A fellow journalist remarked that most people who knew Jack, from his frequent court appearances, felt that Brown had pretty much caught the flavor of the man.
Jack charged that the Hearst Publishing Company had libeled him, but Judge Quilici of the municipal court dismissed the suit.
His friends told him to forget about it, but Jack was adamant. “I’m paying those judges,” he said, “so why shouldn’t I use them?” But he never won any of the lawsuits.
Undeterred, Jack kept suing. He knew exactly what he was doing, however. “Never be afraid to sue,” he told his gangster confederates. “Go into court at the drop of a hat, anytime you don’t like what some newspaper guy writes. You pay your lawyers a retainer. The judges are on our payrolls.
“You can sue in Cook County for fifteen dollars. Just the fact that a suit has been filed will cause most people to shut up. They can never be sure that some nutty jury won’t award you a million dollars in damages.” Excellent logic for a man with an IQ of 82.18
Although Minneapolis, Minnesota could not match any of the other cities in the size of its Jewish population, much of that city’s illicit business was managed by Isidore “Kid Cann” (“If anyone can, the Kid can”) Blumenfeld and his all-Jewish syndicate. Born in Rumania in 1901, Blumenfeld came to the United States as a child. Two of his brothers, Harry and Yiddy, who changed their last name to Bloom, served as his lieutenants. In 1942, the FBI identified Kid Cann as “The overlord of the Minneapolis, Minnesota underworld”; local journalists called him “the Godfather of Minneapolis.”19
This Jewish syndicate oversaw a goodly portion of Minneapolis’s bootlegging, gambling and vice. They also controlled a number of police and politicians. Anyone who got in their way was eliminated.
A crusading newspaperman named Walter Ligget, publisher of the Midwest American, ran a series of editorials exposing the syndicate’s involvement with local officials in a variety of illegal activities. In December 1935, he was shot and killed by two assassins as he came home from Christmas shopping with his family.
Blumenfeld was arrested after Ligget’s wife, Edith, identified him in a police line-up as one of the killers. “Oh that face,” she sobbed to the police. “It passed inches from me and it was grinning, grinning. I’ll remember that face to my dying day.”20
During the trial, Blumenfeld claimed that at the time of the killing he had been at a barbershop nineteen blocks away. And he had the witnesses to prove it. The jury deliberated less than four hours and acquitted Blumenfeld of the murder.
Edith Ligget blamed the acquittal on the city’s mayor, who had been accused of corruption by her husband. Kid Cann celebrated by taking a vacation in Florida. He liked what he saw, and he and his brothers invested in real estate and hotels in Miami, taking up residence in that city when they “retired.”21
Minneapolis’s sister city, St. Paul, was the home of two large Jewish bootleg gangs; the Bennie Gleeman-Harry Gellman syndicate, and the Leon Gleckman syndicate. Of the two, Gleckman rose to become “the most powerful syndicate leader in St. Paul.”22 Gleckman was born in 1894 in Minsk, Russia, the third of eight children, and came to the United States in 1903 with his family. As a teenager, Gleckman married clerical worker Rose Goldstein, by whom he had three daughters. Described as “a salesman by inclination, a bootlegger by vocation, and a sports buff by avocation.” Gleckman was bright, self-confident and glib. With his money and power, Gleckman played an active role in the politics of St. Paul and became a strong factor in that city’s government.23
Gleckman’s prominence — he was called “the Al Capone of the Northwest” — exposed him to a hazard common to bootleggers of the 1930s: being kidnapped by other gangsters. In September 1931, he was kidnapped from his home and held captive in a cottage located in Wisconsin. The initial ransom was thought to be $200,000, but after negotiations with Gleckman’s partner, Morris Roisner, the amount dropped to $75,000. The final sum was reduced to $5,000, plus the $1,450 in cash that Gleckman had in his pockets. He was released in October 1931, after eight days in captivity.
Rumor had it that some of Gleckman’s “friends” had engineered the kidnapping.
Gleckman later told the FBI that he intended to investigate the rumors and “would take care of them in his own way.” Shortly thereafter, one of Gleckman’s kidnappers, hotel owner Frank LaPre, was found dead with multiple gunshots to the face. Immediately after LaPre’s death, the other conspirators were apprehended and convicted of the kidnapping.
After the trauma of being kidnapped, Gleckman had police guard his house, ostensibly to guard against another kidnapping. Many underworld bosses controlled members of their police departments, but not many could command police officers to stand guard outside their home.24
What did Jewish community leaders think of all this? They evinced shame and horror at the activities and notoriety of these men because the gangster epitomized the “bad Jew,” the evildoer who would bring onus and hatred upon the entire community. Chicago Jewish leader S. M. Melamed warned his coreligionists in 1924 “that there is arising now among American Jewry an element which in the course of time may become a danger to us and which already is causing much shame. I refer to the great number of Jews in the underworld.” He deplored the fact that in Chicago “not a single day passes by during which some Jewish criminal is not arrested. Something must be rotten within American Jewry, if such a phenomenon is possible.”25
Reacting to a 1928 grand jury investigation exposing the role of Boo Boo Hoff and other Jews in Philadelphia’s underworld, Rabbi Mortimore J. Cohen of Congregation Beth Shalom bemoaned the shame “that has come to all Israel in the crimes of a lawless few. What disgrace is ours through these men, less than human, who have, without let or hindrance, dragged the Jewish name in the mud and filth of murder and bribery and corruption! As ever, all Israel is responsible one for the other, and the deeds of these men will be held against a whole people for all time to come. Let any cry break out against foreigners, and the Jews will be hounded for the dark sins of these reprobates.”26
Cohen’s fears were born out in Minneapolis. In November 1927, the Minneapolis Saturday Press, ran an article claiming that “ninety percent of the crimes committed against society in this city are committed by Jew gangsters.” The author went on to state, “I am launching no attack against the Jewish people as a race. I am merely calling attention to a fact.”27
These fears increased during the 1930s, when the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Europe fueled a precipitous rise in anti-Semitism in the United States. Jewish leaders worried that Jewish gangsterism would provide ammunition for Jew-haters. Consequently, they steadfastly refused to acknowledge the problem in public. “We knew about the Jewish gangsters,” confesses Detroit community leader Leonard Simons, “but we were afraid to admit it.”28
Long-time Detroit Jewish journalist Philip Slomovitz concedes that the community knew about the Jewish criminals, yet the English-Jewish press printed nothing about them. “We panicked,” he admits. “We worried about what the gentiles would say and submitted to our fears.” In retrospect, Slomovitz believes this was a mistake. “It wouldn’t have hurt if we were unafraid and said, ‘Yes, we have them, but our morality is above that’.”29
If Jewish morality was above this, what motivated these men to engage in criminal activities. Poverty? Perhaps. Meyer Lansky and Longy Zwillman said they did what they did because they grew up poor and never wanted to endure it again. Yet some criminals, such as Arnold Rothstein, were raised in comfortable circumstances. Their environment? Maybe. But these gangsters were no more deprived or suffering than their peers who grew up in the same slum or overcrowded immigrant quarters, but went legitimate.
Anti-Semitism? Possibly, because the United States of the 1920s was not always a pleasant place for Jews to live. From 1920 to 1927 Henry Ford vilified Jews in the pages of his Dearborn Independent newspaper and in pamphlets entitled “The International Jew.” Ford required his a
utomobile dealers to give a pamphlet to everyone who purchased one of his cars, and millions of Americans bought Fords.
The Ku Klux Klan instigated boycotts of Jewish merchants, vandalized Jewish-owned stores, burned crosses outside synagogues and terrorized prominent Jews in southern Jewish communities. Colleges and professional schools, including Harvard, Dartmouth, Rutgers, Columbia and New York University, imposed quotas on Jewish enrollment. And Jews encountered economic discrimination in commercial banks, industrial corporations, public utilities and insurance companies, as well as widespread social discrimination.30
Blocked from respectable avenues to success and status, many Jews selected alternate routes to fame and fortune, such as sports (especially boxing), and the entertainment industry. And some tough young Jews may have been angry enough at American society to choose crime.
