In one of his recorded conversations Meyer discussed how the FBI harassed him, his family and friends.2
“So they started to come to my house when I wasn’t there. Ts Lansky in, FBI.’ The bastards wouldn’t come at six, six-thirty or at nine in the morning. They always came at two in the afternoon and hours like that. Teddy was having trouble with the help. Every maid I got, got contacted by the FBI, and they were quitting.
“So I decided I better call these bastards, and I called. So they said we’d like to come and see you at your house.”
Agents arrived at Lansky’s home and the men sat together on the terrace. They engaged in a discussion of morality and Lansky recounts asking the agents just how moral they were.
“They said, there’s a moral complication. I said, would you like to discuss morals with me? I know I’m not equipped to discuss it. I don’t know if you are. Are you Socrates or some kind of philosopher or something? So I turned to the other guy. I said, what’s moral? So he said, we’re not here to talk about that. So I straightened him out as to what was moral. I said are you a lawyer and he said he was not. I said, you understand the law and he said yes. I said, you’re going around questioning people about my income. You’re going to people that are so devoted to me, it’s not even funny. Then if you don’t like what they say, you say ‘Don’t you know he’s a big gambler? You only know the good side.’
“I said, what the fucking side do you know of me? Was I a thief? Sure I was a gambler. My doors were as wide open as the Fountainbleau Hotel (a Miami Beach hotel). But it didn’t take in a poor unfortunate worker. It took in a class of people that could afford it. Nobody was forced to gamble or to come there. Your fucking reformers that came there and ate my food and your newspapermen and many big officials… they didn’t pay their fucking check. If it was so terrible, why the fuck didn’t they pay their fucking check?
“I said, I know you know everything, but will you tell me what you’re trying to accomplish? Will you tell me what do you want to make out of this? You don’t want to see me make a living? I don’t intend to starve. Before I do, I assure you I’m going to do something to feed myself. Only a moron would refuse. I said, I don’t intend to do anything immoral. I have sympathy for a thief if conditions force him to steal. But I have no sympathy for an immoral thief.
“He said, we don’t want to hear all this. We just want to ask you four questions.
“I said, if the Commies were getting on the beach here, you’d be worried about a broken-down Meyer Lansky.”
At the end of the transcription, the FBI warned their agents that Lansky “should be considered armed and dangerous.”3
Death and Taxes
The most persistent, successful and certainly the most publicized pursuer of Prohibition-era mobsters was Thomas E. Dewey, special district attorney for New York in the 1930s. Dewey came from Owosso, Michigan, where he had been born in 1902. His forebears had immigrated to America from England in 1634. Tom’s grandfather, a crusading abolitionist and prohibitionist, moved to Michigan just before the Civil War. He bought the Owosso Times and used it to campaign against the evils of the world. Dewey’s father carried on the tradition when he became the paper’s editor.4
Dewey was a model child and adolescent, never late or absent during twelve years of school. He remained diligent, reliable and conscientious all his life. After graduating from the University of Michigan, Tom went to Columbia University Law School, then stayed in New York City to work for a Wall Street law firm.
Of average height and build, and with a round, boyish face, Dewey always looked younger than he really was. To give himself a more mature and serious look, he grew a mustache which became his trademark. According to people who later worked for him,
Waxey Gordon
Dewey was “never a great relaxer,” but was always serious, sober and humorless. He was a man on a mission.
True to his heritage, Dewey was a Republican and participated in local reform politics. With other members of a Young Republican Club, he served as a poll watcher on election day in 1928. The experience would influence his future career.
He saw “gangsters with guns that you could see sticking through their clothes” bring unregistered voters to the polling places, while the police looked the other way. Some of his friends who protested were beaten up. From then on Dewey was determined to fight against organized crime. Through a contact, he was appointed chief assistant district attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1931. Dewey commanded a staff of sixty lawyers, most of them older than himself.
Dewey had another motive as well. He had his eyes on higher political office and saw crime-fighting in corrupt, Democratic New York City as his ticket to the top. He would later capitalize on his gang-busting reputation to become governor of New York and the Republican candidate for president in 1944 and 1948.
