Corners

FOR THE BROWNSVILLE troop, and for a lot of other Brooklyn boys of that era, life centered around the corner. In the thirties and forties people had favorite corners the way people have favorite cities today. For more than a few kids, trouble was something first encountered on the corner. Established gangsters recruited from corners, and it was from corners that young men went into gambling, extortion, killing. When you went to the corner, you didn’t have to go anywhere else. The world, sooner or later, came to you. Each group of kids had their own corner. If they went to a strange corner, they took their chances. Some corners were friendly, some not so friendly. In Brooklyn every cool kid had in his head a map of friendly corners stretching from here to home. On summer nights a group of pals might make their way clear across the borough, friendly corner to friendly corner, until they reached their home corner, where nothing could touch them.

Sometimes, late at night, a dark sedan would glide up to the corner. A window would roll down. The kids could barely make out a figure, but they recognized the voice. Someone who once hung out here, who went from this corner to underworld power, a local celebrity. Picking out one of the kids, the gangster would say, “Hey, you! Get over here.”

The kid races over, nerves tight. And now his friends see him in the streetlight, bent to the window. The gangster whispers something. The kid gets in. The car drives off. Those left behind are excited, and sad. Their friend has gone into an adult world, leaving them behind. A curtain has dropped. What’s on the other side? Before they can answer, they are again lost in the trivia of a summer night.

In 1941 a prosecutor asked a Jewish gangster about this aspect of underworld life. “You say you hang around corners?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” said the gangster.

“What were the corners you frequented in 1937?”

“New Jersey and Pitkin; Linwood and Pitkin; Saratoga and Livonia,” said the gangster.

“Now, when you talk about the corner of Saratoga and Livonia, what do you call it?” the prosecutor went on.

“Well,” said the gangster, “we call it ‘the corner.’ ”

Saratoga and Livonia was the intersection in front of the candy store. By the thirties, when the Brownsville troop came to power, it was one of the most important corners in Brooklyn, where members of Murder Inc. came to smoke, talk, unwind. At night it was a collection of dark shapes, hats, cigarettes, shoulders. It had an eerie eye-of-the-storm quality. What happened to the gang in these years, the good and bad things, is really just the story of what happened on Saratoga and Livonia, the history of a New York street corner.

Like a plant, a corner needs certain things to flourish. A corner should be remote enough for privacy, yet well enough trafficked for action. You need suckers to practice on. There should be a light nearby: a storefront, a street lamp. A corner should also be well fed, with apartment or town houses, the kinds of places kids loiter in front of. And there must be a brick wall, bench, or street sign, something a kid can lean or sit or lie on, look cool near. The corner of Livonia and Saratoga, though often quiet, was under the elevated, which supplied a stream of businessmen returning from the city; was lit by the candy store window; had a brick wall, bench, and street sign. It was the kind of corner a thug gets one look at and says, “There’s gotta be talent there.”

In the thirties, when Pep decided, as things were going so well, it was time to expand, train a new generation of Jews, he went no farther than the corner. Pep was always scouring the corner for neighborhood punks who might turn into studs, artists who stand out from the other dingy faces in police lineups. Pep could spot them the way a Brooklyn Dodger scout would later spot Sandy Koufax throwing a baseball in Prospect Park. He was looking for kids still young enough to fall for the great practical joke that a criminal life really is, an up-front promise so great it hides the back end: prison, execution. He was looking for kids who were floating, who had rejected their parents’ way and had yet to find a way of their own, who could be tricked into accepting someone else’s vision of the world. Pep’s vision.

Pretty Levine quit school when he was fifteen and had been floating ever since. He had dirty blond hair, gray eyes, hawk nose, big smile. When Pep met him, he was drifting job to job, working as a printer, in a radio repair shop, in his father’s grocery in East New York. Then his drifting ended. “Hey, you,” said Pep, spotting him on the corner. “Get over here.” Soon Pep was sending Pretty out on errands, small jobs all over Brooklyn. And he gave him a partner: Dukey Maffeatore, another discovery of Pep’s.

Dukey was a fuck-up. Today a school counselor might call him spirited. And he might be right. But he would still be a fuck-up. And as there was no failing up in those days, Dukey spiraled down, down, and down, until he reached a depth where criminals could get him. At a crap game in 1934, he was approached by a well-dressed older man. “Hey, kid, you like this?” the man asked, flashing a bankroll.

“Sure,” said Dukey.

“Well, stick with me, you can make big money,” the man said. “All you need is to drive a car.”

A few days later, Dukey was chauffering the man and his friends around Manhattan. The man had Dukey pull up before an office building. When the passengers left the car, Dukey was told to wait with the engine running. Soon after the men went in the building, Dukey heard alarms. He realized he was parked before a bank. He tried to think. What name did the man give him? Sutton? Shit. This is Willie Sutton, the most wanted man in America, who said he robs banks because “that’s where the money is.” Dukey jumped from the car and ran. From then on he decided to associate only with crooks from the neighborhood.

A short time later he was standing on the corner when he heard someone call to him. “Hey, you!” said Pep. “Get over here.”

And there were other recruits working for the gang: Blue Jaw Magoon, Sholem Bernstein. To Strauss these kids were more than just order takers: they were the future, the next generation, the gangsters who would one day look to him as he looked to Lepke. America is all about moving up, and one way to get higher is to build something beneath you. That’s what Pep was doing. He set the boys up in business. “When I was twenty, I got in with the Mob,” Dukey explained. “I went into the shylock business. Pittsburgh Phil gave me the territory. He made me borrow the money to start out from his brother Alex.”

Pretty and Dukey became experts in auto theft, giving the troop a steady supply of kill and crash cars. Every few weeks Pep would call over Levine. “Hey, Pretty,” he would say. “Go clip me a black car.”

Levine would grab Dukey and off they would go, scouting the streets. Pep usually had the boys steal a sedan. Blue. Brown. Black. Not flashy. A car that falls into the background, another man off to work. And four doors. It must have four doors. Getting into a two-door getaway car, you would get tangled up and confused and flustered and maybe even caught.

The cars were usually swiped from a lot on the other side of Brooklyn. The boys would sneak into a garage in the early morning, as some overworked nightwatchman snoozed in the office. After choosing a car, the boys would search for keys above the visor, on the dash, beneath the floor mats (got it!), release the parking break, and roll into the street. With the sky going gray, they let the car glide down some hill and then, slowly slipping it into gear, turn the key, and the engine cuts the silence. Pretty, who had been behind the bumper pushing, would run for the other car, the one that got them here, Dukey’s beat-up, mud-splattered maroon Pontiac, and pull behind the hot car. And off they’d go, ghosting through Greenpoint, Flatbush, Crown Heights, all the way back to Brownsville.

Every time Dukey pulled up to a stop sign or traffic light, Pretty pulled right behind, hiding the license plates so no suspicious do-gooding smart boy could take down the numbers and call the cops. As the sun appeared above the church spires, they would drop the car in the garage behind Pep’s house. They then swung by the candy store—morning now, only stragglers and lunatics here—and tape the keys under the toilet in back.

The next morning Pretty would again go to the candy store, talk about the mean piss he’s got to take, walk back, feel under the toilet, retrieve the stolen license plates some other thief has left there. Then on to the garage, where he removes the old plates, busts them with a tire iron, and puts on the new plates. He then leaves the car at a drop, a side street or alley, with guns in the glove. Then he waits, checking the papers each day, waiting to see what body turns up in the car he stole. And in another part of Brooklyn, some poor bastard gets a call from the cops: Your stolen car has been found, only covered with blood and carrying a dead gangster.

That’s how it was with at least a few of Pretty Levine’s acquaintances, Brownsville kids he knew from the corner. One day they are hanging around, talking about this or that, the next day they turn up dead in one of Pretty’s stolen cars. Did Pretty feel bad? Probably not too bad. It was just part of the job. Dukey and Pretty were small cogs. They didn’t look at the big picture. They didn’t think about it—not even a little. A few years later, when Dasher was on trial, a lawyer asked Pretty about a car he stole for a crime. “When Strauss asked you to get a black sedan, for what purpose do you think he wanted that sedan?”

“I did not even want to think,” said Pretty. “I didn’t ask any questions. I would not ask any questions. I would be crazy to ask questions. He told me to get it and I just got it.”

A lawyer later asked Reles why Levine never inquired about the use of the stolen cars. “He did not have to ask,” Reles explained. “He could read the papers and see for himself what happens, who is found in the car.”

Know-nothing recruits like Pretty and Dukey were a crucial part of the equation, leaving cops with a murder committed in one place (Brownsville) and a body found somewhere else (Canarsie) in a car stolen in still another place (Greenpoint) with license plates stolen from another place (Red Hook). It was as though the killers were mocking the cops, and the system did frustrate the authorities. The cops knew they would never solve any of these crimes until someone on the inside began talking. And the cops hated a rat almost as much as the gangsters.

With the stolen car delivered, Pretty and Dukey would go for breakfast. They would often eat in the diner my grandparents owned in Brownsville. Sitting at a corner table, they would speak in hushed tones, like athletes after a victory. Dukey had glittering green eyes and would call for coffee without saying a word. When the businessmen started wandering in, stripping off coats and opening papers, they would call for the check. They always left a lot more than the bill called for. They were valued customers. “Tell you what,” Pretty might tell Dukey. “Take me to the baths. I think I’ll take a steam.” Other times Pretty would take a car out on the highway, driving like a madman, until the engine rocked and rattled, steam poured from the hood, the wheels smoked. When the car was spent, he would run right out and steal a new one. The American dream.

These were the glory days of Murder Inc. If the gang were a rock band, this is when they would record most of their hits. If they were the Beatles, this would be 1967 to 1970. If they were Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, this would be the eighties. If they were Wings, well, the troop could never be confused with Wings. But if they were the Rolling Stones, these would be the years of Beggar’s Banquet, Exile on Main Street, Sticky Fingers. Bodies turned up all over the country, and what could the cops do? Nothing. The boys had developed a system of killing as groundbreaking, as effective, as influential, as Henry Ford’s assembly line. And they had in the process become perhaps the most important part of Lepke’s operation, making them among the most important criminals in America.

Though the troop had been heading here ever since they killed the Shapiros, what really put them over was another killing: the Ambergs, a crime family out of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The Ambergs were successful neighborhood bullies who had been robbing, extorting, and killing since the early 1900s. They probably resented Reles: his power, his relationship with Lepke. And they were the only gangsters in Brooklyn willing to challenge Kid Twist. Sometimes they even extorted money from merchants in the troop’s territory. Whenever this happened, Pep wanted to go right out and take care of it. But these matters were instead settled by the courts Lansky and Luciano had created to prevent just such gang wars. The Ambergs had powerful friends (Joe Adonis, Red Levine) who were always able to smooth things over. But they kept pushing—pushing and pushing. And when the boys at last pushed back, it was like one of those bloody civil wars that finally brings a raucous territory (Brooklyn) under the leadership of a single power.

The Williamsburg gang was led by Joey Amberg, a thirty-two-year-old Russian immigrant. Joey had brown eyes and wore his curly brown hair slicked back. He was five four, weighed 135 pounds, and wore size seven shoes. His police record went back to 1908, when he was charged with petty larceny. He was arrested a dozen more times over the years, for everything from selling narcotics to robbery. His body mapped his troubles. A four-inch knife wound snaked across his belly. A grooved .38-caliber slug was a lump in his back. He was a tough Jew, but probably not as tough as the Jews in Brownsville. You have to be a certain shade of foolish to pick a fight with assassins.

In 1935 Amberg gang members had a dispute with Hy Kazner, a small-time thug working for Murder Inc. According to a police report, one of Joey Amberg’s torpedoes—Jack Elliott or Frankie Tietlebaum—owed Kazner $1,100 or $1,600. Whenever Kazner tried to collect, these men stalled. At last, in the summer of that year, Kazner told the troop he was going to get paid. Someone told him not to go alone. He smiled, saying the Ambergs were “but bums,” that he could take care of himself. That was the last anyone ever saw of Hy Kazner.

