Yidfellas: The Kosher Nostra

[John52]

In the history of New York’s underworld, buried among the mythology that has created the people and places making up this often confusing landscape, there is one story that has grown much bigger over the years than the sum of its parts.

There have been countless narratives, and articles and at least two movies- the 1950 classic, 'The Enforcer,' starring Humphrey Bogart, and one with Peter Falk in 1960- perpetrating the legend of a group of Jewish criminals who banded together to prey like a pack of wolves on their victims, across the continent of North America, murdering a thousand people until they were brought to bay.

Or so the legends tell us.

It became known as Murder Inc. a name coined by a tough, chubby little leprechaun of an Irish reporter called Harry Feeney, when he broke his story in the now defunct New York World-Telegram.

When the news of their crimes did hit the streets, it was a refreshing change to see that all of the hoods and killers had names that did not necessarily end in a vowel. Although Jewish gangsters had been around for years, they had taken second stage over the years to the growing profile of the Italian-American criminals, who were called The Black Hand, or rarely, the Mafia, and most often the mob, particularly in the early 1900s when New York newspapers reported daily on the demise of someone called Louis or Salvatore or Giuseppe.

Gangsters ruled the roost by 1930 in the Big Apple. And there was nothing anyone could do about it.

The DA said so himself.

Thomas Crain, appearing before Judge Samuel Seabury, said that the racketeers were out of control, and that neither he or the police force could think of any way to curb them. There were 421 murders, up 18% on the previous year, and at least 66 of these where gangland rub-outs, all of them unsolved. Bodies were being dumped weekly on street corners, left in the trunks of autos, flopped into the Hudson or East River. Most of these stiffs were turning out to be Italians, and when Joe the Boss went for his last lunch at the Villa Tammaro restaurant on Coney Island, the Daily News reported that, 'Police believe the Masseria killing will be the beginning of gang warfare that will exceed anything New York has yet experienced.”

It was as it happens the end of one, but nobody in authority knew anything, especially the cops. In east Brooklyn, things were starting to heat up a bit as well.

Especially in Brownsville.

Brownsville covered just 2.19 square miles but packed in over 200,000 people. It was then, the most densely inhabited community in Brooklyn. Predominately Jewish, there were over seventy synagogues dotted about the borough, which also, incidentally, contained the only Moorish colony in the whole of New York.

Pitkin Avenue, the main drag, was packed with shops, food halls, delis and variety shops and the language heard on the sidewalk was predominately Yiddish; the food in the shops, mostly kosher. In 1916, Margaret Sanger established the first birth control clinic in America, here on Amboy Street.

On the corner of Livonia, just up from the park, at 779 Saratoga Avenue, sat Midnight Rose’s candy store. Here, was where the boys would meet up each day to think up scams, pick up an assignment to go out and shoot a mug, or just shoot the breeze over a chocolate malt and a game of pinochle. To-day, the building store-front is still there- the store now a deli-grocery- partially boarded up, adorned and decorated with the mindless graffiti that characterizes inner city urban decay, the sidewalk in front carpeted with the detritus of people who have lost all hope and are not afraid to show it. It sits there, waiting for some construction crew to come along and put it out of its misery.

The boys, who referred to themselves as 'The Brownsville Troop,' and at their peak may have numbered as many as thirty, were an unreal assortment of misfits, muggers, dead beats and killers, with names equally as wondrous, including:

Frank 'The Dasher' Abbandano, Seymour 'Blue Jaw' Magoo, Mandy Weiss, Moitle 'Buggsy' Goldstein, Vito 'Chicken Head' Gurino, 'Oscar the Poet,' 'Pittsburgh Phil,' a.k.a. Harry 'Pep' Strauss, 'Little Farvel' Cohen, 'Happy' Maione, Sholem Bernstein, Dukey Maffeatore, Alli 'Tick Tock' Tannenbaum and of course the bete noir of the crew, the man who would help to bring it all tumbling down one day, Abe 'Kid Twist' Reles.

Some of these guys might have worked independently, linking up with others to perform specific jobs; some may have worked in packs, forming new relationships as opportunities arose; others undoubtedly stayed together for the course.

Moving about on the fringes of the troop, a thermometer looking for a temperature, was Gangy Davidoff, a tough Jew in his own right, a personal assistant to another major hood, nicknamed 'Lepke', but more famous in history as the older brother of Bummy Davis, one of America's toughest welter weights, rated by Ring Magazine as one of 100 greatest punchers of all time. Gangy's role in the pack is vague and uncertain, but I have always believed him to have been more than a supporting player.

The store was run by a hard-bitten sixty year old, domineering European immigrant called Rose Gold, always called 'Midnight Rose,' as she kept a light burning for the boys late into the night, to show them the way home. She and her son, Sam 'The Dapper” Siegal' helped Reles’ in his extensive loansharking operation, and just to keep things in the family, her daughter, Shirley Herman loaned a hand when things got busy. Rose was illiterate, unable to read or write English, but an investigation of her bank account once showed that over $400,000 had been deposited and withdrawn in a twelve-month period.


http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profile...-kosher-nostra

[littlefieldjohn]

Originally Posted by John52

In the history of New York’s underworld, buried among the mythology that has created the people and places making up this often confusing landscape, there is one story that has grown much bigger over the years than the sum of its parts.

There have been countless narratives, and articles and at least two movies- the 1950 classic, 'The Enforcer,' starring Humphrey Bogart, and one with Peter Falk in 1960- perpetrating the legend of a group of Jewish criminals who banded together to prey like a pack of wolves on their victims, across the continent of North America, murdering a thousand people until they were brought to bay.

Or so the legends tell us.

It became known as Murder Inc. a name coined by a tough, chubby little leprechaun of an Irish reporter called Harry Feeney, when he broke his story in the now defunct New York World-Telegram.

When the news of their crimes did hit the streets, it was a refreshing change to see that all of the hoods and killers had names that did not necessarily end in a vowel. Although Jewish gangsters had been around for years, they had taken second stage over the years to the growing profile of the Italian-American criminals, who were called The Black Hand, or rarely, the Mafia, and most often the mob, particularly in the early 1900s when New York newspapers reported daily on the demise of someone called Louis or Salvatore or Giuseppe.

Gangsters ruled the roost by 1930 in the Big Apple. And there was nothing anyone could do about it.

The DA said so himself.

Thomas Crain, appearing before Judge Samuel Seabury, said that the racketeers were out of control, and that neither he or the police force could think of any way to curb them. There were 421 murders, up 18% on the previous year, and at least 66 of these where gangland rub-outs, all of them unsolved. Bodies were being dumped weekly on street corners, left in the trunks of autos, flopped into the Hudson or East River. Most of these stiffs were turning out to be Italians, and when Joe the Boss went for his last lunch at the Villa Tammaro restaurant on Coney Island, the Daily News reported that, 'Police believe the Masseria killing will be the beginning of gang warfare that will exceed anything New York has yet experienced.”

It was as it happens the end of one, but nobody in authority knew anything, especially the cops. In east Brooklyn, things were starting to heat up a bit as well.

Especially in Brownsville.

Brownsville covered just 2.19 square miles but packed in over 200,000 people. It was then, the most densely inhabited community in Brooklyn. Predominately Jewish, there were over seventy synagogues dotted about the borough, which also, incidentally, contained the only Moorish colony in the whole of New York.

Pitkin Avenue, the main drag, was packed with shops, food halls, delis and variety shops and the language heard on the sidewalk was predominately Yiddish; the food in the shops, mostly kosher. In 1916, Margaret Sanger established the first birth control clinic in America, here on Amboy Street.

On the corner of Livonia, just up from the park, at 779 Saratoga Avenue, sat Midnight Rose’s candy store. Here, was where the boys would meet up each day to think up scams, pick up an assignment to go out and shoot a mug, or just shoot the breeze over a chocolate malt and a game of pinochle. To-day, the building store-front is still there- the store now a deli-grocery- partially boarded up, adorned and decorated with the mindless graffiti that characterizes inner city urban decay, the sidewalk in front carpeted with the detritus of people who have lost all hope and are not afraid to show it. It sits there, waiting for some construction crew to come along and put it out of its misery.

The boys, who referred to themselves as 'The Brownsville Troop,' and at their peak may have numbered as many as thirty, were an unreal assortment of misfits, muggers, dead beats and killers, with names equally as wondrous, including:

Frank 'The Dasher' Abbandano, Seymour 'Blue Jaw' Magoo, Mandy Weiss, Moitle 'Buggsy' Goldstein, Vito 'Chicken Head' Gurino, 'Oscar the Poet,' 'Pittsburgh Phil,' a.k.a. Harry 'Pep' Strauss, 'Little Farvel' Cohen, 'Happy' Maione, Sholem Bernstein, Dukey Maffeatore, Alli 'Tick Tock' Tannenbaum and of course the bete noir of the crew, the man who would help to bring it all tumbling down one day, Abe 'Kid Twist' Reles.