Dewey’s first target was Irving Wexler, alias Waxey Gordon. Tom decided to get Gordon the way the government got Al Capone: for evasion of income tax.
Gordon had many enemies, not the least of whom was Meyer Lansky. Gordon’s feud with Lansky started in 1927 when Meyer and Bugsy Siegel hijacked four truckloads of whiskey destined for Mafia boss Joe Masseria. Unknown to them, Masseria had promised the shipment to Waxey Gordon.
Lansky, Siegel and their gang ambushed the convoy, killing three men and wounding four others. One of the wounded truck drivers recognized Lansky and later told Gordon. Waxey was furious. From then on, he and Lansky quarreled openly, accusing each other of being double-crossers and liars. Once they came to blows and Lucky Luciano had to physically separate them.
The bad blood between the two men persisted and among New York’s mobsters became known as the “War of the Jews.’’ Lucky Luciano decided to do something because the feud disrupted business. Favoring Lansky, his boyhood partner, Luciano and Lansky hatched a plot to dispose of Gordon the best way possible: they would let the federal government do it for them.
Luciano and Lansky knew that Thomas Dewey was investigating Gordon’s income taxes, and decided to help him out. Beginning in 1931, they had Meyer’s brother Jake, a member of Lansky’s outfit, secretly deliver information about Gordon’s bootlegging operation to Internal Revenue officials in Philadelphia. Dewey used this material to convict Gordon.5
Waxey maintained a ten-room apartment with four baths at 590 West End Avenue, paying $6,000 a year in rent. The apartment contained a bar costing $3,600 and a library with $3,800 worth of books, none of which had ever been opened. Five servants looked after the apartment and waited on Gordon, his wife and three children. Gordon also kept a summer residence at Bradley Beach, New Jersey and sent his son to a private military school in the South.6
Gordon drove around in three expensive cars and indulged his taste in flashy and expensive clothes. Socks, which he bought by the dozen, cost him $10 a pair. He paid $45 for silk briefs. His suits cost $225 each and were bought from the tailor who made clothes for A1 Capone. He also liked luxurious furniture and bought it in quantities. He paid $2,300 for a bookcase made to order by an interior decorator.
Waxey reported a net annual income of $8,125.
In April 1933, Waxey was indicted on four counts of income tax evasion. He tried to avoid arrest by hiding out in a small cottage on White Lake in the Catskill Mountains, but treasury agents found the cottage and paid Waxey an early morning visit. They found Gordon and two bodyguards still asleep.
“This is nonsense,” said Waxey after they had awakened him. “I ain’t Waxey Gordon,” he insisted. “I’m William Palinski. I’m in the tobacco business.”
“Look, Waxey,” said one of the agents, tired of Gordon’s protests. “You oughtn’t to keep saying you’re William Palinski and walk around in silk drawers that have I. W. embroidered on them. I. W. means Irving Wexler, Waxey.”
At Waxey’s trial, Dewey showed that in 1930 alone Gordon earned $1,427,531 and paid the United States government $10.76 in income tax.
Gordon’s attorney defended his cl
ient by saying that his only ambition had been to provide for his family and that Gordon had only two vices, “his love of a beautiful home for his family and his love of good clothing.”
The jury took 45 minutes to find Gordon guilty of income tax evasion. In December 1933, he was sentenced to ten years in prison and fined $80,000.
When Waxey got out for good behavior in 1940 he was flat broke. All his property and wealth had been seized or was gone. At the time of his release, Waxey owed the government $1,603,427 in income taxes plus a $40,000 fine. He agreed to pay it off at a rate of $6 per week. At that rate, it would take him 273,903 weeks, or 5,267 years, to clear his debt.
He smilingly told reporters waiting for him at the gate that his life in crime was over and that he was a new man. “Waxey Gordon is dead,” he said. “From now on it’s Irving Wexler, salesman.”7
He did become a salesman of sorts, only it was in the black market during World War II. In 1942, he was caught diverting 10,000 pounds of sugar to a distillery and went back to jail.
