When the Kosher Nostra Ruled the Underworld

Hollywood motion pictures would have you believe that organized crime in America was a duopoly of Irish and Italian thugs, but there is another ethnic group that not only pioneered the corporate structure of the underworld but continues to exercise profound criminal influence to this day: organized Jewry.

The Lower East Side of the late 19th century was a pressure cooker of poverty and ambition, its tenement blocks producing men who would reshape American crime from the ground up. Out of this crucible emerged what scholars call the Kosher Nostra. When Prohibition arrived, Jewish gangsters seized the opportunity with both hands, planting themselves at the center of bootlegging networks stretching from New York to Detroit, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and Newark, while simultaneously building the financial infrastructure that would underwrite the modern drug trade.

The first generation of Jewish organized crime took shape on Manhattan’s streets in the 1890s. On the Lower East Side, the Eastman Gang assembled under Edward “Monk” Eastman—an outfit of 1,200 safecrackers, gunmen, and street brawlers who spent years trading blood with Paul Kelly’s Italian-American Five Points Gang over control of Manhattan’s underworld. What began as a mixed-ethnicity operation shifted steadily Jewish as the Eastern European immigrant tide rolled into lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, launching what historians describe as a 40 to 50 year stretch of dominant Jewish-American influence over New York’s criminal world.

Eastman, however, was a product of an earlier and simpler age of thuggery. The figure who converted organized crime into something closer to a modern enterprise came after him.

Arnold Rothstein built his reputation on two nicknames: “The Brain” and “The Fixer.” The son of a prosperous German-Jewish Manhattan family, he approached crime the way an industrialist approached a market. Crime writer Leo Katcher captured the scale of his ambition precisely: “the J.P. Morgan of the underworld; its banker and master of strategy.” From rigged card games and stock fraud to rum-running and narcotics, Rothstein touched nearly every significant criminal enterprise of his era.

He stood accused of masterminding the fix behind the 1919 World Series—the Black Sox Scandal that shook American baseball to its foundation—though prosecutors never managed to make a case stick. His more lasting contribution was human capital: he bankrolled and schooled the next generation of crime, handing Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, and Waxey Gordon both the money and the methods they needed to build their own empires. F. Scott Fitzgerald took note, translating Rothstein into the character Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. A shooting at the Park Central Hotel cut his career short in November 1928, but the men he mentored carried his methods forward for decades.

Of all those men, none went further than Meyer Lansky. He arrived in New York’s Lower East Side in 1911 from Grodno, Russia, under the name Maier Suchowljansky, and by the late 1910s had partnered with Bugsy Siegel to run gambling operations across the city. The criminal world recognized what it saw, eventually bestowing on him the titles “Chairman of the Board” and “Mogul of the Mob”—names that only grew more apt as his reach extended far beyond New York.

Lansky built the financial backbone of the National Crime Syndicate, the joint Italian-Jewish body that governed American organized crime, which he and Lucky Luciano put together in the early 1930s. From there he pushed the mob’s tentacles outward—into Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba, the Las Vegas casino floors, the Bahamas, and reportedly the vaults of Swiss banks where dirty money could be made clean. He outlived nearly every contemporary and died of natural causes in Miami Beach in January 1983, having defeated a succession of prosecutors who were never able to land a charge that would hold.

Siegel was everything Lansky was not in temperament. Where Lansky sat behind ledgers, Siegel used his fists and worse. The two had found each other as teenagers on the Lower East Side and built the “Bugs and Meyer Mob” together, an outfit that handled the syndicate’s dirty enforcement work and laid the groundwork for what would eventually be institutionalized as Murder Inc.

The syndicate sent Siegel west in 1937, and he made himself at home in Hollywood while expanding the mob’s gambling operations through California. His entry in the historical record came through concrete and neon: the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, which he drove into existence between 1945 and 1946. A project initially priced at $1.5 million ran to $6 million before it was finished, with suspicions mounting that Siegel had been helping himself along the way. When the Flamingo opened to indifferent crowds and bleeding ledgers, the patience of the men behind it finally ran out. Siegel was shot dead at a Beverly Hills home in June 1947, and whoever pulled the trigger was never officially identified.

The syndicate’s killing operation needed a commander, and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter was built for the role. His nickname derived from the Yiddish “Lepkeleh”— “little Louis”—though nothing about what he ran was small. A product of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Buchalter founded Murder Inc., the syndicate’s dedicated contract-killing arm, and ran it through the 1930s while simultaneously strangling New York’s garment industry and trucking sector through labor racketeering. No major American mob boss has since been executed by the government. Buchalter was the last, dying in the electric chair at Sing Sing in March 1944.

