But He Was Good to His Mother - The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters

by Robert Rockaway

  In April 1940, he was found guilty of extortion in the bakery and trucking rackets and received thirty years to life. This sentence was to begin after he had completed his federal jail term.40

  When Buchalter boarded the train which would take him to prison, he talked to reporters. “I may have done a hundred things wrong, but my conscience is clear,’’ he said. “I never did one-millionth of the things they said I did.’’41

  “Those politicians had to have something to talk about, so they picked on me. Dewey is running for president because he picked on me. Why don’t they go ahead and investigate those politicians? Why don’t they investigate Dewey?”42

  When he arrived at Leavenworth, Lepke continued railing. “So they call this justice,” he said. “They double-crossed me.

  “When I gave myself up, I was promised the world. They told me what a great guy I was and that I was doing the right thing and that the whole affair would blow over in no time. Well, boy, did I get the greatest double-cross ever.”

  When asked about the Brooklyn murder mob, Lepke said “Why, I haven’t been in Brownsville in twelve years. I’d be afraid to walk the streets there. Anyone that does is crazy.”43

  On June 20, 1940, Lepke wrote to James Bennett, Director of the Federal Prisons, complaining of his treatment in prison. For “security reasons,” Lepke had been put in a single cell and his movements severely restricted. He couldn’t stand the isolation.44

  “May I take the liberty of explaining my present predicament,” wrote Lepke, “and ask of you your kind consideration in this matter.

  “I am not going into the full details of my case because I believe your honor knows as much about it as I do. However, I am to serve 14 years in a federal prison. My conduct in New York while awaiting trial, and the time spent until I was sent here, will speak for itself. Since I have been here I have lived up to all rules and regulations. I was put to work after my quarantine period and after several weeks for some unknown reason, I was put back into my cell. I am being kept there for twenty-four hours a day, without any exercise whatsoever.

  “Mr. Bennett, all I ask is to alter this for me and put me back to work, it doesn’t matter what it may be, and let me prove to you and the officials here that I am worthy of this kind consideration.

  “I faithfully promise that I will not betray any trust that you may bestow upon me. Hoping you give this some consideration and may I hear from you soon. Respectfully, Louis Buchalter.”45

  The authorities were not finished with Lepke yet. On May 28, 1940, the Grand Jury of the County of Kings, State of New York, presented a “true bill for murder in the first degree” against Buchalter, charging that he, with others, had “shot and killed one Joseph Rosen with revolvers on September 13, 1936, in the County of Kings.”46

  Rosen owned a small trucking company. He had been forced out of business in 1932 because he refused to join Lepke’s truckers’ union. He blamed Lepke for his unemployment and his family’s ensuing destitution, and threatened that unless Lepke took care of him, he would go to the authorities. Lepke obliged. He had Rosen killed.

  On December 1, 1941, Buchalter was found guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair.47

  At his sentencing, Buchalter identified himself thusly: “I am 44 years of age. I was born in New York City; I reside at 427 West Street. I am retired. I am married. I can read and write. I am a public school graduate. I am a Hebrew, irregular attendant. My mother is living. I am temperate. I do not use drugs.”48

  His attorneys appealed the sentence to the Supreme Court, but that body upheld the lower court’s decision. After a series of delays, Buchalter was transferred to Sing Sing Penitentiary at Ossining, New York on January 21, 1944.

  In an effort to gain a last-minute reprieve, Lepke’s wife and son implored him to ask U.S. Attorney James B.M. McNally in New York to listen to his story of a widespread coalition between crime and politics.49

  “He’ll listen to you, Lou,” Mrs. Buchalter pleaded. “God knows you can tell him enough to save you.”

  Buchalter merely shook his head. “Look,” he said. “Suppose I did talk to him. Suppose he asks for a reprieve. What’s the best I could expect? I’ll tell you: they’d give me another six or eight months — at the most a year. No Betty,” he finished. “If that’s the case, I’d rather go tonight.”50

  Lepke was placed in a death row cell to await his execution. At 11:30 RM. on March 4, he was taken from his cell and led to a small room. Inside, bolted to the floor was the electric chair. Buchalter said nothing. He walked quickly across the chamber and almost threw himself into the seat.

