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Amazon Prime doc details the wild life of Jewish gangster Myron Sugerman
(New York Jewish Week) — Mafia movies will have you believe that wise guys aren’t born, they’re made. But that wasn’t the case for Myron Sugerman, a second-generation Jewish gangster who is the subject of the new documentary, “Last Man Standing: The Chronicles of Myron Sugerman.”
Sugerman — who made his mark (and his money) by becoming, as he says in the film, the “godfather of the illegal slot machine business” — took up the mantle from his father, Barney “Sugie” Sugerman, who kept company with and served as a partner in the New Jersey Jewish mob alongside the likes of Abner “Longy” Zwillman, Joe “Doc” Stacher and Abe Green.
In his heyday, Sugie cavorted with the legendary mobster Meyer Lansky, as well as some other bold-faced names who made their money a little more honestly, like singers Perry Como and Tony Bennett.
“Our lives were basically in Newark and Manhattan,” Sugerman, 85, says in the documentary. “Tenth Avenue on the west side was Jukebox Row. From 42nd Street all the way up to 45th, 46th Street were all jukebox operators. I would go into the city in the afternoon after school, and on Friday nights we used to go to Madison Square Garden with all the fellas who worked for my father.”
Per Sugerman, his father “missed nothing” — he had his hand in everything from “bootlegging, boxing, fixing fights, thievery” to “jukeboxes, vending machines, pinball machines, slot machines,” all of which were either illegal or could be used as fronts in money laundering schemes.
But these Jewish mobsters could be called upon for nobler pursuits as well. In 1939, Newark was home to both large Jewish and German populations — Fritz Kuhn, leader of the American Nazi party, included. As Sugerman tells it, Kuhn and his cronies would follow their meetings and rallies with trips into Jewish neighborhoods where they would terrorize their residents. Together with the Jewish prize fighter Nat Arno, Sugie’s associate Longy Zwillman formed an association called The Minutemen, named after the New Englanders who took up arms against the British.
The Newark Minutemen would throw stink bombs into the halls where Nazis met. “As the Nazis came running out, our guys were like a gauntlet. They’re standing there with the monkey wrenches and baseball bats and brass knuckles. And they beat the s*** out of these Nazis,” as Sugerman tells it.
Sugerman’s version of these stories might be lost to time if it weren’t for director Jonny Caplan and his production company Tech Talk Media. Released last January — and now available to stream on Amazon Prime — Caplan’s film features extensive interviews with Sugerman himself, a character who might remind you of your own Jewish grandfather — and also the guy who keeps putting the fix on the temple’s bingo game.
In a recent Zoom interview, Caplan told the New York Jewish Week that he was “kind of blown away” when he first heard Sugerman’s story, courtesy of a colleague who was helping Sugerman with his 2019 memoir, “The Chronicles of The Last Jewish Gangster: From Meyer to Myron.”
Later Caplan watched Sugerman’s interviews online. “He’s just such an amazing character that I fell in love with,” Caplan said. Although Tech Talk mostly covers the world of innovation — previous productions include documentaries about flying taxis and “robots that look after the elderly” — Caplan said they couldn’t resist bringing Sugerman’s story to life.
Born in 1938, Sugerman took up the family business at the age of 21, following his graduation from Bucknell University. Fluent in six languages (seven, if you count profanity, as Sugerman says in the documentary), he was given $3,000 in travelers checks by his father and sent off to Europe to start an “export business.” Sugerman hit a number of countries on the Continent, all while building his reputation and ability to sell pinball machines, slot machines and arcade equipment.
Eventually, Sugerman’s specialty would become Bally Bingo pinball machines, an addictive, “dynamite” arcade game that attracted gamblers and operators who handed out prizes. After its interstate shipment was banned in the United States in 1963, Sugerman would buy parts from all over the country in order to get the machines assembled. “I was the biggest contrabandist and bootlegger of Bally Bingo machines across the states,” he recalls in the documentary. Those efforts got him named in three state cases and three federal cases for illegal gambling and organized crime. And yes, he did serve jail time.
