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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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Palestinian-American to challenge John Fetterman for Senate seat in 2028
(JTA) — Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian-American writer who has worked with anti-Zionists, is the first Democrat to challenge Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman in the 2028 primary.
Fetterman, who has faced sharp criticism from within the Democratic Party for his staunch support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, has yet to announce whether he plans to run in 2028. A defeat or retirement would remove one of the Democratic caucus’s most pro-Israel voices.
Moor, 42, enters the playing field with radically different positions on Israel, and on foreign policy in general, from those Fetterman has promoted. Claiming that the United States “funds wars based on corruption and lies and has turned its back on its own people,” Moor pledged on his campaign website to ensure “this never happens again.”
Moor, born in Gaza, moved as a child to Philadelphia, where he earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard. He switched from finance to journalism, reporting in Beirut and Egypt for The Guardian and other outlets, and co-editing the book “After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine.” He also spent many years in Jordan, where he launched a peer-to-peer lending organization, before moving back to Philadelphia in 2021.
“A few years ago my birthplace was turned to rubble in a genocide funded by our tax dollars,” Moor stated, saying that this has occurred “with the support of politicians on both sides of the aisle who can’t find money for transit or removing asbestos from our schools.”
Moor, who has served on the Philadelphia Democratic City Committee, has never held public office. He says he is determined to address corruption, affordability, foreign policy and constitutional authority, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which first reported his candidacy.
Moor told the Inquirer that he was “not really running against Fetterman” but instead “running for the rule of law.” He acknowledged that he would face an “uphill battle” against Fetterman, who took office in January 2023.
Fetterman has irked some fellow Democrats by siding with Republicans on numerous issues, especially on Israel. He has also drawn praise from the pro-Israel community and Israel’s leadership. With Democrats securing a Senate majority of at least 54 seats, including two independents who caucus with the party, Democratic leadership will be less dependent on Fetterman’s vote when the new Congress convenes in January.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Palestinian-American to challenge John Fetterman for Senate seat in 2028 appeared first on The Forward.
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Northwestern launches civil rights investigation into club that banned pro-Israel group from its food festival
Northwestern University’s Office of Civil Rights is investigating a club that said it canceled its annual “Cultural Food Fest” after students objected to its initial inclusion of a pro-Israel student group.
Spoon University Northwestern, a student-run food magazine, wrote in an email to students that it was calling off its Nov. 6 food festival because of concerns about the participation of Wildcats for Israel, a club housed within Hillel that describes itself as focused on Israeli culture and society.
“There’s been a lot of disappointment expressed in and around Hillel today,” Michael Simon, executive director of Northwestern Hillel, told the Forward on Friday. “What should be an opportunity for connecting across differences and having really positive engagement got turned into a sort of political catfight.”
Students involved with Wildcats for Israel were initially “really excited” to participate in the fest, Simon said.
But amid student backlash, Spoon reversed course and disinvited Wildcats for Israel, Simon said. In a statement posted to Instagram, Spoon cited “the ongoing genocide in Gaza” to explain the group’s removal.
Yet even that exclusion was not enough for some student organizations. Northwestern’s Asian Pacific American Coalition; Alianza, the Latinx student alliance; and the Middle Eastern North African Student Association, issued a joint statement saying that they were withdrawing from the fest because of the original inclusion of Wildcats for Israel.
“A ‘culture’ born from the active land theft and genocide of Palestinians should not be recognized,” the student groups wrote on Instagram.
Spoon then cancelled the event altogether.
Now, Spoon’s status as an officially registered student organization has been frozen while the investigation into allegations of discrimination is being conducted, a Northwestern spokesperson wrote in an email to the Forward.
The investigation comes as Northwestern faces additional obligations to address and report allegations of antisemitism as part of its $75 million settlement with the Trump administration in November 2025. As part of the agreement, the university pledged that its Office of Civil Rights would publish annual reports with data about complaints of antisemitism, including investigative and disciplinary actions taken.
Spoon did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
In its email to students, Spoon said Wildcats for Israel was removed because of its status as “a political action group, not a cultural organization.”
Simon pushed back on that characterization of the club. “They’re not engaged in political advocacy or political work, certainly not in their current iteration,” Simon said. “They’re really focused on doing cultural and educational programming, connecting with Israel and with the Israeli people.”
The idea that Wildcats for Israel is considered political, while other student organizations opposing Israel are not, “appears to be a real double standard,” Simon said.
Still, Simon said the cancellation did not prevent Wildcats for Israel from having its own cultural food event — inviting students to the Hillel building on Friday to talk about what had happened over slushies in two flavors popular in Israel, limonana and iced cafe.
“They’re really turning to a place of being in community and supporting one another,” Simon said.
The post Northwestern launches civil rights investigation into club that banned pro-Israel group from its food festival appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s love affair with Trump may be over – with no other suitor in sight
Israelis were among the few groups outside America who genuinely liked Donald Trump, and they had persuaded themselves that the feeling was mutual. Now, as the American president pledges to terminate military assistance and blames Israel’s unpopularity for the Republicans’ electoral humiliation, they are confronting the possibility that their greatest supposed friend may become one of their gravest strategic liabilities.
In a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of 24 countries, 69% of Israelis expressed confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs. Israelis saw a champion where much of the democratic world saw a menace.
Israelis, who tend to be more direct and plainspoken than other Western societies, were less inclined to be scandalized by Trump’s personal shortcomings. But mainly it was policy that made him so popular: Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and cultivated a conspicuously warm relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite his increasing toxicity around the world. Trump opposed Hamas and ultimately joined Israel in attacking the Iranian regime.