Some of these guys might have worked independently, linking up with others to perform specific jobs; some may have worked in packs, forming new relationships as opportunities arose; others undoubtedly stayed together for the course.

Moving about on the fringes of the troop, a thermometer looking for a temperature, was Gangy Davidoff, a tough Jew in his own right, a personal assistant to another major hood, nicknamed 'Lepke', but more famous in history as the older brother of Bummy Davis, one of America's toughest welter weights, rated by Ring Magazine as one of 100 greatest punchers of all time. Gangy's role in the pack is vague and uncertain, but I have always believed him to have been more than a supporting player.

The store was run by a hard-bitten sixty year old, domineering European immigrant called Rose Gold, always called 'Midnight Rose,' as she kept a light burning for the boys late into the night, to show them the way home. She and her son, Sam 'The Dapper” Siegal' helped Reles’ in his extensive loansharking operation, and just to keep things in the family, her daughter, Shirley Herman loaned a hand when things got busy. Rose was illiterate, unable to read or write English, but an investigation of her bank account once showed that over $400,000 had been deposited and withdrawn in a twelve-month period.


http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profile...-kosher-nostra

Any wiseguy in North Jersey will tell you that today's Russian Jew organized crime family there contains the most crazed and vicious killers-for hire on the street.

[John52]

" Final Resting Place of Louis Buchalter"

Louis "Lepke" Buchalter
6th February 1897 - 4th March 1944
Only mafia head to be given the electric chair. held a stranglehold on New York as he controlled the Unions. Used the mafia's own killing department, Murder Inc. to murder anyone who stood in his way. Brought to justice ironically by District Attorney Thomas Dewey, with the aid of testimony from Abe Reles - Lepke's former associate. It was Dewey who Dutch Shultz was going to kill, until he was murdered by Murder Inc. Lepke was portrayed by Tony Curtis in the Film "Lepke". Lepke was electrocuted in Sing Sing prison.

Mount Hebron Cemetery, Flushing. New York.

Louis "Lepke" Buchalter (6 February 1897 - 4 March 1944) was a major Jewish American mobster of the 1930s. He is the only major mob boss to ever have been executed by state or federal authorities for his crimes.

Early career
Born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Buchalter became involved in pushcart shoplifting and by 1919 had served two prison terms. Together with friend Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro, he ultimately gained control of the garment industry unions on the Lower East Side. He used the unions to threaten strikes and demand weekly payments from factory owners while simultaneously dipping into union bank accounts. His control of the unions later evolved into a general protection racket, extending into such areas as bakery trucking. The unions were an extremely profitable venture for him, and he kept an iron grip on them even after becoming a big-time player in the mob.

http://hollywoodusa.co.uk/GravesOutofLA/lepke.htm

[John52]

Meyer Lansky was born as Majer Suchowlinski on July 4, 1902 in Grodno, Poland. His parents were both Jewish and moved the family to the United States in 1911, where they settled in New York City.



In school, Meyer met a boy named Charles "Lucky" Luciano, who tried to shake Meyer down for protection money. When Meyer refused to pay Luciano any money, a brawl started and he put up a good fight. Afterward, Luciano was very impressed with Meyer's fighting abilities and the two ended up becoming good friends.

In 1920, Meyer met Ben "Bugsy" Siegel, who joined with Meyer and Luciano to form the Five Points Gang. Meyer was the perfect partner to Luciano, providing brains to go along with Luciano's balls In the 1920s, they worked together to steal booze from other bootleggers and sell it for 100% profit. When they weren't stealing liquor, they were hired on to protect shipments for exorbitant fees.

In 1931, Meyer helped Luciano to kill his boss, Joe Masseria, allowing him to seize the top position in the Masseria Crime Family. A short while later, he learned of a plot by Salvatore Maranzano to kill Luciano and the two took preemptive action, killing Maranzano first. After these obstacles were out of the way, Luciano went on to form the National Crime Syndicate, with a board of directors that included Meyer. Meyer made many friends in the circle and was an excellent negotiator who could always swing things his way.