In a highlight of the documentary, Sugmeran is eventually connected with the famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Five years after the capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960, Sugerman happened to find himself in Vienna. Feeling galvanized by the successful hunt for the man who drew up the plans for the Holocaust, Sugerman knocked on Wiesenthal’s door and asked how he could be of service. The answer, like so many other things in life, was money.
Myron Sugerman, right, meets with famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in New York City in an undated photograph. Sugerman says he “sent very generous amounts of money” to help Wiesenthal hunt down war criminals. (Myron Sugerman/Impossible Media LLC)
“I was religious every week — we sent very generous amounts of money to Wiesenthal,” Sugerman says in the film. The pair struck up a friendship, and with each trip Wiesenthal took to New York City, Sugerman says Wiesenthal’s first call was to him. Eventually, prior to one of Sugerman’s trips to Asuncion, Paraguay, Wiesenthal asked the contrabandist to get him information regarding the whereabouts of notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who was rumored to have decamped there. I don’t want to give too much away, but if you enjoyed seeing Nazis killed in the film “Inglourious Basterds,” you might like how this story ends.
Sugerman provides details of his life, confessional style, as he leads the camera crew to local haunts in Little Italy and Brooklyn’s Kings Highway. Along the way, he meets friends who help him tell his tales of the old days, like “Baby John” Delutro, also known as “The Cannoli King,” and Johnny Chinatown, who points out a Chinatown landmark seen in “The Godfather.” Both are 20-plus years Sugerman’s junior, but still have ties to the Mafia life he knows and loves. (Those old days might be gone, but the incredible nicknames persist.)
At Grill Point, a now-shuttered kosher restaurant in Brooklyn, we see Sugerman chatting with Moishe Peretz, a retired mob boss who calmly recalls getting shot in the chest in 2016.
Though the mob plays a central role in Sugerman’s identity, his Jewish bona fides are just as significant. “The Jewish gangster really had a need, a psychological need, to show that the Jews could be just as tough as any other ethnicity, because they were going to break with the 2,000 years of our heads down, living in the ghetto, living fearful,” he says in the film. “There was definitely no identity crisis. These Jews were tough and ready to prove it.”
These days, Sugerman lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife, Clara. Though his life may be quieter now, his sense of humor and joie de vivre endure, and now as much as ever he’s committed to the work of defending the Jewish people. “Most guys at 85 years of age, if they’re lucky to be alive, are sitting in front of a lawn of grass, watching the grass grow,” he told the New York Jewish Week. “But I’m not comfortable — I’m not comfortable when the hair on the head of a Jew is moved out of place by an antisemite.”
To that end, Sugerman is putting together an organization with the goal of promoting Jewish pride — and he encourages all those interested in joining to reach out via his website.
More than anything, the toughness and tenacity of the Jewish people is a message that Sugerman wants to continue to send today. “That the era of bending your head, that the era of dismissing antisemitism as a mosquito on the tuchus of an elephant is over with,” he said.
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The post Amazon Prime doc details the wild life of Jewish gangster Myron Sugerman appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Cyber Threats Spike 150% Since Oct. 2023, Israeli Healthcare Most Vulnerable
A hooded man holds a laptop computer as cyber code is projected on him in this illustration picture taken on May 13, 2017. Photo: Reuters / Kacper Pempel / Illustration.
i24 News – Four years after the cyberattack that crippled Hillel Yaffe Hospital, the vulnerabilities of Israel’s healthcare system remain glaring. Since the outbreak of the war in October 2023, Israel’s digital domain has turned into a front line: by year’s end, authorities recorded 3,380 cyberattacks, a 150% surge compared to previous years.
More than 800 of them carried “significant damage potential,” according to ynet.
Microsoft’s 2025 Digital Defense Report places Israel as the world’s third-most targeted country after the United States and the United Kingdom. It is also the leading target in the Middle East and Africa, absorbing more than 20% of attacks in the region.
Iran remains the most aggressive adversary, directing roughly 64% of its cyber activity at Israel in attempts to gather intelligence, disrupt services, and spread propaganda.
The techniques used are familiar but highly effective: exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities, using leaked or stolen credentials, and launching basic phishing schemes that grant direct access to internal networks. Despite the prominent role of state-linked actors, financial gain still drives most activity: data theft accounts for 80% of attacks, and more than half involve ransomware.
