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© Steve Pease

History's Bad Guys (and Gals)©

Judas Iscariot betrayed Christ. He nodded or otherwise gave the signal leading to Jesus arrest, trial, and crucifixion. And for that, Judas paid the ultimate price. He committed suicide by hanging himself. That he had no choice in what he did, and in what transpired after, did not matter. God, not Judas, was the author of the drama. In that sense, Judas was a victim. But his conscience led him to suicide, and for the 2,000 years since, history has seen him as a traitor whose first name alone lives as a symbol of deceit and betrayal.

For many Christians, Judas is the ultimate Jewish bad guy and a core reason for anti-Semitism. But he is not the only Jew to have done a nefarious deed. And this book would not do justice to the topic of Jewish achievement without discussing the other side of the coin. On occasion the remarkable achievements of Jews have been negative.

Marxism, Communism, and Stalin

Karl Marx remains a controversial political figure more than 120 years after his death. Considered a bad guy by many, others continue to see him as a genius and believe strongly in the notions he fathered. Marxist philosophy still draws millions of followers around the world and on college campuses. Though Marx was descended from long lines of rabbis on both sides of his family, his parents converted to become Lutherans. Marx, instead, chose to become atheist. He never considered himself a Jew, and he spoke of Jews in the third person. Nonetheless, his genetic origins were Jewish.

An outgrowth of Marxism, Communism is the only major political movement in which Jews played a major role. As a major political movement, Communism is now moribund, having lost credibility in its seventy-five-year experiment. It simply did not work. It brutalized and impoverished its own people and because of Communism, millions died unnecessarily. It created an environmental mess in Russia that will take generations to clean up. It led to an incredible waste of time, money, and lives for those who experienced its evils or had to respond to its challenges.

Lenin sometimes gets tagged as a Jew. In fact, it is believed one grandparent on his mothers side was Jewish and Lenin married a Jewess. So there is a connection, but it is tenuous, and by most traditional definitions Lenin is not Jewish, nor did he consider himself one. (He wanted Jews to assimilate.)

Not tenuous, however, is the fact that Leon Trotsky was a Jew (He considered himself a non-Jewish Jew). Trotsky was a vital figure in the early revolution, and he led the fight to preserve the Soviet Union against the White Army and its counter-revolution.

Among other Jewish members of the Bolshevik inner circle were: Lev Kamenev, a leader in the Politboro and chairman of the Moscow Soviet; Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) Soviet; Adolfe Yoffe, who served in ambassadorial roles to the UK, China, Austria, and Japan; Karl Radek, who was a member of the Central Committee and the Executive Committee of the Comintern; and Yakov Sverdlov, chairman of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee. These were all brutal men living in brutal times. The stories of how Bolsheviks seized power from the democratically oriented Mensheviks, the nastiness with which they fought to survive, and the regime of terror that commenced during Lenins rule, leave no question this group truly belongs on the bad guy side of the ledger.

What this listing of Bolshevik Jews neglects, however, is that by Stalins reckoning, Jews were more important to the Mensheviks than to the Bolsheviks. In Stalin and the Jews, Arno Lustiger quotes Stalin as saying:

"Statistics show that Jews are a majority within the Menshevik faction . . . followed by the Georgians and then by the Russians. In contrast to the overpowering majority of Russians in the Bolshevik faction, followed by the Jews . . . and then the Georgians, etc."

Statistics cited by Lustiger show the Bolshevik party had 964 Jewish members before the revolution. This was 4 percent of its 23,600 members.

More important, however, is the simple fact that the villain of the piece is Stalin, and Stalin was Georgian, not Jewish. Lenin lasted for only a few years after the revolution. Stalin grabbed power in 1924 and held onto it for nearly thirty years. The true horrors of Communism occurred during his paranoid leadership.

In that paranoia, Stalin killed nearly every other founder of Soviet Communism, Jew and non-Jew alike. Sverdlov died early (1919) and thus didnt have to be dealt with by Stalin. But Stalin had Trotsky murdered with a pickax to the back of the head. He arranged for Kirov (a charismatic non-Jew and potential challenger) to be assassinated. He put Kamenev and Zinoviev on trial for treason (as enemies of the people) and extracted phony confessions from them, having promised he would spare their families. Then he had them executed for complicity in the Kirov murder (among other crimes). Radek was probably shot in 1939 for having been sympathetic to Trotsky. Yoffe was also associated with Trotsky and reportedly committed suicide. These are but a small tip of the horrific iceberg of what Stalin did to those close to him or those he thought might become a threat. Only one prominent Jewish Bolshevik from the founding cadre, Lazar Kaganovich, survived Stalin.

