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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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U2’s New EP References Holocaust, Hitler, Women’s Rights Protests in Iran, Deceased Palestinian Activist
The Irish rock band U2. Photo: BANG Showbiz
The Irish rock band U2 released an EP on Wednesday titled “Days of Ash” that addresses a wide range of topics, including the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising in Iran, the Holocaust, the killing of a Palestinian activist, ICE raids in the United States, and the Russia-Ukraine war.
“Days of Ash,” which was released on Ash Wednesday and is now available on all streaming platforms, is the first time U2 is releasing a collection of new music since 2017. The EP features five new tracks – “American Obituary,” “The Tears Of Things,” “Song Of The Future,” “One Life At A Time,” and “Yours Eternally” (ft. Ed Sheeran & Taras Topolia) – and the recitation of the poem “Wildpeace,” written by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. The poem is read on the EP by Nigerian artist Adeola Fayehun. It begins with the following lines: “Not the peace of a ceasefire / not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb / but rather as in the heart when the excitement is over / and you can talk only about a great weariness.”
In a new interview with the U2 fanzine “Propaganda,” which is being relaunched as a one-off digital zine to accompany the new EP, lead singer Bono talked about the music referencing Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, concerns about antisemitism, his condemnation of the Hamas-led terrorist attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and his criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for how he is managing the Israel-Hamas war.
The title for “The Tears of Things” is a reference to the 2025 book by Richard Rohr titled The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage. The book is about the Jewish prophets and imagines a conversation between Italian sculptor and artist Michelangelo and his marble statue of the Bible’s King David.
“If you put a man into a cage and rattle it long enough/A man becomes the kind of rage that cannot be locked up … The tears of things/Let the desert be unfrozen,” Bono sings in the track. He also sings about “six million voices silenced in just four years,” which is a reference to the six million people killed in the Holocaust. Bono told “Propaganda” the same song includes a reference to a true story about Mussolini and Hitler meeting. Hitler’s name in the song is replaced by the word “shadow,” Bono explained.
“Mussolini came to see me/A shadow by his side,” Bono sings. “Church bells ring, a vanishing/Then the vanishing denied/Six million voices silenced in just four years/The silent song of Christendom/So loud everybody hears.”
The track concludes with the lyrics: “River, sea and mountain/Desert, dust and snow/Everybody is my people/Let my people go.”
Bono told “Propaganda” it is “the moral force of Judaism that helped shape Western civilization.”
“Some of my favorite bits … some of the greatest hits of Western civilization … were gifted to us by brilliant Jewish minds … mathematicians, scientists … writers … not to mention singwriters,” added the singer-songwriter, who said he comes from a “Judeo-Christian tradition.”
“There has never been a moment when we have needed the moral force of Judaism more than right now,” he explained. “And yet, it has rarely in modern times been under such a siege. From where I stand, as a person with a limited view, Judaism, one of the great and noble religions, is being slandered by far-right fundamentalists from within its own community … I could argue the same about Christianity or Islam.”
Antisemitism “has been a scourge for millennia,” and “was rising long before Oct. 7 and the resulting war in Gaza,” Bono said. “As with Islamophobia, antisemitism must be countered every time we witness it. The rape, murder, and abduction of Israelis on Oct. 7 was evil, but self-defense is no defense for the sweeping brutality of Netanyahu’s response,” he continued.
The musician also talked about how the Israel-Hamas war has resulted in “deep knock-on effects for the Jewish diaspora and their safety … As if all Jews are to blame for the actions of Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben Gvir.” He was referring to Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
When asked later on in the interview about criticism he has faced, especially in Ireland, for not speaking out enough against the conflict in Gaza, Bono said, “I’ve written on Israel and Gaza, but in terms of actions I’ve been focused on the things I know more about.”
Bono also told “Propaganda” that the song “One Life at a Time” on the new EP is inspired by Palestinian activist and filmmaker Awdah Hathaleen, whose was killed last year by an extremist Israeli settler in the West Bank. Hathaleen was featured in the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” which focuses on Israel’s demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Masafer Yatta and criticizes Israel’s military actions. The lyrics of “One Life at a Time” do not reference Hathaleen by name, but the band’s lyric video for the track features a picture of Hathaleen’s face, as well as image of Israel’s West Bank security barrier and the Dome of the Rock.
“Song of the Future” honors the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement and uprising in Iran as well as the protesters killed, including 16-year-old Iranian Sarina Esmailzadeh, who was beaten to death by Iranian security forces. Esmailzadeh is the “star of our song,” Bono told “Propaganda.”
