CRIME AND PUNISHMENT:
Historical Department

"It was with some astonishment that I discovered what an integral part of American Jewish life crime was. Our forefathers made names for themselves, such as they are, as gangsters, murderers, musclemen, hit men, acid throwers, arm breakers, bombers and all the other professions open to nice Jewish boys. Prostitution, vice, alcohol, gambling, racketeering, extortion, and all the other things that fill the newspaper today and that I gladly have been attributing as character flaws in other groups of founding fathers: Those were our things ... I was shocked at how deep our roots are in all the sinks of depravity and corruption ... The Jews were the first ones to realize the link between organized crime and organized politics. They led the way in corrupting the police and city hall. They first realized the value of gang/syndicate cartels in business to reduce the killing of each other. They were monopolists of the highest order ... We wrote the book, so to speak, on crime, but it's all forgotten."
Marvin Kitman,
(Jewish) Forward,
10-14-94, p. 9)



"The first major American drug dealer was probably Arnold Rothstein ... In the mid-nineteenth century when the government started to ban certain narcotics, drugs were smuggled in from Europe and the Far East. But it was a slapdash affair -- not a business. Rothstein changed all that. He saw Repeal coming and knew drugs could fill the void left by alcohol ... So in the late [19] twenties Rothstein retooled a mechanism he had built to carry booze. It would now carry, among other things, heroin and cocaine ... [It] became a blueprint for smuggling drugs into America."
Rich Cohen,
Tough Jews. Fathers, Sons and Gangster Dreams, 1999, p. 131-132



 "By 1926, [Rothstein] was allegedly the overlord of the foreign narcotics trade in America. Beginning with Rothstein, American Jewish underworld figures became prominently involved in smuggling and opium and opiates in the United States. During the 1920s and 1930s Jews competed with Italians for dominance of the trade. The Italian-Americans' racketeering predominated during World War II. This was because of the Nazis. When the Germans began to exterminate European Jewry, they also destroyed the Jewish criminals who supplied American distributors."
Robert Rockaway,
But -- He Was Good to His Mother. The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters, Jerusalem, 1993, p. 8

"Despite all their depravity, members of the Jewish robber bands [in Europe] lived as Jews and generally adhered to traditional Jewish lifestyles and customs. As a rule, they did not undertake any expedition on the Sabbath [Saturday] and kept the dietary laws."
Mordechai Breuer,
in MAYER, p. 249

"Jewish bandits [in Europe over the centuries] stole almost exclusively from Christians. No breaking into houses of Court Jews or representatives of the Jewish community or synagogues (in contrast to the many burglarized churches) were reported."
Otto Ulbrichtl,
p. 62

 

"[There was] picking pockets, the theft of textiles and gold or silver, and church robbery with its concomitant violence against priests and clergy. None of these was the exclusive domain of Jews, who were involved in various other subcategories of theft and burglary as well, but in these particular offences Jews were especially prominent ... Some Jewish groups specialized in church robbery ... From 1680 to 1795 the robbery of churches and priests and clergy was the nearly exclusive domain of Jews ... Jews robbed not only Roman Catholic priests but Protestant ones too. It looks rather as if most Christian thieves stayed away from all churches, while Jewish thieves selected churches for more reasons that just convenience."
Florike Egmond,
Underworld. Organized Crime in the Netherlands, 1650-1800, Polity Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 108-110]

 

"The Napoleon of Crime is the first biography of Adam Worth, the most famous criminal in the Victorian Age and the model for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's insidiously brilliant Professor Moriarty. An American-born German Jew who rose through the ranks of New York's Jewish underworld, Adam Worth amassed millions and built a criminal network that reached from New York to London, Paris, and South Africa."
[from the dustjacket of The Napoleon of Crime. The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief, by Ben Macintyre, Farrar/Straus/Girous, New York, 1997



"In 1908, Jews were 25 percent of the four million residents in New York City but 50% of the prison population."
Marilyn Henry,
Can't We Buy the Wall?,
Jerusalem Post,
October 4, 2001



