Yehuda Arazi, a long-time gunrunner for the Haganah, came to the United States to assist in the arms purchasing effort. Known as a loner with his own method of operation, Arazi made contact with former members of the notorious Murder, Inc. gang of killers for hire and asked for their assistance. As he explained, “In my business we can’t be too fussy who we do business with. Sometimes they’re not nice people.”60
At the time, the government of the United States maintained an arms embargo against Israel. This embargo did not apply to the Arab states, which could always import military hardware.
Arazi knew that the Mafia controlled the port in New York. He approached Meyer Lansky and asked him to find out what weapons passed through the port targeted for Arab countries and, if possible, prevent them from reaching their destination. Lansky said he would handle it.
Lansky contacted Albert Anastasia, who controlled the longshoreman’s union and the docks. Anastasia’s men made certain that weapons destined for the Arabs mysteriously got lost, fell overboard or were mistakenly loaded onto ships bound for Israel.61
New York and New Jersey longshoremen also helped Israeli agents conceal the arms they purchased for Israel. Illegal consignments of military hardware, some of it brand-new and still packed in oil and straw, were secreted onto ships and sent directly to Israel.
At their own initiative, a delegation of Jewish gangsters from Brooklyn met with Teddy Kollek, who orchestrated the arms smuggling venture from a two-room suite on the second floor of the Hotel Fourteen in New York City. The men offered to help in any way they could. One of them said, “If you want anyone killed, just draw up a list and we’ll take care of it.” Kollek politely refused.62
Reuven Dafni, another Haganah emissary, was sent to Miami. While there, he met with a leading Miami Jewish gangster, Sam Kay.
“The contact was made for me by a Jewish lawyer whose office was in the same building as the gangster’s,” says Reuven. “The lawyer felt it was worth seeing the man, since we had nothing to lose. He called the gangster’s office and I was invited upstairs.
“When I entered, I faced his secretary. It was like something out of a movie. She was blond, wore a low cut dress with her bosom half out, and was chewing gum and filing her nails. She never even looked at me, but said ‘Go in, he’s expecting you.’
“When I went in, all I saw were someone’s feet on the desk, a newspaper and cigar smoke curling up from behind the paper. After standing quietly for a few minutes, I cleared my throat a couple of times. The paper was lowered and Sam said, ‘Sit down and tell me what you want.’ So I told him. When I finished he said okay, he would help.
“Now this Sam was good friends with the president of Panama. They were very close. And Sam contacted him for us. From then on, all our ships carrying weapons to Israel were registered in Panama and flew under the Panamanian flag. This was a very, very big help to us.”63
A few months later the Haganah sent Reuven to Los Angeles. One day he received a curious phone call from a man who identified himself as “Smiley” and requested a meeting. When they met, Smiley asked Reuven to “Tell me what you’re doing. The boss is interested.” The “Boss” turned out to be Bugsy Siegel, and Smiley was Allen Smiley, his right-hand man.
Smiley arranged a meeting between Siegel and Reuven at the LaRue restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard. At the appointed time, Smiley and Reuven went into an empty room at the rear of the restaurant. After a few moments, Smiley left, leaving Reuven alone.
Soon, two tough-looking goons entered and searched the room. When they were satisfied it was safe, they left. Shortly thereafter, Siegel came in.
Reuven told him his story, the Haganah’s need for money and weapons with which to fight. When he finished Siegel asked, “You mean to tell me Jews are fighting?”
“Yes,” replied Reuven.
Siegel, who was sitting across the table, leaned forward until the two men’s noses were almost touching.
“You mean fighting, as in killing?” he asked.
“Yes,” answered Reuven.
Siegel looked at him for a moment and said, “I’m with you.”
“From then on,” recalls Reuven, “every week I got a phone call to go to the restaurant. And every week I received a suitcase filled with $5 and $10 bills. The payments continued until I left Los Angeles.”
Reuven estimates that Siegel gave him a total of $50,000.64
In part, this episode reflects Siegel’s attitude and past activities as a gunman and mob killer. Bugsy always remained enthusiastic about violence. Even after he became a major crime boss, he wanted to do the killing himself rather than simply arrange matters. This may explain his willingness to help Israel once he learned that Jews were willing to kill to achieve their state.
