THE JEWISH GANGSTER did not survive the Second World War. The most daring among them had been locked up or executed or purged. In the coming years, the few who did survive, the ragged ends, drifted off or fell away, like Little Farvel Cohen, who was killed in the fifties in upstate New York, some drug thing, a “who cares?” death that flickers in the papers like outtakes shown over closing credits. And when this generation was gone, when the thugs born in Brownsville in the first years of the century were forgotten, who would take their place? No one. This was the last car, the caboose, and the train was going away. In the coming years, as Europe ran out of Jews to send across the ocean, as the ghettos dried up, as the universities and medical schools and law firms filled with Jews, as the Jewish people prospered in America, the gangsters would fade even from memory. “Allie Tannenbaum’s generation was the last generation of Jewish gangsters,” said Ralph Salerno. “The ghettos broke up and the Jews left, so who was there left to recruit?”
When old-generation gangsters like Meyer Lansky cast about for young, lawless Jews to flesh out their schemes, they came back with nothing. Zero. And this, I like to believe, is how they would have wanted it—a community strong enough to forget the street. For Jewish gangsters, crime was a ladder they pulled up behind them, a one-way “this generation only” shortcut to power. “Lansky realized that it was no longer going to be easy to recruit tough Jewish kids,” Salerno went on. “They were all going to college. Moshe Dayan had this same problem in Israel. He said he had trouble finding people to drive taxicabs and work in factories. They all wanted to go to school. They didn’t want manual jobs. Lansky realized this early, that there were not going to be any more tough Jewish kids who would take guns in their hands and have the guts to shoot them.”
By the end of the Second World War, an entire gangster generation had been wiped out. Louis Lepke, Abe Reles, Charlie Workman, Pep Strauss, Buggsy Goldstein, Mendy Weiss, Greenie Greenberg—all killed within the previous decade. The curse of Jewish criminality, a plague once discussed in seminars and at temples, had drifted off in the course of the war. You wake up, and it’s gone. But the war had also changed those Jews who survived. When the extent of the Holocaust came clear, when refugees began turning up with stories and tattoos, Jews who had never really considered the virtue of violence, considered it now. The old cerebral way, the rising above and muddling through of so many prewar scholarly Jews, Jews who filled those seminars on the evils of Jewish crime, now seemed like a failure. Brilliant, well-mannered Jews had been led by thousands to their deaths. Now, when people looked to the war for meaning, they came back with lessons the gangsters had accepted years before, what Meyer Lansky learned from the soldier who scolded his neighbors in Grodno, Poland: “Jews! Why do you sit around like stupid sheep and allow them to come kill you? You must stand up and fight.”
The Holocaust had bred a new kind of Jew, a hybrid of uptown and downtown, brains and swagger, for whom confrontation or violence may not be the first option but is certainly not the last, a style that would manifest itself in Israel, the Jewish state that overcame more populous Arab enemies with sheer determination. In Wanderings, his history of the Jews, Chaim Potok acknowledges this change in character. “Most of the gentle Jews are dead,” he writes. “The gas chambers and ovens have brought a new kind of Jew into the world. Even the Hasidim are no longer gentle. . . . From Auschwitz to Entebbe in a single generation.” The gangsters were dead, but what made them strong, their driving, fight-to-the-end philosophy, lived on. Though Pep Strauss did not survive the war, his ethic, part of it, anyway, not only survived—it prevailed.
For my father and his friends, there could be no better teacher of the new lessons than dead gangsters. These were men who had, in a way, given their lives for their beliefs. When they could have ratted, they chose not to. And the fact that they were gangsters, that they operated beyond the law, past what is acceptable, gave them a kind of legitimacy, the instant credibility of the outsider. For most people, though, a dead gangster will always be preferable to a living gangster. A dead gangster is just easier to get along with. While a living gangster might be a bully, a jerk, a mean, greedy, psychotic, foul-mouthed bastard, a dead gangster is whatever you want him to be.
All across Brooklyn, kids were imitating gangsters, aping a way of life that had just vanished. In dead gangsters they saw something they needed, an essential vitamin. In the end, it would fall to this generation to carry the legacy forward, to extract lessons and memories from the painful history of the Jewish gangster. In a movie, I imagine editors cutting straight from Lepke in the electric chair, head snapping back, to the corner of Eighty-sixth Street and Bay Parkway in Bensonhurst, beneath the west end el, where my father and his friends hung out the way the wiseguys once hung out in Brownsville, only without the mayhem and killing.
My father still remembers every detail of the corner, approaches, getaways, a cityscape frozen in his mind, a model he carries wherever he goes. When asked to describe the corner and the surrounding streets, he closes his eyes and waits for the picture to flicker on. “Okay,” he says, smiling. “I see it now. . . .”
