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

by Robert Rockaway

  When he graduated, Mervin became involved in illegitimate activities, primarily gambling. Mervin remembers his father’s reaction. “He said to me, I chose my life, you choose your life.’’

  Mervin admits that his father would have preferred he go into some lawful profession. If his father was upset that he didn’t, he never showed it.

  With regard to his own son, Mervin says that he would not oppose the boy being involved in illegal activities, but with limits. “The only thing is that whatever you choose to do, I would say to him, you gotta put on tefillin (phylacteries) every morning, you gotta eat kosher meat, you have to maintain certain principles. That means you have to keep your word. A word is a bond.

  ‘After that, whatever a person chooses to do, that’s his business. But no acts of immorality. When I say immorality, I mean pornography, drugs and prostitution.

  “If a man deals in drugs, he sells death. Maybe he sells death and children buy it.

  ‘As far as illegality is concerned, since that changes every day of the week, just like the weather, I’m not in a position to say what’s illegal.”44

  In 1932 Jack Guzik went to prison for evading income taxes. While there, he corresponded regularly with his family. Books and articles portray Guzik as an immoral and unsavory character; the letters show another side to the man, that of a dutiful son, and a loving and concerned father and grandfather.45

  Guzik married at age twenty and had a son and a daughter. By 1932 his daughter was married and had two children.

  The family never forgot a holiday, Jewish or secular, birthday or anniversary. Their letters express great affection for each other.

  In November 1935 Guzik wrote to his grandson Billy Jack on the boy’s birthday. “Please accept my sincerest congratulations on your fifth birthday anniversary. Sorry I cannot attend, but will surely celebrate your sixth. Give my love to your mother and grandmother. Wishing you all health and happiness in the world and sending you so much love. Yours devotedly. Grandpop.”46

  On Rosh Hashanah [Jewish New Year] 1935, Jack’s brother Joe wrote him, “May you be inscribed in the book of life.”47

  Jack’s sisters and brothers wished him “every joy and happiness for the coming year. May it bring your wife and family all you have ever wished for. Hope you are well. Love and kindest regards.”48

  In September 1935 a hurricane threatened the coast of Florida. Guzik’s daughter was there at the time and he was very worried. He sent her a telegram expressing his unease. “Received your wire,” he wrote. “Sure hope it’s a false alarm.” However, take no chances whatever. Would suggest you move inland to Coral Gables till it blows over.

  “Wire me and mom by Western Union developments. Am awfully uneasy about that. Have already written you. Don’t forget. Watch yourself closely. Awaiting and watching news. Much love, Pop.”49

  In February 1935 his daughter wrote him, “Dearest Dad: Valentine greetings to the sweetest sweetheart of them all. We are all great. Have been writing to you right along. Hope you have received all mail. Did you get our pictures. Did you like them? All our love Valentine’s Day. Jeanette, Mother, Charles and Billy Jack.”50

  Jack wrote his daughter on her birthday in 1935: “Dear Jeanette. I am wishing you my finest and sincerest thoughts of love, happiness and health on your birthday and forever after. Take care of yourself and our Billy Boy. How is Rosie ? Give her and Charles my love. Hope you have a wonderful time on your birthday. Lovingly, Pop.”51

  On the anniversary of his mother’s death, Jack received a letter from his son. “Have appropriate services said for anniversary of your mother’s death Wednesday evening to Thursday evening. Mom will burn candles for you.”52

  On his wedding anniversary in 1934, Jack sent his wife a telegram. “My best wishes of love, good health and happiness to my dear old girl on our twenty-seventh anniversary and hoping we spend together many, many more happier anniversaries.

  “I hear from our children and they are fine. Just don’t worry about anything, as I am feeling good and taking good care of myself. Best to Frank and Lou, also Harry and Erma. Lovingly, Jack”53

  The Guzik family correspondence notwithstanding, once most families discovered that a relative was in the rackets they experienced humiliation and anger.