Robert Conquest, perhaps the foremost Stalin biographer, estimates Stalins leadership caused 18 million deaths from famines, imprisonments, and executions carried out in conjunction with forced collectivization, purges, show trials, and other acts of terror between 1930 and 1939. Defector, Victor Kravchenko said in his 1946 memoir, I Choose Freedom, From 1 January 1935 to 22 June 1941, 19,840,000 enemies of the people were arrested. Of these, 7 million were shot in prison and a majority of the others died in camp. Stalin purged (killed) virtually his entire inner circle and much of the Soviet military officer corps. He launched an anti-Semitic campaign in 1948 and was ready to conduct show trials, mostly against Jewish doctors, when he died in 1953.

So, we can place some blame on Jews for helping father a failed, very nasty system (Soviet Communism), but Stalin, the Georgian, was the evil genius behind Communisms worst excesses.

Spies and Traitors

The story of how Stalin got the atomic bomb cannot be told without discussing the Jews who helped him get it. That spies, mostly Jews, were involved, is no longer in question.

The Venona documents secret Soviet cable traffic from the 1940s augmented by the Mitrokhin Archive a trove of documents smuggled out of Russia by a veteran KGB officer as well as access to the long closed KGB files, definitively prove the case. Allegations of revealing atomic secrets and other acts of betrayal were made against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Theodore Hall, Morton Sobell, Elizabeth Bentley, and William Purl, all Jews, as well as Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, Harry Dexter White, and Kim Philby, not Jews. Ultimately, the cables also proved Alger Hiss, Harry Hopkins, (both non-Jews) and J. Robert Oppenheimer were providing information to the Soviets. That the Venona data could not be used during the resulting trials was an unfortunate casualty of not wanting to reveal FBI tradecraft. But when the Venona data was finally made available in 1995 and could be corroborated from then open archives of the KGB, all doubt was erased. Mitrokhins archive further corroborated the facts.

And while the Soviets had brilliant nuclear physicists and would doubtless have ultimately built a bomb, there is no question their efforts were substantially accelerated by the information provided by the traitors. And as many sources have reported, one ironic result of the spies efforts was that Stalin knew all about our Manhattan Project. Truman, on the other hand, only found out about it on the day he was sworn in as president.

One cannot minimize the damage done, nor the betrayal. At the same time, it is important to consider that until 1948, Stalin was not known to be particularly anti-Semitic, and his antagonism toward Jews was not widely understood until after his death in 1953. Moreover, the scale of Stalins crimes, though occasionally rumored, was not conclusively laid out for the world until Khrushchev made his famous February 1956 revelations to the Communist Party Conference and still later, in 1969, when Robert Conquests book, The Great Terror was published to document the horrors of Stalin and the Soviet system.

Communism and the Soviet Union arrived on the world scene with the October revolution of 1917. For most of the early 1920s it was on the defensive, but with Stalins accession, and the Partys series of five-year plans, which forced industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, the Communists began to bring a medieval Russian culture into the twentieth century. The effort began to bear fruit, and the Communists aggressively propagandized the Soviet Union as a workers paradise. This happened while Germany was falling apart and dramatic labor unrest fomented in much of the West. The Crash of 1929 and ensuing worldwide Depression destroyed hope and confidence.

For many who matured in that era, Communism appeared to work while the democracies and capitalism did not. And while Hitlers fascism might also work, it was viewed as evil by anyone with left-wing sentiments. For many idealists, intellectuals and others with liberal views, Communisms successes and the fear of Western decline created sympathy and strong support for Communism. And once their allegiances were compromised, there was simply no turning back.