Murray Greenfield, an American who had been part of Aliya Bet, the “illegal immigrant” movement bringing Holocaust survivors to Palestine, was sent to the sporting division of the United Jewish Appeal in Baltimore in 1949, and given the name of a local contact. Greenfield went to the man’s house and was told to come back at midnight.
“I thought it strange,” he remembers. “But if it helped Israel, I would do it.”
When he arrived late that evening, Greenfield was ushered into the basement recreation room and told to wait. At about 12:30 A.M. the door opened and “the strangest group I had ever seen entered. The men were all short and stocky; their female companions were all blonds. The men sat on one side of the room, the women on the other.”65
The host then asked Greenfield to tell his story. When he finished, his host said, “Okay, you guys know why you’re here and what you have to do.”
Then he looked around the room and said, “Joe, you’re giving $5,000; Max, you’re giving $5,000; Harry, you’re giving $10,000; and so it went.
One of the participants complained that “business is tough because of the cops,” and said he couldn’t contribute so much. Another indicated that “I can’t give you a lot of cash, but don’t forget I helped you last year when you needed guns.”
Undeterred by all the grumbling, Greenfield’s host, formerly one of Baltimore’s leading Jewish mobsters, continued dunning. In no time, more than $90,000 was collected. The money, in cash, was put in a paper bag and handed to Greenfield.
“There I was,” he recalled, “in Baltimore at two o’clock in the morning holding thousands of dollars in a paper bag.”66
In Los Angeles, Mickey Cohen held a fund-raising affair for the Irgun (the underground Jewish organization led by Menachem Begin) in 1947. Leading underworld figures from California and Las Vegas attended and, according to Cohen and other sources, thousands of dollars were raised. The money, claimed Cohen, was used to purchase weapons and have them shipped to Israel.
Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno, a top Mafia killer who later turned informer, attended the party, which he recalls being held at Slapsy Maxie’s restaurant. “The place’s packed. I’ve never seen so many Jewish bookmakers in one place in my life… They’re all there. Famous actors, producers, bigshots in the community. It’s a full house. The entertainers are Lou Holtz, Ben Blue, Martha Ray, Danny Thomas. Sitting at our table’s the chief of police of Burbank and his wife.”67
To start things off, Mickey Cohen pledged twenty-five thousand dollars. “After that,” remembers Fratianno, “forget about it. Everybody’s pledging thousands. Even the bookmakers are pledging five and ten grand. They know Mickey’s running the show and they’re going to have to pay off.”
Nevertheless, Fratianno remained suspicious.
His suspicions increased when a story in the Los Angeles Herald reported that an unnamed ship carrying arms for the Jews in Israel had sunk in the Atlantic Ocean during a storm.
Fratianno knew Cohen very well. When he wasn’t socializing and working with Mickey, he was trying to kill him.
Fratianno maintains that Cohen kept the money for himself, insisting Cohen would never let hundreds of thousands of dollars slip through his fingers.
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br /> According to Fratianno, Cohen had a girlfriend who worked at the Herald. ‘And this broad would walk on hot coals for Mickey. The way I see it,” says Fratianno, “Mickey called her and made up a story about buying guns and ammunition for the Jews with the million raised at the benefits and then told her the boat sank. A few unknown people died, some were saved, and she prints it on his sayso.”
Fratianno confronted Mickey with his suspicions. “I says, ‘Mickey, congratulations. You’ve just pulled off the biggest, cleanest fucking score I’ve ever seen made.’ And he looks at me, just squinting, you know, and for a split second there’s this big shiteating grin on his face.
“But he says, ‘Jimmy, you’ve got me all wrong. The story’s right here in the paper.’
I says, ‘Mickey, with your bullshit you better hold on to that paper, it might come in handy when you’ve got to wipe your mouth’.”68
Other sources, including Yitzhak Ben-Ami, dispute Fratianno’s allegations. Ben Ami headed the Irgun’s European-based illegal immigration operations. In 1947, the Irgun sent him to the United States to assist the American League for a Free Palestine, the Irgun’s funding and propaganda arm in the United States.
