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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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Reed College agrees to sweeping reforms as part of Title VI antisemitism settlement
(JTA) — Reed College has agreed to a host of far-reaching institutional changes, including asserting that targeting Jewish Zionists will be considered discriminatory, in order to settle multiple federal antisemitism investigations, parties to the complaint announced Wednesday.
The settlement was announced by the Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which jointly filed the complaint, under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination at any institution receiving federal funds. It comes as campuses across the country, facing threats of losing federal funding under the Trump administration, have demonstrated willingness to negotiate new antisemitism protections.
As part of the agreement, the private Portland, Oregon, liberal arts school says it will insert language into its discrimination policy asserting that “for many Jewish people, Zionism is integral to their religious, ancestral and/or ethnic Jewish identity,” and that “targeting Jews on the basis of their Zionist identity” will be considered discriminatory.
The school will also contract a third-party consultant to monitor and report on its effectiveness in adhering to antisemitism protections, role that is unusual in similar Title VI agreements. The agreement says Reed will “consider” the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s working definition of antisemitism, which includes some criticisms of Israel, and implement antisemitism training for faculty and staff.
“We take concerns about antisemitism, and all forms of unlawful discrimination, seriously, and we will continue to support the well-being, safety, and success of every member of our community,” a Reed College spokesperson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement acknowledging the agreement. Reed declined to comment further.
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Brandeis Center officials praised the agreement in a release as a potential model for other colleges.
“We believe it should serve as a model for other schools,” Denise Katz-Prober, director of legal initiatives at the Brandeis Center, told JTA about the agreement. The required language in Reed’s discrimination guidelines, she said, is “very clear about what constitutes anti-Zionist conduct in violation of civil rights and in violation of the policy.”
“This outcome demonstrates how the Title VI process can work to effectively protect Jewish students,” Greenblatt said in his own statement.
Around 100 students at Reed College are Jewish, or about 7% of the total student body, according to estimates from Hillel International. A request for comment to the director of PDX Hillel, which serves Jewish students at Reed and others in the region, was not immediately returned.
The resolution stems from two anonymous Title VI antisemitism complaints from Jewish former Reed students, both filed in 2024 under the Biden administration. One of those cases related to a student whose dorm-room mezuzah was vandalized, and who herself was later pelted with rocks, during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in spring 2024. The student later left the school out of concern for her safety.
Both of the described acts would have already been considered violations of school policy for reasons unrelated to the student’s Jewish or Zionist identity. Brandeis’s Katz-Prober argued both should have also been considered in the context of her targeting by anti-Zionist activists.
“It might be difficult for someone to, at first glance, understand whether it was simply an assault or an assault motivated by bias,” she said. The case, she said, demonstrated how in some cases, “‘Zionist’ is merely a codeword for Jew.”
Katz-Prober also touted the agreement’s mandate that the school bring on a third-party compliance consultant, separate from its Title VI coordinator. While she insisted that such a role would be “independent” and free of bias, she noted that both the ADL and the Brandeis Center would have a role in their selection.
“Both sides get a say,” she said.
The post Reed College agrees to sweeping reforms as part of Title VI antisemitism settlement appeared first on The Forward.
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Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs cruises to GOP nomination for governor amid allegations of antisemitism
(JTA) — Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, who has drawn criticism for ties to white nationalist figures, will officially be the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, after winning the primary on Tuesday night.
Biggs, who is backed by President Donald Trump, has drawn criticism for encouraging Stew Peters, an internet personality, and appearing on his show. Peters has labeled Judaism a “death cult” and has called for a “final solution” that involves the deportation of American Jews, and multiple watchdogs identify him as promoting antisemitism.
“Keep preaching,” Biggs told Peters at the end of his June 2023 appearance on the show, during which they discussed government corruption and Biggs agreed with Peters that the FBI should be abolished.
Biggs, 67, who won handily with 73.4% of votes according to multiple media outlets, will challenge Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in what is expected to be a competitive race in November. Biggs has represented Arizona’s 5th Congressional District, which is outside of Phoenix, since 2017.
His opponent in the GOP primary, Rep. David Schweikert, had put out a campaign mailer in March tying Biggs to white supremacy and antisemitism. The mailer featured mentions of Biggs’ interview with Peters as well as Biggs’ endorsement of Texas GOP candidate Brandon Herrera, who owned a copy of “Mein Kampf.”
Biggs’ campaign did not respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s request for comment, but in a local TV interview last month he called the accusations politically motivated and said, “This notion that I am antisemitic is absolutely one of the most ludicrous, insane arguments ever.”
