The Starker: Big Jack Zelig, the Becker-Rosenthal Case, and the Advent of the Jewish Gangster

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

The Starker: Big Jack Zelig, the Becker-Rosenthal Case, and the Advent of the Jewish Gangster
by Rose Keefe (Author)

(A good link on "Tough " Jewish Criminals in the USA: http://www.j-grit.com/criminals.php -- The CSR )

Selig Harry Lefkowitz, alias Big Jack Zelig, was New York's first great gangster boss. Like many of his pre-Volstead contemporaries, his historical impact has been overshadowed by Al Capone and Murder Inc. He is listed in today's crime anthologies primarily because four members of his gang, along with corrupt cop Charles Becker, died in the electric chair for the July 1912 murder of gambler Herman Rosenthal.

In New York City from 1908 to 1912, however, Zelig inspired admiration and fear, and he was synonymous with the word gangster. New York editor Herbert Bayard Swope recalled that "The Starker (Yiddish for 'Big Boss, tough-minded, hardheaded, feared strong arm'') threw terror into the heart of the New York underworld like no one has before or since."

Irony and tragedy often join forces, but the way they combined in the Becker-Rosenthal affair is harrowing. Becker's job was to eradicate the Manhattan gangs. Yet the city's most powerful gangster, Jack Zelig, was prepared to testify for him and save him from the electric chair. But when Zelig was murdered before he could take the stand, Becker was consequentially doomed.

The question is, Who ordered Zelig killed -- and why?

The answer is revealed by Rose Keefe, who follows Zelig's story from his childhood in New York's Russian-Jewish slums to his enlistment in the Manhattan gang wars (1905-10) to his ascendancy to the top of the New York underworld. Keefe reveals that Zelig's murder was a political assassination, not retaliation for an alleged robbery, as legend has claimed. For the first time, the truth about who ordered Herman Rosenthal murdered, and why, will be revealed.

Based on dozens of interviews and years of painstaking research, The Starker introduces readers to a story from New York's criminal past that is dazzling in its audacity and criminal in the success of the people responsible for the murders in covering up their own crimes.

http://www.amazon.com/Starker-Becker-Ro ... -Gangster/

The idiot Jew William Safire called himself a Shtarker...
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The Times story by Katharine Q. Seelye did nothing to advance public knowledge about Kissinger's clients or conflicts, although she did find a tendentious way to connect Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., a White House critic, to Kissinger Associates through H.J. Heinz, the condiment giant. (Kerry's wife, Teresa, is the widow of a Heinz heir and controls the fortune he left.)

Here's another worrisome sign about the Kissinger appointment: William Safire thinks his old pal Henry is just about perfect for this job, and waves away all the ethical questions. (I know this is a digression, but has anyone else noticed that Safire has taken to preening in almost every column now? It began with frequent references to his late-night phone calls with his pal "Arik" Sharon, and now it's getting worse. The other day he proclaimed himself a "shtarker," Yiddish for tough guy, and today he reminds us that he once appeared in a David Levine cartoon and sat in Edward Bennett Williams' Redskins box.) Meanwhile, more probing examinations of Kissinger's history can be found here and here (where Hitchens posted a column foaming with fury, though not exactly tough on the White House, on the same day I wondered what he would write).

http://dir.salon.com/story/politics/con ... index.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

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A little more on the usage of the term in modern times
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Extract from The People on the Street: A Writer's View of Israel (Virago, 2006)

The shtarker, the mensch and the nebbish

When Ze'ev Rosenstein crashed through the tv screen into the Ruppin Street apartment on the day of the big balagan, I immediately recognised him as the descendant of all the Jewish tough guys who muscled in on our family dining table at home in Liverpool. Not in person, of course: my mother would never have let a gangster into the house, even if he was a bona fide citizen of the world's only Jewish state and in need of a table to put his feet under for Friday night dinner. But they were always around somewhere, leaning over my father's shoulder as he ate, stealing his homburg hats and lacing his conversation with their peppery phrases. 'What kind of racket is this?' my dad asked, as he examined the bill for my school fees.

In 1923, my father, a hungry, skinny nineteen-year-old, had jumped ship from his berth as a merchant seaman on the SS Lacona, whose Ellis Island manifest lists him as 'Jew cook'. He spent the rest of the decade in New York, returning to Liverpool on the eve of the stock market crash, and until he died in 1983 he remained inside his imagination in the world he had had and then lost - that of the American gangsters he had watched eating cheesecake in Lindy's Delicatessen on Broadway, who occasionally patted him on the head and gave him an errand to run.