Interestingly, once the facts about Stalin and Communism became more widely understood, the age of ideological spying for the Soviet Union closed, and with that, the era in which Jews were Communisms principal spies ended. Only Gus Hall and the U.S Communist Party persisted, having already made their bed. But once Stalins excesses became known, the motivation for spying changed. Treason became essentially economic (a nice pay-day in the cases of Aldrich Ames, the Walkers, Edward Lee Howard, and others) or pathological and economic (as in the case of Robert Hansen). With few exceptions, after the 1950s, U.S. traitors were generally not political and not Jewish. As noted in his Economist magazine obituary, the last great Soviet spy catcher, Rem Krasilnikov, caught every single CIA spy in the Soviet Union by the end of the 1980s. He did this not because ideological traitors in the United States revealed their identities, but because non-Jews, Edward Lee Howard, and Aldrich Ames (both CIA employees), and Robert Hansen (an FBI employee) were working for the Soviets -- for money.

So in the end, the Jewish traitors did the West a huge disservice. Their naivet helps explain why they did it, but that is an inadequate defense. One can call it an achievement to spirit atomic weapons secrets to the Soviets, thereby changing the balance of power. But it was a pyrrhic achievement. The Soviet Union was never the workers paradise it promised. It was a murderous, bureaucratic mess. A further measure of the ill-fated efforts by the Jewish traitors was demonstrated in the reversal of the Soviet position on Israel. After having been an early supporter, Stalins Soviet Union became an opponent of Israel and stayed opposed to the Jewish state until the Soviet Union fell apart.

Ironically, the only other major Jewish traitor was again ideological. Jonathon Pollard was an ideological spy for Israel. He felt that U.S. secrets should not be secrets from Israel, and he revealed those secrets to them. He was caught and has stayed in jail despite continuing efforts from Israel and American Jewish supporters to have him freed. The odds are he will stay in jail till he dies, or, at best, is a very old man.

Court TV maintains a Crime Library on their Web site listing the major criminals of various kinds. One of their lists is shown in Exhibit 25a. Of the fifteen major spies they identify, Fuchs, Pollard, and both Rosenbergs mean that Jews represent four of the fifteen names, well above what one would expect. At the same time, three of the four were involved in the Atomic spying scandal.

Oligarchs

Russia's oligarchs are a topic suitable for either of two chapters in this book, the chapter on entrepreneurs or this chapter. That the oligarchs are very shrewd and have accumulated great wealth and power is indisputable. In that sense, they would fit nicely with the entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, the rich irony of their contemporary role in Russia (as contrasted with the pogroms of the czars and the anti-Semitism of Stalinism), coupled with the questionable ways in which they have amassed their fortunes, makes it more fitting that we discuss them here.

So first, what is an oligarch? As generally used, an oligarch is one of a very small number of men, mostly Russians, who have taken over major state enterprises and assets of the former Soviet Union. Oligarchs are most often Russian or Ukrainian, but there are oligarchs in other former Soviet countries as well. And in fact, the term oligarch has been so popularized that it has begun to have currency in countries that were never part of the Soviet Union. For our purposes, however, only the Russians matter. They are the original and most important of the oligarchs.

Oligarchs acquired wealth and power in a variety of ways, more often than not questionable. On occasion, they used relationships with Russian government officials to buy state assets for a pittance, often paying bribes back to the officials handling the sale. In other cases, oligarchs acquired control of shares originally distributed free to employees of the enterprise. In those instances, the oligarchs bought the shares for pennies on the dollar from poor Russians who had little sense of their value or were desperate for cash to survive the early days after the breakup of the Soviet Union. In other cases, oligarchs borrowed money from companies they controlled, then loaned it back to the companies in exchange for huge numbers of additional shares. Those additional shares locked in the oligarchs control while diluting the ownership of the rest of the shareholders. This wiped out the value of the investment owned by the other shareholders and eliminated any influence they might have had.

Perhaps the most fascinating and questionable tactic was the loans for shares program. This scheme arose from the fact that Boris Yeltsin was facing re-election in 1996 and was likely to lose. His poll numbers were so abysmal his popularity could be measured in single digits. The odds of his winning re-election were trivial. Many expected the Communists to win big, take over the presidency, hold onto the Duma (legislature) and return to complete power. At one infamous dinner, Yeltsin met with a group of wealthy oligarchs. They had access to sufficient cash to give him a shot at winning re-election. He would use it to retain Western political consultants, purchase huge amounts of media time, and generally portray himself as a youthful and vigorous leader while depicting his opponents as representing a demonstrably failed ideology.

