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

by Robert Rockaway

  Charley knew the difference between right and wrong. He also knew that thieves and killers were not valued members of the Jewish community. Growing up among Jews in Brooklyn, he knew how his parents and their friends viewed Jewish crooks. Charley knew that the parents of wayward boys suffered terrible guilt, feeling they were somehow to blame for their son’s evildoing. He also knew that these parents suffered from the disdain of their neighbors. Charley realized that he had brought all of this on his own parents, who did not deserve it. Remorse for what he had done to his family eventually broke his will.

  Workman was sentenced to life at hard labor. Before he was led away, Charley was allowed a brief visit with his younger brother, Abe. Abe threw his arms around Charley and wept uncontrollably.

  Detectives guarding Workman heard him give this advice to Abe. “Whatever you do, live honestly. If you make 20 cents a day, make it do you. If you can’t make an honest living, make the government support you. Keep away from the gangs and don’t be a wise guy (troublemaker). Take care of Mama and Papa and watch Itchy (a younger brother). He needs watching.’’20

  After Workman was sentenced, a Bronx detective who knew Dutch Schultz’s mother, called to tell her that the man who killed her son was going to jail for a long time.

  Max (Boo-Boo) Hoff

  “I’m so glad to hear about it,” she said. “Thank God, thank God.”21

  Charley Workman went to Trenton State Prison to begin serving his sentence. He was a model prisoner and earned a transfer to the Rahway State Prison Farm in 1952. Charley behaved so well that he became a trusted member of the prison’s operation.

  “If I had a thousand inmates like him,” said Warden Warren Pinto, “I wouldn’t have to worry with this job. He’s just like an ordinary guy, not one of the ‘big shots’ who try to gain special favors. He never asks for anything.”

  The prison psychologist listed Charley as “a reasonably stable individual.” He kept physically fit by playing handball, and he became thrifty as well. Warden Pinto noted that Workman had managed to accumulate a few U.S. Savings Bonds from his 18-cents-a-day prison salary.

  Charley’s family never abandoned him, and his wife, Catherine, visited him regularly.

  In March 1964 Charley won his parole. He was now 56 years old and a grandfather. His wife, who waited for him outside the prison, had not missed more than two Sunday visits in all those years.

  Workman and his wife walked away from the prison and got into a blue Thunderbird driven by his brother Abe. Home after 22 years in jail, Charley got a job selling zippers and other items to dress manufacturers and was never heard from again.

  Workman died content, surrounded by his family and loved ones. But history would always remember him as the man who, in his own words, “went into the shithouse” and killed the Dutchman.22

  Meyer Lansky loved his two sons and daughter, and kept them away from his criminal activities. Doc Stacher, who knew Lansky well, said that “Meyer was close to his children, crazy about them.”

  Lansky’s first wife, Anna, was “opposed to everything Lansky stood for, but there was nothing she could do about it. She was terrified that the children would follow in his footsteps.” Despite Lansky’s repeated assurances to Anna “that he wouldn’t let the children get involved,” she continually worried.23

  But Meyer meant it. His first child, a son Bernard, nicknamed “Buddy,” was born in 1930. The boy was cheerful and even-tempered, but had a damaged spinal cord and would always be a cripple. Meyer was committed to Buddy and supported him all his life.

  Meyer’s second son, Paul, was born in 1932. He grew up normal and healthy. Lansky wanted his younger son to be completely integrated into American society. In 1950, Paul Lansky was accepted to West Point on the basis of his own ability, without his father pulling any strings. Lansky was forever proud of Paul’s achievement and never ceased talking about it.24

  Meyer loved driving up to visit his son at the United States Military Academy, and he took the family there for picnics. His son’s graduation from the Academy gave him the feeling, as perhaps nothing else could, that he had made it in America.

  This feeling was reinforced for him in 1952 when Dwight Eisenhower became president. The father of one of Paul’s roommates was a close friend of Eisenhower’s, and Lansky received an invitation to Eisenhower’s inauguration. Lansky thought this was a mistake. He wrote the man a letter thanking him, but hinting that some of the dignitaries at the ceremony might find his presence objectionable.

  The man wrote back telling Lansky not to forget to come. He disclosed that his club used the same slot machines that Lansky had in his casinos, and during Prohibition he and his friends used to drink Lansky’s bootleg whiskey. Lansky was surprised and flattered, but still declined to attend.25

  Paul graduated from West Point in 1954 with a commission as a captain and a degree in engineering. In 1962, he went to Vietnam for a year, one of the first American advisors sent by the Kennedy administration. By then he was married and had a child. Keeping a promise he made to his wife, he resigned from the army when his tour ended. He moved with his family to Washington State and worked for a logging company and then for Boeing Aircraft. Later he worked for the Defense Department in Washington. In the late 1980s he retired from government service and went to live near Carson City, Nevada. He never had anything to do with criminal activities.26

  Moses “Moe” Annenberg enjoyed the highest income of any American, including Henry Ford, during the Depression. During that time of unemployment and breadlines, Moe netted more than $6 million a year. He controlled the race track wire service, without which no bookie could operate.27

  “Our position is similar to that of the English nation,” he once confided to one of his sons-in-law. “We in the racing field own three quarters of the globe and manage the balance.” No one ever accused Moe of having an inferiority complex.28

  It has been said that Moe was to the bookies of America what Arnold Rothstein was to the bootleggers and narcotics peddlers. He put the racket on a businesslike basis.

  Moe was born in East Prussia in 1877. His father, Tobias, immigrated to Chicago alone in 1882 and found work as a peddler. Three years later, he brought his wife and seven children to America and found them a home in a second-floor apartment over a junk shop on South State Street. Eventually, Tobias ran a junkyard on South Dearborn Street.29

  Moe quit school at the age of twelve, completing the fifth grade, and went to work selling papers. He grew to be tall and rangy, with a long jaw and horse-like face. A tough kid, he got a job at eighteen as a subscription solicitor for the Chicago Examiner, one of William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers.

  Moe became involved in the Chicago circulation wars which pitted Hearst’s American and Examiner against the Tribune. Both sides hired ex-boxers, sluggers and gangsters to persuade newsstands to feature one or the other newspaper. Delivery trucks were seized, bundles of papers destroyed and people killed. Moe got a good education and held his own with the best of them.

  “I was a hungry wolf,” he said. “I had a large family. I had to hunt or starve. I learned how to hunt. And I kept it up.”30

  He hunted so well that Hearst made Moe circulation manager for the Examiner.

  In 1907 Moe moved to Milwaukee, where he handled circulation for several of Hearst’s newspapers and bought a newspaper of his own. He stayed in Milwaukee until 1920, when Hearst brought him to New York as circulation manager for the entire Hearst chain.

  Moe always wanted to be self-employed and in 1922 he bought his first racing sheet, the Daily Racing Form. It did so well that he quit working for Hearst and bought into another paper, the Morning Telegraph. He expanded to Chicago in 1930 and started a bookie wire service, the Nationwide News Service.

  Of every four dollars bet on horses, three were handled by illegal bookmaking operations all across the United States. These bookies needed the race results as they happened. The Nationwide News Service provided these reports from obs
ervers stationed at twenty-nine different race tracks. These men reported back by telephone and telegraph to 15,000 bookies in 223 cities in 39 states. Moe Annenberg became the fifth largest customer of American Telephone and Telegraph.

  Moe charged his customers about $50 million a year for this service.

  He bought out his rivals and partners, and used muscle and guns in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Houston to gain control of the nation’s wire service market. Moe did business with Longy Zwillman, Meyer Lansky and other mobsters. In Chicago, he reportedly paid Al Capone a million dollars a year for protection and enforcement services.

  The Chicago district attorney called Annenberg “a murderer and a thief.” He once told Moe’s tax attorney that he could give him “the names of three people he had killed in the city of Chicago in the last five years. He ought to be hung,” said the DA.31

  Moe had seven daughters and one son, Walter. When Walter turned twenty-one, Moe gave him a harmless job in the family business. Although he employed some of his sons-in-law in the more dangerous and sinister aspects of the operations, he kept Walter out of it. Moe wanted Walter to have a wholesome and legitimate career.

