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

by Robert Rockaway

  Dutch was one of the flakiest, cheapest and cold-blooded gangsters of the Prohibition era. Few other gangsters, including his own men, liked or respected him.

  The bank robber Willie “The Actor” Sutton recalled Schultz as “a vicious, pathologically suspicious killer who kept his people in line through sheer terror. Like anyone else who ever knew him I disliked him intensely.”29

  Schultz paid his men as little as he could get away with and would fly into a murderous rage whenever anyone asked him for a raise. One day he was arguing with one of his men, Jules Martin, about money. Schultz abruptly ended the argument by drawing his gun, shoving it into Martin’s mouth and pulling the trigger. Schultz’s lawyer, Dixie Davis, who witnessed the killing, was horrified. “It is wrong in the underworld to kill a fellow for no reason at all,” he later said. “The Dutchman did that murder just as casually as if he were picking his teeth.”30

  Lucky Luciano called Schultz “one of the cheapest guys I ever knew, practically a miser. Here was a guy with a couple of million bucks and he dressed like a pig. He used to brag that he never spent more than thirty-five bucks for a suit, and it hadda have two pairs of pants. His big deal was buyin’ a newspaper for two cents so he could read all about himself.”31

  Schultz viewed his parsimony differently. “I think only queers wear silk shirts,” he said. “I never bought one in my life. A guy’s a sucker to spend fifteen or twenty dollars on a shirt. Hell, a guy can get a good one for two bucks.”32

  In the mid-1920s Schultz formed a gang of over a hundred gunsels that dominated bootlegging in the Bronx and parts of Manhattan, becoming the undisputed beer baron of the Bronx through sheer savagery and brutality. Two of his toughest competitors were a pair of Irish brothers, John and Joe Rock. After some initial resistance, John thought it wiser to step aside but Joe, apparently made of sterner stuff, refused to withdraw from the beer business. He paid a high price for his stubbornness: he was kidnapped one night, beaten, hung by his thumbs on a meat hook and then blindfolded with a strip of gauze which, so the story goes, had been dipped in a mixture containing the drippings from a gonorrhea infection. Whatever the potion was, Joe came out of the experience blind. Joe’s family paid a $35,000 ransom to get back what was left of him.33

  Schultz also moved into Harlem where he took over the numbers racket. His method was simple: he told those running the business to follow his orders or he would kill them. They agreed. Numbers proved to be a very lucrative part of Schultz’s operation; his Harlem venture added approximately $20 million to his annual income.34

  According to Dixie Davis, only one offense truly enraged Schultz. “You can insult Arthur’s girl, spit in his face, push him around and he’ll laugh. But don’t steal a dollar from his accounts. If you do, you’re dead.”35

  Once, while dining in Newark, Abner “Longy” Zwillman’s territory, Schultz was accosted by an obviously drunk Zwillman cohort named Max “Puddy” Hinkes. Puddy walked over to Schultz’s table and in a loud voice said, “Get the fuck out of Newark. You’re nobody. Newark belongs to Abe. You’re a fucking nobody.”

  The room got very quiet as all eyes were on Schultz. Dutch looked at Hinkes for a moment and burst out laughing. Before

  Louis (Pretty) Amberg

  Schultz’s mood changed, Hinkes was hustled out of the club and driven home.

  When he woke up the next day, Hinkes received a call that Abner Zwillman wanted to see him. When Hinkes entered his office, Zwillman asked him, “Puddy, were you drunk last night?”

  “Yeah,” said Hinkes.

  “Do you remember what you did?” queried Zwillman.

  “No,” answered Hinkes.

  “Did you go to the Blue Mirror?” asked Zwillman.

  “I think so,” said Hinkes.

  “Did you tell someone to go fuck themselves?” asked Zwillman.

  “I tell a lot of people to go fuck themselves,” said Hinkes.

  “Did you tell Dutch Schultz to go fuck himself and to get out of Newark?” asked Zwillman.

  “How the fuck would I know, I was drunk,” said Hinkes.