"During Prohibition (1920-1933), Jewish gangsters became major operatives in the American underworld and played prominent roles in the creation of organized crime in the United States. At the time, Jewish gangs dominated illicit activiites in a number of America's largest cities, including Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, Newark, New York, and Philadelphia. The gang dealt in bootlegging, gambling, extortion, drugs, and murder, and developed a reputation for being more ruthless than Al Capone's mob in Chicago. The Purple's decade-long reign of terror ended when most of the gang's members either went to prison or were murdered by rivals."
Robert Rockaway,
The Notorious Purple Gang: Detroit's All-Jewish Prohibition Era Mob, Shofar, 10-31-01,
p. 113-

Jewish Gangsters, Jewish Virtual Library
"There are few excuses for the behavior of Jewish gangsters in the 1920s and 1930s. The best known Jewish gangsters – Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Longy Zwillman, Moe Dalitz — were involved in the numbers rackets, illegal drug dealing, prostitution, gambling and loan sharking. They were not nice men. During the rise of American Nazism in the 1930s and when Israel was being founded between 1945 and 1948, however, they proved staunch defenders of the Jewish people ... Jewish gangsters also helped establish Israel after the war. One famous example is a meeting between Bugsy Siegel and Reuven Dafne, a Haganah emissary, in 1945. Dafne was seeking funds and guns to help liberate Palestine from British rule. A mutual friend arranged for the two men to meet. 'You mean to tell me Jews are fighting?' Siegel asked. 'You mean fighting as in killing?' Dafne answered in the affirmative. Siegel replied, 'I’m with you.' For weeks, Dafne received suitcases filled with $5 and $10 bills -- $50,000 in all -- from Siegel."

J. P. Morgan of the Underworld. American Jewish Historical Society.
"Historians speculate that Jews comprised half of the nation’s leading bootleggers and that Jewish gangsters like Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel dominated organized crime certain cities. Of course, with the largest Jewish population, New York produced the largest number of Jewish gangsters. The kingpin of the New York Jewish underworld was not a street tough gangster, but a refined gambler: Arnold Rothstein. According to Rockaway, 'Rothstein is recognized as the pioneer big businessman of organized crime in the United States' ... Rothstein was born with a business pedigree. His father, wealthy businessman Abraham Rothstein, was dubbed by New York governor Al Smith 'Abe the Just.' A pious man with a reputation for philanthropy and honesty, Abraham Rothstein served as chairman of the board of New York’s Beth Israel Hospital. His older son became a rabbi ... Historian [Robert] Rockaway reports, 'Out of respect for the older Rothstein, Arnold received an Orthodox Jewish funeral with the renowned Orthodox rabbi, Leo Jung, delivering the eulogy.'"

The Purple Gang, [History], crimelibrary.com.
"In the 1920s, Detroit belonged to the Purple Gang, a group of killers and thugs as vicious and bloodthirsty as any racketeer in New York or Chicago. The Purples ran the rackets in Detroit for much of the 1920s and early 30s until the Syndicate boys from back east moved in and wrested control from a gang that had seen its numbers decimated by infighting and prosecution ... In the beginning, the "gangsters" were nothing more than the sons of Russian Jewish immigrants who had come to the New Country in search of a better life ... The boys, led by the four Bernstein brothers – Abe, Joe, Raymond and Izzy, were shakedown artists and jewel thieves, but thanks to Prohibition and the convenient location of Detroit, the young delinquents quickly graduated from nuisance types of street crime to armed robbery, hijacking, extortion, and other strong arm work. They became notorious for their high profile manner of operation and their savagery in dealing with enemies."

Meyer Lansky: Mastermind of the Mob, [History], crimelibrary.com
"If there ever was a golden age of organized crime, it could be argued that it began with Lansky's descent into the underworld when he placed his first bet on a street corner craps game before the start of World War I and ended when he died in the winter of 1983. Arnold Rothstein, the supposed fixer the 1919 World Series, was the Cronus of American organized crime -- the proto-godfather, if you will. Charlie Luciano stirred up the action, Benny Siegel provided the chutzpa, Lepke Buchalter terrorized the enemy but Lansky rose above the fray and served as the brains of the outfit. Luciano was exiled and died relatively young, Siegel and Rothstein were assassinated and Lepke died in Sing Sing's electric chair, but Meyer Lansky died a wealthy old man in Miami, Florida, where he was known as a supporter of Israel and a frequent contributor to the local public television station."