The oligarchs loaned the money to the Yeltsin government. The loans were collateralized by Russian state-owned assets (businesses and natural resources). Yeltsin used the money to get re-elected, and when the loans were not repaid (and the plan never was for them to be repaid), the oligarchs grabbed the collateral. In short, in exchange for loans representing but a small fraction of the value of the collateral, a few Russian oligarchs took control of major sectors of the Russian economy and made themselves more powerful and much wealthier than they had been. After re-election, but before his term ended, Yeltsin turned the presidency over to Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, who was subsequently elected in his own right. Since then, Putin has proven popular with the Russian electorate and has evolved a different, often strident strategy to attack a number of the oligarchs, in particular, those who have challenged him.

By nearly everyones analysis, these chaps have simply not played the game according to the Rules of the Marquis of Queensberry.

So, how many oligarchs are there? The answer to that question depends upon who provides the list and how many names they wish to include. The San Jose State economics department lists The original seven oligarchs, the California National Guard in the International Section of its Web site lists the top ten. David E. Hoffman, The Washington Posts foreign editor, lists six in his book, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia. The lists share mostly the same names, but for our purposes, Hoffmans list is authoritative and it makes the point. His list includes:

Berezovsky began by reselling Russian Ladas (automobiles) which he bought at artificially low prices because of his cozy relationship with the bureaucrats running the state-owned manufacturer. He resold the cars at a huge markup and pocketed the profits. Later he opened his own dealerships and controlled a major share of the Moscow automobile market. For a time he had effective operating control of Aeroflot, the Russian airline, several newspapers and magazines, and ORT, the countrys state-owned and largest television network. He is now on the outs with Putin, has been exiled, and is in the UK where that government has refused to extradite him to Russia to stand trial for corruption.

Gusinsky began by buying copper wire on the black market, converting it into bracelets, selling them and making a small fortune in the process. Later, he spent time in the United States at the University of Virginia where he did some work for Ted Turner and his Goodwill Games. Upon his return to Moscow, he became a Russian consultant and then a property renovator and construction contractor. Still later, he opened Most Bank, bringing to it deposits from Moscow city government, which he got because of the relationship he had developed with Moscows mayor (Yury Luzhkov) from his property renovation and construction business. Gusinsky did not have to make interest payments to Moscow for those deposits, but he was able to use them for his own benefit, mostly profiting from foreign exchange trades and purchases of state securities. Ultimately, he purchased media properties and came to control major radio, TV, newspaper, and magazine enterprises. Like Berezovsky, Gusinsky ran afoul of Putin. Gusinsky is now in exile and was arrested and later released on bail by the Greek government, pending possible extradition to Russia. If nothing else, Putin has demonstrated his concern over control of the Russian media, and it is in that realm that he has frequently challenged the oligarchs.

Smolensky was arrested by the KGB in 1981 for publishing a Bible using government presses and ink. Under Gorbachev in 1987, he had formed a cooperative supplying materials to Moscow tradesmen. The enterprise was so profitable, Smolensky decided to create his own bank, Stolichny Bank, which has since grown to become one of Moscows largest. In addition, he has developed media properties including two newspapers and part ownership of the ORT television network. He is also a shareholder in the Sibneft Oil Company. Though one of his banks failed and wiped out many depositors, Smolensky remains in Russia and he is very powerful.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky controlled Yukos, one of Russias largest petroleum companies. In addition, he controlled MENATEP, a major holding company formed in 1982 when he was a member of the Young Communist League. MENATEP became a major trader and market maker in shares of privatized state-owned enterprises and through MENATEP, Khodorkovsky came to control large companies in the chemical, construction, textile, consumer goods, mining and oil industries. His takeover of Yukos for a pittance relative to its value, his dilution of other shareholders, his consolidation of control, and his participation in the loans for shares program gave Khodorkovsky great notoriety in Russia. It has also made him one of the worlds wealthiest men. His life appeared assured until those around Putin saw Khodorkovsky as a potential threat. The FSB (successor to the KGB) surrounded his plane one night when it landed in Siberia. He was arrested and remains in jail. The most valuable parts of Yukos have been grabbed and reliable followers of Russian affairs expect Khodorkovsky to face a very long prison sentence.

Yury Luzhkov is the mayor of Moscow. Luzhkov is a larger than life figure, a Mayor Richard Daly writ even larger in Russias most important city. That he is effective is without question. That he is also corrupt is only slightly less open to question.

