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‘Married to the Mob,’ but under a chuppah: A new memoir details a Jewish family’s crime ties
(New York Jewish Week) — The Geiks weren’t your typical Bronx working-class Jewish family.
One brother ran a mob-protected trucking company in Manhattan’s Garment District. Another brother, an NYPD detective, chauffeured organized crime couriers around the city with illicit cash. Their kid sister visited a Las Vegas casino where the tween was set up with a couple of slot machines in a private room.
And a close family friend was sent up the river for killing a notorious Jewish gangster.
Meet the family whose close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz,” a memoir just published by Alan Geik.
Dutch Schultz was the mob name of Arthur Flegenheimer, the Jewish bootlegger and numbers racket kingpin who left this mortal coil in October 1935 at the Palace Chop House in Newark. The triggermen were two Jews, members of the organized crime group Murder Inc. Mendy Weiss and Charles “Bug” Workman, the Uncle Charlie of the memoir’s title, did the hit.
Workman, who reportedly killed more than 20 people before pleading guilty to the murder of Dutch Schultz, was not a blood relative of author Alan Geik. But Workman grew up with Geik’s father on the Lower East Side and was so close to the Geik family he was considered an uncle. The author was in his 20s when he first met Workman, after the hitman was released from a New Jersey prison in 1964.
“I would never think of calling him anything but Uncle Charlie,” said Geik, 80, a retired TV producer and radio host who lives in Las Vegas.
In addition to diving deep into Workman’s story, the book also explores how Jewish mobsters and their hangers-on fought antisemitism, beat up Nazis and helped a fledgling Israel acquire arms for its War of Independence.
“These were people, from the first generation of Jews in America, who fought back against antisemitism in the streets,” Geik said. “Their parents fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe. They were not going to let it happen again and they didn’t.”
Geik’s book joins a crowded shelf of histories and memoirs of the Jewish mob, including “But He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters,” by Robert A. Rockaway, and “Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams,” by Rich Cohen. Like those books, Geik’s family history provides a sort of reverse image of typical Jewish immigrant stories: Instead of scrapping their way up from New York’s Jewish enclaves into retail and the professions, Geik’s family joined a criminal counterculture.
Alan Geik’s family’s close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in a just-published memoir, “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz.” (Sonador Publishing)
Books such as Geik’s “really put a personal experience to this whole world that we all know about, the world of New York mobsters,” said Larry Henry, author of a monthly column for the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. “The public’s appetite for mob stories is insatiable.”
“Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz” describes a tangled family tree ripe with, well, rotten apples. Geik’s father, Lou, was not actually in the mob but did reap benefits from his ties with organized crime, Alan concedes. Lou Geik was one of several individuals who delivered mob cash to Workman’s family over 23 years.
“Uncle Charlie felt indebted to my father,” said Geik.
The author’s father is cited as a source for many of the anecdotes included in the memoir. Geik said that while his father’s business relied on mob protection, Lou Geik didn’t have “that extra whatever-it-took to be a really hardened criminal” — a trait, he said, his own older brother Bernard also lacked.
“My brother always wanted to be a gangland figure,” said Alan Geik. “So, instead my brother became a policeman.”
An ultimately very corrupt policeman. Bernard Geik joined the force in 1962 and resigned in 1971 after serving in the notorious Special Investigative Unit, which, as depicted in the book and the motion picture “Prince of the City,” devolved into an extortion ring. After resigning from the NYPD, Bernard Geik was arrested for bribery and bribe-taking in 1974. He reportedly pleaded guilty but served no time.
The disgraced detective went to work at his father’s trucking company. According to the author, his brother was one of the detectives provided by a supervisor to drive their Uncle George and other mobsters around town when they were transporting mob money in New York.
Uncle George Gordon was a real uncle. Gordon is allegedly one of the gangsters the actor George Raft modeled himself after for his roles in 1930s and ’40s crime melodramas. For decades, beginning at a casino and speakeasy near the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan, Gordon had a big hand in organized crime’s gambling operations, supervising enterprises in Florida, the Midwest, Las Vegas and Havana.
Alan Geik isn’t the only keeper of his family’s convoluted story. His sister Iris has her own memories of growing up mob-adjacent, such as when she and her parents were Gordon’s guests at the Stardust Hotel in Vegas when the mob was running its casino and skimming cash from the profits. Gordon wanted Lou Geik to work there.
According to Iris, Gordon posted a guard outside a private room in which she had been ensconced with a couple of slot machines. The 13-year-old was “mesmerized” by the slot machines. Her mother was initially unaware of what was going on.
