Dov-Ber (Beryl) David Rosofsky was a tough little kid. A street fighter. Pugnacious, stubborn, afraid of no one. Although short and skinny, he stood up to anti-Semitic bullies who, looking for Jews to beat up, had invaded the Jewish ghetto on Maxwell Street in 1920s Chicago. When attacked, he would counterattack, shooting his small, clenched fists into the bellies and eyes of bullies, swinging wildly but connecting with chins and noses. He looked like an easy target, a scrawny figure out of Oliver Twist, an artful dodger, but one who could quickly dodge, duck, and sidestep, while shooting well-aimed blows at a less skillful opponent. A quick right or left to the jaw of a bully ended a fight, the bruised opponent learning the painful lesson not to mess with the little Jewish kid.
Beryl, as he was known before becoming the world famous champ Barney Ross, ran with an informal gang of other teenage delinquents in their Twentieth Ward neighborhood. It was during Prohibition, and adult gangs were fighting for territory and shooting those who got in the way. It was the era of the tommy gun and the Molotov cocktail, of the car bomb and the bombing of uncooperative speakeasies, gambling and bookie joints. And the Twentieth Ward was one of the worst locales in Chicago; in fact, it was so notorious for the number of dead bodies tossed from speeding cars onto its streets that it was known as the “Bloody Twentieth.” It was in the Twentieth Ward that the notorious Genna brothers operated outside of the law. Their base of operations and their bootlegging factory was located there at 1022 Taylor Street, in what was known as the “Patch.” From there, they processed alcohol for distribution to speakeasies, and it was from there that they issued their monthly payoffs to the police of the Maxwell Street precinct. The Rosofskys lived cheek by jowl to some of the most notorious killers in Chicago. Among the more famous Chicago gangsters of the time were Al Capone, Paul Ricca, Frankie Yale, Johnny Torrio, Sam Giancana, Tony Accardo, Bugs Moran, Machine Gun Jack McGurn, and a host of other public enemies.
In such an environment, it was not surprising that Beryl would fall in with a group of aspiring and enterprising thugs. His closest pal was Jacob “Sparky” Rubenstein (aka Jack Ruby, the assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald). Sparky was known for his volatile, hair-trigger temper. When offended, he would explode, pummeling the offender. He seemed to have no fear and would attack anyone regardless of size or strength. He was a boy who hit first and didn’t ask questions later. Sparky and Beryl were an intimidating team; if you were not a resident of Maxwell Street, you would have wanted to cross the street when you saw those two coming at you. It was a wise move to stay clear of their path. They were said to have rolled drunks, offered protection to peddlers (and in some cases it was not just an offer, but insisted upon, or else), and run errands for Big Al, known to the world and history as “Scarface,” Al Capone. He was one of many who made notorious and bloody contributions to Chicago and beyond. In addition to the previously noted Chicago gangsters, the Maxwell Street ghetto was famous for nurturing a number of others, including Samuel “Nails” Morton, Louis “Two Gun” Alterie, and Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, who would rise to become Capone’s money man and run the Outfit while Capone was in prison. While many criminals emerged from the Maxwell Street ghetto, there were even more prizefighters there.
The atmosphere of the Maxwell Street ghetto molded tough young men, for they felt you had to be tough to survive. Like calluses, their toughness grew hard and protective throughout time. For them, life on the streets posed the perils of a wild jungle populated by desperate predators. Attacks and counterattacks were actions of the day and night. You had to be on your guard, be prepared, walk with clenched fists, and look tough. Any sign of weakness in the jungle was an invitation to be set upon as a wounded animal is set upon by a lion. Police sirens and the sounds of shootings were often the soundtrack for the activities of the ghetto. In such an environment, close friendships were necessary to create bonds of protection. Two boys standing back-to-back were a better defense than one boy standing alone. Three or four boys were even better, certainly less easy to threaten than a single boy. The bigger the gang the more control they had of the streets.