Anatoly Chubais headed the early privatization program of Russian state property and has since become the head of UES, Russias electric power monopoly. Many view Chubais as the single person most responsible for the ascendancy of the oligarchs. His willingness to cut deals that he may well have known to be corrupt and to hastily distribute shares representing about one-third of the Soviet economy to citizens who had no sense of their value, may have been dictated by a fear that if he failed to move quickly, the Communists would return and undo the privatization process. Nonetheless, the consequence was the ascendancy of the oligarchs, and today, with his control of the electric power industry, Chubais has joined their ranks. He has also been the subject of assassination attempts as recently as early 2005.

What is interesting about these six oligarchs is that four of them are of Jewish extraction (Chubais and Luzhkov are not). Further, Berezovsky now counts himself a Christian - a conversion some say is intended only to avert anti-Semitic criticism. In addition, Khodorkovsky and Smolensky are of mixed parentage.)

If we were to compare the Hoffman list to the one from San Jose State, we would remove Luzhkov and Chubais but add Vladimir Potanin, Vladimir Vinogradov, and Mikhail Friedman. The San Jose State grouping results in five of its seven oligarchs being of Jewish extraction. Other lists would yield similar outcomes. By any count, Jews are the dominant oligarchs. When one considers that there are supposedly only 550,000 Jews among Russias 145 million people (0.38 percent of the population versus 2.1 percent in the United States), it is simply amazing that Jews represent roughly two-thirds or more of the countrys oligarchs, therein controlling a huge part of the wealth of the country in which they were reviled both in czarist and late Stalinist times.

Mobsters

Meyer Lansky (Meyer Suchowljansky) was not, as commonly believed, just a clever financier for the mob. Nor was he an isolated case of Jewish involvement during the heyday of American organized crime.

In fact, if anyone could be said to have organized crime, it was Meyer Lansky - working with his close non-Jewish friend Charles Lucky Luciano (Salvatore Luciana). Together they created the modern syndicate, set up Murder Incorporated, established huge and profitable bootlegging operations and developed much of the gambling industry in the United States and Cuba.

But Lansky and Luciano really belong to the third generation of American Jewish mobsters, not the first. The story properly begins with Monk Eastman (Edward Osterman). Eastman was born in Brooklyn in 1873. By the time he was in his early twenties, he was the leader of all the Jewish thugs on the East Side of New York. According to Rich Cohen, author of Tough Jews, Monk Eastman could call out over a thousand soldiers, all of them Jewish. They were all part of the Gangs of New York, largely ethnic groupings of tough guys who, when not fighting each other, stole from the poor and weak while shaking down merchants needing protection. Thomas Sowell, in his book, Ethnic America, noted that in 1909, 3,000 Jewish youngsters were brought before the juvenile court in New York. It was neither pretty nor sophisticated.

It was Arnold Rothstein who deserves credit for converting the unruly Jewish mob into a smart, well-organized, highly profitable criminal business. He became the ultimate boss of the New York underworld. Rothstein is most remembered, perhaps apocryphally, as the fixer behind the 1919 World Series Black Sox scandal. (In fact, he was never indicted for anything having to do with the scandal.) Rothstein was a very smart, very dapper fellow, a remarkable gambler, a champion pool player, and the scion of a wealthy Jewish family that owned a dry goods store and a cotton processing plant. Unlike others who saw crime as part of their immigrant legacy from the violent gangs of Odessa or Bucharest, or as a reaction to the poverty and discrimination of the Lower East Side ghettos, Rothstein was apparently drawn by the excitement and drama of the lifestyle. And he was so good at it that before he was killed in 1928, he had far surpassed his fathers fortune, and in fact, anonymously arranged to bail out his father when he had fallen on hard times.

Rothstein truly was the original Jewish Godfather. He was among the very first to see the enormous money to be made from bootlegging and drugs, and he set up organizations to go after those profits. He also recruited some of the best criminal talent in history, including: Meyer Lansky, Benjamin Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello (Francesco Castiglia), Legs Diamond, Waxey Gordon, Dutch Schultz, Louis Lepke, and Gurrah Shapiro. It is doubtful that even a legend like Jack Welch of GE could claim such a remarkable recruiting history. And through it all, until his death over a dispute about a relatively small sum of money, Rothstein dressed immaculately, gambled successfully, and wined and dined with the likes of Governor Al Smith and Justice Louis Brandeis. F. Scott Fitzgerald depicted Rothstein as the character Meyer Wolfshiem in The Great Gatsby, and in Rich Cohens words, Rothstein was the Moses of the underworld.

