Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons and Gangster Dreams by Rich Cohen Cape, 271pp, £16.99 in UK
So I'm sitting at home, minding my own business; it's Monday. The stew is cooking, the kids are screaming. It's normal. Then the phone gives a bell and this guy Cohen comes on the line. He's in New York. He wants to talk about "Kid Twist" Reles. He wants to talk about Meyer Lansky. He wants to remind me of how the boys killed Joe Rubin in his own candy store. He wants to tell me that Jews have not always been victims or in libraries or making jokes at the Palladium. He wants to give me the lowdown on the Jewish gangsters - the tough Jews.
The kid talks a good spiel. But then, shouldn't he. His old man Herbie wrote You Can Negotiate Anything, which my contacts down on Wall Street tell me is the salesman's bible, Old Testament anyway. At the end I'm thinking, yeah, when are we going to see The Rabbi up there on screen telling the story of three generations of Jewish hoods . . .?
Phew, accents can be tiresome. The tone which Rich Cohen, now on the staff of Rolling Stone, takes in his account of the Jewish footsoldiers of gangdom in New York is never so stereotypical, but lively, engaging, at times wistful. He admits that there is a certain regret for these dead criminals, based largely on his own father's fascination with them and on their function as showing that Jews could stand up, play rough and be mean.
For us Western gentiles, our view of Jewish identity has been formed somewhere between the Holocaust and Woody Allen: the victim of unspeakable suffering, the dispossessed, the survivor, the thinker, the intellectual, the kitchen philosopher, the writer, the originator of a thousand great one-liners, all grafted on to the older images of the merchant of Venice, the money lender, the Sephardic masses expelled from Spain, the tens of thousands evicted from the lands of the Russian empire. Rich Cohen has exhumed the bones, metaphorically, of these wonderful (in the classical sense of the word) characters, men with nicknames such as Kid Twist, Bugsy, Happy, Legs Diamond, Pretty Levine, Dopey Benny, Blue Jaw Magoon. They roamed New York in the Twenties and Thirties, stealing, running protection rackets, countering Prohibition, turning to drug-running, and, most of all, killing each other in a variety of imaginative and chilling ways.
Rich Cohen, whose grandparents ran a diner frequented by many of these characters, became fascinated by how such criminals have been airbrushed out of the scene. "Most people have never heard of Jewish gangsters," he writes. "The very idea of a Jewish gangster goes against basic stereotypes of Jews, stereotypes that explain the place of Jews in the world. Jews are physically unthreatening office creatures." He points out that before the 1960s the Jewish gangster was still recognised by Hollywood. Hoodlums in gangster movies were "as likely to be eating corned-beef as pasta". But somewhere along the line these characters disappeared, partly because of the Godfather effect, the string of very watchable pictures about Italian gangsters from the early 1970s on. Cohen says that Once Upon a Time in America, the only contemporary movie to give anything like equal time to the Jewish gangsters, was made by Sergio Leone, of Italian descent and best-known for his spaghetti Westerns. Was Steven Spielberg ever going to make a film about Jewish gangsters? We don't think so.
And yet, what rich material there is. Tales like that of Monk Eastman, who was born in Brooklyn in the 1870s. Cohen describes Monk (real name Edward Osterman) as looking "like an artclass sculpture by an eight-yearold: his nose really just the suggestion of a nose, his mouth a dark gash. His hair was parted neatly - an odd, dandified feature, like a hat on a horse".
Despite a nice middle-class background, Monk preferred thugdom, and had amassed a gang of up to a thousand East Side Jews by 1904, when he accidentally shot a private detective dead, was caught and sent to Sing Sing (described by Cohen as "the university for Jewish gangsters"). When he was released in 1916 the underworld had moved on. Unable to regain his place on the ladder, he joined the US army after America entered the first World War in 1917. When he went for his medical, the doctor, noting the various knife wounds and marks on his body, asked Eastman what other wars he had fought in. "Just a lot of little wars around New York," said the Monk.
Accepted, he was sent to France where he became a battlefield hero. Back in New York in 1919, Governor Al Smith signed an executive order restoring Eastman to full untainted citizenship. But the leopard changeth not his spots. Just after Christmas 1920 Monk Eastman was found, shot five times, in front of the Bluebird Cafe on 14th Street. He was buried with military honours.
This is a fascinating book, though many of the anecdotes related casually are much more ghastly than the quaint tale of the Monk - for example, the famed "Ladies' Night" of 1935 when "the boys" decided that for once they would answer the constant questions of their wives and girlfriends as to "what do you DO when you are out at night, where do you go when you disappear for 48 hours?" The little ladies were rounded up, herded into sedans and taxis, collected from bed and moviehouse and taken en masse to be proudly shown the handiwork of their menfolk: the body of Pretty Amberg, who had died the death of a thousand cuts, worked over with knives, slashed to bloody ribbons, then driven out to an isolated spot where the vehicle containing his corpse was doused with petrol. One of the ladies had the honour of lighting the match which set off his funeral pyre. So then they knew.
Cohen's book is very interesting, although it suffers somewhat from the circumstances of its birth, the old men's tales in diners which often seem to constitute its main structure. The measured progression of Lawrence Ber green's 1994 biography of Al Capone, for example, is missing. Yet Cohen did not base his book only on the anecdotes of those still alive who remember the Jewish gangsters. One of his main sources of information was an archive in Chambers Street, Manhattan, where, he says, he spent three solid months sorting through boxes of material relating to Jewish gangsters, and Murder Incorporated in particular. "It was like going through an attic," Cohen says. "So much stuff, and for hours you might be saying `Boring, boring, boring', and then all of a sudden `Wow! Paydirt'. "
The archive boxes contain ice picks used in assassinations, ropes used to strangle people, getaway maps - a confused jumble that reflects colourfully the life and times of the Jewish gangs. They were mostly small-timers, Cohen says, but the foot soldiers of the whole gang era. "People say I am glamorising these gangs, that they were just killers and criminals, and I know this is true to a point. But what appeals to me is that these were Jews who fought back, who didn't lie down and accept their fate, and whether they were right or wrong they did that, and this is also part of Jewishness."
Angela Long is an Irish Times staff journalist