The Incorruptibles & Organized Jewish Crime in New York City in the Early 20th Century

Unsung History

In 1912, a group of wealthy and influential German Jews in uptown New York funded an effort to root out organized crime on the lower East Side, then the most densely populated neighborhood on Earth, home to half a million people, many of them recent Jewish Russian immigrants. As a result, a Jewish investigator and a Jewish lawyer joined the NYPD and pulled together a group of cops who refused to be paid off. The Incorruptibles, as the vice squad came to be known, quickly quashed the criminal element, but as war loomed in Europe, the attention and funds of the uptowners shifted abroad, and the Incorruptibles folded. Crime, of course, remained, and Jewish organized crime in New York only grew as the Prohibition Era dawned.

Joining me in this episode is writer Dan Slater, author of The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Havdole gut Schabes,” performed by Lizzie Einhorn Abramson in 1910; audio is in the public domain and available via the Library of Congress National Jukebox. The episode image is a photo of Arnold Rothstein, taken on November 1, 1919, which appeared in several newspaper stories about the Black Sox scandal; it’s in the public domain and available via Wikimedia Commons.

Additional Sources:

• “The Life of a City: Early Films of New York, 1898 to 1906,” Library of Congress.
• “The Lower East Side,” Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History, Library of Congress.
• “Uncovering the History of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire,” by David von Drehle, Smithsonian Magazine, August 2006.
• “‘Ten Thousand Bigamists In New York’: The Criminalization Of Jewish Immigrants Using White Slavery Panics,” by Mia Brett, The Gotham Center for New York City History, October 27, 2020.
• “SAY SLAYERS DIDN'T RESEMBLE GUNMEN; Defense Rests After Calling Some of Those Who Saw the Murder of Rosenthal,” The New York Times, November 16, 1912.
• “Abraham Shoenfeld Papers,”American Jewish Historical Society.
• “An Assassin’s Bullet Took Three Years to Kill NYC Mayor William Jay Gaynor,” by Rose Eveleth, Smithsonian Magazine, September 11, 2013.
• “How Arnold ‘the Brain’ Rothstein Modernized the Mob,” by Angela M.H. Schuster, Avenue Magazine, May 22, 2020.
• “Ninety Years Later, Arnold Rothstein Murder Still a Mystery,” by Christian Cipollini, The Mob Museum, November 6, 2018.

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