How ‘Uptown’ Jews Fought to Clean Up the Lower East Side’s Criminal Underworld

“If a lady whistled at you on Allen Street, you knew she wasn’t calling you to a minyan!”

That’s a particularly illuminating quote from a lawyer named Jonah Goldstein, who describes how destitute life was on the Lower East Side in July 1913, when gangs, pimps and other criminals ran free in the neighborhood.

In his new book, Jewish attorney and author Dan Slater describes the enormity of crime in the early 20th-century neighborhood where famous Jewish gangsters like Meyer Lansky, Lefty Rosenberg and Dopey Benny got their start. But he doesn’t stop there.

In “The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld,” Slater profiles a group of wealthy Jewish reformers in the city who waged war against the pimps and gangsters of the Lower East Side. The shocking story is largely forgotten by American Jews today, even though it is part of the dramatic backstory behind Jewish institutions such as the Educational Alliance and the American Jewish Committee.

“I’ve been reading a lot my whole life and this material was new to me,” Slater, 46, told the New York Jewish Week, “so it must be new to other people.”

“The Incorruptibles” chronicles the tactics used by Jewish clergy, civic activists and law enforcement officials to clean up the Lower East Side, including an undercover surveillance operation to capture prostitution in a sleazy hotel and one of the first times an NYPD wiretap was used to catch a murder suspect involved in the underground gambling scene.

From the late 1800s through the 1920s, Manhattan’s Jewish residents lived in two very different worlds. The affluent, assimilated German Jews lived primarily on the Upper East Side, where many lived in luxurious mansions and summered on vast estates. Meanwhile, their more recently arrived brethren from the Pale of Settlement below 14th Street lived on what was then simply called “the East Side.” The immigrants struggled to eke out a living in crowded, impoverished conditions that inevitably bred disease, vice, and crime.

“Today we don’t consider ourselves Russian or German, we just consider ourselves Jewish-American,” Slater said. “But back then that distinction meant everything.”

Author Dan Slater, left, and the cover of his new book, “The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld.”

As the book details, the scale of prostitution on the Lower East Side in the early 20th century was greater than some historians are willing to admit. (“Communities struggling to survive are seldom in a hurry to publicize their failures,” Irving Howe wrote in his 1976 book about the era, “World of Our Fathers.”) There were brothels above, below and next to synagogues. They were also next to schools, soup kitchens and wedding halls. There was even a fraternal pimps’ association on the Lower East Side, established under New York State law: the Independent Benevolent Association, which provided members with unemployment insurance and burial places. The Forward estimated that in the early 1900s, nearly 4,000 Jewish women disappeared from New York City each year, many of them, ostensibly, to a life on the streets as sex workers.

Despite all the sordid details, Slater believes “The Incorruptibles” is ultimately a story of hope. That’s because it shows a community taking matters into its own hands to create a better future for all of its members, he said.

“What you had was the Germans spending a lot of money to elevate the refugees to provide all these services that weren’t available to the poor because there was no social security yet,” Slater said, noting that the federal income tax wasn’t introduced until 1913. “The rich didn’t even pay taxes. So anything that was going to be done for a poor person would have to be done on the goodwill and goodwill of a rich person. And fortunately, these German Jews, for whatever reason, felt this moral obligation to do what they could do.”

Affluent Jews who had already formed the American Jewish Committee to represent their interests joined with an alliance of downtown organizations to establish the Kehillah, a clearinghouse to study and improve “the social, moral, and economic conditions” of the city’s Jewish poor, according to its 1914 charter. The organization, as Slater points out in the book, was an outgrowth of the centuries-old tradition of self-government in Jewish communities in ancient Israel and later in Europe.

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The Kehillah recruited such people as researcher Abe Schoenfeld, a Wall Street lawyer named Harry Newburger, and Rabbi Judah Magnes, who was the spiritual leader of Temple Emanu-El, the Reform congregation on Fifth Avenue. The fiery rabbi was unhappy with what he saw as his congregation’s lack of empathy for the troubled lives of Lower East Side Jews and eventually went to work for the Kehillah full-time. (Magnes later moved to Palestine and helped found Hebrew University, where he became its first chancellor.)

Among the Germans who financed and were active in the Kehillah were Jacob Schiff, the investment banker whom the New York Times dubbed “the Jewish J.P. Morgan,” and his son-in-law Felix Warburg, a member of the oldest banking family in Europe. (Warburg’s house at 92nd Street and Fifth Avenue now houses the Jewish Museum.) Other wealthy German Jews from uptown included the Ochs family, who owned the New York Times, and the ancestors of future Wall Street powerhouses named Goldman, Sachs, Lehman and Solomon.

A milk depot on the Lower East Side sells bottles of pasteurized milk for pennies, sometime around the turn of the 20th century. (Courtesy of Dan Slater)

“It was a big crowd, and they partied, they lived it up with all that untaxed wealth,” Slater noted. “Those mansions they lived in uptown were no joke: vacation homes on the Jersey shore and in Maine; yachts and horse farms. It was pretty crazy.”

Nevertheless, through a combination of self-interest and charity, they funded an orphanage, provided free health care to the poor, and in 1889 founded the Educational Alliance, a settlement house for newly arrived Eastern European Jews. The financing of reform efforts on the Lower East Side, however, was “always a bit of a mystery,” Slater says.

Despite the help of their brethren from uptown, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were also responsible for the neighborhood’s revival, Slater said.

“The immigrants had not lived in a free world for centuries,” he noted. “They had lived under great oppression, survived massacres, adapted to laws that restricted the professions they could practice, laws that encouraged them to commit crimes. When they arrived on the Lower East Side, although it was a ghetto with many problems, it was still a country where they could theoretically do anything.”

The only thing the Jews in the city center and the center did what they had in common was that they both left religious Judaism.

“The children of the immigrants (downtown) saw (Judaism) as something old. They wanted to be American, they wanted to assimilate,” Slater said. “They didn’t want to be involved in some stuffy religious stuff and that was what connected a lot of them to the German Jewish uptowners, because the children of those people were the same.”

Slater — whose previous book was 2016’s “Wolf Boys,” a true story about two American teenagers who served as hitmen for a Mexican drug cartel — spent seven years researching and writing “The Incorruptibles.” That included reading transcripts of the trial of seven members of the United Hebrew Trades, a federation of Jewish labor unions, for the murder of a strikebreaking Jewish tailor. (They were acquitted.) He also had a translator sift through 13 Yiddish newspapers published on the Lower East Side, as well as unpublished portions of the Yiddish autobiography of Abe Cahan, the Forward’s founder and editor in chief.

A crime scene photograph from the 1920s shows the body of a “manufacturer of men’s shirts” who allegedly resisted union demands. (New York City Municipal Archives)

The book also benefits from Slater’s personal collection of period photographs, purchased at online auctions by the Brown Brothers Collection. A valuable collection of hundreds of thousands of photographs dating back to 1904, including photos of slums, immigrants and crime scenes. The images were auctioned off one by one, with Slater purchasing 700 of them.

“It was just amazing. All these characters and episodes and incidents that I’ve been researching and writing about, like the horse poisoners — suddenly[they’re]there in front of me on my computer,” Slater recalls. “I saw these original and beautiful photographs of these things and I thought, ‘Oh my God! This stuff is real. There it is.’”