Case File | The Incorruptibles

From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

In a lot of ways, the history of organized crime mirrors the rise and fall of the world's greatest empires.

And there's always one guy there at the top when everything starts crumbling to the ground.

When John Gotti took over the Gambino crime family in 1985, he reigned over the New York mafia at the peak of its prominence and power.

But it was only a brief shining moment for the Dapper Don.

Like any leader, John was a product of his time.

He'd clawed his way out of poverty and spent years earning his place in the Gambino family through extortion, theft and murder.

Life taught him to seek power without remorse, no matter what rules he had to break to get it.

After organizing one of the boldest hits in mob history, John became a new kind of mafia boss, one who didn't shy away from the press and cameras.

He wore his power like his flashy tailored suits, winning as many fans as he did critics.

But John Gotti's self-serving ego also won him the eye of the federal government.

Though it took years, the Teflon Don was eventually locked away, and his organization, his empire, was driven to a low point.

John's story, his rise and inevitable fall, is just one link in a chain going back generations.

Before his story played out, with the drugs and the murder and betrayals, before the Italian Mafia took over New York's underworld, Weiss was controlled by Eastern European Jews in the city's Lower East Side.

Gangs of horse poisoners, casino tycoons, thieves, and sex workers vied for dominance throughout the early 20th century.

But history always repeats itself.

Like with John Gotti, the law eventually rose against these gangs.

An off-the-books Weiss squad known as The Incorruptibles embarked on a campaign to purge the Lower East Side of crime and sin.

These men refused to be bought off or threatened by organized crime.

Led by a passionate reformer, the detectives utilized an extensive network of informants to learn all they could about their targets.

Armed with intel and local support, they took on the Yiddish Black Hand, raided illegal casinos and put an end to extortion.

Their diligent work changed the face of New York, at least for a time.

But it also paved the way for a new kind of mobster to fill the power vacuum left behind.

Because despite taking place in different eras, the stories of John Gotti and The Incorruptibles are intimately connected.

From the Dapper Don to a cracked team of zealous detectives, this is The Incorruptibles from the podcast Most Notorious.

Welcome all to the Most Notorious podcast.

I'm Eric Rivenes.

Hope you're having a wonderful summer.

Thank you so much for downloading and continuing to stay interested in the show.

I am very excited to introduce Dan Slater to the podcast.

Today, he has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Texas Monthly, The Boston Globe, and many other periodicals.

His book Wolf Boys was voted a Best Book of 2016 by the Chicago Public Library, and it will soon be a major motion picture from Sony.

His latest book is called The Incorruptibles, a true story of kingpins, crime busters, and the birth of the American underworld.

And it came out on July 16th.

Thank you so much for coming on the show, so great to have you.

Thank you, Eric.

It's a pleasure to be here.

So your previous book, Wolf Boys, is about two American teenagers recruited as killers for a Mexican cartel.

So this book, The Incorruptibles, it must have been quite a shift for you.

Yes, yes and no.

It was certainly on the face.

It's different.

It was my first historical project.

All the other articles and books I've done have had some historical angle to them.

But this is the first narrative I'm telling that's entirely based in the past.

And there was no one that I could go to speak to.

This was a book that was pulled entirely from the archives.

But as far as comparisons to Wolf Boys, they're both set in Underworlds.

And they both have a lot to do with Vice Prohibition, which has been, I feel like, a big theme in America in the 20th century.

And when I was working on Wolf Boys, I had a misunderstanding that the drug wars went back to the 1970s, roughly, with Nixon.

And once I started working on The Incorruptibles, that research opened my eyes to the fact that no, no, no, a lot of the vice laws that we know today actually originated in the early 1900s, earlier than a lot of people think.

So if there was a parallel or if there was a sort of a common thread between these two books, I would say that vice and the origins of vice have a lot to do with both.

Otherwise, they have nothing in common.

Right.

So yeah, much of your story takes place in New York City's Lower East Side in the early 1900s.

Could you set the scene for us?

Where in Manhattan is it?

Who lived there?

What were some of the vices that one could find as a visitor traveling to the Lower East Side?

Sure.

Well, the Lower East Side, and we're talking here like south of 14th Street, west of the Bowery, all the way over to the East River, it feels big when you're walking through it, but it's not a lot of geographical area.

It was a ghetto by the time of the 1880s.

Now, before the Eastern European Jewish refugees begin to arrive in 1882, the neighborhood had been mostly Irish.

And to the extent there was vice among the Irish or an underworld, that was mostly, we're talking there kind of mostly like thugs, the street gangs, thievery.

There was not a big organized underworld until the Jews arrive.

And then it becomes expansive over the course of the, say, two decades between 1882 and the early 1900s.

A big underworld evolves.

And you've got prostitution, you have gambling, and you have a lot of crime, a lot of violence.

There was a horse poisoning gang.

Again, this is something that had, you could have found in Russia, and it was kind of imported to New York.

But this was a gang that called themselves the Yiddish Black Hand.

And they would go around to local businesses and extort them and say, hey, if you don't want to show up to work tomorrow and have half your stable forces poisoned, you need to pay us a certain amount a month.

So there was a lot of crime.

The population was huge.

By about 1905, Lower East Side is the most densely packed urban area in the world, surpassing Bombay, India, which is, of course, the modern day Mumbai.

