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

by Robert Rockaway

  Yoski concentrated on the produce market, truckmen and livery stables, leaving the ice cream trade, seltzer and soda water dealers to others. He planned the gang’s strategy and routinely boasted of personally poisoning over two hundred horses. This feat earned him the title “King of the Horse Poisoners.”10

  Benjamin Fein was born of poor immigrant parents on the Lower East Side in 1889. He started off in crime at an early age, stealing packages from express wagons and delivery carts, rolling drunks and picking pockets. He acquired the nickname “Dopey,” because adenoidal and nasal troubles from infancy gave him a sullen, sleepy appearance. By the time he was sixteen, Fein commanded one of the toughest gangs of shtarkes, or strongarm men, on the Lower East Side.

  Benny was the first Jewish gangster to make labor racketeering a full-time and profitable business. He institutionalized the practice of supplying gangs of hoodlums to unions in their wars against employers. Jewish labor unions in New York, including the butchers, bakers, garment workers, neckwear makers, ragpickers, sign painters and others, turned to Benny at one time or another to help them during strikes. Using bats, clubs and blackjacks, but not guns, Dopey’s gang protected striking workers from being attacked by management’s hired thugs. At other times, Dopey’s gang wrecked non-union shops and beat up some of the employees.

  Dopey also employed a gang of female thugs, who attacked nonunion female workers with sharp hairpins and umbrellas weighted with lead slugs, to persuade them to join the union. For these services, Benny charged between $25 and $50 a week and an additional $10 a day for each of his men. He also had a schedule of prices for different tasks. Shooting a scab in the leg cost the union $60. Breaking an arm cost $200. Demolishing a non-union shop ran from $150 to $500, depending on its size. Murder cost $500 per victim.

  Bosses also hired gangsters, but never Dopey Benny. He remained loyal to the unions and refused to work for management. “My heart,” he once explained, “lay with the workers.” In 1912, one manufacturer offered Dopey $15,000 to take his side, but Dopey refused. “He put fifteen $1,000 bills in front of me,” said Dopey. “And I said to him, ‘No, sir, I won’t take it/ I said… I won’t doublecross my friends.” Dopey Benny had his principles.11

  As tough as Yoski and Dopey were, the most dominant Jewish gangsters of the pre-1914 era were Monk Eastman and Big Jack Zelig.

  Herbert Ausbury, the contemporary chronicler of New York’s early criminal gangs, called Monk the prince of gangsters and “as brave a thug as ever shot an enemy in the back or blackjacked a voter at the polls.”12

  Monk’s real name was Edward Osterman. He was born in Williamsburg, New York in 1873, the son of a respectable restaurant owner. Monk began life with a bullet-shaped head and a short, bull neck. During his turbulent career, he acquired a broken nose, a pair of cauliflower ears and heavily veined, sagging jowls. His face was pocked with battle scars and he seemed always to need a haircut. He accentuated his ferocious and unusual appearance by wearing a derby hat several sizes too small, which perched precariously atop his shock of bristly hair.

  Monk would have made an excellent movie caricature of a gangster, but he was the real thing. His appearance belied the fact that he stood only five feet and five inches tall and never weighed more than 150 pounds.

  Eastman was one of New York’s first Jewish major underworld figures. He bossed a Jewish street gang and could field as many as 1,200 gangsters on short notice.

  He and his mob derived most of their income from delivering votes to the local Democratic Party political machine, Tammany Hall, and from a variety of protection rackets. And Monk was one of the first underworld figures to furnish strongarm men to warring unions and employers.

  Monk also had an interest in houses of prostitution and stuss (card) games, and shared in the earnings of prostitutes who walked the streets under his protection. He directed the operation of pickpockets, loft burglars and footpads (holdup men who traveled on foot), and provided thugs for men who wanted to rid themselves of enemies. Eastman set his fees according to the degree of “disability” desired, from broken limbs to total elimination.

  Eastman patrolled his domain armed with a huge club, a blackjack and brass knuckles. In an emergency, he could expertly wield a beer bottle and a piece of lead pipe. Monk was also a skillful boxer and street fighter.