In the Damon Runyon stories he read and reread (and so did I), Lindy's was thinly disguised as Mindy's, but all the types were identifiable to him: Harry the Horse, Dave the Dude, the Lemon-drop Kid - little-league hoodlums he ran into while driving trucks of illegal beer over the Canadian border into upstate New York during Prohibition. Back home, walking on the shores of the Mersey in the 1930s, wearing a Panama beach suit and a straw hat, his Scouse accent sharpened by an American twang, he spoke of people like Dutch Schultz, Meyer Lansky and Louis Lepke, the then-rising stars of the Jewish underworld, but it was Arnold Rothstein who, for him, was the embodying myth of American immigration.

The gangster's biography sat in the bookcase next to the twin beds my parents slept in, removed a few spines along, for decency's sake, from the collected essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and my mother's well-thumbed paperback editions of Harold Robbins. Rothstein, gunned down over a gambling debt in 1928, was a sophisticated fusion of brains, chutzpah and brutality, the man on whom F. Scott Fitzgerald would base the character of Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, the crook who was rumoured to have fixed the 1919 World Series. There had been New York Jewish gangsters before Rothstein: Monk Eastman, Kid Twist Zweibach, Big Jack Zelig, Dopey Benny Fein, Little Augie Fein and Kid Dropper, but they were just petty street thugs, immigrant kids trying to earn a bent living among the warring Irish and Italian gangs of old Manhattan.

Rothstein was the first person to see in Prohibition a business opportunity, a means to enormous wealth; he was the Moses of the Jewish gangsters, the progenitor, a rich man's son who showed the young hoodlums of the Bowery how to have style; indeed, the man who the Italian Lucky Luciano would later say taught him how to dress.

My father, the family man, the local businessman, the supporter of the synagogue, the protector of the virgin purity of his two daughters, loved Rothstein because of something that was embedded in the Jewish consciousness in those days, which reached its height in the 1930s when a Jew in Europe would turn on the radio and all he heard was bad news. The urgent need for a superhero, for a Jewish tough guy who could take on the bad men of Nazi Germany, was rooted inside my father and all of his generation who still had a small mental foothold in the inconsequential towns of eastern Europe.

For whatever else you might say about the gangsters, they never forget they were Jews. In 1945, Rueven Dafne, an emissary for the Haganah, met up with Bugsy Siegel in New York and asked him for money and guns. 'You mean to tell me Jews are fighting?' Siegel asked. 'You mean, fighting as in killing?' And hearing that it was true, Siegel replied, 'I'm with you,' and delivered a series of suitcases to Tel Aviv over the next few months filled with $5 and $10 bills amounting to $50,000.

The Soviet writer Isaac Babel summed up my father's feelings about gangsters in his story, 'How it was Done in Odessa', set among the hoodlums of that Black Sea port at the time of the Russian Revolution: 'Tartakovsky has the soul of a murderer, but he is one of us. He originated with us. He is our blood. He is our flesh, as though one momma had borne us.'

* * *

Ze'ev Rosenstein appeared on tv as a stocky, blockish, thicknecked figure with a bristly head, a schnitzel-and-chips kind of man, despite his million-and-a-half-dollar home in Hod HaSharon, a dormitory town near Tel Aviv. He was fifty and had grown up on the mean streets of Jaffa, where two families, Jewish and Arab mob bosses, had demonstrated that peace and coexistence were achievable by an equitable and just settlement, dividing between themselves the Tel Aviv drug trade.*

Mobsters like Rosenstein had been present in Palestine as far back as the 1930s, when eastern Europe emptied out its twilight population of gunmen and con artists. In 1972, Meyer Lansky, escaping the FBI at home, fled to Israel, seeking his right to become an Israeli citizen under the Law of Return, and was turned down by the prime minister herself, Golda Meir, the first Jew ever refused Aliyah. 'No gangsters in Israel,' she said. But the gangsters were there already.

Long before organised crime, the Jews had had their shtarkers: hard men, thugs. Back in the shtetls of eastern Europe, the villages and small towns where Jews lived a Yiddish life with all its economic and social aspects - its butcher, baker, rabbi, innkeeper, matchmaker, dressmaker, dairyman, miller, marriageable daughters, Talmudic scholars, revolutionaries hunched over tracts imported from Moscow and St Petersburg, Messianic Hassidim, small-time conmen and wealthy merchants - it was possible for everyone to exist within certain well-defined categories.

At the pinnacle of society was the mensch, a man, a human being in the fullest sense of what God had intended by the term, living a moral life based on hard work, charity and family values. To be a mensch was to be admired and respected, not merely for one's wealth or achievements (and a mensch always made sure his family was properly provided for), but for the essential decency and dignity of your being. A mensch always tried to do the right thing, to live his life humanely.

Various minor categories lay below: the schlemiel, the awkward individual who was always dropping his bowl of soup, and the schlimazel, the unfortunate on whom the soup got dropped.