And it was interesting because these Eastern European refugees who populated this area, they were coming from another ghetto, the Pale of Settlements in Russia, which was not the most densely packed area, but one of the largest ghettos in the world in terms of just the geography of it, because there we're talking about the entire western border of Russia, 17 provinces where the Jews of Russia were forced to live.

So they're moving from the largest ghetto in the world to the most densely populated one.

And there was a lot of vice there.

And when I say big and expansive underworld or like an organized underworld, I actually mean organized.

There was a fraternity of pimps, like an actual union of these pimps who would all gather at a cafe on Second Avenue.

These guys were incorporated under New York state law.

There were bylaws and a constitution on file in Albany.

And for the other sort of underworld fiefdoms, there was a similar kind of organization where they'd be a club, where all the people who participate in that vice would kind of gather almost like a political thing, you know, a place where you pull your resources, you pull your political leverage, you pull your money together to pay up to the cops or the politicians.

So there was a lot of crime.

And that is, roughly speaking, that's the world of the book.

Right, right.

I want to go back for a quick moment and ask you about a couple of things you just mentioned.

First, the Yiddish Black Hand.

That came from the Italian Black Hand, right?

That's where it got its name.

They stole the phrase Black Hand from the Italians.

And the reason that they did that was because the Italian Black Hand was known to be particularly vicious and particularly ruthless.

They would kidnap your child for ransom money.

And it was kind of a relentless thing.

And so the Jewish horse poisoners operated on similarly ruthless principles.

And so they called themselves the Yiddish Black Hand.

And they took some of the tactics, like the letter writing thing.

You know, they would send these letters to businesses who relied heavily on horses to move their product around.

And they would focus on businesses that traded in particularly perishable goods.

So fruit and vegetables, ice cream, anything that needed to be moved fast to get it to the customer before it spoiled or before it melted.

These are the people who really needed their horses to be in good shape for the business to work.

So those were the kinds of businesses that the horse poisons would go after.

But these folks began to operate the earliest articles I found of horse poisoning in New York and the Lower East Side are probably about 1891, 1893.

And then over the years, it starts to speed up and speed up where more and more horses were poisoned every day in the city.

And it culminates or, you know, climaxes around 1910 or so where you have a hundred, you know, a couple hundred horses a week are being poisoned.

So that was one of many things that the reformers wanted to wipe out.

How were these horses poisoned?

Did people sneak into their stables and poison them there?

Yes, there was, there was that.

That's a great question because it is a detail that is known.

What the horse poisoners would do is they would fry up balls of flaxseed, which is a bit sweet and horses like flaxseed, and they would put arsenic in the flaxseed balls.

So, and then someone would sneak into the stable at night and they would put one of these arsenic balls in the feed or they would give it directly to the horse.

And the thing about the arsenic poisoning is it takes about 12 hours to kick in.

So, the horse doesn't just drop that night.

The next day, the business owner saddles up the horses to go out for a delivery and you're in the middle of the streets and all of a sudden the horse just drops dead.

Oh, that's horrible.

Yeah.

And there was, I mean, dead horses were, that was a common sight in the city.

There were about 70,000 to 100,000 work horses in the city.

You know, at any given time, horses were everywhere.

And then by about 1910, 11, 12, that's when automobiles began to go mainstream.

So, by about 1912, we had a situation where the streets were 50% autos, 50% horses.

And you can imagine how difficult that was for the horses, because, you know, you're trying to imagine being, being, you know, a horse, you're pulling a carriage or whatever down Fifth Avenue, and you got all these really loud cars screaming by.

And those early cars were very, very loud.

We've all seen a horse get spooked before, but you had these horses getting spooked constantly.

And some of them would just take off down the street.

So you have loose horses running around, and the newspapers of the time are filled with stories of, you know, a horse gets loose on, you know, a street and just takes off and runs over a baby carriage or plummets off the side of a bridge and falls on a car, you know, below.

So this was something that people of the time were dealing with, even without having these horse poisoners around.

Geez.

Also, the term ghetto, which you mentioned as well, that's an Italian word, correct?

It is a Jewish Italian word.

Again, this is one of the most, one of the more interesting things I learned while working on the book is that the word ghetto originates in Venice in the early 1500s.

There were about 100 or 150 Jewish refugees who had fled a nearby war, and they showed up in Venice, I think this was around like 1509 or something.

And the people of Venice were split over what to do with the Jews.

The church wanted them out of the city, and people in the Venetian Senate, the politicians saw how they could be useful in certain ways as money lenders, as providers of used clothing and so forth.

So the people of Venice struck and compromised, is it okay?

Well, let these Jews stay here, but we're going to have an area where they're going to live.

And so there was an island in Venice that had been a copper foundry, and the copper foundry was no longer there, it had been dismantled.

So that became the area where the Jews lived.

And there was a bridge that went into sort of the main part of Venice.

And in the morning, they would, the gate would be unlocked and they could go into the main part of Venice and do their jobs.

And then at night, they would go back onto the island.

Catare is the Italian word to pour or to cast.

So that was a word that would have been involved with a copper foundry.

And I believe G-E-T-O was possibly the word for a foundry, although don't quote me on that.

But anyway, the Jews who lived there realized that, hey, this is gonna be our situation for a while.

And they had a word in their own language, the get, which is a document of a divorce that a Jewish wife needs to get from the husband in order to be officially released from the marriage.