In the hiatus between Rothsteins death in 1928 and the ascendancy of Lansky and Luciano, two Italians, Giuseppe Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano took over as joint kingpins of New York crime. Both were old-school Sicilians, and each of them wanted Lucky Luciano to ditch Meyer Lansky and come work solely for them.

Luciano had other plans. He knew that Maranzano intended to destroy Masseria and thereby control all crime in the eastern United States. It was an opportunity for Lansky and Luciano to change the game. First they orchestrated Masserias classic mob-style execution over lunch (shot immediately after Luciano left the table to go to the mens room). Maranzano thanked Luciano and immediately declared himself boss of all bosses. That lasted less than six months. Lansky and Luciano set up Maranzano and had him killed. Together, they then took over. They organized the five crime families in New York into a syndicate with no boss of all bosses. The five families would be independent but act in concert. To enforce discipline, and with support from the families, Lansky and Luciano established Murder Incorporated. Its job was to kill all mutually agreed upon renegades who defied the power of any family or otherwise insulted key players in the syndicate. To make it work, they assigned the job as co-heads of Murder Incorporated to Louis Lepke Buchalter (Jew) and Albert Anastasia (non-Jew), two very nasty fellows. Together, they invented contract killing and recruited mostly Jews to do the work including: Abraham Kid Twist Reles, Harry Straus, Buggsy Goldstein, and others.

Meanwhile, in 1927, Lepke and Jacob Gurrah Shapiro killed Augie Orgen. In the process, they took over the business of shaking down labor unions and the companies those unions were trying to organize. It did not take Lepke and Gurrah long to decide that working on a payment for services basis was not nearly as profitable as taking over the unions themselves. Soon they controlled thousands of workers in trucking, motion pictures, and painting, and with that, mob control of unions - and their pension funds - had begun.

From their early days under Rothstein, Lansky, Luciano, Frank Costello and Bugsy Siegel honed their skills in casino gambling and hotel operations starting originally with hotels in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. They learned both how to pay off cops and other officials and to operate clean, high quality casinos and hotels where customers got good value and were not cheated. This followed the earlier pattern set by Rothstein in which their bootleg booze was always of the best quality and never watered down. Customers liked the quality Lansky and his cronies provided, and they came back for more. As Prohibition ended, gambling became the vehicle to replace the lost profits - and profit they did.

Working with Lansky, Bugsy Siegel is said to have pioneered large-scale Las Vegas hotels and casinos just as Americas GIs were returning from World War II. (This move ultimately led to his execution for being over budget, behind schedule with the Flamingo Hotel and Casino, and perhaps for diverting some funds to a girlfriend.)

Lansky paid off Governor Huey Long for rights to operate in New Orleans and he set up operations in Hot Springs, Arkansas, as well as Kentucky and South Florida. Lanskys most notorious operation, however, was in Havana, Cuba, in a partnership with Dictator Fulgencio Batista. Those operations were later popularized in Francis Ford Coppolas movie, Godfather II, wherein Michael Corleone has to come to grips with Hyman Roth, the fictional characterization of Meyer Lansky. In the movie, Michael has Roth killed. In real life, however, the ending was much different. After a drawn out and ultimately unsuccessful effort to immigrate to Israel (or anyplace else that would have him), Lansky was returned to the United States, where he faced three separate charges. He defeated the first in court, had a preliminary conviction on the second overturned, and saw the third charge dismissed. In fact, through his entire life, Lansky never spent significant time in jail. He died of old age (82) at his home in Miami.

In the end, Lanskys death coincides with the final demise of prominent Jewish involvement in organized crime. Rich Cohens take on the fact that Italians continue to lead organized crime while Jews pulled out is interesting. He quotes John Cusack, a retired thirty-six-year agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, as saying The Jewish Mafia was never passed on like the Italian Mob. Jews didnt recruit. The old-timers did what they felt they had to do; but they did not want the younger generation of Jews mixed up in it.