Looking south down Bay Parkway, you see the narrow red brick buildings of the Italian section, pushcarts, pizza joints. That’s the way you walk to school, stepping into the street to let the ladies pass. But school is over, so you head the other direction, past Richland Clothing, where no one you know can afford to shop, past Vim Sporting Goods, where a loudspeaker pipes Frank Sinatra tunes into the street. If you take a right on Twenty-first Avenue and ditch the junior high punks who are always tagging along—maybe you lose them in F. W. Woolworth’s; you can lose anything in Woolworth’s; a friend of yours lost his virginity in Woolworth’s—you can go into Sam Maltz’s candy store. You hate Sam Maltz. He is always peering at you through the glass candy case, his waxy candy head floating above the ring-dings. “No money? Get out!” So one day you go in with a pocketful of nickels. “Hey, Sam, you can’t kick me out. I got money.” And you walk to the jukebox and play Frankie Laine’s “Wild Goose” twenty-seven times. Sam Maltz pushes the machine out the door after you, cursing. Still laughing, you head to Feder’s Feedbox, a drowsy diner full of walk-up workingmen. Your friend Bernie has just read an article about food, some nutritionist saying since all food mixes in your stomach, it doesn’t matter what you eat together. “It’s mind over matter,” he keeps saying. “I like pickles, I like ice cream, so I can eat pickles with ice cream.” So you cover Bernie’s ten dollars with a ten of your own and call over the waitress. “My friend will have ice cream with baked beans, scrambled eggs, pickles, chocolate syrup, and a glass of milk.” As Bernie vomits into some poor stranger’s lap, you take your twenty dollars, walk out the door, take a right, and now you are back on the corner, a warm summer night. Now and then a train goes rattling down the tracks overhead, sending down a shower of white sparks.
My father and his friends were sometimes on the corner late into the night, telling stories, laughing, helping each other through the rough terrain that runs from adolescence to adulthood. They must have sensed they were part of a tradition, the art of hanging out, an art perfected by Lepke and Luciano at the Hotel Arkansas in Little Rock. Each night after dinner the Bensonhurst boys walked to the corner from houses and apartment buildings around the neighborhood. The first to turn up got a seat on the bench; late arrivals leaned on the stop sign or else against the store windows.
Sid Young, then Sid Yalowitz, walked over from Seventy-fourth Street, where he lived in an apartment with his parents. Sid then was Sid now, just shrunk down, an imagination waiting for a body to grow. He was small, with a round face and a broad smile. He was playing basketball all the time, stories and sentences set to a dribble. Hear what happened? Dribble. Dribble. I’m comin’ down the street and run into the cutest girl. Dribble. Dribble. And then. Fade back. I ask her to go out. Shoot. And she says. Swish. Yes. Sid would dribble from bedroom to kitchen, kitchen to living room, and then, when his mother told him to take it outside, he would dribble on every stair on his way out.
There was a grocery on the ground floor of Sid’s building. The store was owned by an immigrant named Jagoda, a merchant who saved his best dreams for his son, Asher. Sid first met Asher on the street in front of the building, and they became friends. Together they played basketball, went to school, the corner, the world. From the beginning, Sid knew Asher was special. He was a born aristocrat, the handsome sailor of Melville. His features together made the kind of darkly mysterious face actors like Rudolph Valentino and Tyrone Power had prepared the women of America for. In high school Asher attracted the attention of adults, who put him in magazine ads. At seventeen he began posing for the covers of romance novels. You would be walking by the drugstore window and there, looking out from some glossy cover, would be Asher Jagoda, shirt undone, girl in his arms, under words like “Exotic” and “Adventure.” Everyone knew Asher was bound for some other place, far from Bensonhurst, where words like “Exotic” and “Adventure” came from.
By the time Sid and Asher turned on to Bay Parkway, the corner was full of faces. Sam Deluca, a thick-wristed football player who later, as a member of the New York Jets, would snap the ball to Joe Namath; Sandy Koufax, who would go on to pitch for the Dodgers; Peter Max, who would become a world-famous artist, filling walls with colorful outside-the-lines sketches. They were standing out there, heads together, talking fast, in a language only they could understand.
It was on the corner that the boys were first saddled with nicknames, a way to be seen outside the house. Some nicknames were simply chosen (Bucko, Noodles); some emerged over time (Ben the Worrier); and some just sort of presented themselves. Bernard Horowitz, when asked a question, said, “Who?” and when the question was repeated, said, “Ha?”—and was ever after known as Who-Ha. In school, Irving Kaplan, on a dare, drank an inkwell and was quickly dubbed Inky. In high school Inky could eat lit cigarettes; he is now a dentist. One kid, nobody knows why, was called Gutter Rat, even by his own mother. Hey, Gutter Rat. Come in for lunch!
Larry King, whose real name is Zeiger, was known as Zeke the Creek the Mouth Piece. Even then Larry was a broadcaster, announcing happenings on the corner. “Here comes Sam Deluca,” he might say, into a rolled-up newspaper. Larry already had his trademark baritone—a voice designed to relate big, earth-shattering events. “Now Deluca is telling Zeiger to shut up,” he would continue. “Now Deluca is approaching Zeiger. Now Deluca is lifting Zeiger off the ground. This is Larry Zeiger, signing off.”
Larry was born in Brownsville, where his father, Eddie Zeiger, a hardworking immigrant (Pinsk, Russia), owned Eddie’s Bar & Grill on Fulton Street, a favorite among cops on the beat. Eddie was short and broad shouldered with a wide-open face that seemed to say, “Me? I’m nothing. But getta look at my boy!” Every day after school, Larry walked under the Fulton Street el, the sun coming down in patches, and into the bar’s dusty interior, where some old cop set him on the bar and asked him what was wrong. “Kid, don’t you know I’m a cop?” he’d say. “I can fix anything.”