A few days later Pep Strauss went to Williamsburg to find out what happened. Strauss found Amberg at his clubhouse. Amberg said Kazner had not been around in weeks. So Pep went to see Louis Capone in Ocean Hill. Capone was also worried about Kazner. But all he had were suspicions, and Joey Amberg was too well connected to be killed on suspicion. Until something else happened, Kazner’s disappearance would be just another Brooklyn mystery.

And it would have stayed that way had it not been for Gangy Cohen. Gangy was a handsome, broad-shouldered, Brooklyn-born thug. He was well liked. His best friend was another thug named Walter Sage. Gangy sometimes worked for the Ambergs, hanging around their clubhouse, joking, plotting, listening. After listening to an especially interesting piece of news, Gangy might go see Pep. That’s what he did, anyway, when he learned the fate of Hy Kazner.

A few weeks before, when Kazner had arrived at the clubhouse in Williamsburg, he was asked to state his business. When he said he had come to collect his money, Amberg’s men dragged Kazner into a cellar, beat him, tied him up, cut him to pieces, put the pieces in a bag, dumped the bag in a sewer. The sewer emptied into Jamaica Bay, and the tides carried Kazner to sea.

When the troop heard about the killing, they went to see Albert A. and Lepke. They knew what they wanted to do, but they needed permission. Lepke got the go-ahead from other Syndicate leaders. A few days later, Albert A. and Louis Capone ran into Charlie Luciano in Saratoga, New York. They told Lucky the story, and Lucky added his approval: Amberg could be dealt with. There was nothing Red Levine or Joe Adonis could do. Amberg and his guns had killed Reles’s partner; Reles was a partner of Lepke. By a transitive property that underlies all Mob business, Amberg and his men had killed Lepke’s partner.

The Brownsville troop must have been happy with the way things worked out. Hy Kazner for Joey Amberg was a good trade. A lot of people did not like the Ambergs. When a guy like Joey Amberg turns up dead, people say things like “Karma is not supposed to work that fast!” For years Joey had been back stabbing other thugs in Brooklyn. Now Joey gets his. Maybe Reles even thought, What goes around comes around! Probably not. For this suggests there is a finite amount of shit, and every gangster knows the amount of shit is infinite. It also suggests a degree of cause and effect, and every gangster knows the shit you give and the shit you take are only sometimes connected. And this is one source of the gangster’s power: a freedom the rest of suspicious, God-fearing America will never have access to. Gangsters know that even if they stop doing bad things, which they so enjoy doing, bad things will still happen to them. So why not go ahead and break shit before you yourself are broken?

Joey Amberg was killed in a garage at 385 Blake Avenue in Brooklyn. They got him on September 30, 1935, when he went to pick up his 1933 LaSalle sedan. That morning a few gangsters sat around an apartment with a view of the garage, waiting for Amberg’s arrival. The apartment, a top-floor, three-bedroom place at 474 East Ninety-eighth Street, belonged to Mikey Sycoff, a thug who wanted to get in good with the troop. His big, round, doughy face was like the moon seen through a telescope—gray and white with small blue patches that were his eyes.

The day before the killing, Sycoff ran into Pep Strauss on the corner of Sackman and Livonia. Strauss asked if he and some friends could use Sycoff’s apartment. “When Sycoff asked the purpose of this meeting, Strauss stated it was to talk certain matters over, to iron something out,” reads a 1941 police report. “When Sycoff was assured there would be no rough stuff at the apartment, he assented.”

At ten A.M. the next day, there was a knock on Sycoff’s door. It was two men who, according to the report, were “of obvious Italian extraction.”

“Are you Mikey?” one of the men asked.

“Yes,” said Sycoff. “Who sent you?”

“Harry,” the man said.

The gangsters sat in the living room. More turned up. Louis Capone. Strauss. Dasher. Happy Maione came by, said a few words, left. Much of the time these men spoke Italian, which Sycoff could not understand. They kept their coats on, fingered their hats. Every now and then one of them went to the window, pushed back the curtain, and looked out. There was a man leaning on a car across the street. This was Walter Sage. Whenever a gangster looked down, Sage looked up, shook his head, and looked back down the street. At around eleven-thirty A.M. Sycoff went to the window. He saw Sage waving his arms. Looking out, one of the gangsters said, “There he is.”

“The entire group immediately left the apartment,” reads the police report. “About an hour later, when Sycoff left the house, he learned from gossip on the street that Joey Amberg had been killed.”

Sage waving was a signal—it meant Joey Amberg had entered the garage. He was not alone. Morris Keossler, his thirty-year-old chauffeur, was with him. Killing Keossler was not the plan, but here he was, a presence that had to be dealt with. The men entered the garage. Across the way a race car was propped on blocks, and two men, passing tools, worked on the engine. When they reached the LaSalle, Keossler walked to the driver’s side and Amberg went to the passenger side. As Amberg reached for the door, a man dressed as a mechanic stepped from the shadows. He wore a greasy coverall. He had a gun. “Turn around,” he told Amberg. “This is a stickup.”

Amberg seemed to recognize the gunman. It was Happy Maione. Amberg started to say something (“It’s—”), but before he could finish, Happy shot him. The other killer, never identified, shot Keossler. The shots must have echoed wildly in the garage. If there had been a convex mirror posted, the killers would have been reflected as squat little men with squat little guns, and the blue flames from the pistols and the blood running across the sloped concrete into a drain.

Amberg had been shot three times in the chest, once in the head. He was wearing a brown tweed suit with red flecks, a brown shirt, green silk suspenders, a white ribbed T-shirt, blue boxer shorts with deep blue vertical stripes, brown wool socks held up by leather garters, which can only be called a luxury, oxford laced Lord & Taylor shoes. He carried two handkerchiefs, one initialed J. He had ten dollars and a comb in his pocket.

On the other side of the LaSalle but already an infinity away, Morris Keossler was dying. He had been shot in the back, probably as he fumbled for his keys. He was wearing a green jacket, the right sleeve smeared with blood and grease, a vest, a shirt with a button-on collar, tan shoes. His soft gray fedora was full of blood and brain tissue. The cops found him on his back, a bullet in his arm, another in his head. He was buried a week later in Mount Hebron Cemetery.

A few blocks from the garage, a cop working the school crossing at Sackman Street and Blake Avenue heard the shots. As he arrived on the scene, someone grabbed his sleeve, pointed out two men dressed as mechanics, and said, “There they go!” One of these men, fleeing down Christopher Street, outran the cop. The other ran into a building. When the cop went back to the building, he found the roof door open. On the roof he found a tan coverall, a blue sweater, and a gray salt-and-pepper cap.

A few days later the police arrested Louis Capone. But they had no evidence and had to let him go. The men who had been working on the race car told the cops that they were sorry but had seen nothing, as both were under their car at the time of the shooting.

The troop caught up with Frankie Tietlebaum a week later. They pulled him off the street, shot him, stuffed him in a trunk, and left the trunk under the Manhattan Bridge for a scavenger to find.

And that should have been the end of it. Amberg killed one; the troop killed three: a winning fraction. It should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. There was a loose end: Pretty Amberg. Pretty was five years younger than his brother Joey, and even more hated. He had once worked as a gun for Dutch Schultz. He had a violent temper. He could often be found at the Second Avenue baths, invisible through the steam but for his glowing cigar. He spent his nights at Yiddel Lorber’s, a hangout of Jewish gangsters near the on-ramp of the Williamsburg Bridge. He had grown up in Brooklyn, lived his short, violent life there, and would leave his bones in the soil of a dusty lot where the ash is carried on the wind.

When Pretty learned of his brother’s death, he went over to Midnight Rose’s candy store. He went to Brownsville the way Hy Kazner had gone to Williamsburg, pledging to take care of it himself. He found members of the troop on the corner. He demanded answers. He said he would avenge his brother’s death. He was in a rage. He kept nothing hidden. A few days later he proclaimed, to all who would listen, his intent to kill Louis Capone and Pep Strauss. He didn’t stop long enough to ask, “Am I committing suicide?”

Even those who might have supported Pretty backed away. His anger made him weak. He was out where no one could help him. It was the kind of anger that attracts attention—a threat to everyone. Even law-abiding residents of Brooklyn could feel it, a tension in the air. In 1935 such a citizen was concerned enough to write the police:

Dear Sir:

Please take notice that you will stop a new gang war for revenge if you will pick up (Dopey) Red Levine and his partner Pretty Amberg.

Red Levine, if he is sweated, will tell you who committed the last few murders in Brooklyn. You can find him any night at Ratner’s restaurant on Delancey Street.

Sincerely,

Dan Seveozza

If the troop did not get Pretty, Pretty would get the troop, or the police would get Pretty and Pretty would get the troop that way. But who gets Pretty? The guy was vigilant. He thought just about everyone in Brooklyn was out to get him, and he was right. He would not go easily. If the troop went in with force, he was sure to take a few of the boys out with him. One day, as the troop mulled this over, Mendy Weiss stepped forward. Mendy was Lepke’s top gun and also happened to be an old friend of Amberg’s. “Pretty won’t go with nobody but me,” he said. “He likes me. I’ll steer him. He’ll never get wise.”

Mendy asked Pretty to meet him for dinner at Yiddel Lorber’s. Before they sat down, Yiddel asked the men to the kitchen for a drink. Two torpedoes were waiting there for Pretty. For many gangsters, the moment before death is a moment of betrayal. It is the second to last thing that ever happens to them. Looking at pictures of dead gangsters, you can say, “Betrayed, then killed; betrayed, then killed; betrayed, then killed.” It happens all the time; it’s one of the things that must make this way of life especially hard and isolating. It gives many gangsters an edge, a paranoia that sends them on killing sprees: betray before being betrayed. And it also makes gangster life a powerful metaphor for life in general.

The killers tied up Pretty Amberg. Then, using small knives, they cut him to pieces. The boys had decided Pretty’s death should be especially painful. He was the last of the Ambergs. With this killing, the troop was not just taking out a rival, they were wiping out a people. They were stealing everything from Pretty: traditions, stories, dreams his grandparents carried from Russia, the children and grandchildren he was to pass those traditions on to.

Mendy loaded what was left of Pretty into a car and drove the car out near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He parked on North Elliot Place, facing a field called City Park. The boys met him out there, looked at Pretty, mingled. They talked about their girlfriends and wives. The women in the underworld were dolls, ornaments. Of course, they could sense the dread that surrounded their men, the menace the boys shed like light. Maybe it’s what attracted them in the first place. But they had no idea how the boys earned that aura. Wives and girlfriends were insulated by many layers of ignorance. A man who tells his wife everything is a romantic, a fool. Ignorance protected the boys from the wives and the wives from the cops. If you know nothing, there is nothing to give away. And still the women asked: Where do you go at night? What do you do? Who do you see?

They want to know what we do? Well, let’s show them. So that night the boys went across the borough, helping ladies into sedans, having pleasant conversations as they made their way back to City Park, where they all stood looking in at Pretty, a piranha in glass. Bloody limbs. Someone doused the car in gasoline. The women drew straws. Pep’s girl, Evelyn, the bombshell of the group, drew the short straw. She crossed the field and dropped a match on the car. The faces of the girls and their gangsters flickered in the flames. Looking back, the boys would say, “Yeah, that was ladies’ night.”

With their most powerful rivals gone, the troop carried on as never before. Most of them had a regular job, a means of support, something to tell the cops. Tannenbaum was a cutter. Pretty Levine drove a garbage truck, which he sometimes used to haul dead bodies. But their real moneymaking came from extorting merchants, bullying bullies, running scams. Reles hosted a crap game on State and Court streets in Brooklyn. When a gambler lost his money, Reles lent him more, often at 25 percent interest. To pay back Reles, the gambler might borrow from Strauss or Pretty Levine or Dukey Maffeatore. Before he knew what had happened, the gambler owed everything he had to the troop. Some of this money the boys invested in local businesses. Happy Maione bought a flower shop in Ocean Hill. Sholem Bernstein opened a bar and grill in Bensonhurst. Abe Reles started a rental car agency in Brownsville. The rest was spent on clothes or trips or cars or girls. They were what grandmother would call “big spenders.”

