THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Friday, August 15, 1980 13 Era of Existence of a Jewish Underworld Defined in Prof. Fried's 'Jewish Gangster' le In The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America" (Holt, Rinehart and Winston), Albert Fried, a professor of history at the State University of New York, makes an interesting study of the era when Jewish criminals were in- volved in many sordid occu- pations. It was especially during the prohibition years that Jews were among the gamblers, when there were Jewish pimps and whores. As the title of his book indi- cates, there was a decline. As Fried states in his intro- duction: "I continued to follow the careers of these gangster, capitalists, Jewish and non-Jewish, as they passed from early manhood to mid- dle and old age, as they went on to market other illicit goods and services (primar- ily gambling) after Prohibi- tion ended, as they kept im- proving their system of mutual cooperation and self-goverance and assumed more and more the aspect of modern business enterprises. "Jewish gangsters, meanwhile, were growing less visible. There were fewer and fewer of them, and those who remained tended increasingly to oc- cupy the strictly commer- cial and financial stratum of the criminal hierarchy. So that by now, entering the 1980s, all that is left is the intimation of a Jewish un- derworld, the residue of an obliterated past." Fried read a great deal and studied the problem. He was moved into the project upon reading Michael Golds' "Jews Without Money." The crime wave subsided, as Fried states in his intro- duction: "What I found out in the course of desultory reading over the next several years fairly astonished me. I dis- covered that an enormously complex, richly endowed culture of vice and criminal- ity, made up mainly of young people, thrived on the Lower East Side, that most outsiders regarded it as a running sore of corruption and mayhem, and, not acci- dentally, as Tammany Hall's bastion of power, that the Jews themselves even- tually came to look upon it as an insufferable burden of shame and embarrassment, and that this underworld culture, finally, did not begin to decline until World War I and then only because lower east siders were es- caping to better neighbor- hoods thanks to the bur- geoning prosperity, espe- cially in the garment trades." Fried began his study with Meyer Lansky, whose role is defined in this vol- ume. Finding it too limited, the author of this thorough study turned to the many communities in the land, including Detroit, to trace , the era of the Jewish gangs- ter. Traced here is the "evolu- tion of the Jewish under- world in its various social, economic and political set- tings, moving from the early Eastern European immigrant settlements to the present-day era of multi-national corporations and high finance epitomized by Meyer Lansky." The reader of Fried's expose will learn anew about Louis (Lepke) Buchhalter, about Jacob Shapiro Gura; about the New York gangsters, about Monk Eastman, Kid Twist, Gyp the Blood, Big Jack Zelig, Yosky Nigger, Dopey Benny, Arnold Rothstein, the Lepke Case' — the famous New York trial which resulted in electric chair convictions. Thomas E. Dewey gained popularity in the Lepke case. So did William O'Dwyer. That's how some men rose in politics, by pro- secuting the gangsters. The several cities' gang riles are eleborated in the Fried volume. Of interest to Detroiters is the Purple Gang's his- tory, to which Prof. Fried has this reference: "Detroit's Hastings Street quarter, "Little Jerusalem," spawned a far- rago of teen-age Jewish street gangs before the `Great War.' None com- pared to the gang which the Fleishers, Harry and Louis and the Bernsteins, Joseph and Benjamin, presided over. How they acquired the name that would one day make them nationally famous — the Purples — is a matter of some dispute. "One writer contends that the folks in Little Jerusalem, storeowners especially, called them `tainted,' off-color,' in a word, 'purple,' the epithet that was invoked whenever they showed up. "Another writer traces its origin to an early leader, Samuel 'Sammy Purple' Cohen. And a third traces it to a new member, Eddie Fletcher, who wore a purple jersey while working out at the local gym, the others soon following suit. "In any event, when Pro- hibition arrived the Purples had the rudiments of an organization, a pre- established network. From their original base in the downtown ghetto they radiated out in a steadily widening arc of appropria- tion and control. And like every bootlegging street gang they went on to ac- quire whatever illicit opera- tions lay within reach." Prof. Fried makes this important comment on his studies researched in "Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America": "It is no secret that Jewish crimhials did what others did before them and have continued to do, that they all have used crime as another way of moving up- ward and onward in the American manner. First the Irish (and to a much lesser extent the Germans); then the Jews and the Italians; and now, presumably, the Blacks and the Hispanics and the Chinese too have successively climbed the same 'queer ladder.' True enough. But in itself the point remains a stale generalization, a platitude. "The significant question is what kind of underworld each ethnic group estab- lished in response to the unique experiences it encountered, who its un- derworld dramatis personae were, and what, specifi- cally, they accomplished. This book attempts to ad- dress and answer that very question: to show in detail how some Jews followed an ERSH FOR JEWELRY Highest dollars paid fbr your diamonds. gold. sterling or old jewelry! undying American tradi- tion." The first Jews in America came from Spain and Por- tugal by way of Brazil. L • WEST PRICES Cassette Dictating Transcribing Machines 342-7801 Breyers yogurt is not just all natural, ifs all kosher,too. •-ko - -•>` bsbkitelv'ind., :7- • • - or the tame= \A TI rfor Bryers. In a 100 off is kosher,too. „on a.ny 8 oz. 1 : 1 cup of Breyers yogurt. 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