One day, soon after his ninth birthday, as Larry made his way home from school, he could see, off in the distance, the dull throb of police lights. As he approached, he saw squad cars parked in front of his building. He heard screams. His mother. Before he made it through the door, a cop put him in a car and drove him to the Loew’s Pitkin, a huge movie theater. And it was there, as John Wayne fought “Japs” in Back to Bataan, that the cop told Larry about the sad way things sometimes work out. “Your father died of a heart attack this morning,” he said in the dark. “You’re the man of the house now.” And Larry sat there to the end—Wayne, machine gun in hand, fighting to the death as he’s overrun by the enemy—in the very theater where, a few years before, Dukey Maffeatore and Pretty Levine spotted the long missing Gangy Cohen in a boxing movie crowd scene.
“Hey look up there,” Dukey had said. “That’s Gangy.”
That fall Larry’s mom moved her family to Bensonhurst. The Zeigers, now fatherless and on relief, took an attic flat on Eighty-third Street. “The city of New York bought my first pair of glasses,” Larry wrote. “Wire-rimmed glasses that told the world you were poor and on Relief and couldn’t afford a pair with frames.” When school began, Larry had trouble settling down. To a boy who has lost his father, some things just don’t matter. What did subjects like math and biology have to tell him? Larry never again got good marks. He was smart but reckless. Several times each week he was sent to the principal’s office, and that’s where he met my father. “Herbie Cohen was the first friend I made in Brooklyn,” he has written. “If Brooklyn has produced its share of characters, Herbie may head the list. A better friend no man ever had.”
When I was growing up, my father told me all his childhood nicknames had to do with his physical appearance, which he said was pretty incredible. “What did they call me?” he would ask. “Handsomo, Mr. Stunning. Mr. Charming, General Gorgeousimo Franco.” One year, over Passover dinner, I asked my grandma Esther if my dad really had been called Handsomo by high school friends. My grandma is of the old-fashioned, Eastern European variety: low center of gravity, accent, puff of blue hair. Before answering, she chewed her food carefully, swallowed, then said, “Vell, I know that’s vhat he asked them to call him.” For kids in Bensonhurst, as it had been for the gangsters in Brownsville, taking a nickname was a kind of liberation, a way of taking hold of your destiny, renaming yourself, a kind of self-christening, a way to shrug off the past, creating a world distinct from that of parents, free of traditions and expectations. A guy named Bucko is not a guy you expect to keep the Sabbath.
Now and then someone would come to the corner with news of the gangsters. The boys spent hours talking about Lepke, wondering where he was hiding, why he was surrendering, how he would escape, and finally how he would die, bravely or like a coward. The plight of Lepke taught my father an early lesson: Escape is sometimes impossible for even the toughest men; sometimes the best you can do is lose with grace. “You fellows hear about Lep?” my dad said after the execution. “Didn’t say a word. He’s no rat.”
My father was touched by the example of the gangsters. From them he learned to live by a code, despise a rat, cherish loyalty. For parents, the gangsters may have been a schanda, the shame of the Jews, but the kids on the corners knew the truth—that the gangsters had at least part of a secret they were looking for.
From the beginning, my father and his friends unconsciously patterned some part of their style on the gangsters. In the early fifties some of the kids on the corner decided to start a gang. The Warriors. They ordered jackets. The jackets were reversible, red on one side with a white W, white on the other side, the W in red. On the breast, below a member’s name, were stitched the letters SAC: Social Athletic Club. One night Who-Ha stormed to the corner, pulled my father and Larry aside, and said, “Guys, I have a question.” Who-Ha had a lazy, pseudoaristocratic way of talking. When he said “guys,” it came out like “gauze.” “Guys, why are we called Social Athletic Club?” he asked. “All we do is athletic. We don’t have mixers or nothing. Where is the social?”
My father looked at Larry, then said, “Ya see, Who-Ha, the athletic is social, ’cause we talk when we play sports. The A is S, so it is SAC.” Who-Ha smiled, sighed, and walked away.
The Warriors had a clubroom on Eighty-fifth Street between Bay Parkway and Twenty-first Avenue, the basement of a house owned by Mr. and Mrs. Horowitz, Who-Ha’s parents. The basement had its own entrance, a creaky staircase that led down from the street. Sometimes a Warrior would pause at the top of the stairs, shift his head, cock his hips, framing himself in the doorway, then yell, “Hey, fellas.” The Warriors paid forty bucks a month for the unfurnished room, money collected in dues. Over time, the walls of the club were lined with couches and chairs, furniture swiped from apartment houses in Brooklyn. Walking into some lobby, my dad would ask for the super. “We’re here for the couch,” he would say matter-of-factly. “Got an order for reupholstering.” As they carried out the couch, my dad would turn to the super and say, “Hey, pal, how ’bout getting the door?” Even now, walking through an apartment lobby on the way to see one of his kids or grandkids, my father will take a quick look around and say, “Easy score. In and out. But you’d want the whole set.”
On the clubroom floor the boys sketched, in glow-in-the-dark paint, a huge Indian head. When they got girls back to the basement, the gutsiest among them might say, “Wanna see the Indian glow?” Who-Ha had a great-grandmother, an about-to-die old lady with terrible circulation. When her fingertips went blue, she was put on the floor and rolled. So even these romantic moments, as the stolen couches heaved and sighed, as the Indian glowed, were often set to the rumble of a geriatric being rolled across the floor.
“What’s that?” a girl would ask, looking up.
“My heart,” Larry would say, pulling her close.