  Zwillman told Hinkes that was exactly what he did. Zwillman smoothed things out with Schultz, and Hinkes lived to tell the tale fifty-five years later.36

  Jack “Legs” Diamond was not as fortunate. For years he and Dutch engaged in a shooting war over bootlegging territory. For some time, Diamond led a charmed life, and every Schultz effort to eliminate him failed. In the early morning hours of December 18, 1931, Diamond’s luck finally ran out. As he lay drunk and asleep in his boardinghouse room, someone entered and pumped three bullets into his head. The killer was never caught.

  When he was informed of his rival’s death Schultz remarked, “Just another punk caught with his hands in my pocket.”37

  The Bugs-Meyer mob was formed in 1921 by two of the most famous Jewish organized crime figures of the twentieth century, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and Meyer Lansky.

  At the time the gang was formed, Siegel was fifteen and Lansky nineteen years old. Lansky was born Meyer Suchowljansky in Grodno, Poland in 1902, and brought to the United States by his parents when he was ten. He completed the eighth grade and left school at age fifteen for a job in a tool and die shop. Despite his early departure from school, Lansky remained an avid reader all his life.

  Siegel was born in New York in 1905 and evolved into the archetypal movie mobster: handsome, hot-headed, ambitious and ruthless. When Ben got angry he actually glowed with rage. He was so reckless and violent, people said that he was “bugs,” slang for crazy. According to East Side folklore, that was how he got his nickname, Bugsy. Siegel hated the nickname and no one dared call him “Bugsy” to his face.38

  Together, Lansky and Siegel made a fearsome combination, with Lansky providing the brains and Siegel the brawn. “He was young but very brave,” Lansky recalled of Siegel. “He liked guns. His big problem was that he was always ready to rush in first and shoot — to act without thinking. That always got him into trouble.”39 The two fledgling gangsters recruited an expert group of gunmen and offered to transport illegal liquor for bootleggers, delivery guaranteed. The boys also supplied mobsters with stolen cars and trucks and expert drivers.

  In the dangerous business of bootlegging, Siegefs fearlessness often proved an asset. Joseph “Doc” Stacher, an early member of the group remembered that Siegel never hesitated when danger threatened. “While we tried to figure out what the best move was, Ben was already shooting. When it came to action there was no one better. I’ve seen him charge ten men single-handed and they would all turn and run. I never knew a man who had more guts. And the Sicilians felt the same way.”40

  Later in life Lansky claimed that he always tried to avoid the use of guns. “It’s always much better not to shoot if you can help it. It’s better to use reason — or if that fails, threats.” Violence, Meyer liked to say, was “a poor substitute for brains.”41

  In line with this philosophy, Lansky asserted that his gang killed no one, but operated as an efficient business. “We were in business like the Ford Motor Company,” Meyer said. “Shooting and killing was an inefficient way of doing business. Ford salesmen didn’t shoot Chevrolet salesmen. They tried to outbid them.”42

  That’s not quite how others remembered the mob. Police recall the gang as particularly vicious, one that used violence, intimidation and murder if it had to. One veteran New York City detective, who dealt with them all, said Bugsy was the worst. “For two bucks that Bugsy-Meyer mob would break the arm of a man they’d never seen. They’d kill for less than fifty. Bugsy seemed to like to do the job himself. It gave him a sense of power. He got his kicks out of seeing his victims suffering, groaning and dying.”43

  By 1928, the Siegel-Lansky outfit sold protection to nightclubs, acted as troopers for the Italian mobsters Joe Adonis, Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello, muscled in on the labor unions and dabbled in armed robbery, burglary and narcotics.

  Siegel and Lansky’s friendship with the ri
sing young Italian mobsters benefited both sides in the years to come, especially Meyer’s relationship with Lucky Luciano. Lansky and Luciano had known each other since childhood and remained close all their lives. Bugsy Siegel once described the special affinity that existed between the two men to Joe Stacher. “They were more than brothers, they were like lovers, Charley Luciano and Meyer, although of course there was nothing sexual between them. They would just look at each other and you would know that a few minutes later one would say what the other was thinking. I never heard them argue. I never heard them quarrel. They were always in agreement with each other.”44

  In 1931, Luciano decided it was time to eliminate the old-time New York Mafia leaders and asked his Jewish associates, Lansky and Siegel, for help. The first man Luciano went against was his own boss, Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria.