The Development of Organized Crime and the World of Meyer Lansky/Lansky's Inner Circle. [History] Eastern Kentucky University/Department of Criminal Justice and Police Studies
A detailed examination of the world of Syndicate godfather Meyer Lansky, including the Jewish mob's influence in the creation of Las Vegas. With few exceptions, the many characters noted here in Lansky's criminal underworld are Jewish.

Mobtown Confidential. Baltimore Magazine, 2000
"Julius 'The Lord' Salsbury ... was a [Baltimore] Block kingpin who was hunted down by the Feds ... Salsbury ... was never caught. After appealing in a gambling conviction, he jumped bail and fled the country in 1970, eluding capture ever since. Legend has it that he went to Israel to enjoy the protections afforded Jewish-American criminals under the 1965 U.S.-Israeli extradition treaty ... Julius Salsbury became Mobtown's outlaw hero ... By the early 1950s, the lowdown on the Block was attracting out-of-town press. In Washington Confidential, the bestselling pulp expose from 1951, Baltimore's red-light strip was described as 'one of the most vicious and lawless areas in the world' by muckraking authors Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer. 'At this writing,' they concluded, 'any and all forms of vice are tolerated and protected. There is a price for everything and it's not much.'"

Murder with a Blunt Instrument: Ronald Cohen, 1970. African Crime
"A murder trial which attracted immense public interest, both at home and overseas, was that of millionaire Ronald Vivien Cohen, who battered his wife to death at their fashionable [South Africa] Constantia home on the evening of 5 April, 1970. The motive for the killing was never established. Ronald Cohen and Susan Johnson were married on 26 February, 1963. He was thirty-four, a rich and successful businessman, and she was eighteen. It was his second marriage, his first having ended in divorce five years earlier. In 1967, Cohen bought two acres of land on 'millionaire's row'- Monterey Drive, Southern Cross, Constantia - for R12 000. The magnificent Spanish Moorish-type house he had built there was named Southcape ... On 18 September, Ronald Cohen was found guilty of murdering his wife."

The Leopold and Loeb Case of 1924. Jazz Age Chicago
This site is an archive of material about the famous murder trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two Jewish wealthy Chicago teenagers. As psychiatrist David Abrahamsen notes: "[Leopold and Loeb] kidnaped fourteen-year old Bobby Franks, and Loeb beat him to death. They stripped the body from the waist down, and although the evidence is inconclusive, one or both of them probably peformed a sexual act on it ... In the perspective of all that happened since the 1920s, the murder of Bobby Franks hardly qualifies as the crime of the century, as it was seen then. But at that time the brutality and senselessness of the act exploded like a bomb in the public consciousness. People began to realize that society was changing in some frightening way. The youth of the two murderers (this was the beginning of the tidal wave that came to be called juvenile delinquency), the sexual undercurrent of their crime and the fact that theirs was the first major trial to use the testimony of psychiatrists on the background and state of mind of a defendant made an indelible impression on the millions who followed the sensational case in the newspapers." [ABRAHAMSEN, D., 1983, p. 41-42]
http://www.suba.com/~scottn/explore/scrapbks/leo_loeb/leo_loeb.htm

Did Gay Affair Provide a Catalyst for Kristallnacht?,
Guardian [United Kingdom], October 31, 2001
"The assassination of a top German diplomat which triggered Kristallnacht, the organised Nazi pogrom against Jews across Germany, was not politically-motivated, as commonly believed, but the result of a homosexual love affair between a Nazi diplomat and a young Jewish man, according to a leading expert on the Third Reich. Hans-Jürgen Döscher, considered Germany's foremost authority on the events of November 9 1938 following the publication last year of his definitive history, Reichskristallnacht, has gathered scores of documents and eyewitness accounts, including the diaries of the French writer André Gide, to support the theory. On November 7 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a Jew, walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat, five times. Vom Rath died two days later. Nazi propagandists condemned the shooting as a terrorist attack to further the cause of the Jewish 'world revolution,' and the pogrom was launched ... Prof Döscher gleaned his previously unpublished evidence from court archives, reports from the propaganda ministry, letters, diary extracts, and interviews with diplomats of the time. Most startling are the diaries of Gide, in which the writer expresses his amazement that the scandal failed to gain public attention. Vom Rath, Gide wrote, 'had an exceptionally intimate relationship with the little Jew, his murderer.'"

[Commentary at a discussion forum by Stan Nadel], June 18, 1998,
Mendele. Yiddish Literature and Language [Nadel is a professor at Southwestern Oklahoma State University]
"It seems that [the Yiddish word] gonef (sometimes gonnoff, hence the false etemolgy) entered American and English slang via what is known as thieves cant. One of the traditional occupations for Jews in Europe and America was as pawnbrokers. That is an occupation which tends to bridge the border between the criminal and business worlds. At the margin, the line between pawnbroker and fence (handler of stolen goods) is often obscured and some Jews played an important role in the criminalized underground economy of large cities. To provide a concrete example from my own research, I'll offer up the notorious Fredrika "Marm" Mandelbaum of New York--who was alleged to have gone from fence to crime boss and veritble female Morriarity in the third quarter of the 19th century (see George W. Walling's "Recollections of a New York Chief of Police" -- which has a thieves slang appendix which, as I remember, included the term gonef defined as a pickpocket. Herbert Asbury later defined 'gonnoff' as 'a thief who has attained the higher walks of his profession'). I had assumed it moved into American English from German Jewish immigrants in New York (like Mrs. Mandelbaum) until I learned it was also present in 18th century London's thieves cant. Then I was told by a specialist on the 18th century London underworld that Jewish fences played a key role in linking the London underworld with markets in Amsterdam (he says they claimed they could fence anything, including the crown jewels), and that this is the source of Yiddish loan words in English thieves cant. So we have two possible sources for the American usage-- Anglo-American thieves cant via London and German-American thieves cant directly from the Yiddish."

I Am Salve the Thief, Tra-La-La. Songs of the E. European Jewish Underworld, Jewish Heritage Online Magazine, October 2001
"The two large cities of Warsaw and Odessa 'boasted' of a strong Jewish underworld which lived by its own laws, and the songs in this category are varied and vivid, revealing the sentiments of the criminal world in the Pale (area of Czarist Russia where Jews were permitted to live) ... Children born into this environment became hardened criminals. Others who slipped into it, at times cherished fond memories of a once secure home, loving parents, and a life regulated by the spiritual atmosphere of the Jewish Sabbath, the festivals anholidays, the year-round customs and traditional Jewish way of life ... There was fanatic devotion to each other as they faced the hostile, respectable world about, whose laws they were flagrantly defying ... Their 'professions' were varied, with some of them socialized: there were those that 'covered' travelers' luggage in transit on trains; other who hijacked boxes and crates of merchandise from moving vehicles; those who broke into unlocked houses, which called for the speediest kind of operation; and those who entered second-story homes and were adept at jumping from upper-story windows if necessary. There were pickpockets who worked as a team, with one distracting the selected the selected victim while the other 'did the job.' There were safecrackers and 'diamond' window-cutters, who covered jewelry establishments."

[19th Century Yiddish Song from the Eastern European Jewish Criminal Underworld], Jewish Heritage Online Magazine, October 2001 [click on "Song 4"]
"I am Salve, the thief,
Four brothers are we;
One is hungry, the other well fed,
But thieves all four are we.
One is a pickpocket,
The second-a pimp, a handsome fellow;
One is hijacker on the lookout for packages,
And I am a house thief.
A pimp is common,
As all agree: From his own wife,
He gets the disease
To be a hijacker is bitter:
You can rupture your lung,
It's hard to earn something with some of the packages,
The best thing is to be a house thief."

A Biography of Jack Ruby, The JFK Assassination Home Page
A biography of Jack Ruby [born Jacob Rubenstein] -- the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald (the assassin of President John F. Kennedy].

Legend of the Sassoons, China Daily (Shanghai Star)
"Of all the Jewish families that had prospered in Shanghai, the Sassoons were probably the most famous. They once owned the Cathay Hotel, today's Peace Hotel, which stands prominent on the Bund as a monument to Shanghai's past. Jacob Sassoon, the Jewish millionaire Victor Sassoon, nicknamed Lame Sassoon. The legend of the Jewish clan can be traced back to David Sassoon (1792-1864). Born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Baghdad, Iraq, David Sassoon set up the Sassoon company in Bombay, India, in 1833. In 1844, he set up a branch in Hong Kong, and a year later, he set up his Shanghai branch on the Bund to cash in on the opium trade. At that time, about one-fifth of all opium brought into China was shipped on the Sassoon fleet. They brought China opium and British textile and took away silk, tea and silver. Very soon the Sassoons became the wealthiest family in India. Many more Sephardic Jewish people came to Shanghai seeking the same kind of business success."