From such protective necessities developed deep and lasting friendships, and the bond of friendship that Sparky and Beryl created in boyhood lasted a lifetime. There were other members of their gang, but they are the only two who made a mark on history. Ross and Ruby were considered by neighbors and friends to be good candidates to grow into professional hoodlums who would find their true home in prison. Others thought they might qualify for membership in the Outfit, which could protect them from prison, since cops and judges were on the Outfit’s payroll. Since members of one gang often killed members of other gangs, service in the Outfit was no guarantee of a long life; however, unlike many institutions of corporate America at the time, the Outfit did not have a quota on Jewish admittance. In fact, the Outfit was primarily made up of Jews and Italians. When Big Al was sentenced to Alcatraz, the “Rock,” it was no surprise to anyone that his empire was run by a Jew, “Greasy Thumb” Guzik. (When Guzik died in 1956, there were as many Italians as Jews at his funeral service, which was held in a synagogue.)
Like many poor delinquents, young and brazen, Beryl had dreams of being a gangster, wearing elegant suits, driving a fancy car, and having beautiful babes, one on each arm. He had already showed how tough he was; scared of no one, fearing neither the law nor the Old Testament scripture contained in the Ten Commandments, Beryl asked one of his Italian friends to introduce him to Big Al. To be introduced to Big Al, for a street kid, would be like an ardent Catholic kid asking and being granted an audience with the Pope. Although his requests were regularly ignored, Beryl wouldn’t give up. Big Al held the key that could open the doors to a world of wealth and excitement. Beryl was as relentless in pursuit of an invitation as he would later prove to be in going after an opponent in the boxing ring. He kept coming back like a dog to a hidden bone, and he would not stop until he was granted that introduction. He would not take no for an answer. Days and weeks of trying finally led to admission into the presence of the big man, the “Don,” the “Godfather” who controlled Chicago, the man who controlled the importation and distribution of illegal liquor throughout Illinois.
Big Al, a connoisseur of tough young talent, had finally learned of Beryl’s fast-flying fists as a street fighter; he had heard the tales of Beryl being challenged and erupting with a furious rapid-fire display of fists that knocked a challenger to the pavement. On Maxwell Street and in other ethnic enclaves, Beryl was known as “One-Punch Rosofsky” and “Beryl the Terrible.” Big Al had nodded and paternalistically smiled at this persistent young tough guy; he was impressed with the kid. The kid had heart and guts, and could not be intimidated. The Outfit was always on the lookout for young tough guys who could be its soldiers, its muscle. The Outfit didn’t need recruiting posters. The word was always out on the street: If you’re a small-time crook, stay away; if you have the makings to be a big earner, the Outfit will always be interested in your services. If those who signed up had brains, as well as muscle, they might pull off big scams. Brains, muscle, and creative schemes were the best ingredients for getting profitable results. Al could always find a use for such a young man.
So, he finally summoned the tough kid who had wanted to meet him. Al smiled like an indulgent older brother or a pleased uncle meeting a distant nephew; he gently slapped Beryl’s cheek, then squeezed a fold of skin. “So tell me about yourself,” he said. Beryl told him the story of his brief life up to that time, and Al questioned the eager young thug, just to make sure the kid was on the level. Capone offered Beryl low-level employment—a test. He could start out as a messenger, maybe become a runner for Al’s bookie joints, and perhaps eventually a bagman. Beryl passed his initial test of delivering envelopes of money and never opening them. The kid could be trusted. He wouldn’t steal from the hands that paid him. In addition to running errands for Capone, Beryl ran errands for Capone’s brothers, for the Fischetti brothers, for the Genna brothers, for Bugs Moran, and for Machine Gun Jack McGurn. It could have developed into a mob-owned messenger subsidiary run by a talented young junior executive on his way up the corporate ladder. By the time of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, Beryl had run errands for all the victims. The cops never thought of the kid as a witness or someone who could give them leads. He was never questioned.