“This new EP is a response to current events, inspired by the many extraordinary and courageous people fighting on the frontlines of freedom,” U2 said. “Four of the five tracks are about individuals – a mother, a father, a teenage girl whose lives were brutally cut short – and a soldier who’d rather be singing but is ready to die for the freedom of his country.”
The first track of the EP, “American Obituary,” is dedicated to Renee Good, a mother of three and protester who was fatally shot on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent during a protest.
The track “Yours Eternally” is about the war in Ukraine.
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Jewish Peoplehood Shouldn’t Be Up for Debate
Thousands of participants and spectators are gathering along Fifth Avenue to express support for Israel during the 59th Annual Israel Day Parade in NYC, on June 2, 2024. Photo: Melissa Bender via Reuters Connect
The world’s largest association of psychologists is currently debating whether Jews are allowed to describe themselves as a people.
As crazy as that sounds, this is not a joke. It is a controversy unfolding right now among members of the American Psychological Association (APA), as a group of Jewish psychologists has sought recognition similar to that enjoyed by other ethnic minority groups within the association. The APA’s governing council is set to vote on this question imminently. What should have been an uncontroversial measure has instead become an argument over identity itself — one that reveals a deeper problem in how discrimination is understood today.
We are two Jewish women who have direct, personal experiences with antisemitism, and whose families historically have been discriminated against simply because they were Jewish. Our families’ and our own experiences, as Jews who faced persecution and as advocates for other vulnerable communities, make it especially painful to see our Jewish identities and need for representation and protection questioned in this way.
The opponents from ethnic caucuses within the APA that already have formal representation argued that Jews are a “majority white” population and therefore do not need such recognition. They asserted that Jewish identity is only religious, not ethnic; that antisemitism is not a distinct concern; and that acknowledging Jewish peoplehood would somehow undermine efforts to confront white supremacy.
At a time when antisemitism has reached historic levels in the US and globally, these claims are not only deeply concerning but also evidence of a larger pattern of discrimination in professional and academic organizations and labor unions.
Like any ethnic or religious minority, Jews should not have to justify their existence to others. No one should be told that their identity is somehow invalid because it does not fit neatly into racial categories or prevailing political narratives. Yet that is precisely what is happening here.
Jewish identity has always been multifaceted, encompassing ancestry, culture, history, and, for some, religion. Jews today include families from the Middle East and North Africa, Ethiopia, Europe, and the Americas, observant and secular alike. But the specifics matter less than the principle: In every other context, communities are trusted to define their own lived experience and identity. Here, that authority is being claimed by those outside the community, ironically, inside a profession dedicated to compassionate and nuanced understanding of identity and trauma.
To understand why this moment is so troubling, one must understand something distinctive about antisemitism: It adapts to the assumptions of the era.
At times throughout our history Jews were persecuted as a religious group, forced to convert, be expelled, or be killed. At others, we were targeted as a race, culminating in Nazi racist ideology used to justify the extermination of 6 million Jews. One of our aunts (Eveline Shekhman’s), Rocha Vilenski, was forcibly transported from the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania to Stutthof and then Auschwitz. Her transport papers listed “Jude” as her race, a clear marker that she was not considered “white.”
In other periods Jews have been accused of being foreigners, disloyal to their countries of origin. And sometimes, even simultaneously, Jews are painted as the ultimate insiders, wielding outsized power to manipulate society in pursuit of some untoward end. The accusations are rarely consistent, but they do paint a pattern: Jews are blamed for whatever is most feared or condemned in society at that particular moment.
Today, in some spaces, the prevailing narrative is that Jews are overly powerful, privileged, and white. From there flows a natural conclusion: that Jews cannot meaningfully experience discrimination and therefore require no specific protections.
The logic is familiar even if the language is new.
A prejudice that changes form to match prevailing moral categories is harder to recognize. But that does not make it any less real — only adaptable. Indeed, antisemitism’s shapeshifting nature is part of what makes it so pernicious and difficult to combat.
Psychologists help shape how institutions recognize bias, how patients’ experiences are interpreted, and how discrimination is measured across society. When a field responsible for understanding prejudice treats a community’s lived experience as a definitional debate, protection becomes conditional on whether the group fits an approved framework. Such a dynamic is anathema to the discipline of psychology.