Still, warning signs were there – in the displays of U.S. dominance over decisions in the 2025 and 2026 Iran confrontations and in the Election Day announcement last week that Trump plans to terminate roughly $4 billion in annual military assistance to Israel this year.
The announcement threatened a cornerstone of Israeli security planning established under Barack Obama, whose administration negotiated a 10-year, $38 billion assistance agreement extending through 2028.
The precise legal and financial consequences remain uncertain, not least because Congress controls appropriations. But the political significance is unmistakable: The president whom Israelis regarded as their most dependable protector was proposing to dismantle an arrangement that even administrations regarded as unfriendly to Netanyahu had sustained.
Moreover, the aid is far more than a gift. Its greatest value is not financial but geopolitical: the unmistakable message to Israel’s enemies that Washington stands behind it.
As the dismal election results became clear, Vice President JD Vance highlighted a supposed demand among disaffected Republican voters to “change our relationship to Israel,” placing the alliance itself among the issues requiring political reassessment.
In Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview, Trump went further, identifying what he called a “great dislike” for Israel as one factor in the Republican electoral defeat.
Trump certainly has a point. A 2026 Pew survey found that 60% of Americans viewed Israel unfavorably, up from 42% in 2022, including 57% of Republicans under 50. Gallup found that, for the first time in its 25-year tracking, Americans were no longer more sympathetic to Israelis than Palestinians: 36% favored Israelis, compared with 41% for Palestinians. The longstanding bipartisan consensus is unraveling. Among younger Americans, the situation is even worse.
Whether the reason is a global propaganda campaign against Zionism, social media manipulation, Netanyahu and his noxious far-right allies, or Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank are almost beside the point – the collapse in Western and U.S. opinion is undeniable.
Trump also asserted that “those countries that we’ve protected” from Iran – meaning Israel – “wouldn’t exist” without the U.S. and “are going to pay us back any and all costs that we’ve had for the war,” which was another major surprise and mystery that caught Israelis off-guard.
Whether this implies a demand that Israel reimburse the United States, and for precisely what, remains unclear. What is clear is that Trump has begun discussing a relationship Israelis considered existential in the language of electoral liabilities and financial transactions.
Writing in Maariv on Monday, veteran Washington correspondent Shlomo Shamir reported that senior Washington commentators described Netanyahu as having become effectively persona non grata in Trump’s inner circle – and that Trump’s seeming affinity for Netanyahu was “more a media relationship than a genuine friendship.”
The change in atmosphere in Israel has been extraordinary.
On Monday, Israeli television seemed preoccupied with little beyond the coalition negotiations following Israel’s election and the growing fear that the country might lose its most important international relationship.
Appearing on Channel 13, I argued that another Netanyahu government would have faced economic sanctions from Europe and even serious discussion of an American weapons embargo. This provoked very little disagreement.
“Netanyahu put all his chips on Trump, and it’s falling apart,” observed anchor Daniel Zilberstein. “It wasn’t only him, but the entire system,” replied Omri Rolls, an expert in monitoring and countering anti-Israel propaganda. “We put all our attention on the United States. Europe, we’ve completely given up on. All over the world, important elements are simply not on Israel’s agenda.”
The alarm was loud and clear this week across the Israeli political and diplomatic establishment.
Tovah Herzl, a former Israeli diplomat who served in Washington as liaison to Congress, captured the predicament in the title of her article in Maariv: “Netanyahu Bet on Trump — and Israel Could Lose Far More Than Money.”
“Israelis are unaware of the depth of the hole into which the country has fallen,” wrote Yedidia Stern, a leading expert on Israel-U.S. relations, in Ynet. “The hourglass has been turned over: we have two years to regain the legitimacy that has been lost” before a Democrat potentially wins the White House.
Ashley Perry, a former senior Israeli government adviser, wrote in The Jerusalem Post that Israel must urgently start arguing its case – “consistently demonstrating what Americans gain” in intelligence cooperation, joint defense development, investment, trade and Israeli contributions to scientific and technological progress.
Beyond all that, there is a general understanding that Israel will need some real policy changes – for example, cracking down on Jewish extremists in the West Bank. And it will need to court the U.S. Democrats and the Europeans once more – as it did decades ago.
There is a grim lesson at play, and it has more to do with morality than ethics.
Israelis are people badly traumatized by the conflicts that implacable enemies have forced on them. Over the decades, however, they took some pride nonetheless in what they believed was a moral high ground. It’s safe to say this has eroded, at least somewhat.
In a reflection of that erosion, one of Trump’s greatest attractions to Israelis – sadly enough – was his indifference to Palestinian human rights, an issue that had long complicated Israel’s relations with more conventional Western leaders. Trump was clearly untroubled by the West Bank occupation, the expansion of settlements or the absence of a credible political horizon for millions of Palestinians. In February 2025, he even proposed removing Gaza’s Palestinian population in its entirety and placing the territory under American control, a scheme whose breathtaking implications seemed scarcely to concern him.
Many Israelis overlooked the dark aspects of such absurdities, seeing only evidence of exceptional friendship. They overlooked the possibility that a president so utterly uninterested in Palestinian rights might also prove indifferent to Israeli interests whenever they ceased to coincide with his own.
They celebrated his willingness to discard diplomatic conventions – or even basic human decency – when it worked in their favor. They are discovering now that sometimes cliches are true: What goes around comes around.
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