#Mob Archives - Sterling Terrell

This Is How The Jewish Mafia Was Different

The Jewish mafia was different than the Italian mafia – and all the other mafias.

How so? The Jewish mob never sought to pass on the family business.

The key here is that they likely saw a life of organized crime as a way to another life, not as a way of life to be held on to.

It seems as though even brutal mobsters that did brutal things may have had some moral qualms about what they were doing – at least to the extent that they wanted something more for their kids.

Isn’t that what we all want?

For these men, the greatest dream, the dream they reserved for their children, was to be a successful, law-abiding American. The Jewish people wanted a future like the one my father and his friends live today: summer in the mountains, winter in the sun, deals in the steamroom, politicians to the house, and nothing to go to jail for. Legitimate power. Doctors. Lawyers. The gangsters knew they could not have this for themselves. They were too rough, too green, not far enough from Europe, the shtetl, the pogroms. They were like the generation Moses led out of Egypt, a generation lost in the wilderness, a slave generation that must die away before Jews can settle the promised land. So they instead got themselves in position to make the dream come true for their children. “The Jewish Mafia was never passed on like the Italian Mob,” Cusack said. “Jews didn’t recruit. The old-timers did what they felt they had to do; but they did not want the younger generation of Jews mixed up in it.”

-Rich Cohen, Tough Jews

The gangster legacy is one of idleness and leisure.

Because a life of organized crime has a lot of downtime after all.

Days were lethargically spent in pool halls, candy shops, street corners, and diners. The best were extended stays in luxury hotels.

In this same way, the legacy of the cowboy is pickup trucks, boots, and ranchettes, that echo a longing for more land and a chance to go on a cattle drive again.

This birthright lives on in Saudi Arabia through the legacy of the Bedouin too.

See, there is this yearning to live parts of life in a way that we in the next generations have only heard stories about. If you are lucky, you might catch a glimpse of it in your grandparent’s old pictures too.

You see, the gangster legacy was about pursuing leisure over work.

I’m not going to lie. I sometimes like the ethos of that idea.

Now, all these years later, my father, and a lot of other men old enough to know better, are still hanging out. They lose whole mornings at diners like Nate ’n’ Al’s, give entire afternoons to the club. A few times each year, my dad and his friends go to La Costa, a spa near San Diego, where they live pretty much like Lucky Luciano lived in Hot Springs. They play cards, take massages, swim. They sit under the stars at night, burning off those extra hours they worked so hard to accumulate. It’s a legacy of the gangsters; it’s what men do.

-Rich Cohen, Tough Jews

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