Ben-Ami helped organize the fund-raising affairs Fratianno spoke about. He claims that “between $50,000 and $60,000 was raised,” and not the hundreds of thousands that Fratianno mentions.
“The ‘Jewish underworld’ contributed all together about $120,000,” for the Irgun, says Ben-Ami.69
The funds were transferred to New York, partly for the outfitting of an LST vessel, renamed “Altalena,” the pen name of writer Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky, the leader of Revisionist Zionism.
Carrying 900 people and a cargo of 5,000 rifles, 450 machine guns and millions of rounds of ammunition, the ‘Altalena” sailed to Israel from France on June 11, 1948. When it reached the coast of Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of Israel, ordered it fired upon, believing the weapons, designated for Menachem Begin’s Irgun forces, posed a threat to the new Labor-led Israeli government.
The “Altalena” burst into flames. Forty persons perished and many of the weapons were destroyed.70
This was most likely the ship referred to in the Los Angeles Herald article.
Ben-Ami regards Fratianno as Mickey’s enemy. Spreading a false story about the Irgun money was his way of denigrating Cohen, and since Mickey was dead, he couldn’t refute the charges.
Herb Brin also discounts Fratianno’s version. He knew Cohen and believes Mickey told the truth about buying weapons with the money he raised.
“I knew who he was and what he was,” says Brin. “But when we talked about Israel, he was a different person. He had tears in his eyes once when we talked about Israel.”71
Why did these gangsters help the Jewish community? Some saw themselves as defenders of the Jews, almost biblical-like fighters. It was part of their self-image.
Herb Brin believes they helped their people because in each of them there was a “pintele Yid,” a spark of Jewishness.72
Although he did not believe in God and was uninterested in religion, Meyer Lansky said he felt obligated to help the Jewish community and Israel because he was a Jew. Perhaps this was a way of compensating for his other, less heroic, life.73
In their later years, some gangsters simply sought the respect and legitimacy denied them in their youth. The way to acquire communal recognition and approbation was through Jewish philanthropy and devotion to “Jewish causes.”
Other mobsters sought respectability so as not to embarrass their children and grandchildren, and thus jeopardize their chances for success in the legitimate world.
Reuven, the Haganah emissary, believes that Sam, the Miami gangster, assisted the Haganah for just this reason. “He had a daughter of marriageable age, but she had a difficult time meeting Jewish boys because of what her father was,” he says. “I think he helped us because it was a way to gain acceptance in the Jewish community.
“Once it became known that he was helping us, the Jewish community’s attitude toward him changed. His daughter began dating Jewish boys and eventually married one.”74
Be that as it may, helping Israel may be seen as a later version of the Jewish gangster’s tradition of protecting his neighborhood from anti-Semites. After World War II, the Jewish state symbolically came to represent the Jewish neighborhood. In defending Israel against her enemies, the Jewish gangster was still defending his people against the Jew haters.
Nevertheless, not every Jewish gangster was so altruistic toward the Jewish community or Jewish interests. Some of the same Jewish hoodlums who later claimed to have defended their neighborhood and Jews aginst anti-Semites, got their start in crime by preying on fellow Jews. Mickey Cohen, who boasted that he “would do anything for a cause that was right, particularly Jewish causes,” and who said that “Jews should behave differently and more correctly,” threatened and extorted Los Angeles Jewish businessmen left and right.75
Other Jewish criminals thought nothing of working against Israel’s interest if they could profit by it doing so. In 1951, two Detroit Jews, Arthur Leebove and Sam Stein, were convicted for conspiracy to smuggle 21 American warplanes from Newark, New Jersey to Egypt during the Arab-Israeli hostilities in 1948.76
Their scheme was to purchase surplus military aircraft, load them with British crews in Newark and fly them to England. Once there, an Egyptian crew would be brought on board and the planes flown to Egypt. The syndicate bought AT-6 airplanes and one B-25 bomber.
