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

by Robert Rockaway

  Benny Newman’s barbershop in Newark often served as a meeting place for Longy Zwillman and his associates.27 Itzik Goldstein remembers going into Newman’s barbershop one day in 1938. “When I’m walking in, Benny walked over to me and says, Itzik, you know that fella sitting on that chair?’

  “I says, I don’t know him. I says, why do you ask?

  “He says, Took, he’s sitting there naked. Took off all his clothes.’

  “At that time, they didn’t have no air-conditioning. I said, I don’t know him. So I sat down. I was waiting for Doc [Stacher] to come in.

  “So Doc came in and Longy came in and they went into the back

  Abe Reles

  room. And this fella, they were probably just about through shaving him, gets up. And he was looking in the mirror, standing there naked.

  “I was looking at him. He was nice looking, a handsome looking fella. I didn’t know who he was.

  “He puts on his pants, and a jacket and a tie, and he went in the back. Then he comes out and leaves.

  “Now, I get in the car with Doc and I was driving. I says to Doc, ‘Who was that fella sitting there naked? Benny Newman told me he walked in there and took off all his clothes.’

  “Doc says, ‘That’s Bugsy Siegel.’

  “I said, ‘Really.’

  “He says, ‘Don’t you recognized him?’

  “I says, ‘I never met him.’

  “He says, ‘Well, they had his picture in the paper. I thought maybe you recognized him from the paper.’

  “I says, ‘No. That was Bugsy Siegel?’

  “He says, ‘Yeah. If you ever meet him, don’t call him Bugsy, call him Ben, ‘cause he’ll get mad. He don’t like the name Bugsy.’

  “That was funny, him sitting there naked, just with his shorts on, getting a shave.

  “Maybe that’s why they called him Bugsy, ‘cause he was crazy. Who knows.

  “But he had a lot of nerve to walk into a strange barbershop and take off all his clothes.”28

  Dating back to Prohibition, Siegel was good friends with Meyer Lansky, Lepke Buchalter, Lucky Luciano, Abner Zwillman, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, Jake Guzik and Tony Accardo, to name just a few of America’s better-known mobsters. Everyone who knew Ben either admired or feared him, sometimes both.

  Siegel had an advantage over his compatriots. He was handsome and a sharp dresser. His taste ran to broad snapped-brim hats, pinstriped suits with high-waisted trousers and pegged cuffs, exquisitely tailored overcoats with fur-lined collars, hand-crafted shoes with pointed toes, and handmade silk shirts. Everything was monogrammed, right down to his tailored silk shorts Bugsy also pursued a high-class life. He moved into a suite in the Waldorf Astoria, rode around in a bullet-proof, chauffeur-driven limousine and was accompanied by two bodyguards wherever he went. Siegel dined in the finest restaurants and spent his evenings frolicking in nightclubs and speakeasies.29

  Dinner with Bugsy was sometimes more than just a pleasant meal.

  Beatrice Sedway, the wife of Bugsy’s pal, Moe, remembers the time she and her husband dined with Siegel and some friends at an Italian restaurant. “We had a big table spread out, and there was windows, big windows,” she said.

  ‘All of a sudden a car comes around and starts machine-gunning the window, and Ben yells, ‘Down!’

  “There was a ladies’ room back of us. I started slithering on my tummy. And there was a space above the ladies’ room where the entrance was, and I went in and stood up on the seats so nobody could see my feet, and I just stayed there.

  “I saw Ben and the boys tip up the table for protection and duck. In a little while Moe came to the door and he said, ‘Honey, you can come out now’.”

  Beatrice came out not knowing what to expect. She was relieved to find that no one had been hurt. “The table was all set again with new antipasti, and nothing was ever mentioned. That was it.”30

  In 1937, Bugsy’s associates sent him out to Los Angeles to consolidate and expand their business on the West Coast. They couldn’t have chosen a better ambassador. Before long, the charming Mr. Siegel was hobnobbing with the Hollywood elite and having well-publicized affairs with some of the film industry’s most beautiful women. His growing notoriety made Siegel’s associates back east nervous and they began to worry.