At a moment when confidence in expert institutions is fragile, credibility depends on applying principles morally, and consistently. Members of the APA Council have an opportunity to reaffirm a simple principle: Communities deserve the same respect for self-definition that psychology teaches in every other context.
Sara Colb is Director of Advocacy at the Anti-Defamation League. Eveline Shekhman is Chief Executive Officer of AJMA, The American Jewish Medical Association.
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New Location of London Bakery Founded by Israeli Vandalized With Anti-Israel, ‘Free Gaza’ Graffiti
April 4, 2025, London, England, United Kingdom: Exterior view of a Gail’s bakery in Covent Garden. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
A newly opened London branch of a popular bakery founded by an Israeli baker was vandalized on Wednesday night with anti-Israel graffiti as the chain was accused of funding “Israeli tech.”
Photos and videos shared on social media show that the new Gail’s Bakery location, which opened this week near the tube station in the Archway neighborhood, had splattered red paint on its walls and graffiti that read “Free Gaza,” along with another message that said “Boycott Gail’s Funds Israeli Tech.”
More thuggery from so-called activists.
Pro-Palestine thugs have vandalised the newest Gail’s branch in Archway.
Targeting businesses with Jewish roots belongs in the dustbin of history.@MetPoliceUK must ensure the perpetrators face consequences.pic.twitter.com/vZ8Au7cgHv
— Campaign Against Antisemitism (@antisemitism) February 19, 2026
Police were called to the scene on Wednesday night, but the vandals had fled before officers arrived, according to a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police.
“Our bakeries are places for the community, and no one – whether that’s our bakery teams or our customers – should feel targeted or unsafe,” a spokesperson for Gail’s told The Algemeiner following the vandalism. “We are a British business with no specific connections to any country or government outside the UK. Our focus right now is on working with the authorities and making sure our people feel safe and supported.”
An anti-Israel demonstration also took place at the same Gail’s location this week, according to multiple reports. Videos online show protesters standing outside Gail’s holding signs including a massive banner that said, “Boycott Israel for Genocide and War Crimes in Gaza.” Another sign held by a protester read “No to Gail’s” and accused the American investment firm Bain Capital, which acquired a majority stake in Gail’s parent company Bread Holdings in 2021, of having “links to Israeli war-tech.”
First the vandals, then the harassment. Another scene today at Gail’s in Archway, London, the city that we all know is a “shining beacon of hope” where “everyone is loved and wanted”. pic.twitter.com/zd25zMucqR
— habibi (@habibi_uk) February 19, 2026
Bain Capital was among the more than 200 venture capital funds that signed an open letter in support of Israel following the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The company has investments in Israel, including in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and software companies. In October 2025, CTech reported that Bain Capital had invested more than $150 million into Israeli companies over the past year.
Gail’s was founded by Israeli baker Gail Mejia in the 1990s and serves freshly handmade bread, pastries, and cakes. Its first store opened in 2005 in London’s Hampstead High Street with the help of Israeli entrepreneur Ran Avidan, and today, there are hundreds of locations in and around London. Gail’s was voted the best bakery chain in Britain last year. Meija and Avidan no longer have any involvement in the company.
The European Jewish Congress condemned the “deeply concerning” anti-Israel graffiti found on Gail’s Bakery. “Targeting a local business because of perceived Jewish or Israeli associations reflects a troubling normalization of hostility that must be firmly rejected,” the EJC wrote in a post on X. “Such acts have no place in our societies and must be unequivocally condemned.”
In a statement given to The Algemeiner, the Campaign Against Antisemitism called on London’s Metropolitan Police to ensure those responsible for the vandalism are punished for their actions.
Last summer, hundreds of people signed a petition criticizing the opening of a Gail’s in east London and several of them said they opposed the new location because of the bakery’s “Zionist” ties, according to The Jewish Chronicle. In a statement released to The Guardian at the time, the company reiterated that it is “a UK-based business with no specific connections to any country or government outside of the UK and does not fund Israel.”
In an interview with The Times in 2024, Gail’s co-founder and CEO Tom Molnar denied the “ludicrous” accusations that the company is owned by Israel or funds the Jewish state.
“Gail’s proudly has Jewish roots and there’s plenty of stuff out there celebrating our heritage and history, but it’s not true it’s Israel-owned,” he said. “There’s some just crazy stuff on the web thinking we are funding Israel, which is just completely ridiculous. We’re a wholly UK-based business, paying UK taxes, it’s just ludicrous and I think it needs to be called out.”