More than a century ago, if you were a newly landed Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, you probably ended up on New York City’s Lower East Side. The tenement-heavy neighborhood couldn’t hold the nearly two million arrivals from Romania, Hungary, and the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1924, but it did anyway, leading to overcrowding, disease, and brute-force survival. For men, it often meant turning to crime, organized or otherwise. Women’s choices were even bleaker: sex work, as a prostitute or madam, or being kept by the rich. Dreams, if they weren’t snuffed out early, existed in the shadows. But one group saw things differently.
The community of richer, uptown German Jews was outraged when the 1912 murder of a gambler named Herman Rosenthal cast unwanted attention on the immigration influx, claiming these supposed undesirables would undo all of their progress and make life harder for Jews as a whole. The uptown Jews, who had embraced being fully American, could no longer side-eye their poorer, downtown, Yiddish-speaking brethren. They formed the Incorruptibles, a secret vice squad to stamp out crime and root out vice with every available method and means, no matter the cost.
Such is the milieu vividly re-created, almost down to the smell and taste, in Dan Slater’s The Incorruptibles, a rollicking account of the gangsters, reformers, crooked politicos, labor organizers, and wayward women who shaped New York City and its burgeoning underworld. Thanks to a treasure trove of previously little-plumbed archival material and a fabulous sense of narrative, Slater brings the reader fully into the New York City of the 1910s, when big cons and horse poisonings were about to give way to bootlegging and World Series “fixing.” Reformers could barely keep pace with it all.
The uptown Jews, who had embraced being fully American, could no longer side-eye their poorer, downtown, Yiddish-speaking brethren.
Two men with larger-than-life fathers operated on opposite sides of this criminal spectrum. Abe Shoenfeld, the son of a righteous tailor named Max, became the Incorruptibles’ main detective, chronicling vice and sin while barely keeping his moral compass intact. Meanwhile, Arnold Rothstein, son of “Abe the Just,” rejected his religious upbringing and embraced the black market as his unrepentant playground—even though he steadfastly denied rigging the 1919 World Series, in both court testimony and the press. But Shoenfeld never directly targeted Rothstein. The closest he got was rejecting bribes from a holding company with ties to the gambler.
As Slater demonstrates, the men’s affinity for common stomping grounds, from the flashing lights of Times Square to the dank, dark dens where anything went, was forged in their childhoods, from the same striving impulses to stand out from their downtrodden neighbors and relatives. Both men depended upon—and chafed against—the corruption of the strong Democratic political machine Tammany Hall and the power of bankers, such as Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg. Those influences would sharpen into focus well before the vice squad disbanded and Rothstein was murdered, in 1928. (A gambler was tried and acquitted, and the crime remains officially unsolved.)
The Incorruptibles is populated with colorful characters, from Tammany Hall’s chief, “Big Tim” Sullivan, and The Forward newspaper founder Abraham Cahan to crusading rabbis such as Judah Magnes. My own attention gravitated to the narrative’s two central women. Carolyn Green, a chorus girl who married Rothstein, enjoyed his bounty of riches until the costs of wedding an unfaithful gambler became too much. The life of Antonia Rolnick, or “Tony the Tough,” initially resembled that of famed madam Polly Adler—dashed romantic beginnings, sex work for survival, the exploitation of other girls—but it veered into a different direction when she decided to inform for the Incorruptibles squad.
“If [Tony] was going to die in this city, she wanted to die like those girls on the street, fighting for something better,” writes Slater. Both Carolyn and Tony symbolized the impossible choices women had to make before gaining the right to vote, while also demonstrating how much of a mirage that freedom turned out to be.
Slater’s act of historical reanimation is both urgent and entertaining, one that uncovers, but does not moralize about, a shadowy world of avarice and naked ambition that still made room for the possibility of hope. It’s a harbinger of how America would transform over the next century and beyond.
Sarah Weinman is the author of The Real Lolita and the editor of Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession
