by Bruno, Joe
When he was released in 1917, Spanish took dead aim at Dropper and every illegal activity Dropper controlled. Each man had approximately three dozen shooters under their wings, and these shooters went to work, resulting in the deaths of several men on both sides. The war ended, when Dropper got the drop on Spanish, so to speak, after he and two of his men ambushed Spanish as Spanish exited a restaurant at 19 Second Avenue. When the dust settled, Spanish was dead, and Dropper was now in charge of all the strong-arm tactics used by several unions to control their men.
Between 1920 and 1923, Dropper and his gang were responsible for more than 20 murders. However, in these rackets, when you kill one competitor, another one usually emerges from the shadows intent on doing to you what you did to the other guy, to gain control of whatever illegal activities you dominated. This person emerged in the name of Jacob “Little Augie” Orgen.
Little Augie had in his stable a crew of every capable killers, which included Jack “Legs” Diamond, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, and Gurrah Shapiro. In 1922 and 1923, Dropper's gang and Little Augie's gang turned Manhattan into one big shooting gallery. The result was 23 murders, including the death of one innocent man who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In 1923, Dropper was arrested on a concealed weapons charge. He was soon released outside the Essex Market Court, on Second Avenue and Second Street. There were rumors that a death squad was awaiting his release, so as he stepped into a waiting taxi, Dropper was surrounded by a phalanx of cops.
Dropper was sitting in the back seat of the taxi next to Detective Jesse Joseph, when a minor thug working for Little Augie, named Louis Kushner, rushed from behind the cab and shot Dropper through the closed window, twice in the head.
Dropper's wife rushed to her mortally wounded husband, and said, “Nate! Nate! Tell me you were not what they say you were.”
Dropper gasped, and with his last breath he said, “They got me.”
Then he keeled sideways, dead, his head nestled on Detective Joseph's shoulder.
Kushner, restrained by several burly cops, was obviously proud of his handiwork. He smiled at the coppers, and snapped, “I got him! Now give me a cigarette!”
Kelly, Paul (Paulo Vaccarelli)
In the early 1900's, Paul Kelly was the most high-profile gangster in New York City. Real name Paulo Vaccarelli, Kelly was born in Sicily in 1879. He immigrated to America in the early 1890's, and soon became a bantamweight boxer of some repute. He changed his name from the Italian Vaccarelli to the Irish-sounding Kelly, in order to get more fights, at a time when being Italian in America was considered being a low-class citizen of ill repute.
Unlike most gangsters of his day, Kelly was an intelligent, erudite man, who could speak three languages. Kelly was a dapper dresser and an easy person to like, which is why he was able to recruit so many quality gangsters to work for him.
After Kelly retired from boxing, he formed the notorious Five Points Gang in Lower Manhattan. The 1,500-member Five Points Gang was the breeding ground for some of the most famous gangsters ever to set foot in America. Their members included Johnny Torrio and Al Capone (both of whom later emigrated to control Chicago), Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano, and Frankie Yale.
While Kelly's gang was almost entirely comprised of Italians, his main nemesis was Monk Eastman, who headed a 2000-strong, mostly Jewish gang. Kelly and Eastman's crew fought often and violently. The dividing line between their territories was the Bowery. Kelly's domain was west of the Bowery, and Eastman ruled to the east of the Bowery. Everything else was neutral territory, and that's where the trouble began, resulting in disputes over who controlled what and where.
Both Kelly and Eastman worked for Tammany Hall as head-busters on Election Day, when either one group, or the other, would stand guard at all the polling places, making sure that the Tammany Hall-backed candidate won the election. Finally, the two gangs became so out-of-control dangerous to the community, the Tammany Hall bosses ordered Eastman and Kelly to duke it out, mano a mano, with the winner getting control of the prized neutral territories.
The two men went at it for a full two hours, and even though the ex-boxer Kelly was 50 pounds lighter than the hulking Eastman, neither man was able to knock the other man out. The fight was ruled a draw, and Kelly and Eastman went back to their usual violent territorial disputes.