For Amir Preminger, CTO of the Israeli critical-infrastructure security firm Claroty, the scale of the threat can no longer be ignored. His team has tracked 136 claimed attacks over the past three years, including 34 aimed at essential infrastructure and eight targeting healthcare systems. “Hospitals face the same risks as any organization, but their rapid digitalization leaves them uniquely exposed,” he warns.
The exploited weaknesses are often depressingly basic: weak or reused passwords, overdue software updates, and outdated systems. Preminger identifies two main types of state-sponsored operations: high-impact attacks designed to cause maximum shock, potentially endangering patients, and long-term infiltration efforts intended to quietly siphon off sensitive medical data.
Artificial intelligence is amplifying the threat. “AI tools are enabling inexperienced attackers to scale up quickly,” Preminger says. Some autonomous agents can already execute complex sequences of cyber operations, while healthcare institutions adopt AI faster than they can secure it.
Despite the escalating danger, Preminger argues that regulation has fallen behind. The state possesses advanced cyber capabilities but has limited authority to enforce standards or assist private-sector organizations.
The path forward, he says, must include education, awareness programs, financial support, and mandatory baseline security requirements, before the next major attack hits the core of Israel’s healthcare system.
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Exclusive: DOGE ‘Doesn’t Exist’ with Eight Months Left on its Charter
Elon Musk holds up a chainsaw onstage during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, US, February 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard/File Photo
US President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has disbanded with eight months left to its mandate, ending an initiative launched with fanfare as a symbol of Trump’s pledge to slash the government’s size but which critics say delivered few measurable savings.
“That doesn’t exist,” Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters earlier this month when asked about DOGE’s status.
It is no longer a “centralized entity,” Kupor added, in the first public comments from the Trump administration on the end of DOGE.
The agency, set up in January, made dramatic forays across Washington in the early months of Trump’s second term to rapidly shrink federal agencies, cut their budgets or redirect their work to Trump priorities. The OPM, the federal government’s human resources office, has since taken over many of DOGE’s functions, according to Kupor and documents reviewed by Reuters.
At least two prominent DOGE employees are now involved with the National Design Studio, a new body created through an executive order signed by Trump in August. That body is headed by Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, and Trump’s order directed him to beautify government websites.
Gebbia was part of billionaire Elon Musk’s DOGE team while DOGE employee Edward Coristine, nicknamed “Big Balls,” encouraged followers on his X account to apply to join.
The fading away of DOGE is in sharp contrast to the government-wide effort over months to draw attention to it, with Trump, his advisers and cabinet secretaries posting about it on social media. Musk, who led DOGE initially, regularly touted its work on his X platform and at one point brandished a chainsaw to advertise his efforts to cut government jobs.
“This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy,” Musk said, holding the tool above his head at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, in February.
DOGE claimed to have slashed tens of billions of dollars in expenditures, but it was impossible for outside financial experts to verify that because the unit did not provide detailed public accounting of its work.
“President Trump was given a clear mandate to reduce waste, fraud and abuse across the federal government, and he continues to actively deliver on that commitment,” said White House spokeswoman Liz Huston in an email to Reuters.
TRUMP OFFICIALS HAVE BEEN SIGNALING DOGE’S DEMISE
Trump administration officials have not openly said that DOGE no longer exists, even after Musk’s public feud with Trump in May. Musk has since left Washington.
Trump and his team have nevertheless signaled its demise in public since this summer, even though the US president signed an executive order earlier in his term decreeing that DOGE would last through July 2026.
In statements to reporters, Trump often talks about DOGE in the past tense. Acting DOGE Administrator Amy Gleason, whose background is in healthcare tech, formally became an adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy in March, according to a court filing, in addition to her role with DOGE. Her public statements have largely focused on her HHS role.
Republican-led states, including Idaho and Florida, meanwhile are creating local entities similar to DOGE.
A government-wide hiring freeze – another hallmark of DOGE – is also over, Kupor said.
Trump on his first day in office barred federal agencies from bringing on new employees, with exceptions for positions his team deemed necessary to enforce immigration laws and protect public safety. He later said DOGE representatives must approve any other exceptions, adding that agencies should hire “no more than one employee for every four” that depart.
