The material in this book comes from various sources. In addition to those books mentioned in the bibliography, much of my research was done at the New York Archives, where the glory days of the Jewish gangster can be followed in skeleton form. In the forties, in the wake of the trials that put so many of the criminals in prison, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office gathered their evidence into boxes, which were then archived in a building on Chambers Street in Manhattan—boxes that contain not only transcripts and police reports but maps of getaway routes, ropes used to strangle informants, wiretaps, and bullets pried from bodies. At the archives, I held in my hand the bullets that ended Plug Shulman. I am indebted to Ken Cobb of the archives, who led me, box by box, through the history of Murder Inc., and also to the author, Robert Lacey, who first clued me in to the archives.
Much of my research came from interviews. Not many people who have firsthand memories of the old Jewish gangsters are alive today; not many of the living were willing to talk. The gangster is dead, but the fear lingers on. First among those who did speak is my grandfather Benjamin Eisenstadt, who has since passed away and who, during the Depression, worked in a diner frequented by the gangsters. My grandmother Betty Gelman-Eisenstadt, whose family owned the diner, was also of great help. Other people I spoke with include Dorrie Shapiro-Grizzard, granddaughter of the notorious gang leader Gurrah Shapiro; Arlene Brickman, who was called on 60 Minutes the closest thing we have to a female wiseguy. I also interviewed several people on the law enforcement side, including Ralph Salerno, a retired New York detective who specializes in organized crime; Ben Jacobson, a retired police officer who now works as a private investigator; Robert Patterson, a federal judge who had a distinguished career as a prosecutor; Herbert Brownell, recently deceased, who, before serving as Attorney General under President Eisenhower, managed Thomas Dewey’s presidential campaigns; John Cusack, a longtime agent for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, now the head of drug enforcement in the Bahamas; J. Edward Lumbard, a federal judge and former U.S. Attorney, who served in the U.S. Attorney’s Office with Thomas Dewey; Judge Joseph Stone. I must also acknowledge the guidance of my sister, Sharon Cohen Levin, and my brother, Steven Cohen, both current assistant United States Attorneys in the Southern District of New York. Sharon is the Chief of the Asset Forfeiture Unit; Steven is the Chief of the Violent Gangs Unit. They were able to give me a sense of what it might feel like for a young prosecutor to face down notorious criminals.
Then there are the neighborhood stories, folklore that has come to me from my father’s Bensonhurst friends, especially Larry King, Asher Dann, and Sid Young, who spent many afternoons with me at the Friars Club in Los Angeles, where Sid once made me order a tongue sandwich (tongue tastes like tongue—my tongue, your tongue; tongue with mustard tastes like my tongue with mustard) so he could eat it when I gave up. “Don’t want that, Richie? Pass it over.” More than any other sources, however, what inspired this book are the Jewish gangsters themselves—that vanished, half-forgotten breed, whose dramatic lives even now, so many years later, hang like smoke in the air.