In the early twentieth century, millions of immigrants came to the United States looking to improve their lives and provide a better future for their children. In the first decade of the century alone, 8.2 million immigrants came to America; by 1910, in New York City, three-quarters of the residents were either children of immigrants or immigrants themselves, and nearly fifteen percent of the country had been born out of the United States.
Unlike prior arrivals from Northern Europe, most of these immigrants came from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russians, and Jews. Life was very hard for them as they faced poverty, crowded and dirty tenement living conditions, and enormous prejudice from the established groups who had preceded them. Still, most of these immigrants fashioned new lives, making friends, helping each other, falling in love, creating families. They worked hard, sent their children to school, and saw the next generation better their futures and improve their lives.
But for some of those children of immigrants, the lure of the streets proved too strong. Street gangs ruled neighborhoods by bullying, petty crimes, extortion, and threats. Joining a gang gave boys protection and, more importantly, fast and easy money. Most of the gangs were loosely organized around ethnic groups, and they fought each other for ownership of the criminal businesses in their neighborhoods. That is until Prohibition became the law in 1920.
Arnold Rothstein, born to a wealthy and pious Jewish New York family, was addicted to gambling, but he was so brilliant that he had already earned a fortune by organizing the illegal gambling industry in New York. When Prohibition became law, he again found a way to make a big business from bootleg alcohol by purchasing liquor from England and Canada, smuggling it into America, and selling the alcohol to illegal speakeasies that replaced the legal bars and taverns. Rothstein went on to organize the illegal narcotics trade and was murdered by the time Prohibition was repealed in 1931. But the men he had recruited and trained in the early days of Prohibition—the Jewish and Italian gang bosses like Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, and Bugsy Siegel—had learned how to make big business of a host of criminal enterprises. They went on to develop a more effective organization for illegal activities, which the newspapers called the National Crime Syndicate. Their criminal activities were murder, illegal gambling, prostitution, theft, money laundering, arms trafficking, fraud, fencing, kidnapping, and robbery.
By 1933, with Prohibition behind them, and wanting to distance themselves from the dirty work that was required by their illegal businesses, they had outsourced the worst violence to a group called Murder, Inc., founded in Brownsville and run by Louis Lepke Buchalter and Albert Anastasia. Murder, Inc., was active from 1929 to 1941 and was the enforcement arm of the National Crime Syndicate.
Murder, Inc., was composed of Jewish and Italian American gangsters mainly recruited from neighborhoods in Manhattan (Lower East Side) and Brooklyn (Brownsville, East New York, and Ocean Hill). Murder, Inc., was responsible for hundreds of contract killings until Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, who worked directly with Lepke and Anastasia, turned state’s evidence in order to keep himself from jail and possible execution. In the trials that followed, many members of Murder, Inc., were convicted and executed, and Reles himself died, probably murdered, while in police custody.
Today, later generations of Jewish and Italian families, who no longer have any connection with organized crime, are aware of their ancestors’ involvement in the gangs of the early twentieth century. In Jewish communities, it is seldom talked about, but well-known, that in the first half of the twentieth century many Jewish immigrant families in New York City had relatives or friends who were involved, tempted, or had to contend with the gangsters who ruled the streets of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side.
Street Corner Dreams is a novel in which one such family is portrayed.