More likely, however, these men selected careers in crime
Louis (Lepke) Buchalter
because they wanted money, power, recognition and status, and they wanted it fast. Crime offered them a quick way to realize their dreams. And crime was exciting, certainly more glamorous than the tedium of studying or the drudgery of working long hours in a shop or factory.
By the age of twenty-three Harry Fleisch owned a Cadillac, wore fancy clothes, cavorted with blond girlfriends and lived in a fine house. “I had been to Europe before I was twenty-flve,,, he recalled. “My brother, the schlemiel, studied day and night as a kid and later worked like a dog in his store. He went to Europe for the first time when he was forty-five years old. And you know who paid for the trip? I did.”31
Meyer Lansky always considered his father to be a failure and something of a fool for having worked so hard all his life, in the sweatshops of the garment industry, for so little reward. While still a youngster, Lansky determined not to repeat his father’s mistakes, swearing that “When I grew up I’d be very rich.” He chose crime as the way to reach his goal.32
Lester Schaffer, the Philadelphia attorney who defended Willie Weisberg, believes his clients became criminals because their options were limited. “They were uneducated men, but they wanted the good life,” he says. “There was little else they could do to get it.”33
Herb Brin, a crime reporter in Chicago during the 1930s and a feature writer for the Los Angeles Times in the 1940s, personally knew many Chicago and Los Angeles Jewish mobsters. He agrees with Schaffer’s assessment. “They were uneducated. Crime was the easy way to make a buck,” he says. “That’s all it was.”34
West Coast mobster Mickey Cohen echoes this analysis. Reflecting on what a life in crime did for him, Cohen explained that he was uneducated. “So where could I have had the opportunity to meet the people that I’ve met in my life? Being an uneducated person, what walk of life could I have gotten into that I could have become involved with such people? I’m talking about celebrities, politicians, people in higher walks of life and education. Where could I have ever come to meet these kind of people if I had gone into some other line of work than I did?”35
Contrary to the image promoted by movies and crime exposes, not every Jewish gangster was a boss, like Mickey Cohen. Most of the hundreds of Jewish mobsters who toiled during Prohibition and the Great Depression were members of gangs, and took orders rather than gave them.
Chapter Three: The Purple Gang
On the afternoon of September 16,1931, three transplanted Chicago Jewish hoodlums, Herman “Hymie’’ Paul, Joseph “Nigger Joe” Lebovitz and Joseph “Izzy” Sutker, members of Detroit’s “Little Jewish Navy” gang of rum-runners, and a local bookmaker, Solomon “Solly” Levine, pushed the buzzer for Apartment 211 at 1740 Collingwood Avenue on Detroit’s west side.
Levine had brought the others to the apartment house ostensibly to discuss a “peace treaty” with rival gangsters. They came unarmed.1
Waiting for them inside the apartment were Irving Milberg, Harry Keywell, Ray Bernstein and Harry Fleisher, all members of Detroit’s notorious Purple Gang.
The men all knew each other. The Purple Gang had imported Hymie, Nigger Joe, and Izzy to Detroit in 1926, to help them in their wars against other local bootlegging organizations.
For a while, the trio did their job well. But then they decided to go into business for themselves. They hired their own gunmen and tried to get a piece of the Detroit action, something even Al Capone himself declined to do.
The boys moved into the rackets and affiliated themselves with the Third Avenue Navy, a gang so named because it landed its river cargoes of Canadian whiskey in the railroad yards between Third and Fourth Avenue. Because all its members were Jews, the outfit was also referred to as the “Little Jewish Navy.”2
The Chicagoans quickly acquired an unsavory reputation in the Detroit underworld. They hijacked from friend and foe alike and double-crossed almost everyone who worked with them. Local mobsters found them so untrustworthy that no one dared collaborate with them. Worse, they refused to stay within their own boundaries in the alcohol and whiskey trade, encroaching on the domain of other gangs. They especially angered the Purple Gang by brazenly selling bootleg whiskey in the Purple’s territory.3
In 1930, the trio began extorting protection money from blind pigs1 and bookmakers. Their targets included friends of the Purples as well as establishments that were already paying the Purples for protection. Moreover, they behaved deceitfully in their bootlegging deals with the gang by failing to pay what they owed.