  He sat rigidly as restraining straps were quickly tightened around his arms, chest and abdomen. The attendants fastened the electrodes, making sure that one electrode was attached to his leg through a slit in his trousers.

  As the head electrode was lowered into place, Lepke looked up at it. That was the last thing he saw.

  A mask was placed over his face to hide the facial contortions from the witnesses when the current was turned on. The mask was made especially tight around the eyes to keep them from popping out of their sockets.

  Buchalter’s heart raced and he gasped for breath.

  Everyone moved clear of the chair.

  Warden Snyder dropped his hand. Unseen, Joseph Francel, the official executioner, pulled the switch. There was a whir of motors. Twenty-two hundred volts slammed into Lepke’s body, heaving him against the bindings. His hair stood up and his flesh turned beet-red. Foam seeped out from behind the hood.

  Another massive jolt was delivered. Then the whirring stopped. The attendants bared Lepke’s chest and Dr. Charles Sweet, the prison physician, stepped forward and applied a stethoscope.

  “I pronounce this man legally dead,” he said.

  Attendants loaded Lepke’s body onto a stretcher and rolled it into the autopsy room.

  “You look at the face… you cannot tear your eyes away,” wrote Frank Coniff the next day in the New York Journal American.

  “Sweat beads his forehead. Saliva drools from the corner of his lips. The face is discolored. It is not a pretty sight.”51

  Lepke was the only big-time American gangster to die in the electric chair.

  Chapter Six: The Hit Parade

  Once, in an expansive mood, Bugsy Siegel told Del Webb, the contractor who built the Flamingo Hotel, “that he had personally killed twelve men.” Webb turned pale.

  Noticing the change in his friend’s face, Siegel laughed and said that Webb had nothing to worry about. “There’s no chance that you’ll get killed,’’ he said. “We only kill each other.’’1

  And so they did. Oftentimes, mobsters posed a greater menace to each other than did the police.

  After putting Waxey Gordon away for income tax evasion, Thomas Dewey turned his sights on Arthur “Dutch Schultz’’ Flegenheimer. He began to probe Schultz’s tax reports and to investigate other aspects of his underworld empire. Using a vast network of illegal wiretaps and intimidation of witnesses, Dewey made the Dutchman’s life miserable.

  Schultz became furious and began suggesting things like “Dewey’s gotta go,’’ and “We gotta knock off Dewey.’’2

  Eventually he brought an assassination proposal to his associates, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Longy Zwillman and Lepke Buchalter. They tried to dissuade him. Killing Dewey, they explained, would bring the heat and the feds down on all of them. It would wreck their rackets and launch a nation-wide war on crime.

  ‘All of us was very worried,” Luciano later explained.

  “We didn’t kill nobody but our own guys, if they give us too much trouble… I just couldn’t see how we’d be able to buy our way out of trouble if we let Dewey get knocked off.”3

  Buchalter registered the strongest veto, saying: “This is the worst thing in the world. It will hit us all in the pocketbook because everybody will come down on our heads.”4

  Dutch was not deterred. “I still say he ought to be hit,�
� he raged. “If no one else is gonna do it, I’m gonna hit him myself.” He then stormed out of the meeting.5

  Schultz signed his own death warrant with this outburst,. The contract was given to Charlie “the Bug” Workman, referred to by Allie Tannenbaum, a Murder, Inc. colleague, as “one of the best killers in the country.”6

  On the night of October 23, 1935, Schultz went to his favorite restaurant, the Palace Chop House and Tavern in Newark. With him were two bodyguards, Abe Landau and Bernard “Lulu” Rosenkrantz, and his bookkeeper, Otto “Abbadabba” Berman. Later in the evening, as they sat around the table, Schultz got up and went into the men’s room.7

  A moment later, Bugs Workman and Mendy Weiss entered, walked over to the table and began shooting. Landau, Rosenkrantz and Berman never had a chance. Workman looked around for Schultz and, noticing the men’s room door, walked over to it and pulled it open.