And they were looking at this new living environment to sort of their divorce from society.

So they called it the ghetto, the get, the ghetto.

And that's where that word evolves from.

And it up until the middle of the 20th century in America, really prior to World War II or so, if you said the word, you know, if you said the word ghetto, the only connotation would have been Jewish, which is much different than today.

I mean, today, if I hear that word, what am I going to think of?

I'm going to think of black, brown, possibly Native American.

I would have never thought of Jews in relation, but that just shows the sort of commonalities of, you know, marginalization over the centuries.

And it seems like there's always going to be somebody who is put on the outside or forced to live in an area that no one else wants to live.

There's a museum in that neighborhood called the Tenement Museum.

Yeah.

On my bucket list of places to visit, what do you think about the Tenement Museum?

Does it give visitors a solid idea of what life was like in the Lower East Side during this time period?

It gives a very good idea of what it was like to live in the Tenements.

The Tenement Museum is a great museum.

It is somewhat unlike maybe other museums that people are used to because there are no permanent exhibits per se, aside from the lived-in areas where they take you.

So there's a bookstore when you go into the museum, and the bookstore they have is wonderful.

And then you can go visit certain preserved places, like a tenement where they know the history of it, they know the families who lived there.

You walk inside of the apartment and it's still the way that it was.

So in that sense, yeah, you get a very good sense of what it was like.

The harder thing to get a sense of what it was like is, what were the streets actually like?

What did it feel like to walk through the place?

What were the sounds?

What were the smells?

What were the sights?

What was the feel of it?

And I guess that's what I'm trying to evoke in the book.

Right, right.

So one of the main figures in your book is Arnold Rothstein.

I did an episode about him years and years ago.

His name pops up occasionally in interviews here.

Would you give us a refresher on Rothstein?

Tell us his origin story.

Yeah, Rothstein is a fascinating character.

The Rothstein was born to Orthodox Jews in New York in the early 1880s.

And they had been Russian Jews, but their story was different from the other Eastern European arrivals because the Rothstein grandfather had come from Russia a bit earlier, in the 1840s, during the time of the German Jewish immigration.

So the Rothsteins were, by the 1880s, Arnold's father had inherited the garment business that his father had started in New York.

They were decently well off.

They lived uptown in a brownstone.

And Arnold was one of the children of this family.

He was one of the middle sons.

Really, they had three sons.

He was the middle son.

And his older brother was kind of the pride of the family.

Very intelligent, went to synagogue, knew the Talmud.

He was very friendly.

He had kind of an easygoing laugh.

And Arnold's dad always kind of wanted Arnold to be like his older brother.

But Arnold liked other things.

He wanted to be on the streets.

He loved to gamble.

The 1890s in New York was a wide open period.

It was a wide open city during that time.

And what that means is that you could walk down the street and get a gambling game pretty much anywhere.

Yes, there were some laws, but the laws weren't observed and the cops looked the other way.

And there were payoffs.

And it wasn't just the casinos.

You get a dice game on the street.

And this was just everywhere.

And he loved that world.

He didn't like school, but he had a head for numbers.

And he loved to go around the city, kind of collecting the odds for all these different games that you found.

And because of that predilection, the fissure between him and his dad got bigger and bigger.

And Arnold split off on his own.

And he became a gambler.

He became a gambler of every kind.

And that's how he started his life.

There was a casino owner at the time named Richard Canfield, an Arnold idolized Canfield.

And he wanted to be the next Canfield.

He wanted to open up, you know, not just a casino, but a beautiful casino in Midtown, not in the Lower East Side, but up in Midtown.

And he wanted to cater to the sons of the Gilded Age, all these guys who had inherited all this money and could spend as much as they wanted.

And he enjoyed sort of fleecing those sorts of people.

So that's how he gets his start in life.

And then, of course, through the events I tell in the story, he becomes eventually something else entirely, although that kind of risk taking addiction of the gambler is what sticks with him.

So even as he gets into the liquor trade during prohibition and the drug trade eventually, all of those things seem to satisfy his love of risk.

And he was central to the underworld.

And he was central to organizing a new underworld after these new anti-vice laws helped eliminate the old one.

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Yeah.

It's been a long time, but I did do an episode about the Black Sox scandal, and Rothstein, of course, was involved in that event.

But one of his gambling contemporaries was a man named Herman Rosenthal.

And your book opens with the murder of Rosenthal on July 16th, 1912.

Could you tell us more about the murder and why it would become important in the history of New York City crime?

Yeah.

So, Arnold Rothstein and Herman Rosenthal met on the Lower East Side when they were both very young.

Herman was about eight years older than Arnold, but they both loved to gamble and they came up together.

They both ended up owning a casino around Times Square in 1911, 1912.

But they were different people.

They lived by a different code.

Arnold came from assimilated people.

He came from a bit of money.

He came from a bit of privilege and he was more kind of debonair.

He didn't like to ruffle feathers.

He didn't do things with violence.

He did things with your brain.

Herman was more brash and Herman was upset because he was paying off these cops to look the other way.

But he was still getting raided anyway.

And eventually, he starts to get angry about that and he starts to talk.

He starts to talk to reporters.

He starts to go to the district attorney saying, hey, I got a story of corruption in the NYPD.

And so the more Herman does this, the more heat he brings to himself.

