Kindle Notes & Highlights
docks to the Lower East Side with their bundles of meager belongings, hoping for new lives in this American shtetl of more than one million people, four thousand residents per block, more tightly crammed than the population of Bombay, India.
In fact, most of the Lower East Side’s prostitutes were Jewish, catering to immigrants whose wives remained an ocean away: a vast and lonely clientele.
Hymen was a common boy’s name bestowed upon the children of first-generation Jewish immigrants. It was a simplified version of “L’Chaim,” the Jewish toast to life.
When Meyer reached Ellis Island at age ten, the authorities changed his surname from Suchowljansky to Lansky.
He adored his daughters and felt, until the end, a certain loyalty to his wife, at least as the mother of his children.
Real freedom meant knowing you could always earn more, as much as you liked, if only you knew how to do it.
“The small number of Jews who moved into the village discovered that non-Jews refused to associate with them socially. Although they could join the local civic organizations, they were not admitted to the Scarsdale Golf Club.”
By 1935, Siegel was ready for a move up. He rented the large Beverly Hills home of Metropolitan Opera singer Lawrence Tibbett at 326 South McCarty Drive.
He bought a 1.7-acre plot on 250 Delfern Drive, above Sunset Boulevard in the Beverly Crest neighborhood of Holmby Hills.
Katz Theater Corporation, or B&K, whose founders had made their fortunes not by making films but by building the ornate theaters in which those films were shown, including the first to be air-conditioned.
For the 1930 U.S. census, he had called himself a candy salesman. He carried candy with him like a charm.
1937, Lepke became the object of the largest international manhunt in the FBI’s history.
By the late 1930s, Murder Inc. would be said to have killed close to one thousand men.
Later, Siegel would be credited as the first to envision the glamour palaces to come. In truth, a hotel owner from Sacramento named Tommy Hull had the jump on him.
Las Vegas was farmland, alfalfa its chief crop, sheep its main livestock.
Grim years ensued, until President Calvin Coolidge brought Las Vegas roaring back to life in 1928 by authorizing the massive Boulder Dam, later to be named the Hoover Dam, on the nearby Colorado River.
In the watershed year of 1931, however, the sparsely populated state of Nevada, fearful the dam would fall short of counteracting the Great Depression, sanctioned almost everything else. Card games, roulette wheels, and slot machines became legal. So did prostitution and quickie marriages: no waiting period, no health certificates needed, with county clerk offices open twenty-four hours a day to rake in the marriage fees.
