I blame my parents. It’s their fault. They were the ones who insisted I watch “The Godfather” at the age of eleven. Most parents would balk at exposing their pre-teen children to grisly images of horses’ heads in beds and wire-aided death by strangulation. But not mine. “It’s a film classic,” they said, and popped the video in the VCR.
Sonny Corleone’s chest exploded in squibs as he was pinned to the door of his car by Tommy-gun fire. He roared in agony as the bullets shredded him. And then. Then one of the assassins, dressed in a natty suit and hat with his Tommy-gun still resting in the crook of his arm, sauntered over to the prostrate corpse, looked it up and down, and gave it a vicious swiping kick across the face as a final insult. That was it. I was hooked.
At my brother’s Bar-Mitzvah, I strutted about in my gleaming new suit, hand thrust into my jacket like Michael Corleone guarding his father. I was family heavy at the synagogue and at the kosher reception. The kindly guests asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. I kept stum. My brother wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to be a gangster.
Trouble was there weren’t any big scary men wolfing down the cholent. My relations were all disgustingly legitimate—no broken noses, no shoulder harnesses. The only offer they couldn’t refuse was a call up to the bimah. Francis Ford Coppola had provided only Italian gangsters and so an impediment to my fantasy.
Imagination exists because reality isn’t enough. But it does rather spoil the fun of fantasy to know your desire is unattainable. The nagging voice of reality tells us to stop kidding ourselves. And it’s that voice that ultimately causes us to put away childish dreams. It’s tough to keep striving to Be Like Mike when you level out at 5’ 3’’ and develop an allergy to rubber.
And so my gangster dream might have petered out too if not for the corrupting influence of that same nefarious duo—my parents. “Liked that film did you?” Vigorous nod. “There’s a sequel you know?” Eyes widening. “It’s a classic.” And that’s how I made the acquaintance of Hyman Roth. He could easily have been one of my relatives slurping Shlivowitz at the old-folks’ table, except for his command of a murderous criminal enterprise. “A Jewish gangster?” I said to my parents. “Of course. He’s based on Lansky. Haven’t you ever heard of Meyer Lansky?” By then I was almost salivating.
More than a decade later, I’ve reached the point in my life where people ask me what I want to do with the rest of it. The answer is the same now as it was then. I still want to beat, extort, and (if the situation so dictates) put a bullet through another man’s brain stem. I’m as obsessed as ever but my rap sheet remains clean. With college over and the pressure on to make a serious career choice, the time for a decision has come: to be a gangster, or not?
They always told me I should do what I love. And I would love to live the life of a criminal. But isn’t it preposterous? Nice Jewish kids don’t become gangsters. Then again, nice Danish princes aren’t supposed to kill their usurpers either, and that turned out to be a matter for serious consideration.
Why be a gangster? Why would the obsession persist if the job didn’t have something to recommend it? After all, the gangster’s life is glamorous. Who else has such easy access to sex, money, and respect (or at least fear masquerading as respect)? Who else gets the good table, the better stuff in the back, the best room at the inn? And all of it by cheating, saddled with none of the moral qualms the rest of us labor with.
Granted, the gangster to which I’ve been paying tribute all these years is a construct. And one could argue that such rich trappings only apply in fiction. Maybe so. But there is something inherently glamorous to being an outlaw. Even if I were just chopping up bodies or fetching coffee in the rain for higher-ups, I would still be breaking the rules. And in the routine commission of the forbidden, I would be doing something terribly dangerous.
Risk—that’s what separates a gangster from the workaday world. Face it, most of us are cowards. The dictionary defines a “wimp” as “a spineless, gutless, harmless person.” A gangster, on the other hand, is a person with the capacity to do harm. Extortion works because he has access to violence, whether his own or of his cronies. And to do harm, he must be willing to risk harm – whether to his freedom or his person. So you can call a gangster evil, but you can’t call him a wimp.
The pay-off for being a gangster is power. The guy with the gun, the one willing to pull the trigger, will always win the dispute. And that for me is the ultimate selling point. A gangster has the power to get what he wants. If you don’t give it to him he’ll take it from you, or hurt you, perhaps even kill you. Wouldn’t you like the power to effect your will? Is there anything we want more than to get what we want?
As a person unwilling or unable (at least so far) to resort to violence, I have almost no control over getting what I want. The pay-off for abiding by the law—for not resolving conflict by violence or fraud—is peace. The police will not come to arrest me and gunmen will not come to my door to kill me. But if someone does me wrong, I have to beg the courts for help. And I have no control over the mechanism of punishment. In any confrontation, I either have to argue inexorably or shout louder. Neither of which will ever be as effective as making my point with a baseball bat.
