After You Must Remember This, my oral history of Manhattan, was published, I came up with what I thought was a cool idea: a little guidebook to the city’s most notorious crime scenes, offbeat places or historically interesting grave sites that you could slip into a shirt pocket. Let’s say you happened to be walking along a certain street in Soho, you could pull out your little guide and say, “Oh, this is where Jill Clayburgh threw up in An Unmarried Woman.” Or if you happened to be in a certain midtown hotel, you could impress your friends by pointing out the room where the gangster Arnold Rothstein played his last fatal card game. I even had what I thought was a pretty good title for it: Eve’s Apple. I went out and did a lot of firsthand research, took a bunch of pictures and wrote up what I thought was a pretty good proposal. Alas, the idea got nowhere, and I soon set it aside to pursue another idea.
I dug out those pictures after starting this blog, and I thought beginning tonight I’d periodically share a few of them.
I have a soft spot (soft in the brain, most likely) for the Jewish gangsters who were associated with Murder, Inc. in the 1920s and ’30s. This is ridiculous, I know, because they weren’t nice guys. One of the ways they made money was a protection racket that they set up to extort money from many legitimate businessmen on the Lower East Side. One of those businessmen was my grandfather. The way it worked was a guy with a broken nose visited you and offered you a service: if you paid him a certain sum every month, he would very kindly protect your storefront windows wouldn’t get broken. They even gave you a sticker to put on your window indicating that you had purchased their services. Of course, if you turned down their deal, the guy would make sure that the next night someone heaved a rock through your window. If that didn’t work, the following night, someone would heave a rock against your noggin. And if that wasn’t enough to convince you, the next night you would find yourself laying quietly in a fresh-smelling new pine coffin. So my grandfather like most everyone else paid.
Occasionally, someone took the gangster on and survived to tell the tale. One of the people I interviewed for my book was a retired boxing promoter named Marty Cohen. His father delivered on a horse cart. There was a group of criminals active on the Lower East Side known as the Jewish Black Hands. If you drove a horse cart and didn’t pay the Black Hands every month, they poisoned your horse. Nice! This is what Marty told me:
“My father was a rough old guy. He had a horse poisoned. He knew who did it. The guy was on Ludlow Street. We went over there. He found the guy, and he said, ‘This horse cost me $17.50. If you don’t pay me the $17.50, I’ll kill you.’
“With that the guy took out a gun. My father said, ‘If you don’t put that gun away, I’ll stick that gun right up your ass.’
“The guy threatened him. The old man walked right up to him, took the gun away from him, and did exactly what he said. He stuck the gun up his ass and threw the guy down a flight of cellar stairs. They never bothered us again after that.”
So why do I admire these people. I don’t know, but I guess I like the notion of Jewish tough guys who in an age when anti-semitism ran rampant and members of my family were barred from professions, restaurants, schools, apartment buildings, clubs and more just because of their religion, I like the image of these people who didn’t take shit from anyone (which was obviously a mistake in the case of the guy who confronted Marty’s father).
Anyway, one of the toughest of the tough guys was a bootlegger, extortion artist and hired killer named Arthur Flegenheimer, aka Dutch Schultz. He was only thirty-three years old when Charlie “The Bug Workman and Mendy Weiss put some lead into him on October 23, 1935. He lingered almost a day before he died. Taken down by a court stenographer, his last words uttered in a haze of fever have since been studied by cultural historians as if they were the equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
This is obviously a reproduction, but I used to have this on my wall (click on it for the larger view):
Anyway, I found Dutch’s grave and went out there alone to pay my respects. Unfortunately, the grave facing the Dutchman’s was a little low to the ground, so I couldn’t get the camera angle right, but you do get a nice shot of my snazzy low red Converse sneakers. I thought it was very thoughtful of Schultz’s family to turn his headstone into a bench, thus allowing visitors to sit and contemplate the meaning of his short, ugly life, but it was really surprising to see the crosses on the grave. I did a little digging (so to speak) afterward and found out he converted to Roman Catholicism before he died and was actually administered the last rites. No wonder it took him twenty-two hours to kick, he had an awful lot of confessing to do.