The Warriors met often in the clubroom, aimless discussions that led nowhere or else to idiotic schemes, plots that could end only in embarrassment or ruin. These schemes were usually designed by my father, who always loved to test himself, getting into trouble mostly to see if he could get out. In even his earliest stories, those told by friends from grade school and junior high, Herbie is cast as the disruptive force, the troublemaker who is followed by otherwise sensible kids. In whatever situation he finds himself, my father seeks the gesture that will provoke, inflame, disrupt. If you turned up on a street in Bensonhurst in 1946, say, you might find him raising funds for the funeral of Gil Moppo, a kid that was alive and well in Arizona; or crashing a New Haven campaign rally, loading up on free doughnuts, then taking stage to stump for the candidate who he has never seen; or driving any number of forward-thinking public school teachers out of their minds. “Back in Brooklyn, Herbie was, as they say in Yiddish, a tombenik,” writes Larry King in Larry King by Larry King. “And Larry Zeiger was always ready to go along for the ride.”
In later years, when I was a kid, these schemes expanded in scope, from Brooklyn to New Orleans, where he tried to convince the Tulane English Department I was an A student; to a checkpoint leading from Hong King to China, where he told a soldier he wanted to go to China “just for a minute”; to Moscow, where he went through Soviet customs with a list of Jewish refusniks in his breast pocket. “Last place the Ruskies would ever look,” he later explained. “Right in front of their eyes.” There have been times I was thrilled by his recklessness, his compulsion to skate the edge, like when he skipped every line, convincing Egyptian custom agents we were a family of diplomats, and there were times I was embarrassed, like when he told my high school principal, who was trying to suspend me, “Look carefully, for the next thing you will see will be me going over your head.”
In his memoir, When You’re from Brooklyn, Everywhere Else Is Tokyo, Larry King writes about my father’s need to sneak in, sneak out, circumvent. When Larry told my dad he would be at Madison Square Garden in New York, where the Democrats were holding their presidential convention, my father said he would meet Larry on the convention floor. “Herbie, you don’t understand,” said Larry. “I can’t get you a pass. Everything is triple-checked here. Ed Muskie got thrown out yesterday because he didn’t have a red badge. He’s the secretary of state. There’s a security guard at every entrance. I’ll meet you outside the Garden for a bite.”
“Herbie doesn’t know the meaning of the word, ‘Can’t,’ ” Larry writes. “ ‘See you on the floor tomorrow,’ he said.
“Herbie just walked into the Garden, found a likely looking entrance ramp to the floor, and marched full of confidence up to the stunned guard. He slapped him hard on the back and said, ‘Great job,’ and wham, he’s on the convention floor. And the guard just stood there with a huge smile on his face. I looked up and it was Herbie.”
Over the years, I have come to see my father’s antics less as a good time than as a philosophy in action, proof of his belief that authority, whether it be Russian customs agents or security at Madison Square Garden, can always be outfoxed. It’s his way of showing us that the world is still a manageable place, that all these rules—Do this, Don’t do that—are just the construct of other men and can be defeated. As an adult, Herbie would make his living as a negotiator, strategist, and also as a speaker, a man sharing the findings of a lifelong investigation into authority. In his book, You Can Negotiate Anything, he says, “Everything is negotiable,” which to me refers less to the price of a car than to that part of your fate that seems predestined. He believes in free will, in finding a way around those bigshots who tell you what you are not capable of. It’s the wisdom of the street, negotiating your way to the promised land, never taking anyone’s word for it—and all of it old gangster wisdom, learning summed up back in the twenties by Arnold Rothstein. “The majority of the human race are dubs and dumbbells,” Rothstein told the Brooklyn Eagle. “They have rotten judgment and no brains, and when you have learned to do things and how to size people up and dope out methods for yourself, they jump to the conclusion that you are crooked.”
I think my father learned his philosophy partly from boyhood experiences in Bensonhurst, partly from old movies, where the Brooklyn wiseacre always wins in the end, partly from the Jewish gangsters, who really saw authority as a rival gang, and partly from the Holocaust, which (he feels) began with the acceptance of another’s power. No matter how small you feel, you can outsmart a Nazi; if you outsmart a Nazi, you undermine his power; without power, a Nazi is just another schmuck you take on in the street. My father’s lessons have always been tangled in my mind with things I was told in religious school, the story of Abraham, the patriarch of the Jews, who came to distrust false gods the day he destroyed the idols in his father’s factory. Recently, when I asked my father, “If I can kick Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s ass, does that mean he is not the Messiah?” he smiled and said, “Interesting question.”
For my father, every run-in with authority is a test, an indication of how he will stand against genuine evil. When trying to explain why he is fighting some skirmish that to me seems irrelevant, he says, “This is 1941 and these bastards are killing Jews.” When Herbie and Larry were fifteen, they were picked up by the police in Bensonhurst. They were on the corner, just back from their Friday night dates. As they talked about the girls, a squad car glided up. “Okay,” said a cop. “You two, get in.” As Larry protested, saying there must be some mistake, my father, knowing a good ride when he sees one, said, “Larry, when they got us, they got us.” The cops were looking for two kids, vandals tearing up the neighborhood, and my father and Larry fit the description.
On the way to the station, Larry’s eyes filled with water. “You got the wrong guys,” he said.
“Knock it off, Larry,” said Herbie. “I told you justice would catch up with us.”