And the Rosenthal murder has been kind of famous throughout history.

There have been a couple books written on it and it's never been clear exactly why.

I just think it's a very sensational case.

There are a lot of larger than life figures involved with it.

And of course, there was also a cop who got involved.

And that cop would end up going to the electric chair, becoming the first cop in American history to be executed by the state.

What I discovered through my research though, is that one of the most interesting effects of the Rosenthal murder was not really anything to do with the case itself or how it was resolved, but it was that it inspired these wealthy up-towners to finally do something about the crime issue amongst the co-religionists who live downtown in the ghetto.

And so, the Rosenthal murder, which as you say the book opens with, becomes in a way the inciting moment for the story that I'm telling.

And that affects Rothstein and his business, right?

Because it shines a public light on this nefarious relationship between the city's underworld and corrupt members of its police department.

It definitely affected, yeah, that's absolutely right.

The world of the sort of the New York of the casino was kind of over.

You know, you could no longer walk into a brownstone just openly and just like, you know, imagine Las Vegas in the middle of New York.

Those those days were kind of ended by the Rosenthal murder.

And so it's a big moment for Arnold because he has to adapt to this new world and figure out how to make opportunities for himself.

And in a way, that's where the Rothstein story, I feel like really begins.

I mean, there's a lot of amazing things that happened in his life before then.

But the Rosenthal murder and the fallout from it, that's what incites him to become the Rothstein that we know today or think about now.

The guy who might have fixed the World Series, the guy who finances bootleggers and the narcotics underworld, et cetera.

Absolutely, yeah.

So one of the fun things about your book, and turn of the 20th century New York City always delivers on this, are all of these fascinating characters with colorful nicknames.

And one of these characters you write about was a woman known as Tony the Tough.

Would you tell us more about her?

Yeah, so her nickname in the underworld was Tony the Tough.

Her name is Antonia Rolnick, and she is not a figure that is known to history at all.

You're not going to find her in any books.

She was someone who came out of the archival research that I did.

And I thought she was just a fascinating figure.

And also, I felt like she was representative of the young women on the Lower East Side at the time.

The kinds of women who had come from the Pale of Settlement as refugees, got here and as 13, 14, 15 year olds, they left the school system, which ultimately became just too overloaded really, because of all the immigration.

And they went to work in the garment factories, which was kind of a miserable life.

And they famously advocated for themselves.

Toni starts off in that world, and then she gets lured into the underworld.

I don't want to say too much about the hows and the whys of that, but she becomes a prostitute, and she kind of makes her way through the underworld, and through the course of the narrative, she sort of hops back and forth between, from the kind of, say, the bad guys to the good guys.

And she has a relationship with the main figure in the book.

So they do, you know, crime fighting together, but then sometimes she hops back to the other side.

And she was, she, in my eyes, is kind of the, one of the main three figures in the book.

And she was not someone I expected to find at all when I embarked on this.

She just, as I said, she popped out of the library materials.

Right, right.

So, let's talk more about this third figure you mentioned, Abe Schoenfeld.

Tell us about his life, if you don't mind, and how he became a detective.

Yeah, so Abe, Abe Schoenfeld is the person who kind of got me into this project.

He was the first figure that I found when I started researching this era.

And he was the son of a famous reformer.

Abe was born in 1891, and his father was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant.

So was his mother.

And his father was kind of a great man.

He'd become a tailor, but then he gave that up to become a union leader, fighting for labor rights, for the Lower East Side refugees.

At a time when there was no labor regulation at all, there was no limit on hours worked, there was no minimum wage, there were no factory regulations for safety or anything like that.

And so Abe's father led some of the first strikes in the garment industry when Abe was a child.

So that was the world that Abe was raised in.

Eventually what happens is his father decides that the kind of, you know, the labor agitation world is pointless because they're not going to make the gains that they want until there are actual laws in place that require garment manufacturers to meet certain expectations.

So Abe's father pivots to the criminal underworld, not as a criminal, but as someone who's trying to stamp it out.

And that happens in the early 1900s or 1901.

His dad takes on the problem of Jewish prostitution.

And there was not a lot of success with that either.

But again, this is the world that Abe is raised in.

And by the time he becomes a young man, the vice reform movement is starting to grow and starting to become more well backed and more well financed.

And so after the Rosenthal murder, the German Jews who live uptown decide, hey, all the crime in the Lower East Side among the Eastern Europeans is giving us a bad reputation at a time when we can't afford that.

And they felt like they needed to take serious actions.

So they contact Abe, who at the time was a 21-year-old.

He dropped out of high school when he was 15.

And for the previous five or six years, the five or six years that followed that, he had been kind of an underworld researcher, kind of almost a freelance writer and researcher.

He'd go into brothels, he'd interview prostitutes about their lives.

He would put this information into reports that he would then hand to the uptowners who used it for whatever they used it for.

They used it to get a headline in the newspapers.

They used it to unseat a politician, whatever.

But there wasn't any serious reform going on.

So by the time Abe is 21, he's already kind of jaded.

He's like, no one's actually ever gonna do anything.

I'm kind of just being used for these ulterior motives.

And so that's the state of mind when the German Jews call him in and say, hey, we would like you to seriously investigate the underworld of the Lower East Side, pass us information about who's doing what, and we will pass that information on to the mayor.

And the mayor can then deal with the police department.

And so this is what he starts off doing.

