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SCHLAMMERS


Abe Reles had nothing to do but skulk on the corner with other fifteen-year-old dropouts. In Brooklyn of the 1920s, the street corner was a tutorial, a tribal gathering, a stage for posturing, a bully pulpit, a marketplace, and a Darwinian proving ground. Boys cadged cigarettes, ate knishes smeared with spicy mustard, drank egg creams, and rolled dice for nickel bets. They filched apples from pushcart vendors, threw rocks at laundry wagons pulled by swaybacked horses, and traded punches with boys from neighboring corners. The street rang with Yiddish insults. Pisher! Schlemiel! Momzer! Chozzer!

Even at age fifteen, Reles ruled his own street corner like an underage general. He stood only five foot two, but he had thickset-man strength, with Popeye arms that dangled unnaturally almost to his knees and fists that a prosecutor later called “a set of hammers.” He stared down all comers with the fat face of a Pixar villain. His rubbery lips rested in a sneer. He spoke with a baritone rasp, already roughened by daily packs of Lucky Strikes, and deformed by a lisp.

Add to his unhandsome appearance the grating “dese” and “dems” of a Brooklyn patois so thick and constant that he sounded like a parody of the New York street punk. “He spoke,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote years later, “with an impediment suggesting a mouthful of marbles.”

However witless he might seem, Reles had a gift for mean manipulation and bully tactics. He had an eye for weakness and the muscle to exploit it. The term “street smart” might have been coined with him in mind. He scared even his friends.

As a teen Reles could already see criminal possibilities beyond the street corner. He gravitated to a pasticceria in the East New York neighborhood where grizzled Italian men with bad teeth, Brooklyn padrones, read neatly folded racing forms and the Italian-language newspaper Il Progresso with solemn concentration. They drank cup after cup of tar-thick espresso and fattened up on riccios, buttery Italian croissants.

The proprietor, Louis Capone (no relation to Al Capone), was a well-groomed Neapolitan with a gentle manner and watery blue eyes. His broken nose lent his swarthy face a cockeyed aspect as he hovered about the café tables, formally shaking hands and patting forearms. He spoke of the old country and neighborhood gossip.

The padrones understood that Capone’s real job was racketeering: The pasticceria was only a front and recruiting tool. He lured useful young toughs like Reles with free coffee and pastries. He engaged them with his avuncular singsong accent and riccios warm from the oven, then asked if they wanted to earn pocket money running a few hoodlum errands in their spare time. He could offer them more work, he said, if things went well.

Things did go well for Reles—so well that he became Capone’s full-time enforcer, bagman, and lookout. He spent his days shaking down whorehouses and collecting extortion payments from defenseless bakers and grocers. Reles was Brooklyn’s toughest teenage runt, an undersized street punk with a hair-trigger temper. He stopped to commiserate with butchers and tobacconists after a brick thrown from the street shattered their shop window, and a second brick broke it again after a pricey repair. How unfortunate, Reles said, that a good-for-nothing kid was breaking their window and they could do nothing about it. What you need, he suggested, is a watchman to protect your shop. Reles could arrange it for thirty dollars up front and five dollars a week thereafter.

If they failed to pay promptly Reles barged in, all bulging arms and menace. He ripped goods from shelves and threw his oversized fists. He put his face close and, through sprays of spittle, issued threats in his odd baritone lisp. I give you a nice deal and this is how you repay me, you schmuck? If you want to be my fucking friend, you’ll have the fucking money ready next time. He might throw them to the floor and press his foot to their neck. His anger was real and dialed to a piercing pitch.

Reles commanded his own small gang made up of his childhood friends: Harry Strauss, a linebacker-sized heavy who took sadistic joy in violence, and Martin Goldstein, a mean little wiseass with wide-set frog eyes and an oily, sneering presence. Together they were schlammers, the Yiddish term for intimidator.

As the schlammers made their rounds, Reles sometimes encountered his father, Sam, a stooped figure in a shapeless old hat, kibitzing in Yiddish with customers as he sold pants and shirts from a wooden pushcart parked among the fruit and pickle vendors on Pitkin Avenue, Brownsville’s commercial thoroughfare. Sam and his wife, Rose, had arrived in 1900 from the Jewish slums of Galicia, an Austro-Hungarian province. They settled in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville instead of the noisome Jewish ghetto of Manhattan’s Lower East Side because it was roomier, cheaper, and newly linked to the city by elevated subway and, in 1903, the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge.

Brownsville was grimy beyond today’s imagining. It was a district of tenements and factories rising from the swampy flats of northeast Brooklyn, an outpost where newcomers could, with luck, hustle up a living doing manual labor and usher their children along the paths of advancement.

For Jewish immigrants like Sam and Rose, survival was success. They undertook a wrenching break from everything and everyone they knew in their shtetl to embark on a monthlong ocean passage in steerage while subsisting on herring and potatoes. Landing in Brownsville was triumph enough. Brooklyn was their Plymouth Rock, a hopeful new start.

Reles saw no heroics in his parents’ plight. He was unmindful of the ways in which they valiantly assumed hardship so that he and his brother, Max, and sisters, Bessie and Esther, could grow up American. He found the crude comforts of the tenement life pitifully inadequate and a source of shame. He looked down on his father, Sam, with his foreign manners and low station edging on penury. He pitied his weary mother, constantly washing clothes and cooking kreplach and krupnik soup, herring and blintzes over the sad little potbelly coal stove in their flat. Their Old World ways were alien to him, and embarrassing. He was tired of kugel. He wanted steak.

Reles grew up in a neighborhood that was, if anything, tougher than the Lower East Side. “More guys carried guns,” wrote Sammy Aaronson, who operated a gym where amateur boxers pounded punching bags, “and instead of six beatings a day there were six an hour.” It was probably the toughest neighborhood in America, maybe the toughest ever.

Reles was shrewd enough to observe that the wealthiest, most powerful men in Brooklyn were the racketeers Louis Capone reported to—big shots with fist-thick rolls of cash and long-hooded cars. Their money and political weight was a source of wonder to street-corner kids. Reles could see that the men moved in a secret world, a brotherhood ruled by its own code of honor.

The racketeers set an example for boys like Abe Reles: Americans need not labor for their luxuries, as his foolish father did. They simply grabbed their wealth. If Reles had to seize the golden calf with a Smith & Wesson shoved in his overcoat pocket, then so be it.

Prohibition uplifted gangsters like Meyer Lansky, Legs Diamond, and Lucky Luciano, and glamorized them. Before the Volstead Act shut the taps in 1920, small-time neighborhood crooks held up passersby and burgled homes. Prohibition was their deus ex machina, a gift bestowed from gangster heaven. Almost overnight local thugs were collaborating with larger networks to supply New York’s five thousand speakeasies. They smuggled cases of Scotch whiskey on freighters and rented speedboats and caravans of midnight trucks. The hootch earned them undreamed of profits. The money piles grew higher and higher. So much money flowed into their wallets that they could easily pay police and politicians look-the-other-way money on a massive scale.


Copyright © 2020 by Michael Cannell