'The Wizard of Odds': Double Dribbling',
New York Times, March 2, 2002
"The Wizard of Odds. How Jack Molinas Almost Destroyed the Game of Basketball. By Charley Rosen. 428 pp. New York: Seven Stories Press. Molinas, who had had a Jewish middle-class upbringing in the Bronx, was a sort of double prodigy in his own right. He took up both gambling and basketball in 1944, when he was 12 years old, and by the time he was starring for Stuyvesant High School and then Columbia University, he was working with a mob-backed bookmaker -- betting against his own team, at times throwing games outright, at other times playing hard enough to win but intentionally bungling shots and dropping passes in order to stay under the point spread. ''To Molinas, playing in a rigged ball game was more exhilarating than playing it straight,'' Charley Rosen writes in ''The Wizard of Odds.'' ''Was it time to kick a pass out of bounds, or get called for a three-second violation? Or should he go on a scoring binge to make his own statistics respectable? . . . Molinas loved the idea of playing so many secret games at the same time.'' Standing 6-foot-6, with a superb one-handed push shot from the perimeter (the jumper hadn't yet come into its own) and a hook shot that made him deadly near the basket, Molinas was, briefly, one of the premier high-scoring forwards in the fledgling N.B.A., before he was suspended for gambling during his first and only season with the Fort Wayne Pistons."

Jewish Gangs and Organized Crime,
Organized Crime

Frank Sinatra and the Mob,
Crime Magazine,
"Frank Sinatra was physically a small man. At his local draft board physical in 1943, the 5’71/2"-teen idol weighed in at 119 pounds. (He flunked the physical due to a perforated left eardrum.) Sinatra idolized the strong and the tough. Since boyhood he always wanted to be around the strongest and the toughest men he could find. This led to his strong attraction to both boxers and gangsters. One FBI informant said it was well known that Sinatra had a 'hoodlum complex'. According to Eddie Fisher, Sinatra once said, 'I would rather be a Mafia don than president of the United States.' According to Jo-Carroll Silvers, wife of comedian Phil Silvers (a good friend of Sinatra’s), 'Phil and Frank adored Bugsy (Ben) Siegel…They were like two children seeing Santa Claus…They were so wide-eyed and impressed with this man…They would brag about Bugsy, what he had done and how many people he had killed… I will always remember the awe Frank had in his voice when he spoke about him (Siegel). He wanted to emulate Bugsy.' Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel was the representative of Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano in Los Angeles from 1934 until his death in 1947. He was known as one of the original members of the legendary, and some say fictional, Murder Inc. Siegel was also one of organized crime’s pioneers in Las Vegas, building the Flamingo Hotel which opened on Christmas Eve 1946. Sinatra and Siegel had a nodding acquaintance, but there is no evidence that there was anything more than that. Mickey Cohen The relationship between Sinatra and Mickey Cohen is well documented. Cohen was a Siegel lieutenant who made himself an underworld power after Siegel’s death. Cohen, a Jew, was never a 'made guy' (a member of La Cosa Nostra), and he had constant battles with Jack Dragna, the official Mafia boss of Los Angeles, but he remained a powerful crime figure all through the 1950s and well into the 60s. Cohen and Sinatra were fairly close friends. Sinatra visited him at his home in 1948, even though Cohen warned him that he was under constant surveillance, to ask him to have Johnny Stompanato, Cohen’s bodyguard, stay away from Ava Gardner. Cohen told him that he never mixed in between men and their 'broads' and that Sinatra should go back to his wife and kids. 'I talked to him like a friend,' Cohen stated later in his autobiography. Cohen, like the other mobsters who knew Sinatra, used him for his star power. On at least one occasion Cohen called Sinatra and asked him to meet with a business associate from Ohio and his 14-year-old daughter. Sinatra didn’t rush over to Cohen’s house, as Cohen wanted, but he did invite them to a radio broadcast where all three were allowed to sit on the stage."