THE INCORRUPTIBLES

A riveting account of the corrupt landscape of early-20th-century New York City.

Well before the Five Families put their mark on organized crime, Jewish immigrants controlled the trade, exemplified by gambler and crime lord Arnold Rothstein. He started off small, building an empire piece by piece on the East Side, mostly settled by recently arrived Eastern European Jews. So did Tammany politician “Big Tim” Sullivan, who traded his upwardly mobile Irish constituency for the Jewish newcomers. At the time, the city was rife with prostitution, gambling, labor agitation, and rising leftist politics. “Ever since the Eastern European Jews began arriving,” writes Slater, author of Wolf Boys, “the German Jews worried that these unwashed co-religionists, with their orthodox religiosity and radical politics, would undermine their own hard-won social respectability with the ruling patrician class.” Given that Tammany and the New York police force were thoroughly corrupt, the Germans, financier Jacob Schiff among them, pushed the relatively clean mayor to found a Jewish-led vice squad: the Incorruptibles of the title. As Rothstein, later to be infamous for the 1919 Black Sox baseball scandal, drifted deeper into the drug trade and other illicit activities—not least the murder of a rival—the mayor and vice squad leader “debated constitutional issues surrounding policing, such as warrantless raids, undercover stings, and bridging wires.” Slater’s narrative, full of twists and turns, is populated by characters from Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano to Louis Brandeis and Damon Runyon. The author yields not just a gripping crime story—though it certainly is that—but also a richly detailed, informal social history of New York between the Gilded Age and the Jazz Age that, apart from its scholarly rigor, is also highly readable.

A grand evocation of the Gotham of gangsters, crooked cops, “beefsteak dungeons,” and nativists versus newcomers.