1. How and when did you get hooked on history?
As a child, I tried to memorize the World Almanac. I was particularly interested in events in America during the decades before I was born, that is the first half of the twentieth century. Looking back, I think I was trying to lengthen my life in the other direction, to acquire knowledge that would make me feel as if I were born before I was. I can still recite all Oscar-winners and heavyweight champions in order—but only until 1966, which was the edition of the almanac I wore out.
2. What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?
I am lucky enough to be married for 35 years to a woman who tolerates my obsessions, like the years I spent writing about old, old science fiction movies, or the five years I spent researching every baseball park ever used in North America going back to the Civil War, or the years I spent writing about all of the real-life characters connected in one way or another with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
3. How does history play a part of your professional life/career?
All of those obsessions I mentioned in the previous answer turned into books that advanced my career as a bookwriter. Vintage Science Fiction Films was my first book. After that, I wrote Ballparks of North America. My career took a leap when I acquired an agent from the William Morris Agency and published the results of my assassination research in Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination.
4. Why is studying/knowing history important?
I’m always unpleasantly surprised at the lack of wisdom in people who know nothing about history. To try to sort out current events without examining historical precedents creates shallow thinking, and a void that can be exploited by clever propagandists. Learn more! Know what you don’t know. Be wise.
5. What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?
My forte remains the first half of the twentieth century. Two world wars, a “great” depression, the birth of motion pictures, the introduction of the nuclear era, all fascinating stuff. I don’t dip into the nineteenth century nearly as much, with the exception of the Battle of Gettysburg, which changed American history more than any other single battle.
6. What draws you to true crime stories in particular?
My interest in true crime has an origin story. When I was nine years old my babysitter, George-Ann Formicola, and her friend from down the road, Kathy Bernhard, were murdered and mutilated on the other side of the creek that crossed my back field. The girls had gone swimming and didn’t come back. I lived in a rural area, at the end of a dirt road, south of Rochester NY. The murders were never caught so I spent my childhood knowing that a real-life Boogie Man had crossed my back field. And so, I grew up to be a true-crime writer, not a coincidence. I teamed up with a private detective and Kathy’s mom, Alice Bernhard, and together we sent the investigation in a startling new direction, all of which became my book, The Devil at Genesee Junction, a book in which I am both the author and a character.
7. How did you get to the subject of your latest book Gangsters vs Nazis and why is the story important?
I knew parts of the story, from my reading of the 26 volumes of Warren Commission testimony, biographies of various mobsters of the era, word of mouth, but I didn’t realize how organized the anti-Nazi movement was in 1938 America among Jewish gangsters until my agent Doug Grad alerted me to an article by Robert Rockaway in Tablet Magazine which introduced me to Judge Nathan Perlman, the true hero of the book. Perlman was a New York judge who thought outside the box and called mobster Meyer Lansky and asked him to put together an army to teach the Germans that being a Nazi in America could be dangerous, that a Nazi in America could have problems, and that Jews in America would not just sit back and accept insults. Insult a Jew and you risked getting a punch in the nose. In 1938, American Jews were poor. Everyone was poor, America was nine years into the Great Depression, but Jews had it particularly rough because they were ostracized from gentile society. There were only a few occupations that Jewish men and women were allowed to have, and they lived almost entirely among themselves in tightly-packed Jewish neighborhoods in many of America’s big cities, having come from Europe where, the say the least, the persecution was even worse. So Jewish people in America already have problems when the German-American Bund begins holding rallies and parades singing the praises of Adolf Hitler, and blaming all of the world’s problems on the Jews. It isn’t the numbers of Nazis that bothers Jewish leaders in America most, but the brazen nature of their actions, holding parades in Manhattan that looked like the Macy’s except with goose-stepping and Sieg Heiling. During the depression it was easy to scapegoat a group of people. The Bund told America that the Jews were all communists and they had all of the money, which is why gentiles were so poor. This must have come as quite a shock to the Jewish ragpicker in Newark NJ whose horse just dropped dead in the middle of the street. Luckily for the rest, there was a new generation of Jewish men who didn’t follow gentile rules, who didn’t wait to be given a piece of the pie, who went out and took it, and who, if confronted with anti-Semitiam, would feed it a knuckle sandwich. The hero of the book is New York Judge Nathan D. Perlman. He is Polish-born, came to NYC at age four. Attended NYU Law, served in both NYS assembly and as a US Congressman before being appointed to the bench. Barrel-chested, active in Jewish affairs. Enjoyed a good time, in bars he told people, truthfully, that he was one of the US congressmen who repealed Prohibition, and they always bought him a drink. After an incident in which a patriotic ceremony in Manhattan was forced inside because of chanting Nazism Judge Perlman was in a bar one evening when he had an idea, he thought outside the box. The Nazis in America needed a good butt-kicking, and he knew how to make that happen.