There was an intellectual class, the luftmensch, who lived on air: he who starved his body to feed his mind, wandering from place to place in search of a crumb that would sustain his study.

And teeming those shtetl streets were the nebbishes, the early nerds: awkward and klutzy with their hands, neurotic, hypochondriacal, life's worriers for whom the Jewish telegram joke could have been invented - Start worrying. Details to follow.

Famous examples of the mensch exist in literature and film. Primo Levi was a mensch, the survivor whose great literary powers allowed him to explore the inner world of death camps, to interrogate their terrible moral meanings. Woody Allen is a nebbish, the harmless, puny, witty Jew who fights back armed with nothing more than chutzpah. Though before Levi became a mensch, he was a nebbish.

On the outskirts of the shtetl, along the rutted muddy road that led out of town to the dangerous lands, another type was lurking, about whom no one ever said much. Every so often a kid was born with a build like an ox; too stupid to advance in school or make much of himself in business, he would be posted like a hulking, animated scarecrow outside the village.

The shtarker, the Jewish thug, was there to scare off your enemies. He was not someone you boasted about, but nonetheless it was possible to have a sneaking admiration for a Jew who could see off the marauding Cossacks with his fists instead of weasely appeals to their better nature or those scheming attempts to out-manoeuvre them, which became the subject of so many Jewish jokes.

Ze'ev Rosenstein was a shtarker, as were all his enemies, the rival gangs that tried to whack him. The prime minister of Israel was also a shtarker, a thug in a military uniform who baffled the liberal West which wanted to think well of the Jews, those incubators of world culture who had produced Primo Levi, Spinoza, Kafka, Mahler, Proust, Joseph Roth - nebbishes, all.

The Israelis liked Ariel Sharon in the same way and for exactly the same reasons that my father had liked Arnold Rothstein, and why Israelis were secretly excited by Ze'ev Rosenstein.

Sharon attracted shame and admiration. His obesity, his shady past, his bullying, his indifference to murder, his corruption, his lobbishe sons, the rumours about his marriages, everything about him made you cringe when you saw him on tv, particularly on the BBC. The Jews wanted a shayner Yid, a beautiful Jew, like Yitzhak Rabin, to be their representative, but they kept on winding up with these loud-mouthed former terrorists and war criminals. I was always being asked, plaintively, why the Jews chose brutes to represent them. Surely the Knesset had more to offer than this, such as the modestly spoken former mayor of Haifa, Amram Mitzna, who had so disastrously lost to Sharon when he ran for office for the second time. But Mitzna was a yekke, a German Jew, a type of whom it was said in Palestine in the 1930s that instead of a heart they had a clock. They were above all the Yiddish categories because they were not Yiddim - Jews, but not Jew-ish. Respected, usually on the extreme left, but rarely loved, they were intellectuals who could win the Nobel Prize for this or that, but in their company you couldn't sit around with your feet up on the coffee table, telling jokes, waving your arms around and talking with your mouth full.

The shtarker does not bring you yiches, that sense of pride and honour that is bestowed on the family and indeed the whole community when, say, a Jew or an Israeli wins the Nobel. The shtarker is a necessary fact of this terrible life. We have one in the Bible.

Unlike the prophets, Samson doesn't get a book of his own. He puts in his first appearance in Judges chapter 13, during the period when the Jews are under occupation by the Philistines. Samson is the product of divine infertility treatment. His father, Menorah, and wife (unnamed) do a deal with God, who promises a son to deliver the Jews from colonialism as long as Samson never cuts his hair. Samson's progress through the verses is a list of murder and massacre, revenge and counter-revenge. For relaxation he sleeps with shiksa prostitutes in Gaza. Every time Samson brandishes his ass's jawbone and murders a few more Philistines, God couldn't be more delighted. Samson, like the Golem (the medieval Prague progenitor of Frankenstein's monster, built by a rabbi to fight anti-Semitism), has been specifically created to be the defender of the Jews. After Delilah, in the pay of the Philistines, persuades him to reveal the secret of his strength, and cuts his hair while he is sleeping, his eyes are put out and the enemies of the Jews 'offer a great sacrifice unto Dagon their god . . . for they say, Our god hath delivered into our hands our enemy, and the destroyer of our country, which slew many of us.'

But the cretinous Philistines don't realise that while Samson languishes in prison his hair is growing. They take him out for a bit of sport and tie him to the pillars of the building. Samson prays to God to grant him the strength to deliver a final crushing revenge. Straining his muscles, he brings down the prison on top of him, with three thousand people gathered on the roof, 'so the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life'. The first suicide bomber!