And in the first few months of doing this, which is the end of 1912, he has some unexpected success.

And eventually the mayor of the city says, I'm not very into reform.

I don't believe in vice reform.

I believe it's a tool that the wealthy people use to suppress minorities.

That said, we got to do something.

And I like the way this kit operates.

So the mayor installed Abe in the police department and gave him a squad.

And that story right there that I just described, that was kind of the rough outline that I understood going into the project.

So that was like the kernel that got me interested.

And that's where I started with Abe.

And then Tony the Tough, Antonia and Rostein, they come later.

As I proceed to understand Abe's life in the world that he operated in.

Right, yeah.

So we all know about Chicago's Untouchables.

Los Angeles had their gangster squad in the 1940s.

This is a similar situation, right?

The Incorruptibles.

It is similar.

It's a generation earlier.

And it's at a time, it is similar and it's different.

This earlier period is the very dawn of vice reform.

When laws against drugs, laws against gambling, laws against prostitution, these things are just coming into existence.

Before then, you could up until 1911 or so in the city, you could just walk in your local pharmacy, you could buy morphine, you could buy cocaine, you could get pure heroin, pretty much whatever you wanted.

And all these things start to become illegal thanks to the reformers and the vice reformers.

But what were their motives at the time?

Well, the motives during Abe's era was he wanted to clean up his neighborhood, he was embarrassed.

He lived in the ghetto, he was born in the ghetto.

A lot of his friends, including the woman that he fell in love with, sort of get sucked into the underworld.

And he was sick of that, and he was ashamed of it.

So that was his motivation.

And so his motivation is kind of different than the motivation of the wealthy up-towners who are hiring him.

But when you then jump to the next era, to kind of the Elliott Ness era, the Capone era, by then you have all these anti-vice laws.

They're now entrenched in American life, and they've gone to the federal level.

So you have the 14-year experiment with prohibition from roughly 1920 to 1934.

You have the drug laws continuing to tighten, tighten, tighten at the federal level.

So when we watch a movie, or at least when I watch a movie like The Untouchables, or I read the book The Untouchables that was written in the 1950s, for me to really care about that story, I have to care about Al Capone getting taken down.

I have to care about prohibition.

Abe's era was different.

It was more about looking around your local neighborhood and wanting to clean it up.

It wasn't that you were going to take on one vice.

It wasn't this feeling that we needed to eliminate the marijuana fields in Mexico or wipe out the head of the Sinaloa Cartel.

It wasn't a single thing.

It was more of a pragmatic approach.

We want to clean up our cities.

We don't want to have so much shame in our neighborhoods.

So in a sense, that was kind of a more wholesome approach.

And then by the time we get to Elliott Ness and the gangster squad in LA in the 40s, the idea of reform has almost gone out the window completely.

And I don't even think the word reform would be mentioned in, you know, conversations by probably the end of the 1920s.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

So this group, The Incorruptibles, who were its members?

How was it formed?

So it was very informal.

Abe is installed in the police department at the beginning of 1913.

And his condition for taking on this job was that he wanted to handpick a squad of his own, so 20 cops that he was going to handpick.

These were going to be people who didn't take money from the underworld.

And he was basically going to be feeding them information so they could go out and shut down the things that he wanted to shut down.

So it was a lot of power put in the hands, a lot of power and money put in the hands of a 21-year-old.

And so this squad within the NYPD becomes known as The Incorruptibles.

The way I think of it, though, is not just the squad itself, but also this huge web of informants that Abe had.

So he was getting tens of thousands of dollars from these wealthy uptowners.

And keep in mind that trying to translate money then to money now, the multiple is about 20 to 25.

So $10,000 is maybe 200, 250 grand.

He was getting like 20, $50,000 at a time to sort of spread around.

And he didn't have to return receipts.

He didn't have to show what he was spending it on.

They just said, go and do what you do.

So he was able to buy himself this big network of informants.

And those were people who show up in his reports, usually by, you know, a pseudonym.

And, but you can tell that he was getting a lot of information from people.

So the way I think of The Incorruptibles, I think of it as the vice squad within the police department.

But then I also think of it as all these people who were feeding him information because for all kinds of motivations, maybe they just wanted money.

But a lot of them were also sick of seeing their neighborhood the way that it was.

Particularly if you're a business owner and you've shown up one day and all your horses are dead in the stable, you know, then...

Right, right.

It's scary to take on the horse poisoners, but at some point, you know, what is your option if you want to continue to do business?

So a lot of Abe's struggle over the course of the story is trying to convince people in the population of the Lower East Side, the community there, to say, hey, we're taking these guys on for real, and then basically trying to lower the fear factor of it.

These people were coming from ghetto to ghetto to ghetto for centuries.

So for them, corruption was just business.

You know, you paid off people.

There was going to be violence.

There was going to be...

And you just paid off the cops, or you paid off whoever, or, you know, your co-religious or neighbor who was shaking you down.

And you kept your mouth shut.

And so Abe had to kind of try...

That was the attitude that he was fighting a lot of the time.

Yeah, right.

And it wasn't just fear in the Jewish community, the city's regular citizenry.

They were frightened too.

And much of that fear was fueled by an article in the North American Review written by Theodore Bingham, the Commissioner of the New York Police Department.

Yeah.

Bingham was the Commissioner of the NYPD from roughly 1905 or 1904 to maybe 1909.