Perlman called Meyer Lansky, the world’s top Jewish gangster, and put the ball in motion. Let these Nazi anti-Semites know that it could be dangerous spouting hate speech in the U.S.A.
The other thing that appealed to me about the story, I guess it brought out the anarchist in me. The entire book explores the space between what is legal and what is just. The villains are within the law, the heroes without.
Perlman needed Jewish gangsters, gangsters because they were being asked to break the law, and Jews because they best understood the situation in Europe. It seems hard to imagine now, but in 1938 most Americans were against going to war against Hitler. He had conquered most of Europe and still Mr. and Mrs. America felt they didn’t have a dog in the fight. Jewish Americans saw it differently. They knew that horrible things were happening in Europe, that their relatives were being rounded up and no one was coming back. So Jewish Americans were the first to realize that war against Hitler was necessary and inevitable, and that the war for the hearts and minds of Americans had already begun.
There were two Nazi organizations holding rallies in the U.S.: the German-American Bund, known as the Brown Shirts, run by a drunken loner named Fritz Kuhn, whose oratory style was as much like Hitler’s as he could muster, and the Silver Legion, known as the Silver Shirts, run by William Pelley. He was an ex-Hollywood writer who claimed that during a near-death experience he’d been advised by God to spread the word of Hitler.
At a typical Bund rally, large swastikas hung from the back of the stage and formed the backdrop. Portraits of Hitler were placed next to those of George Washington, and the men on stage, some wearing Hitler-esque toothbrush mustaches, delivered their speeches as much like Hitler as they could, with arms waving and spittle spewing. There were no hate-speech laws back then, so as long as no one said anything obscene or shouted “Fire!” they could say whatever they wanted. When Judge Perlman decided to sic an army on the Nazis in America cities, he knew he needed an army of Jewish men who didn’t care that much about the letter of American law. So he called Lansky.
Italian mobsters get all the press, but back in the day the Jewish mob was very powerful. Arnold Rothstein was the first, a guy who once tried to fix the World Series. But Lansky was even more powerful. The bosses of the five families all listened to Lucky Luciano and Luciano always listened to Meyer Lansky—so Jewish men made money and wielded power in U.S. cities, New York, Chicago, L.A. The Jewish men who fought the Nazis in New York were members of a sette, which is an organization of professional killers that carried out contracted hits pre-approved by a commission of Mob Bosses. The sette was in place to keep everyone with a beef from killing their enemies, which ended up being bad for business. Luciano knew about Judge Perlman’s request for assistance and offered the services of Italian gangsters as well, but Lansky said no thanks, this was a Jewish fight. He owed it to his Jewish brothers and sisters who were suffering in Europe. Judge Perlman offered to pay the men of Murder, Inc. to fight Nazis but Lansky said no, as did Micky Cohen on the West Coast. The fight was one of Jewish pride, and not a professional matter. The Jewish community in New York, some of it anyway, was embarrassed that there were Jewish members of organized crime, but that didn’t keep Jewish boys from looking upon the Jewish gangsters as heroes. It was a world that believed Jews to be soft, there to be picked on, and these were tough Jews. These guys loved America, and the thought that Nazis were growing in power was an automatic call to action.
Lansky, of course, wanted to go out and shoot Nazis, but Judge Perlman forbid it. Do that and you lose the moral high ground. As Lansky later put it, we won’t kill’em, we’ll just marinate’em. It was a key factor. No one gets killed. Instead of using guns, the gangsters use brass knuckles and sawed-off pool cues. The idea was to discourage the American Nazis from being so bold and brazen, and it worked.
The no-kill rule caused a slight problem for Lansky. Some of those Murder Inc. boys were dangerous in a street fight, but there were others, you took their gun away they stopped being so tough. So he took them to Gleason’s Gym, which was in the Bronx at that time, and had them take boxing lessons. In retrospect, the exercise may have been more a matter of team-building than throwing combos. These guys at the most went out in pairs when they killed a guy. Now they had to act as an angry mob in a situation where they left the heaters home and they would be greatly outnumbered.
