By Joe Spier
CALGARY, Alberta, Canada — I have always had a peculiar fascination for Jewish gangsters. Over the years, I would read much written about the Jewish mob. How could I not be enthralled with guys who had nicknames like, “Little Farvel”, “Legs”, “Dopey”, “Waxey”, “Greenie”, “Who-Ha”, “Kid Twist”, “Dutch”, “Tick-Tock”, “The Bug”, “Dimples”? I even learned that some were Orthodox. Mob hit man, Samuel “Red” Levine refused to kill on Shabbat. Now there’s someone whose morals you can admire.
The roots of Jewish-American gangsterism lay in the tough streets of New York and other cities into which poured a vast immigration of the poor and destitute from Eastern Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While most became hard working, a few saw crime as a way to crawl out of the poverty they had come from. The Jewish gangster thrived from the beginning of Prohibition in 1920 until the 1950s and 60s by which time nearly all either were in prison, retired from the rackets, had been killed or died of natural causes. For the most part, the Jewish mob was one generational.
Jewish gangsters, not very nice guys, were involved in most forms of criminal activity. During the rise of American Nazism in the 1930s and when Israel was being founded in the late 1940s, they were also defenders of the Jewish people.
The German American Bund, an anti-Semitic organization of ethnic Germans was established in the 1930s to promote Nazi Germany. At rallies in major American cities, the Bund would spew its pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish diatribe. Jewish mobsters took it upon themselves to quell those rallies using not particularly legal but effective methods.
New Jersey numbers boss, Max “Puddy” Hinkes’ method was to throw stink bombs into the hall where the creeps were and as they fled the room, he and his boys would beat them with bats and iron bars. One of the fleeing Nazi sympathizers had the imprudence to shout “heil”. He received a particularly severe beating. There were no more Bund meetings in the area.
Chicago gambling czar, Davie Berman distributed brass knuckles and clubs to his men who burst into the hall where the pro-Nazis were meeting and proceeded to beat them. Berman, covered with the blood of his adversaries then took to the podium, fired a shot into the air, and warned them next time would be worse. Two more attacks closed down the gatherings for good.
New York’s Jewish leaders wanted the Bund rallies stopped but there was nothing legally they could do. Judge Nathan Perlman secretly approached America’s most notorious Jewish gangster, Meyer Lansky to handle the problem with one stipulation, that no one was to be killed. Lansky rounded up his friends together with members of Brooklyn’s Murder Inc. mob and went about New York for more than a year disrupting Bund meetings. Nazi arms, legs and ribs were broken but no one died.
Following World War II, as Israel prepared for statehood, unlike the well-equipped Arab forces, she found herself desperately short of armaments. America had plenty, surplus from the war, but there was an embargo against arms shipments to the Middle East. The leadership of the Yishuv (the Jewish community living in Israel) and its military wing, the Haganah sent emissaries to the United States to raise money, purchase arms and illegally transport the arms to Haifa in circumvention of the embargo.
The Haganah agents established their U.S. headquarters in midtown Manhattan at Hotel Fourteen owned by a Jewish Zionist couple. It was inevitable that the agents would encounter the Jewish mob as in the basement of Hotel Fourteen was the famous Copacabana nightclub. The Copacabana was controlled by Italian mafioso, Frank Costello and was a favorite mob hangout.
Haganah emissary Reuven Dafni was sitting in the rear of a restaurant explaining to syndicate gambler and bootlegger Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel the need for money to purchase weapons. “You mean to tell me Jews are fighting?” Siegel asked. “Yes,” replied Dafni. “You mean fighting as in killing?” Again, the answer was “Yes.” Every week thereafter Dafni received a suitcase filled with $5 and $10 bills for a total of about $50,000. Siegel, the builder of the Flamingo, the first hotel-casino in Las Vegas is considered the father of modern Las Vegas. The hotel was built on behalf of the Mafia and unfortunately for Siegel, they believed he was skimming into his own pocket funds they had given him for construction. Siegel was whacked while sitting in the living room of the home of his mistress.