“Uncle Charlie” Workman, seen in 1941, pled guilty to the 1935 murder of mobster Dutch Schultz and was given a life sentence. (NYPD)
“I was having a blast,” Iris Geik said. “I’ll never forget when the door flung open and my itty-bitty mother came in with a big guard behind her. She immediately made me stop [playing with the slot machine] and give back the money I had won.”
Iris Geik, now a privacy lawyer in the Boston area, has written hundreds of pages of her own memoir about the wives and girlfriends of the Jewish gangsters, tentatively titled, “The View From the Women’s Table.”
“Their lives were complex but they were also heimische Jewish women,” she said, using the Yiddish word for cozy and familiar. She and her father eloped because they were a mixed couple: Her mother Reba was a Sephardic Jew and her father was Ashkenazi.
Geik remembered that as a child she noticed a newspaper article about a family friend being arrested. She said, “Mom! Mom! Look, we’re famous.” To which her mother replied, “That’s infamous, dear.”
Geik said that on several occasions her mother observed: “There are no second-generation Jewish mobsters. Jews don’t make gangsters out of their children.”
Reba Geik had been involved in caring for two of Iris’ aunts who lived in Brooklyn while they were dying. Those acts of kindness had a profound impact on Uncle George, the casino supervisor.
After the aunts passed away, Gordon always stood when Reba entered a room, Iris said. “My mother was very honored by that because he was such a big shot.”
Throughout her life, Reba Geik remained close to Sylvia Lorber, a friend from her teenage years. Lorber was the only mob mistress her mother would spend time with, said Iris. Lorber was the paramour of two Jewish gangsters: Benny Kassop, the brother of Murder, Inc. gunman Sammy Kassop, and Sam “Red” Levine, an observant Jew who wore a kippah under his fedora. Levine won the affection of Lorber while the Kassop brothers were in Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in Ossining, New York.
“Sylvia was a hell of a lot of fun but my mother worried about her,” Iris said. “Sylvia told me her stories, which were kind of glamorous when she was young but sad when she was older.” After spending 20 years with Levine, Lorber couldn’t attend his funeral. Sylvia Lorber stopped talking to Reba Geik in her last years.
Jewish gangsters do, on occasion, display some altruism in Alan Geik’s memoir. Take Moe Dalitz, the head of the Cleveland Syndicate. He was a major bootlegger during Prohibition whose flotillas of illegal liquor on the Great Lakes came to be known as The Little Jewish Navy. His family ran legitimate laundry businesses in Boston and Detroit. Too old to be drafted during World War II, he enlisted at the age of 42 and was commissioned as a lieutenant. Dalitz ran the military laundry service on New York’s Governor’s Island — but declined to bunk in the island’s barracks, opting instead to stay at a swanky hotel overlooking Central Park.
Then there was Johnny Eder, a major source for Geik’s narrative. Eder was part of the Lower East Side teenage crime crew that included Uncle Charlie and Uncle George. As an adult he was a major fence for stolen jewelry and always had a bag of stolen rings on him. Eder also had many connections at City Hall and in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.
According to Geik’s account, Eder was the mob’s representative to the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force in Palestine. Eder arranged meetings in the noisy kitchen of the Copacabana, a mob hangout, between Haganah agents and mobsters and others described as “former wartime U.S. intelligence agents” working to secure weapons for Israel’s War of Independence. (The late Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s longtime mayor, would tell a story about passing cash to an intermediary at the Copacabana, who brought the money to an Irish sea caption with a ship full of munitions bound for the Holy Land. The bagman, according to Kollek, was Frank Sinatra.)
Author Alan Geik’s father-in-law, Lou Lenart, left, and other fighter pilots in front of Avia-S-199 plane. Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to the Holy Land for use in the War of Independence. (Courtesy of Boaz Dvir)
Alan Geik has a very personal connection to the creation of the Jewish state. His late wife Nina was the daughter of Lou Lenart, a World War II fighter pilot who served in the U.S. Marines. Geik’s memoir details how the elder Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to Palestine for use in Israel’s War of Independence. Lenart’s story was featured in Nancy Spielberg’s 2014 documentary “Above and Beyond,” about the creation of the Israeli air force.
The story of how Jewish gangsters used some violent muscle against Nazi sympathizers in New York has been told before in historical accounts, but one episode in Geik’s memoir is particularly dramatic. A pair of Jews attended a Bund rally at Camp Siegfried on Long Island, a summer camp that taught Nazi ideology, and were offered a ride back to the city by a Nazi sympathizer who they ended up beating senseless in Brooklyn.