  On a beautiful spring day in April 1931, Luciano invited Masseria to dine with him at the Nuova Villa Tammaro Restaurant on Coney Island. They sat at a corner table. Never a big eater, Luciano ate slowly and sparingly. Masseria gorged himself on antipasto, spaghetti with red clam sauce, lobster Fra Diavolo and a bottle of Chianti. He was still eating when most of the other lunchtime diners had left. Soon Masseria and Luciano were the last patrons in the restaurant.

  After the meal, Luciano excused himself to go to the men’s room. Outside, a car drew up alongside the restaurant; in it were Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis and Bugsy Siegel.

  As soon as the bathroom door closed behind Luciano, the front door of the restaurant opened and the four men, led by Siegel, burst in. They pulled out revolvers and began firing at Masseria. More than twenty shots ricocheted around the room, six of them slamming into Masseria. He slumped, face down, on the table. The killing took less than a minute. Luciano left the restaurant before the police arrived and the police could find no witnesses to the shooting.45

  In September 1931, less than six months after the killing of Masseria, four gunmen shot and killed the last remaining old-time boss, Salvatore Maranzano, as he sat in his office over Grand Central Station.

  The assassins were never caught, but underworld lore has it that they were Jewish men organized on Luciano’s behalf by Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel. Dutch Schultz’s bodyguard, Abe “Bo” Weinberg, later claimed that he was one of the killers. According to Joseph Valachi, a small-time hood who informed on the Mafia, Samuel “Red” Levine was another one of the gunmen.46

  Luciano never forgot the invaluable help his Jewish associates gave him in his rise to the top of organized crime. With his blessings and assistance, Siegel and Lansky went on to bigger and better things: Meyer to creating a gambling empire in Cuba and the Bahamas and to notoriety as the alleged “chairman of the board” of the National Crime Syndicate, and Bugsy to renown as the dreamer who built the Flamingo Hotel and opened up Las Vegas to organized crime.

  Labor racketeering became the province of Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, one of the most vicious gangsters in the annals of American crime. Lepke became boss of an extensive racket and smuggling empire, a man who “hired killers the way the average contractor hires day laborers.”47

  Buchalter was not at all typical of the gangster image usually held in the public mind. He was quiet and unprepossessing in appearance, “neat and almost apologetic in manner,” and content to let his lieutenants get the spotlight as long as he got the money. Posing as a prosperous businessman, he became the symbol of the most deadly type of operator, skillful and successful in evading the law for many years.

  Louis Buchalter was born on the Lower East Side of New York in 1897, the son of Barnett Buchalter, who had immigrated to the United States from Russia, and Rose Buchalter. As a result of previous marriages, there were eleven children in the Buchalter household. One of Lepke’s brothers became a rabbi, another a dentist, and a sister became a teacher. Lepke was the only one to go bad.48

  Louis’s mother nicknamed him “Lepkele,” an affectionate Yiddish diminutive meaning “little Louis.”

  Lucky Luciano remembered the First time he met Buchalter. “I took one look at him and all I could see was a guy with a fat face, a big head and so much muscle it was bulgin’ out of his sleeves. Somethin’ inside warned me that this guy was mostly strong-arm and very little brain. So I said to him, ‘Listen, Lou…’

  “He stopped me and said, kinda nice, ‘You can call me Lepke.’

  ‘‘I couldn’t help it,” recalled Luciano, ‘‘I started to laugh. I said, ‘What the fuck kinda name is that?’

  ‘‘He got all red and embarrassed and he explained that when he was a kid his mother used to call him by a pet Jewish name, Lepkele.

  ‘‘So from then on we all called him Lepke. How can you not like a guy who always thinks about his mother?”49

  J. Edgar Hoover didn’t. In the 1930s, Hoover labeled little Louis as ‘‘one of the most dangerous criminals in the United States.”50

  Lepke got better-than-average marks in school and seems to have behaved himself. When he was fourteen his father died. One year later Buchalter quit school, despite the pleas of his mother and family, and went to work as a delivery boy. By the time Lepke was eighteen his entire family, except Louis himself, had moved out west.

