Wearing a yellow skirt that reached just below her knees, a black and white shirt, and a sunbonnet, 15-year-old Amelia Staffeldt planned to pick dandelions. But after she crossed the road to the old Steitz farm, she was attacked and stabbed twice behind her right ear. It looked as if the murderer had also tried to strangle the girl using the strings of her bonnet, according to the New York Times.
It was 1907, an era when crime proliferated especially among New York City’s politicians and policemen — most of whom were connected to Tammany Hall. The attack in Elmhurst, Long Island, shocked readers and caused outrage. Something had to be done. Thus begins the trajectory of Dan Slater’s intriguing social history, The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld.
A former journalist for the Wall Street Journal, Slater wrote the well-received Wolf Boys, a story of two Texas teenagers lured into a Mexican drug cartel and the efforts of an American detective to stop the illegal drug trade from crossing into the United States.
The Incorruptibles is another true crime story, but it is broader in scope. It describes the work of several detectives who would not be corrupted, as well as many characters who would: numerous gangsters, gamblers, prostitutes, fences, extortionists, and murderers. The narrative, which focuses on efforts to combat crime in New York City in the early 20th century, begins with police commissioner Theodore Bingham’s 1908 article for the North American Review.
He blamed immigrant Jews for the high rate of crime in New York, but soon he retracted his claim and insisted that those who had compiled the numbers caused the error, saying that he hadn’t meant any prejudice. Nonetheless, wealthy German Jews, who had arrived in America many years earlier, some in the 1600s, formed a Kehillah, a Jewish self-help group, because they were alarmed at the anti-Jewish rhetoric. They worried the story of crime would become a Jewish one, as this history of crime and crime-fighting largely is.
The “Incorruptibles” of the title were part of this group. These mostly Jewish detectives formed a task force promoting social morality. They reported crimes to the police and to some other members of the Kehillah. They also helped new Jewish arrivals become assimilated. The new immigrants spoke Yiddish and did not understand English. Nor did they have the wherewithal to earn a living. Some were peddlers. Others were menders and tailors. They worked in sweatshops. They sweltered in the summertime even with the windows open. The doors were usually locked, as they were at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911 when 150 garment workers famously died trapped inside in a fire. There were labor strikes and episodes where thugs attacked picketing workers.
The Lower East Side, Slater explains, was considered the world’s largest Jewish ghetto and was home to impoverished Eastern European Jews who left Russia, Poland, and Lithuania to escape pogroms and to avoid being conscripted into the army of Czar Nicholas II. Some Jewish boys as young as 8 were drafted. Their mothers tried to save them by cutting off their sons’ fingers.
Jewish families came to America hoping to send money back home. But American streets were covered with muck, not gold. New York was rife with gambling, illegal drugs, burglary, pickpocketing, prostitution, and murder. During Prohibition, some people took up importing and selling booze. In New York’s Lower East Side, 3,800 girls went missing every year. Many were Russian Jews who were trafficked.
Two main characters in Slater’s book, Herman Rosenthal and his friend Arnold Rothstein, were involved in most of these nefarious activities. Rosenthal was assassinated because he squealed to the newspapers about corruption in the New York City Police Department. Rothstein was killed over a gambling debt in an allegedly crooked poker game. Accused of fixing the 1919 World Series, Rothstein was also the inspiration for Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby.
Rothstein’s story somewhat shakily holds together Slater’s extensive social history. But it’s an uphill battle given the breadth of his narrative, which features a host of mostly unfamiliar characters. A chronology and a list of names with brief bios would help.
Slater includes major Jewish figures such as Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, as well as Jacob Schiff, a German American banker and philanthropist who financed railroads and helped Russian Jewish immigrants. These elites and others, such as Louis Marshall, Oscar Straus, Mayer Sulzberger, and Cyrus Adler, were part of the American Jewish Committee. They worried that the new Jewish arrivals, many of whom were uneducated, impoverished serfs, would give Jews a bad name. This would negatively affect Jewish immigration laws in America and hurt those Jews still in Russia who wanted to come to the U.S.
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Abe Shoenfeld, Harry Newberger, Joseph Faurot, and Rabbi Judah Magnes were among the good guys. Magnes, a brilliant teacher and inspiring speaker, was one of the founders of the Kehillah. He planned the process of infiltrating criminal groups as well as methods of attacking crime. Schoenfeld, a writer and novelist (The Joy Peddler), was among those that Magnes hired. He spied on criminal gangs and sent daily reports to Magnes. Newberger, an honest lawyer, and Faurot, an honest cop, helped Schoenfeld and Magnes.
As he tells the story of crime and prejudice in this period, Slater weaves his narrative from Central and Eastern Europe to America and Canada. He brings in New York City, the Pale of Settlement, and Bar Harbor, Maine. He covers events affecting Jews from the 17th century to the 20th and even manages to include his own family’s story. Though its narrative sags a bit under the weight of too many disparate stories, The Incorruptibles is a compelling portrait of a time, not unlike our own, when crime in American cities drives ethnic polarization and a political demand for restricting immigration. It also suggests that there is a way through if enough honest actors expend enough effort working to bust the problem rather than denying it.
Diane Scharper is a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner. She teaches the Memoir Seminar for the Johns Hopkins University Osher program.