At the police station, the Warriors were put in separate rooms and questioned. In a movie, this scene is shown in split screen, Larry on one side, crying, my father on the other, confessing to this crime and any others still on the books. “I think he claimed responsibility for Pearl Harbor,” Larry later wrote. After a while the police figured these were not the kids, that there was some mistake, and what they had here was a wiseass and a crybaby. The cops called the boys’ parents to come pick them up. When the Warriors were released, they were met by parents, aunts, uncles, friends, and my father’s brainiac sister Renee. (Once, when I told my dad I felt dumb, he said: “You feel dumb? I had a sister who was three years older than me and seven years ahead of me in school. How do you think I felt?”) When they came into the throng, my father turned and said, “Hey, Larry, they got the whole gang!”
As the Warriors grew older, the gangsters began to fade from their minds. The usefulness of their example began to flicker. My father and his friends would have chances of which the gangsters could only dream. College. Professions. Careers. In Bensonhurst in the forties, the promise of America was something real. For them, going to the street was not a way up, it was a way out. A failure. Already these kids were fixed on the future, a time when Jews would become gentiles, and some gentiles would even want to become Jews. In Jewish life, the day of the ice pick was over. What would the boys keep of the gangsters? A style, a toughness, a pose to strike in the world. Nothing more. They were growing up, forgetting, moving into the mainstream. With them they would take a Brooklyn style, which at some level is a gangster style.
My father and his friends still checked in with the gangsters, though, tracking them like half-forgotten friends. In 1950, when Senator Estes Kefauver from Tennessee launched an investigation into the underworld, an investigation that ran over two years and heard testimony from over six hundred witnesses, the Warriors watched the hearings on TV. Herbie and Larry stood before the set as gangster after gangster testified.
Hey, lookit. That’s Mickey Cohen. He used to box. Terrific flyweight, Mickey Cohen.
No, it ain’t! That’s Meyer Lansky, guy used to go around with Bugsy Siegel. Siegel’s sister lives in Brooklyn, ya know!
Sure. Who don’t know that!
When he testified, Frank Costello, fearing media exposure, secured a court order barring networks from showing his face. So, for hours, for days, screens around the country showed nothing but the gangster’s veiny hands. Costello, bothered by the tone of questioning, stormed out of the hearings. He was later found in contempt and spent eighteen months in prison. When Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, a Jewish gangster from Chicago, was asked a question, he refused to answer, saying, “My answer might discriminate against me.”
One afternoon, as my dad was standing on the corner, looking through the el tracks at the sky, he saw Larry running up Bay Parkway. Every few feet Larry paused to push his glasses up his nose. By the time he reached Eighty-fifth Street, he was out of breath. “Hear what happened?” he said quickly. “I just read it in the paper. They killed Albert Anastasia.”
“Who killed Albert Anastasia?” asked my father.
Larry looked through the girders, then said, “I don’t know.”
Albert Anastasia was probably killed at the order of Vito Genovese, a coup aimed at control of the Luciano crime family. He was killed in the barbershop of the Park Sheraton, the same hotel where Arnold Rothstein was shot thirty years before, as if the producer ran out of sets. Anastasia was in chair number four at 10:15 A.M. He dozed as the barber worked. The chair was turned away from the door, so the gunmen, two men in suits, fedoras, and sunglasses, must have seen the jowly gangster in the mirror, his face wrapped in a steaming towel. When the barber saw the gunmen, he stepped aside.
They shot Anastasia through the chair five times in the back. When he fell to the floor, they shot him five more times in the chest. There is a picture of the body taken a few minutes later. Albert is on his back, face covered by one sheet, legs by another. His chest is thick as a tree trunk. With the killing, the Jewish Mob was pushed one death further into memory. Another body. Another spadeful of dirt. For Larry, having news of the murder was being connected to a world once frequented by Reles, Strauss, Goldstein. The chair Anastasia was shot in, chair four, was later sold at auction for seven grand. The gangster’s estate in Fort Lee, New Jersey, was bought by Buddy Hackett. In the end, everything belongs to the comedians.
In the fifties, parts of Brooklyn started to vanish. Entire blocks would pack up and move off, to tract houses in New Jersey or Long Island, or else west, to wide-open one-season states. Jackie Gleason, who had set The Honeymooners in Bensonhurst, took his entire television crew to Miami. In 1957 even the Dodgers left Brooklyn, chasing fans to California. A few years later Ebbets Field was replaced by a housing project, a complex that did to the color brown what Hitler did to the name Adolf. And then people started vanishing from the corner. You would get down to Bay Parkway after dinner, and someone would be gone. A friend that used to be on the corner was not on the corner anymore. Maybe it was Sandy Koufax and he’d gone off to play with the Dodgers. Or maybe it was Inky and he’d gone off to Howard Dental School. And the next day someone else was gone. This time it was Who-Ha or Gutter Rat or Bucko or Sheppo or Moppo. And then someone else.
One day on the corner, as Larry, boasting of radio dreams, announced passing cars—There goes a 1949 Ford Fairlane, ladies and gentlemen; a big hand, please!—my father noticed Sid and Asher were gone. A few days before, Sid and Asher had lit out for California with vague plans of playing basketball, USC or maybe UCLA, teaching West Coast kids the Brooklyn style. Now and then a report would make it back to the corner. Sid and Asher are playing at some junior college; Sid and Asher are surrounded by women; Sid and Asher are drunk all the time; Sid and Asher are now Sid Young and Asher Dann; Asher Dann had a meeting with a big-shot movie executive; Asher Dann signed a contract with Universal Pictures; Sid Young has a job in real estate; Asher Dann is in a B movie called September Storm as a cabin boy who almost never wears a shirt; Asher Dann was voted the sexiest man in Hollywood. After that, Sid and Asher sort of faded from view, a signal getting weaker as it goes away.
