BUT HE WAS GOOD TO HIS MOTHER
THE LIVES AND CRIMES OF JEWISH GANGSTERS
ROBERT A. ROCKAWAY
JERUSALEM ♦ NEW YORK
Copyright © Gefen Publishing House Jerusalem 2000
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rockaway, Robert, 1939-
But — He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters
ISBN 965-229-249-4
1. Jewish Criminals—United States—History—20th century. 2. Jewish Criminals—United States—Biography. 3. Organized crime—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. HV6194.J4 R63 2000
364.1 ’ 06’ 6089924073—dc21 99-059148
Introduction
The concept for this book evolved out of a conversation I had with my mother. I had been doing research on American Jewish gangsters and was telling her about some of my findings. When I started to discuss the nefarious deeds of a Detroit gangster whose family we knew, she interrupted to say, “That may be true, but he was always good to his mother.” Her reaction and that phrase stuck in my mind and I began to think about doing a different sort of book about Jewish gangsters.
As I collected material from FBI files, newspapers and books, I looked for anything that shed light on the personal and less publicized aspects of the gangster’s life, such as his family and his relations with the Jewish community. I also focused my interviews with old-time Jewish mobsters, and people who knew them, in the same direction.
Wherever I lectured about Jewish gangsters, I found that what most interested audiences were the personal stories and anecdotes about these men.
I decided to write a book which combined the two impulses: tales and anecdotes about less well-known facets of the Jewish gangster in America. Above all, I wanted the book to be lively and entertaining, but factual.
Many of the stories in the book are humorous. However, the comic nature of the anecdotes is not meant to minimize the viciousness or ruthlessness of these men. They and their activities were not funny, yet, some of the things they said and did were farcical. I attempt to capture this in my narrative.
In no way do I seek to glorify the Jewish gangster. He was, however, part of the Jewish experience in America. What I have presented is an unconventional perspective on their lives.
Chapter One: Crime Barons of the East
They had names like Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Benjamin JL “Bugsy” Siegel, Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer, Meyer “The Little Man” Lansky, Charlie “King” Solomon, Max “Boo Boo” Hoff and Abner “Longy” Zwillman.
They had two things in common: they were all gangsters and they were all Jews.
They flourished in the period between the two World Wars and, together with the Italians, organized American crime and made it large, powerful and deadly.
“We’re bigger than U.S. Steel,” Meyer Lansky, one of the most important and longest-living actors in this drama, allegedly said.1 And he may have been right.
In January 1919, three-fourths of the states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbid “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors… for beverage purposes.” Congress then passed the Volstead Act to enforce the Amendment, making the Federal Government responsible for keeping the nation dry.2
When news of this event reached the Protestant evangelist and former baseball player, Billy Sunday, he exploded with joy. “Goodby, John Barleycorn,” he exulted. “You were God’s worst enemy. You were Hell’s best friend. The reign of tears is over.’’3
The reign of tears may have been over, but the reign of the gangster had just begun.4
The ban on alcohol went into effect at midnight, January 16, 1920, and from that moment on it seemed that every American over the age of twelve had to have a drink. In response to this great American thirst, 200,000 unlicensed saloons selling illegal, or “bootleg,” whiskey sprang up all across the United States. These bars and restaurants were euphemistically called “speakeasies” and “blind pigs.”5
Large bootlegging organizations, led by tough, ruthless lawbreaking sons of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants, arose to service them, making huge amounts of money. Income from the liquor industry ran into hundreds of millions of dollars annually, with smuggling alone bringing in over $50 million a year.6
Al Capone, who became a popular symbol of this era, spoke for his gangster colleagues, Jews and gentiles, and a lot of “respectable” Americans as well, when he declared, “You can’t cure a thirst by law.”
“They call Al Capone a bootlegger,” he would say. “Yes, it’s bootleg while it’s on the trucks, but when your host at the club, in the locker room, or on the Gold Coast [Chicago’s prime residential and nightclub district] hands it to you on a silver tray, it’s hospitality.”
Capone wanted to know what he did that was so awful. He supplied a legitimate demand. “Some call it bootlegging. Some call it racketeering. I call it a business. They say I violate the Prohibition law. Who doesn’t?” To stress the point, Capone enjoyed telling his listeners that “The very guys that make my trade good are the ones that yell loudest at me. Some of the leading judges use the stuff.”7
The morality of the age also contributed to the rise of the gangster. The post-World War I period was one of “anything goes,” when an honest man was considered to be a “square” and a “sucker,” and flaunting the rules was the norm, affecting every sector of society.
“People wanted booze, they wanted dope, they wanted to gamble and they wanted broads,” reminisced former Detroit gangster Hershel Kessler. “For a price, we provided them with these amusements. We only gave them what they wanted.”8
During Prohibition, fifty percent of the nation’s leading bootleggers were Jews, and Jews and Jewish gangs bossed the rackets in some of America’s largest cities.9
New York, with 1,700,000 Jews, more than 40 percent of the nation’s Jewish population, contained the greatest number of Jewish gangsters. But the man who masterminded New York’s underworld was not a gangster; he was a professional gambler and his name was Arnold Rothstein.