  In 1939, the government indicted Moe for massive income tax evasion. Walter was charged with aiding his father. Moe was devastated. He would do anything to keep his son out of jail.

  Moe agreed to plead guilty to one count of income tax evasion. As part of the deal, all charges against Walter would be dropped. Moe received three years in prison and a fine of $8 million. At the time, this was the largest single fine ever paid by an individual tax evader. With Moe gone, Nationwide News folded.

  Suffering from cancer, Moe was released from prison in 1942. He died that same year.32

  Walter took over his father’s newspaper empire and added to it Seventeen magazine and TV Guide. As if to atone for his father’s crimes, Walter became a philanthropist, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to schools, hospitals and the Republican Party.

  In 1969, Richard Nixon appointed Walter Annenberg ambassador to Great Britain. Thus, his father’s analogy comparing his empire to that of England was not far-fetched.33

  Even the vicious and violent Lepke Buchalter was a doting husband and father. Buchalter married Betty Arbeiter Wasserman, a widow with one child, in 1931. Following his marriage to Betty, Buchalter adopted her son, Harold. Lepke made certain the boy never knew what his father did for a living.

  According to an FBI report, Lepke did not drink or gamble, and “apart from his criminal activities, Lepke appears to have been content to lead a quiet home life in the company of his family to whom, regardless of his other traits, he appears to have been genuinely devoted.”34

  This affection was genuine. Some years later, Harold remarked that “Louis was better to me than my own father could have been.”35

  Betty’s first husband had left a small trust fund for their son. Buchalter, however, would never allow his wife to draw any of the income from the trust fund, insisting that the monies accrued be used later for Harold’s college education. It was.

  Jewish gangsters revered their mothers. In this, they were little different than other second generation American Jews. Among them, the immigrant East European Jewish mother, the “Yiddishe Mama,” achieved mythical status, symbolizing the parent who sacrificed everything for her children.36

  In dozens of stories, plays and films, the Yiddishe Mama is depicted as going to irrational lengths to provide her children with the best and freshest food, the best medical care, the warmest clothing, all at the sacrifice of other needs, especially her own.

  The canonization of this image occurred in 1925 when entertainer Sophie Tucker, “the Last of the Red-Hot Mamas,” introduced the song “My Yiddishe Mama” to audiences. This paean to the long-suffering immigrant Jewish mother took the American Jewish community by storm and became a national hit. The song could not have reached the popularity it did among Jews (it’s still being recorded today) if it did not contain truths and strike a responsive cord.

  “My Yiddishe Mama” had an English and a Yiddish version, both calculated to evoke the past and tug at the audience’s heartstrings. The Yiddish version contained the following verses:

  As I stand here and think my old mother comes to mind.

  No made-up, well-dressed lady, just a mother,

  Bent over from great sorrow, with a pure Jewish heart And with cried-out eyes.

  In the same little room where she’s gotten old and gray

  She sits and cries and dreams of long gone days

  When the house was full with the sound of children’s voices….

  You can be sure our house did not lack poverty,

  But there was always enough for the children.

  She used to voluntarily give us bread from her mouth

  And she would have given up her life for her children as well….

  A Yiddishe mama, oh how bitter when she’s missing.

  You should thank God you still have her with you

  You don’t know how you’ll grieve when she passes away.

  She would have leaped into fire and water for her children.

  Not cherishing her certainly the greatest sin.

  Oh, how lucky and rich is the person who has such a beautiful gift from God:

  Just an old little Yiddishe mama, my mama.Nur an alte, kleyne yiddishe mame, mayn mame37 Jewish gangsters frequented nightclubs and heard the song. In fact, Jewish underworld figures owned many nightspots and speakeasies. In New York, Dutch Schultz owned the Embassy Club. Charley “King” Solomon owned Boston’s Coconut Grove. In Newark, Longy Zwillman owned the Blue Mirror and the Casablanca Club. Boo Boo Hoff owned the Piccadilly Cafe in Philadelphia. Detroit’s Purple Gang owned Luigi’s Cafe, one of the city’s more opulent clubs.38

  Jewish singers and comedians such as Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker played in the mob clubs and they sang “Yiddishe Mama.” Oh, how they sang it. The song always brought the house down. More than one observer noted how these hardened Jewish mobsters would break into tears when they heard “My Yiddishe Mama.”