The plot came to light in December 1948 when the B-25 bomber was forced to return to Newark because of bad weather. The planes were then seized by federal agents before they could be delivered.77
For men such as these, protecting and helping Jews was fine as long as it did not interfere with business. When the two clashed, making money superseded ethnic loyalties.
Although the activities of the Lanskys and Siegels embarrassed the Jewish community, they could provide what respectable Jews could not: physical protection for the community and arms for an Israel struggling to survive. These men were not latter-day Robin Hoods and should not be glorified as such. Yet in their time, they contributed to their people’s survival.
Epilogue
Jewish gangsterism declined after the Second World War. The urban ghettoes that spawned these men — New York’s Lower East Side and those of Detroit, Philadelphia and Newark — no longer contained Jews. Jews moved to the suburbs, sent their children to universities and became part of America’s economic, educational and occupational elite. Third and fourth generation American Jews no longer needed crime to “make it.” Unlike the Italian Mafiosi, Jewish gangsters did not want members of their families to go into their “business.” Hence, the activities of these men were one-generational. They had no successors. The Jewish gangster in America became history, something for their grandchildren to read about.
And what of the gangsters? Despite their depravity and violence, a part of these men remained a son of immigrants, still tied to his parents, his family, his people and to the American dream.
Author’s Note and Acknowledgement
My approach to the subject of Jewish gangsters in the JL V JL United States has been selective. I did not attempt to be all-encompassing and include every important Jewish mobster.
The men I chose to include in my narrative lived in American cities which had large Jewish communities and whose rackets were, in large measure, influenced or dominated by Jews.
Chicago, whose organized crime was governed by Al Capone and his Italian successors, does not exactly fit my criteria. Nonetheless, Jack Guzik was such a character that I felt impelled to include him.
Another factor influencing my choices was the availability of written and oral sources on the various Jewish gangsters which suited my purposes.
Works on crime, whether recounted by the criminal, the lawman or the journalist, are filled with inaccuracies, errors, hearsay, misstatements and whitewashes.
Using these sources frequently poses problems for the researcher seeking the truth. Since I used an anecdotal approach, I have avoided many of the dilemmas faced by historians who must make judgements on the reliability of the evidence.
Nonetheless, this is not a book of fiction. Wherever possible, I verified the accuracy of my sources and based my narrative on fact. The dialogue contained in the anecdotes is transcribed as related to me or as it appears in written accounts. In some instances, I edited the material and changed punctuation or capitalization to enhance readability. In all cases, I strove for accuracy without sacrificing the tone, flavor and spirit of the stories and the storyteller.
In this revised and expanded edition of the original, But — He Was Good to His Mother, I have added source notes as well as new material.
A number of persons were especially helpful to me and I want to acknowledge them. “Mervin,” Irving “Itzik” Goldstein, Max “Puddy” Hinkes, Heshey Weiner, Faye Skuratofsky, Jerry Kugel, Myron Sugerman, Eli Golan, David Stern, Herb Brin, Lester Schaffer, Charles Jacobs, Carol K., Reuven Dafni, Jeremiah Unterman, David Avivi, A. Rubin, Murray Greenfield and Lori Levinski, gave generously of their time and reminiscences. Their input added spice and substance to the book. I also want to thank Dena Rubens, David Levitt, and Fay Newman Rubenstein, who took the time to write and share their memories with me. In addition, I wish to credit people who spoke to me but are no longer living, including Meyer Lansky, Harry Fleisch, Hershel Kessler, Sam Hessel, “Dutch,” Philip Slomovitz, Leonard Simons and Elsie Proskie. Then, too, are those persons who spoke to me on condition of anonymity. In citing them in the text, I used an alias in place of their real names. I am also grateful to Professors Menachem Amir, Alan Block and Peter Lupsha for sharing their expertise and sources on organized crime with me.
For twenty years, I have used the good services of the people who administer the Freedom of Information Act at the Department of Justice. My thanks to all those who helped process my requests, including James K. Hall, Thomas H. Bresson, David G. Flanders, Emil P Moschella, J. Kevin O’Brien, Linda Kloss, Marshall R. Williams and Helen Ann Near.
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