When Philip Roth interviewed Primo Levi in 1986, he criticised If Not Now, When? (Levi's novel about Jewish partisans during the war), which he described as 'more narrowly tendentious . . . than the impulse that generates the autobiographical works'. Levi replied, a little defensively: 'I wished to assault a commonplace still prevailing in Italy: a Jew is a mild person, a scholar (religious or profane), unwarlike, humiliated, who tolerated centuries of persecution without ever fighting back. It seemed to me a duty to pay homage to those Jews who, in desperate conditions, found the courage and skill to resist.'

Even Levi fancied himself as something of a shtarker. Indeed, his capture by the Germans was due to an ill-fated flirtation with the partisan life.

Thus the mensch, the nebbish and the shtarker are the three figures which form the true trinity of Jewish culture, and they come together in the stories of Isaac Babel - of the Jewish gangsters of Odessa and of a Jew incongruously serving in a Cossack regiment during the civil war. Babel based his stories on his own self, a child of stunted growth growing up to be a writer, 'with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart'. His father's escape fantasy for Isaac, the son born in Odessa in 1894 during the period of state-sponsored pogroms against the Jews, was that he might become an infant prodigy on the violin, performing before the crowned heads of Europe. Like the immigrant Jews of New York, Babel was drawn, instead, to the Jewish gangsters of his city. As a young intellectual during the Revolution, he took the advice of Maxim Gorky and went 'among the people'.

When the American critic Lionel Trilling wrote an introduction to the (incomplete) 1955 Penguin edition of the stories, he saw as the principal joke of the 'Red Cavalry' stories the anomaly of having, as their main character, a Jew who is a member of a Cossack regiment, traditionally the persecutors of the Jews. The Cossack, he wrote, 'stood in total antithesis to the principle of the Jew's existence. The Jew conceived his own ideal character to consist in his being intellectual, pacific, humane. The Cossack was physical, violent, without mind or manners . . . the enemy not only of the Jew . . . but the enemy also of all men who thought of liberty; he was the natural and appropriate instrument of ruthless oppression.'

But to nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals, including Tolstoy, Trilling points out, the Cossack was rather an appealing figure: 'He was the man as yet untrammelled by civilisation, direct, immediate, fierce. He was the man of enviable simplicity, the man of the body - and of the horse, the man who moved with speed and grace . . . For [Tolstoy] the Cossack was indeed the noble savage, all too savage, not often noble, yet having in his savagery some quality that might raise strange questions in a Jewish mind.'

Thus Trilling saw in the figure of the Cossack a yearning in Babel to throw off his own liberal, intellectual instincts, an itch in him to become part of a people of the body rather than a people of the head. He points to the story which exposes the psychic divisions within Babel's mind during this period. In 'After the Battle', the narrator is discovered to have gone into battle with no ammunition in his gun; he is accused of being a member of the Molokan Sect - a pacifist and God-worshipper. But this is not it at all. Trudging through the rain, the narrator pleads for a favour, 'imploring fate to grant me the simplest of proficiencies - the ability to kill my fellow-man'. This sentiment in Babel's mouth is, Trilling says, only partly ironic.

The period between the 1880s and the start of the First World War offered Jews in eastern Europe three possible means of reinvention: the first was emigration to America, where the Jewish gangsters of Odessa would thrive in the fresh air of American capitalism; the second was Zionism, which was in the process of discarding the neurasthenic shtetl Jew and re-engineering his soul in preparation for the outdoor life of the kibbutz; the third was the Russian Revolution, in which Jews were to play a leading role.

Those who adopted this final option abandoned the mystical baggage of an ancient religion and their predicament as a tiny persecuted minority, protected only by their irksome status as God's chosen people; they abandoned their history for the Marxist notion of History. They signed up for equality, freedom and rights accorded to them by virtue of their class. October 1917 was the defining moment when the mensch and the shtarker were joined together. It was a Jewish dream come true. Only through violence could man liberate himself from oppressive forces, but violence in their hands was not mindless. It served a revolutionary ideology, which would bring justice to suffering mankind.

Of those three choices Jews of the time could make, this turned out to be the very worst. Babel was murdered by firing squad in Moscow's Lubyanka prison in 1940 at the age of fortyfive, on a trumped-up espionage confession after unsuccessfully begging to be allowed to finish his only novel. Of those Russian Jews who emerged blinking into the tail end of the century in 1992 and emigrated to Israel, some were scientists, some were chess grand masters, some were prima ballerinas; others formed the country's new industry of organised crime, drug dealing and prostitution - the shtarker with all the mensch-like elements corroded by seventy-five years of Soviet socialism. According to eyewitness Palestinian accounts of the Israeli incursions into Jenin, many of the soldiers were recent immigrants from Russia who spoke little Hebrew and who looted the homes of civilians. Their hatred of Muslims did not suddenly appear out of nowhere, inculcated by the Israeli state, but was nurtured during the exceptionally brutal wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

Ze'ev Rosenstein and Ariel Sharon, each in their way, answered a need in Israeli society that went deeper than politics, occupation, intifada, failed peace agreements or the founding of the state.