Wouldn’t it be sweeter to steal and kill—to know that you risked your freedom and your life for what you have? Isn’t that risk—and the power that comes with it—worth giving up the security of civil society? Yes, the price might be death. Live by the gun, die by the gun. But doesn’t that sound so much cooler than “I did what I was told”?
In my romantic vision, a gangster doesn’t have to bear the oppressor’s wrong. He welcomes the law’s delay and sticks the proud man’s contumely where the sonnet doesn’t shine. No fardels, no grunting or sweating under a weary life. Why didn’t my high school guidance counselor at least present the option?
Perhaps it was because I’m Jewish. Complete the proud Jewish mother’s sentence: “My son the ….” “Doctor,” “lawyer,” perhaps “accountant” for the black sheep of the family. “Gangster” isn’t on the list. Jews have assimilated so successfully into American society, it’s hard to believe that less than a century ago respected newspapers were editorializing against the Jewish criminal scourge. For years, I thought Meyer Lansky was an anomaly—my one potential role model. I was wrong.
Up into the early 1960’s, American Jews were at least as prominent in American and global organized crime as the Italians (a couple of super-wealthy families now prominent in Jewish affairs made their first pile through bootlegging). By the early 1980’s, the Israeli mafia had become a burgeoning power in international crime with strongholds in New York and Los Angeles. Today, organized crime is considered second only to terrorism as a threat to Israel’s survival, and Jewish criminals—whether they be Mizrachi mobsters, Jews from the former Soviet Union, or common-or-garden Israelis—have a controlling stake in the global ecstasy trade and in the horrendous trafficking of women for Israel’s sex market.
Some commentators on Jewish gangsters have seized on the likes of Bugsy Siegel and Dutch Schultz as the antidote to Jewish passivity. Images of Holocaust victims going meekly to the slaughter have made them ambivalent about their
Jewish identity, the historical legacy of the Jew as weak victim creating in them a neurosis. Through the vicarious thrill of gangsterism—”tough Jews” who didn’t take no anti-Semitism —they overcome their obstacle to Jewish pride.
For me, pride was never the issue. And I’ve never been able to cast judgment on death camp victims for not resisting. Being Jewish simply seemed incongruous with being a gangster. Jewish religious tradition is about following rules (all six hundred or so). Talmud is an obsessive discussion about whether the rules are being followed. Given the choice, I would rather not obey.
What I’ve learned is I do have the choice. My Jewish background is no impediment to a life of crime. In fact, it might be an asset. I could polish up my Hebrew, grab a flight to Amsterdam or Tel Aviv, and be working the street in no time. Within a year I could be slinging ecstasy or providing “security” full time.
Ultimately, criminality requires only that one be a criminal. There’s no entrance exam or physical. A gangster need not come up from the streets, he can come down from the penthouse like Arnold Rothstein. If a rich kid from Manhattan can grow up to run an illegal empire, keep thieves and murderers on his payroll, and (allegedly) fix the World Series, why not me?
Why not?” That is the question. Is it because I’m too scared to take the risk or because I’m a fundamentally moral person? “Conscience doth make cowards of us all,” Hamlet says. Lazy readers assume he means “conscience” in the sense of “moral awareness.” But that’s not what he’s saying. He means it in the sense of “consciousness,” the awareness of risk (in his case that he’ll die and burn in hell). In my case, which “conscience” is it?
We’re all inclined to do terrible things. Imagine a room outside space and time. Nothing that happens inside that room leaves it. There’s no one to see you, no one to punish you, and no historical memory. Now imagine the person who scratched your car is in the room, or the person who cut in front, or perhaps just someone who rubs you the wrong way. What would you do? I bet you’d surprise yourself. I bet it would be something nasty.
I don’t know what holds me back. I don’t know whether I’m too scared of breaching etiquette, of having others think ill of me, of being dragged into court, throw in jail, or knifed to death. Or whether I ultimately abhor hurting others. And I’m certainly not sure the two explanations are mutually exclusive.
A few things I do know. I have no desire to brutalize or murder innocents, as some gangsters do. In the course of researching this issue of New Voices I was often shocked by the actions of my subjects, and took comfort in moral superiority. And yet I still think our society rests on an assumption of morality in human nature that goes uninterrogated. It’s worth asking why our anti-social desires remain unfulfilled—the reason we do what is considered “right.”
The gangster’s life for me? It seems not. That I’m so sicklied over with thought about the prospect is a mark against. Gangsters aren’t know for moral reflection. Despite my obsession, I’ll most likely be a good boy. I’ll live my life within the law; grow old without breaking a single thumb. But even if I do behave myself, I’ll always have the same yearning as the poet Roger McGough: “Let me die a young man’s death….when I’m 91 with silver hair/ and sitting in a barber’s chair/ may rival gangsters/ with ham-fisted Tommy -guns burst in/ And give me a short back and insides.” It is a criminal consummation devoutly to be wished.