And all of it—vacations, cars, stores—was paid for by the killings. Killing for the Syndicate gave the boys the right to run eastern Brooklyn. And there was always killing to be done. If these killings could be given names, they would sound like Edward Hopper paintings: New York Pavements, Two on the Aisle, Conference at Night. The killing of Frankie Tietlebaum would be called Manhattan Bridge Loop. The killing of Pretty Amberg would be called Girlie Show. And the killing of Walter Sage would be called Road and Trees. It would be painted in blues and blacks, and the figures in the foreground would have the same vague shape as the hills in the background. It would be a gloomy painting, but also funny.

A few years before, Sage had been given control of the troop’s Long Island slot machine operation. Over time, a problem developed. Sage’s books did not balance. He was stealing from the troop. In the Mob, one bad deed wipes out a lifetime of good work. Stealing is a capital offense. Sage had to be killed. And who should kill him? Gangy Cohen. He could steer Sage without making him suspicious. They were best friends. A few years before, they had lived, along with Pep, in an apartment in Brooklyn, a hit man’s bachelor pad. Their relationship would now reach a proper underworld conclusion.

Getting the men together was easy enough. It was the middle of summer, and everyone was up in the Jewish Alps. One afternoon Gangy phoned Sage and suggested a nighttime ride through the woods. A good way to relax. From there it was just a matter of getting some of the boys together. That afternoon Strauss went resort to resort, recruiting a crew.

Pretty Levine was staying with his wife at the Evans Hotel, near Loch Sheldrake. They were taking in the vistas—the mountains sloping out the window—when there was a knock on the door. It was Pep. “I heard you were in town,” he said, leaning in the doorway.

“Do you want to come in?” said Pretty.

“No, I just decided to come by.” Pep paused, then said, “Hey, Pretty, you got a car up here?”

“Yeah, I got it parked downstairs. Why?”

“Look, meet me down at your car at seven o’clock tonight. Don’t be late. Okay? Good to see you. So long.”

Pretty met Strauss that night in front of the hotel. Allie Tannenbaum was there, too. The three men got in Pretty’s car, drove a few miles down the road, and pulled onto the shoulder. And they waited. Hours went by. It was one of those lonely country roads that winds through the trees. When Pretty asked what they were waiting for, Pep said, “Just wait.”

At midnight a car came down the road. The headlights flashed once, very fast. “There it is,” said Pep. “Follow that car. Not too close. Just follow.”

Pretty was driving the crash car. The car ahead was being driven by a man he did not know. Also in that car were Gangy Cohen and Walter Sage. Pep watched the kill car closely as Pretty drove.

This story comes from testimony later given by Levine and Tannenbaum, so our point of view is the crash car, which, like a camera on a dolly, follows the action. We see a dashboard, a hood, a piece of road, and then the car ahead, where shapes move. Things are revealed. Noises. Sage is in the front passenger seat. Gangy is directly behind, a seat reserved for the mark’s trusted friend. When a gangster rides shotgun, he looks at the man in back and asks himself, Will he kill me?

As the men in the kill car talked, Gangy, leaning forward, drove an ice pick into his friend’s chest. Then, holding Sage tight with his left arm, he stabbed him thirty-one more times.

Pretty could see the struggle in the car ahead, arms flailing. In a cartoon, the air would be filled with jagged lines. He heard a scream. He saw the car swerve left, right, left, then off the road. As the nose went into a ditch, the back wheels came off the ground. Levine saw the back door open and a figure race into the woods.

When the crash car pulled up, the back wheels of the kill car were still spinning. As Pretty walked over, he saw the driver wiping off an ice pick. Every now and then he looked at the woods and shouted, “Come on, Gangy! Come back!”

No one knew why Gangy had run into the woods. Was it a joke? The boys waited on the road awhile, then left. No one saw Gangy again. He had just disappeared. It was a great mystery.

The boys put Sage’s body into Pretty’s car and drove to Loch Sheldrake. When a lawyer later asked Pretty, “Were you in the car with Sage?” Levine thought a moment, then asked, “Alive?” They carried Sage into a boat, lashed a slot machine to his chest, rowed him out, and dumped the body. A few months later, when the corpse and the slot floated up, the message was clear to those who could read: Here’s what happens when you steal.

A few years later, Pretty Levine and Dukey Maffeatore went to see a movie at the Loew’s Pitkin in Brownsville, Golden Boy, a classic boxing picture written by Clifford Odets and starring William Holden and Barbara Stanwyck. In one scene, as the hero fights in the old Madison Square Garden, the camera sweeps the crowd, landing on a heckler. “Hey!” said Pretty. “That’s Gangy Cohen!”

“Where?” asked Dukey.

“Up there—in the picture. The guy waving.”

“That’s him all right,” said Dukey.

“Wow,” said Pretty. “Wait till the troop hears this.”

They left the movie and went to the corner. When they told the boys about Gangy, few believed them. There was an argument. Bets were made. Then everyone went to see Golden Boy. They were sitting side by side—Reles, Pep, Capone, Blue Jaw Magoon, Pretty, Dukey—when Gangy came on. “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Pep.

The troop later found out what had happened. After killing Walter Sage, Gangy had an epiphany few gangsters experience in time: If they have me kill Walter, then, sooner or later, they will have someone else kill me. By the time the kill car had pulled over, his mind was made up. He would run. He went for miles through the trees. The night closed in. The stars came out. He found a train station in a clearing. He bought a ticket and went as far west as the train would take him. Upon reaching California, he looked for work. He started in the movies as an extra. He worked his way up. He changed his name. He was now the actor Jack Gorden. A few years later, a police officer, who had long been looking for the missing Gangy Cohen, found him on screen in the movies, playing a cop. Gangy was brought back from California in handcuffs. He was tried. He was acquitted. He was a hero to the boys. If things got too rough, they could always go to Hollywood and become movie stars.

Here is what confused the troop about Gangy: Why quit such a great job for the whims of Hollywood? By the mid-thirties the boys were among the highest paid men in Brooklyn. Each was making around a hundred thousand a year. This money came partly from the retainer paid by Lepke for contract killing, partly from the odd jobs they did around Brooklyn. This was not Lepke or Lansky money. They were not millionaires. They were not capitalists. They had to work with their hands. Still, they were bringing home more cash than they probably ever dreamed possible. Most of them never made it past eighth grade. Most had been told, by teachers and cops and parents, that they were bound to fail. And here they were, in the midst of the Depression, the only men around who could afford to vacation, sleep late, drive new cars.

Of course, success brought new worries. They were hit hard by ambition. With their first taste of power they knew only that they wanted more. Members of the troop were trying to climb, which meant winning the favor of Lepke and his guns. And they soon came to see their rivals not as other gangs or cops, but as each other. Old friends came to resent old friends, as each encounter became a test, an establishing of position. They were riven by the kind of politics that sets worker against worker. Speaking of Reles, Blue Jaw Magoon once said, “He was mean and cheap. When he was with his superiors in the Mob, he wined and dined them, and made a show at splurging. With his equals or subordinates he would argue when it was his time to pay a check. But not with Mendy Weiss, Charlie the Bug, or other mobsters of a higher grade.”

One night Blue Jaw went to dinner with Reles and Strauss. They ate lobster. After the meal Pep and the Kid argued over who should pay. So there they sat, old friends glaring at each other. Three hours passed before they agreed to split the bill. It is probably not unfair to say this argument was about more than money.

I suppose it is logical that once the troop had whipped their enemies (Shapiros, Ambergs) they would turn on each other. They were cantankerous men and needed someone to fight. I also suppose that once they began fighting each other, their downfall became inevitable. The system of killing they had designed was so sophisticated that maybe the only thing that could topple them was the rivalry that followed their success, a success that changed not only the dynamic of the group, but also the character of its members.

Even friends said Reles was changing. He had once been seen as an underdog. He was becoming just another bully. He swaggered around Brownsville, kicking in doors, roughing up punks. When his brother testified against him in court, he stabbed him. He was a great small-time hood, like a ball player who breaks all the minor league records but still cannot make the majors.

He was twenty-five. Twenty-five is the age of plans, of looking ahead, of the next moment and the moment after that just coming into focus. When he visited the future, he probably saw only himself: how he would come to dominate every situation, defeat every foe. He was riding on a kind of high-octane confidence, a belief that he could get out of any jam. Nothing struck him as fatal. That’s how it was when he met Jake the Bum. Anyone else in that situation would say their prayers and wait to die. Maybe Reles was just too dumb to give up like that.

Jake the Bum was a criminal hack who had strayed into the troop’s territory. Late one night, in a crowded club in East New York, he had words with Reles, who said something like “Next time I see you, I’ll kill you.”

“Not if I see you first,” said Jake. “Not if I got the drop on you.”

“Think so?” said Reles. “Well, even if you get the drop on me, even if you have every advantage, I will still kill you. That’s a promise. I am telling you now.”

“You little loudmouth bastard,” said Jake. “Let’s see how tough you are dead.”

A few months later Jake ran into Reles in Red Hook. “Hey, Kid,” said Jake. “Ready to die?”

Reles didn’t have his gun. The cops were on him for every little thing, so he had to travel unarmed. And here he was, far from home, looking into the snub-nosed .38 of Jake the Bum. “You win,” said Reles. “I’m a loudmouth. You proved it. And now I’m good as dead. You win. But look, Jake. What’s it going to get you? The Combination will take care of you eventually. They will have to. You can’t kill one of them without yourself being killed. You know that. And what’s the percentage in both of us getting rubbed out? But together? Together we might do business.”

Jake frowned. It made sense. The men went into a saloon. They talked for hours, drinking as Reles explained a future where Jake and Kid Twist are partners, running rackets, getting rich. As they walked out, arm in arm, Reles told Jake about the problems he had been having with the cops. “You know, if you’re my partner, you shouldn’t carry the gun so much,” he said. “The cops shake me down every time they see me. They will do the same to you. Besides, if you’re with me, you don’t need the gun. The threat of the Combination is all you need. Hell, give me the gun and let me get rid of it.”

When Jake handed over the .38, Reles said, “You stupid fuck. I told you I would kill you.”

Jake’s body was found in the weeds a few days later. Shot twice in the head with his own gun.

Reles thought he could get himself out of any jam, and usually he could. It was his strength. Confidence alone can often win the day. It was also his weakness—a fatal flaw. Success had taught him the wrong lessons: that there were no limits, that his temper could be trusted, that he would never let himself down, that he was important. He could probably not picture a world big enough to shake him off. When I read about the bad things that later happened to Reles, I can’t help but think he had been set up: by circumstances, by success, by the fates, which were about to withdraw their favor.

In 1934 Reles pulled his sedan into a parking garage in midtown. He honked. No one came. His friends were griping in the backseat. He honked again. Nothing. He laid on the horn. Finally an attendant appeared, a black man named Charles Battle. Battle told Reles to pipe down. The friends in back broke up laughing. Stepping from the car, Reles told the man to watch himself. There was a threat in his language, something the attendant could not hear. Or maybe he just didn’t care. Battle told Reles to go to hell, that he was not here to make him look the big man in front of his friends.

Reles had a violent temper. He searched every sentence for the insult. When he closed his eyes, he must have seen shapes and colors, red, black, orange. Maybe, just before he lost control, he saw blood or flames or sparks. Probably before he knew what he was doing, Reles was punching Battle. He hit him again and again. When Battle fell, Reles went on kicking until the attendant was just a bloody thing on the floor. His temper, which always got him out of trouble, was getting him into it now. As careful as he was while killing for the Syndicate, he was just as careless here. He was beating an attendant in a garage where he was known. The next day the man who came to relieve Battle, a man named Snider who looked a lot like Battle, was found dead behind the garage, stab wounds in his chest and neck. The cops figured Reles had come back later that night and killed Snider, whom he must have mistaken for Battle—who was himself recovering at home. Reles was charged with the murder.

It was a scandal in Brooklyn. A lot of people hoped Reles would die in the electric chair, or at least spend his life in prison. But the evidence wasn’t there. Reles was instead convicted of assault, a misdemeanor. The judge was angry. He felt the system had been cheated. He gave Reles the maximum sentence: three years. “I had hoped for a felony conviction,” said the judge. “I could have sent him away for ten years.” Then, giving Reles a kind of backhanded compliment, he added: “Why, this man is the worst character in greater New York. He’s worse than Dillinger!”