In order for an Israeli to write poetry, or make millions on the stock market, or act in a movie and win an Oscar, in order to be ordinarily useful and productive, he required a kind of mental protection, the idea that the shtarker was outside the village with his ass's club. In the 1950s the Jewish gangsters of America began to die out as a force in organised crime; unlike the Italians, they did not found families; they did not send their sons to the streets, they sent them to law school. People felt that now Jews were entering the full life of America, the suburban dream, there was no more need for them to turn to violence, but perhaps the truth was that the Jews no longer needed their shtarkers at home - they had the Israeli army, Jewish soldiers with a gun, the Uzi, actually designed and invented by a Jew.

Rosenstein did nothing for the good of the state, but he and Sharon were from the same mould and impulse. Like Babel's gangsters in pre-Revolutionary Odessa, in particular Benya Krik - with his 'lightning-quick beginning and his terrible end' who 'talks little, but he talks with zest. He talks little, but you want he'll say more' - they were men. The Benya Kriks drove around in loud motor cars and wore raspberry-coloured boots and chocolate jackets, watch straps with diamond bracelets. They did not keep their head down and avoid trouble. A community bound by laws designed to contain and persecute them saw and marvelled at outrageous characters who defied all laws, whether they came from the court system or the United Nations.

The Jewish revolutionaries promised universal equality; the Jewish gangsters, anarchic and individualistic, and the Jewish thug who ran Israel offered something else: 'And he got his way, that Benya Krik, because he was passionate, and passion holds sway over the universe.'
*Organised crime in Israel was set up along ethnic lines. Immigrants from the former Soviet Union specialised in sex slavery and prostitution; the Bedouin clans of the south smuggled women and drugs over the Egyptian border and dealt in stolen cars; Palestinian-Israelis distributed drugs; while the Jewish-Israeli crime families focused on protekzia, loan collection, and gambling. Rosenstein had already faced off the Aslans in the working-class Hatikvah neighbourhood of Tel Aviv in the late 1980s and early 1990s over gambling turf. His wealth grew from operating casinos in eastern Europe; at home a vacuum inside Israel was being filled with illegal gambling dens: seedy establishments advertising themselves as internet cafés or bingo parlours. At the beginning of 2000, Palestinian entrepreneurs in Jericho had built a fabulous new casino to which Israeli gamblers flocked. The West Bank town near the border with Jordan had the potential to become a new Las Vegas until the outbreak of the intifada later that year, which abruptly halted the flow of Israeli suckers across the Green Line.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts-Liter ... 3_3917.jsp

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Born: May 13, 1888 - New York, NY
Died: October 5, 1912 - New York, NY


Bick Jack Zelig

"I never wanted this," Zelig confided to a trusted henchman shortly before his death. He was referring to the leadership of the gang that became Manhattan's earliest example of Jewish-controlled organized crime. But once he had it, Big Jack Zelig became infamous as the 'terror and commander' of the Lower East Side. "But for some," Professor Arthur Goren remembered, "(he was) the quarter's guardian as well."

From 1910 until 1912, Manhattan's Jewish district was Zelig's oyster. Small merchants paid his agents for protection, and bought tickets by the bundle when the gang threw a dance (or 'racket', in the parlance of the day). He rented his shtarkers at hefty rates to union leaders and politicians. Anyone who defied him risked violent consequences. But he also made his co-religionists safer from street crime than ever before. He chased away pimps, obstructed the drug trade, and sent any hooligans who assaulted Jews straight to the hospital. These acts of altruism would cause social workers, judges, and journalists to revere him for decades afterward.

The gangster who would one day generate headlines was born Zelig Zvi Lefkowitz on May 13, 1888, in a Norfolk Street tenement. His parents, Ephraim and Sarah, were Russian immigrants active in community life. They provided a positive example to Zelig, who was bright and did well in school. But he was one of nine children, and by the time the Lefkowitzes noticed that he was running wild with a youthful pickpocket gang led by Simon 'Crazy Butch' Erenstoft, it was too late.

It was through Erenstoft that Zelig met Monk Eastman, Manhattan's earliest celebrity gangster, whose fleet of shtarkers numbered over a thousand during its heyday. Another close companion was Max Zweifach, alias Kid Twist, a shrewd and relentless killer who took over the gang after Monk was shipped to Sing Sing in 1904.

The Eastmans regularly fought Paul Kelly's mob from the old Five Points district, but it's unlikely that Zelig participated in any of their battles. Although six feet tall and ruggedly built, he was strictly a pickpocket with no taste for violence. During those early years, his quick hands took wallets and jewellery, not lives. When caught, the teenager escaped arrest by crying until his accuser softened, a trick known as 'the baby game'. His skill at it rescued him from a lot of jail time.