In 2024, Biggs opposed the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, which passed in the House of Representatives. Biggs wrote that he opposes antisemitism and that the “pro-Hamas, pro-genocide, anti-Israel events happening across the nation are sickening.” He rejected the legislation, he said, because it was “so poorly drafted that it violates the Constitution and could have serious ramifications for the Christian community.” Right wing Republicans objected especially to the bill citing a definition of antisemitism that included as an example the claim that the Jews killed Jesus.
That same year, Biggs attended a rally co-sponsored by the Proud Boys, an extremist militia style group. In 2019, he spoke at a “Patriotism over Socialism” rally in Arizona, which watchdogs warned would draw extremist groups.
Media Matters, a group that mostly monitors right-wing groups, in 2023 wrote that “the links between Biggs and far-right extremists have been well-documented,” citing among other things his ties to another far-right group, the Oath Keepers.
The Republican Jewish Coalition did not respond to a question over whether it would support Biggs’ run for governor.
At a campaign event on Tuesday, Hobbs skewered Biggs for his denial of Trump’s 2020 election loss, and for not acknowledging Hobbs’ narrow 2022 gubernatorial victory over Republican Kari Lake.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Denied arrest power, Mamdani encourages New Yorkers to protest Netanyahu
After conceding that he cannot arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal, Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday doubled down on assailing the Israeli leader and encouraged New Yorkers to protest his expected visit to the United Nations in September.
“I think one of the bedrocks of our city is protest,” Mamdani said at a press conference in City Hall Wednesday morning. “If anyone feels a level of frustration or opposition, protest is something that we will always respect. I leave it to New Yorkers themselves to make that decision.”
The mayor also faced renewed questions about why it took months to acknowledge that the pledge he made last year to arrest Netanyahu could not legally be carried out, and about his choice to post a formal mayoral address on his official social media accounts to announce the city’s legal conclusion that it has no authority to execute the International Criminal Court arrest warrant against Netanyahu.
“What brings me to my conclusions about Israel and Palestine is a belief in the universality of humanity,” Mamdani said.
Mamdani pointed to a roundtable with faith leaders on Staten Island on Tuesday where he met a young Gaza refugee who had lost an arm, and he recounted stories from Palestinian New Yorkers who shared that their families have been affected by the war.
“I view that as a very serious issue,” Mamdani said. “I think that it is incredibly important that we ensure that we have done all of our due diligence when conducting a review.”
The ICC, based in The Hague, issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif. Hamas confirmed in January 2025 that Deif was killed during an airstrike.
The United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court and the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the ICC months after it issued the warrants.
In his video posted Tuesday night, Mamdani accused Netanyahu of orchestrating a “horrific genocide against the Palestinian people” in the Gaza Strip. He cited reported Palestinian death tolls, wounded children, the destruction of hospitals and clinics and the killing of aid workers and journalists. He did not mention the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, which sparked the war. He instead called on the federal government to join the ICC and execute the warrant.
Jewish organizations sharply condemned the mayor’s Tuesday remarks, accusing him of presenting a one-sided narrative of the war.
“Shame on you,” the UJA-Federation of New York said in a statement. “Your video is rife with distortions and disinformation. At a time of rising antisemitism, repeatedly singling out and vilifying the world’s only Jewish state for perceived political benefit is repugnant and puts Jews at greater risk.”
The Orthodox Union said the video “endangers Jewish New Yorkers” and “is a betrayal of his oath of office and his own commitment to protect all New Yorkers.”
Mamdani rejected the criticism.
“We cannot pick and choose which crimes against humanity we oppose,” he said. “We must be in opposition to all of them.” Asked whether he considers the Hamas massacre a genocide, he stopped short of using that term, instead calling the Oct. 7 attacks “a horrific war crime” that should be opposed “with every single fiber of our being.”
Mamdani used the moment to bring his long-held pro-Palestinian advocacy into City Hall, framing Netanyahu’s expected visit as both a moral and political issue. While acknowledging the city lacks legal authority to arrest the Israeli leader, Mamdani shifted the conversation toward the role of the federal government.
In a Truth Social post, President Donald Trump reassured Netanyahu that he “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America.”
Mamdani also encouraged New Yorkers to take it to the streets to protest Netanyahu during his visit. “That welcome ends with me,” he said. “I will not be welcoming Benjamin Netanyahu or any other war criminals when they come to this city.”
Mamdani’s remarks could resonate well beyond New York as rejection of Israel is increasingly part of national Democratic Party politics. By arguing that Washington should join the International Criminal Court and enforce its warrants, