The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  America seemed to have reentered an era of Victorian nicety, when mild expressions were substituted for disagreeable truths; an era of euphemism, when to die became to pass away; when toilet became rest room or convenience or powder room; when poverty stricken became underprivileged or disadvantaged; when crippled became handicapped, a garbage collector became a sanitation engineer, and a defeat became a strategic withdrawal of troops. Of course even anti-Semite is a euphemism for anti-Jew, since a true anti-Semite would be one opposed to all Semitic people, including Arabs. And even the term “Jewish” could be construed as evasive or defensive, since there are no equivalent terms, such as “Christianish” or “Moslemish.” Hitler was himself fond of euphemisms, and instead of murder spoke of a final solution.

  Mr. Popkin did not note that euphemism is a characteristic form of expression in totalitarian countries, where assassination becomes liquidation, where an invasion is a liberation, and where a military takeover is an appropriate action. But he did conclude that the gradual elimination of the Jew from the American public consciousness was not a matter of anti-Semitism, exactly. “This,” he wrote, “originates not in hate, but in a misguided benevolence—or fear … [and the source of it] is Hitler. When Hitler forced Americans to take anti-Semitism seriously, it was apparently felt that the most eloquent reply that could be made was a dead silence.”

  13

  AT LAST, A HOMELAND

  In 1937, Benny Siegel—whom everybody called Bugsy, though never to his face—had left the East for Hollywood with the idea of becoming a movie star. After all, he was a friend of George Raft, and Benny knew that he was handsome and bore more than a passing resemblance to Errol Flynn. Nothing much had come of the acting ambition, but he had also been given an assignment by his old friend Meyer Lansky, which was to set up the organization’s own racing wire to the West Coast, to supervise bookmaking operations there, and to introduce Lansky’s numbers game to the Mexican-American population of Los Angeles. At all three of these tasks he had succeeded.

  He had also, on his own, made a number of trips to investigate a dusty little desert crossroads called Las Vegas. Gambling had been made legal in Nevada in 1931, and its capital had become Reno, in the north, where gambling operations were pretty much under the control of two or three Christian families. But when the federal government started work on the Hoover Dam in the early 1930s, the nearest town of any size where the construction workers could come to gamble was Las Vegas. And when the dam was finished, Siegel figured, Las Vegas would have something that it desperately needed if it was to sustain any growth at all—a water supply. Siegel began to dream of turning Las Vegas into a huge, luxury resort dedicated to gambling. Las Vegas was only a little over five hours’ drive from Los Angeles, and it would attract the high rollers from the movie crowd. These glamorous types, furthermore, would attract tourists. Siegel shared his idea with Lansky, and Lansky liked it. There was little likelihood that he and his group could invade the claims that other casino operators had already staked out in Reno, but there was no reason why they couldn’t have the southern part of the state to themselves.

  Lansky carried the idea of Las Vegas one step farther. The resort should offer the most luxurious accommodations, the most elegant restaurants and bars, topflight entertainment in its nightclubs—the proximity to Hollywood made that feasible—all at rock-bottom prices, affordable to almost anyone. The money, after all, would be made at the gaming tables. Plans to develop Las Vegas would probably have got off the drawing boards in the late 1930s if the war and wartime shortages had not intervened.

  Meanwhile, Benny Siegel cut quite a swath in Hollywood. He was impeccably tailored, favoring cashmere sport jackets, monogrammed silk shirts from Sulka, snappy ascots, and hand-benched English shoes. He was swept up by the movie crowd, invited to all the best parties, seated at the best tables at Romanoff’s and the Brown Derby, and dated the likes of Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Betty Grable. Meyer Lansky had also supplied him with a plump little sidekick, assistant, and bodyguard named Mickey Cohen.

  Cohen was by no means as dashing and debonair as his boss. Short and round, a chewed-up cigar usually stuck between his teeth, he looked like a character Damon Runyan might have invented, and talked like one, too. But there was something about Mickey Cohen that struck people—women, particularly—as cute. He was teddy-bear cuddly, and he was fun to be around. Mickey Cohen, too, had no trouble making friends in the movie capital, and no trouble dating movie stars. He brought out their mothering instincts. Among his celebrated friends he counted Judy Garland, Betty Grable, Alice Faye, and Don Ameche. As a criminal, Mickey Cohen was something of a joke, but he was an affable joke. He had a neurotic obsession about cleanliness and would wash his hands hundreds of times a day. Even in prison—through a miscalculation, Cohen had spent some time in the penitentiary—his daily consumption of Kleenex and toilet paper was monumental.

  But, like his superiors, Lansky and Siegel, Cohen insisted that he didn’t think of himself as a criminal, but as a man in a service type of business. Crime, as Cohen defined it, was when a father and his ten-year-old son got off a plane at the Los Angeles airport after a holiday in Hawaii, and were held up at gunpoint by a band of young hoodlums. The father and son turned over their money, their watches, their rings. The gunmen then shot them both, killing the boy and paralyzing the father for life. This had actually happened and that, to Cohen’s mind, was crime—pointless murder. To speak of that sort of thing in the same breath with what Mickey Cohen did for a living gave his livelihood a bad name. That sort of criminal, as he put it, was “not good for anyone’s image.”