And in 1908, he writes a big feature article in the North American Review, which at the time is a pretty popular periodical in the US., and he writes this long article where he's blaming all the crime in the city on what he calls Russian Hebrews.

And it's pretty sharply worded.

He's saying, you know, they're all pickpockets and thieves, but they operate in every in every underworld category.

And it was kind of full of anti-Semitism, and it ruffled a lot of feathers, and it also showed who Bingham was.

And that's the way he ran the police department.

You know, round up all the Jews you can find, send them back to Russia.

And the article, I think when we look back on it now, it shows you what the temperament was like in the country at the time, because he wouldn't have put that out there if he didn't think that there were a lot of people who believed what he believed.

Now, at the time, there was a lot of crime in the city.

It wasn't only Jewish people.

But of course, the Jews lived in the big ghetto, and they were very good at organizing the underworld because they had been doing it for a long time, because they'd been marginalized for a long time.

You know, going back to the money-lending law that the Christians come up with in the 11th or 12th century in order to galvanize the Christian community in Europe, they say, okay, what's going to make a Christian a Christian?

Well, we need a law.

Okay, well, the law is going to be you can't lend money to people.

And it was kind of an inconvenient time to have an anti-money lending law because capitalism at the same time was becoming the other world religion.

And for capitalism, what do you need?

You need money lending and credit.

They said, all right, well, we're outlining money lending, but we also need money lending.

So what are we going to do?

Well, we'll give it to the Jews to do because they're already tainted.

People already don't like them.

So this is a theme that begins then, but it's so resonant today.

Anyway, so down through the generations, the Jews knew how to organize an underworld.

They'd been doing it for years.

So there was a lot of crime in the Lower East Side, and Bingham's article is one of those moments that kind of brings the German Jewish up-towners together and says, oh man, this is tough.

We gotta do something, but we don't wanna do something because A, what do we do?

And if we come up with something to do, then is this gonna somehow spring back on us?

So it took another few years for them to kind of get up the motivation, the guts to do something and to call in Abe after the Rosenthal murder in 1912.

But the Bingham article in a sense got the ball rolling.

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Right.

So one of these German Jewish businessmen, his name was Jacob Schiff.

He played a role in this drama.

Now, was Schoenfeld meeting with Schiff or any of these other business leaders or the district attorney?

Who did he report to?

Who was he coordinating this all with?

He is coordinating a lot of it on his own.

He's been given free reign, but there is a kind of a bridge, a kind of spy handler figure who is the kind of intermediary between Abe and the German Jewish uptowners who are flipping the bill for all of this.

And that is a rabbi named Magnus.

Who was, Judah Magnus was a young rabbi from California.

He came to New York to minister to the German Jewish uptowners at their fancy synagogue on Fifth Avenue.

And Magnus eventually becomes kind of embittered toward the uptowners that he's working for because, mainly because he doesn't think they're doing enough about crime on the Lower East Side.

And so he actually left their synagogue in 1910, but he remained part of this kind of secretive organization that they had.

And when this organization decided to wage a war on the underworld and to get Abe in there, Magnus becomes the go-between.

So Abe would get information, he would get money through Magnus, but Magnus and him had an agreement that Abe didn't really need to tell him anything.

So the answer to the question, Abe never really dealt with these business people uptown directly.

He knew who they all were.

In fact, he'd met Schiff when he was a kid, because Schiff worked with Abe's father on a bunch of failed reform efforts in the late 1890s and the early 1900s.

But yeah, I mean, Abe was this, he was this young guy.

He was 21 years old.

And over the course of the Vice Crusade, which, you know, lasts roughly three years from 1912 to 1915, he's probably given somewhere in the neighborhood of like $100,000 to spend, which is maybe $2 to $2.5 million today.

Wow.

So along with this army of informants that he had assembled with this cash, he also utilized the latest technology in his fight against crime.

Yeah, it was a really interesting period.

And it was fun to research some of this.

Cause again, I did not know anything about it, but for instance, wiretaps, the wiretap technology that we know today was just starting then.

And wiretaps play a role in the story.

Of course, fingerprinting had been around for a few years, but I believe 1911 or 1912 is the first time that a fingerprint is used to convict somebody.

Obviously, telephone use is expanding and there is a voice recorder that is just coming into existence.

So you could wiretap someone who is using the phone, but you could also record somebody in a private conversation that was not on a phone.

There were also new invasions and weaponry.

They had just started to put lights and sights onto handguns.

These sort of, you know, so you could shoot in the dark, I guess.

And, yeah, there was a lot of technology involved that becomes pertinent to the story I tell in the book.

So were the incorruptibles, was their job mostly just to gather evidence in kind of a passive way, or were they out on the streets roughing people up?

They were resorting to raids.

That's what they did.

So the squad of cops, of 20 approximately cops, divided up into two squads.

And each of the two squads had a couple of different things.

They were responsible for going after it.

And so they were raiding casinos.

They were raiding brothels.

They were raiding other dens of iniquity.

And meanwhile, there were people, there were cops in the squad who were going after thieves and pickpockets and sort of pursuing them on the train.

So there was violence involved, but it was mainly raids and eventually a reputation built.

So it wasn't just the raids.

It was the fact that there were things happening politically that were starting to transform life in the city so that payoffs were no longer as easy as they had been.

