LM Live Recap: Crime, Corruption and the Evolution of New York’s Underworld

On Wednesday, March 26, fans of crime stories and New York history gathered at the Down Town Association (60 Pine St.) for the LM Live event, “Crime, Corruption and the Evolution of New York’s Underworld.” Authors Dan Slater and Richard Price (“Clockers,” “Lush Life,”) engaged in a panel discussion moderated by Hell Gate co-founder Max Rivlin-Nadler that dug into themes from Slater’s new book, “The Incorruptibles,” — including political machines, poverty, policing and their connection to the rise of New York’s criminal underbelly.

Slater discussed his book, a work of non-fiction chronicling the organized crime rings that sprung up in the Jewish immigrant community on the Lower East Side in the early 20th century. Slater said he was inspired to write his book while working on a magazine piece. “I was reporting a nonfiction story in 2018 about an Orthodox gang of rabbis who would beat up husbands who wouldn’t give their wives a ‘get’,” he said, referring to the Jewish divorce practice. “In the course of researching the story, I got into the history of crime in the Jewish world. That’s when I stumbled on the story of ‘The Incorruptibles’.”

Slater said the Lower East Side crime rings were born from a number of factors, including New York’s infamous Tammany Hall political machine, police corruption and the marginalization of poor Jewish immigrants who came from oppression in the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe. Price concurred with Slater, telling the audience about his grandfather, who grew up in poverty on the Lower East Side and became involved with a gang of strikebreakers living in his tenement building. At one point, Price said, the strikebreakers sent his grandfather to physically attack a woman on factory strike — the woman ended up being his grandfather’s cousin, and she walked away unharmed.

Price says the cycle of poverty crime in low-income neighborhoods like the LES of the early 20th century repeats itself among different demographics. “Once children hit the street and they’re poor, they’re going to look to the local big shot. You want to be like that, and you get played, and you either go to jail or you’re about to be these guys,” he said. “The common denominator is poverty.”

Slater noted that corporations had a hand in New York’s burgeoning criminal underbelly, with Wall Street firms and other business interests hiring gangs to break up labor unions. Some of the run-ins between these criminal elements and labor leaders and workers were violent and harrowing, though they eventually led to widespread labor reform. 

The Jewish criminal organizations, which included notorious leaders like Meyer Lansky, were overtaken in numbers in the 1920s and ‘30s by the Italian mafia, which rose to prominence in large part due to Prohibition. (“You want to start a criminal organization? Ban something,” Price said.) But while the Italian mob is oft memorialized in the history books and pop culture, the Jewish mob was actually bigger and more diverse around the turn of the century — and a part of their story unfolds in “The Incorruptibles,” which Snyder researched using historic newspapers, oral histories and the unpublished memoirs of labor reformer Abe Schoenfeld. What he found were crimes “that seemed almost like science fiction,” Snyder said, detailing horse poisonings and horrific pranks gone wrong. It’s certainly a far cry from the Lower East Side of today.

“The Incorruptibles” was released in July; “Lazarus Man,” Price’s latest novel, was out in November. Both are available for purchase at your local bookstore or online.