  When he was a youngster, his father opened a pet store for him, but Monk abandoned it for the crime-ridden streets of the Lower East Side. Nevertheless, he retained his love for animals, especially cats and pigeons, all his life. He was said to have owned more than a hundred cats and five hundred pigeons at one time.

  “I like de kits and boids,” Eastman would say, “and I’ll beat up any guy dat gets gay wit’ a kit or a boid in my neck of de woods.”

  His love for animals didn’t extend to people.

  Monk enjoyed violence. He would personally lead members of his gang on raids against stuss games, which flourished throughout the East Side, and he occasionally accepted blackjacking jobs himself.

  “I like to beat up a guy once in a while,” he said. “It keeps me hand in.”

  In all fairness, it should be mentioned that Monk never struck a woman with his club, no matter how much she annoyed him. When it became necessary to discipline a lady, he simply belted her with his fist.

  “I only gave her a little poke,” he would exclaim. “Just enough to put a shanty on her glimmer. But I always takes off me knucks first.”13

  Eastman was the instrument of his own downfall. In February 1904, he held up a well-dressed young man who was drunk. It was a robbery Monk did not have to commit, but could not resist. The kid seemed like such an easy mark.

  Unfortunately for Monk, the young drunk turned out to be the son of a wealthy and well-connected family which had hired a Pinkerton detective to follow the boy and keep him out of trouble. When the detective saw Eastman accost the young man, he opened fire. Eastman returned the fire and fled — right into the arms of a policeman who knocked him out with his nightstick.

  Eastman was tried for highway robbery and felonious assault. He was convicted and sentenced to ten years in Sing Sing Prison in 1904.

  Six years later he was paroled after serving a little more than half his sentence, and returned to the East Side hoping to pick up where he had left off. Things had changed, however. New leaders had arisen and Eastman’s power was gone. So he became a sneak thief, a burglar, a pickpocket and a dope peddler.

  When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Eastman enlisted. He served throughout the war with bravery and distinction. Bullets held no terror for him and Monk led the charge

  Harry Horowitz

  whenever his unit went over the top. In recognition of his actions, Monk was awarded a full pardon for his misdeeds by Governor A1 Smith of New York after the war.

  Monk promised to go straight. The police found a job for him and he did not come to their attention again until the morning of December 26, 1920, when his body was found lying on the sidewalk in front of the Blue Bird Cafe on East Fourteenth Street. He had been shot five times.

  Eastman had been killed by a corrupt Prohibition enforcement agent with whom he was running a small bootlegging and dopepeddling operation. The agent had quarreled with Eastman over tipping a waiter. Eastman was buried with full military honors.14

  Monk was succeeded as leader of the gang by his right-hand man, Max “Kid Twist” Zweibach, when he was sent to prison in 1904. Zweibach was aptly named “Kid Twist” because of his treacherous nature. Detective captain Cornelius Willemse, who knew Zweibach, remembered him as “a brutal, double-crossing criminal whose own men hated him. He couldn’t be trusted even by his friends.”15

  Zweibach was no Eastman and the gang he inherited lost its supremacy over the various Irish and Italian gangs. Had he paid more attention to the gang’s business, Zweibach might have been able to maintain its dominant position in the New York underworld. But an affair of the heart distracted him and caused his downf
all.

  The Kid was in love with Carroll Terry, a Coney Island dance hall girl of exceptional beauty. It so happened that Carroll was also being courted by one Louis Pioggi, better known as “Louie the Lump/’ Since Louie the Lump was rather undersized, Kid Twist took to battering him around every chance he got. The Kid was no fool and usually picked on Louie when the Lump was alone and could not draw his gun.

  The Lump was a member of the Five Pointers, a gang that controlled the Five Points section of Manhattan which encompassed the area between Broadway and the Bowery, and Fourteenth street and City Hall Park. The Five Pointers were an Italian mob led by an ex-prizefighter named Paolo Antonini Vaccarelli, alias Paul Kelly. The gang, whose alumni included such luminaries as Johnny Torrio, Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, was continually at war with the Eastman gang.