Although Luciano held the top position in the organization, Meyer was not jealous. He preferred to maintain a lower profile and realized that assuming the top position would attract a lot of negative attention from rival criminals and the government. It was also necessary to make alliances with Italian gangs who could not tolerate a Jewish leader.

Throughout the 1930s, Meyer set up many gambling operations in Florida, New Orleans, and Cuba. Although many other criminals tried to muscle in on his territory, Meyer was always able to crush their attempts using his strong connections all over the United States.

When Bugsy Siegel came to him seeking money to build a casino in Las Vegas, Meyer invested large amounts of money and managed to convince other wealthy criminals to do the same. When the casino went over budget, several meetings were called to debate killing Siegel, but Meyer managed to hold them off for several years.

Unfortunately, he was eventually forced to step back and allow the murder of Siegel in 1947, although his projects ended up being a huge success over the rest of the twentieth century.



Over the 50s and 60s, Meyer was heavily involved in drug smuggling and prostitution, although he also invested money in legitimate enterprises like golf courses and hotels. In 1970, the government finally began to catch up with him and prepared tax evasion charges. When Meyer learned that he would be prosecuted, he fled to Israel, where he attempted to gain public support to stay in Israel. He dumped millions of dollars into the Israeli economy, but was eventually forced to return to the United States in 1972, after a long battle in court.

In 1973, he underwent open heart surgery just before being put on trial for tax evasion. The government-appointed prosecution failed miserably and Meyer was acquitted of all charges. After Meyer walked free, the government turned its attention elsewhere. Over the next decade, he continued his leading role in the mafia, amassing a fortune of approximately four hundred million dollars.


On January 15, 1983, Meyer died of lung cancer.


http://www.freeinfosociety.com/article.php?id=90

YouTube - Meyer Lansky Interview 1971

YouTube - Meyer Lansky Interview 1971

YouTube - "This is the business we have chosen"

YouTube - "This is the business we have chosen"

[MikeTodd]

In 1973, he underwent open heart surgery just before being put on trial for tax evasion. The government-appointed prosecution failed miserably and Meyer was acquitted of all charges.

I would not be at all surprised to find out that that prosecutor went on to have an incredibly lucrative private practice.
Most likely he himself was tribe.

[John52]

[John52]

The Sociopath



Benjamin "Bugsy"
Siegel



Standing just a tad under six-feet tall, with a thick head of black hair and piercing blue eyes, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel seemed to be a gangster sent from central casting in Hollywood. He was charming with the ladies and a sharp dresser, athletically inclined and fearless. Not only did Ben talk the talk, he walked the walk of a prototypical racketeer.

It seemed only inevitable that Siegel would end up hobnobbing with the glitterati in Hollywood. While his friend Meyer Lansky flitted back-and-forth between legitimate and illegal business opportunities all the while keeping a low profile, Siegel moved from the crime-ridden slums of Brooklyn to the backlots of Hollywood and along the way became one of the first page-one "celebrity" gangsters.




Bugsy was a textbook sociopath. He took what he wanted when he wanted it and the emotion of remorse was alien to him. In his mind, other people were there to be used by him, which was demonstrated by his long record of robbery, rape and murder dating back to his teenage years.

In gangster circles, the nickname "Bugsy" is often a term of endearment or honor. It is given out to those racketeers who show no fear in sticky situations or who are willing to step up to jobs that others are afraid to take. Bugsy Siegel earned the nickname early on in his criminal career because of his tendency to "go bugs" whenever he was angered or thwarted. It was an appellation that he strongly disliked and anyone who used the nickname to his face risked certain bodily harm. Siegel preferred that his friends call him Ben. If you weren't his friend, "Mr. Siegel" would do just fine.

"When we were in a fight Benny would never hesitate," Meyer Lansky once said. "He was even quicker to take action than those hot-blooded Sicilians, the first to start punching and shooting. Nobody reacted faster than Benny."

Benjamin Siegel, with his Hollywood friends and flamboyant lifestyle, will go down in the annals of crime history as the man who brought the rackets to the West Coast and made Las Vegas into the gambling mecca of the United States.

This is the story of Bugsy Siegel — a man who rose from the depths of poverty to the pinnacle of mob life, but whose hubris would be his downfall.