Dead or out of town—as true for my father and his friends as it once was for anyone who might testify against Lepke. You have to leave town to claim your life, to birth yourself, to take possession of the world. If you do not leave town, sooner or later, ten minutes from now if not ten years hence, you wake to find you were never alive, that your town exists against a nothing background. You have to leave your town before you can claim it—this is something my father and his friends came to realize in the fifties, when it seemed the entire borough was packing up and moving off. Dead or out of town. Dead or out. Out or dead of town. Dead town out of. And of course, years later, when they did try to come back, when they stood on the corner and closed their eyes, they realized the old town was gone, had died while they were off living their lives. Yet inside them they kept some of that old town, a world that existed once, exists still, at night, when they are dreaming. Dead or out of town. Well, the ones who stayed died with the town—only they don’t know it. The ones who left are different, too; they changed the way the town should have changed if all the other things had stayed the same. It reminds me of a series of paintings by the Italian artist Boccioni: Those Who Stayed; Those Who Left; The Farewells. On either side, faces are lost in a soup of color, the same yet different. But the middle is The Farewells, which are full of life, and the railroad clangs as a train whistles down the track. The departures are the main thing; the departures are your life.
In 1954 my father enlisted in the army. He had been living at home with his parents while taking classes at NYU. He had not done well in school. Each night, when he set his books before him, the street below his window filled with Warriors. “Hey, Herbie,” they would shout up. “Come out!” My dad would look at his books, the window, books, window, then race down the stairs. He knew this could not go on, that he was letting his youth extend into a twilight. A war was being fought in Korea—a way out of town. When he signed his induction papers, he at first felt a kind of relief, as if he had at last given his life shape. His own father had served in the First World War, and his cousin Nathan had been part of the Allied invasion of Sicily, Anzio, and Normandy in the Second World War.
The night before he was to report, he sat alone in his room. His mind danced into the future, dying alone on a desolate beach in the South Pacific or else leading a group of GIs in a charge up a hill. He watched the sky out his window fill with stars and the white curtain flap in the breeze off Gravesend Bay. He listened to the Frank Sinatra record In the Wee Small Hours until each song was grooved in his brain, until he was lost in a blue funk. When the sky grew pale, he fell into a light sleep. A few hours later he hugged his parents good-bye, swallowed hard, reported for duty at Whitehall Street, and was immediately shipped to New Jersey. A few days after that his parents visited the base, loaded with matzoball sandwiches.
After training at Camp Chafee in Arkansas, my father was shipped to Europe, which was electric with cold war tension. He was stationed in Bad Kissingen, Germany, in a flat region known as the Fulda Gap, through which, in the event of a world war, the Soviets would probably drive their tanks. For a time he patrolled the border in an armored car, manning the shotgun in back. Later he became a clerk in courts and boards, coached army basketball teams, found loopholes in arcane regulations, went on trips to France, Spain, and North Africa, filled a photo album with postcards, and pretty much had the time of his life. These days, when any old-timer asks if he served, he smiles and, in a slightly southern accent, says, “Korean War veteran under Public Law 550. Yep. Saved us all from the Commies.”
When my father joined the army, Larry was the last of the gang left in Bensonhurst. He did not go to the corner. No one hung out there anymore, just high school kids, babies. He took low-paying jobs (delivery boy, mail clerk, milkman), all the while dreaming of the radio. Being on the radio was something Larry had wanted since he was a boy. In 1960, on the advice of a radio executive, he went to Miami. “It’s the coming city, a place full of kids on the way up and old guys on the way out,” the man told Larry. “They have no union yet, so you can get a job quickly. Low pay. Long hours. But at least you’ll be working in radio.” Over the next few years Larry worked his way station to station. His first general manager said Zeiger was too Jewish and changed his name to King. He was soon a star in Miami. By the late sixties, in addition to a radio show, he was hosting a TV show, calling play-by-play for the Dolphins, and writing a newspaper column. The world had become his corner.
In these years, Larry, and other Warriors scattered across the country, were following the travails of another New York favorite. What Meyer Lansky went through in 1972 now seems like the story of the Jewish gangster in microcosm, what happens to a group of men when their place in the world vanishes. In 1970, Lansky, then living in Miami, heard he was about to be indicted for income tax evasion. Rather than stand trial, he fled to Israel. He was making use of Israel’s law of return, which guarantees every Jew citizenship. As soon as he was settled in Tel Aviv, Lansky began waging court battles, fighting the Justice Department’s efforts to extradite him. The case went clear to the Israeli Supreme Court, which refused Lansky asylum. Someone later approached Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, on Lansky’s behalf. When Meir heard the word “Mafia” she shook her head, saying, “No Mafia in Israel.”