Kelly's base of operations was his fancy New Brighton Athletic Club on Great Jones Street, just north of Houston Street. In April 1905, police raided the club, and they arrested several members, including Kelly. Even though four policemen testified they had witnessed illegal activities in the club, due to the false testimony of a police captain named Burke and a Tammany Hall-appointed judge named Barlow, Kelly's case was summarily dismissed, to the roar of a cheering crowd of hundreds of Kelly's supporters assembled in the courtroom.
In November 1908, Kelly's luck ran out, when two of his former henchmen, Biff Ellison and Razor Riley, barged into the New Brighton Athletic Club, with guns blazing. Kelly was sitting at a table with his two bodyguards, Bill Harrington and Rough House Hogan. Kelly dove under the table, but not before he was shot three times. Harrington took a bullet in the head, and he died instantly. Kelly fired back from under the table, and he injured both Ellison and Riley.
Even though he recovered from his injuries, Kelly's clout was never the same after the shooting incident. Within days, since Kelly's new-found notoriety had cost him the favor of Tammany Hall, police shut down the New Brighton Athletic Club. Kelly relocated to Italian Harlem, and he toned down his criminal activities, to a point. Kelly became intimately involved in union activities, some legal and some not-so-legal. Through intimidation and strong-arm tactics, Kelly was eventually elected vice president of the International Longshoremen Association.
Unlike his arch enemy Eastman, who was shot to death on the streets in 1920, Kelly died in 1936 of natural causes.
Lansky, Meyer
Born Majer Suchowlinki on July 4 1902, in Grodno, Poland, Meyer Lansky was considered one of the great masterminds of the modern day mob.
In 1911, Lansky's family immigrated to New York City, and they took up residence at 6 Columbia Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. As a boy, Lansky learned the trade of tool and die making. He also dabbled as an auto mechanic, and for a short time he worked in a factory. Tired of the 9-5 drag, Lansky hooked up with fellow Lower East Sider, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel (no one called him Bugsy to his face), and they started an auto-theft racket. Siegel would steal the cars. Lansky would get them in good working order, and then sell them.
They soon formed the violent “Bugs and Meyer Mob,” which delved heavily in the illegal booze business. When Lansky and Siegel weren't hired as muscle to protect other bootlegger's shipments, they were hijacking liquor trucks themselves, sometimes even the trucks of the bootleggers whom they were supposed to be protecting.
The “Bugs and Meyer Mob” was also intimately involved in violent “schlammings” (beating up people for a fee) and a few murders, as long as the price was right. The murder business was so lucrative, several of the “Bugs and Meyer Mob” alumni eventually became key members of “Murder Incorporated,” which terrorized the streets of New York City in the 1930's. These killers included Joe “Doc” Stacher, Joe Adonis, Abner “Longie” Zwillmen, and Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer.
As a young man, Lansky became fast friends with Italian mobster Lucky Luciano. Lansky and Luciano joined forces with men like Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein, and they began to run their crime enterprises like a business, with violence used only as a last resort.
In 1931, after the deaths of Mafia bosses Salvatore Maranzano and Joe “The Boss” Masseria (both were ordered killed by Luciano), Lansky and Luciano transformed the mob into one National Crime Syndicate, with men of assorted nationalities on their “Board of Directors.” Not only did this Crime Syndicate engage in illegal activities, such as gambling, hijackings, shakedowns, and loanshark
ing, but they also controlled the labor unions, which oversaw the shipping and trucking industries, as well as public works projects. Lansky also partnered with mob boss Frank Costello, to corner the illegal slot-machine markets throughout the country.
Even though most of his mob boss associates were in the Italian Mafia, Lansky had as much say as the Italians. In fact, most people considered Lansky “the brains of the operation,” while the Italians mostly provided the muscle. Because he was short in stature, Lansky was dubbed “The Little Man,” However, this was not a derogatory term. Lansky's vote on any crime issue usually took precedence over anyone else's vote.
After Luciano went to jail on a trumped-up prostitution charge, Siegel convinced Lansky that there was money to be made in the desert of Las Vegas, Nevada, which was then little more than a “comfort station” for weary travelers. Lansky formed the Nevada Projects Corporation, and Las Vegas was born.