Dafni had a problem. In order to avoid U.S. government regulations, the ships carrying weapons to Israel required a “flag of convenience” – registration in a foreign country. Dafni was directed to see a leading Miami Jewish gangster, Sam Kay. As it turned out Kay was good friends with the President of Panama. From then on, all Haganah owned ships carrying weapons to Israel were registered in Panama and flew under the Panamanian flag.
Yehuda Arazi, the Haganah’s chief arms purchaser needed help on the docks of New York to aid the illegal transport of arms to Israel and to find out what weapons passed through the port destined for Arab countries. Nothing moved through the port without the longshoremen and the longshoremen were controlled by the Mafia. Arazi approached Meyer Lansky who in turn contacted Albert Anastasia, the Mafia boss of the longshoremen’s union. Part of one consignment of arms from a Pittsburgh dealer destined for the Arabs mysteriously fell overboard. Most of another weapons cargo was by mistake loaded onto ships bound for Haifa. And dockworkers secreted military hardware purchased by the Haganah onto ships leaving for Israel.
The Haganah even on one occasion enlisted the services of Frank Sinatra. Sinatra, certainly not a gangster, had relations with members of the mob for many years. In March 1948, Sinatra was performing at the Copacabana. One night, Teddy Kollek, a Haganah emissary who would later become mayor of Jerusalem, was sitting at the bar of the Copacabana explaining to Sinatra that he had an Irish ship captain waiting in the port of New York with a vessel full of munitions destined for Israel but a large sum of cash needed to be handed over. Kollek feared that the FBI, suspicious of the Haganah’s activities was watching him and didn’t know how he was going to deliver the cash. Sympathetic to the Israeli cause, Sinatra offered to help. Kollek walked out the front door of the Copacabana and Sinatra out the back carrying a paper bag filled with cash. He went down to the pier, handed the cash over and watched the ship sail. Frank Sinatra remained a champion of Israel all his life.
West Coast mobster Mickey Cohen was active in raising funds for the Irgun, the armed Jewish revisionist underground organization headed by Menachem Begin. In Los Angeles, Cohen held a fund raising affair at Slapsey Maxie’s restaurant. Attending were leading underworld figures, Hollywood producers and actors, community big shots and the chief of the Burbank police. Cohen started things off by pledging $25,000 and everyone else promised thousands. Bookmakers were pledging five and ten grand. Hundreds of thousands were raised. Jewish gangsters alone contributed about $120,000 for the Irgun. The funds were mainly used to outfit the ill-fated Irgun ship, “Altalena”.
Carrying 4,500 tons of weapons and 940 Irgun fighters, the Altalena sailed from France to Israel on June 11, 1948. Offshore Tel Aviv on June 22, the Altalena was shelled and sunk, not by Arabs but by the newly formed Israel Defense Forces of David Ben-Gurion’s Provisional Government. In what is now known as the “Altalena Affair,” the complicated events leading to the sinking of the ship have been much written about and from different perspectives. Oversimplifying, it was a battle for control of the armed forces of the newly created State of Israel. Following the sinking of the Altalena, Irgun fighters agreed to be absorbed into the Israel Defense Forces, staving off civil war.
In 1970, Meyer Lansky, hounded by the FBI who followed him everywhere, wiretapped his phones and made life generally unbearable, moved to Israel. Shortly thereafter, he was indicted in the United States for conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Government of income tax on $36 million. Lansky petitioned for Israeli citizenship under the “Law of Return” and hoped that his earlier assistance to the State might outweigh his unsavory reputation. When the matter reached the desk of Prime Minister Golda Meir, she exclaimed; “Mafia? No Mafia in Israel” and Lansky’s fate was sealed. Back in the United States, Lansky was eventually found not guilty of all charges brought against him. Meyer Lansky passed away peacefully at the age of 89, just another elderly Jew who had sought the sun of Florida.
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Mark Antony eulogizing the murdered Caesar says, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” For me, remembering the Jewish-American gangster, it is the opposite.
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Spier is a retired lawyer with a keen interest in Jewish history. You may contact him via joe.spier@sdjewishworld.com