“There is no target around reductions” anymore, Kupor said.
FORMER DOGE EMPLOYEES MOVE ON TO NEW ROLES
DOGE staff have also taken on other roles in the administration. Most prominent is Gebbia, whom Trump tasked with improving the “visual presentation” of government websites.
So far, his design studio has launched websites to recruit law enforcement officers to patrol Washington, D.C., and advertise the president’s drug pricing program. Gebbia declined an interview with Reuters via a spokesperson.
Zachary Terrell, part of the DOGE team given access to government health systems in the early days of Trump’s second term, is now chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services. Rachel Riley, who had the same access according to court filings, is now chief of the Office of Naval Research, according to the office’s website.
Jeremy Lewin, who helped Musk and the Trump administration dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, now oversees foreign assistance at the State Department, according to the agency’s website.
Musk shortly after Trump’s election said he had a mandate to “delete the mountain” of government regulations. He made undoing government regulations and remaking the government with AI two key tenets of DOGE, in addition to eliminating federal government jobs.
The administration is still working toward slashing regulations. The White House budget office has tasked Scott Langmack, who was DOGE’s representative at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, with creating custom AI applications to pore through US regulations and determine which ones to eliminate, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Musk, meanwhile, has reappeared in Washington. This week, he attended a White House dinner for Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
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How Black music brought me closer to Judaism
Once, while my parents were away, my Grandma Min woke my three siblings and me at five in the morning to lecture us on the proper way to squeeze a toothpaste tube. Funny how effective that was. To this day, I can’t pick up a tube of Crest without thinking about how to squeeze it properly.
Toothpaste incident notwithstanding, I loved my Grandma Min. She was a rule-breaker and a rebel. Among the first Jewish women in Minneapolis to march for civil rights, she regularly hosted Black community leaders in her apartment and served them her own brand of soul food: blintzes, kugel, borscht, and mandelbrot. Everyone she touched — including me — was changed for the better. She’s the one who introduced me to the world’s greatest guitar teacher.
One Sunday afternoon, in the midst of a brilliant sun-shower, Lester Williams pulled up to our house in his pale-yellow Fleetwood Brougham. There’s little question that he was the first Black man to park a Cadillac on our block and walk to the door of a Jewish kid’s house for a guitar lesson.
It was Grandma Min’s idea. She’d seen Lester perform at a Hadassah luncheon, singing songs from Fiddler on the Roof with a big archtop Gibson and a tambourine balanced on his shoe. Afterwards, she asked if he’d teach me.
Lester, who was in his mid-70s at the time, wore a high-rise Don King hairdo and played in a style that was equal parts Texas blues and Yiddish theater. He taught me Sam Cooke’s ”You Send Me” and Lightning Hopkins riffs. When he sang, his eyes closed like he was singing for the Lord.
To this day, I’ve never opened my guitar case without thinking of Lester.
Back then, Jewish felt dorky; Black felt cool. In the early ’70s, a newly bar-mitzvahed kid playing funk and blues was an anomaly. Now, of course, the pop charts are built on it, but in the day it was the Eagles and Jethro Tull, not Kanye and Kendrick Lamar.
I was drawn to the groove and gravitas of Black music — Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, John Lee Hooker. It wasn’t only sound; it was a worldview. There was truth in that rhythm: sophisticated, sardonic, somehow sacred. It hovered between sex and Godliness. You could put a record on the stereo and feel righteous about reproducing the human species to it. To play that music, you had to become it, not just imitate it. I developed a lilting accent that slipped in naturally when I sang, like a thing that made down-in-the-bones sense. Every rock musician had done it in some form — Jagger, Van Morrison, the whole British Invasion.
It was a bridge to something larger, a way to escape the confines of white suburbia and begin what would become a lifelong expansion of my creative and spiritual boundaries. In retrospect, it may have been the first step on the path that led me to become an observant Jew.
Most of the kids around me seemed content inside their circumscribed worlds of hockey, keggers and Sadie Hawkins dances. I wanted to erase the margins someone else had drawn around my life. The times I could do that were rare, but they happened most powerfully when I was making music. It was then that the world lost its edges. The interplay between musicians could feel like one spirit inhabiting separate bodies. That’s how it felt when I first played with Wynston Robyns.
