How about a Jewish Non-Achiever Award?

DAVID SAKS

As a New Yorker, Mason will nevertheless be well aware that it was not always thus.  Between the wars, the city was awash with Jewish gangsters, and there was no shortage of them in a number of other major American centres as well. Three ethnic groups – the Italians, the Jews and the Irish – dominated the criminal underworld during these years and the Jews may have been the most dangerous of them all.

They were at the heart of much of the racketeering, extortion, bootlegging and illegal gambling that was going on, and few were more deadly when it came to eliminating rivals or those within their own ranks who were adjudged to have stepped out of line.

The dingy lives of the smalltime hoods and hangers-on who existed on the fringes of this underworld, were brilliantly captured at the time in the exuberantly comic short stories of Damon Runyon.

On first reading, one might conclude that the designations Runyon gives to some of his criminal characters are broadly satirical. In the real world, would one really come across individuals known as Harry the Horse, Rusty Charlie, Liverlips and Ikey the Pig?

Once you start reading up on American gangsters, however, you quickly realise that if anything, Runyon was being quite restrained. Their ranks (and these were just some of the Jewish ones) included Albert “Tick-Tock” Tannenbaum; Abe “Kid Twist” Reles; Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer; Seymour “Blue Jaw” Magoon; Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzick; Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss; Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro; Max “The Jerk” Golob; Moey “Dimples” Wolensky; and Martin “Buggsy” Goldstein. (Bennie Siegel was also famously called “Bugsy”, but never to his face, if you valued your life!)

Runyon gave a comic veneer to the gangster underworld, but of course, in reality there was little to laugh about. Amusing though it might be that there was once a Jewish mobster known as Knadles Nitzberg, the reality is that Knadles is today best remembered as the hitman who “iced” Albert “Plug” Shuman – two bullets in the back of the head. 

Of Kid Twist Reles, the formidable Brooklyn prosecutor Burton Turkus said: “There was something about Reles’ physical bearing, a look in his eye that actually made the hair on the back of your neck stand up.”

Reles himself admitted to carrying out 10 killings. He eventually turned stool pigeon, lived long enough to send a number of his erstwhile associates to “The Chair” in Sing-Sing and was ultimately thrown from a high window, despite being in protective custody at the time.

Even today, some Jews can’t repress a certain admiration for the Jewish mobsters of bygone times (see, for example, Rich Cohen’s curiously ambiguous attitude towards his protagonists in his book Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons and Gangster Dreams).

These, after all, were Yids who fought back – hard – against a system that tried to keep them down. It is also the case that Jewish gangsters were instrumental in breaking up – brutally and effectively – numerous pro-Nazi rallies during the 1930s and ‘40s, and that several of them – such as Meyer Lansky, Bennie Siegel and Mickey Cohen – raised considerable sums of money and smuggled significant amounts of arms to Israel when the fate of the Yishuv hung in the balance.

What is glossed over by those who lean towards such views is the reality not only that these men carried out multiple murders (Pittsburgh Phil alone had at least 100 kills to his name), but more often than not, their victims were other Jews, generally gangsters like themselves who had fallen foul of the bosses in some way or had come to be regarded as a security risk.

A number of hoods ended their lives in the embrace of “Old Sparky” and a smaller percentage somehow lived out their ordinary life spans, but the majority died violently at the hands of other Jewish gangsters, people with whom they’d collaborated, shared simchas (they would always attend the brisses of one another’s children, for instance) and often grown up with.

Bugsy, Blue Jaw, Lepke, Longy, Big Gangi and all the rest of them were very bad guys.

How many people are aware that within South African Jewry for a time, there was also a gangster underworld? Shamefully enough, the racket in which Jewish criminals were dominant was prostitution. Throughout the 1890s, pimping on the Witwatersrand was to a great extent a Jewish business and Jewish men and women were among the leading brothel owners.

The undisputed “King of the Pimps” was Joseph Silver, an international gangster and psychopath so vicious as to have been put forward as a possible candidate for the never-identified Jack the Ripper by his biographer, Charles van Onselen.

Among the prostitutes plying their trade were many Jewish girls who had been tricked into coming out to South Africa with promises of jobs. Much of the early work of the Chevrah Kadisha was aimed at quietly alleviating the plight of these ruined and desperate women.

It goes without saying that until recently, none of this ever made it into the standard histories of South African Jewry. Maybe it’s time to introduce a Jewish Non-Achievers Award evening…