Throughout his long life, Lansky was involved with so many other Jews in organized crime that they are simply too numerous to mention. Among them were: Dutch Schultz (Arthur Flegenheimer), Mickey Cohen, Charlie Workman, Albert Tannenbaum, Detroits Bernstein Brothers (the Purple Gang), Kidd Cann, Moe Dalitz, Motche Goldberg, Abner Longy Zwillman, Louis Amberg, Abe Greenthal, and the Sheeny Gang and many, many others. It simply does not wash to say that there were very few Jews in organized crime. There were many.

Major Jewish involvement in organized crime really came to an end well before Lanskys death. The era culminated between 1935 and 1945. Dutch Schultz was taken out by Murder Incorporated in October of 1935 because he refused to go along with a mob decision not to kill prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey. Abe Kid Twist Reles, tired of serving jail time, began to rat on his former colleagues in March of 1940, providing information on seventy unsolved Murder Incorporated contract murders. Charlie Workman was sentenced to life in jail. Harry Straus and Bugsy Goldstein were tried and executed for murder during 1941. On August 24, 1940, Louis Lepke turned himself in to newspaper columnist Walter Winchell - of all people - who in turn handed him over to J. Edgar Hoover. Lepke was later tried and executed on the same night as Mendy Weiss and Louis Capone, based in part on Reles information. Reles either jumped, or was shoved, from the window of the room where he was being watched over by eighteen cops during the trials of his former friends. Many other Jewish mobsters were sentenced to long terms or went to death row during this time period. Bugsy Siegel lasted till June 1947, when he was executed by the mob.

In the end, it is fair to say that between 1900 and 1945, organized crime in the United States was mostly a product of two cultures, Italians and Jews - with a few Irish and others thrown in. Further, though the story of Jewish involvement is fascinating, the dominant players were always the Italians. Jews were critical players with a vital role, but the big numbers were with the Italians. Court TVs Library of Crime describes at least sixty-three leading Mob Bosses, Crime Family Leaders, and heads of Unique Gang Organizations. Of the sixty-three (See Exhibit 25b), one is Japanese (representing Japans Yakuza), two are English (the Kray Bothers), three are Irish, (James Burke of the Lufthansa Heist, Willie Egan and Bugs Moran) and nine are Jewish. The rest (forty-eight), are Italian. Out of the sixty-three, sixty are American and thus, based on population we might have projected there to be 1.2 Jews on the list. Instead we get eight times that number.

Today most would say there is no significant Jewish involvement in residual organized crime in America, and that appears to be the case. Less well documented, however, is the extent to which the so-called Russian Mafia has significant Jewish involvement. That topic will wait for a later edition of this book

Violent Crime and Assassins

David Berkowitz (Son of Sam) makes everybodys list as one of the most notorious criminals of all time. He terrorized New York for more than a year between July 29, 1976, and August 10, 1977. He killed five young women and one man, and he wounded at least seven more. His was the rampage of a probable paranoid schizophrenic who had lost his mother to breast cancer when he was fourteen. Son of Sam was national news as the story played out during that year and later over the course of his trial. Berkowitz is still in jail, has converted to Christianity, and acknowledges that he is unlikely to ever be paroled.

Berkowitz is one of only six Jews to make the Court TV Librarys lists of Serial Killers, Notorious Murderers, Outlaws, Terrorists, and Assassins. The other five are: Ira Einhorn, Nathan Leopold, Richard Loeb, Joel Steinberg, and Otto Sanhuber. All but Sanhuber are well-known names, and Sanhuber was not really certain that he was Jewish, but he thought that he was. There are 200 American names included on these lists and 78 foreigners (Exhibit 25c). None of the six Jews is foreign. Perhaps the incidence of violent crime by Jews outside the United States is extremely rare, but there are insufficient data to make a definitive statement. The U.S. data is clear. Of 200 violent U.S. criminals, one could project there to be a bit more than four Jews. Instead, at six, the incidence is roughly 50 percent more than expected. And while our sample may be off - missing some violent criminals who did not make Court TVs lists or missing Jews whom we did not identify - those errors would not likely change the overall observation that Jews are involved in violent crime only somewhat more than would be expected. Violent crime (not counting the heyday of organized crime) is not an area in which Jews represent disproportionately high numbers. They do their share, but not that much more or less than others. Interestingly, none of the seventy listed sexual predators is Jewish.