At my cousin Jeff’s house near Cedar Lake, we jammed in the basement — low ceiling, unused shuffleboard court in the floor, winter coats piled on the Ping-Pong table. Some older Black guys from the North Side brought their gear, a little weed, and some Ripple wine. I’d never tried Ripple before. I drank to excess.
Soon the room came alive: guitars tuned, reeds moistened, drums whacked, a few tentative chords tossed out. First rhythm, then flight. Jeff on the Fender Rhodes, me on guitar, all of us tearing it up. After an hour, the alto sax player, Jimmy, said, “You boys gotta meet Wynston Robyns.”
With Jeff’s parents away and my parents asleep and dreaming back at my house, we piled into Jimmy’s car and drove north, well past the safety of our suburb. By the time we reached Wynston’s place it was close to one in the morning. Dim light spilled from the basement windows, bass and drums rumbled from below. When Wynston finally opened the door, he filled its frame: barrel-chested, magnetic, with a half-smile suspended between welcome and menace.
We smoked more weed and played until God knows when. Some Stevie, some Lou Rawls. It was nearly dawn when Jeff and I became the new members of Wynston Robyns and Soul SearchLyte.
Rehearsals were constant — four nights a week, sometimes after school, sometimes before. Neither of us was old enough to have a driver’s license, so we took the city bus.
It took months for Soul SearchLyte to land just two gigs. The first was a corporate lunch my dad attended in a suit and tie. “Wynston seems like a really nice guy,” he said afterward, which was true…mostly. The second was New Year’s Eve at the Holiday Inn downtown. We were the “headliners,” scheduled for 1:00 a.m. — which everyone in the business knows means the time everybody has gone home to party. The real headliners went on at midnight. It was another North Side band, Champagne, featuring Morris Day, André Simone, and a diminutive guy with a large afro.
Jeff and I watched them in awe. André’s bass ran through a Mu-tron Funk Box that made every note sound like it came from the world’s best wah-wah. Morris Day’s drumming was tight, crisp, unstoppable. Wynston leaned toward me and shouted over the groove, “You see that guy? The way he chops out that rhythm? His name’s Prince. They say he’s got a record deal on Warners. Peter, that’s what you need to do if you wanna be more than just a basement guitar player.”
No offense to Soul SearchLyte, but Champagne was a brutal act to follow. By the time we went on at 3:00 a.m., only my Uncle Sonny and the bar staff were still around, mopping the floor while we played our hearts out.
A few weeks later, during rehearsal, our lead guitarist, Larry Crags, announced he was quitting.
“Wynston, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to leave the snap,” he said.
Wynston stared at him. “What the fuck did you just say?”
Larry shifted his weight. “My wife thinks it’s not a good idea — all this practice when we haven’t got any gigs lined up.”
Wynston stepped forward and jabbed his finger into Larry’s chest. “You sayin’ I’m not a man?”
It was strange. Larry hadn’t said anything of the sort.
Before Larry could answer, Wynston swung and caught him square in the face. Larry, who’d once told me in strictest confidence he was a Kung Fu master, fell hard, then rose, bloodied, into a fighting stance. Having been an ardent viewer of Kung Fu, the TV series, I waited for the mystical retaliation. It never came. Wynston hit him again, a clean right hook that sent him flying into my amplifier.
Larry crawled away, whimpering, up the stairs and out of the house. Jeff, maybe out of shock, started playing ”Rock-A-Bye Baby” on the high keys of his electric piano. From behind the drum kit someone said flatly, “Why don’t somebody shut off that amplifier?”
Wynston, panting hard, looked at me. “Peter, I suppose you wanna quit this snap too, since you’ve just seen a Black man beat up on a white dude.”
“No, Wynston,” I said. “I love being in this band.”
Hell yes, I did. I just became the lead guitarist.
Those nights in North Minneapolis — half teachable moment, half transcendence — were my first real taste of faith: the moment when music, spirit and belonging coalesced into one sound, one rhythm, one funky-ass pulse of Creation.
I’m positive Grandma Min would approve.
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