A spate of new movies and books embellishes the legend of the great Jewish gangsters
This year the legendary Jewish mobsters conquered a new piece of territory the movie screen. Meyer Lansky made an appearance in the romantic drama "Havana" last winter, as did Bugsy Siegel in the comedy "The Marrying Man" this autumn; both were central figures in this past summer's "Mobsters," a glamorized account of their early days in the mob.
Last month Dustin Hoffman showed up on screen as Bronx crime boss Dutch Schultz in the screen version of E. L. Doctorow's novel "Billy Bathgate." And "Bugsy" a $ 40 million gangland epic starring Warren Beatty, which is already being described as "the Jewish 'Godfather'" opens in the United States on December 13. Next year will see the release of producer Menahem Golan's "Hit the Dutchman," also about Schultz, while "Top Gun" producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckenheimer plan to begin filming of Jerusalem Report editor Ze'ev Chafetz's book about the Jewish underworld, "Inherit the Mob."
Siegel, Schultz and Lansky, together with the likes of Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, "Murder Inc." and "The Purple Gang" are names enshrined in American pop mythology: the great Jewish gangs and gangsters who rose out of immigrant ghettos at the beginning of the century and carved out bloody empires of vice during the Prohibition and Depression eras.
In those years, the numbers and power of the Jewish mobsters were equal to, if not greater than, the Italian-American Mafioso, their frequent partners and/or rivals. Most are said to have been proud of their Jewish backgrounds, even while flagrantly violating the most sacred commandments of the Jewish tradition (although Murder Inc. killer Samuel "Red" Levine is said to have worn a yarmulke and refused to carry out hits on the Sabbath).
The age of the Jewish gangsters is now gone; although new Israeli and Russian-Jewish emigre gangs have developed in the United States (see following story), American Jews turned away from careers in organized (if not white-collar) crime as they rose up the socio-economic ladder. But the great Jewish mobsters left behind both a number of colorful legends and a dubious cultural legacy, with which American Jewry is still contending.
Jewish gangsters provided fuel to Jew-haters like Henry Ford who frequently published their pictures in his anti-Semitic Dearborn Independent newspaper and they provoked feelings of both shame and denial in the Jewish community. In his seminal study of the American-Jewish immigrant experience, "World of Our Fathers" (1976), Irving Howe disingenuously wrote: "In the life of the immigrant (Jewish) community as a whole, crime was marginal" blithely ignoring what Albert Fried, author of "The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster"(1980), described as "an enormously complex, richly endowed culture of vice and criminality."
In recent years, however, the Jewish community has apparently grown less defensive about the shadier members of its tribe, at least if one judges by the veritable industry of books and films which has sprung up in recent years that both draws on Jewish gangsterdom as source material, and in some sense celebrates it. Why the change in attitude? In a cultural study published last year titled "Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry," Paul Breines suggests that such influences as guilt over Jewish weakness in the face of the Holocaust and admiration of the rise of Israel's military might, have led to a skewered sense of pride not in "Jewish crime itself, but rather its presumably more appealing essence Jewish toughness."
Regarding the plethora of Jewish gangster movies being made or released these days, Los Angeles Times film industry reporter David Fox says: "After Goodfellas' and three Godfathers,' we've been through the Italiangangsters and there's nothing more to do there. But the Jewish gangster is a subject area that has not been fully tapped, because Hollywood has always had a slight reluctance to making movies widely perceived to be Jewish-themed."
Describing the past approach of Hollywood's Jewish moguls to gangland's Jewish kingpins as one of "slight reluctance" is something of an understatement. Although Jewish actors like Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni frequently played gangsters during the 30s and 40s, they were always Italian, Irish or ethnically non-descript. Hollywood first began to broach the subject in low-budget B-movies like "Murder Inc."(60) and "Portrait of a Gangster"(61), about the Schultz mob. It wasn't until the past decade, with films like "Cotton Club"(84) and "Once Upon A Time in America"(84), that Jewish gangsters took center stage in big-budget crime epics.
"Billy Bathgate" is the screen version of E. L. Doctorow's acclaimed 1989 novel about the relationship between a teenage Bronx boy and his idol, Dutch Schultz. Born Arthur Flegenheimer to Austrian-Jewish immigrant parents, Schultz was a volcanic-tempered killer who rose out of a South Bronx slum during the 20s and built an empire of bookmaking and racketeering stretching from Brooklyn to New Jersey. When the politically ambitious New York special prosecutor (later governor) Thomas E. Dewey began his crusade against crime in 1935, the "Dutchman" was a natural first target. Schultz decided that Dewey should be assassinated, but New York's other crimebosses, realizing the disastrous consequences such a rash act would have for the rest of them, ordered Lepke Buchalter overseer of the Brooklyn-Jewish Murder Inc. gang to dispatch the Dutchman first. On October 23, 1935, two of Lepke's hitmen entered the Palace Chophouse in Newark, New Jersey, and shot down Schultz and three of his associates.
Doctorow's novel was a brilliant evocation of the power of the mobster myth in the American imagination. But the film fails to transfer the richness of the book's language to the screen, and Hoffman falls short of conveying the ferocious charisma the Dutchman is said to have had. After opening to mixed reviews, it did disappointing business at the box office.
If Schultz seems a creature tailor-made for Hollywood, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel was a notable real-life player there. Born and raised on the Lower East Side, Siegel was already a major Manhattan mobster when he moved out to Los Angeles in the early 30s looking for fresh territory to conquer. In Hollywood, the stylish and rakishly handsome Siegel was welcomed with open arms by stars and star-makers alike, thanks to introductions provided by actor George Raft, an old buddy from Manhattan's mean streets. Siegel has also been widely credited for the creation of the Las Vegas gambling industry during the post-World War II years, a notion that is perpetuated in "Bugsy." Says the film's director, Barry ("Rainman") Levinson: "Basically (the film) is Bugsy's years in Hollywood. . . and ultimately the concept of Vegas… Vegas was a crazy vision, but I wouldn't call Bugsy a visionary."
In fact, Siegel was only one among dozens of gangsters who built and bankrolled Las Vegas, although he did personally spearhead the building of its first luxury hotel-casino, the Flamingo. When the high-spending and high-profile style of Bugsy and his flamboyant moll Virginia Hill began to worry his mob partners, they had him gunned down in his Los Angeles home, on June 20, 1947.
One of those partners was Bugsy's old friend Meyer Lansky the Jewish gangster whose legend today captures the public imagination more than any other. Described as "the brains behind the Mob" and its "chairman of the board," Lansky was a soft-spoken, low-key little man who stayed resolutely in the background while his more colorful cohorts grabbed the spotlight. Born Meyer Suchowljansky in Grodno, Poland, in 1902, he was once called the Mafia's Henry Kissinger by comedian Jackie Mason, who asked, "How could all those Italians have created something like the Mob unless they had a Jew to show them?"
Lansky has been portrayed on screen a number of times, most notably in the guise of Michael Corleone's treacherous partner Hyman Roth in "The Godfather II." Like Dutch and Bugsy, Lansky has also been the focus of recent media attention, thanks to the publication this autumn of Robert Lacey's biography "Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life" (Little-Brown). But whereas "Billy Bathgate" and "Bugsy" glamorize their subjects, Lacey's meticulously researched book punctures some of the myths surrounding Lansky.
It is true that Lansky was a sometime partner and adviser to the first modern Mafioso, Charlie "Lucky" Luciano; that he controlled Havana's gambling scene until Castro closed down the casinos in 1959; and that he was the mastermind behind a "skimming" operation that siphoned untold millions for organized crime from Las Vegas casino earnings. It's also true that in the early 70s he made an unsuccessful attempt to emigrate to Israel, in the hope of putting himself beyond the reach of U.S. government prosecution (see box); and that he died peacefully in his Florida home in 1983, having spent a total of less than four months in jail despite a lifetime in crime.
But Lacey torpedoes the view that Lansky was ever the big boss or financial mastermind behind organized crime. After Prohibition, Lansky's scope of activities was limited largely to gambling, as he avoided involvement with more violent mob enterprises like labor racketeering, loan-sharking and drug trafficking. Lacey also found little evidence to support the oft-quoted claim that Lansky was worth "$ 300 million" an arbitrary estimate, made up by journalist and Lansky biographer Hank Messick. In fact, after two decades of expensive legal wrangles prior to his death in 1983, Lansky ended up leaving his family less than $ 300,000. And Lansky, despite his talent with numbers, was no financial genius; almost all of the legitimate businesses he dabbled in (oil wells, TV distribution) ended in failure.
The portrait Lacey paints of Lansky is not the popular one of a sinister super-criminal, but that of a cold, calculating conniver with modest personal desires, who basically saw himself as a businessman providing for the essential illicit desires of a hypocritical society. Shortly before his death, Lansky complained to a reporter: "What have I done that's worse than all the fixers on Wall Street? But I'm the one who gets all the blame."
Perhaps but unless a generation from now financiers like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken show up on the movie screen played by the Warren Beattys and Dustin Hoffmans of that day, it can be said that along with all the blame and shame, Meyer, Dutch and Bugsy have also ended up with a share of dubious glory. With reporting by Sheli Teitelbaum, Los Angeles