Tough Jews

Tough Jews is a short history of Jewish-American gangsters and their Italian colleagues with whom they made common cause. It is here for the first time that we understand why Arnold Rothstein was the most important gangster in America.  Having introduced "organized" into organized crime, he promised underworld figures the help of the famous attorney William Fallon if they landed in trouble and agreed to look after their families if they got sent up the Hudson (to Sing Sing). I am struck by the fact that Cohen makes his history personal, by means of his own contacts with the people… show more.

Cohen, whose father grew up in Brooklyn in the shadow of Murder, Inc., has written a savvy, almost affectionate portrait of a world he knew only through his dad. It was a world in which murder was cheap, and sometimes otherwise decent men learned to kill those near and dear. Although Albert Fried’s The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America is more historically detailed, Tough Jews is the more colorful introduction to the milieu of the mob and its rackets—a milieu that had Sid Luckman’s father in its clutches.