  Longy Zwillman’s daughter, Lynn, displayed artistic talent. But whenever she applied to art schools she was refused admittance. Longy had the problem investigated and discovered that Lynn was turned down because of his reputation.

  Longy loved his daughter with a passion, but Lynn never returned his affection. She could never accept Zwillman for what he was, and blamed him for the rejections. As Longy grew older, his daughter’s remoteness affected him greatly.54

  Brothers and sisters of mobsters also often suffered because of their notorious siblings. At the time that Harry and Irving Kushner of Detroit’s Purple Gang received life sentences for murder, their younger brother was a student in a Hebrew day school.

  The trial caused a sensation in the city’s Jewish community. One afternoon, as the younger Kushner sat in class, his teacher began to shout at him. “You… Your family is bringing shame on the Jewish people.”55

  The youngster jumped up and ran out of class and never returned to Hebrew school. In adulthood, he changed his name, became a successful attorney and a judge. But he never got over this incident from his early life.

  Sam was another Purple Gangster who was convicted of murder and received a life sentence. His sister Sarah remembers the shock and shame the family suffered. “My mother and father sat around the table at night whispering about my brother so we children wouldn’t hear what they were saying. When I found out about my brother from kids at school, I was traumatized. I couldn’t believe it, I wouldn’t believe it.”

  She remembers how difficult it was for her to go to school and face “all the stares and know that everyone was talking about my family.”

  For years Sarah refused to believe that her brother was a killer. She decided to devote herself to proving him innocent. Later, while a student at Wayne University in Detroit, she dated a law student who wanted to marry her. Sarah agreed, but made him promise that he would help free her brother. He kept his word.

  After thirty-five years, Sarah’s efforts were rewarded and her brother was paroled. She and her family drove up to Jackson State Prison to bring him home. When he came out, she could hardly contain her joy.

  As they walked to the car, her brother took Sarah aside. “I want you to know how much I appreciate what you’ve done for me,’’ he said. “But I have to tell you. I was guilty.’’

  Sarah was devastated and never fully recovered from the shock of this revelation.56

  After the disclosure that Jews worked as hitmen for the so-called Murder, Inc. gang of killers-for-hire, the New York Jewish community was in an uproar. In March 1940, the Jewish Daily Forward sent a reporter into Brooklyn to talk to the man-on-the-street and to interview the parents of the convicted killers.

  The reporter was struck at how humiliated all the parents were. Some mourned as though their son had died. Others searched for some explanation to the tragedy that had befallen them. A few were too shocked and embarrassed to speak.

  The mother of Abraham “Pretty” Levine expressed her dismay to her interviewer. She wailed to him, “All my other children are good and decent. All studied, all work. All have married, lead good family lives and are a comfort in our old age. All except for one. Except for him.”57

  Yet, some relatives recall the the gangster members of their family with affection and view them as something akin to folk heroes.

  Dorie Shapiro Grizzard, the granddaughter of Gurrah Shapiro, is a case in point. When she speaks about Gurrah, she does so with affection, and even pride. In her grandfather’s time, she says, men like him did not indulge in random acts of violence. ‘They had a code of honor. They only hurt people they knew.” Gurrah “killed for a reason. He killed somebody that bothered him or did something to hi
m. Not a stranger.”

  She also notes that being the relative of a gangster could have its advantages.

  “Anytime I would go out with somebody, and it wasn’t working, I just told them who I was, and you would see an instant change in their personality. I mean, they were so nice to me. They were like my best friend.

  “If I couldn’t get a job or something like that and I hinted who my grandfather was, I had the job the next day. Regardless of whether I could spell or I could read, they gave me the job.”58

  George Tane was a bootlegger who controlled Green Bay, Wisconsin. After Prohibition, he owned all the houses of prostitution in the city. Every November George would go through Chicago on his way to Florida. He usually came driving a brand-new Packard sedan and with a brand-new “wife.”

  His niece Dena remembers her parents telling her that “Uncle George is a gambler and he goes to Florida to gamble.” George “always arrived laden with presents and each of the thirteen nieces and nephews would get a dollar bill.”