  The rivalry between Kid Twist and the Lump reached a climax on May 14, 1908, when the Kid and his companion, Cyclone Louie, a local strongman and hired killer, forced the Lump to jump out of the second-floor window of a Coney Island bar. Unluckily for Zweibach, the Lump landed on all fours.

  Determined to exact vengeance, Louie called the Five Pointer’s headquarters to report that Kid Twist was nearby with only one other gunman for protection. Within an hour, 20 Five Pointer gunmen appeared on the scene.

  Louie the Lump was given the honor of gunning down his hated foe. When Kid Twist came outside, Louie shot him through the brain, and then shot him in the heart as he toppled to the sidewalk. Cyclone Louie tried to run, but was cut down by a hail of bullets.

  The police were so delighted to have Zweibach out of the way that Louie received only eleven months in jail for assault.16

  Kid Twist’s successor was William Alberts, better known as Big Jack Zelig. Zelig was born in 1882 to middle class Jewish parents. He began his criminal career at the age of fourteen when he ran away from home to join a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by a youngster called “Crazy Butch.”

  Zelig was an apt pupil with a real gift for theft, and he soon developed a reputation as someone whose services were always available to anyone for a price. It was said that Jack never turned down any job of violence. By the age of twenty he was one of Monk Eastman’s prize gunmen.

  Jack seems to have been a youthful-looking lad with large brown eyes who took advantage of his boyish appearance whenever he had a run-in with the law. Each time he was arrested, Jack would hire a frail and sickly-looking girl to come timidly into court to plead for him. “Oh judge, for God’s sake, don’t send my boy-husband, the father of my baby to jail,” she would wail.

  Few magistrates were hard enough to resist these tearful pleas, and Jack was invariably released with a warning to be a good boy and go home to his wife and baby. This ploy worked frequently during Zelig’s early career.

  Once Zelig became the Eastman gang’s leader, he expanded its operations and offered clients a fixed rate for services performed. A Zelig associate once gave the police Big Jack’s price list:17

  Slash on cheek with knife……..$ 1 to $ 10

  Shot in leg…………….$1 to $25

  Shot in arm…………….$5 to $25

  Throwing a bomb………….$5 to $50

  Murder……………..$10 to $100

  As his fame increased, Zelig’s following was augmented by a number of young and ambitious sluggers and gunmen. One newcomer to Zelig’s mob was Harry Horowitz, who went under the nom de guerre of “Gyp the Blood.” Gyp was a vicious brute of extraordinary strength, which he relished demonstrating.

  He used to boast that he could break a man’s back by bending him over his knee. He performed this feat several times before witnesses. Once to win a two dollar bet, he grabbed a total stranger and cracked his spine in three places.

  Gyp became an expert shot with a revolver and was extremely accurate at throwing a bomb. He enjoyed bomb-throwing because, as he explained, “I likes to hear the noise.”18

  With gifted thugs such as Gyp under his command, Big Jack carried on his various activities with great success. For several years he did a booming business in slugging, stabbing, shooting and bomb-throwing. And he knew how to protect his enterprises by making friends with politicians and business people on the East Side and uptown as well.

  Jack’s demise came in 1912 when he agreed to do a killing for police Lt. Charles E. Becker, head of New York’s gambling squad. Becker was a silent partner with a gambler named Herman “Beansie” Rosenthal. They had a falling out and Rosenthal threatened to go to the district attorney and expose Becker.

  Becker asked Zelig to take care of Rosenthal. Jack was given $2,000 and he delegated the job to Gyp the Blood and three other gang members.

  Late in the evening of July 15,1912, Rosenthal was dining in the Hotel Metropole on West Forty-third Street, just east of Broadway. A man came in and told him he was wanted outside the hotel. Rosenthal stepped to the sidewalk and was gunned down by the four killers who waited for him in an automobile. The murderers then sped away.

  After the deed was done, it appeared that the killers would get away clean, since Becker was in charge of the investigation. However, a reform-minded district attorney named Charles Whitman launched his own investigation and found witnesses who identified the four gunmen.

  Gyp soon confessed and implicated Zelig and Becker. Zelig also broke the underworld’s code of silence by testifying before the grand jury about Becker’s links to the crime.