So it was kind of a multi-front war.

It was the raids.

It was trying to limit corruption within the NYPD.

In fact, one of Abe's partners in the crime fight, he was running the first, basically the Internal Affairs Department.

It was the first version of the Internal Affairs Department for the NYPD.

So one of the things The Incorruptibles did, in addition to fighting violence and vice out on these treats was to fight it within the NYPD as well.

And there were many, many cops who were fired in 1913 as a result of that.

So would you say that that was money well spent?

Were the Incorruptibles in general successful in their attempts to clean up the Lower East Side?

Yeah.

Yeah, they were.

They were.

They were very successful, actually.

According to the research I did, I think, again, there were lots of other favorable things happening at the time that contributed to that.

There was a large uplift movement that was happening where these wealthy up-towners were using their money to organize hospitals, education, and trying to bring these refugees into assimilated American life.

And that ended up happening.

It ended up happening to, I think, a greater extent than anyone had imagined.

And by 1915, 1916, 1917, people are moving out.

They had been moving out for years by then, but you see the generation, the sons and daughters of the immigrants are going to Harvard and things like that, and going off to law school and stuff.

So that was pretty impressive.

Right, right.

So Arnold Rothstein, of course, died a violent death in 1928, and Jewish gangsters continued to thrive across the United States, guys like Meyer Lansky.

But when does the era of Jewish-controlled crime end in New York City and replaced by the Mafia?

It comes to an end with the death of Arnold Rothstein.

That's really when the shift happens from the Jews to the Italians.

They had been in competition for years, but Rothstein really ruled the roost.

And there's a really interesting book.

It's an oral history of drug use in the early 1900s.

This was a book that was produced, I believe, in the 70s.

Some researchers were going around to rehab clinics in New York, and they noticed that there was a generation in the clinics of folks who were like 70s, 80s, 90s.

And they had survived as addicts for a long, long time.

And these were people who remembered what it was like to be an addict in the city in the 1910s or the 20s.

So, there was a big oral history project that was done.

And it's fascinating to read, because a lot of them make similar comments about the importance of Rosting, and they all say that Rosting was the one who really trained people like Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano.

And then when he dies, it sort of shifts to that Italian mafia that we kind of know today.

And that when most people think about the underworld today, they think about the godfather type stories.

And that I think is post-1928, post-1930 is really when the world of the godfather begins.

And the Jewish underworld, although it remains in some form, kind of begins to fade away.

Right.

So, I received an advance proof of your book from your publisher.

My copy doesn't have photographs, but the one available for purchase does, correct?

Yeah.

So, there will be, there's 60 plus never before seen photos in the book.

And I mentioned earlier just the incredible sources that popped up while I was doing my research.

And one of those sources was this big photography archive.

There was a photo news service in New York City in the early 1900s called Brown Brothers.

They opened in 1903 or 1904, and they went strong for a few decades.

And then they closed in the 1930s or 40s.

And when they closed, they had about a million images that had been taken, not just of New York City, but most of the shots are of New York.

And all those images just went into a warehouse, and that asset got passed down to the descendants of the owners of this photo news service.

And about, I don't know, maybe five, six, seven years ago, a deal was finally struck with an auction house in New Jersey, and the auction house bought the entire archive.

And what their plan was, was to put three to 400 images a week on eBay, and sell them off one by one.

And they started doing this right around the time I started working on the book.

So I stumbled on these auctions, and it was incredible because these seemingly obscure figures, like, for instance, the King of the Horse Poisoners, and these underworld figures that I had been discovering in archival materials, and the trial transcripts, and things like that, and kind of trying to imagine what was the world that these people lived in, what they look like.

And now here in front of me were these incredibly stunning photos of the horse poisoners, or a casino, what a casino looked like, or kids' shoelace on the Lower East Side, in the ghetto.

And so yeah, I was able to buy a bunch of those photographs that came up for sale.

I bought several hundred, and I think maybe 67, 68 of them are in the book.

So those are all images that had been sitting in storage for over a century.

You've also got a glossary at the end, lots of interesting terms.

The red light district is referred to as the gut, which I found very fitting.

A reformer is called a goo goo boy.

What are your favorite terms?

Oh, gosh, there were so many.

I'm somebody who loves language.

And I don't speak Yiddish, really know any Yiddish myself.

Although working on this project, I ended up learning a lot.

I had an amazing Yiddish researcher who assisted me.

And I was working with incredible materials.

But a word like, you know, showmas, for instance, a showmas was an underworld slang term for a detective.

And a shamash is also the ninth candle on a menorah.

It's the candle that's used to light the other candles.

But the root of the word is sort of like a functionary, something that plays a functional role.

So it's just interesting to think about people taking this word that really had identified like a candle that lights the other candle and they started to use it to describe a detective, this person who carries something out or serves a function.

Gosh, there were so many amazing phrases.

And some of them are not so family-friendly either.

But I tried to include all of them because these are all words that are all lost to time.

I mean, you don't, some of them you'd see in movies like The Sting.

And there was a little bit of a sting element in this book.

So there was a handful of terms that I had heard before, but the majority of it was totally new to me.

This one is fascinating.

There was something called a rubber neck bus.

Yeah, those were the tourist buses.

It was a ghetto, and wealthy people were fascinated by the ghetto.

And the people wanted to take a tour and say, oh, hey, here's how the other half lives.