The stage was set. Sutker, Paul and Lebovitz had pushed their luck once too often. Their activities spelled death. It was only a matter of time.
Ray Bernstein, the accepted leader of the Purple Gang, was 28 years old, short and slightly built, with a dark complexion and prominent blue eyes that gave his face a perpetually devious expression. He was the one who had organized the meeting between the two groups, and he was the one who answered the buzzer and ushered the visitors into the apartment.
The men shook hands and the visitors sat together on a long couch facing the Purples. After chatting for some minutes, Bernstein asked, “Where’s Scotty with the books?’’
He then got up and left on the pretext of calling their bookmaker. The others continued talking about details of their mutual financial transactions.
Crowded together on the sofa, the visitors failed to see any significance in the fact that the Purples stood or sat some distance apart, directly across from them.
Meanwhile, Bernstein had walked down to the alley behind the apartment house and started the engine of the getaway car. After making sure the escape route was clear, he tooted the horn and waited.
Suddenly the Purples drew guns and began shooting.
Levine sat frozen to his seat as bullets whizzed around him. One bullet zipped past his nose and struck Sutker in the head. His three companions made desperate but futile efforts to flee as slugs from blazing guns slammed into them. It was over in seconds.
When the smoke cleared, Lebovitz, Sutker and Paul, their bodies riddled with bullets, lay dead.
Keywell, Milberg and Fleisher huddled for a moment, then one of them turned to Levine and said, “Come on!”
As they retreated through the kitchen, the killers dropped their guns into a can of green paint they had left on the floor near the stove. The registration markings on the weapons had been filed off and the green paint would eliminate any fingerprints.
They rushed down the back stairs to the waiting car. With Bernstein at the wheel, the car sped away, nearly hitting a truck and barely missing a woman and child. After driving a short distance, they stopped the car and let Levine, a pal from their school days, get out.
Letting Levine go proved to be a mistake. Within hours, he was seized by detectives who were rounding up known underworld figures. He fingered the Purples as the killers.
The authorities apprehended Keywell and Bernstein two days after the murders. Heavily armed lawmen surrounded their house, but both surrendered without a fight. Milberg was captured in an apartment on September
19. Police confiscated five pistols and a rifle. He, too, yielded without a fight.
Fleisher, also named in the murder warrant, vanished and was not heard from until months later.
Solly Levine testified at the preliminary hearing against the three men, who were bound over for trial on first degree murder charges. Levine remained the key witness in the trial, which took place on October 28, 1931, although the caretaker of the Collingwood apartment building and the boy who was almost run over also testified and identified the Purples.
The police’s greatest tasks were keeping Solly alive so he could testify in court, guarding the jurors against intimidation and protecting the accused from retaliation by the slain men’s friends.
The defendants were transported to and from court in a patrol wagon with machine and riot guns protruding from the rear door. The jurors rode to the trial in a special bus escorted by five police cruisers in front and back, a detail of motorcycle police on either side, and a squad of armed police within.
Detroit had never seen anything like it.
Throughout the trial, Solly Levine had a personal bodyguard of twelve fast-shooting policemen. He voluntarily chose to live inside the police headquarters building.
Sitting slumped down in the witness chair, a pale, nervous and frightened Solly told his story. As he spoke, eight of his bodyguards flanked the witness chair, hands close to their revolver holsters.
Solly admitted that he was a partner of Hymie Paul, Joe Lebovitz and Izzy Sutker. “We owed Bernstein several hundred dollars for alky and I guess, too, they thought that we had been responsible for trying to cut in on their business and that we had hijacked some of the dope they were transporting,” he said. “But we didn’t have any idea that they were trying to get us.
But He Was Good to His Mother - The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters Page 5