One omission from the Court TV list deserves a passing mention. That is Yigal Amir. Amir is Israeli. He will go down in history as having committed a notorious political assassination that changed the course of Middle East history. He shot and killed Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who signed the Oslo Peace Accords with the Palestinians. That breath of hope was intentionally destroyed by Amir. His purpose was to set back any compromise agreement that would have resolved the 50 year dispute between the Jews and Palestinians. That the assassin was a conservative Jew, and not Palestinian, has been a source of shame and embarrassment to many Jews both in Israel and abroad. Deservedly so. It was and is a tragedy.

Financial Crime, Frauds and Scams

If there are a relatively small number of Jews among street criminals and murderers, the reverse tends to be true of financial crimes.

It does not take particularly sensitive antenna for anyone who follows the financial news to anticipate that Jews commit their share of financial shenanigans. Names like Michael Milken, Marc Rich, Ivan Boesky, Jay Gould, Andrew Fastow, and others are just too well known and too often discussed in the media to avoid a sense that as active players in money and finance, Jews are involved in a significant number of financial crimes. That expectation is borne out by the data.

There is no single place that gathers all financial scandals through time into a single frame of reference for this evaluation. In its absence the author has compiled one list which is provided in Exhibit 25d. It includes 78 major financial scandals involving 118 individuals. It was developed from lists such as the March 3, 2002 Fortune magazine list of white collar criminals (Exhibit 25e), the New York Chapter of the Institute of Financial Auditors, the University of Exeter list of classic financial scandals, and other sources. And while it cannot claim to be either comprehensive or rigorously random, it is reasonably representative.

The companies listed and the individual names bring to mind some of the more notorious scandals over time including such well known fiascos as:

Perusing the list is a bit of a walk down the Memory Lane of financial scandals for anyone who has followed such shenanigans over the last forty years or so. A review of the entire list shows that of the 118 names, twenty-four are Jewish. Because the scandals generally arose in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, those populations form the basis for saying that, based on population, we would logically expect only two Jews rather than the twenty-four shown on the list.

When the information is further culled to include only the seventy-three names involved in predominantly U.S. scandals, we would expect 1.5 Jews. Instead there are nineteen. Both ways of looking at the data indicate that Jews have been involved in financial scandals at a rate about twelve times their proportion of the overall population. This is probably in the ballpark in terms of their overall incidence in financial crimes. It is borne out by looking at the much shorter list from Fortune magazine (Exhibit 25e) which includes twenty-three individuals, mostly from the United States. Of the twenty-three, only .5 should be Jewish. Instead, six are: Bernie Cornfield, Marc Rich, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Martin Frankel, and Al Taubman. This is twelve times what we would expect.

A caveat: caution must be taken in interpreting these data. That is, Jews have significantly higher levels of education, hold disproportionate numbers of white collar jobs, and are disproportionately counted among entrepreneurs, financiers and attorneys. As such, the frame of reference for measuring the incidence of Jewish financial bad guys is not simply their percentage of the overall population. We know, for example, that Jews are 23 percent of Fortunes 2004 Americas Richest 40 under 40. They are 10 to 15 percent of Fortunes 100 CEOs, 23 percent of the Forbes 400 and 24 percent of Fortunes list of the 25 most powerful people in business. Collectively, the data suggest that while Jews are well represented amongst the great financial swindlers, the incidence is most likely proportionate to their numbers in the industries and situations where such crimes arise.

Further while Jews are high achievers in financial scandals, that conclusion must be matched with the corollary observation that non-Jews are still the predominant actors in financial scandals. That twenty-four of 114 people were Jews means ninety were not. This obvious point deserves being made explicit because in researching this topic, it became clear that information put forward by those who dislike Jews, or are otherwise anti-Semitic, suggests Jews commit the bulk of the worlds financial crimes. That view is ignorant or disingenuous. Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling (Enron), Billie Sol Estes, Joseph Jett (Kidder Peabody), Nicholas Leeson (Barings Bank), Bernie Ebbers and Scott Sullivan (Worldcom), Chainsaw Al Dunlap (Sunbeam), Albert B. Fall (Teapot Dome) Charles Ponzi (Ponzi Scheme), and many others are not Jewish. Jews do their share, or perhaps a slight bit more, but that is all.

Embarrassments

Jews also have their share of embarrassments. Among them:

Clearly, embarrassments happen - even in the best of families.