Despite his success at playing the baby, Zelig was imprisoned twice for stealing- once in 1901 and again in 1906, when he was sent to Sing Sing for over two years. In late 1908 he returned to a changed gangland: Monk Eastman was in prison, and Kid Twist Zweifach had been killed at Coney Island by a vengeful Five Pointer named Louie the Lump. The current leader of the Eastman crew was a second-rate hoodlum named Abe Lewis, whose cousin had been Kid Twist's favorite bodyguard and companion in death.

Zelig needed money badly: by 1908 he had a common-law wife, Henrietta, to support, as well as her young son Harry. Lewis offered the ex-convict a way back into the fold- kill Frank 'Chick' Tricker, who had been leading the Five Pointers with Jack Sirocco since Paul Kelly's retirement. Zelig agreed to try despite being new to the art of murder, acknowledging that Zweifach had been slain by one of Chick's men. He attempted to shoot Tricker in the latter's saloon, but at the last minute his nerve failed him and he ran. Scared and disgraced, he fled to Chicago, where he decided to make a fresh start. His life did change there, but not in a way he anticipated.

Chicago had some criminal cliques that were hostile to newcomers. In January 1909 Zelig ran afoul of a gang of gamblers who hung out in a downtown cigar store. They lured him into a back room, jumped on him en masse, and beat him so severely that he almost died. Medical intervention pulled him through, but he was never the same afterward. He was harder and tougher, and had a violent streak that roared into life at the first sign of trouble.

Zelig returned to Manhattan in the summer of 1909, after his physical injuries healed. If anyone taunted him about his original flight from New York, he punched first and remonstrated later. His transformation became universal knowledge at the end of November 1910, when he went to the old Chatham Club in Doyers Street with friends.

They were accosted at their table by one Tommy Fitzpatrick, whose older brother Ritchie had challenged Kid Twist's leadership of the Eastmans and died for it. They ignored him at first, but when Fitzpatrick slashed one of his friends with a knife, Zelig erupted. He pounded the Irishman and two companions to a bloody pulp and went for a gun to finish the job. A policeman stopped him, but the beating itself awed the roomful of tough customers. Fitzpatrick retaliated a week later by ambushing him at a sports event, but Zelig put up such an impressive fight that Eastmans and other unconnected criminals gravitated toward him.

The Eastman gang had been drifting without a leader since Abe Lewis was sent to prison in 1909, and Zelig Lefkowitz's show of force placed the crown on his head by unanimous consent. He was now 'Big Jack' Zelig. He never asked for the honor, but once he had it, he remade the gang in his own image.

Under Monk Eastman and Kid Twist, money had been made via almost every form of crime and vice that paid. Zelig was more discriminating. A monogamist, he scorned prostitution as immoral. He was also against drugs: when Eastman, ravaged and desperate after years in prison, approached him in 1911 for cooperation in an opium selling racket, Zelig turned the old gangster away. He also stated in no uncertain terms that the gang would not provide muscle to gamblers during their petty wars. His Chicago experience forever embittered him against them.

Zelig concentrated instead on two lucrative fields, the first of which was the time-honored protection racket. In theory, merchants, madams, and gambling house owners paid to keep their premises and employees safe from all marauders, but in practice they were only guaranteed freedom from molestation by the extortionists. Such had been the case when Eastman and Zweifach ran the show. In contrast, Zelig honored his agreement to keep troublemakers away. One madam later testified that the $100 she paid his agents each month had been money well spent.

The second was labor racketeering. Both unions and employers hired gangsters to terrorize the opposing side, and picket lines were regular battlefields. Zelig sided with organized labor, refusing to offer strikebreaking services. His men protected picketers, attacked scabs, and swarmed into anti-union workplaces. Overseeing this undertaking was Benjamin Feinschneider, alias Dopey Benny Fein, a veteran pickpocket and organizational genius. Fein set the prices for a job, ensured that it got done, and cleaned up afterward. A mutual respect evolved into a friendship, and Fein became the gang's second in command.

Zelig is arguably the first Jewish gang boss to use the power of the underworld to protect the community. He drove away pimps that he found prowling the streets, sweet-talking gullible Jewish girls. Judge Jonah Goldstein, an esteemed jurist, remembered Zelig and his men riding trolley cars all over Manhattan, making sure that Jewish passengers were not harassed. He went down to the waterfront when a boatload of immigrants arrived and made short work of the thieves, con men, and panderers who intended to exploit the newcomers. Even Abe Shoenfeld, a private detective hired by reform groups to compile secret reports on Lower East Side crime, admitted to a reluctant admiration.