Unfortunately, Siegel did not live long enough to reap the mob's Las Vegas profits. Siegel was suspected of skimming the mob's construction cash, and in 1947, Siegel was shot through the eye, as he sat in the living room of his girlfriend Virginia Hill's mansion in Beverly Hills. Rumors arose that Lansky voted against killing his longtime pal Siegel, but in fact, Lansky agreed, saying, “I had no choice.”
Lansky invested heavily in the casino gambling operations in Cuba. However in 1959, Lansky lost everything, when Fidel Castro took over the rule of Cuba from Fulgencio Batista in a military coup.
With the United States government cracking down on the mob in Las Vegas, Lansky fled to Israel to avoid arrest. He tried to claim Israeli citizenship under “The Law of Return,” a rule that gave citizenship to anyone born of a Jewish mother. After lengthy court battles, Lansky's pleas for citizenship in Israel were turned down, and he was sent back to America. In 1973, law enforcement officials tried to jail Lansky on tax evasion charges, like they had done with Al Capone four decades earlier. However, Lansky was acquitted at trial, which gave the government a big black eye.
After undergoing open heart surgery in 1973, Lansky spent the rest of his life as a sickly man. Stricken with lung cancer, Meyer Lansky died at his home in Miami Beach, Florida, in January 1983, at the age of 80.
Leslie, George Leonidas
George Leonidas Leslie started out in life as one of the privileged class. However, Leslie soon became a criminal, known by the New York City Police as “King of the Bank Robbers.”
Leslie was born in Cincinnati in 1840. His father owned a brewery, and Leslie started out as an academic, graduating from the University of Cincinnati with honors and a degree in architecture.
After both his parents had died, Leslie sold his father's brewery. He gave up his architectural career, and he moved to New York City. There Leslie fell in with a bad crowd, and he decided he could make a darn good living by robbing banks. It is estimated, that in the 10-year period spanning 1874-1884, Leslie was responsible for 80 percent of all bank robberies committed in the United States; swiping cash estimated to be between 7-12 million dollars.
In New York City, Leslie posed as a man-about-town of considerable means. He belonged to the most exclusive clubs, and he was a regular theatergoer and a patron of the arts. Leslie used this false pretense to gain access to valuable bits of information, that made his bank-robbing life most profitable.
Leslie would often spend as much as three years planning a bank job. When he found a bank to his liking, Leslie would try to get the blueprints of the interior of the bank. If that were not possible, Leslie would visit the bank posing as a depositor. With his experience in architecture, Leslie would then draw up rough plans, detailing the intricacies of the inside of the bank. Sometimes, Leslie would have one of his gang members get a job at the bank, either as a night watchman, or a porter. These “inside men” would provide Leslie with the exact specifications of the inside of the bank, and the make and model of the bank vault.
After obtaining all this valuable information, Leslie would then buy a duplicate of the bank's safe. Leslie spent days, and sometimes weeks, perfecting the art of opening that safe. Leslie shied away from using dynamite to crack the safe, having decided that an explosion would cause too much noise and lead to them being detected.
Leslie method of opening safes included boring a hole underneath the dial, then using a thin piece of steel to manipulate the tumblers into place. To cover almost any contingency in robbing a bank, Leslie had a set of burglar tools specially created for him, which cost the staggering sum of $3,000 - more than most people, at that time, earned in several years.
To perfect the job he was planning, Leslie sometimes set up a room in a loft he had rented downtown to resemble the inside of the bank he was planning to rob. There Leslie, and the men whom he had selected for that particular bank job, would spend considerable amounts of time practicing exactly how the bank robbery should develop. Leslie would darken the lights, and watch his men go through their maneuvers in the dark. He would then critique their work.
Leslie’s cohorts consisted of various known criminals, such as Jimmy Hope, Jimmy Brady, Abe Coakley, Shang Draper, Red Leary, Johnny Dobbs, Worcester Sam Perris, Bill Kelly, and Banjo Pete Emerson.
In May of 1875, Leslie decided to rob the Manhattan Savings Institution at 644 Broadway. Leslie, through his “inside man” at the bank, Patrick Shelvin, found out the make and model of the lock on the bank's vault. Leslie procured an exact model from the manufacturers: Valentine & Bulter. Then, Leslie spent six months perfecting the opening of the lock.
