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

by Robert Rockaway

  Dave proved to be a model prisoner and was released after seven and a half years. The warden made a special request to have him freed, citing Berman’s exemplary behavior, high IQ. and “total rehabilitation.”

  As soon as he got out, the “rehabilitated” Berman solidified his links with organized crime. He moved into New York’s Mayflower Hotel and began a life-long affiliation with Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello.

  With their encouragement and backing, in 1934 Berman relocated to Minneapolis, where his brother Chickie and his mother lived. He concentrated on gambling and built a city-wide Jewish gambling syndicate. According to the FBI, Berman’s bookmaking establishments were popular because “he always located them near Hebrew cafes which served excellent Hebrew food.” The menus of these restaurants listed delicacies such as, tongue, flanken, boiled chicken, goulash, kreplach, kneidlach, knishes and potato pancakes, most of which were cooked in chicken fat.

  Minneapolis contained other criminal syndicates as well. An Irish combination dealt in liquor, and another Jewish syndicate, led by Isidore Blumenfeld, ran a variety of illegal businesses, including gambling. In 1941, Marvin Kline, a Berman-supported candidate, won the mayoralty race. Shortly thereafter, Davie replaced Blumenfeld as the city’s gambling czar.

  A 1939 FBI memo described Berman as “tall, lean, giving the appearance of a great quantity of nervous strength. Quiet to the point of being noticeable. High cheekbones tended to accentuate the peculiar steadiness of the eyes. Berman in his conversation, as well as mannerisms, clearly reflected that he spent a great deal of his adult life in prison confines… Inasmuch as he had tasted confinement for a considerable length of time, he is a most dangerous type of law violator, due to the great price he is willing to pay in order to avoid another taste of confinement. Had a great ability to control his emotions, and where prior to being sent away to Sing Sing Prison for a lengthy term he was considered tough, subsequent to his release he was considered vicious.”6

  When the United States entered World War II, Berman wanted to enlist and “kill ten Nazis for every Jew.” Rejected by the U.S. Army because he was too old and a convicted felon, Davie joined the Canadian Army in 1942. He was wounded in action on the Italian front and honorably discharged in 1944.

  Minneapolis had changed during the war. Reform-minded mayors such as Hubert Humphrey, cleaned up the town and abolished gambling. They put pressure on gamblers and “encouraged” them to take their operations somewhere else. Davie decided it would be wise to leave.

  In 1945, Berman moved west to Las Vegas, a place he had visited before. He borrowed a million dollars from his mob contacts and purchased the newly refurbished El Cortez Hotel. His co-owners were Bugsy Siegel, Moe Sedway, Meyer Lansky and Ice Pick Willie Alderman, an old associate from Minneapolis.

  In Las Vegas, Berman became known as “the Mob Diplomat/’ Everyone trusted his integrity and he set up liaisons between aspiring opportunists and East Coast gangster bosses. After Bugsy Siegel’s death in 1947, Berman became one of the owners and operators of the Flamingo Hotel and, later, the Riviera Hotel. He died of a heart attack, after surgery, in 1957.

  Berman had married twenty-year-old Gladys Evans, a professional dancer, in 1939. Berman adored their daughter Susan, born in 1945, and until his death he did everything in his power to shield her from knowing about the life he led.

  She writes, “He told his friends that I must never know the secrets of his past because the knowledge might destroy me.”

  Susan’s mother, Gladys, “remained fanatical about keeping me away from anything that might mention my father — newspapers, detective magazines, books.”

  Her mother’s friend, Ethel Schwartz, remembers that she used to say over and over again, “But what if Susie reads something one day on her own?”

  Once Susan bought her father some detective magazines, which he enjoyed reading, for his birthday. Her mother “admonished me severely and told me never to purchase such a magazine or look at one again.”

  One issue of the New Yorker contained a “Talk of the Town” column which said that Las Vegas was run by former bootleggers. “My parents took no chances,” remembers Susan. “My father had all the issues on sale bought out so that there would be no chance I could see it and make a connection.”7

  Their vigilance bore fruit. Susan knew nothing about her father’s mob connections and activities until she reached young adulthood.