Al kept an eye on the kid as weeks and months passed. He liked the kid, was really fond of him, and decided not to promote him as a runner for bookies. There were plenty of other young, aspiring mob guys who would work as messengers, each trying to get his nose in the door of the executive suites. Maybe Big Al liked the kid too much and wanted to protect him, thinking there might be a better career path for the young thug. Based on his ability to read people, to intuitively delve into their motives, to size up their talents, Capone decided that Beryl was not cut out for the mob. He could fight all right, but he didn’t have a killer instinct. He didn’t enjoy hurting people. His fists were more defensive weapons than offensive ones, not to be used for cold-blooded adventures. The kid may have thought of himself as a thug, but he was basically just out to protect himself and prove that he could survive better than his compatriots. You wouldn’t want to use him to muscle some recalcitrant speakeasy customer into paying his bill or to blow up the refinery of a competitive bootlegger.
So while Capone initially dismissed Beryl, telling him to get a legit job and support his family, and handing him some money, he would come to think that the kid had the makings of a boxer. Capone got in touch with Beryl and directed him to a boxing gym. He made sure that Beryl didn’t have to pay for training. Capone would collect on his investment at a later time. The kid would learn the skills of a professional boxer, learn that boxing was a sport of skill and that if you mastered those skills you could protect yourself from getting badly hurt. Facing opponents who had differing styles, you could adopt tactics to outwit those styles and develop a strategy for winning. It was no different than what the kid had been doing on the streets of the ghetto. And who wouldn’t want to bet on such a boxer?
Beryl, the tough guy of Maxwell Street, the Outfit’s messenger boy, was not what his father Isadore had expected or wanted. He wanted a boy who would follow in his footsteps. He was an Orthodox Jew, a Talmudic scholar and teacher. He should have had his own synagogue; however, as a poor immigrant with little money and several children and a wife to support, he settled for running a tiny grocery store, Rosofsky’s Dairy, where he was only able to eke out a small income. The store was so modest that no more than four or five customers could fit inside at one time. Its prices were modest, the margins of profit even more modest. Yet, it provided the Rosofsky family with a sense of security; it was their small lifeboat in an economically precarious sea of poverty. Isadore hoped to provide the support and example that would be an impetus for his children to have a better life than he struggled to maintain. Poor Isadore.
When Beryl would come home with a black eye, a bloody nose, or a cut lip, his father’s dreams of a better life for his children exploded into a nightmare of such intense disappointment that it horrified him. His face would turn red with frustration, anger, and disappointment. Fighting was not for Jewish scholars. No self-respecting Jew would permit his son to wander the streets with clenched fists, ready to punch the first kid who called him a dirty Jew, a sheenie, or a kike. Although Beryl would claim that he tripped and bruised his face or bloodied his nose or cut his lip, Pa Rosofsky did not believe such tales. For him, Beryl had descended to the level of a bum, a tramp, and (he could barely bring himself to admit) a hoodlum. The boy had disgraced his heritage, violated the values that his father had attempted to instill in him.
Pa Rosofsky would take his leather belt and, with a swishing sound, rapidly pull it through the loops of his pants and tightly wrap it around his angry hand. It was refashioned as a whip; in fact, Beryl referred to it as a “cat o’ nine tails.” It was supposed to break the boy of his wild ways, break his spirited rebellion, make him obey, make him into an honest student of the Talmud, not some wayward warring waif. As Isadore angrily whipped his son, the belt rising and falling with a crack of pain on naked, reddened flesh, he cried out that Beryl had forgotten his background and was ignoring his heritage, which went back thousands of years. Beryl, gritting his teeth, refusing to cry or whimper, would stoically receive the beating. Although the belt raised welts on young Beryl’s bottom, he never complained, never cried out for his father to stop, and he refused to change his ways, refused to desert his pals. Yes, he loved the Torah, but he also was a street kid. Why not adhere to codes of both worlds? Well, at least some of them. He was a boy of the streets and could never be like his father, an ardent biblical scholar. But he could be a good Jew, even an observant one. He admired his father, dearly loved the man, but he could not follow his example. He could not become his father. Poor Isadore, frustrated and angry, even after beating his son, his anger at high volume, would yell that Jews were not to be fighters or street thugs. Jews were not trained to be fighters. Let gentiles fight. A Jew should study and learn from the Talmud. Jews were born and raised to be scholars of the law, not lawbreakers. Beryl should be a good Jew, not a hoodlum from the streets.