Reles was sent to Sing Sing. It should have been easy time. He read, wrote, talked to guards. A visitor came each week with an envelope—his share of troop proceeds. Yet this experience broke something in him. He forever after seemed haunted by the idea of again losing his autonomy to the grid of prison life. Most of the Jewish gangsters had been to prison as young men. It occupied a small, almost romantic place in their minds, a part of their education. They did not go to jail in the twenties or early thirties. They had by then perfected a system that kept them on the street. So when they were again sent away, many realized prison was worse than they remembered. It was harder now that they were older, fatter, slower, more successful. Jail was a place for young men, a place to learn—not a place to pass your middle years. Starting in 1935, Lepke and Gurrah learned the same lesson, serving two years in a federal pen for racketeering. Like Reles, they probably realized they could not go through it again, a realization that would go a long way toward explaining their future decisions.

When Reles was released from Sing Sing in October 1936, he had just $1,600 put away. He went to Florida to relax. When he came back to Brownsville, he found the troop going as before, only in all capital letters: MORE BEATINGS, MORE KILLINGS. Like many successful people, the members of the troop were becoming caricatures of their youthful selves, imitating now what came naturally then. Strauss was running things, and the business was touched by his brazen style. Reles was slow getting back in the swing. Prison had changed him. He was not sure where he fit in. “I had nothing to say,” he later explained. “I just came out of the pen. I was no big shot then. I was a bum. They were the big shots when I came out.”

Most people have never heard of Jewish gangsters. They do not believe they ever existed. The very idea of a Jewish gangster goes against basic stereotypes of Jews, stereotypes that explain the place of Jews in the world. Jews are physically unthreatening office creatures. I once heard a comedian refer jokingly to the Jewish Mafia. The very idea seemed absurd. The mere mention of a Jewish gang broke up the audience. “You know why the Jewish Mafia never worked,” he said. “Because the nicknames weren’t tough enough. There was Matzoball Goldberg and Hanukkah Harry Fishbein.” Sometimes, when I see this comedian’s bit rerun on cable, I imagine Pep Strauss entering stage left and cutting him belly to chin.

Even the few Jewish gangsters who are widely known are viewed through these stereotypes. They are seen as number crunchers, financial geniuses who could have worked their craft as easily on Wall Street as on Hester Street. When paging through one of the many true crimes books I own, like World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime or Blood Letters and Badmen, I look up “Jewish Gangsters,” and the paragraph usually opens with a picture of Meyer Lansky above a paragraph that describes him as a kind of accountant to the Mob. How can people believe in violent Jewish mobsters? Jews don’t do that.

Jews themselves have suppressed the memory of Jewish gangsters. It was once seen as a major community problem. There were conferences. Now, less than two generations later, even Jews find the idea unbelievable. They have kept before them the image of Holocaust: Never forget. Never forget when you were victims. They have pushed aside the image of the gangster: Forget. Forget when you were bullies. When I tell old Jews about this book, they change the subject. The blood drains from their faces. Sometimes they argue with me. When I told a friend about my book, he was upset. He said it would be a self-hating book, a book to make Jews look bad. I would not mind Jews sometimes looking that kind of bad. I want the freedom to be a bully. Without that freedom, my decision to not be a bully doesn’t mean very much. I am a Jew. What choice do I have?

My friend’s reaction may have to do with his upbringing. He grew up in Manhattan. His ancestors were uptown Jews, and for uptown Jews the downtown gangsters were a shame, a schanda. They tried hard to disassociate from that rabble. My father grew up in Bensonhurst, among the rabble, those descendants of Eastern European immigrants. Of course, there is not really a class consciousness among most Jews. There is no rabble in Jewish history, only the lucky and unlucky. And now we are all the elect in America.

But even among those who claim to know the story of the Jewish gangster, one thing you never hear about are Jewish drug runners. They are off the map, beyond the pale even for the Brooklyn-born rabble. Even Jews who love to romanticize criminals don’t talk about it. They just didn’t exist.

The first major American drug dealer was probably Arnold Rothstein. “It became increasingly obvious to us that dope traffic in the United States was being directed from one source,” a late twenties federal crime report reads. “More and more, our information convinced us that Arnold Rothstein was that source.” For Rothstein, drugs did not have the fall-of-civilization taint they carry today. When he was growing up, drugs were just another colorful aspect of downtown life. Opium dens were strung along the harum-scarum Chinatown intersection of Doyer, Mott, and Pell Streets, which was called the Bloody Angle. More people were killed on the Bloody Angle each year than anywhere else in the world. The killing was done mostly by Chinese hatchet men, who carried knives up their sleeves and fled into the Chinese theater, which was underlain by secret passages that led killers to the safety of the crowded market.

East Side gangsters met in the dens, where they could plan and schmooze as they got high. They sat hollow eyed in the gloomy basements, smoking in the half-light of some old Chinaman’s idea of luxury, laundry strung wall to wall, a bed or couch creaking beneath their weight. As a kid, Rothstein spent hours there, coolly watching as thugs wandered up from Hester and Delancey Streets, slipped off their shoes, picked up a hookah. “Many of these guys were opium smokers,” John Cusack of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics told me. “Luciano was an opium smoker. I’m almost positive Lansky smoked opium. A lot of these Jewish guys smoked. It kept them calm.”

This aspect of East Side life was captured in the Sergio Leone film Once upon a Time in America. It is interesting to me that the only movie that makes a real effort to portray Jewish gangsters was made by an Italian director best known for westerns. It also seems fitting. Whenever I read one of Isaac Babel’s stories about the Jewish gangsters of Russia, they remind me of westerns: in a world where normal, bourgeois morality has been inverted, the hero rides the void in outline against the sun, which is always just going down or coming up. Within this world Leone shows the opium den as a temple, a reprieve, a sanctuary from where the chaos of the street can be seen through a sheen of smoke.

At the end of the movie, one of the gangsters, played by Robert De Niro, comes into a lavish den, slips off his shoes, and takes the pipe. And for a moment, as his eyes lose focus, you sense that maybe the whole thing is a dream. And maybe the story of the Jews is also a dream—bondage in Egypt, destruction of the Temple, exile, shtetl, pogroms, crossing the ocean, America—all just flickering patterns in the smoke. For the Jewish gangsters, and for a lot of other people, too, drugs offered a way to believe things could have happened a different way.

For much of America’s history, there was no such thing as an illegal drug. That was a silly idea, like an illegal apple. Then, 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 that. He saw Repeal coming and knew drugs could fill the void left by alcohol. Here was another vice that seemed victimless, where the government was legislating morality, where society had lost the capacity to give grown Americans what they desired. So in the late twenties Rothstein retooled a mechanism he had built to carry booze. It would now carry, among other things, heroin and cocaine. It was as natural as a car factory retooling, on the eve of war, to make weapons. And it was yet another of the shameful, unintended side effects of Prohibition, which built a system that remains a blueprint for smuggling drugs into America.

Rothstein put together a team, a group of young men to operate his narcotics empire. His first lieutenant was Louis Lepke, who hired dealers to move the drugs and make sure no other wiseguys hijacked shipments. Rothstein also hired a field agent to take care of supply. In those years drugs were easy to come by. Cocaine, heroin, and morphine were made legally in pharmaceutical plants in Europe. “Every country had eight or ten drug factories,” John Cusack told me. “You could go to certain regions of France, and just breathing the air would get you high.”

Rothstein’s field agent spent several months a year in Europe, going factory to factory, cutting deals. He was a kind of criminal Willie Loman, out there on a shoeshine and a smile. His name was Yasha Katzenberg, and he was one of the great mysterious figures of the Jewish underworld.

When Rothstein died in 1928, his drug operation was taken over by Lepke. Then, in 1931 the League of Nations drafted a treaty prohibiting much of the world’s drug production. Each country could now produce only as much of a narcotic as was needed for domestic medical use. In the coming years, as country after country signed the treaty, which was fully ratified in 1934, Lepke’s drug supply ran dry. In the mid-thirties, in a last-ditch effort to get something going, he sent Katzenberg east.

Yasha vanished into China, leaving behind a trail of letters. He turned up months later in the hills around Shanghai, surrounded by an army of Chinese thugs. He taught them how to make heroin. He built a factory in a river valley. Heroin was soon flowing back to the Lower East Side. On the eve of the Second World War, as Japanese soldiers stormed Manchuria, Yasha kept on. In a time of chaos, he functioned smoothly. He was like some ancient Mongol warlord, with his kingdom and his army. In the late thirties his operation netted Lepke around $10 million.

Katzenberg was Russian born and grew up on the East Side. I do not know what he looked like, but I have tried to imagine him. I see his eyes as mirrors, reflecting not what he is looking at, but what he will see: mountains, rivers, wars. I imagine him tall and slender, wearing a hood, taking his time—something long prophesied, a nomad who has crossed wastes to get here. Or maybe he was completely unremarkable, just another curly-haired Jew boy in back of Hebrew class, saying the words but thinking only of the presents his bar mitzvah will bring. To me, Yasha Katzenberg was the ultimate example of the wandering Jew, going country to country, east to west, always on the other side of the glass, lost in the wilderness.

In the late thirties, when officials at last figured out what Katzenberg was up to, the League of Nations declared him an international menace. A few years later Yasha was indicted, along with Lepke and twenty-eight others, for violation of narcotic laws. I don’t know what happened to him after that.

As trade in narcotics grew, so did the mechanism to fight it. In the twenties the government created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics to go after smugglers and dealers. At first the FBN, the forerunner to the Drug Enforcement Agency, was like a group of men working in the dark, hoping something would catch their eye. Lepke was then operating an opium plant on Seymour Avenue in Brooklyn. In 1935 it blew up. It was hard to miss. From then on Lepke, whether he knew it or not, was being watched, his drug shipments tracked and followed. In the end, drugs gave Lepke what they give so many serious users: a short, intense high followed by withdrawal and ruin.

Before the creation of the FBN, few in law enforcement understood organized crime. Local cops knew about gangsters in their own city, but how could they know about the national Syndicate? These were state and municipal cops: they could see only the part of the picture that was under their feet. National trends were a mystery. Even the best cops, those who wanted the truth, knew little of the conferences where people like Lansky and Lepke governed the underworld. And when cops found a gangster who would talk, they still learned little. For gangsters, talking can be just another way of saying nothing, of distracting cops as truth slips out the door. For police, it was like adding up a column of numbers and still coming up with zero. Some experts said the criminals were just being true to the Omerta, the code of silence that the Mafia had brought from Sicily.

For a long time the only organization in any position to map the underworld was the FBI. Founded in 1908, the bureau was to go after criminals (kidnappers, smugglers) who crossed state lines. Big-time gangsters, who ran drugs and booze state to state, should have been prime targets. But for some reason, J. Edgar Hoover, who then headed the FBI, was not interested in the Mafia. He didn’t even believe the Mafia existed. He thought it was a fairy tale, the kind of goblin mayors cook up to explain away problems. When investigators came forward with evidence of the vast criminal conspiracy, he dismissed the idea as absurd. He told reporters, “There is no Mafia in America.”

Why did Hoover deny the existence of organized crime? Some say he just didn’t want to believe it. If he admitted there was an American Mafia, he would have been obligated to fight it—a daunting task with no assured outcome. The gangsters were well connected politically, with access to the best lawyers. “The Mafia is so powerful that entire police forces or even a Mayor’s office can be under Mafia control,” William Sullivan, a top FBI official, wrote in his memoir, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI. “That’s why Hoover was afraid to let us tackle it. He was afraid we’d show up poorly. Why take the risk?”

Others say the Syndicate was just low on Hoover’s list. He was too busy attacking those he considered a real threat: civil rights leaders, Communists. After all, what was so bad about gangsters? They were really a lot like Hoover—men who know the power of information. “He thought organized crime constituted no danger to the established order,” wrote Albert Fried in The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. “Syndicate members were in fact pillars of the status quo. They had a vested interest in the free enterprise system, in America’s triumph over Communism, over anything that threatened their specific opportunities.”