  As a result, she never questioned what she later came to see as “unusual” precautions taken for her safety while she was growing up. “We had kidnap drills,” she says. Berman told her, “If anyone asks if you’re Davie Berman’s daughter, say no, run, scream, yell, use whatever you have to get away.”

  “We carried no house key,” she says, “because someone was always home. Several men lived with us who my father said were Triends’. I never knew they were bodyguards.”

  Consequently, Susan’s memory of her father was of a man who read to her, hugged her and played with her. She enjoyed a wonderful, albeit sheltered, childhood.

  “He lived in the midst of a world that was dangerous, violent and severe,” she says. “But he fabricated a childhood for me that seemed all-American and completely normal, disguising his real career as carefully as he managed it.”

  When she grew to adulthood, Susan became a journalist, writer and editor. She became renown for being able to get the “impossible” interview.

  Many years after Davie’s death, Susan finally learned who and what he had been. It was painful for her, but she still remembers him as a loving and wonderful father “who was a gangster, not a gangster who was a father.”8

  For more than thirty years, Abner “Longy” Zwillman was one of America’s leading gangsters. Longy had connections everywhere, from his home base in Newark, New Jersey to Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Hollywood. And he was on intimate terms with America’s top mobsters, Jews and Italians alike. Despite this, he kept his family totally separated from and uninvolved in his illegal businesses.

  Longy is a prime example of the way Jewish gangsters kept their children and relatives isolated from their criminal activities. Longy’s Italian mobster friends, on the other hand, often brought their offspring and relations into the business. This was a major difference between the two ethnic groups.

  Like the Jews, Italian syndicate leaders were proud and devoted fathers. They, too, wanted their children to marry well and attain success. They, too, wanted their children to be accepted in the legitimate world. So they sent them to the best schools and paid for their studies in law, medicine or some other prestigious profession.

  At the same time, they wanted to maintain control of their criminal business within the biological family. If this was not possible, they made an effort to keep it within their extended family of nephews, cousins and other relatives. If necessary, they brought in outsiders through marriage and godparentage.

  For example, the children of three of the five “bosses” of New York crime families, Carlo Gambino, Tommy Lucchese and Vito Genovese, married into each others’ families. In Detroit, mob boss Joseph Zerilli’s daughter Rosalie married Dominic Licavoli, the son of Peter Licavoli, who headed another Detroit Mafia faction. Zerilli’s son married the daughter of Joseph Profaci, boss of a New York crime family. Zerilli’s sister, Rosalie, married William Tocco, a Mafia associate of Zerilli in Detroit. Their son, Anthony, married Carmella Profaci, another daughter of Joe Profaci. And so it went.

  Of the more than sixty Mafia bosses who attended the famous meeting in the tiny upstate New York town of Appalachin, in November 1957, almost half were related by blood or marriage.9

  This is why Italian-American criminal syndicates are referred to as “families.” They are tied together by marriage and kinship.

  This tradition was totally absent among Jewish gangsters. None of their children married the offspring of other Jewish gangsters. And none of their relatives “inherited” their business. Jewish mobsters
knew that what they did was not an “honorable” occupation, and they did not want to pass it on to their loved ones. This is why the activities of the Zwillmans, Lanskys and Buchalters lasted a single generation. It lived and died with them.10

  Longy had three sisters and three brothers, Barney, Harry and Irving. According to Itzik Goldstein, who knew Longy very well, Longy was wonderful to his family.

  “The only thing is he never wanted his brothers to be connected to the mob,” says Itzik. Longy controlled Local 244 of the Motion Picture Machine Operators Union through an associate, Louis Kaufman. Longy used his influence with the union to get jobs for his relatives.

  “Irving was a motion picture operator (projectionist), Harry was a motion picture operator,” says Itzik. “Barney had a shoe store. As the years went by he went into the liquor business. He had a couple of liquor stores.”

  As long as he lived, Zwillman supported his relatives. He continually gave them money and found jobs for them. Although they were not part of Zwillman’s operation, the family sometimes encountered whisperings and slights from “respectable” citizens of Newark because they were Zwillmans. Nonetheless, the family continued to love and respect him.