But for Beryl, the street was his universe and his university. He learned to defend himself against the Italian and Irish kids fighting for territorial advantage. He learned the tough ways of the world. Yes, he loved his father and appreciated how hard he worked to earn a small living for the family. But the life of a grocer, especially a grocer scholar, was not the life for him; who would want to work 16 to 18 hours a day in a tiny grocery for little money? He had to work every day, except on the Sabbath. Beryl understood his father’s anger. But it would have no effect on the choices he would make. They lived cheek by jowl, but in two different worlds. What Beryl wanted from life his father would never be able to understand. There was a big, glittering world beyond Maxwell Street that Isadore would never experience, and even if he did, he would not be able to comprehend or evaluate it, except in the terms of the Bible. His father was more familiar with Sodom and Gomorrah than what went on in Al Capone’s Chicago. For the Rosofskys, their world was the synagogue, the home, and the grocery store. It was a poor, confined world, but it was one in which they felt safe. They were glad not to be in Russia, not to be victims of drunken Cossacks who started pogroms and beat, raped, and killed Jews.
But it was that small, confined world of the Maxwell Street ghetto that felt so constricting to young Beryl. He wanted out. He wanted the big, wide, exciting world that he imagined the bootleggers inhabited. It was a world where the flashes and smoke from gunfire made one take notice; danger was exciting and to be close to those who committed violent acts could be exciting. The benefits of a well-executed crime could be exciting. It was a world of its own laws, laws that intimidated the lawful, leaving them at the mercy of strong, violent men who went their own way and flouted the rules of society.
Nevertheless, it would be irrational gunfire that would blast holes in Beryl’s world. Gunfire would be the sound that ended the past and brought about the future. Two black hoods, desperate thieves with angry eyes and hair-trigger tempers, entered his father’s store, pulled out pistols, and demanded cash. Impetuously, the daring, righteous grocer rushed at the robbers; they could not take the money that he worked so hard to earn, the money that put food on the table for his family and kept a roof over their heads and clothing on their bodies. And so they shot him in the chest, the bullets penetrating his heart. His yarmulke flew off his head, and he collapsed onto the floor with a thud. His head fell back onto the floor, and his open mouth gurgled blood. He clutched his chest; the pain was excruciating, his shirt and apron covered with blood. His heart pumped the blood out of his dying body. He was rushed to a local hospital, but he had lost a tremendous amount of blood. His pulse was as faint as a whisper, his skin pale, cold, and clammy. The paralyzed look on his face was that of a man who was shocked and furious. He died angry. His son would live on anger.
In the furious estimation of Beryl, his father died a hero, a man who had been obedient to his principles and the rules of the Talmud, a man who slaved to support his family, a man who never complained of his fate, a man who accepted his responsibilities, for that was what he expected of himself. His father died a hero, trying to save what little security he had been able to provide for his family. Beryl would never stop loving his father, would never need to forgive him for those beatings, for he knew that his father could not understand the world and did not know how to deal with his wayward son. His father, in his limited way, thought he was doing the right thing. It was the way he had been raised and probably the way his father had been raised, generation after generation.
Beryl wanted to track down and kill his father’s murderers, hunting them down as if they were wild game. He wanted to break their heads, to beat them until they could no longer stand. But the thieves had vanished, fleeing into anonymity. Beryl was propelled by his need for revenge; it was more than just an eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth. He wanted to plunge his hatred like a dagger into the heartless hearts of the assassins and turn that blade over and over. He wanted to exact the revenge called for in Exodus—an endlessly repeated echo in his mind:
If any man hate his neighbour, and lie in wait for him, and rise up against him, and smite him mortally that he die, and fleeth . . . then the elders of his city shall send and fetch him thence, and deliver him into the hand of the avenger of blood, that he may die. Thine eye shall not pity him . . . if a man come presumptuously upon his neighbour, to slay him with guile; thou shalt take him from mine altar, that he may die. . . . And he that smiteth his father, or his mother, shall be surely put to death.