Others sense something more sinister in Hoover’s indifference to organized crime. What if the mobsters had something on him? What about all those afternoons he spent at the track? What about the betting tips he got from Frank Costello? And what about the recent revelations? Hoover in a dress. The Mafia knew everything else, why wouldn’t they know this, too? Information is power. Maybe it was like the scene in The Godfather, Part II where the senator from Nevada wakes up next to a dead prostitute. Maybe Hoover was beholden. For some, a high official in a dress is just too fantastic not to explain a lot of other things. How could Hoover’s cross-dressing not have affected American history? To such people I say this: J. Edgar Hoover wore a garter belt for the same reason as everyone else—to hold up his stockings.

Or maybe it is more simple. Maybe Hoover just underestimated the gangsters. Maybe he saw them as little more than brutish thugs, clearly not smart enough to create a national Syndicate. Maybe he felt about Italian and Jewish gangsters the way many Americans felt about the Japanese before Pearl Harbor—a bother, not a threat.

The work of the FBN changed all that. FBN agents were the first to glimpse the sophistication of the underworld. Tracking narcotics showed them how the Syndicate worked, how it was built. For agents, drugs were like a radioactive dye injected into a heart that shows doctors how the blood flows. Watching shipments move through all kinds of valves and arteries, they came to understand the system assembled by Rothstein in the first days of Prohibition. “We at the Narcotics Bureau were the only ones who really knew about the Mafia,” John Cusack told me. “Why did we know? Because we took the time to study it; because we knew how smart these men were; because we were working in Italy as far back as the thirties; because we followed the drugs through the maze.”

For over twenty years Hoover ignored this work. “There is no Mafia in America.” He ignored it in the thirties, forties, and much of the fifties. He ignored it right up until 1957, when two cops in rural New York made a bust that changed everything. It was a flash of lightning that illuminates a landscape: fields, hills, telephone poles, and over sixty gangsters conspiring in the dark.

The local cops had received an anonymous tip: Keep an eye on Joseph Barbara’s place. Something is about to happen. Barbara had come to America from Castellammare, Sicily, in 1921. After early trouble on the East Side, he moved upstate. He prospered. By 1957 he was said to run the Buffalo Mob. He was also president of the Canada Dry Bottling Company in Endicott, New York. He remained friends with many of the East Side gangsters. He lived in a ranch house outside Apalachin, New York.

The house was large and secluded and had been host to many Syndicate meetings. When the cops drove by in 1957, it must have been like stumbling on a car dealership in the trees. Everywhere black sedans with out-of-state plates. Inside, the owners of the cars were attending a meeting that had been called by Vito Genovese. They were discussing the future of the crime family set up by Lucky Luciano. Genovese was making a grab for power. The cops turned into the driveway.

The men inside had spent the afternoon talking around a table. Paunchy old gangsters. Chins had fallen, eyes lay hooded, but the threat was still there—you just had to look for it. These were still the most dangerous men in America. From New York, in addition to Genovese, there were, among others, Carlo Gambino, Joseph Bonanno, Joseph Profaci, Gerardo Catena, Paul Castellano. Meyer Lansky and Doc Stacher had been invited but did not attend. Santo Trafficante Jr. had come from Florida; Gabriel Mannarino from Pennsylvania; Frank DiSimone from Los Angeles; Joseph Civello from Dallas; James Colletti from Colorado; Frank Zito from Illinois; John Scalish from Cleveland; Joseph Ida from Philly; Sam Giancana from Chicago. When they talked, the room was full of double meanings. When they did not talk, the room was held in the kind of silence it takes more than one person to make. But what you would have most noticed were the men who were not there, those who had died or were sent to jail or into exile. More than anything, a life in organized crime is a war of attrition.

Looking out the window, someone spotted the patrol car heading up the driveway. He shouted to the others. Never before had these men been found in the same place. What would happen if the cops realized they worked together? They panicked. They fled the house like high school kids fleeing a party when that word hits the room: Cops! From above, you would have seen gangsters pouring out doors on every side of the house and others coming through windows; you would have seen hats and arms moving in patterns across the grass; you would have heard that metallic jangle—change and keys in pockets—that fills the air whenever old men run.

Some made it to cars, got a key in the ignition, and coasted along country roads. Others scrambled down trails, raising dust and dirt. As they ran, not wanting to be caught with too much cash, they set bills in the wind. Others busted through bushes and brambles and danced off into cathedrals of pine. They were at first running, then jogging, then walking, then standing, hunched over, getting their breath.

Some cops gave chase, shouting, shooting in the air. Others called for backup. Blocks were set on all the local roads. So one by one, state troopers stopped the gangsters in sedans. Most of those who had gone into the woods came back. Where could they go? Within a few hours the cops had rounded up almost sixty men. When they were brought in, the gangsters told the cops they had come to visit a sick friend. Barbara had suffered a heart attack a few months before, but no one believed this story.

Sam Giancana was one of the few who got away. Walking through the woods, loafers crunching twigs, sleeves rolled up, he must have looked like a lunatic, the remains of a crazy businessman. He was built like wire, with bristly black hair. He wore dark glasses, Panama hats, and pin-striped suits. Looking back from a distant hill, he would have seen police lights, cars, cuffed gangsters, cops, disaster. It later turned out that Lansky had tipped off the cops. He had been fighting a low-grade war with Genovese. How better to discredit a foe than have his party guests locked in jail?

The cops charged the gangsters with conspiracy. They were tried and convicted—a conviction later overturned. But none of that mattered. What mattered was how elected officials and the public reacted when the story hit the papers. No Mafia in America? Never again would the gangsters get a free ride from the FBI.

“Apalachin was the grand council of the Mafia,” said John Cusack. “Over the years, there had been national meetings in Chicago, Colorado, Florida, Las Vegas, Atlantic City. This one just happened to be in upstate New York. And it at last convinced the FBI we had been telling the truth all along: that there was a Mafia that organized crime not just within the cities, but throughout the country and the world. How else could they explain all these men, notorious in all their local cities, coming together in a small town in upstate New York? That meeting changed the way Americans looked at crime forever.”

A few months after the arrest, the New York State Legislature scheduled hearings. When state senators asked Hoover for information on the gangsters, he referred them to the FBN. When hearings began that fall, the FBN sent a young agent to New York to explain the meeting in Apalachin. The agent they sent was John Cusack.

John Cusack went to work for the FBN in 1947. He was an undercover agent, trying to make buys and bust dealers. Working his way up, he was soon going after traffickers and suppliers. After thirty years with the bureau, and later the DEA, he was forced to retire at sixty-five. He was not ready and instead moved to the Bahamas, where he oversees drug enforcement. He has been very successful. Five years ago, when he took the job, the country was among the top spots for international drug traffic. It is no longer ranked.

Cusack works in a white stone colonial building that sits on a hill above Nassau. Looking out his window, he can see down a narrow brick street to the harbor. In the afternoon, when the fishing boats come in, the street fills with chatter. When I met him one winter morning, he shook my hand and fell back into his chair. His desk was covered with mugs and pens and paper. He has a large, chiseled head, stripped-down features, and lucid blue eyes. He was seventy-three years old. “So you want to know about Jewish gangsters?” he said. “It all seems so long ago. A different world. Sometimes I hardly believe it existed.” He frowned, then said, “But other times it seems like yesterday. Some of those men were the most interesting people I have ever met. And, of course, some were not.”

When Cusack started with the FBN, there were still dozens of Jewish drug dealers roaming New York City, the remnants of Rothstein’s machine. Before our appointment, he had written their names on two sheets of white notebook paper. Next to each name he had jotted a few notes to refresh his memory. Over the next few hours he carefully read each name, then told me what he could remember. Cusack has an expressive way of talking. His voice is low and calm, but his words are full of color, pictures, flashes of light. As he read a name, that gangster seemed to file in, nod at me, and stand in the corner, holding his hat as Cusack discussed him. Rothstein bounded in with his diamond tie clip and gold watch; Lepke stormed in, eyes blazing; Lansky shuffled in, shook my hand, and said something about his ulcer. Oy, gevalt! This pain in my side!

“And there were dozens of others,” Cusack told me. “So many, and all of them dead. There was Solly Gelb, who lived on West End Avenue and was always into drugs. And Solly Gordon, who was into drugs going back to 1914. And Tudi Schoenfeld, Artie West, Niggy Rutkin, Harry Koch, Sam Haas, Moe Taubman, Harry Hechinger. There is a very famous hardware store in Washington called Hechinger’s,” Cusack said, looking up. “Harry was the founder’s brother. As young men, they had been in the machinery business. They worked in one of those big buildings in SoHo.

“So one brother goes into hardware, the other into opium. We all make choices. Harry was a big-time smoker. A pipe fiend. I arrested him for it. One night, in the fall of 1947, my group leader had information that a guy named Murray Krim, a low-level hustler, was running a drug thing from his place. When we went over, Murray wouldn’t let us in. He said he was in mourning—sitting shivah. When we heard that, we said, ‘Okay,’ and left. Coming downstairs, we ran into Harry Hechinger. He’s got this big tray wrapped in cellophane. We figured, Aha! We searched the tray, and it turned out to be a beautiful array of cookies. We apologized and left.”

Some of the gangsters were brilliant men. Their restless, inventive minds were lit from within: by poverty, necessity, ambition. “What about Tolly Greenberg?” said Cusack, leaning back. “Tolly did something very smart. In most of the South, there was no heroin, no morphine. And during Prohibition, those people were looking for something to do. Also, there were drug addicts passing through who needed a fix. So Tolly took a piece of pharmaceutical equipment and converted it. He rebuilt this machine so it would turn liquid heroin into pills, which he then sold in the South as morphine pills. He made a killing.”

When I think of someone like Tolly Greenberg, I think of my grandpa Ben. The same restless energy drove both men toward invention. Ben worked in a diner and was tired of clunky sugar dispensers and so converted an existing piece of machinery, a tea bagger, creating the first sugar packet. Tolly worked in narcotics and knew there was a southern market for drugs and so converted an existing piece of machinery, creating the first morphine pill.

I would like to say there is some great difference between these men. I would like to say Tolly was working for evil, my grandfather for good, but I don’t know if it’s that simple. I sometimes think the moment of invention, the flash of insight, is itself the good thing, a reflection of the divine spark. What becomes of that invention, the value it is given by the world, is not the whole story.

And then the question of motivation. Was Tolly excited when he finally got his pill machine to work? Did he rush home to tell his wife? Or did he think he was involved in something wicked? I did not know Tolly at all, but I think I knew my grandfather even less. Tolly’s motivations seem clear to me: money, power. My grandfather’s remain a mystery. Was it money he was after or something else? I think of his ambition as an Abstract painting: something I don’t understand, something that makes me feel stupid. Besides, who can know how their work fits into the greater scheme of things? Who has the imagination to feel how their actions affect others? It seems impossible to know. Well, both Tolly and my grandfather are dead now, so maybe they have the answers. Or maybe not.

Most Jews I know do not believe in heaven or hell. Or they just do not think it matters. How you live this life, that’s what matters. Depending on how you live, you can find heaven or hell here on earth, a view most of the gangsters could have confirmed. For them, heaven, hell, redemption, damnation—it was all in Brooklyn. Few gangsters had to reach the next world to be punished. The reckoning began in the parking lots, garages, street corners, and rooftops of East New York, Brownsville, Williamsburg. If anything, God seems more present in the underworld; every time a gangster dies, another judgment has been passed. The punishment that found the drug dealers was often the worst. “That was the curse of it,” says Cusack, frowning. “These guys started dealing drugs, and before they knew it, the drugs were dealing them.”

They wandered the streets, their elegant suits crumpled like pajamas. Even the most powerful of these men, those with their hands on the levers, could be sucked through the needle. What about Waxey Gordon, who years before had gone to Rothstein with the plan to bootleg alcohol? “Just think about him,” said Cusack. “For Waxey, narcotics was the last stop on the way down.”