  “His mother was a wonderful woman,” remembers Itzik. “I used to go to their house. They lived on Hansberry Avenue. Wonderful people.

  “Longy used to come there every Friday with a half dozen fellows. His mother used to cook Jewish food, kreplach, gefilte fish.

  A few Italianas (Italians) used to come. They never ate so good, them assholes.”11

  In 1939, Longy married Mary Mendels Steinbach, a divorced woman with a son, John. The wedding and reception took place on a Saturday afternoon in July, at the Chanticleer Restaurant in Newark. The Zwillman party took over the premises for the day.

  The guest list for the wedding reception included Wall Street financiers, government officials, including former New Jersey governor Harold Hoffman, Democratic and Republican politicos, and nationally-known gangsters. Longy’s best man was Joseph Sisto, a Wall Street financier, head of J.A. Sisto and Co., and chairman of the board of Barium Steel Corporation, a company in which Longy held a controlling stock interest.

  Outside, some uninvited observers, including FBI agents, prosecutor’s investigators and state troopers, checked the comings and goings of the guests.

  Longy adored his wife and raised her son as his own. The boy loved Zwillman and the two became inseparable. Longy took the youngster with him wherever he could even to “business” meetings. This alarmed some of Longy’s colleagues, who worried that the child might remember some of the things he heard.

  As the boy grew up, this changed. Longy’s bodyguard remembers that when the boy was a teenager, Longy would “ask him to leave the room when a meeting began.”

  Despite their father-son relationship, Longy never legally adopted John. “If I adopt you,” Longy told the youngster, you’ll carry my name. You’ll be marked for life, and that won’t be an advantage. No matter what you do, how well you behave, you’ll be pointed out as a Zwillman. I’ve seen it happen to the rest of my family,” said Longy, and I don’t want it to happen to you.”12

  It didn’t. John married in 1958 and led a respectable life without anyone connecting him to the Zwillman era.

  Waxey Gordon grew up tough. As a young man he was a terror on the streets and later ruthless as a bootlegger. However, his wife and three children meant more to him than anything else. Throughout his criminal career he shielded them from the uglier aspects of his life. His conviction for income tax evasion shattered the illusion of respectability he sought to create, exposing him for what he was. His wife, Leah, the daughter of a rabbi, was forced to endure the shame.

  Waxey’s beloved eldest son, Theodore, was a nineteen-year-old pre-medical student at the University of North Carolina at the time of the trial. Waxey often boasted to his friends about Teddy’s aptitude for study, his love of books and his devotion to his parents.

  During his father’s trial in December 1933, Teddy remained in New York to be with his mother. He returned to school after Waxey’s conviction. A few days later, Teddy received a call from his uncle, Nathan Wexler, urging him to return to New York and go to the judge and Thomas Dewey in order to plead for a reduction of his father’s ten year sentence, and to ask for Gordon’s release on bail pending appeal.

  “But uncle, I have an exam in the morning,” the boy said. “Can’t it be put off for a day?”

  His uncle told him that haste was important. Teddy went straight to his car and started back to New York. It began to snow and sleet and he was tired, so he asked a friend of his to drive for him. The boy fell asleep at the wheel and the car went off the road and crashed. Teddy was killed.

  A few hours after the accident, Waxey was told of his son’s death.

  “That boy was my one hope,” Waxey told his attorney. “I counted on him. Everything I did centered around him.”

  Gordon asked the court for permission to attend his son’s funeral, and prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey granted his request. Teddy was buried in the Mount Hebron Cemetery, in Flushing, New York. Gordon, tears streaming down his face, stood in the sunlight. Mourning beside him stood his wife and their other children, Paul, fifteen years old, and Beatrice, eleven.

  Rabbi A. Mordechai Stern led the kaddish and Gordon followed, muttering like a man in a dream. Afterwards, he stood as if in a daze as the clods of earth rained down on the coffin. “I would rather have taken any sentence, even life,” he said, “than to have this happen to Teddy.”

