Hollywood motion pictures would have you believe that organized crime in America was a duopoly of Irish and Italian thugs, but there is another ethnic group that not only pioneered the corporate structure of the underworld but continues to exercise profound criminal influence to this day: organized Jewry.
The Lower East Side of the late 19th century was a pressure cooker of poverty and ambition, its tenement blocks producing men who would reshape American crime from the ground up. Out of this crucible emerged what scholars call the Kosher Nostra. When Prohibition arrived, Jewish gangsters seized the opportunity with both hands, planting themselves at the center of bootlegging networks stretching from New York to Detroit, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and Newark, while simultaneously building the financial infrastructure that would underwrite the modern drug trade.
The first generation of Jewish organized crime took shape on Manhattan’s streets in the 1890s. On the Lower East Side, the Eastman Gang assembled under Edward “Monk” Eastman—an outfit of 1,200 safecrackers, gunmen, and street brawlers who spent years trading blood with Paul Kelly’s Italian-American Five Points Gang over control of Manhattan’s underworld. What began as a mixed-ethnicity operation shifted steadily Jewish as the Eastern European immigrant tide rolled into lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, launching what historians describe as a 40 to 50 year stretch of dominant Jewish-American influence over New York’s criminal world.