Released after a few years, he returned to sales, this time dope. In 1951, he was caught trying to pass a $3,600 package of heroin to a federal narcotics informer.
As the officers arrested him, Waxey began to weep. “Shoot me,” he pleaded. “Don’t take me in for junk. Let me run, then shoot me.”
One of the old gangster’s confederates took $2,500 from his pocket and slipped two diamond rings off his fingers. “Take this,” he said. “Take me. Take the whole business. Just let Pop go.”
Ignoring his plea, the officers handcuffed Gordon and took him away.
At the age of 63, Gordon was sentenced to 25 years to life in Alcatraz. This was a cruel punishment. Alcatraz was a place for dangerous prisoners; Gordon was a threat to no one.
In the end, it made no difference as he only lived six months. Waxey Gordon, once a millionaire bootlegger, died in prison of a heart attack in 1954.8
Failure to pay income taxes also tripped up Joseph “Doc” Stacher, Longy Zwillman’s buddy and right-hand man. Stacher was born in Poland in 1902 and came to Newark at the age of ten. His police record included arrests for atrocious assault and battery, robbery, burglary, larceny, bootlegging, hijacking and murder.9
During Prohibition, Stacher aided Zwillman in his bootlegging and gambling enterprises and worked with Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and other New York Jewish mobsters. Later, Lansky chose Stacher to head the group that built the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and to represent the mob’s interests there. Stacher also operated as the official paymaster to Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, who permitted Lansky and his friends to build and operate casinos on the island.
Although they pursued Stacher for years, it wasn’t until 1963 that the government was able to convict him. Stacher reached a settlement with the Internal Revenue Service and instead of jail, was deported.
Stacher had never become a citizen, but flatly refused to go to Poland or Russia. Moreover, the law prohibited the government from sending anyone to a communist country. As a Jew, Stacher was entitled, under the Law of Return, to immigrate to Israel and become a citizen. He accepted and moved to Israel in 1965.
If the government thought Doc would suffer in exile, they were sadly mistaken.
Doc set up residence in the Sheraton Hotel on Tel Aviv’s seacoast and enjoyed an idyllic retirement. He had a car and driver every day and, at the grand old age of seventy, acquired a twenty-three year old girlfriend who was a law student at Tel Aviv University.
Doc enjoyed Israel and Israelis found him entertaining and generous. His largess attracted the attention of Agudat Israel, an ultra-Orthodox political party. One of its rabbis, Menachem Porush, convinced Stacher to invest $100,000 in a plan to build homes for young, strictly Orthodox Jewish couples. But instead of applying the money to this end, Porush used it to build a kosher hotel in Jerusalem.
Stacher and Porush quarreled and the matter went to court. Stacher claimed he had loaned Porush the money to build a charitable institution. Not only was he unable to get back the loan, but he had not received any interest on the money.
Israelis found the episode hilarious: the famous American gangster being ripped off by a rabbi.
Wild scenes punctuated the trial, with Stacher’s lawyer calling the rabbi a swindler and Porush’s attorney accusing Stacher of being a criminal.
Stacher won the case and Porush had to return the loan. As Stacher left the courtroom, a reporter asked him what he thought about the affair. “I can’t believe it,” Doc replied. “A rabbi stole my money, a rabbi stole my money.”
Standing nearby, another reporter was heard to say, “This rabbi may be a bigger crook than you were.”10
For a time, Israel became something of a refuge for old-time Jewish mobsters on the lam. Stacher’s friend Meyer Lansky also moved to Israel to avoid standing trial in the United States. In 1970, he applied for citizenship under Israel’s Law of Return. After a protracted trial and public debate, Lansky’s request was denied and he was expelled from the country in 1972.
The proceedings against Lansky spurred a national debate in Israel. Prime Minister Golda Meir was told that Lansky was the alleged boss of the American underworld and if he were allowed to stay, Israel would become a center for Mafia activities. Golda knew nothing of Meyer Lansky and little about American organized crime, but she had heard of the Mafia. That word was enough to seal Lansky’s fate in Israel.