  Weeping bitterly, Gordon was led away.13

  Charley “The Bug” Workman was a short, curly-headed and casual killer, one of the Brooklyn underworld’s most valuable gunmen. It was said that he killed twenty men, all criminals, during his career. Because he was so expert at assassination, Lepke Buchalter gave Charley the contract to kill Dutch Schultz.

  Charlie was born on New York’s Lower East Side in 1908, the son of Samuel and Anna Workman. Bad from the beginning, he quit school at seventeen to become a thief and slugger. His first arrest, for robbery, came at eighteen. The next year the police picked him up for shooting a man behind the ear in an argument over $20. He beat the case when the victim thought it healthier to develop amnesia and could not identify who shot him.14

  Over the next twelve years, from 1927 to 1939, Charley was arrested, but not jailed, for a variety of offenses, ranging from carrying concealed weapons to bashing in the face of an off-duty cop in a traffic argument. By then he had graduated from being a mere bruiser for the mob to a full-time spot on Lepke Buchalter’s payroll, available at all times to the Brooklyn gun-for-hire ring called Murder, Inc.

  Charley earned the usual fee of $125 per week, which was not a bad salary during the Depression. He supplemented this by sweeping out the pockets of his victims for loose cash and change. Charley became one of the gang’s better marksmen, ranking right alongside Harry Strauss, Abe Reles and Buggsy Goldstein. Lepke, who liked Charley very much, used to say that he had so much guts he was “bugs” (crazy). The appellation fit and from then on Charley was called “the Bug.” He went by other underworld nicknames as well, among them “the Powerhouse.”

  Author Paul Sann, once asked a police inspector how he would characterize the Bug. He replied, “The same as a regiment.”15

  And Burton B. Turkus, the assistant district attorney who, in 1940, prosecuted Harry Strauss, Buggsy Goldstein and the other sterling characters of the so-called Murder, Inc. execution cartel and later wrote a book about it, called Charley “one of gangland’s most deadly executioners.”16

  Despite his underworld reputation, Workman kept his occupation hidden from his family. While they may have suspected something, neither his parents, brothers or wife knew exactly what Charley did for a living. They only discovered it after Charley was arrested for killing Dutch Schultz.

  This seems hard to believe. But those in the know kept their knowledge to themselves. Given who Charley was, it se
emed the prudent thing to do. Workman’s secret career became public when Abe Reles began to sing. When Reles’s information was corroborated and embellished by another sterling hitman and Workman pal Albert “Allie” Tannenbaum, Charley’s fate was sealed.

  Tannenbaum had been born in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, in 1906, but the family moved to the Lower East Side when he was three. From there they moved to Brooklyn. Allie quit school at seventeen and went to work in the garment center, later becoming a salesman for a paper jobber. Allie’s father acquired the Lock Sheldrake Country Club in the Catskills and Allie helped him out on weekends and summers.17

  It was there, in 1931, that Allie met Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro, a guest at the resort. Shapiro was impressed with Allie’s brawn and intelligence, and introduced him to his Brooklyn mob pals. Allie found the boys and their work far more fun then selling. So at the age of twenty-five he became an enforcer and hitman.

  Tannenbaum’s testimony was crucial because Workman told him everything.

  Allie hadn’t seen Charley for several days after the Schultz shooting, When he did see him, he asked Workman, “Where were you the last couple of days?”

  “Gee, what an experience I had,” the Bug was supposed to have replied.

  Then, according to Tannenbaum, Workman described to him in great detail how he killed Schultz. Workman supposedly ended his account by claiming “It looked like a Wild West show.” Tannenbaum never clarified what Workman meant by that.18

  Workman’s trial was held in June 1941. Charley was a very tough and uncompromising defendant. His facade began to crack, however, when his emotion-wracked parents came into the courtroom. It was obvious to everyone that Workman could not bear to see them there. He decided to spare them and his family further shame and disgrace and switched his plea to non vult, which meant that he would not offer a defense. In Workman’s case this was tantamount to a confession of guilt.

  Charley said he changed his plea because he did not want “members of my family and others to be subjected to humiliation on my account.”19