  Despite their notoriety, most of these gangsters managed to keep their mothers blissfully unaware of their underworld activities and treated them with gentleness, respect and affection.

  Meyer Lansky adored his mother. He remembered how she gladly sacrificed herself for her children. While still a youngster he swore that when he grew up he would be very rich, “and I’d make sure that for the rest of her days my mother had only the best.”39

  As he rose in the world of crime, Meyer settled his parents in an elegant apartment, complete with maid, in a fashionable section of Brooklyn. When his mother had eye surgery in the late 1930s, Meyer got her a full-time private nurse to stay with her in the hospital. The nurse remembers Meyer showing “much compassion” for his mother. He came to visit every day, sitting at her bedside for hours, talking and listening. Before he would leave, he always asked the nurse if there was anything else his mother needed.

  After his mother came home, Meyer asked the nurse to stay on till his mother was completely recovered. He continued to visit his mother every day, talking with her in Yiddish. From time to time he called home so his children could speak to their grandmother. The nurse who cared for Lansky’s mother was struck by the closeness between mother and son.

  In later years, Meyer settled his mother in a retirement apartment near the sea in Hollywood, Florida and visited her regularly. As his mother grew frailer, Meyer made sure that she had the very best in medical care.

  To the end, Meyer remained an affectionate and devoted son. He had made good on his childhood vow that for the rest of her days his mother should have only the very best.40

  Longy Zwillman bought his mother a beautiful home in the Weequahic section of Newark and visited her often. Longy’s mother constantly worried about her son, but not because he lived in a violent world. She never knew what he did for a living. She fretted about him because h
e was not married and had no one to care for him.

  She frequently admonished Sam “Big Sue” Katz, Longy’s boyhood friend, sometime chauffeur, and bodyguard, to “watch out” for her son. “You hear, Sam? Take care of my Abe,” she would say.41

  When Zwillman’s mother learned that he was finally getting married, she cried with joy. She told everyone that maybe now she would become a grandmother.

  In 1944, Longy’s daughter Lynn was born and his mother’s wish came true.

  Detroit Jewish mobster Maxie Hassel venerated his mother. Whenever he remembered or spoke about her, he would choke up and tears would come to his eyes. Once, during the Depression, when broke and wanted by the Detroit police in connection with a gangland killing, he had to leave town, and fast.

  Maxie’s father, Jake, had immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1910. Jake was an Orthodox Jew who peddled junk for a living. Jake wanted nothing to do with Max, considering him a bum and no good. Maxie’s mother, Gita, loved her son and never abandoned him.

  Maxie asked his mother to help him. “It was the Depression,” he said. “My father would get up at four thirty in the morning, stoke the furnace, say his prayers and go off to work. He came home at eight or nine at night. He was careful with his money and gave Ma a few dollars a week. With this she had to feed my six brothers and sisters and run the house.

  “She couldn’t manage and took a job plucking chickens for a kosher butcher. She saved her pennies and kept it hidden somewhere in the house.

  “I was desperate, so I went to her for help. I’ll never forget what she did as long as I live.

  “She gave me $3 tied in a handkerchief. It was all the money she had. But it was enough to get me out of town. She saved me.”42

  Despite the strong tradition of keeping their family uninvolved in their business, there was an occasional gangster who did not oppose his son’s going illegal.

  Mervin’s (whose identity must be kept secret) father was in the rackets during the 1930s and 1940s, but he “insisted on me going to college after my brother. And I really had no great ambitions whatsoever, but I only followed suit because my father insisted on us having a college education. In view of the fact that I was not college material, he still encouraged me to go to school.”43