"At all times he (Zelig) has had the reputation... as being a good scrapper and above all a man of principle which readily understood is a quality seldom found amongst thieves. You may find honor but never principle," Shoenfeld wrote in August 1912. He also described the gang leader as having "prevented more hold-ups than a thousand policemen."

His altruism and fair dealing with those whom he was technically exploiting made Zelig popular. A dance that the gang held to raise money through ticket sales was widely attended. Abe Shoenfeld wrote, "Not only did crooks, gamblers, and others attend this ball, but (also) East Side businessmen, young and old, came to pay willing tribute to Jack Zelig. There was a large crowd of legitimate businessmen... Jack was very popular."

Gyp the Blood and Lefty Louis
Gyp the Blood and Lefty Louis
Under Zelig, the gang was known as the Boys of the Avenue, because they spent their leisure time in Segal's Café at 76 Second Avenue. His prize soldiers were 'Lefty' Louis Rosenberg and Jacob Seidenschner, alias Whitey Lewis, who were both veteran brawlers and killers despite their youth. As Zelig's star rose, even former adversaries joined him. Harry 'Gyp the Blood' Horowitz, a Lenox Avenue Gang alumnus, had robbed a brothel protected by the Boys of the Avenue and been beaten to a pulp in consequence, but he ingratiated himself once the bruises healed. So did 'Dago' Frank Cirofici, a professional gunman whom Zelig had shot when they were on opposing sides of an election day skirmish.

Battles with the Five Pointers made such experienced muscle necessary. Drive-by shootings and alley ambushes battered both sides and drove the cops to distraction. Throughout 1911 and 1912, gunfights, stabbings, and bombings were an almost weekly occurrence.

On December 2, 1911, a Five Pointer named 'Julie' Morrell crashed a ball thrown by the Boys of the Avenue. Zelig shot him full of holes and hurled him into the street. The following February Morrell's partner Frank Renesi was found with his head blown off. When Jonesy the Wop, a friend of both slain men, cursed Zelig as a 'Jew bastard' and attacked him in a restaurant with a knife, the Jewish gangster disarmed him and sliced up his face.

The violence peaked in early June 1912, when Zelig, Lefty Louis, and Whitey Lewis brawled with Tricker and a bevy of Five Pointers at a Chinatown dive, and all were arrested. When Zelig left the courthouse afterward, he was shot in the head by a gunman named Charles Torti, a known associate of Jack Sirocco. While surgeons operated on him, his boys nearly killed Tricker in a drive-by shooting.

Upon his discharge from the hospital, a weakened Zelig was sent to the Tombs prison to await bail. Once it was posted, he left for Hot Springs to complete his recovery. His departure took place days before New York witnessed a murder whose repercussions would send five men to Sing Sing's electric chair. This tragedy and ensuing miscarriage of justice would go down in history as the Becker-Rosenthal affair.

In July 1912 a waning gambler named Herman Rosenthal declared to the press and District Attorney's office that Police Lieutenant Charles Becker, who headed one of the NYPD's elite Strong Arm Squads, had been a silent partner in his gambling house for months. When Becker's superiors forced him to shut the place down, an enraged Rosenthal retaliated by exposing the policeman as a venal wolf in a cop's uniform. His allegations made the front pages of the daily papers and shocked New Yorkers with lurid tales of police-gambler collusion.

'Dago' Frank Cirofici
'Dago' Frank Cirofici
Becker and the NYPD weren't the only ones burned by the heat that ensued. Told that he needed corroborative witnesses before his case could be taken to the grand jury, Rosenthal named fellow gamblers who wanted no part of an investigation. Threats against his life were heard in poker rooms and stuss houses everywhere. Therefore, when Rosenthal was shot to death outside the Metropole Hotel on July 16, popular opinion was divided on who ordered the hit: some pointed the finger at Becker while others blamed the victim's former colleagues.

The latter theory appeared to be correct when three gamblers named Bald Jack Rose, Louis 'Bridgey' Webber, and Harry Vallon were arrested. Rose, who was also a graft collector and stool pigeon for Lieutenant Becker, admitted to hiring the shooters. But he stressed to District Attorney Whitman that he and his two confederates had acted as agents of Becker, who threatened them with jail time or worse if they did not silence Rosenthal forever.

Although all three were known enemies of the victim, the politically ambitious Whitman foresaw more glory in prosecuting a corrupt cop for murder instead of three scheming lowlifes. He hurried them before the grand jury, which promptly indicted Becker for murder, and granted them immunity in exchange for their testimony.

One by one, the hired guns were picked up. They were none other than Lefty Louis, Whitey Lewis, Gyp the Blood, and Dago Frank. With their leader out of town, they had somehow been persuaded to bend the rule about avoiding gamblers' feuds. Jack Rose would say that fear of Becker made them acquiesce, but Benny Fein met with Zelig in Boston and filled him in on what had really happened.