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/g...l/index_1.html

YouTube - The Godfather- I'm Moe Greene! Remix

YouTube - The Godfather- I'm Moe Greene! Remix

Early Days

The Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in the early part of the 20th Century was the proverbial melting pot of America. Within its tight confines lived thousands of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants all struggling to make a life for themselves in the New World. The streets were lined with tenements which teemed with poverty and disease. Push-cart vendors hawked their wares, yelling in Yiddish or Italian, ethnic tensions ran high, and the streets of Hell's Kitchen were a perfect breeding ground for crime.

This was the world to which Benjamin Siegelbaum was born in 1902. His poor immigrant parents raised five children, including Ben, on the meager wages that a day laborer could bring in. Ben saw how hard his Russian-born father worked for pennies and vowed that he would rise above this life. There would be no backbreaking garment industry job for him, he said. He was destined for bigger things.

As a youngster, Ben's best friend was Moey Sedway, a diminutive lackey who was willing to go along with whatever plan Ben was hatching. Their favorite pastime was a two-bit extortion racket launched against the street vendors.



Mug shot of Bugsy

Ben would go up and ask for a dollar. When the vendor would tell the kids to scram, Ben would have Moey splash the wares with kerosene and set a match to it. The next time the boys came around, the vendor was usually willing to pay up. From there, Ben and Moey moved into a protection scam, taking money from the vendors on Lafayette Street in return for making sure no one else pulled the same rip-off.

It was while Ben was running this protection racket that he met another immigrant teen outlaw with big plans. Together, these two youngsters would build up a gang of killers that became first the underworld's murder-for-hire squad and later an integral part of the fledgling national crime Syndicate. There are several stories of how Bugsy Siegel met Meyer Lansky. The first, probably apocryphal, is that Bugsy had been enjoying the unpaid favors of a prostitute in the employ of a young Charlie Luciano and that Lucky was none too happy about her extracurricular activities. He began to beat the hooker and Siegel after catching them in the act and Meyer, then a tool-and-die apprentice, happened upon the scene. Lansky came to Siegel's rescue by beating Lucky with one of his tools and the trio reportedly became friends.

Another version of how the two met, retold in Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life by Robert Lacey, claims that Lansky was watching a street corner craps game when a scuffle broke out and a gun fell to the pavement. Siegel picked up the piece and was preparing to shoot the gun's owner when police whistles sounded. Lansky knocked the gun from Siegel's hand and dragged him away from the ruckus. Although Siegel was not happy about losing the gun, a friendship blossomed. Uri Dan, an Israeli journalist who interviewed Lansky for his biography Meyer Lansky, Mogul of the Mob, also cites this story.

Lansky, who had already had a run-in with a young Salvatore Lucania, later known as Lucky Luciano, saw that the Jewish boys of his Brooklyn neighborhood needed to organize in the same manner as the Italians and Irish. The first person he recruited for his gang was Ben Siegel.
"I told little Benny that he could be my number two," Lansky remembered years later. "He was young but very brave. His big problem was that he was always ready to rush in first and shoot — to act without thinking."

Siegel's gang mates included Abner "Longie" Zwillman, who later ran the rackets in New Jersey; Lepke Buchalter, the head of Murder, Inc. and the only top mobster to get the chair; Lansky's brother, Jake; and a young boy named Arthur Flegenheimer, who would go make a name for himself as Dutch Schultz. Benny and Meyer Lansky were so close that the gang became known as the "Bugs and Meyer Mob."

"Doc" Stacher, another member of the Bugs and Meyer Mob, recalled that Siegel was fearless and saved his friends' lives many times over as the mob moved into bootlegging.

"Bugsy never hesitated when danger threatened," Stacher told Uri Dan. "While we tried to figure out what the best move was, Bugsy was already shooting. When it came to action there was no one better. I've never known a man who had more guts."

Lucky Luciano remembered a similar Ben Siegel in his biography, The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: "We was like analyzers," he said of himself and Meyer. "We didn't hustle ourselves into a decision before we had a chance to think it out. Siegel was just the opposite, and I guess that's what made him good for us, because he would make his move on sheer guts and impulse."

YouTube - Ben "Bugsy" Siegel's Daughter Speaks

YouTube - Ben "Bugsy" Siegel's Daughter Speaks

[John52]

Detroit News file photos

Purple Gang members teased photographers by doffing their hats to hide their faces as they waited to be booked by Detroit police.