His real name was Irving Wexler. He was first called Waxey on the Lower East Side, where he waxed his fingers to help him slide wallets from the pockets of strangers. In the twenties he was making around $2 million a year. He was like an early underground version of Ralph Lauren: a Jewish city kid who turns himself into a WASP-y country gentleman. He built a huge mansion on the palisades in New Jersey. He filled the library with Thackeray, Dickens, and Scott, every book leather bound, not a binding broken. It was like the scene in The Great Gatsby where Nick Carraway comes across a man going through Gatsby’s library. Waving his hand toward the shelves, the man says, “Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. . . . What thoroughness. What realism. Knew when to stop, too—didn’t cut the pages.”

Waxey went to prison in 1933: income tax evasion. Ten years later, when he got out, he turned to drug dealing: here was a way to rebuild the empire. He was soon running all over town, lit up with the desperation of the small-time peddler. To other hoodlums he became a warning, an after photo. In 1951 he tried to sell heroin to an undercover narcotics agent. When he realized he could not bribe his way out, Waxey asked the agent to shoot him. In his mug shot, Waxey looks worn out and faded. His face hangs in the air like a reflection, something seen in a pane of glass. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. Wexler died in 1952 in Alcatraz.

There is an underworld myth, spread by movies but also by the gangsters themselves: that the Mafia bosses banned family members from dealing drugs. This issue is seen as a debate between bosses in The Godfather. When Joseph Valachi, a low-level member of the Gambino family, turned informant, he told prosecutors that some bosses paid capos $200 a week to steer clear of narcotics; he also said members caught selling drugs were sometimes killed. In his autobiography, A Man of Honor, Joseph Bonanno writes, “My tradition outlaws narcotics. It has always been understood that men of honor don’t deal in narcotics. However, the lure of high profits tempted some underlings to freelance in the narcotics trade.”

Many see such statements as a tactic, something to throw off the cops. Even the most arrogant mobsters knew drugs could be the downfall of the Mafia. Here was an issue where the public would demand results. Gangsters killing gangsters was one thing; gangsters selling drugs in a school zone, that was something else. It was one area where wiseguys could not buy off cops, where even the most corrupt judges would not give them a pass. And if a low-level dealer was somehow tied to the big boys, it could put the bosses in jail. So, in their loudest voice, the bosses told the capos, “No drugs,” as they faithfully collected their percentage. Vito Genovese, who was among the first of the modern gangsters, died in jail for narcotics dealing.

“I knew a lot of the big guys had been mixed up in drugs,” Cusack told me. “You kept your eyes open, you saw it. But I learned something in the seventies that did surprise me. I found out that Meyer Lansky was, at one point, addicted to heroin. That was a big surprise. It had to do with a time in the old days when he about broke down.”

Cusack was referring to a crisis Lansky went through in the early thirties. In the middle of the Castellammarese war, his first child, Buddy Lansky, was born crippled in both legs. “Lansky’s first wife was very religious,” Ralph Salerno told me. “Yet she married a gangster and spent her honeymoon at the big 1929 Mob meeting in Atlantic City, where she met people like Al Capone. Then her first son has all these problems. I think she blamed her husband; she saw it as the wrath of God. Is it any wonder she later wound up in the booby hatch?”

Lansky was troubled. Who wants to be on God’s bad side? One day in 1931 he got in a car and drove north, past towns and rivers, to a hideout the gang kept near Boston. For the next few days he did not shower or change; he let his beard grow. He was Henry Thoreau alone in the woods, getting to the bottom of things; a holy man, locked in the desert, challenging the night. Why had his son been crippled? Were his sins being visited on the boy?

The sun came and went. The wind rattled the windows. There was a knock at the door. It was Vincent Alo, who had been sent by Luciano to look after Meyer. Alo was a broad-beamed Sicilian. Friends called him Jimmy Blue Eyes. “For nearly a week Alo sat with Lansky,” Uri Dan writes in Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob. “As the grief-stricken Little Man struggled with his emotions, Alo provided his friend bottle after bottle of his own whiskey.”

The hours passed. The shadows shifted. Then, one day, Lansky got up, showered, shaved, got in his car, and drove back to New York. Though his week away was never again mentioned, it was understood: Lansky had made his peace.

While John Cusack accepts this story, he says there was another element at play: not only was Lansky struggling with his son’s illness, he was going through heroin withdrawal. Lansky had gone north to kick the habit. Alo was there to guide him through hell. Is this true? Cusack says it is. He says agents in the FBN knew about it at the time. And if he’s right, if Lansky was up there with the shakes, we now have a new image of the gangster, an image at odds with the constrained, button-down Lansky of the gangster movies: Lee Strasberg in The Godfather, Part II; Ben Kingsley in Bugsy. It means Meyer Lansky knew something Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix would later find out. And it sets him firmly in the narrative of this century, at the forefront of grunge, just another addict looking for a fix. It also means Lansky was stronger than we ever supposed. Weaker, too.

In the ensuing years, Meyer Lansky and Vincent Alo became best friends. When Meyer at last came out of the woods, having shed the indulgences of youth, Alo was with him. “What Lansky and Alo had was a love affair,” Cusack told me. “Even those of us on the other side of the law came to respect what they felt for each other.” In the eighties both men were living in Miami, old gangsters walking the beach, eating in diners.

When Lansky died in 1982, Alo kept on, opening a restaurant in South Beach. He’s still there, just another white-haired old man haunting the ocean avenues of Miami. He is a slight, stoop-shouldered man in his nineties, yet people are still scared of him. They say it is his connections they fear, but really it is the man himself. They fear him the way you might fear a toothless dog that was once ferocious. A dog that has tasted flesh remains a dangerous dog.

A few years ago I was having breakfast with my father and his friends (Sid, Asher, Larry) at Nate ’n’ Al’s, and I asked if they could put me in touch with Vincent Alo. “I think we can make a few calls,” said Sid. “We know someone who knows him.”

“Yeah, but be careful,” said Asher. “When Jimmy Blue Eyes don’t like something, it’s not a letter to the editor he sends.”

“Tell him about the espresso drinker,” said Sid. His voice was pinched with excitement. “Go on, tell him.”

“Sure, I’ll tell him,” said Asher. “Well, Blue Eyes has a restaurant in Miami Beach. And he has this guy running it for him, a real big espresso drinker.”

“This guy’s always sippin’ espresso,” said Sid. “Sip, sip, sip.”

“Yeah, always sippin’,” Asher said. “Well, anyway, Blue Eyes lets this espresso drinker run the joint. One condition: he’s gotta keep a table open for Blue Eyes. Don’t matter if Blue Eyes is out of town, that table stays open. It’s Alo’s table. So, okay. Months go by and no Blue Eyes. The place gets hot. The lines run out the door. One night, the espresso drinker gets greedy. Someone slips him a hundred. He gives ’em the table. An hour later, and who walks in with a bunch of outta-town friends but Jimmy Blue Eyes.”

“Whaddya know,” said Sid, clapping his hands. “Walks in that very night.”

“So, Blue Eyes looks at the table, looks at the espresso drinker, walks out,” said Asher.

“Doesn’t get mad or nothing,” said Sid. “Just walks out.”

Asher ate a fry off Sid’s plate, then said, “An hour later, the espresso drinker is stretched out in the kitchen, flat as a board, dead.”

“Flat as a board, dead,” said Sid. “Poison espresso.”

This story is not true. No way. A ninety-year-old man does not poison the espresso drinker. But Asher and Sid believe it’s true, which shows how good a gangster Alo must have been. As a young man, he crafted an image that seventy years later still has people talking on the other side of the country. My meeting with Alo never did come off. He sent word back that he had no interest in talking about the old days. Before I left that morning, though, Sid grabbed my sleeve and said, “We like you, Richie. If you meet Jimmy Blue Eyes, make nice.”

Is it any wonder some of the gangsters turned to drugs? Their lives were made of stress. Things used as metaphors in corporate America (bagman, hit man, hatchet job) were reality here. Living into middle age was itself a kind of victory. They worked under a pressure unknown even to deep-sea divers. They had built their world on a shifting landscape, a riot of feuds, wars, schemes. They learned to see their actions through strange eyes, to refract their lives through the eyes of enemies. Who will kill me next?

They were often awakened in the middle of the night. A pebble on the window. The stores below are shuttered, stoops empty. A man is standing under the streetlight. Hey, Kid, it’s me, Pep. We need you at the candy store. So they dress in a cold room, in the light of a naked bulb, not knowing if they are going out as killer or mark. If they were dumb, they were soon dead. If they were smart, they were afraid all the time. Afraid of enemies, more afraid of friends.

They joined the Mob when they were young, before they knew what it was about. Only later, after the first robbery, the first killing, did the picture come into focus. This is a world where no one is trusted, where no one walks away, a world without windows or doors. And by then it was too late.

Now and then, someone did try to get out. He would go all around the candy store, shaking hands. He had fallen in love or found God or whatever. He had forgotten something, too—that the last person who had fallen in love or found God or whatever had turned up in the weeds.

But when a man makes up his mind, what can you do? You just shake your head and watch him go. A shack in a forest, an apartment in a city, a house in a suburb. For a few weeks the reformed hood is left to live his new life, a routine just beginning to form, a glimpse of a future. But it’s an illusion, a dream that comes after the gunshot, before the bullet. Sooner or later there is a knock on the door.

For the boys, someone who quit was a threat. It was someone they had lost control of, like a plane that’s gone off radar, and who knows where it will turn up? It did not matter how many promises you made. Don’t worry ’bout me, boys! I’ll never tell a thing! Once you quit, you were carrying around the secrets of everyone in the gang. You couldn’t be allowed to walk off with that. That would be like stealing. Sooner or later the boys would track you down. When they did, they would take back what you stole. And the only way at it was through your head. They bled it out. The only person who ever got away was Gangy Cohen, and to do it he had to run to the movies. No. Quitting was something you were not allowed to do. If they let you go, not only were you a threat, you were the worst kind of advertising, a message to everyone with a gripe, an arrow saying, “This way out!”

That’s how it was with Tootsie Feinstein. In the thirties Tootsie rode with Charlie Workman on all kinds of errands. He and Workman were friends. They cared for each other. Then one day Tootsie tells Workman that he is going straight. He wants a future as real as his past. Workman drops off Tootsie, heads into the city, and tells Lepke all about it. Yes, he is friends with Tootsie. But a mistake made by a friend is still a mistake. So Lepke gives Workman the job. “Charlie has a tough assignment,” Lepke said. “I hate like hell to have to do it, but we have got to take Tootsie Feinstein.” When issuing a death sentence, Lepke used the word “take,” like a heavenly bureaucrat just following the timetable set down by God.

A few days later Workman told Tootsie he had something on his mind, that he wanted to go for a ride. Did Tootsie know he was going to die? A lot of the gang members killed by friendly fire must have sensed something was up. They had seen it so many times: someone makes a mistake, there is a pause, a passage of time, a knock on the door, a friend wanting to go for a ride. Maybe the mark knows there is no way out and figures, if he has got to go, it might as well be with a friend. At least the conversation on the way to the weeds will be pleasant. Workman buried the body in Lindhurst, New Jersey, in a lime-lined grave the boys kept on the bank of the Passaic River.

A few days later a member of the troop rang Feinstein’s bell. When Tootsie’s wife answered, he handed her a fifty-dollar bill. He said her husband would be gone for a while. Every week someone came by with a fifty. Some women might tear up the money. Tootsie’s widow was a realist. Because she lost a husband, did she have to lose everything else, too? She liked the lifestyle. She continued to spend time with the boys. She even spent a winter with the troop in Miami. Allie took home movies on the beach, the jerky black-and-white film showing surf, sky, and Tootsie’s widow goofing with the man who killed her husband. When lawyers later prosecuted Tootsie’s killer, she spoke on his behalf. This only added to the legend: When Handsome Charlie kills a man, the widow stands for him in court.