Alan Geik was not really hungry when he met Meyer Lansky at a Central Park hotel in the late 1950s. The gangster asked the 15-year-old nephew of George Gordon if he wanted a pastrami sandwich. Geik declined. Then Lansky, who struck Geik as an “older Jewish man who I knew was really powerful,” suggested that they split one. It was an offer that Geik did not refuse.
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The post ‘Married to the Mob,’ but under a chuppah: A new memoir details a Jewish family’s crime ties appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Memes, mashiach and ‘Torah-cyclopedias’ put a Jewish twist on the Knicks’ title hunt
Anyone living in the five boroughs has likely seen the Chabad stickers on street corners proclaiming, alongside a photo of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, that the “Messiah Is Here!”
But this week, a different kind of redemption feels imminent in New York — and there’s a new face on the “Messiah” posters.
With the hometown Knicks two wins away from their first NBA championship in 53 years, fans mocked up a t-shirt featuring an image of star point guard Jalen Brunson superimposed on the Chabad sign, black hat, beard and all. (Including Brunson’s signature cornrows.)
The Brunson memes are just one Jewish piece of an unexpected Finals run uniting the five boroughs — and perhaps, even more astonishingly, its Jewish community. There’s been a giant dreidel spinning outside Madison Square Garden, Talmud-lined shelves displayed on sports broadcasts, and a Jewish-inclusive chant going viral. The team on the court has a Jewish aspect, too: Brunson is married to a Jewish woman — and apparently signed a ketubah at his wedding.
Home to an estimated 1 million Jews (a number that nearly doubles when including the full metro area), New York probably couldn’t have had a Finals run without Jewish undertones. After all, their last title-winning team was helmed by a Jewish head coach, Hall-of-Famer Red Holzman. The team’s Jewish history goes well beyond that.
But the Jewish presence has been unmissable — and in these times, unmissably welcomed — in the city’s sports hysteria.
“I seen Hasidic Jews break-dancing with Black kids,” the rapper Fat Joe told reporters Sunday. “This is the greatest unification of the city since 9/11.”
‘People in yarmulkes, people in turbans’
Though the first two games of the NBA Finals were played in Texas, the home of the Western Conference champion San Antonio Spurs, the center of the action for Knicks fans remained Madison Square Garden — the arena known as the basketball Mecca. (OK, that part’s not so Jewish.) The Knicks faithful assemble there after each game, Midtown descending (ascending?) into full-scale revelry.
That’s where a yarmulke-wearing teenager wearing a Brunson jersey was caught breaking it down like a 1970s b-boy, other fans encircling him and cheering him on. About as miraculously as a Brunson high-arcing fadeaway plunging through the net, the kippah stayed on.
Meanwhile, a fan’s improvised rallying cry was becoming an instant hit: “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish, my Christian Dior, Knicks in four!” (My colleague Mira Fox has written eloquently on the chant.)
Outside MSG — and at the Knicks watch party at Bryant Park — is also where Rami Even-Esh, the Jewish rapper known as Kosha Dillz, plans to bring his human-sized dreidel Monday night, when the Knicks take on the Spurs in Game 3 (8:30 p.m. ET on ABC.) He did a “Knicks Shabbat” outside the Garden during Friday night’s Game 2, serving challah to passersby, and recorded a Knicks music video that featured people of Jewish and non-Jewish backgrounds.
“There’s people in yarmulkes, people in turbans — there’s no ‘anti’ stuff, so that makes it very Jewish for me, and it feels very authentic,” Even-Esh said in an interview.
And let’s not forget that the arena — with President Donald Trump expected in attendance — now has the security infrastructure of an American mega-shul.
‘Torah-cyclopedias’
This Finals’ Jewish imprint also extends to the court. The architect of this team, Knicks team president Leon Rose, was born to a Jewish family in South New Jersey. He later became an NBA super-agent whose clients included Allen Iverson and LeBron James, before taking on the challenge of restoring the ill-fated Knicks to their former glory.
The franchise had long been a vehicle for Jewish hoopers to make their imprint on the game. The first basket in NBA history was scored by a Jew, Ossie Schectman; the late 1970s and early 1980s Knicks featured Ernie Grunfeld, the son of Holocaust survivors.
But the team became a punchline under Knicks owner James Dolan, whose verbal sparring with an elderly Jewish fan once made national headlines. Only after Rose executed a series of transactions both shrewd (like inking Brunson, then seen as a mere second-fiddle, in free agency) and bold (like big trades for Karl-Anthony Towns and Mikal Bridges), the Knicks turned the ship around.
One of their latter-day stars, meanwhile, is Amar’e Stoudemire, who converted to Judaism after playing for the Knicks in the 2010s. Stoudemire is often seen wearing a black hat and a remote hit on a Barstool Sports talk show allowed basketball fans to see bookshelves behind him lined with seforim.