  Lepke turned down an elder brother’s offer to put him through high school and college and, instead, moved into a furnished room on the East Side.

  It was in this brawling neighborhood that Louis embarked on his criminal career. He joined a gang of local hoodlums who rolled drunks, picked pockets and robbed pushcarts. His close associate at this time, and for the next thirty years, was Jacob ‘‘Gurrah” Shapiro, a surly, loud-mouthed and hoarsely guttural 200-pound enforcer. One reporter called him ‘‘the Donald Duck of the New York underworld, constantly out of temper.”51

  Just after his nineteenth birthday, Lepke was sent to jail for stealing a salesman’s sample case. Paroled in 1917, he was back in prison the next year on a larceny charge. He was arrested again in 1920 on a burglary charge and was sent up for two years. Upon his release, he turned his talent to labor racketeering and managed to avoid further prison sentences until his arrest in 1939.

  In his private life, Lepke was a devoted family man who rarely drank or gambled, but outside his home he commanded an army of gangsters who extorted millions of dollars from his victims. It was estimated that payments to Lepke for “protection” amounted to over $10 million annually.52

  The gang’s weapons were destructive acids, bludgeons, blackjacks, knives, fire, ice picks and guns. For a fee, Lepke protected manufacturers from shop unionizers and strikers by intimidating workers and using strong-arm tactics. He also forced unions to do his bidding by installing his own business agents or by creating rival unions.53

  Lepke explained that the trick was a captive union and a captive employer’s association. “That way you got both management and labor in your pocket.”54

  His system worked and he became a legend. The few men who failed to heed the gang’s orders or who dared to go to the police with their stories suffered destruction, acid burns, mayhem and murder. As a Buchalter associate once put it, “Lep loves to hurt people.”55

  In the same way that he gained control over the unions through terror, Buchalter moved into legitimate business. Those who tried to fight him found their plants wrecked or their stocks ruined by a special Lepke task force, expert in the art of acid throwing. When a manufacturer surrendered, Lepke would place his men in the factory as managers, foremen and bookkeepers.

  By 1932 Buchalter dominated a wide assortment of industries and unions in New York, including the bakery and pastry drivers, the milliners, the garment workers, the shoe trade, the poultry market, the taxicab business, the motion picture operators and the fur truckers.56

  Lepke also engaged in a sideline — drug trafficking. Before long he became one of the largest importers and distributors of heroin, cocaine and opium in the United States. Lepke used young women, chosen for their charm and personality, as his agents. Each
lady received $2,000 plus her expenses to make the trip to Europe and bring back trunks loaded with narcotics. Lepke’s syndicate operated in Mexico, Japan, China, France, Italy and Denmark, and such American ports as New York, San Francisco and Seattle.57

  With all the money rolling in, Lepke became a multi-millionaire and lived accordingly. He resided in a plush mid-Manhattan apartment and maintained chauffeur driven cars for trips to racetracks and nightclubs. And he often spent his winters in Florida and California.58

  Buchalter’s reputation throughout the underworld was that he never lost his temper, but his own men feared him. They called him “The Judge,” sometimes “Judge Louie.” One associate, Shalom Bernstein, summed it up for all when he said, “I don’t ask questions, I just obey. It would be more healthier.”59

  The history of organized crime in America is filled with myths. One of the more enduring, reinforced by Hollywood and crime writers, is that sometime in the 1930s Jewish and Italian mobsters in New York came together and set up a National Crime Syndicate to divvy up the rackets across the country in an orderly and businesslike fashion. Among the founders of this alleged syndicate were Lepke, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz and Longy Zwillman, and Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello and Joe Adonis.60

  At Lepke’s suggestion, the syndicate supposedly created an enforcement arm of killers to maintain order. The primary members of this unit were a Brooklyn-based gang of Jewish thugs led by Abe “Kid Twist” Reles and his friends Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss, Abraham “Pretty” Levine and Martin “Buggsy” Goldstein, together with an Italian mob led by Harry “Happy” (because he wore a perpetual scowl) Maione and Frank “Dasher” Abbandando. A zealous crime reporter, Harry Feeney, dubbed this outfit of killers-for-hire Murder, Inc. And Murder, Inc. it has remained.61