  In Hollywood, Mickey Cohen was a good friend to have, in more ways than just helping place a bet at an out-of-town track. If one was hoping for a particular movie role, or was having difficulty negotiating a contract, or was having union problems at one of the studios, Mickey would make a phone call or two and work it out. He was Hollywood’s Mr. Fixit. As an example of the kind of power he wielded, a young and ambitious California politician named Richard M. Nixon had sought Cohen’s support. But Cohen hadn’t liked Nixon, who reminded him, he wrote, of “a three-card Monte dealer … a rough hustler of some kind.”

  Mickey Cohen had what he called his “code of ethics,” as his story of how he became Betty Grable’s friend illustrates. Early in his career, on orders from Lansky and Siegel, Cohen had organized a holdup at a Los Angeles nightclub operated by one Eddie Neales, who had not been “cooperating” with his protection payoffs. Cohen had been “at the stick,” meaning he had a shotgun trained on the room while the others carried pistols. The patrons were instructed to put their wallets and jewelry on the tables, where they were collected. One of the jeweled ladies at the club was Miss Grable. Later, when Cohen had been promoted to less menial chores in the organization, he met Miss Grable socially, and, like the gentleman he was, apologized to her for the incident at Eddie Neales’s place. Miss Grable giggled and confessed that she and her friends had found the whole thing pretty exciting. Then she whispered in Cohen’s ear, “We were insured anyway.”

  Mickey Cohen also became a good friend of, and did favors for, Ben Hecht. But of how they became friends, and of what the favors were, each man would tell a different story.

  In his 1954 autobiography, A Child of the Century, Hecht wrote that Mickey Cohen had first approached him in 1941, not long after the disappointing fund-raising rally at the Fox studio commissary for Peter Bergson’s Jewish Brigade. According to Hecht, Cohen also had the notion that “millions” could be raised from the studio heads for the Bergson cause, though presumably Cohen had somewhat different fund-raising tactics in mind. According to Hecht, when he explained to Cohen that this had already been tried, and had failed miserably, Cohen had said, “Knockin’ their own proposition, huh?”

  But in his own 1975 autobiography, Mickey Cohen gave this version of their meeting and its purpose: First of all, said Cohen, Ben Hecht approached him, and not the other way around. And t
he year was not 1941, but 1947, an important difference considering the fact that a whole world war had begun and ended in the interval. At that point, Cohen said, he had never heard of Hecht, and learning that the writer wanted to see him, had asked, “Who the hell is Ben Hecht?” Finally, Cohen recalled an entirely different reason for the meeting. It had nothing to do with Bergson’s Jewish Brigade—by then a dead issue, anyway—but had been to enlist Cohen’s support for Israel in its bitter war of independence. This would seem to make sense, because by 1947 Hecht had become a militant Zionist.

  In the United States at the time, there were almost as many kinds of Zionists as there were Jews. There were religious Zionists, labor Zionists, Zionist moderates, Zionist militants. The splinter groups of Zionism operated with as much internecine conflict as with cooperation. Jewish Socialists tended to see the Zionist movement as competitive with their own—a distraction that would draw the attention and energies of American Jewry away from what the Socialists saw as a more important goal, the improving of living and working conditions of the masses. The Socialists saw the creation of the State of Israel as an essentially bourgeois, capitalist enterprise.

  In 1947, Palestine was in a state of siege as the days of the British mandate drew to a close, and it became clear that Britain had no intention of implementing the Balfour Declaration of thirty years earlier, which had stated that London and His Majesty’s government would “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” A civil war was raging between Palestine’s Arabs and Jews, and there were terrorist incidents by both Arab and Jewish guerrillas against the British forces. One of the Jewish guerrilla groups, the Haganah (“Defense”), had been organized by David Ben-Gurion, and contained men who had been trained by the British in commando tactics during the war for missions behind enemy lines. Now this British training was being used as the British had feared it would be—in raids and forays against British troops, to attack and blow up bridges, railroads, and radar installations. The Haganah had been formed completely illegally; nonetheless, it considered itself the “legitimate” Jewish army.

  Less legitimate guerrilla contingents were the so-called Stern Gang, and Menachem Begin’s violent Irgun Tzevai Leumi. Between 1943 and 1947, Begin’s Irgun had waged relentless war against the British rule, and Begin had begun to be seen—and perhaps to see himself—as a kind of personification of Jewish bravery, stamina, and military ruthlessness, a Jewish Attila or Genghis Khan. Ben Hecht, wrote Mickey Cohen, had come to see him to ask his help in raising funds for Begin and the Irgun terrorists.

  At the time, Cohen admitted, he had not been paying too much attention to international affairs or to what was going on in Palestine. But Cohen considered himself a good Jew, and when he met with Hecht—and when Hecht explained to him in dramatic terms the Irgun’s aims and considerable successes—Cohen quickly became excited and volunteered his services to the Irgun’s cause. The violent nature of the Irgun’s activities obviously appealed to the gangster in Cohen. As he wrote, “This guy got me so goddamn excited. He started telling me how these guys actually fight like racket guys would. They didn’t ask for a quarter and they gave no quarter. And I got pretty well enthused with them.”