  Ben calmed their fears by doing a splendid job for them. He formed a coalition of top mobs and brought order to what had been a chaotic situation. He made the local Mafia chieftain, Jack Dragna, his lieutenant and together they reorganized the narcotics, prostitution and bookmaking rackets. Bugsy also spent thousands of dollars buying politicians and police. By the end of 1945, Siegel had the California crime situation well in hand and turned his attention to another state, Nevada.

  Nevada had legalized gambling, but its two largest cities, Reno and Las Vegas, were little more than desert watering holes. Siegel visited Las Vegas in 1941 and was struck by its potential as a gambling center. He envisioned the place as eventually encompassing dozens of hotels and casinos that would serve the country’s high rollers. It could be a bonanza for the underworld.

  Few shared his enthusiasm. Many years later, Meyer Lansky recalled his visits there during the 1940s. “It was in sorry shape,” said Lansky. “Living conditions were bad. No one wanted to go to Vegas to gamble. Air connections were bad. And the trip by car was bothersome. It was so hot that the wires in the car would melt.”31

  But Bugsy had a dream. He wanted to own the grandest, most magnificent gambling casino in the world. It would not be just a casino, but a luxurious hotel with a nightclub, bars, swimming pools, fountains, landscaped gardens, and the finest service available.

  His enthusiasm was contagious and his partners back east agreed to finance his dream. In 1946, Siegel moved to Las Vegas. His wife Esta went to Reno and got a divorce.

  Siegel and his partners bought a two-thirds interest in a financially troubled hotel being built by Billy Wilkerson, the owner of the Hollywood Reporter and the man who had created a number of successful Hollywood night spots. The name of the hotel was the Flamingo.

  Ben set a deadline for the completion of the hotel: Christmas 1946. He hired the Del Webb Construction Company of Phoenix, Arizona and began to build. Siegel demanded the latest innovations and used the most expensive materials. Since postwar steel, copper and other items were scarce, Siegel went to the black market, sparing no expense. The cost was originally calculated at $1.5 million, but it quickly doubled to $3 million.

  To the surprise of many, Siegel opened the Flamingo on December 26, 1946. The hotel wasn’t finished, but the casino, lounge, showroom and restaurant were all open for business. Jimmy Durante, Eddie Jackson, Tommy Wonder and Xavier Cugat’s band provided the entertainment.

  Still, the opening flopped. Everything that could go wrong, did. Bad weather kept many celebrities from attending. The casino lost money. The fountain didn’t work. The lights went out. And Bugsy had a fit.

  Bad luck plagued Siegel throughout the New Year holiday. At the end of January, the Flamingo closed its doors, having been open less than a month.

  Siegel asked his friends for more money. They grumbled, but Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello gave him the money he needed to finish the hotel.

  The Flamingo reopened in March 1947 and Siegel was told in no uncertain terms that this time the hotel had better show a profit.32

  It did, but not fast enough to suit Ben’s partners. Moreover, they began to suspect Bugsy of cheating them. Meyer Lansky allegedly learned that Siegel’s paramour, Virginia Hill, was making regular trips to Switzerland, buying fancy clothes and depositing money in a numbered bank account. If Siegel was in financial straits, where was Virginia getting the money from?33

  A meeting was held to discuss “the Siegel Situation.” According to Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky said, “there’s only one thing to do with a thief who steals from his friends. Benny’s got to be hit.” A vote was taken and the result was unanimous.

&n
bsp; Bugsy was as good as dead.

  On the night of June 20, 1947, Siegel was sitting on the chintz-covered sofa in Virginia Hill’s home on North Linden Drive, Beverly Hills, reading the Los Angeles Times. Siegel’s close friend Allen Smiley sat across from him. Charles Hill, Virginia’s brother, was in a bedroom upstairs with his girlfriend.

  Someone rested a .30 caliber army carbine on the latticework outside the window and squeezed the trigger.

  The first bullet crashed through the window into Siegel’s head, blowing his right eye out. It was later found fifteen feet from his body. Another shot smashed his left eye, broke his nose and shattered a vertebra in the back of his neck. There were seven more shots, all of which missed.34

  Siegel never knew what hit him.

  Bugsy always said, “Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse.” He looked anything but good when he died.