The Purple Gang's bloody legacy

By Susan Whitall / The Detroit News
June 9, 2001


They are unlikely souvenirs from the bloody Purple Gang portion of Detroit's history: European porcelain so delicate you can see through it, fine-cut glass, and a teapot painted with pink roses and lined in gold.

The porcelain and china, handed down to Carol Long of Washington Township from her grandparents, was gang barter, what the Purple Gang sometimes used to pay her grandfather George VanInwagen to fix their bullet-ridden Fords. He was a mechanic at the Keystone Garage on Larned Street in downtown Detroit.

"He did good work, and they'd bring their cars to him," Long says. "That's partly how he made his living. My grandmother said he got along with them because he didn't ask any questions."

In the annals of crime, Detroit's Purple Gang didn't have a long ride, but it was colorful enough to inspire books, get them name-checked in an Elvis song ("Jailhouse Rock") and even prompt a Hollywood movie in 1960 starring actor Robert Blake, who ironically is a suspect in the murder last month of his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley.

The fact that the Gang dominated the flow of liquor in Detroit for most of the 1920s, were judged responsible for some 500 murders by the Detroit police and were largely Jewish has helped hone their mystique some 70-plus years later.

Look around Detroit and there are fading remnants of gang history.

This includes the still-vibrant shvitz (bathhouse) on Oakland Avenue the Gang used to frequent; the former blind pig in the basement of the Woodbridge Tavern; and a slew of hollow-eyed mugs shot by Detroit News photographers on file at Wayne State University’s Reuther Library.

Other cities had bootlegging gangs in the '20s, but there were few American cities as "wet" as Detroit, which got a jump on the production and distribution of bootleg liquor when all nonmedicinal alcohol was banned in 1919, a year ahead of most states. Instead of prohibiting the flow of alcohol into Detroit, it instead opened up the floodgates and created a new sort of gangster to swagger around Hastings Street and Oakland Avenue on the city's east side.

The young men who came to be known as the Purple Gang lived in the Jewish neighborhood near Eastern Market. They earned the nickname the "Third Avenue Navy" or the "Little Jewish Navy" from their nighttime excursions back and forth across the river carrying booze from Canada, or just as frequently, hijacking the booty of other bootleggers.

The Bernstein brothers; Abe, Ray and Izzy; Harry Fleisher, Abe Axler and Phil Keywell were just a few of the names that became infamous to Detroiters during the years when most of America was forced by the 1919 Volstead Act to buy wine, beer and liquor from the underworld.


Police mug shots of Purple Gang members Sammy Millman, from left, Phillip Keywell and Harry Keywell.

Prohibition provides opportunity

While Detroit in the early '20s was starting to stir with its first automotive boom, it was a different story in the back alleys and crowded tenements of the east side.

The near east-side neighborhood the Gang sprang from was an incubator for trouble, teeming in the period between 1910-1920 with just the right mix of poverty, ethnic rivalries and the business opportunity created by Prohibition.

The youngsters who came to be known as the Purple Gang started out bullying Eastern Market fruit and vegetable merchants. Soon, they graduated to providing thug services for an older gang that ran the Oakland Sugar House at Oakland and Holbrook avenues.

The Sugar House was a legitimate business on its face, providing corn sugar for home brewers who were still allowed to make a set amount of liquor for personal use. The sugar houses were a valuable resource for illegal stills and breweries, and the Oakland Sugar House was controlled by mobsters. The men known as the Purple Gang were younger, but came to assimilate a portion of the older Sugar House Gang.

The Purple Gang moved on to start up and take over alley breweries and stills, and wrested control of the alcohol flowing into blind pigs in many areas previously controlled by Italian gangs.

On the river, Purple Gang members would tow rowboats filled with liquor behind their speedboats. If they saw government agents, they could cut the rope and take off, free of the illegal stash.

However, the gang became arrogant, even sloppy to the point where they were terrorizing Detroit with street executions of their enemies, killing a police officer and in bloody 1930, murdering a well-known radio personality Jerry Buckley right in the lobby of a downtown hotel.

John T. Greilick / The Detroit News

Joe Newman, 99, of Southfield, knew two Purple Gang cohorts and grew up in the same neighborhood near Eastern Market with the nucleus of the Purple Gang.

Who's left to remember?