  Seemingly oblivious to the shooting, Schultz was standing at the toilet urinating. Workman aimed and fired, putting one bullet in the Dutchman. He then turned and walked quickly out of the tavern.

  Mortally wounded, Schultz staggered out of the toilet and slumped at a table. The single bullet had hit him just below the left chest and tore through the abdominal wall into the large intestine, gall bladder and liver before lodging on the floor near the urinal.

  Jacob Friedman, the owner of the Palace Chop House, had dropped to the floor when the shooting started. He got up only when the killers bolted out the door.

  “The first thing I noticed was Schultz,” he later recounted. “He came reeling out like he was intoxicated. He had a hard time staying on his pins and he was hanging on to his side. He didn’t say a cockeyed thing. He just went over to a table and put his left hand on it, kind of to steady him, and then plopped into a chair just like a souse would.

  “His head bounced on the table and I thought that was the end of him, but pretty soon he moved. He said ‘Get a doctor, quick.’

  “But when he said it, another guy gets off the floor. He had blood all over his clothes but gets up and comes over to me, and he looked like he was going to cry. He throws a quarter on the bar and he says, ‘Give me change for that,’ and I did.’’

  The man was Lulu Rosenkrantz. Having probably learned his parsimony from Schultz, he hung on to the bar while waiting for his change.

  After getting his change, he wobbled unsteadily toward the phone. Sagging against the wall, he managed to dial O and gasp, “I want the police. Hurry up.”

  Patrolman Patrick McNamara at police headquarters heard a faint, faltering voice say, “Send me an ambulance, I’m dying.” But the only sound that came back when he asked where the call was

  Marty Goldstein (left), detective (center), and Harry Strauss (right)

  coming from was that of the receiver banging against the wood below the coin box.

  McNamara, who had already received a call about the shooting at the Palace, immediately sent a squad car and an ambulance to that address.

  Police, detectives and three ambulances arrived on the scene, where they found Schultz still alive. One of the detectives asked him who shot him.

  “I don’t know who shot me,” said Schultz.

  “You’ve got a serious wound,” said the detective. “Why don’t you tell us who did it.”

  “I don’t know,” replied Schultz. “I know I got bad cramps. Do something.”

  The police brought Schultz a drink and loaded him, still slumped in the chair, into the ambulance.

  Once at the hospital, Schultz was given a dose of morphine to kill the pain, and questioned by deputy police chief John Haller.

  “What happened, Dutch?” asked Haller.

  “All I know,” said Schultz, “is that I saw fire and sort of lost track of everything. Now I’ve told you the truth.”

  “You haven’t told us who shot you,” Haller said.

  “I’ve told you everything I know,” replied Schultz. “I don’t know nothin’. I was in the tavern and some fellows came in shooting.”

  Under guard, Schultz was moved to a vacant four-bed ward on the second floor of the hospital to await surgery. Patrolman Timothy O’Leary sat next to him.

  “Anything you want me to get for you,” asked O’Leary.

  “Yes,” said Schultz. “I want a priest.”8

  This seemed a strange request coming from the son of German-Jewish parents. Yet some years earlier Lucky Luciano had noticed Arthur’s interest in Catholicism. Once, Schultz had dropped in to visit Luciano during a meeting with Vito Genovese. “And I’ll be damned if he didn’t start to talk about the Catholic religion,” recalled Luciano. “He wanted to know what it was like to be a Catholic; whether Vito and me ever went to confession, if we knew what a guy had to do to switch into Catholicism from bein’ a Jew.

  “I almost fell over when he told us that… in all his spare time he was studyin’ to be a Catholic. I swear, from that minute on, the Dutchman spent more time on his knees than he did on his feet.

  “It’s funny. When I first started hangin’ around with Jewish guys like Meyer and Bugsy and Dutch, them old guys Masseria and Maranzano and lots of my friends used to beef to me about it. They always said that some day the Jews was gonna make me turn and join the synagogue.

  “So what happens? It ain’t me that gets turned, it’s the Dutchman. That’s some joke.”9

  Schultz wanted to see Father Charles Mclnerney, a prison chaplain Schultz had met while in the Hudson County jail.