  About twenty minutes after the shooting, and just as the police began to arrive, Gus Greenbaum and Moe Sedway strode into the Flamingo and announced to the staff that the hotel was under new management.35

  Meyer Lansky always denied having anything to do with the killing. “Ben Siegel was my friend until his final day,” he told Israeli journalist Uri Dan. “I never quarreled with him. If it was in my power to see Benny alive, he would live as long as Methuselah.” Meyer believed that Lucky Luciano ordered the hit. Despite Lansky’s denials, however, the rumor persists that Siegel would not have been killed without Meyer’s okay.36

  Only five mourners attended Siegel’s funeral: Esta Siegel, his ex-wife; Millicent and Barbara, his teenage daughters; his brother Dr. Maurice Siegel, a respected Beverly Hills physician; and Bessie Soloway, his favorite sister. To observers, it seemed odd that none of Siegel’s friends or associates came to pay their last respects.37

  Bugsy’s killers were never found.

  By 1954, Abner “Longy” Zwillman was a tired man. He had spent most of his adult life bossing crime in New Jersey, and now he wanted out. In 1951, the televised Kefauver Crime Committee hearings exposed Longy as one of “the top gangsters in America” and, in one swoop, the facade of respectability he had built up over the years fell away. He was never again the same person. Photographs taken of Longy after the hearings show him looking sullen and worried.

  He had turned his organization over to his Italian lieutenant, Gerry Catena, and planned to enjoy a life of leisure with his friends and family. Or so he thought.

  In 1956, after two years of investigation, the Internal Revenue Service brought Longy to trial for evading income taxes in the years 1947 and 1948. After a month-long trial, the jury reported that it was hopelessly deadlocked. No new trial date was set. It appeared that Longy could retire after all.38

  But in 1959, the FBI arrested a number of Longy’s associates for “offering money to… influence the decision of the jury in the Zwillman tax-evasion case.”39

  The FBI had installed a microphone in the office of Herman Cohen, one of Longy’s close associates and friends. In January of that year, the agent monitoring the bug heard Cohen discussing how the jurors were bribed. Sam Katz, Longy’s confidante, chauffeur and bodyguard, was mentioned as one of the payoff men.40

  The authorities arrested Katz, but he never stood trial. He plea-bargained, pleading guilty, and received six years in prison. He could have gotten out in two if he had implicated Longy. His friendship with Zwillman and his personal code of honor kept him silent.

  Years later Katz described how one went about finding the right juror to bribe.

  “You have to be scientific about it,” he said. “You hire private dicks sometime. You go to the man’s neighborhood. You check with neighbors, friends, relatives. You claim you’re a private eye, and you need information because the person you’re checking may come into a large sum of money. That ain’t a lie is it?

  “When you get a line on somebody — he needs money badly, he has a mistress his wife doesn’t know about, he gambles or drinks, something — you have a lever.”41

  Katz’s arrest and the ongoing IRS and FBI probes of his affairs troubled Longy and allowed him no rest. Subpoenas, indictments and litigation were nothing he looked forward to.

  In addition, Longy had been experiencing severe chest pains for more than a year. They began to concern him and he consulted his personal physician, Dr. Arthur Bernstein. After examining him, Bernstein told Longy that he suffered from a serious heart ailment and high blood pressure. Bernstein remembers Longy becoming depressed.42

  Meanwhile, the underworld was awash with rumors that Longy would talk to save his skin.

  On the morning of February 26, 1959, West Orange Police Chief Thomas F. Mulvhill got a call that there had been “an accident” at

  Mickey Cohen

  Longy Zwillman’s home. He dispatched Lt. George Bamford to investigate.

  Bamford took one look at the “accident” and called the prosecutor’s office and the medical examiner.

  He had found Longy hanging by a plastic electric cord, grasping one part of the cord in his left hand. He was dressed in a checked bathrobe, striped pajamas, brown leather slippers and socks. The pocket of his robe contained twenty-one tablets of the tranquilizer Reserpine. A half-empty bottle of Kentucky bourbon stood on a table near the body.

  After an investigation, the prosecutor ruled Zwillman’s death “a suicide due to temporary insanity.” Nevertheless, questions remain.

  Longy’s body showed unexplained bruises, and there were strong indications that his hands had been tied with some kind of wire. To kill himself, Zwillman would have had to tie one end of the cord around his neck, throw the other end over an exposed beam in the ceiling, and slump downward while holding the loose end in his hand until he suffocated. Very difficult and cumbersome to say the least.