And so there were these double-decker buses that would take you down to the Lower East Side in Chinatown.

And that's where the term rubber necker came from, which is another kind of amazing thing, because today we hear that people on the highway who stopped to look at an accident, and they hold everyone up behind them.

Right.

So I want to change the subject, if you don't mind, and ask you about The Wolf Boys, your award-winning book from just a few years ago.

Can you tell us about it?

Give us a summary.

Yeah.

So Wolf Boys is another book of narrative non-fiction.

It is a true story about a group of boys from Laredo, Texas who go to work as hitmen for a big Mexican drug cartel called the Zetas.

Again, these are American boys living in Laredo, Texas right on the border, and they get sucked into this world, and end up operating both in the US and Mexico.

They eventually wind up getting taken down around 2006, 7, 8, and several of them went to prison for very long periods of time.

But the book tells the story of their lives and one of the boys in particular, whom I follow from beginning to end.

So yeah, that was, you know, as far as the motivation for me for these projects, kind of what I'm trying to do or what I'm hoping to do or the reason that I take on a subject or a story is I want to make it as immersive and vivid as possible.

So I didn't want to do like a cartel book that just talks about all of the grisly things that have been reported in newspaper headlines.

I wanted to try to get down to what is the human lived experience of a kid who goes to work for this global drug cartel.

That just blew my mind.

And so I wanted to find out for myself and in the process be able to take readers right into that world.

So that was the genesis of Wolf Boys.

And I think there was a kind of a similar animating spirit involved in this new book.

Because again, like the Lower East Side ghetto is this fascinating time and place in history.

And I wanted to take people there so we could all put our noses up against the window and really see and feel it.

Right.

It's like we're rubberneckers, right?

Take taking a bus through the Lower East Side.

Yeah, it is a slum too.

And there's some guilt.

There's some guilt involved in it for me, you know, like in a more just world, these stories wouldn't exist.

These places wouldn't exist of such marginalization and desperation, people turning on one another and such.

But of course, that's not the world we live in.

Yeah.

So, you know, I tried it.

It's interesting.

And this is just, you know, on a kind of a different subject, but they're obviously in these stories.

If you're going to tell these kinds of stories, and I have other projects we can talk about too, you know, where they take place in an underworld, there's going to be violence involved.

And the question is always, well, what violence should be depicted in the book or the magazine story if it's a magazine piece, and what doesn't need to be there, you know?

And the rule I always have for myself and the rule I try to live by is that violence should only be in a story if it moves the story, if it moves the plot of the story in a certain direction or reveals something about a character.

So, you know, Wolf Boys, that world that those kids lived in was just, is just incredibly violent, often bordering on sadistic.

And yeah, I mean, you become a rubbernecker.

It's like terrifying and horrifying and you can't look away.

And I feel like that's, that ends up being my situation on a lot of projects.

I did a piece a while back about a gang of rabbis who would go around beating up husbands who refused to give their wives religious divorce.

In the Orthodox religion, a Jewish woman needs to get basically a bill of divorce signed by her husband in order to be released.

It's this kind of weird thing.

It's laid out in the Bible.

You wind up with these husbands who, for all kinds of reasons, they want to extort money or they're disangry, they withhold the divorce document.

These women are chained women that can't move on with their lives.

They can go to this little gang of rabbis and pay them.

The rabbis go and pull the husband into the van, and they put a cattle prod on his testicles and break a couple of ribs until he decides to do the right thing and sign the contract.

There was violence there, but then there's also violence against all these women who are being out of these relationships.

I feel like these are important stories to tell, but I'd be lying if I said they weren't also very difficult to tell, and they do take a toll on me.

I think the colleagues that I have who do similar work tend to say the same thing.

Yes.

Fascinating.

Let's talk about how people can get your book, how people can learn more about you.

The Incorruptibles comes out on Tuesday, July 16th, and it is available in stores and online wherever books are sold and across format.

There's a wonderful audio edition.

It's really amazingly narrated by a very talented narrator.

However, and I encourage people to get the audio edition because it's great.

However, the audio edition will not have the 60 plus never-before-seen photos that are featured in the hardcover version of the book.

There's also an e-book, which I guess would have the photos.

So those are the three formats.

Again, the book is available everywhere.

And as far as information about me, there is a bio on the flap of the book, and there's been profiles and things that people can look up about me.

And they can also just reach out to me on any social media platform and ask me a question.

I always love to hear from readers, and I'm happy to sort of interact because I love the craft of writing and storytelling, and I love to talk about it with folks who are interested because if we didn't have folks who are interested in this stuff, I wouldn't have a career.

Well, perfect.

Thanks again.

So appreciate your time.

Yeah, Eric, absolutely.

Thanks a lot for your interest in this.

Again, I've been speaking to Dan Slater.

His book is called The Incorruptibles, a true story of kingpins, crime busters in the birth of the American underworld.

This has been another episode of the Most Notorious podcast, broadcasting to every dark and cobwebbed corner of the world.

I'm Eric Rivenes, and have a safe tomorrow.

If you want to hear more true life tales of criminals, tragedies and disasters throughout history, search for and follow Most Notorious wherever you listen to podcasts.

American Criminal is hosted, edited and executive produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio editing by Mohammed Shazi.

Sound design by Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Terrell Wells.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson and Lindsey Graham.