Lanksy flew from Tel Aviv on November 5, 1972. In Zurich, Switzerland, he was met by a friend with tickets to Rio and a connection to Buenos Aires. From there he would catch a flight to Paraguay, where he would pay off officials, take a new name, vanish. The FBI sent a bulletin to airports around the world, and the police caught up with Lansky in Argentina. After answering questions, he was allowed to board Braniff flight 949. When the plane landed in Paraguay, Lansky was met by police agents, who said he was not to leave the plane. He found the same stern keep-it-moving greeting when the plane stopped in Bolivia, Peru, and Panama. In those hours the seventy-five-year-old gangster seemed to live again the history of the Jews, arrivals and departures, exile, wandering. He looked out the window, his face a blank sheet of paper. He slipped a nitroglycerin pill under his tongue.
When the plane landed in Miami on November 7, 1972, he was met by a crush of newspaper photographers. Flash. Flash. Flash. He had been traveling for thirty-six hours. In the end, after all that, court cases, running away, coming and going, he winds up right back in Miami, where so many old Jews take their dreams to die. Over the coming years, Lansky faced two tax evasion trials. He was acquitted. He could be seen in his last days walking along Collins Avenue, an old man with his dog. He died of a heart attack in 1983. He was eighty-one years old. He had achieved the only victory that can ever really be had by a gangster: he died of old age.
When my father got back from the army, he finished college and went on to law school. He met my mother in the NYU cafeteria in 1956, and they were married less than two years later. My sister, Sharon, was born in 1960 and my brother, Steven, three years after that. My father then took a job as a claims adjuster with Allstate Insurance Company and began his slow march up the ranks, each promotion a new life in a new town. In the years before I was born, which my brother says were the best years of all, my family moved from Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, to Aurelia Court in Brooklyn, to Syosset, Long Island, to Berkley Heights, New Jersey, to Libertyville, Illinois, where I was born in 1968. As sure as Lansky’s journey encapsulates one part of the Jewish story, the wanderings of my family encapsulates another: the trip from cramped city apartments to rolling suburban lawns; from East to West, or Midwest anyway. We were the only Jewish family in Libertyville. One fall my mother took my sister aside and said, “Good news. There will be another Jewish kid in school next year.” When my sister asked who, my mom said, “Your brother Steven.”
When I was four years old, we moved down the lake to Glencoe. There were plenty of other Jews in Glencoe, but they were different from my parents. They were old money, midwestern Jews. They handled silverware as deftly as surgical instruments and rarely raised a voice. Sometimes, when I found out some super-WASP-y family was actually Jewish, I would say, “You’re shittin’ me.” In my house, the voices at mealtime made the glasses rattle. To see my dad on the street in town was to see a piece of Brooklyn out walking around. Life in Brooklyn seemed to speed him up, get him going, like pedals on a bike when the chain comes off. Once, when my brother got in a pile fight in a hockey game, my dad ran onto the ice and dove on the pile. He used to walk through the drive-in at the bank, waiting in line with the cars; he used to stand on the bleachers when I played hockey, a cigar in his mouth, shouting, “Move it!” When I brought a super blond friend home from school, he looked at the kid sideways and said, “Look, it’s Rich’s white friend.” He often spoke in the far-seeing truisms of gangster movies. He spoke the way Don Corleone speaks in The Godfather when he says, “A man will come to you to set up a meeting with Barzini. You will be killed at this meeting. This man is the traitor.” Once, soon after my grandmother got remarried to a man named Izzy, a man my dad did not like, we were driving on the highway and my dad said to me, “When I die, your mother will meet a man who will buy her gifts and flowers, who will do all the little things I was never good at, and who will ask your mother to marry. I tell you now so you know: This man is a schmuck.”
You saw Brooklyn mostly in his basketball game. We played each night after dinner. I wore shorts and T-shirts. He wore button-down shirts and suit pants. Change jingled in his pockets. He smelled of steak. Setting down his cigar, he would say, “Make it, take it.” And bang! He’s around me. If the game was close, he would talk trash. “Punk like you never beats the old guy.” If I went ahead, he would say, “You’re adopted.” If I began to pull away, he dropped his voice to say, “Your mother needs your help; I have her tied up in the basement.” He employed an array of graceful old-time shots: set shot, one-hand push shot, fade away. His favorite was the hook. He could also hit the jumper. He was violent under the hole. Once, when I went over him for a lay-up, he drove me to the ground. “I don’t care if I’m in a wheelchair,” he said, helping me up. “I still beat you. I’m from Brooklyn. Where are you from? The hills.” Though there are no hills in Illinois, my father always said my brother and I were from the hills, up where rich kids live behind gates. Weak in our refinement, we were lost in the mountains of Illinois. If my life were a book, I would call this chapter “Why Our Fathers Mock Us.”
My generation of Jews is different from my father’s. My friends and I are still one more generation removed from Europe, from the shtetl. In my case, I feel a lot of the tough, world-weary Brooklyn humor has been replaced with a nasal midwestern irony. When I was growing up, any mention of Jews as Jews would make me cringe. Other than my parents, I really knew of only one type of Jew: cerebral bourgeois kids-to-college suburbanites. Do Jews get drunk? Do Jews trash hotel rooms? Do Jews defend themselves? Questions I never thought to ask. Why? I had no way of knowing the past. After the bulk of the Jewish gangsters died off, after the ghettos were left to the blacks or Latinos, that part of Jewish history, a New York story, was mostly forgotten. It was the willful act of grandparents, I suppose, like letting a failed path grow over. For Jewish kids of my generation, Israel would have to take the place of gangsters. Here were tough Jews, Jews who fought back, were strong, met aggression with aggression. Jewish kids talked in squeaky voices about the Israeli army, the wars, the victories. But Israel was faraway, foreign. What could it mean in Glencoe? And unlike my dad, I did not have Jewish gangsters or even Jewish boxers. Who did I have? Michael Milken, Steve Guttenberg, Abner Mikva. On television and in movies, tough-looking Jews invariably played Italians. Henry Winkler as Fonzie in Happy Days; James Caan as Sonny Corleone in The Godfather; Edward G. Robinson as Rico in Public Enemy. In the Richard Price book The Wanderers, an Italian character, not believing a movie star is Jewish, says, “Bullshit, he’s too good lookin’ for a Hebe.”