According to Yosef Burg, who was then Minister of the Interior, Golda was horrified when that word was mentioned in connection with Lansky’s application to remain in Israel.
“Dr. Burg, Mafia?” she asked. “No Mafia in Israel.”11 Golda had grown up in the United States and was extremely sensitive to American, especially Jewish American public opinion. She knew that if Israel gave shelter to an alleged crime boss, it might encounter difficulties in raising money among American Jews. Therefore, the word “Mafia” held dangerous connotations for her.
Golda may also have worried that if she allowed Lansky to stay in Israel, the Nixon administration, which wanted to extradite Lansky, might have deferred sending Israel the Phantom jet fighter-bombers Israel needed to counter the new Soviet weapons going to Egyptian positions on the Suez Canal.
In September 1971, Yosef Burg rendered his decision based on FBI files, Justice Department documents, the Kefauver Committee hearings and books on organized crime. None of these had ever been enough to convict Lansky. Although Lansky had been involved in organized crime for over fifty years, he had only served three months in jail: in 1952, after pleading guilty to gambling charges in Saratoga Springs, New York. After carefully studying the evidence, Burg concluded that Lansky was a person with a criminal history and likely to endanger the public welfare. He therefore denied Lansky’s application for Israeli citizenship and ordered his extradition.12
After undergoing open heart surgery in 1973, Lansky stood trial in Miami for income tax evasion. He was acquitted. The government also failed to convict Lansky in two other cases against him. In November 1976, the Justice Department gave up trying to put him behind bars.
While in Israel, Lansky became friends with a journalist, Uri Dan. Their friendship continued for a number of years and Lansky told Dan a great deal about his past. Unbeknownst to Lansky, Dan would use this material in a book about Lansky. After the book’s publication, Lansky felt betrayed, which only reinforced his deep distrust of writers and journalists. When asked how he felt about Dan’s actions, Lansky looked his questioner in the eye, and without the trace of a smile said, “Some people will do anything for money.”13
During his stay in Israel, a small-time Israeli criminal named Ilan plotted to kidnap Lansky and hold him for ransom. The plot failed to materialize when Ilan disappeared mysteriously. His body was later discovered in the northern part of Israel, chopped into pieces and stuffed in bags. His killer was never caught.14
Doing Time: Hard and Soft
Being sent to prison could be a terrible experience fo
r men accustomed to freedom, power and the action of the streets. If you were “well connected,” however, you might pass the time in relative comfort and security, as in the case of Max “Puddy” Hinkes, a stalwart enforcer in Longy Zwillman’s Newark mob.
“In my stay at these various prisons I had nothing but money,” recalls Puddy. “Always everything that was done for me was through Longy’s connections, for which I was always entirely grateful to him. And to the day he died, I loved him.”15
In 1939, Puddy was sentenced to the minimum security prison at Leesburg, New Jersey. “At Leesburg we gambled very freely,” he says. “Once when I was called in by the superintendent, I told him we would only gamble for cigarettes. And here I am standing there, without exaggeration, with thousands of dollars in my pocket.
“I had a private room above the barracks, and I ate nothing but the best. I also had a person by the name of Playboy Figer, who used to come down and visit me, bring down a girl that I used to associate with when I was off the premises. This was a sneak job.
“I also went to town. I would get whiskey, which I would bring back and let certain inmates, friends of mine, drink as much as they could. And the next day they would say, That lousy Jew done it again/
“The guards were pretty hip to what went on, but apparently being they knew that I was connected pretty good, they didn’t bother me too much.
Jack Guzik
“I was arrested, I would say, roughly around fifty times. It wasn’t too bad. I only done two sentences.”
Sometimes, the more famous the gangster, the harsher the treatment. Jack Guzik, who was sent to jail for income tax evasion in 1932, had a difficult time of it. Jack felt that he was not being treated fairly because of his notoriety, and that he was being singled out for sterner treatment by the guards. True or not, he continually petitioned the authorities to alleviate his situation by transferring him from the Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg to Alcatraz in California. He asked for Alcatraz because Al Capone, his pal and boss, was there.
But He Was Good to His Mother - The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters Page 10