The team that attacked the Nazis at the Yorkville Casino were stone-cold killers: Buggsy Goldstein, Tick Tock Tannenbaum, Pittsburgh Phil (who’d never actually been to Pittsburgh), Blue Jaw Magoon.
In the short-term, the German-American Bund wanted to unite German-American voters to create a political force and thus get like-minded individuals into positions of power. In the long-term, they envisioned a world in which America would’ve been transformed into an overgrown duplicate of Nazi Germany. Jews would have been rounded up and executed. Democracy would’ve been abolished. Civil rights for minorities would have been non-existent. It’s hard to imagine who would have been left after the white supremacists finished their purge.
It is important to note that, back then, in what some people tend to think of as the good old days, racism and anti-semitism was quite casual. No one had the courage to ask Americans in a survey if they approved of Jews being killed, but a solid ten percent told survey interviewers that they’d prefer it if the Jews “went back to where they came from.” Many white gentiles to this day tend to think they are the only Americans that truly matter.
The nation’s most popular anti-Semite was Father Charles Coughlin. gave his sermons over the radio on Sunday afternoons, right between the Rhythmic Ramblings program, and Design For Dancing. They called Coughlin “The Radio Priest”. Coughlin had a velvety soft voice and tenderly wrapped his hate speech in a warm security blanket of tone and comfort. In 1926 he built his own church, Shrine of the Little Flower, and was given free radio time to promote his church. His first shift from the religious to the political came in 1929 after the Stock Market crashed and the nation plummeted into despair. Eventually, the radio priest broadcasted had nationwide syndication and was dishing out a strong defense of Nazi Germany. In particular, he praised the way Nazis dealt with Jews. The priest said that he was against all forms of religious persecution, of course, but the German’s treatment of the Jews was a natural reaction to the communist threat that the Jews represented.
It is unclear if Coughlin was aware of the genocide underway when he said this, but he certainly knew about Kristallnacht, November 9-10, 1938, in which Jewish neighborhoods were smashed and many of their residents killed. Coughlin told America that he wasn’t pro-Nazi; he was anti-communist. He named the names of two-dozen Jewish men who were involved in the “Russian revolution.” He said the Jews had money and were backing the communists. He said the Jewish religion and communism, in fact, had become synonymous and the power of that combo was making Germany sick, like a cancer. Was it any wonder they wanted to cut it out?
Without any sense of irony, Father Coughlin said that many Jews in Germany had become powerful by using their talents to acquire positions in radio, on newspapers, and in international banking. The Jews, he said, were dangerous because of their solidarity. It was one-for-all with those people, so that when they wanted to be aggressive, they could hurt Germany. He pleaded with FDR to pull American ambassadors out of all communist countries.
Coughlin’s ratings were through the roof. So, when Judge Perlman got on the phone and called Jewish mobsters across the country, including Chicago, anti-semitism was in the very air.
On April 20,1938, Hitler’s birthday, Lansky takes his crew to the Yorkville Casino on East 86th Street. Albert Anastasia, the Italian mobster known as the Lord High Executioner, used to have a trick. If he had to whack someone in New York City, in a high profile way, a famous guy or in public, he’d buy hats made in Chicago, put them on his hit team, and after the shooting was done the hoods would lose their hats and flee. Sure enough, the papers would quote the cops the next day saying they suspected a hit team from Chicago had been brought in, while the actual killers were playing cards in Midnight Rose’s back room in Brownsville, Brooklyn. So, Lansky uses this technique. His guys wear American Legion hats, beat the crap out of a bunch of Nazis, drop one out a second-floor window, and lose their hats as they escaped into the night. Sure enough, the New York Times reports the next day that seven Nazis ended up in the hospital and that the invaders were thought to be members of the American Legion. (In truth, the American Legion didn’t mind being falsely accused. A lot of them had fought in World War I and didn’t like the idea that Germans were getting aggressive again.)
The scenario was repeated across the country, in Newark NJ, Chicago IL, Minneapolis MN, Los Angeles CA. The intelligence gathered during this little war before the big war, comes in handy after Pearl Harbor, when Nazi sympathizers were weeded out of jobs as shipbuilders or on the docks, where they could have committed acts of sabotage.
Judge Nathan Perlman
German American Bund leader Fritz Kuhn
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