On October 27, 1875, Shelvin let Leslie and Leslie's crew into the bank at night. When their work was done, they had stolen $3.5 million in cash and securities, almost $50 million in today's money. No one was arrested until May 1879, and as a result, Jimmy Hope and Bill Kelly were convicted and sent to prison. Abe Coakley and Banjo Pete Emerson were also arrested, but they were acquitted at trial. Leslie was never arrested, and his involvement in the bank robbery was not discovered until after his death.
Leslie’s reputation grew to such gigantic proportions, he was often called in as a “consultant” by other bank-robbing gangs. It is believed, Leslie received more than $20,000, just to travel to San Francisco to look over plans for a local bank heist.
Yet, if Leslie had one weakness, it was for the affections of a woman. Leslie began an affair with the girlfriend of one of his cohorts: Shang Draper, a murderous thug of the worst sort.
On June 4, 1884, Leslie's decomposed body was found lying at the base of Tramps Rock, near the borderline between Westchester and the Bronx. He was shot twice in the head. Police speculated that Leslie was killed by the jealous Draper in a house at 101 Lynch Street in Brooklyn. Then Leslie's body was carted to Tramps Rock, by three of Draper's associates, who had been seen near Yonkers at the time Leslie's body was discovered.
However, there was little evidence of the crime, and no one was ever arrested for Leslie's murder.
Luciano, Lucky
Lucky Luciano was born Salvatore Luciana on November 24, 1896, in Lercara Friddi, a tiny town near Palermo, Sicily. Luciano immigrated with his family to America in 1907, and they settled in an apartment building at 265 East 10th Street. The rumor was that as a 10-year-old Luciano was a terror in Sicily, and he convinced a customs officer at Ellis Island to change his name from Luciana to Luciano, in order to avoid detection by several enemies he had made in the old country.
Luciano was not a model student. As a result, Luciano decided to work a racket in which he would confront skinny Jewish kids on their way to the public school he attended, and offer them, for a penny or two, protection from him not beating them up. Some kids paid, and some kids Luciano beat up badly. However, one skinny Jewish kid fought Luciano tooth and nail in an all-out street fight. The Jewish kid's name was Meyer Lansky, and they started a lifelong friendship that would be extremely profitable to both.
Luciano dropped out of school at the age of 15, and he worked in a hat factory for a while. Unfortunately, that
was not the life for him. Looking for a different kind of work, Luciano started hanging out on Mulberry Street, and soon he became a charter member of the Five Points Gang, under the tutelage of their leader, Paul Kelly, with top-notch hoods Johnny Torrio and Frankie Yale as his mentors. Luciano became a “leg-breaker” for the Five Points Gang, and he was suspected of many beatings and maybe even a few murders. However, the Five Points Gang had their hooks into crooked cops and politicians, so Luciano was never brought up on any criminal charges.
By 1920, the Five Points Gang had splintered into several smaller gangs. Luciano saw potential in the rackets of Joe “The Boss” Masseria, who himself saw potential in the rough-and-tumble Luciano. Masseria treated Luciano like a son, and he made Luciano his top gun and second in command in all Masseria's operations.
However, Masseria didn't like the fact that Luciano did business with Jews like Lansky and Lansky's partner Bugsy Siegel; or even with Italians like Frank Costello, who was from Calabria, and didn't have Masseria's required Sicilian bloodlines.
Finally, Luciano decided Masseria had to go, and because Masseria was now involved in the Castellammarese War with rival Salvatore Maranzano, Luciano threw in with Maranzano with the intention of killing Masseria. To finalize his double-cross, Luciano lured Masseria to a Coney Island restaurant, and while Luciano was taking a bathroom break, Siegel and three other men barged in and shot Masseria to death.
After a few months under the strict rule of Maranzano, Luciano decided Maranzano, and his old-world ways, had to go, too. Furthermore, Maranzano felt the same way about the ambitious Luciano. As a result, Maranzano invited Luciano to a meeting in Maranzano's midtown office, where he planned to have Vincent “Mad Dog” Cole shoot Luciano into Swiss cheese.
