruption. A lot of them simply turned their backs and looked away while the sand dunes were traversed by crews offloading cases of booze. In 1929 a grand jury went so far as to indict the mayor and twenty members of the police department in the resort town of Ocean City, which was hardly a unique incident in an era when the profit from a few cases of booze was more than many people’s weekly, or even monthly, salary.
The Jersey Shore is littered with the stories, and ghosts, of the rum-running era. But for all the high-seas adventure and high-speed chases, the Shore was sometimes just one part of a bigger operation. In fact, one of the largest rum-running operations in Atlantic Highlands started around 1925 when Joseph and Saul Reinfeld began bringing liquor into port with the help of a
partner from Newark—who also brought in Joe “Doc” Stacher into the partnership—who managed to bring his name and reputation to the forefront of Prohibition-era crime in New Jersey. In fact, this partner’s name became so synonymous with the underworld at that time that he earned the moniker “the Al Capone of Newark.” His name was Abner “Longy” Zwillman, and he became one of the most influential mobsters in the Garden State.
1. William G. Hosie, “An Honest Bootlegger Can Make Money; They’re Mostly Crooks; Says ‘King’ McCoy,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 16, 1923, 61.
2. Ibid.
3. Harlan S. Miller, "‘Rum Row’ Produces Volsteadian Hero in Mccoy, Skipper Chief,” Pittsburgh Post, November 28, 1923.
4. Don Linsky, Atlantic City and Gaming, e-book, 1st ed. (N.p.: Eagleton Institute of Politics, 2014).
5. Michael Clark and Dan Good, “Nucky Johnson: The Man Who Ran Atlantic City for 30 Years,” Press of Atlantic City, August 15, 2010, http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/blogs/boardwalk_empire/nucky-johnson-the-man-who-ran-atlantic-city-for-years/article_4277415c-a815-11df-be3f-001cc4c002e0.html.
6. Asbury Park (NJ) Press, “Says Booze Flows in Atlantic City,” March 10, 1924.
7. George Anastasia, author and journalist, personal interview with the author regarding the Bruno-Scarfo family, email, March 18, 2017.
8. Linsky, Atlantic City and Gaming.
9. Asbury Park (NJ) Press, “Enoch Johnson ‘Real Governor,'” April 2, 1929.
10. MonopolyCity.com (blog), “Early Hotels—From Atlantic City’s Nostalgic Past,” 2008, http://www.monopolycity.com/ac_earlyhotels.html.
11. Bill Tonelli, Mob Fest ’29: The True Story behind the Birth of Organized Crime (San Francisco: Byliner, 2012).
12. Baltimore Sun, “Atlantic City Police Don’t Want Capone Around,” May 16, 1929.
13. United Press, “Capone Made Peace with Moran Gang,” Mount Carmel (PA) Item, May 17, 1929.
14. Albany (OR) Democrat-Herald, “Feud at End,” May 17, 1929, 1.
15. J. Anne Funderburg, Bootleggers and Beer Barons of the Prohibition Era, 1st ed. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014).
16. Red Bank (NJ) Register. “Killed in Street Fight.” October 24, 1923.
17. Asbury Park (NJ) Press, “Rum Runners Boast of Busy Christmas Trade,” December 26, 1923.
Chapter 3
Zwillman
In the lore of the New Jersey underworld, few figures loom as large as Abner Zwillman. Nicknamed Longy, due to his tall stature, Zwillman was one of the—if not the most—influential figures in organized crime in the first half of the twentieth century.[1] His presence both figuratively and literally set the course for the expansion of the mob in New Jersey and across the United States, touching into Florida, Las Vegas, and pre-Castro Cuba. In the historically Jewish section of Newark, the Third Ward, Zwillman was both feared and beloved, wielding enormous political and criminal influence over the neighborhood, while standing up for the neighborhood denizens, often against anti-Semitism, especially in the years leading up to World War II.
Zwillman moved effortlessly between the mob he controlled in Newark, the Mafia families of the New York/New Jersey metro area, politicians, and businessmen. He cultivated an image of success and, unlike many of his contemporaries, was able to leverage his activities during Prohibition into successful legitimate businesses throughout the Garden State.
Abraham “Abner” Zwillman was born on July 27, 1904, in Newark, the third child of seven. His parents were Russian immigrants who had settled in the heavily Jewish Third Ward. The neighborhood ran through a patchwork of streets bounded today by Avon Avenue and Springfield Avenue to the west and east and Irvine Turner Boulevard and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to the north and south, respectively. Though few remnants of the area’s Jewish influence remain today, at the time of Zwillman’s birth the crowded neighborhood was teaming with Jewish merchants, poultry and produce dealers, kosher butchers, and all kinds of peddlers walking the streets selling all manner of goods. Prince Street was the main thoroughfare and is where Zwillman got his start.