  During World War II, when many of Dena’s cousins were in the armed services, it was Dena’s job “to mail a $20 bill to each of them from Uncle George.”

  In the spring, George “would return from Florida, always with an entourage, and the gorgeous little blond who was always introduced as his wife,” remembers Dena. “He was married to several showgirls, for a few years each,” she says.

  “He was warm and full of fun. The entire family would gather and he would tell wonderful stories, enchanting us all.

  “He always said he came to Chicago to see his mother. He treated her like a queen. His three sisters adored him, and so did all the children in the family,” says Dena.

  “Many years later,” relates Dena, “I learned that he was known as ‘Silky/ because he always wore custom-made silk shirts. I remember that he wore nothing but custom-made imported shoes, smoked cigarettes with a gold cigarette holder and always smelled beautiful.

  “In later years he married the woman who had been his bookkeeper for years,” says Dena, “and lived out his life between Green Bay and a little hunting lodge he had in Mountain, Wisconsin.

  “He was buried on the day American astronauts landed on the moon.”59

  As they say, you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your relatives. So it was that some Jewish families of the inter-war years had a father, a brother, an uncle or a cousin who was adept at using guns in illegal enterprises. Jews were not unique in this, other ethnic groups did it as well. This was all part of being an American.

  Meyer Lansky was once asked if he had his life to live over again, would he live it another way.

  After thinking for a while, Lansky remarked that when he was young he thought that Jews should be treated like other people. He remembered that after a pogrom, a young soldier in Grodno, the town where Lansky was born, said that Jews should stand up and fight.

  “I guess you could say I’ve come a long way from Grodno and a long way from the Lower East Side,” Lansky said. “But I still believe him. I wouldn’t have lived my life in any other way.”60

  Chapter Eight: Defenders of Their People

  Chicago gangster Samuel “Nails” Morton (born Markowitz) was a stellar member of the Dion O’Banion mob and one of the gang’s few Jewish recruits. Morton was a stylish dresser who lived the high life and loved horseback riding. One fine Sunday morning in May of 1923, while cantering through Lincoln Park, a stirrup strap broke and Morton tumbled to the ground. The horse, later described as “particularly nervous and mettlesome,” lashed out, kicking Nails in the head and killing him.

  Morton’s grief-stricken buddies demanded revenge. Led by Two-Gun Louis Alterie, a zany and pathological killer and Morton’s closest friend in the outfit, they broke into the stable and kidnapped the guilty horse. The group led the horse to the spot where Morton died and solemnly “bumped him off,” each man pumping a bullet into its head. Alterie then telephoned the stables. “We taught that goddamned horse of yours a lesson,” he said. “If you want the saddle, go and get it.”1

  The O’Banion gang then staged a lavish gangster funeral. The funeral cortege was two miles long, and it took six limousines to carry the flowers. Five thousand Jews, including rabbis, turned out to pay tribute to Nails.

  Local reporters were shocked. Why would so many law-abiding Jews attend the funeral of a gangster? When the story came to light, it showed that Morton had another side to his life that few outsiders knew about. From the time he was a teenager, Morton had protected and defended Jews from attacks by anti-Semites. Attending the funeral was the community’s way of showing its gratitude.2

  Morton grew up on Chicago’s Maxwell Street, the heart of the city’s East European Jewish quarter. The immigrant Jews who lived in the district faced a daily battle for economic survival, as well as constant harassment from Jew-baiting Polish gangs who enjoyed going down to “Jewtown” to beat up Jewish kids, steal from pushcarts and create mayhem. As a young man, Morton organized a defense society to drive these gangs from the west side.3

  In one incident, several Jewish youngsters were assaulted as they passed through the Polish neighborhood. When Morton heard about this, he assembled a gang of Jewish toughs and headed for the Polish district to retaliate. They went to the street corners indicated by the boys who had been attacked and started a free-for-all fight. After administrating a sufficient amount of physical punishment, the Jews withdrew.4

  When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Morton enlisted in the 131st Illinois Infantry that went overseas with the famed “Rainbow Division.’’