By the mid-thirties the gangsters had built a world of their own. They had friends in every town, towns in every state. No matter the jam, someone could always be contacted. There was always somewhere to go. Entire counties out west had been made gangster friendly: houses bought, cops, politicians paid off. In a few small villages in Michigan, strange men in dark suits and fedoras could be seen on the road from town, groceries in hand, walking back to a house in the woods. They would be seen on the road every day for a week, a month. Then gone. The trouble back east had been taken care of. In 1919, when Al Capone was wanted in Brooklyn for murder, he hid in Bugsy Siegel’s place on Fourteenth Street long enough for Siegel to arrange safe passage to Chicago.

If things got especially hot, if there was a dead cop or a dead kid, a gangster might be sent clear across the ocean. For Italians there was Italy, the villages of their ancestors. In 1937 Vito Genovese, wanted for murder, fled to Naples, where he ran drugs and formed an alliance with Mussolini. In 1947 he was brought back to New York for trial. He was acquitted. For Jews, whose past seemed to vanish just behind them, there was Miami, the other holy land. And soon there would be Israel. For Jewish gangsters, Israel’s successful war of independence meant partly a victory for self-determination, partly a victory for Jews on the lam.

And if a gangster just needed to get away, if he was waiting for something to blow over, or if maybe he was sick of his wife, he could always head down to the Hotel Arkansas, a spa and casino Owney Madden ran in Hot Springs. Madden was the last of the old old-timers. His youth was lived in another age, an early century world of thousand-man street gangs, of opium dens, of Monk Eastman and Big Jack Zelig and knife fights at dawn. He was like an exotic animal that turns up from the past, a parrot feeding with pigeons. He had a sallow face on which everything was written. He is what might have happened to a Dickens character who lived into the twentieth century, was taken too far from home, had all of the ambition, none of the luck. To childhood friends he was “that little banty rooster out of hell.”

Madden came to America from Liverpool, England, in 1903. He lived with his aunt in Hell’s Kitchen. When he was eleven he joined the Gophers, one of the last of the old street gangs. He was arrested forty-four times before he was twenty. He took over the gang when he was seventeen. To celebrate, he went out and killed an Italian immigrant, someone who would not be missed. In 1916 he boarded a streetcar and killed a kid who had asked out his girl. Though he killed the kid in front of witnesses, no one came forward. He fired his gun as the trolley, rumbling up Ninth Avenue, crossed Sixteenth Street, a few blocks from where I now live. The streetcar is gone, but you can still go look at the elevated tracks, which run across the tops of newsstands and auto repair shops. Away from buildings, the tracks run on a sort of steel viaduct, the supports rusty. In the summer, cattails grow through the ties. Madden killed five men by his twenty-third birthday. On the street they called him Owney the Killer.

Madden was sent to Sing Sing in 1914. He had been convicted of killing a rival. When he was released in 1923, he found himself in a new world. He had gone to prison in the morning, and now it was night, the racy night of New York in the twenties. Madden was maybe the only old-timer to really make the transition. While legends like Monk Eastman stumbled opium soaked through the East Side, Madden was cutting deals with the new generation, making a fortune in numbers and bootlegging; he owned the Cotton Club in Harlem. Madden worked with Lansky and Lepke for the same reason Frank Sinatra later cut songs with Bono of U2 and Paul Simon: because things change. In 1929, when young underworld leaders (Luciano, Costello, Lansky, Al Capone, Lepke) held a conference in Atlantic City, Madden was there, a historical figure who wandered into the wrong era.

When Prohibition ended, Madden went south. He had ridden atop the New York underworld long enough to know he could not do so forever. If he stayed, he would sooner or later be killed or locked up. People like Reles and Madden lived in a world of diminishing returns, where everything to be had can be had in youth. So Owney took his winnings and bought the Hotel Arkansas, a spa and casino in Hot Springs.

By the mid-thirties the hotel had become a gangster getaway. Thugs took the train from New York, stayed in big, well-lit rooms, were healed by the waters, lost fortunes in the casino. They stayed a week, a month, a season. All paths led to the dining room, where the boys stayed up late, smoking. After dinner they sat outside in chairs, charting the night by the stars. On weekends bands came from Little Rock to play Gershwin and Cole Porter songs. And the wives dripping jewels in the shade. And the boys out on the town, in clubs up and down the strip, leaving a charge in the air. When a warrant was put out for Lucky Luciano, he came to the hotel, where he felt as safe as Vito Genovese in Naples. It took several months, a political scandal, and the state militia to root out Lucky and get him on a train north.

And it was at the Hotel Arkansas, on rainy evenings and balmy afternoons, that gangsters developed that most important part of their style: hanging out, an activity that came to define their way of life. Gangsters were maybe the first common-born Americans who did not spend all their time at work or with families, men with time on their hands; they were among the first Americans to grapple with the great problem of the age: boredom, how to fill the hours between waking and sleeping. It was a problem faced by Abe Reles on the corner of Livonia and Saratoga; by Bugsy Siegel in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria; by Frank Costello at the Hotel Arkansas. These were perhaps the first Americans to break truly free of the Puritan work ethic. They stood on corners all day, tracking the sun across the sky, watching commuters go and come. They were pioneer members of a class of aimless adults later portrayed on TV shows like Seinfeld. They were men waiting for a bus that never arrives.

Now, all these years later, my father, and a lot of other men old enough to know better, are still hanging out. They lose whole mornings at diners like Nate ’n’ Al’s, give entire afternoons to the club. A few times each year, my dad and his friends go to La Costa, a spa near San Diego, where they live pretty much like Lucky Luciano lived in Hot Springs. They play cards, take massages, swim. They sit under the stars at night, burning off those extra hours they worked so hard to accumulate. It’s a legacy of the gangsters; it’s what men do. Whenever I phone Asher Dann, I am taken through the same pleasantly absurd chain of events. Calling his house, I am told, “Asher is at the Friars. Try him there.”

When I call the Friars Club, I am connected to the locker room. “Looking for Asher?” asks the attendant. “I’ll get him.” I hear the phone set down as the attendant goes through the room, shouting, “Asher! Ash! Asher!” As his voice trails off, another sound takes its place, the sound of men hanging out. Though I cannot see them, I know what they look like. They wear towels, sit on a wood bench along a row of lockers. Some have towels wound around their faces, an opening where a cigar goes in. Some wear gold chains. Their chins are covered with hard gray stubble. Their eyes sparkle. They are mischievous. At the ends of sentences, their voices rise, indicating the joke. They have mostly New York accents. They talk about a deal they are about to close, a car they are about to buy, an amazing thing their kid just did. They all have the greatest kid in the world. They also talk about the old days, Brooklyn, and how it was when Jewish gangsters were the toughest thing going. “Sorry,” says the attendant, picking up the phone. “Asher is taking a steam.”

The clientele at the Hotel Arkansas was mostly Italian and Jewish. Regulars included Louis Lepke, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Joey Adonis, Frank Costello. These men had forged a bond beyond religion. Jew or Italian, they even looked alike, with dark eyes and dark hair, came from the same ghettos, seemed to want the same things. “You know how you tell a Jewish neighborhood?” Ralph Salerno asked me. “Look for the Italian restaurants.”

At Madden’s resort, in the shimmering light of the pool, they were one people. “The Italian Mafioso had tremendous respect for the Jews,” said John Cusack. “They didn’t push them around. Luciano was the first to say, ‘Fight these guys? What do you mean? Get with them. Work with them.’ ” But it was a world fast disappearing. This was the golden age of the Jewish-Italian underworld alliance. These people were thrown together by poverty, and prosperity would soon pull them apart. Back then, Jewish and Italian gangsters looked alike the way seeds look alike. But as they blossomed, with money, with power, differences would emerge. What they wanted, their ambitions, fears, dreams they had for their children, were not the same. Over time, these differences would draw the children of Jewish gangsters away from crime, until a Jewish presence in the underworld was a vague memory, as hard to believe in as the youth of your parents. “The Jews were ahead of the Italians: ahead of them in immigrating here, ahead of them in being organized criminals, and ahead of them in getting out of it,” Cusack said.

When an Italian gangster made a criminal score, he usually kept the money in the neighborhood. He might take a better apartment, move up a few flights, buy a new car, a new girl. You might see him cutting down the street in a razor-sharp suit, the sky in his shoes. But the Italians, at least those below the top echelon, rarely left the corner where they grew up. Why make it big if you can’t flash it on the street? Who wants to look sharp for strangers? In Italian neighborhoods like Ocean Hill, the criminal hierarchy was there for everyone to see, as naked as the wheeling of the constellations. There were men on the streets, in the doorways, in the clubrooms, in the apartments above. And all this was the best recruiting poster in the world. Here is your bleary-eyed, overworked, dog-tired father. And here, a few doors away, is a cool, well-rested wiseguy who does nothing but hang out. “You know what parents told their kids the first day of school?” Salerno asked me. “They told them, ‘Sometimes you get in a fight in the schoolyard. Okay. We understand. But there is someone you never fight with. We know who his parents are. You hurt him, you end up in Gowanus Canal covered with wire. And if you see that man on the sidewalk, step into the street, put your arms out, and say, “Hello, Don Chich.” ’ ”

When Jewish gangsters made their score, in rackets or robbery, first thing they did was get out. They moved from Brooklyn or Queens to lower Manhattan, to the Upper West Side, Central Park West, or West End Avenue, to the suburbs, Westchester, New Jersey, Long Island, and then to Miami, Las Vegas, or Los Angeles. Who knows? Maybe Jews are just more comfortable on the road. Maybe all those years in exile have made them restless. Maybe no homeland meant no home. Maybe something deep in them said, “Get out before the roof caves in.” For a successful Jew, a big part of life is visiting the old neighborhood, walking the shoulder-wide streets with a sense of victory. Jews collect hometowns. “The Italians liked the celebrity of that life,” Cusack told me. “The Jewish gangsters, when they made it, got out of the neighborhood. They didn’t have the bravura of the Italians, who wanted to walk down the street and everyone knows them and they’re loved and adored. The Italians wanted to be in the neighborhood, wanted people to know who they are and this and that. But the Jews were different. They married, moved uptown, lived on the park, dressed modestly, and made sure everyone thought they were businessmen.”

For Jewish gangsters, crime was not a way out of the system; it was a way in. Jews were mostly not wanted in the white-shoe firms of Wall Street and Madison Avenue. Their kids were not accepted by Ivy League schools. In a society so often closed, is it any wonder guns could seem the best way in, a shortcut to the American dream? But they did not glory in it. Many of the Jewish gangsters did not even like it. When they wore flashy suits, it was not to advertise their wealth; it was because they didn’t know better. A gangster in a fuchsia suit is a gangster who wants to be loved.

For these men, the greatest dream, the dream they reserved for their children, was to be a successful, law-abiding American. The Jewish people wanted a future like the one my father and his friends live today: summer in the mountains, winter in the sun, deals in the steamroom, politicians to the house, and nothing to go to jail for. Legitimate power. Doctors. Lawyers. The gangsters knew they could not have this for themselves. They were too rough, too green, not far enough from Europe, the shtetl, the pogroms. They were like the generation Moses led out of Egypt, a generation lost in the wilderness, a slave generation that must die away before Jews can settle the promised land. So they instead got themselves in position to make the dream come true for their children. “The Jewish Mafia was never passed on like the Italian Mob,” Cusack said. “Jews didn’t recruit. The old-timers did what they felt they had to do; but they did not want the younger generation of Jews mixed up in it.”

Most Jewish gangsters said they were importers or mediators or organizers. They rarely even told their children what they did. I have found only a handful of Jews who say they are related to gangsters. And even those found out only years later, long after the grandfather or great-grandfather was senile or dead. It was a family secret, something that slipped out after a few glasses of wine. And there must be others, thousands of Jews who will never know the secrets of just a few generations back. To them, their ancestor is just a kindly old face pasted into a photo album; to others, that face was Knadles or Bugsy or Kid Twist. When Abe Reles died, his wife remarried, changed her name, changed the name of her children. And off they drifted into the mumbling crowd that is Jewish America.