  But on October 5, 1912, the day before he was to appear in court, Zelig was shot and killed by Red Phil Davidson as he stepped aboard a Second Avenue trolley car at Thirteenth Street.

  Even without Zelig’s testimony, the four gunmen were convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison. They were electrocuted on April 13, 1914. Becker was also found guilty and was electrocuted on July 30, 1915.19

  With Zelig’s death, the Eastman gang’s reign as the dominant Jewish gang in New York came to an end. It was not until after World War I that Jewish gangsters once again achieved a dominant position in that city’s criminal underworld.

  Chapter Five: The Perils and Pitfalls of the Gangster Life

  Being a gangster was never easy. Hunted, wiretapped, harassed and jailed by the authorities, shot at by rivals, and haunted by the specter of an early and violent death, the gangster led a life of tension and risk. Many Jewish gangsters probably felt as Lucky Luciano did when he mused that “there must be an easier way to make a living.”

  Cops and Robbers

  Sometimes being chased by the police could deteriorate into comedy, resembling in a scene from an old Keystone Cops movie. Jake “Mohawk” Skuratofsky was one of Newark’s more colorful bookmakers. Trusted by everyone because he was thoroughly honest in the way he ran his business, Jake claimed that a bookmaker was the most honest person alive, because he had only one asset, his reputation. No matter what happened to Jake, whether arrested or his money confiscated by the law, he always paid off, immediately.1

  Jake’s love, next to his wife Faye, was shooting craps. Long before Jake had his own club, he could be found playing on street corners at night. When the law put the “heat” on, he would take the crap game to the cellars of apartment houses or to his own home.

  One cold October night in 1938, with a beautiful harvest moon in the sky, Jake decided to start a crap game. The “fix” was in with the law, with the okay scheduled for Tuesday. However, the participants began arriving one day earlier and Jake felt it no great risk to start the game on Monday.

  Unknown to Jake, there was an enthusiastic rookie cop on the beat who was unaware of the okay for Jake to run his game.

  That night Jake’s home was filled with Damon Runyanesque characters with names like Big Ann, Sid Red, Tanks, Tootsie Roll and twenty or so other mobsters and gamblers. Somehow this group caught the attention of the rookie policeman, who called the station house for backup.

  Police in the precinct were faced with a dilemma because they could not admit to knowing that a dice game ha
d been okayed for the following day. So they were forced to act.

  Suddenly, Jake’s crap game was raided by the police, and the dice shooters and bettors scattered all over the house looking for places to hide. Harry Levine bolted down the basement steps and jumped into the coal bin. Abie Markowitz darted into Jake’s bedroom and slid under the bed. Sam Gold flung himself into a clothes closet and huddled behind the coats. Jules Stein clambered into a cedar chest filled with linen, but couldn’t close the top. Morrie Marks sprinted into a bathroom, stripped off his clothes, climbed into the tub and turned on the water. The police found them all.

  Sidney “Big Red” Klein, who weighed close to 300 pounds and looked like he was nine months pregnant, managed to run up to the second floor, open a bedroom window and crawl out onto the roof.

  A policeman appeared and seeing the bedroom window open, stuck his head out. He saw Klein lying on the roof, still and quiet, as though he were asleep.

  “What the hell are you doing out there,” he hollered.

  Quick as a flash, Sid looked up at the moon and bellowed, “What the hell does it look like Fm doing? Fm taking a damn moon bath!”

  The cop seemed convinced, since Big Red was the only one who wasn’t booked that night.

  Most of the time, however, the law’s pursuit of the gangsters was serious business and no laughing matter.

  Stop Bugging Me

  The FBI kept Meyer Lansky under surveillance for years. In the spring of 1962, Lansky, 60 years old, was recovering from heart trouble. He had been released from the Trafalgar Hospital in New York City and was staying at the Volney, a quiet, unobtrusive hotel, spending most of his time in his room chatting with his wife, Teddy, and with friends who came to visit. With the hotel management’s permission, the FBI wiretapped the room and listened to every word Lansky said.