  Cohen could also understand why some of Hollywood’s higher-ups showed less enthusiasm over the possibility of an independent Israel. “Jewish people,” he wrote, “are very complacent, particularly when they become high in their society walk of life, high in their field of endeavor.” It was true. The more the Russians moved upward socially and economically, the more they seemed to think and behave like the Old Guard, anti-Zionist Germans. (Though even the Germans had a Zionist concept of sorts. While they dismissed the idea of a Jewish state as an unrealistic fantasy, and though a resolution had been passed by American Reform rabbis declaring themselves “unalterably” opposed to such an idea, they had characteristically added, “America is our Zion.”)

  By the 1940s, more and more prosperous Russians were abandoning the Orthodoxy, and joining the Germans’ “more American” Reform temples. Orthodoxy had become synonymous with poverty, with lack of progress—the party line that the Germans had adopted more than a generation earlier. The writer Doris Lilly has put this phenomenon another way: “When one has ten million dollars, one is no longer Jewish.” This de-Semitization process, noticeable in the acquisition of wealth and status, has also been described as the Law of Diminishing Concerns.

  But Cohen still saw himself as a member of the fighting Jewish underclass, and promised Hecht that he himself would toss a fund-raising affair for the Irgun. This was held at Slapsie Maxie’s restaurant in Hollywood, of which Cohen happened to own a share. As a matter of course, the major studio heads like Goldwyn and Mayer were invited but, as Cohen had guessed they would, they declined, though Cohen’s lawyer did come to him with a message to the effect that Goldwyn and the others might be more receptive if Cohen would switch his allegiance to the more moderate, less terrorist Haganah. But Cohen would have none of that. As a result, the gathering at Slapsie Maxie’s was not of the elite that had met at the Fox commissary six years earlier. But there was a respectable contingent of film stars, including Betty Grable and Harry James, along with every important gambler in the area, plus a number of prominent judges, for in Mickey Cohen’s line of work it was important to have friends among the judiciary. (Though gambling was illegal in nearby Burbank, Lansky-run gambling parlors flourished openly, and no wonder—the Burbank sheriff’s office, the police department, and even some state officials in Sacramento shared in the take.) One judge, who was not even Jewish, came all the way from Galveston to deliver his personal check for five thousand dollars. Unlike the Fox affair, at this gathering no pledges were accepted—only cash. And unlike the Fox affair, Cohen’s evening was a resounding success, with more than half a million dollars collected for the Irgun fighters before it was over.

  Soon Mickey Cohen was spending so much time and energy on behalf of the Irgun and Israeli independence that he was having to curtail his regular activities. But that was all right with Meyer Lansky, who was also throwing his weight behind the Israeli cause. Lansky’s bailiwick was the East Coast, and in particular the docks of New York and New Jersey, where he wielded more than a little power. With the war in Europe over, shiploads of military hardware—machine guns, grenades, mines, explosives, and other matériel—were arriving in East Coast harbors from the European theater of operations to be put into mothballs. Some of this equipment had seen action in the war, but much of it was brand-new and had never been used. There were machine guns that had never been assembled, and were still packed in oil and straw. Lansky, with his influence on the docks, had no trouble seeing to it that these shipments got diverted from their intended destinations and sent directly to the Israeli fighters. Helping him were Albert Anastasia, who was in charge of the New York docks, and Charlie “the Jew” Yulnowski, who handled New Jersey.

  It was a remarkably streamlined operation. At one point, for example, a large shipment of dynamite was smoothly rerouted from Newark to Haifa. Then word came back from Palestine that the Jewish guerrillas were not using the dynamite properly. Mickey Cohen had a solution. He had a friend known simply as “Chopsie,” whose specialty was blowing up things. Chopsie was immediately dispatched to Palestine, where he spent eleven months giving lessons to the Israeli troops on the fine art of handling explosives.

  Meyer Lansky learned through his grapevine of informants that, while scattered Israeli armies were battling Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip and in the Sinai, certain American armaments dealers were somehow managing to smuggle arms to Egypt. This was illegal, since there was an embargo against shipping arms from anywhere in the United States to the Middle East, supposedly to be fair to all sides in the conflict. But the law wasn’t working. In fact, the Arab states had succeeded in buying more than fourteen million dollars’ worth of surplus American arms. The British were also selling arms to the Arabs, and making a lucrative bus
iness of it, and the Arabs were able to buy arms from other European countries as well.

  To correct this situation, Lansky, as usual, took the law into his own hands. One munitions firm in Pittsburgh was found to be the chief smuggling culprit, and, with the cheerful help of the New York and New Jersey longshoremen, a number of baffling accidents began to happen to this firm’s Egypt-bound consignments when they reached the East Coast ports. Some shipments fell overboard as they were being loaded. Others mysteriously vanished. Still others got loaded on the wrong ships, and somehow those ships were usually bound for Haifa.