When Abe was only fourteen, his father passed away, forcing the boy to leave school early to work and provide for his family. He became a produce peddler and realized quickly that his best customers weren’t the poor immigrants in his neighborhood but wealthier clients in other parts of Newark. But his loyalty to his fellow neighbors was strong, and when elderly Jews and merchants of the Third Ward were harassed by roving outside gangs, they would seek out Abe’s help. They would send out the call for the Langer, a Yiddish word for “the tall one.” This morphed into the nickname Longy.
Though he hadn’t graduated from school, Longy’s considerable street smarts were matched by his overall intelligence. He quickly saw that the path to fortune was not in selling produce alone. “The men in the Third Ward who made real money, the kind of money Longy was after, were either in politics or gambling.”[2] And it was gambling, specifically the numbers game, that Longy took on as his first organized racket.
The numbers racket, known by a variety of names from policy to bolita, is essentially the same as a pick-three lottery. A bettor would pick a three-digit number and bet a penny, nickel, or dime. The bet would be made with a collector, who would give the betting slips to a runner, who, in turn, worked for a seller or bank where the money was collected, the betting slips indexed, and the winning number drawn. Depending on who ran the bank determined where the winning number was drawn. Some policy games took their winning number from the last three digits of the stock market, others from horses at the racetrack, while some simply made the number up, though that last group was rare. In order for the game to work well, and for the bettors to keep coming back, the game needed to be straight and run well, which many were not. Another essential part of keeping the numbers game running smoothly was cooperation from local police. In some cities, police even worked hand-in-hand with policy banks selling numbers as well as protecting the operations.
To the enterprising young produce dealer and numbers racketeer, the same customers, mainly housewives, to whom he sold vegetables door-to-door were also his best customers. And Zwillman’s door-to-door service meant that some of his more discreet customers did not need to venture out to a centralized betting location to make their policy pick. This type of customer service helped the operation flourish, and before long Zwillman had a small crew that worked with him, expanding his numbers game across Newark—though at that time the terminus of his territory was the nearby First Ward, under the control of the Italians.
Among the early recruits to Zwillman’s gang was Joseph “Doc” Stacher, a Ukrainian-born Jew whose family had immigrated to Newark in 1912. Over the next few years after joining Zwillman’s group, Stacher became an essential element to the gambling enterprise’s success. “Doc was not a refined gentleman. He would wipe his mouth on the tablecloth after he ate. He didn’t care. He also scared the shit out of a lot of guys. However, at the same time he could be extremely charming. He was highly intelligent and was close to Longy Zwillman and to Meyer Lansky.”[3] Another member of Longy’s gang was Abe Green, described as “very powerful. He was originally with Longy and sold alcohol with him. Abe dressed like he belonged in Esquire magazine. He didn’t talk much. He was very quiet.”[4]
But, while gambling was bringing in a good payday for the gang, the advent of Prohibition brought about an outstanding opportunity to make more money than either Longy or Doc could have ever dreamed of. And Longy was in the right place at the right time. Newark was well situated as a waypoint between New York and Philadelphia, with access to major roads, trains, and the port. “By 1922, Newark, New Jersey, was the bootleg capital of the country. Newark was chosen over other cities for good reason. It had the most corrupt police, prosecutors, and courts in the country.”[5]
Zwillman started off by providing transportation and protection to other bootleggers in town. “Zwillman’s men proved to be the best protection available; the only attempt
to hijack a shipment they were transporting was met with a fusillade of bullets.”[6]
One of the early bootleggers that Longy’s gang worked for was Joseph Reinfeld, who owned a tavern in Newark. Reinfeld’s operation involved smuggled whiskey coming across the Great Lakes from Canada. Longy became one of his most trusted workers, helping the Reinfeld operation make significant inroads into the bootlegging business and solidify ties between Reinfeld at the Bronfman family in Montreal, who owned Seagrams.
The young Zwillman showed his fortitude around this time by shooting Leo Kaplus, a well-known local bootlegger who had been harassing Zwillman and his operation. He shot Kaplus in the leg in 1923 and thereafter “gained some prominence among racket people in North New Jersey . . . and was associating with well-known gangsters in the area.”[7] Kaplus disappeared from the scene, surfacing only briefly in 1937 when he was indicted for, and ultimately acquitted of, a land-deal conspiracy that included then–Newark mayor Meyer C. Ellenstein (also acquitted), one of Zwillman’s political allies, who Longy helped get elected according to some sources.
Garden State Gangland Page 4