Best known, perhaps, as the man who allegedly “fixed” the 1919 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and Cincinnati Reds, Rothstein is recognized as the pioneer big businessman of organized crime in the United States. A man of prodigious energy, imagination and intellect, he transformed American crime from petty larceny into big business. One social historian described him as “the J.P Morgan of the underworld; its banker and master of strategy.”10
“Rothstein had the most remarkable brain,” said Meyer Lansky admiringly. “He understood business instinctively, and I’m sure if he had been a legitimate financier he would have been just as rich as he
became with his gambling and the other rackets he ran.”11
During the 1920s, Rothstein put together the largest gambling and bookmaking empire in the nation, masterminded a million-dollar stolen bond business, and controlled most of New York’s gangs, as well as that city’s traffic in narcotics, bootlegging and gambling. These feats earned him the title of “Czar of the Underworld.”
For Arnold Rothstein, a life in crime had been a matter of choice. He was born in New York City in 1882, the son of Abraham Rothstein, a wealthy and respected businessman. The elder Rothstein was one of the pillars of the Upper West Side’s Orthodox Jewish community, was something of a philanthropist and was chairman of the board of New York’s Beth Israel Hospital. New York’s governor, Al Smith, called Abe “the Just,” because of his high principles, selflessness and honesty in business transactions.12
Abe’s younger son Arnold followed a different path. School and studying never interested him, but he did love to play cards and dice. “I didn’t go to school much, but I used to gamble a lot and lose,” he said. “Gradually, however, it dawned on me that if anyone was going to make money out of gambling he had better be on the right side of the fence. I was on the wrong end of the game.”13 In his late twenties, Rothstein opened his own gambling house on Forty-sixth Street.
Although Arnold never achieved the kind of respectability his family hoped he would, he did exceed their expectations in another area: he became both nationally famous and a millionaire by the time he was thirty.
With gambling as his base, Rothstein had access to the cash and political protection needed to make big deals in many other spheres
Arnold Rothstein
of activity. With the coming of Prohibition, Rothstein’s business empire developed another dimension — bootlegging. Rothstein laid the foundation for the enormous profits of Prohibition by creating an organization to buy high quality liquor by the shipload in England and distribute it to buyers in the United States. This idea caught on and soon others were engaged in the same enterprise.
Always a loner, Arnold had no desire to be part of a venture he could not control. Prohibition was simply too big for him, or any one man, to dominate. After organizing eleven successful voyages, Rothstein retired from rum-running.
He next turned his talents to narcotics smuggling which, until he became involved, had been unorganized. Rothstein converted the racket into a businesslike machine by sending buyers overseas to Europe and the Far East, and by controlling the purchasing operation in the United States. The dope traffic attracted Rothstein because it offered the chance to make a huge sum of money with a very small initial investment: in 1923, a kilogram of heroin (2.2 pounds) could be purchased for $2,000 and sold for more than $300,000. By 1926, Rothstein was allegedly the financial overlord of the foreign narcotics traffic in America.14
It has been said that Jewish gangsters did not deal in dope. This is not true. Beginning with Rothstein, American Jewish underworld figures became heavily involved in smuggling and distributing opium and opiates in the United States. During the 1920s and 1930s Jews competed with Italians for dominance in the trade. After World War II, however, the Italian-American racketeers prevailed for one reason: the Nazis. When the Germans exterminated European Jewry, they also destroyed the Jewish criminals who supplied American distributors. And after Pearl Harbor, Asia was in chaos. This wrecked the American Jewish connections with European drug traders living in Chinese coastal cities.15
According to the testimony of persons engaged in the traffic, the quality of the product declined once the Jews left the scene. Jewish dope was purer and cheaper than that of the Italians, who cut their narcotics with chemicals.16
One long-time dealer offered another distinction between Jewish and Italian narcotics traffickers of the inter-war period. “The Jews,” he said, “were businessmen. They wanted to make a buck on you today and a buck on you every day. The fucking wops, they wanted ten, and tomorrow maybe choke you for fifty.” This dealer was himself an Italian-American!17
Rothstein moved freely in all circles, from politicians and statesmen to bankers and bums. On his payroll at one time or another during the 1920s were gangsters who would become famous, such as Jack “Legs” Diamond, Charley “Lucky” Luciano, Dutch Schultz, Frank Costello and Waxey Gordon, as well as a goodly number of public officials.
Luciano always admired Rothstein not only for his business acumen, but because, as he explained, “He taught me how to dress, how not to wear loud things but to have good taste.”
Apparently, when Rothstein first hired Luciano he was disturbed by Lucky’s loud attire. Rothstein instructed the young hoodlum to appear less visible. “I want you to wear something conservative and elegant, made by a genteel tailor.”