The Purple Gang's brief, but vivid reign of terror -- Al Capone traveled from Chicago to import his liquor from them -- was so long ago that it's hard to find Detroiters who remember the days when gang shootings and murders were commonplace.

One who remembers is Joe Newman, 99, who grew up in the same neighborhood as many Purple gangsters. He can pinpoint the site of the Oakland Sugar house and many other gang hangouts. He knew Purple Gang mentor Harry Shorr as well as Solly Levine, a bookie who worked for the gang. Newman also remembers frequenting countless speakeasies as if it were yesterday.

"They were all my favorites!" Newman jokes of the speaks, or blind pigs that in some neighborhoods numbered 150 to a block. While 1,500 Detroit saloons were closed by Prohibition, by 1923 there were 7,000 blind pigs, and by 1925 the number had grown to 15,000.

Adding to that number were neighborhood stills stashed away in bathtubs, basements and garages, and in candy stores or confectionaries. If you asked the right question, a bottle of whiskey would be brought out from the back room.

Newman also remembers "a conflict between the bootleggers," when the Italian and Jewish gangs started fighting over territory, and that when anyone was shot, newsboys would hawk a special edition of the former daily newspaper the Detroit Journal with extra pages devoted to details of the killing.

In 1931, during the height of the Gangs' reign, Detroit Mayor Chester Bowles dismissed the killings as just gangsters helpfully eliminating each other, but Detroiters weary of being caught in the crossfire disagreed, and recalled him from office.

Detroit News file photo

A crowd quickly formed outside the Collingwood Apartments at 1740 Collingwood in Detroit, where three men were shot by Purple Gangsters in 1931 in one of their most daring crimes yet.

Feds target Purple Gang

The flouting of Prohibition was so blatant that federal agents targeted the city and the Purple Gang for prosecution. According to Robert A. Rockaway's book on Jewish gangsters, "But He Was Good To His Mother," FBI agents dressed as Hasidic Jews attended a service at B'Nai David on the Day of Atonement, hoping some wanted Purple gangsters would show up. The feds cover was blown when they stepped outside to smoke cigarettes, which is strictly forbidden on the holiday.

The demise of the Purple Gang began when government agents enlisted the help of the Italian mafia. Another turning point came when one of the gang's acolytes testified against the organization following the Collingwood Apartments Massacre, one of the most-daring Purple Gang murders in 1926.

Bookie Levine had been asked by Purple Gang boss Joe Bernstein to bring three Jewish gangsters from Chicago -- Herman "Hymie" Paul, Joseph Lebovitz and Izzy Sutker -- to a meeting at Apartment 211 in the Collingwood Apartments on Detroit's west side.

The three were imported to Detroit to work hired hands in the gang's bootlegging operation. Once they decided to bypass the gang's authority and go into business for themselves, their Purple bosses decided they had to go. It was during the meeting in Apartment 211 that all three were shot and killed. Although bullets whizzed by his nose, Levine was spared.

Believing that he had lived only to be knocked off at a later date, Levine agreed to testify against the three Purple gangsters who were charged in the murders. After his testimony, Levine set up residence in Detroit police headquarters.

Newman remembers Levine's mother lived upstairs from him at the Cordoba Apartments. But there was no sign of Solly.

"She said he moved to Chicago," he says.

Just a memory




David Coates / The Detroit News

Marcia Cron shows the narrow, short door in the basement of the Woodbridge Tavern, which led to a speakeasy run by her grandparents during Prohibition. The speak was a hangout for members of the Purple Gang.

Today there is little evidence left of the Purple Gang's bloody heyday.

Downstairs from the shuttered Woodbridge Tavern in Rivertown, owner Marcia Cron shows the basement room where her grandparents ran a blind pig when their legitimate bar, Dick's, had to close.

On the wall behind what was the bar is a faded painting of a flapper lounging in a seductive pose, as well as a more demure view of a flapper's bobbed hairdo. The blind pig was just yards from the river and served as a frequent watering hole for Purple gangsters, Cron says. "My mother would drive a car to go pick up the liquor (from gangsters) when she was just 12," she says. "She would deliver it here to the back cellar door."

Today, Hastings Street is just a memory, the ghosts of its jazz musicians, gangsters and wild women lying under the concrete of I-75. While the Sugar House is gone, a rickety nearby commercial garage is almost surely the one that figures in Purple Gang history. And farther down Oakland Avenue, the Shvitz, a bathhouse used by Purple gangsters, is still open for business, circled by a barbed wire fence.