The apparatus he constructed was not limited to outside targets. Arthur Flegenheimer—the Bronx-born son of German Jewish immigrants who operated as Dutch Schultz—built an operation that touched bootlegging, the Harlem numbers racket, and restaurant extortion, and conducted himself with such erratic brutality that his own syndicate partners concluded he was more liability than asset. Murder Inc. shot him in a Newark chophouse in 1935.

Across the Hudson, Abner “Longie” Zwillman assembled the most powerful criminal apparatus in New Jersey, running as a close partner of both Luciano and Lansky and smuggling an estimated 40 percent of all illegal liquor entering the country at his peak. Schultz’s 1935 murder handed Zwillman his remaining New Jersey territory, and the nickname followed: “Al Capone of New Jersey.” On February 26, 1959, he was found hanging from a rafter in his West Orange basement. Authorities called it suicide, but wrist bruises told a different story, and Lucky Luciano later allegedly told journalist Martin Gosch the suicide theory “was nonsense”—that Zwillman’s killers “had trussed him up like a pig” before finishing the job.

Irving Wexler, who ran his criminal career under the name Waxey Gordon, began as Arnold Rothstein’s principal bootlegging lieutenant, overseeing Rothstein’s East Coast distilleries and rum-running routes while building his own network of speakeasies across New York and New Jersey. A losing power struggle with Luciano and Lansky drained his position, and a tax evasion conviction accelerated the collapse. He turned to narcotics in his final years, drew a federal conviction in 1951, and died at Alcatraz on June 24, 1952.

The killing operation the syndicate needed ran out of Brownsville, Brooklyn. Murder Inc. operated through the 1930s and into the early 1940s as a predominantly Jewish contract-killing enterprise, commanded jointly by Lepke Buchalter and Albert Anastasia on behalf of the entire National Crime Syndicate. The outfit’s most lethal figure was Abraham “Kid Twist” Reles, a hitman linked to dozens of killings who eventually turned state’s evidence and put multiple Murder Inc. members in the electric chair—then fell to his death from a hotel window while under police protection in 1941.

Jewish organized crime’s most consequential institutional legacy was the National Crime Syndicate itself. In the early 1930s, Lansky worked alongside Lucky Luciano to dissolve the boundary between Jewish and Italian criminal enterprises and rebuild them as a single coordinated structure—with Jewish figures handling the money and strategy while Italian members supplied the muscle and the formal hierarchy of “made” membership. The structure proved so sound it endured for decades.

The story also ran through the regions. The Purple Gang, under the Bernstein brothers, dominated Detroit’s Great Lakes bootlegging market in the 1920s and 1930s through extortion, murder-for-hire, and iron-fisted territorial control. Moe Dalitz built the Cleveland Syndicate and eventually turned his criminal capital into Las Vegas casino holdings. Charles “King” Solomon held Boston’s underworld through bootlegging, narcotics, and gambling until someone shot him dead in 1933. The FBI named Isadore “Kid Cann” Blumenfeld the “overlord of Minneapolis underworld.” Mickey Cohen seized the West Coast operation after Siegel’s murder and held it as the undisputed Los Angeles boss through 1949. Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal managed four casinos—the Stardust, Fremont, Marina, and Hacienda—for the Chicago Outfit, a career Martin Scorsese translated into Casino, with Robert De Niro playing Rosenthal as Sam “Ace” Rothstein.

These men built their empires within American borders. The next generation of Jewish organized crime figures had no such limitations. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it produced Semion Mogilevich, born in Kiev in 1946 to a Jewish family, who ascended to command what U.S. and European Union law enforcement agencies describe as the world’s largest Russian Mafia syndicate. The FBI called him “the most powerful and dangerous gangster in the world” and charged him with weapons trafficking, contract murders, extortion, drug trafficking, nuclear material trading, and international prostitution, placing him on its Ten Most Wanted list in October 2009 and removing him in 2015 only because Russia will not extradite its own. He lives freely in Moscow to this day. Where his predecessors had measured their territory in city blocks and state lines, Mogilevich measured his in continents, with tentacles reaching into governments, militaries, and political structures across the globe.

What began as a localized racket in the tenements of the Lower East Side has ultimately metastasized into an invisible, institutionalized regime. Modern-day Jewish power functions effectively as a legalized form of organized crime, with a grip on our institutions that is predicated on the same old methods of deceit, extortion, blackmail, and, when necessary, outright elimination of opposition. Until the American people summon the courage to speak the truth about how these figures have operated as bad actors in the United States from the very beginning, we will remain trapped in their noxious grasp, unable to reclaim the nation our ancestors built.