His father would have been surprised that Beryl knew the Bible, for he truly was his father’s son, more than either father or son had realized.
While Beryl’s anger boiled inside of him like lava waiting to erupt from a pressure-filled volcano, he could not satisfy his need for revenge. There was talk that Big Al would take care of it. Whether he did, no one knows. Beryl hoped that the big guy would throw the punks who had killed his father into a river of sharks. That only would have been good enough for Beryl if he had been one of the sharks. What did, in fact, happen only served to make Beryl even angrier and more determined to seek revenge.
After much questioning, threats, and some roughing up of people who might have heard the two murderers talking about the crime, the killers were finally caught. A reward had been posted, and one of the thieves’ neighbors wanted the money more than he wanted to see justice done. The thieves were treated roughly by the cops. They were punched and shoved, and tightly handcuffed, the skin on their wrists pinched tight. They were taken to the local police precinct, undergoing an intense interrogation that included the use of blackjacks, punches, and threats until they confessed. The suspects were arraigned, jailed, and scheduled for trial. Beryl, when told of what had transpired, yelled at the cops for not being given the opportunity to address the killers himself. He wanted the pleasure of slowly killing them, watching them suffer as his father had suffered. A friendly neighborhood cop, Officer Murphy, took Beryl aside and assured him that justice would be served. It was out of Beryl’s hands. The state would fry them as crisp as chicken in “Old Sparky,” the electric chair.
But it was not to be. Because the killers had made oral confessions, their lawyer told them not to sign subsequent written confessions. In court they testified that they had never confessed to holding up the grocery or to shooting anyone. They said they had been beaten and threatened by the cops. The police, however, had an eyewitness, a fragile, frail, frightened old lady from the neighborhood. When asked to identify the killers in a lineup, she hung her head in fear, trembled, and mumbled that she couldn’t. She said that if she identified them, she would be killed. She did not want to die. She knew from reading the paper that stool pigeons were killed and that sometimes their tongues were cut from their mouths. She wanted to do the right thing, but what would it get her? A bullet in the mouth?
As Beryl and others begged, urged, scolded, yelled, and fulminated that she had a duty to do the right thing, she wiped tears from her eyes and shook her head. Her breathing was hard and swift, like a cornered animal frightened that it would be killed. She held a hand to her chest as if she was going to have a heart attack. She closed her eyes and used the thumb and forefinger of her right hand to massage her forehead. She said she never should have come and wanted to go home and be left alone. A few months later, she died of a heart attack. Beryl and his siblings thought it was God’s will; the poor old lady had been cursed by them, and she paid the price.
With no evidence and no witnesses to testify against them, the killers were set free and never seen or heard from again on Maxwell Street. Officer Murphy thought their luck would run out one day. Maybe sooner rather than later. There were always people who were willing to see that justice was done. Beryl doubted it, but there was nothing he could do.
There was a funeral to plan. There was family to help. For Beryl’s mother Sarah, who had attempted to throw herself into Isadore’s grave during the funeral service, revenge should be left to God. She yelled out her husband’s name as if he could still hear her. She then said the Kaddish and hoped that God would hear her prayer and honor the life that Isadore had lived. The thought of life without Isadore filled her with panic. Who would run the store? She knew nothing about buying and selling groceries. She had been a housewife and mother, not a grocer. Who would pay the bills? Who would discipline the kids? She felt a void. The emptiness was like a black hole that would grow larger until she finally disappeared inside of it. The hole, like a large mouth, would swallow her pain. But for now, she could only endure that pain. Her soul was shattered without her soulmate. Isadore had been her rock, her anchor, her friend, her guide, the interpreter of her universe, her lover, the breadwinner, the moral guide for their children. How could she possibly replace him?