  Longy’s friend Itzik Goldstein does not believe this verdict.

  “They claim he committed suicide,” says Itzik. “I doubt it.

  “I met him in a steak joint up in West Orange. It was a Monday or Tuesday. He was sitting in a booth, him and his wife and another couple. I told the maitre d’ to give that party there a drink. He came back and said they’re leaving right away.

  “Abe got up and said ‘Hello, Itzik, how are you.’

  “I said, All right.’

  Then Goldstein recounts, “I was hanging around in a place off Springfield Avenue, in a club. And a guy calls me up and says, ‘Itzik, they just killed Longy.’ This was on a Wednesday or Thursday.

  “I said, ‘You’re full of shit. I just seen him the other day.’

  “I put the radio on. Sure enough. They found him hung in his basement.

  “Now me, personally, I think he was killed. Abe didn’t drink no bourbon. He hated bourbon. He used to drink brandy. They found two, three glasses, and a bottle of bourbon there.

  “Somebody must have come in, must have said listen, if you don’t do what we tell you to do, we’ll go up and kill your whole fucking family. He had his wife and kids there.

  “They went down the cellar and they strung him up. That’s what I think.’’43

  Lucky Luciano also expressed skepticism about Longy’s suicide.

  “Suicide over tax problems? That’s bullshit,” Luciano said. “They murdered Longy. He tried to put the arm on Carlo (Gambino) after Vito (Genovese) got his sentence. What the hell, the poor guy was part of us for a long time and there was enough money around to give him a hand.

  “But the guys in Brooklyn was afraid he’d do a Reles. So they beat him up and trussed him up like a pig and hung him in his own cellar.”44

  Meyer Lansky believed that Vito Genovese had Zwillman killed. “Genovese was behind that killing,” said Lansky. “He just ordered his killers to make it look like Zwillman had taken his own life.”

  According to Lansky, many people at the time believed that Zwillman killed himself. “Longy was in trouble with the tax people,” said Lansky, and was worried about the effect of the publicity on his family. The theory was that Long
y committed suicide in order to spare his family from additional publicity and embarrassment. Lansky adamantly discounted this.

  “It was a Genovese murder. I know,” he said.45

  Zwillman’s funeral took place twenty-four hours after he died. It was a simple ceremony held in a funeral parlor a few doors down from his boyhood home in Newark’s Third Ward. Rabbi Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, officiated.

  In brief remarks, Rabbi Prinz called for “understanding, comfort and love” for members of the Zwillman family. He termed Longy a “loving husband, a devoted father and a kind son.”46

  About 350 people crowded inside the funeral parlor while another 1,500 stood outside.

  One hundred red roses covered Longy’s coffin. As the casket was wheeled out, Longy’s 80-year-old mother sobbed, ‘Abele, Abele, my son, my son.”

  Zwillman was buried at B’nai Abraham Memorial Cemetery, in Union, New Jersey. After the kaddish, the traditional mourner’s prayer, was recited, Longy’s coffin was lowered into a concrete vault in the ground.47

  Yet despite the mob bosses’ apparent success in hitting their man, they did not always accomplish their goal. Mickey Cohen is a case in point.

  Cohen was born in Brooklyn in 1913, the sixth child of poor Russian Jewish immigrants. Mickey’s father, a produce worker, died when he was two months old. Seven months later his mother moved to California, taking Mickey and leaving her other children with relatives.48

  Mickey started selling newspapers at the age of eight and began hanging around a gym. He got a job as a sparring partner, dropped out of school in the sixth grade, and began fighting as a bantamweight at thirteen.

  When his mother remarried, Cohen ran away to Cleveland to be a boxer. The “natural step” for a washed up pugilist in those days, he said, was “to wind up in the racket or gambling world.” By the time he was nineteen, he was running with an outlaw gang in Cleveland.49

  In 1938, Cohen transferred his illegal activities to Chicago, then to Los Angeles, where he worked in Bugsy Siegel’s bookmaking operations. After Siegel’s death in 1947, Cohen tried to continue Bugsy’s business and to emulate his lifestyle.