Newman remembers all the addresses for the Oakland Sugar House, Henry the Hatter (where his oldest brother worked), plus every address and phone number where he ever lived.

He can remember when Detroit was a bloodier and yes, a more colorful place, with characters like blind pig owner Lefty Clark walking down the street with a monkey on his shoulder and the German shepherds brought in by gangsters running the Ackmu Club to guard their liquor.
"The Irish, Jewish and Italians didn't get along," says Newman, modestly describing his former east-side neighborhood.

http://apps.detnews.com/apps/history/index.php?id=8

[John52]

[Stewart Meadows]

Yeezy-wearing mobster sentenced for running violent crime syndicate


By Andrew Denney
December 3, 2019



Leonid "Lenny" Gershman

The Brooklyn federal judge who put “El Chapo” behind bars for life gave a lighter sentence to the leader of a violent Brooklyn crime syndicate Tuesday — saying he’s been “jaded” by worse mobsters.

Leonid “Lenny” Gershman — who made headlines due to his expensive tastes, including Kanye West-branded footwear and fancy cars — was sentenced to 16 and a half years in prison, which was more than 10 years shorter than the stint that prosecutors had sought.

Gershman, 36, was convicted last year on charges including racketeering, extortion, illegal gambling and loan sharking.

He was also found guilty of giving the go-ahead to members of his Eastern European crime syndicate to torch a three-story apartment building in Sheepshead Bay that housed a rival illegal gambling operation — nearly killing a 19-year-old college student and 12-year-old boy who got trapped in the blaze.

Brooklyn federal Judge Brian Cogan — who recently sentenced notorious drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman to life in prison plus 30 years — explained that he has been “jaded” by some of the mobsters he has sentenced in the past and that Gershman’s crimes look tame by comparison.

https://nypost.com/2019/12/03/yeezy-...ime-syndicate/

[Ray Allan]

I don't know exact statistics, but I'm sure the number of Italians and Italian-Americans involved in organized crime or criminal activity period is miniscule, but unfortunately they have gotten all the notoriety. With jews however, this type of behavior is entirely genetic amongst the entire rotten tribe.

[Stewart Meadows]

In ‘Lansky,’ Harvey Keitel puts the legendary gangster’s Jewishness front and center


BY STEPHEN SILVER JUNE 25, 2021 1:04 PM



(JTA) — Perhaps no American Jewish actor has been so closely associated with crime films as Harvey Keitel.

During a career now in its sixth decade, the 82-year-old Keitel has appeared in “Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” “Wise Guys,” “Bugsy,” “The Two Jakes,” “Reservoir Dogs” and “The Irishman,” among numerous other films.

Now he’s adding to the list with “Lansky,” portraying perhaps the most famous Jewish gangster of all time, Meyer Lansky.

Lansky, born in Russia in 1902, arrived in New York in 1911. Known as the “Mob’s Accountant,” he was notorious in his own right, operating criminal rackets from Miami to Las Vegas to Cuba and playing a role in the establishment of what’s been called the National Crime Syndicate.
(...)
We see Lansky, in the run-up to World War II, brawling with Nazi sympathizers from the German-American Bund. We also see him saying Kaddish in a synagogue and telling a rabbi joke. A montage of brutality by the Jewish criminal outfit Murder, Inc., is scored with “Hava Nagila.”

“I’m an American, and a Jew,” Keitel as Lansky says in the film. “The Germans wanted to destroy both of those things. So I wanted to destroy the Germans, and I did.”
(...)
An active criminal for more than a half century, Lansky was a rarity among gangsters in some key ways: Aside from serving a couple of months on a gambling charge, he avoided major prison time, and also managed to live to old age, passing away at 80 in 1983. That gambling conviction was costly, however, as it later led Israel to deny him asylum.

Lansky’s “good” side, at least according to the film, consisted of fighting Nazis, and also providing crucial support to Israel at the outset of its existence.

https://www.jta.org/2021/06/25/cultu...ont-and-center

[Dawn Cannon]

Originally Posted by Ray Allan

I don't know exact statistics, but I'm sure the number of Italians and Italian-Americans involved in organized crime or criminal activity period is miniscule, but unfortunately they have gotten all the notoriety. With jews however, this type of behavior is entirely genetic amongst the entire rotten tribe.

It's another of those things that people just won't believe.