But He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters, by Robert A. Rockaway (HC, 1993, autographed, $5, which is 1/3 the internet price.)
When someone says gangster, we think Italian, we think Russian, but who thinks Jewish! Yet between the two world wars Jews, together with the Italians, "organized American crime and made it large, powerful and deadly". Even so the Jewish gangster stayed "tied to his parents, his family, his people and to the American Dream." (Thus, the title of the book, But He Was Good to His Mother, a comment Rockaway's mother made to him about one of the gangsters he was writing about.)
"The morality of the age also contributed to the rise of the gangster. The post-WWI period was a time of 'anything goes'... 'People wanted booze, they wanted dope, they wanted to gamble and they wanted broads,' reminisced former Detroit gangster Hershel Kessler. 'For a price, we provided them...'"
"During Prohibition, 50% of the nation's leading bootleggers were Jews, and Jews and Jewish gangs bossed the rackets in some of America's largest cities." But the time of the Jewish gangster lasted only one generation. After the second World War Jews left the urban ghettos, moved to the suburbs, sent their kids to college, and joined the elite of American society. "Third and fourth generation American Jews no longer needed crime to 'make it'. Unlike the Italian Mafiosi, Jewish gangsters did not want members of their families to go into their 'business'."
Look for this book on the new non-fiction table. (L-Am Hist)