The background prompted a question from the program’s hosts: Are those encyclopedias? Stoudemire explained: “Those are my Torah-cyclopedias,” adding that the one book missing from the shelf was the one he is currently working through.
The Knicks’ success has presented a challenge for Jews like Stoudemire who observe Shabbat, as Game 2 of the Finals fell on Friday night.
It’s a common occurrence for Orthodox fans of teams like the Yankees and Dodgers — and one Knicks fans hope to get used to.
The post Memes, mashiach and ‘Torah-cyclopedias’ put a Jewish twist on the Knicks’ title hunt appeared first on The Forward.
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What exactly did Israel gain from striking Beirut and provoking Iran?
On Monday morning, Israelis — my family and me among them — awoke to a day of sirens, confusion and suspended normalcy.
Flights had been canceled. Schools had closed. Businesses across parts of the country had shut their doors. Once again, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had led Israel into a widening regional confrontation — and the question of what exactly Israel had gained from striking Beirut’s Dahiyeh district amid a Israel-Lebanon ceasefire suddenly stood at the center of public debate.
Iran had retaliated with airstrikes against Israel after the Sunday strikes; Israel launched strikes on Iran in response; fears of a broader regional escalation rose; and, after President Donald Trump posted warnings to both parties on social media, the conflict thankfully appeared to have halted by Monday afternoon.
In one version of events, the region had merely stumbled into another familiar spiral of action and reaction. Israeli cynics see something else entirely: a prime minister who once again appeared to need a war, and was determined to restart the conflict with Iran.
“I understand neither the strategy nor the tactics,” said Nir Dvori, the military affairs analyst of the leading Channel 12 station.
Had the strike in Dahiyeh — Hezbollah’s stronghold — fundamentally altered the strategic balance, one could at least have argued there was a cold logic behind it. Had it prevented an imminent attack, saved soldiers’ lives, or significantly degraded Hezbollah’s operational capacity, perhaps the gamble could have been justified.
Yet the attack seemed to change nothing. Hezbollah was not going to collapse because another building in Beirut had been hit. Nor did the operation appear likely to prevent the kinds of attacks that had continued killing Israeli soldiers. If anything, civilian casualties only risked providing Hezbollah with renewed legitimacy.
The strikes seemed to involve great risks and few rewards. They came at an extraordinarily delicate moment in the American negotiations with Iran, as Trump has been trying desperately to lower tensions in Lebanon — including by privately cursing at and humiliating Netanyahu over Lebanon policy last week. And they threatened one of the most important strategic assets Israel had in Lebanon in years: a broad Lebanese consensus that Hezbollah has become a disaster for Lebanon and needed to be disarmed.
The Trump-Netanyahu divergence
Israel was already in an extraordinarily delicate position vis-à-vis Washington.
Despite impressive military successes in the early days of the Iran campaign, there was no clear exit strategy, nor any serious solution for Iran’s clamp down on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
The war amped up political pressure on Trump, with rising energy prices and mounting public anger threatening the Republican outlook in looming midterm elections. A prolonged regional war risked transforming him within months into a weakened president facing congressional investigations and political paralysis should his party lose control of Congress.
Which means Trump and Netanyahu increasingly appear to be moving in opposite directions. Trump needs stability. Netanyahu, facing dismal polling numbers and growing public exhaustion, needs disruption.
At this point in Netanyahu’s tenure, large segments of the Israeli public no longer dismiss the possibility that political considerations influence national security decisions. As the week opened with the threat of renewed war, many openly speculated that the government had an interest in raising the temperature yet again by provoking an emergency severe enough to argue for postponing elections.
But tension between American and Israeli leaders leaves Israel’s strategic interests imperiled. Israel continues to rely on American airlifts, munitions, diplomatic protection at the United Nations, and broader strategic backing against European and international pressure. And as Trump and Netanyahu’s political interests clashed, ordinary Israelis once more found themselves in shelters, with children out of school and flights grounded.
Net strategic negatives
Meanwhile, every strike that harms Lebanese civilians or damages infrastructure risks reviving Hezbollah’s preferred narrative: that it alone stands between Lebanon and Israeli aggression.
That makes each such strike a lost strategic opportunity. Under President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, a new Lebanese leadership had begun cautiously presenting Hezbollah not as a defender of the state but as an obstacle to Lebanese sovereignty itself.
Rather than helping isolate Hezbollah politically inside Lebanon, Israel’s strikes risk helping it regain relevance and legitimacy.
Many Israelis are maddened by the sense that Jerusalem simply refuses to think two moves ahead.