They were an old-world couple with old-world values. Yes, Chicago was their home, but it did not represent the traditional Jewish values they had brought with them from the old country. Like many Orthodox Jewish women, Sarah had relied on Isadore to make many of the decisions that defined how they lived. She could not imagine living without him. His death was too much to bear; it led her to despair. Having sole responsibility for her four children was too much to bear. She felt bent over, crushed. Her deeply religious husband had seeded her with those children. Why wasn’t he here to help her? What would happen to them without the guidance of their father? She could not stop crying. She fretted; she yelled at God. She banged her fists on the kitchen table. Her condition was diagnosed as a nervous breakdown. She felt herself sinking like a bag of cement tossed into the ocean. Down and down she went, until she was institutionalized. Beryl’s three younger siblings, two brothers and a sister, were scattered, either being sent away to live with a cousin or to an orphanage. Beryl would eventually rescue them, bringing them out of the fetid darkness of their depressing lives and into the fresh air and sunlight of a new, better day.
The flame of anger that had been ignited by the indignities of poverty and anti-Semitism, by feeling like an outsider, had turned Beryl into a highly determined young man. Religion was no longer for him. He gave up attending Hebrew school and never went to synagogue. When his rabbi asked why, Beryl asked what God had done for Isadore, a holy man, a good man gunned down by a pair of lowlife punks who escaped their punishment. Yet, every day, for 11 days, Beryl said the Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer for the dead. He did not want his father to turn to dust and be forgotten. Beryl would make enough money to rescue his family. He would find a way to reunite his family. But first he would become even more of a thug.
In school, he was such a troublemaker that he was frequently suspended. In the neighborhood, he was running illegal craps games. He ran a variety of scams and, one day, was invited to join a new gang and participate in a robbery. He thought for days about whether he should. He avoided seeing the gang’s leader so that he wouldn’t have to decide. On the night of the robbery, he didn’t show up, a wordless answer that saved him from a life of serious crime and its consequences. A few days later, the gang leader told Beryl that he had missed out on a great score. There were sharp new clothes, beautiful babes, and smooth booze (not that rot-gut stuff). They had been dancing, cutting loose, and raising hell. Beryl just smiled and nodded. He was not prepared to go so deep into a life of crime. Maybe Big Al had been right that Beryl wasn’t really cut out for a life of crime. He also had some of his father’s values in him now. Beryl was having second thoughts, and he was right, for the path that the gang would tread for the next few years would not be one of easy riches. Several members were killed, while others were sentenced to long prison terms. Beryl had, indeed, made a wise decision. But he didn’t know what his next move should be.
One may have to ponder various alternatives before deciding on a course of action. What was Beryl good at? What could he do to earn money? When he reached the decision to fight, it seemed like the only solution. What else was he going to do? Work as a clerk in a store? Be a shipping clerk on a loading dock? Dig ditches? He decided to fight to earn enough money to buy his mother a house and give her the warmth that comes from feeling safe and secure, and he would ransom his deracinated siblings from their abandonment.
Again, Big Al had been right. Beryl confessed his intentions to his pal Sparky, who offered to do whatever he could to help. Theirs was a friendship as close as that between two siblings born out of the same womb of ghettoized poverty. And now that it was time to venture forth, it was Big Al who launched Beryl’s career as Barney Ross, future lightweight, light welterweight, and welterweight champion of the world. He would become one of the greatest fighters of the twentieth century, the heir to Benny Leonard; he didn’t yet know it, but he was on his way to becoming an iconic figure who would be applauded for his heroic rise from poverty to become a millionaire, a war hero who would be awarded the Silver Star by President Roosevelt in the Rose Garden at the White House, a drug addict who would become clean and sober in record time and serve as a mentor to kids, an author of a best-selling autobiography, and a hero in a Hollywood movie. Barney Ross would be the proud young man, a son and a brother, who fought for sums small and large so that he could rescue and reunite his family. That was his ambition. And his ambition and drive to succeed would take him to the top of the world of boxing.