One hundred years ago, New York City was in the midst of what newspapers decried as “a Jewish crime wave.” The causes were complex, but most observers at the time laid the blame on Prohibition, which created a lucrative black market for alcohol overnight.
“Shifty-eyed boys of the slums,” a reporter noted in 1922, “suddenly began to wear $200 suits of clothes, to flash five-carat diamonds, to drive high-powered cars, to shoot craps for $100 a throw.” Led by Arnold Rothstein (nickname: “the Brain”) and fueled by the phenomenal profits of the bootleg booze trade, Jews by the mid-1920s dominated the illicit industries of gambling, narcotics, labor racketeering and loan-sharking in the city.
The sordid but riveting history of the Jewish contribution to organized crime is told in two exuberant new true-crime books, “The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum,” by Margalit Fox, and “The Incorruptibles,” by Dan Slater. Together these books chronicle the heyday of the Jewish underworld on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, from the Gilded Age, when Jews began challenging Irish control of gangland, through the Jazz Age, when the Italian mob began to wrest away power.
Fox and Slater, each a seasoned journalist and author, write in a breezy, fast-paced style. They revel in the Dickensian details of the demimonde — the colorful lingo, intricate professional techniques and social snobberies of the criminal classes — looping through decades of political and economic history that spills over into chatty footnotes. We learn how to blow a safe, poison a horse, manipulate a stock, bribe a cop and shoplift a bolt of silk. Who knew that the floor managers at Macy’s doubled as pimps who enticed shopgirls into the sex trade or that hatpins could be wielded as weapons?
“The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum” serves up a platonic ideal of the criminal mastermind. Fredericka Mandelbaum was a clever 25-year-old in 1850, when she arrived in the United States from Germany. Her husband, Wolf, worked as a peddler, and Mandelbaum began her career the same way, hawking lace door-to-door on the Lower East Side. By 30, she had established herself as a reliable “fence,” a receiver and seller of stolen goods. Converting plunder into clean cash is critical in any underground economy. But Mandelbaum had grander ambitions. She began cultivating her own army of skilled pickpockets, shoplifters, housebreakers, bank robbers, safecrackers, metalsmiths and black-market vendors, aided by scores of unscrupulous policemen, magistrates and politicians.
Soon Mandelbaum was commissioning major heists. In 1869 she pulled off what was then the largest bank burglary in American history, stealing nearly $1 million (close to $20 million today). By the mid-1880s an estimated $10 million worth of goods had passed through her hands (approximately $300 million now). In 1884, the police finally mustered enough evidence — and gumption — to arrest her. But when they released her on bail, she fled to Canada, taking nearly $1 million worth of loot with her. She died in exile, still running a small fencing operation in Ontario.
“The Incorruptibles” picks up the narrative where Fox leaves off, in the 1890s, as immigrants from Russia, Poland and Hungary began flooding into New York. Slater offers a more panoramic view of the underworld, framing his story as an epic battle between the gangsters, with their co-conspirators in law enforcement, and a small cadre of Jewish reformers — “the Incorruptibles” — who are determined to clean up the Lower East Side.
Many of these villains, like Big Jack Zelig, Louis “Lefty Louie” Rosenberg and Mother Rosie Hertz, are longtime legends. Slater gives center stage to Arnold Rothstein, the infamous dean of gangland, who was accused of fixing the 1919 World Series and inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald to write “The Great Gatsby.” In the mode of Mrs. Mandelbaum, Rothstein was a criminal visionary who commanded a national network of bookmakers, bootleggers, blackmailers, drug dealers, con artists and corrupt lawmen. His murder in 1928 marked the beginning of the end for Jewish dominance of the underworld.
Both Fox and Slater stress that organized crime depends on organized corruption: the crooked cops, judges and politicians who serve as the “Bureau for the Prevention of Conviction,” to borrow a phrase from one former police chief. Unfortunately, the men in blue rarely come alive on the page the way their criminal colleagues do. But Slater finds an exception in the character of Abraham Shoenfeld, an undercover investigator, vigilante and chronicler of the twilight world. He is the rare moral crusader who is as fascinating as his foes. Six feet tall, with beefy forearms, a booming voice and an air of “Hungarian arrogance,” Shoenfeld was a brilliant autodidact who left school after ninth grade to fight crime in his community. “I was, plainly, very angry; maybe this is an understatement of my feelings,” he recalled. “I keenly felt the shame and disgrace that the men and women [of the underworld] were heaping on the body of law-abiding and respectable Jews.”
Yet Shoenfeld was no outsider like Nick Carraway, gaping at the gaudy gangsters. He was one of them, a childhood pal of Lefty Louie and former lover of Tony the Tough, a prostitute turned labor union shtarker (a thug hired to beat up scabs) turned vigilante. When Judah Magnes, the rabbi at the wealthy uptown German synagogue Temple Emanu-El, expressed shock that Jews were involved in the sex trade, Shoenfeld was unfazed. “If it is any consolation, sir, there is no Jewish way of being a whore,” he replied.
No one understood the shadowy world of the Lower East Side better, in all its perverse ingenuity. If we know more about the Jewish demimonde than we do about the Italian or the Irish, it is not because the Jews were any more criminal than their neighbors. It is because the Italians and the Irish did not produce their own Abe Shoenfeld, whose candid, firsthand reports from the heart of the ghetto remain unrivaled.
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