Stopping the Gangs of New York

As the 20th century dawned, New York City was filled with vice and corruption. The worst area was the Lower East Side, a densely populated slum into which Eastern European immigrants poured, including many Russian and Polish Jews.

The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld, by Dan Slater, tells how some New Yorkers banded together to clean up the Lower East Side and the criminal underworld’s reaction to those efforts.

The early 20th-century wave of Eastern European Jews was preceded in New York by a mid-19th-century surge of Western European Jews, mostly German. These German Jews had assimilated, gained wealth and moved uptown. The Eastern European Jews were less educated and considerably poorer. They fled pogroms in Russia.

With the new immigrants came a criminal class. A small minority, they ran prostitution and gambling rings, created violence, and preyed upon the honest majority of Jewish immigrants. The criminals ran protection rackets and forced young women into prostitution. They gained immunity by paying off corrupt city police and politicians.

The Uptown German-American Jews worried about how this Jewish criminal class would affect national attitudes toward Jews. They feared it would trigger antisemitism. They felt this underworld fed nativist and anti-immigration causes.

They decided to take action. They knew the New York City government would take no serious action to reign in crime in the Jewish ghettos. City employees did not want to stop the flow of money received for turning a blind eye to crime. The uptowners secretly funded a vice squad to crack down on crime in the Lower East Side. They used their influence to create a vice squad within the New York City Police Department, run by an ambitious reformer. It became known as the Incorruptibles.

The result was a war between the reformers seeking to shut down New York City vice and the city’s underworld. Slater documents move and countermove by both sides. He shows how the reformers used excessive and sometimes illegal means against their foes. He shows how, in reaction to the attacks, crime syndicates formed, leading to national-scale organized crime by the mid-20th century.

The Incorruptibles is a fascinating book. It shows the rise of both organized crime and the surveillance state. It also illustrates what Friedrich Nietzche meant when warning: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.”

“The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld,” by Dan Slater, Little, Brown and Company, 2024,‎ 432 pages, $32.50 (Hardcover), $15.99 (E-book), $22.95 (audiobook)

This review was written by Mark Lardas, who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com.