  During Schultz’s operation, Mclnerney sat on a bench in the corridor with the gangster’s mother, Emma Flegenheimer, his sister Helen and Helen’s husband Henry, who was called “Peanuts” because he took care of the vending machines in Schultz’s speakeasies.

  After surgery, Schultz rallied briefly but then began to decline. He became delirious and ranted incoherently, but in a lucid moment, he called for Father Mclnerney.

  When the priest came in, Schultz asked to die a Catholic. Mclnerney baptized him and gave him the last rites of the Catholic Church.

  Some hours later, Schultz fell into a deep coma. He died in the evening of October 24, 1935.

  Immediately thereafter, Dr. Earl Snavely, the superintendent of the hospital, went into an adjoining room where the family waited. Walking directly to Arthur’s mother, who rose as he approached, the doctor said, “Mrs. Flegenheimer, your son has died.”

  Schultz’s mother fainted into the arms of her daughter.

  Schultz was buried at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Westchester County. Father Mclnerney officiated and performed a fifteen-minute Catholic service, omitting the eulogy.

  Schultz’s mother waited until everyone had left, then took a Jewish prayer shawl and placed it over the coffin.10

  By killing Schultz the syndicate saved Dewey’s life. Dewey later showed his gratitude by prosecuting Buchalter and Luciano.

  Jacob “Little Augie” Orgen was an early labor racketeer in New York who got his training as a slugger in the pre-World War I labor wars. In 1919, Jacob organized his own gang of musclemen, which included the young Lepke Buchalter and Legs Diamond, and fought a running battle with the forces of the much larger Nathan “Kid Dropper” Kaplan organization.

  Kid Dropper was quite a character. When he began his criminal career, he was a sloppy and slovenly dresser. Once he became a gang leader, however, he dressed commensurate with his position, appearing along Broadway and the Lower East Side in a belted checked suit, narrow, pointed shoes, and shirts and neckties of weird designs and loud, garish colors. In summer he wore a straw hat with a narrow brim and brightly colored band. In the winter he wore a derby which he pulled rakishly over one eye. He let it be known that he preferred to be called Jack, and he named his gang “The Rough Riders of Jack the Dropper.”

  The two sides slaughtered each other, especially for control of the wet wash laundry workers. From 1922 to mid-1923 their war resulted in 23 murders.

  In August 1923, Kid Dropper was arrested on a concealed weapons ch
arge. As he entered a police car to be transferred to another court, a minor hoodlum named Louis Kushner jumped forward and shot him through the windshield.

  Kushner nursed a grudge against Kaplan because Kid Dropper had attempted to blackmail him out of $500. Kid Dropper had damaging information about Kushner beating up a strike-breaker. Kushner, who was none too bright, also dreamed of being a great killer and seeing his name in the newspapers. He shot Kid Dropper for revenge and glory.

  Kaplan collapsed inside the car while his wife fought through the police to reach her husband. “Nate, Nate,” she cried. “Tell me that you were not what they say you were.”

  The Kid looked at her and gasped, “They got me,” and died.

  “I got him,” crowed Kushner. Td like a cigarette.”11

  Kushner was convicted of murder and sentenced to serve from twenty years to life. He died in jail.

  Little Augie immediately took control of Dropper’s enterprises and was crowned “King of the East Side Gunmen.” He retained the crown for only a few years.

  On the evening of October 15, 1927, Orgen and his bodyguard Jack “Legs” Diamond were strolling along Norfolk Street on the Lower East Side. A black touring car with four men inside drove up alongside them. Lepke was behind the wheel; next to him, pistol in hand, sat Gurrah Shapiro. They were after Orgen only. Shapiro jumped out of the car, yelling for Diamond to move. Jack hugged the wall of a building as Shapiro fired. Little Augie fell to the ground, dead, a bullet in his head.

  Diamond didn’t move fast enough and was wounded in the arm and leg. After this brush with death, he felt it would be healthier to stay out of the labor rackets. When he recovered from his injuries, Diamond made peace with Lepke and Gurrah and concentrated on bootlegging and the narcotics trade.