The gangsters made sure their kids lived normal lives, stayed in school, studied, got into college. They had the muscle their fathers didn’t, the muscle to take on the schools with quotas. “I knew a Jewish kid who used Bugsy Siegel’s gangster money to get into medical school,” Salerno told me. “Those schools didn’t want Jews or Italians. I don’t give a shit how smart you are. All right? But the people who made the decisions, they could be corrupted, too. And who among the Italians and Jews had the power to do that? Gangsters. Someone from the neighborhood would approach a gangster and ask the favor. Do it for your people! And so the gangster would send someone up to one of these fancy schools and they would say, ‘Your answer is no? Who do I have to see who will tell me yes?’ ”

The sons of the gangsters went off to college and grad school and then into medicine, law, business. Lansky’s second son, Paul, graduated from West Point. After ten years in the army, he moved to California and became a computer programmer. When he had a son of his own, he named him Meyer Lansky II, which upset the gangster. The idea was to fade into America, not brandish your name. Lansky’s other son, Buddy, who was handicapped, remembered the old gangster’s reaction. “Dad got mad,” he told Robert Lacey in the book Little Man. “He thought it was not fair on the kid that he should have to live with that.” For later generations, the life of the ghetto, the crime and violence, were just stories, something you forget before you hear. Why should they remember? In the story of the Jewish underworld nothing compares with the Italian dynasties, the Gottis, the Gallos. No one runs out to avenge a family name. That’s the last thing the patriarch would want. Even the most violent of the gangsters saw themselves as good Jews, people of the Book. They went to temple on High Holy Days, thought of God when things went bad, had their sons circumcised and bar mitzvahed. Being a Jew was not something they were thinking of all the time, but they were aware of themselves as Jews, as players in a larger story—the Temple, the Exodus. How did they square their criminal life with the life of the Bible? Well, like most people, they made a distinction: this is the life of the soul, this is the life of the body. Next year in Jerusalem. But this is how I live in the Diaspora.

A lawyer asked Reles how he dealt with the contradictions. “Do you have any regrets?” asked the lawyer.

“This is the way I live,” said Reles.

“Do you believe there is a God?” asked the lawyer.

“Yes, sir.”

“When did you start to believe in God?”

“Always knew there was a God,” said Reles.

“You knew there was a God while you were doing these different killings?”

“That is the way my life was mapped out,” said Reles. “That was my profession.”

“Did you believe in God while you were killing Jake the Painter?”

“I knew there was a God.”

Of course, most people in the neighborhood had no sympathy for the gangsters. To people in places like Brownsville, those who worked for everything they had, the gangsters were nothing but cheaters. Probably no one hated them more than other Jews. When federal prosecutors began targeting Jewish gangsters, a large part of each legal team was Jewish; Jews thought it important to be seen fighting Jewish criminals. It’s hard enough finding your way in a new world without thugs ruining the name of your people. Other locals ignored the problem, telling themselves gangsters lived somewhere else, Italian areas like Ocean Hill. Not here. When I asked Marty Glickman about Jewish gangsters he gave me a blank look. Glickman, a Jewish athlete who represented the United States in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, who was not allowed to compete for fear of offending Hitler, who went on to become the first voice of the New York Knicks, who invented the word “swish,” grew up in Brownsville in the twenties, when the neighborhood was run by Abe Reles; you couldn’t turn around without seeing a wiseguy. Yet Glickman seems convinced Jews were above organized crime. “I don’t know how many gangsters there were, but it could not have been very many,” he told me. “After all, being a gangster is not a Jewish way of life.”

Even when the gangsters did something helpful—made sure Brownsville got its share of government spending, stood up to Irish or Italian bullies—people still asked themselves, “Is it good or bad for the Jews?” And almost always they decided it was bad. The image of the Jews was being tarnished. In movies and fiction, the heavy often had a Jewish last name or a mother with a European accent. Edward G. Robinson, a Jewish actor, earned his fame playing gangsters many people thought were based on Buggsy Goldstein. One of the great turnarounds in movie history, ranking with the rout of the musical, is the way Italian actors have cornered gangster roles; until about 1950, a movie gangster was as likely to eat corned beef as pasta. “Most Jews hated Jewish gangsters,” Herbert Brownell told me. Brownell, who managed Tom Dewey’s presidential campaigns, prosecuted the gangsters while serving as President Eisenhower’s attorney general. “Those people wrecked the image of the Jewish community. It was only the kids that admired them, because those crooks seemed to beat the system. Of course, a lot of them wound up dead.

“I found it remarkable that there even were Jewish gangsters,” Brownell went on. “These people had such opportunity, such chances. They could have done anything. And they muffed it. I mean, if you look at what the Jewish people have done for this city—they built it. And that some of their sons should choose to tear it down . . . I never understood that.”

Herbert Brownell, who died a few months after we spoke, was a Nebraska-born Protestant. He came from a different world from that of the gangsters. Silos, grain elevators, cornfields. How could he understand someone named Buggsy Goldstein? Many of the men Brownell worked with came from the same world, small Protestant towns scattered around the West and Midwest. They went east to work in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, to go after gangsters they felt had a stranglehold on New York. When I spoke to those still alive—they are in their eighties and nineties now and remember only bits of stories—they had trouble recalling the gangsters in individual detail. They remember them more as a type, a single, sneering über-thug. “Nothing but punks,” said Edward Lumbard, who served as the New York district attorney, then as a federal judge. “They were hiding behind their people, sapping their community.”

Many of the prosecutors did not even see the gangsters as men. They saw them as strangers, a foreign presence, the cause of every social evil; it’s the way many white people now see black and Hispanic gangs. To some, the problem wasn’t poverty or the ghetto—it was Jews. In some churches there was talk of how the Jews betrayed God, killed Jesus, and were now up to their old tricks in the new world. In my father’s neighborhood, at four o’clock every weekday, the streets would fill with Catholic school kids spoiling for a fight. When I asked my dad why they wanted to fight, he said, “Because we killed their Lord.” A lot of the journalism of the day carried the scent of the old European anti-Semitism, of blood libel, Jews spiriting away gentile babies. In the twenties, when a reporter for the Saturday Press was criticized for linking Judaism to crime, he responded in print: “When I find men of a certain race banding themselves together for the purpose of preying upon gentiles; gunmen, killers, roaming our streets shooting down men against whom they have no personal grudge; defying our laws; corrupting our officials; assaulting business men; beating up unarmed citizens; spreading a reign of terror through every walk of life, then I say to you in all sincerity, that I refuse to back up a single step from that ‘issue.’ ”

All this helped open a rift between the uptown Jews and the Jews downtown. The uptown Jews, educated, prosperous, assimilated, were threatened by such creeping anti-Semitism. And whom did they blame? The anti-Semites? No. They blamed the downtown Jews, who, with their accents and crime, were an embarrassment. The uptown Jews looked at their cousins downtown the way my big brother looked at me when his cool friends came over—as though they had snuck in the back door. Over time, this attitude drove some downtown Jews into sympathy with the gangsters. For people in far-flung Brooklyn, a sense of exclusion led to a kind of unity. The gangsters, at least, were with them.

When Reles and the boys were hanging out at my grandparents’ diner and the cops came by, my great-grandmother would hide their guns in the onions. She hated gangsters, but she hated people she thought hated Jews more. Besides, the gangsters did things the cops couldn’t. They kept the streets safe, got local kids into college. When my grandma Betty went into labor while working in the diner, who do you think drove her to the hospital? Abe Reles. “The gangsters helped crack barriers,” Ralph Salerno told me. “The world was closed to people in their neighborhoods, and the gangsters had the muscle and money to see that it was opened.”

The gangsters were fighting a hearts and minds campaign. If they were liked, they would be protected. A gangster fighting for the little guy is a gangster you don’t rat on. (Of course, if they weren’t liked, they made sure they were feared.) And who liked them most? The kids. Kids in places like Brownsville were starved for role models. They were always on the lookout for someone other than their father, a destiny other than the domestic one they saw at home. They followed Jewish boxers: Benny Leonard, Barney Ross. They knew Jewish actors by their movie names and real names: Kirk Douglas, Jeff Chandler, Tony Curtis (Bernie Schwartz). In Brooklyn, kids made up all-star baseball teams consisting entirely of Jews: Al “Flip” Rosen, Max Fischl, Heine Bloom. “One year, Hank Greenberg, who played first base for the Detroit Tigers, was holding out for more money,” Salerno told me. “So he got a pitcher and went to the park to hit flies. It was one of the funniest sights I have ever seen. There must have been two hundred outfielders. Every Jewish kid in the neighborhood wanted to catch a ball hit by the great Hank Greenberg.”

My father lived in Bensonhurst, not far from Sholem Bernstein, a junior member of the Reles gang. To kids on the block, Sholem was both familiar and alien. He was a Jew like their fathers; yet he was a mystery. He blew through the neighborhood like a gust of color, in $300 suits, hair greased back, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. At fourteen, Larry King, trying to smoke like Sholem, leaned to kiss a girl, forgot about the cigarette, and just about burned a hole in her face. “Sholem was like some kind of a champion athlete,” Larry told me. “Everything he did looked cool and easy, but when you tried it, you fell flat on your ass.”

Sholem Bernstein owned a store in Bensonhurst. Now and then some of the boys would drive over from Brownsville. If it was a nice day, they might walk through the streets. When my father describes the gangsters walking by, all you see are big meaty hands, gold watches, pinky rings, teeth, very white, thick wrists, and broad shoulders under a green sky. Walking down Bay Parkway, they were followed by whispers. From a distance, people picked them out like Dodgers on a scorecard. “The short stocky one is Reles; the handsome one, that’s Charlie Workman; the mean-looking one with blue eyes is Pittsburgh Phil Strauss; and the one who looks like Edward G. Robinson, that’s Buggsy Goldstein.”

Shoulder to shoulder they walked past dusty bars and concrete stoops where men in shirtsleeves read the Brooklyn Eagle, past crowded basketball courts and apartment house windows where mothers were calling children to supper, past side streets where kids were playing stickball. Asher Dann is pitching. He pushes his hair from his face. Sid Young is catching. He calls for the fastball. Herbie is hitting. He waves a broomstick. Larry is down the street fielding, just glasses and a laugh from here, waiting for the pink speck against the green sky. Larry spots the gangsters first. He bites his lip and runs to the mound. He calls for a conference. As the boys pretend to talk, they check out the hoods. Look at them! They live in another world, outside everything the rabbi says on Friday night, our fathers say the rest of the week. And still they prosper. Look at those clothes! I can see my reflection in that jacket!

To kids like my dad, the gangsters were something different from the books and prayers, mourning and wailing, of the Jews. If the gangsters lived in Palestine, there would be no Wailing Wall. It would be the Don’t-Fuck-with-Me Wall! A few years later, when kids on these blocks were faced with the image of the German concentration camp, the memory of the gangsters would give them another image: tough Jews, Jews who will not be led to slaughter. What do you think Pep Strauss would do to a guy like Heinrich Himmler? Drill fifteen holes in him, the Kraut bastard! I sometimes think my father’s image of himself, how he faces the world, began with those first gangster encounters. Even though he did not follow their lead, they gave him the illusion of freedom. Who knows? Maybe I will end up like that. “Here’s my tip for the future,” one of the gangsters says. “Lose the ball; keep the stick.”

“What’s the history of the Jews before they came here?” Ralph Salerno asked me. “They were in Europe. Cossacks chopped their heads off. They came here and were not accustomed to defending themselves. Who was it among them who knew how to defend themselves? Who could teach them to fight back? Gangsters. Jews with guns, like Meyer Lansky and Dutch Schultz and Ben Siegel. They proved that Jews can be the toughest guys of all. If you want to mess with them, okay, but you’re in for a real fight.”

So, in the mid-thirties, when Tom Dewey, working first as a special prosecutor, later as a district attorney, then as the governor of New York, went after the gangsters, Jewish kids all over Brooklyn were transfixed by the fight. They followed the action each day in the papers and tried to read between the lines. Most of them believed the gangsters would come out ahead. From their view, somewhere above the home run leader and the heavyweight champion was the gangster. But the view from Dewey’s office was different. He knew the truth about the gangsters: that their strength was the strength of the weak, the terrorist, the man outside the system. With courage and patience, he could topple the leaders of the underworld. And if the Jewish gangsters couldn’t give the kids of Brooklyn a victory, they would at least give them a terrific fight.