Luciano wasn’t sure what Rothstein meant. “What the hell are you talkin’ about?” he said. “My tailor’s a Catholic.”18
Luciano followed Rothstein’s instructions and never regretted doing so. “He taught me how to use knives and forks, and things like that at the dinner table, about holdin’ a door open for a girl, or helpin’ her sit down by holdin’ the chair. If Arnold had lived a little longer, he could’ve made me pretty elegant; he was the best etiquette teacher a guy could ever have — real smooth.”19
However, Luciano and others learned something much more important from Rothstein: the good business sense of forming alliances, regardless of ethnic considerations, not only with underworld accomplices, but also with those who could handle the political fix.
Rothstein taught his charges that the dollar had one nationality and one religion — profit.
Arnold’s persona and success in organizing criminal enterprises led the writer Damon Runyon to nickname him “the Brain,” and to model Nathan Detroit, the main character in “Guys and Dolls,” on him. And F. Scott Fitzgerald immortalized Rothstein in The Great Gatsby, as the gambler Meyer Wolfsheim. “He’s the man,” Gatsby told Nick Carroway, “who fixed the World Series back in 1919.”20
Rothstein’s life of crime, for which he never spent a day in jail, ended when he was shot to death over a gambling debt in New York’s Park Central Hotel in 1928. True to his underworld creed, Rothstein refused to divulge the name of his assailant.
Detective Patrick Flood, who visited Rothstein as he lay dying in the hospital, asked him, “Who shot you?”
According to Flood, Rothstein replied, “I won’t talk about it. I’ll take care of it myself.” He never did.21
Out of respect for the elder Rothstein, Arnold received an Orthodox Jewish funeral with the renowned Orthodox rabbi, Leo Jung delivering the eulogy. The Yiddish newspaper Der Tog matter-of-factly reported one conspicuous infraction of Orthodox tradition: Rothstein’s body, wrapped in a talith (prayer shawl) was laid in a bronze casket — worth $5,000 the paper noted — rather than in the simple and inexpensive wooden coffin called for by religious law.22 At the time of his death, Rothstein’s assets totalled $3 million.
After Rothstein’s death, no single individual was ever again able to dominate New York’s underworld the way he had. Instead, the various criminal enterprises were divided up, a number of them going to his Jewish proteges. Bootlegging became the province of Waxey Gordon, Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer, and the Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and Meyer Lansky combine, better known as the Bugs-Meyer Mob.
Waxey Gordon’s real name was Irving Wexler. He was nicknamed “Waxey” because, as a youthful pickpocket, he was able to slide a victim’s wallet out of his pocket “as though it were coated with wax.”
Waxey was born on the Lower East Side in 1888, “the son of poor tenement folk.”23 He never went beyond grade school, but loitered around street corners developing his talent for crime. In his teens, Waxey joined the Dopey Benny Fein Gang which terrorized much of the Lower East Side in 1910. By the time he was twenty, Gordon had worked as a labor goon, strikebreaker, bookmaker, burglar, dope peddler and extortionist, and had accumulated over $100,000 from gambling and other illicit activi
ties. In the years before Prohibition, Gordon was a partner in five different cocaine mobs and was one of the major cocaine entrepreneurs in New York.24
So he was an experienced criminal when Prohibition went into effect. He quickly realized the enormous potential for profits and went about raising capital to import illegal liquor from Canada, England and the West Indies. One of the people he approached was Arnold Rothstein, for whom he had worked as a slugger in the labor wars. Rothstein loaned Gordon the money and made him a junior partner in importing whiskey from Scotland.
When Rothstein abandoned bootlegging, Gordon expanded his operation. By the mid-1920s he was one of the East Coast’s biggest bootleggers, with an estimated yearly income of well over $2 million. Gordon also owned speakeasies, nightclubs, gambling casinos, a fleet of ocean-going rum-running ships and blocks of real estate in Philadelphia and New York. He lived in a castle, complete with a moat, in New Jersey, and maintained a luxurious ten-room apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.25
Arthur “Dutch Schultz’’ Flegenheimer was born in 1902, the son of Herman Flegenheimer, a saloon and stable owner, and Emma Neu Flegenheimer. Arthur was not really Dutch. His parents were German Jews. His father deserted the family when Arthur was eight and his mother took in washing to support the family. Arthur contributed to the family’s support as well, leaving school at age fourteen and selling papers, running errands, and working as an office boy and pressman in a printing plant. None of these occupations proved lucrative enough, so Arthur joined a gang and became a burglar.26
Arthur had little religious training, but his family were “traditional” Jews and his mother kept a kosher home. At various times when he was arrested, however, Arthur listed himself as Jew, Protestant and Catholic.27
His chums nicknamed him “Dutch Schultz” because his blue eyes, light brown hair and stocky build reminded them of a murderous member of a turn-of-the century Bronx gang, the Frog Hollows. Arthur liked the name Dutch Schultz and kept it “because it was short enough to fit in the headlines. If I’d kept the name of Flegenheimer, nobody would have heard of me,” he said.28
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