On the night of July 15, Rose had met with the quartet at Bridgey Webber's poker place, plied them with liquor and cocaine, and convinced them to beat up Rosenthal. After the target was located at the Metropole, the original agreement received a lethal modification. Harry Vallon, seething with hate, fired at Rosenthal first, and a coked-out Louis and Gyp mechanically followed suit. Whitey missed fire, and Dago Frank was not even present, having decided at the last minute to go home.

Zelig was furious. He knew that Lieutenant Becker had nothing to do with the crime. Jack Rose tried to hire him to kill Rosenthal in April, citing a long-standing personal feud. Zelig refused, but Rose did not give up. When the gangster was jailed in May on a bogus gun-carrying charge, the bald gambler offered to use his influence with Becker to get the charge dropped. All he wanted in exchange was for Zelig to order his men to rub Rosenthal out. Again he was rebuffed. Rose tried one more time, visiting Zelig in late June while he was in the Tombs prison awaiting bail for his role in the Chinatown brawl. Temper soured by pain from his bullet wound, the gang leader erupted and sent him running. Jack Rose made no further approaches- until Zelig was out of town and unable to interfere.

Now Herman Rosenthal was dead, and Becker and the gunmen were facing the electric chair. Zelig knew that he could not save his friends, as there had been too many witnesses to the shooting, but he could make sure that they had company on Death Row. Zelig notified Becker's defense team that he had exculpatory evidence to offer. He was no lover of cops, but he could not sit and watch an innocent man suffer the death penalty because Jack Rose successfully conned an ambitious district attorney. Shoenfeld's 'man of principle' was prepared to act.
Whitey Lewis in Court
Whitey Lewis in Court

Zelig would never take the stand. On the rainy evening of October 5, 1912, two days before Becker's trial was due to commence, the gangster left Segal's and went to a nearby barbershop for a shave. Then he boarded a Second Avenue streetcar to go home. As the trolley neared Thirteenth Street, Zelig was shot in the head from behind by 'Red' Phil Davidson, a pimp who poisoned horses as a sideline. Davidson, who was arrested without difficulty, said that he had killed Zelig for beating him and stealing his money -a sum he fixed as different times as $400 and $18.

No one believed him. Davidson was a noted coward and an easy tool for those with a stronger will. It was whispered that certain members of New York's political machine did not want Zelig to testify, worried that if Becker went free, Rose and his cohorts might bargain for their lives by handing some bigger fish to Whitman on a platter. Because the gang leader was too powerful to be silenced via threats, he was assassinated. His evidence died with him, and Lieutenant Charles Becker was convicted of murder and executed in Sing Sing's electric chair on July 30, 1915. Lefty Louis, Whitey Lewis, Gyp the Blood, and even Dago Frank, who had not even been present at Rosenthal's murder, were electrocuted in April 1914.

The funeral of Zelig Lefkowitz, alias Big Jack Zelig, was attended by thousands. His supporters hired a fleet of cars to transport his remains to Washington Cemetery in Brooklyn. Talmud Torah children and a choir conducted by Cantor Goldberg of the Shaare Shamayim synagogue accompanied the coffin. Benny Fein and other tough gangsters joined Zelig's family in shedding tears. The conservative Jewish press decried the dead man as a murderer and reprobate, but the residents of the Jewish quarter had benefited from the gangster's protection, and their grief was genuine. Many knew that he died because he intended to save a man's life.

Shortly after Zelig's death, Abe Shoenfeld wrote, "Jack Zelig is as dead as a door nail. Men before him - like Kid Twist, Monk Eastman, and others - were as pygmies to a giant. With the passing of Zelig, one of the most 'nerviest', strongest, and best men of his kind left us."
Interesting Facts

    * Zelig's sister-in-law, Amelia Lewis, became a celebrated attorney who helped reshape the American juvenile justice system. In 1967, thanks to a case that she argued, the United States Supreme Court ruled that juveniles charged with criminal offenses were entitled to the same procedural protections in juvenile courts that adults had in the criminal courts.
    * Zelig's great-grand-nephew, Jan Lefkowitz, portrays him in a series of webisodes titled Our Gotham. http://www.monk1903.com

Further Reading
Some of these sites were used as source material for this entry and may be of interest to those looking to learn more about this person/topic. .

    * Keefe, Rose. The Starker: Big Jack Zelig, the Becker-Rosenthal Case, and the Advent of the Jewish Gangster. Cumberland House Publishing, 2008
    * Downey, Patrick. Gangster City: The History of the New York Underworld 1900-1935. Barricade Books, 2004
    * Fried, Albert. The Rise and fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1980
    * Rockaway, Robert. But He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters. Gefen Publishing House, 2000.

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