  Nails rose through the ranks to become a first lieutenant, and received the Croix de Guerre, France’s highest decoration for bravery, for capturing a German machine gun nest despite being wounded. He returned to Maxwell Street a hero, became a bootlegger, and put his training in warfare and weapons to practical use.

  After his death, Nails was characterized as a man who led a number of lives. To one set of acquaintances he was a gallant soldier. To another, a dauntless defender of Jewry. And to the police, a notorious gangster.5

  Morton was not unique. During the early decades of the twentieth century, Jewish districts and immigrant Jews were often victimized and attacked by young hoodlums from other ethnic groups. Jewish gangsters frequently protected their neighborhoods from these racist gangs. It was not simply an aspect of protecting one’s turf against rivals, but part of a deeper commitment to the safety of one’s people.

  This protection extended to individual Jews as well. Alex Levinsky was the first Canadian Jew to play professional hockey. He began his career in 1932 playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs. In the mid-1930s, Toronto traded him to the Chicago Black Hawks. While playing for Chicago, opposing fans harassed him verbally, and opposing players verbally and physically, because he was a Jew. After one blatantly anti-Semitic assault on the ice, a group of Chicago Jewish mobsters contacted Alex and offered to protect him on and off the ice whenever he traveled to other cities to play. Levinsky thanked them, but declined their proposal.6

  Levinsky closed his hockey career by coaching the New York Rangers and winning two Stanley Cup championships.

  Some mobsters even considered protecting Jews to be one of their gang’s functions. When one such Chicago gangster was told that there were no Jewish gangsters in Milwaukee, his first question was, “Do the Jews get pushed around much in Milwaukee?”7

  This role brought the mobsters a measure of admiration and status among law-abiding members of the Jewish community. For instance, Jews on the Lower East Side of New York accorded a grudging respect to the notorious killer Max “Kid Twist” Zweibach because he kept Italian and Irish gangs, or as he called them, “the wops and the micks” from invading their neighborhood.8

  Zweibach’s sometime rival and successor, Big Jack Zelig, was another gangster who kept other ethnic hoodlums out of the Jewish neighborhood.

  In 1912, the New York Jewish community hired Abe Shoenfeld,
an experienced detective, to investigate crime and vice on the Lower East Side. For five years, Shoenfeld diligently gathered information and compiled intelligence reports on the location, management and clients of gambling resorts, brothels and gang hangouts. He offered a perceptive evaluation of Zelig.9

  Shoenfeld never minimized Zelig’s criminality. But he also noted that Zelig performed a valuable service for the Jewish community, because “he has rid the East Side of Italian pimps and thieves.”

  According to Shoenfeld, Zelig was angered by the Italian gangs who invaded the Jewish quarter, looking for Jewish women to seduce into prostitution and businesses to rob. Zelig and his henchmen, Louis “Lefty Louie” Rosenzweig, a dead shot with his left hand, and Jacob “Whitey Lewis” Seidenshner, who could not shoot straight, but was a “frisky scrapper,” opened fire on some armed Italians who attended a dance sponsored by a local group of prostitutes and procurers. They killed the leader of the gang and sent his comrades scattering into the streets.

  After that, Italians dared not strut in the Jewish district escorting a Jewish girl, and they stopped patronizing the local dance academies.

  Shoenfeld was no admirer of Jewish gangsters. Nevertheless, he credited Zelig with ridding the East Side of Italians who robbed gambling houses and legitimate businesses. “He has prevented more hold-ups and things of a similar nature in his career than one thousand policemen/’ wrote Shoenfeld.

  The East Side Jewish community was so appreciative of Zelig’s efforts that when he sponsored a ball at Arlington Hall, not only did the underworld community attend, but legitimate businessmen came as well. They came, said Shoenfeld, “to pay tribute to Jack Zelig.”