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February 11, 2000/5 Adar 1 5760, Vol. 52, No.23
Historian takes aim at Jewish mobsters
CHRIS GARIFO
Staff Writer
Robert Rockaway |
Bugsy Siegel wanted to "live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse," but according to author and historian Robert Rockaway, the Jewish gangster's bullet-ridden corpse was anything but good-looking.
Rockaway is the author of "But - He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters," the newest edition of which has just been released by Gefen Publishing House.
Rockaway, a professor at the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, will be speaking about Jewish gangsters on Sunday, Feb. 13, at Har Zion Congregation, 6140 E. Thunderbird Road in Scottsdale, in connection with the Bureau of Jewish Education's Jewish Passages lecture series.
Rockaway, who moved to Israel in 1971, admits to being intrigued by Jewish gangsters, though he says his book is not an attempt to glorify them or their actions.
"It's a fascinating subject," he says. "It's a part of Jewish history in the United States, the American Jewish experience that not many people know about."
Rockaway became interested in the topic in the 1970s while researching a book about the Jews of Detroit, where he was born and raised.
"I discovered that ... there were many more Jewish gangsters than I had assumed or thought about," he says.
Rockaway began looking through newspaper articles, FBI files, results of the Kefauver Committee hearings and other sources, then wrote an article comparing Jewish and Italian gangsters of the 1920s, '30s and '40s, and, in the Jerusalem Post, an article titled "Mobsters for Zion" about gangsters who helped found the modern state of Israel.
Soon after the article was published, Rockaway received a call from a man whose father had been connected with Abner "Longy" Zwillman, a mobster who commanded a New Jersey gang that was part of the "Big Seven" controlling organized crime beginning in the late 1920s and included the Bugsy Siegel/Meyer Lansky gang, Irving Wexler (alias Waxey Gordon), Charles "Lucky" Luciano and Joe Adonis.
The caller had grown up knowing members of the Zwillman and Siegel/Lansky gangs and agreed to put Rock-away in touch with the "old-timers" of the Jewish gangs.
Personal interviews with those old-timers led to "But - He Was Good to His Mother," originally published in 1993.
Rockaway says that, while American Jewish gangsters were as important as American Italian gangsters, many of whose crime "families" remain to this day, "with the Jews, it was that one generation, the second generation, the children of immigrants, and it ended with them."
Rockaway says that, for most of the Jewish gangsters in his book, "crime, in a sense, really didn't pay."
"These old men that I interviewed that at one time had hundreds of thousands of dollars pass through their fingers, and now they're basically being supported by friends and some others because they have no money (left)," Rockaway says. "They blew it on gambling and all kinds of other things."
Rockaway says his work has been criticized by some who considered the topic "taboo" and others who feared bringing that aspect of the American Jewish experience to light might foment anti-Semitism.
"I say (to them), listen, anti-Semites hate Jews because they're Jews and they can always find a reason to hate," Rockaway says. "(Anti-Semites) can always find a million reasons for hating a Jew, and usually being a gangster is not one of them."
Rockaway admits that, while "the community wasn't proud of them and neither were their families," there was a certain respect for Jewish gangsters, especially in light of the anti-Semitism washing across America and Europe at the time.
"And here you have these (Jewish gangsters) who gave as good as they got; they weren't not afraid of anything," Rockaway says. "Meyer Lansky once said to me, 'I never got on my knees for anyone, especially not for a Christian.' We were talking about the period of the Nazi Bund when he and other Jewish men in New York - gangsters - attacked and beat up Nazi Bundists in the '30s."
"On the one side of the coin, you fear these men because they're violent and they exploited Jews," Rockaway says. "On the other side, these men were tough and no one messed with them."
Rockaway says he's always been interested in "the underside of history ... the common man, the immigrant, that part of the experience, not about the great leaders or the great organizations."
While TV shows like "The Sopranos" and movies like the "Godfather" series paint an exciting, romanticized picture of gangster life, Rockaway says reality proved far grimmer for most Jewish gangsters.
"In the larger picture you can see that they don't end up very well," Rockaway says. "They die very young, their families suffer because of what they were, and they're aware of that. ... None of them saw what they were doing as a creditable or honorable profession."
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