What, exactly, was the long-term plan? Hezbollah remains deeply entrenched across Lebanon. No Israeli slogan about “relying only on ourselves” can change the basic strategic reality. Israel cannot permanently occupy large parts of Lebanon, nor sustain endless military operations. A peaceful future requires a stronger Lebanese state and a Lebanese public that views Hezbollah as a burden rather than a protector.
Perhaps the most tragic aspect of Israeli life in 2026 is that millions of citizens no longer consider suspicions that the state is acting against their interest in order to favor Netanyahu’s to be implausible. The notion of “ulterior motives” had become normalized in Israeli political discourse in a way unimaginable under earlier prime ministers. That erosion of public trust may have been the bleakest development of all.
The post What exactly did Israel gain from striking Beirut and provoking Iran? appeared first on The Forward.
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‘My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish’ — the Knicks chant capturing New York’s soul
Perhaps you, like me, have had a very specific earworm for the last week. It’s not a song, though there is a sing-song-y element to it. It’s a chant: “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish. My Christian Dior — Knicks in four!”
If you hadn’t heard, the New York Knickerbockers are in the finals for the first time since 1999, on a 13-game streak and looking good to win a championship NBA title they haven’t gotten since 1973. The city is going nuts. I am not a big sports fan, but even I have been caught up in the fever, watching the first two games of the best-of-seven finals pitting the Knicks against the San Antonio Spurs at sports bars where fire codes are being flagrantly broken and attendees have brought drums to assist in leading chants.
The newest chant was born from the mouth of a rabid fan featured in a surreal supercut of fan reactions that went viral. (The video also features a dancing robot wearing a jersey emblazoned with the Kalshi logo, the online predictions market that lets users bet on the NBA, sure, but also on what day the U.S. will bomb Iran.)
It pretty much instantly caught fire; my city councilman Chi Ossé posted a video with the slogan, while watching the second game’s nail-biter of a win. Shekar Krishnan, a city councilman from Queens, walked onto the main stage at Gov Ball to lead the crowd in a rousing rendition of the chant.
Beyond the rhyme scheme — which, if we’re being honest, is a little bit difficult to nail — what made this chant catch on so fast is its ability to capture a certain ineffable quality of New Yorkiness. There’s diversity, there’s humor — I’m sorry but it is very funny to name two of the major Abrahamic religions with pride and then ignore the one practiced by the majority of Americans in favor of a fashion designer — and there’s a sense of unity as the city rallies behind its long-losing sports team.
And, at a time of rising antisemitism and just generally bad PR for the Jews, I am heartened to see the city embrace its Jewishness.
Bagels have long been a metonym for the city, and a source of great pride and snobbery for its residents, a food not incidentally rooted in Jewish history. Jews run some of the city’s most beloved neighborhood institutions. They have represented New York on the page and the screen — think Nora Ephron, Fran Drescher, Leonard Bernstein and Woody Allen (for better or for worse). Jews have imparted a Jewish humor, sensibility and even accent that have so shaped the city that they are now basically synonymous. I cannot tell you how many people I’ve met who are not Jewish, but feel as though they are by virtue of growing up in the city.
This hasn’t always been a positive thing. Sometimes equating New York with Jewishness has been used as a sort of racist dogwhistle; Mitch McConnell, for example, asked voters whether they really wanted “somebody from New York” to “set the agenda” as a way of signalling that Chuck Schumer is too Jewish, too liberal, too out of touch with real Americans — in short, the same antisemitic “rootless cosmopolitan” stereotype that has long motivated hatred against Jews.
Of course, the chant isn’t magical, and many of the now-familiar political dynamics came into play. Some communities of Jews are at odds with the way the city is shifting, particularly with the election of Zohran Mamdani, and some posts of the chant have comments from Jews annoyed at being lumped into the same cultural moment as a mayor they see as their enemy. (“Hi, we’re actually humans, not baked goods,” wrote one user. “We’re currently experiencing the highest rate of hate crime in the city. This isn’t cute.”) And, on the flip side of the political spectrum, other commenters accused those spreading the chant of doing “full on genocide rehab,” seemingly for merely mentioning Jews in a positive context.
But however online commentators want to spin the chant, the reality on the street is pure hype. As the rapper Fat Joe put it when interviewed at Madison Square Garden after the game: “I seen Hasidic Jews break dancing with Black kids. This is the greatest unification of the city since 9/11.” (Video proof bears this out.) Somehow, even the local Hare Krishna gathering got in on the Knicks mania.
That’s the true beauty of the city’s diversity — everyone lives together regardless of their political disagreements. And they can still unite in a common cause: the Knicks.
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