I first heard about the gangsters from Larry King, sitting in our kitchen in Illinois. Just the words—Jewish gangsters—seemed to bring the room to life. The air filled with bullets, curses, schemes. The hanging fern plant looked springier. The bird chirping in the next room sounded ominous, a foreshadowing. My own face in the mirror looked darker, tougher. Somewhere in there, in lines that had yet to appear, a gangster might be hiding. A Jewish gangster. People don’t believe in Jewish gangsters because Jewish gangsters fall outside stereotype, thwart the expectations so many people have of Jews. The Jewish gangsters were among the first Jews to scrap the notion of Jewish exceptionalism, to set Jews adrift in a world of killers and thieves, to set them free. When Reles took a mark, he was not just ending a life; he was expressing the essential freedom of the Jew in America.
In Glencoe, if I were to tell one of my “white friends” about Jewish gangsters, they would have laughed in my face. And I guess that’s why I clung so tightly to those words: Jewish gangsters. The very fact that Jewish kids were once running in gangs, fighting, shooting, changed everything. It meant anything was possible. People could no longer judge me on the stereotype because the stereotype was wrong. People would have to meet me, talk to me, look into my eyes, before they could think they knew what I was like. Once, when my dad was driving my brother and me through Bensonhurst, we saw a hard-looking man skulking down the street. My father rolled down the window and yelled, “Hey, Sheppo.”
The man’s face lit up. He ran over. “I don’t believe it,” he said, looking into the car. “Handsomo is back.” And that’s when I knew the world before I was born was a different place.
When my father left the East, he lost touch with most of his Brooklyn friends. It was part of being an adult, I suppose, of being a father, a husband. A person can lead only so many lives. In 1976, when Larry’s mother died in Miami, my grandmother saw the announcement in the paper and went to the funeral. She spoke to Larry, showing him pictures of my dad and his family. Larry, who was well on his way to CNN and global fame, phoned my father. Though they had not spoken in a decade, it was as if no time had passed. They were soon talking the nights away. Larry then put more of the gang back together. In the eighties he heard Sid had breakfast each day at Nate ’n’ Al’s. When he was next in Los Angeles, Larry stopped by the diner. He saw Sid alone in a booth, reading the paper as he ate. Larry quietly slid in across from him. Sid is semiretired and has made enough money in real estate to enjoy his breakfast. When he set down the paper, he saw Larry, grinning. “What the fuck is this?” said Sid, dropping his fork. “The corner? Ain’t that Larry Zeiger?” After a while, Asher turned up. Asher, who long ago quit acting, owns one of the biggest real estate companies in California. His face has grown old and wise, but the handsome kid is still in there. A few days later my father flew out and the old friends were together again.
In the last few years they have spent a lot of time together, carrying their excited chatter into elevators, down hallways. I have seen them drunk at black-tie galas, shouting down pious after-dinner speakers; I have seen them in stuffy uptown restaurants climbing on tables to dance; one afternoon I rounded a corner at the Four Seasons hotel in Washington only to find Asher chatting up a minibar attendant as Sid, in his underwear, swiped dozens of mini Absolut bottles. Once I found Sid in a hotel lobby, surrounded by three blond women, saying, “Tell me, ladies, when does the fun begin?” I was at a party where Sid and Asher made so much noise that Helen Gurley Brown stormed over and said, “Gentlemen, please shut the fuck up.” And I have seen them in the early morning, talking together in tender voices, in shades of concern that can be learned only with time, upsets, put-downs, and all the things the years bring. Everywhere they go, they take the corner with them.
The old neighborhoods are mostly gone now. The names are still on the maps and some of the buildings stand, but the people are different. The accents on the street have changed, and so have the smells. In Brownsville the row houses where young men spent nights on the stoop have made way for projects that run clear to the horizon: the Van Dyck Houses, the Laughton Houses. The Loew’s Pitkin is a clothing store. The corner once occupied by Midnight Rose’s candy store has become the Brownsville Bargain Center, a desolate storefront looking out on all-night delis and cold-water flats. The house where Reles and Strauss fought over the spelling of the word “friend” is still there, a two-story brick building surrounded by barbed wire. The drapes in the window are tattered, like after a hurricane. The house around the corner where Strauss lived has been boarded up, and the planks are appropriately covered with gang graffiti: “The Bump Crew Here!” My grandparents’ diner is gone, too, replaced by endless vistas of steel-shuttered warehouse. But the legends are alive. You can hear them banging on doors and running down alleys. And every time my father is together again with old friends, telling stories, talking of the old days, the Brooklyn of Reles and Strauss and Goldstein, the years fall away. So they keep talking, telling themselves again of long-ago nights, sharpies and sharks under the bridge.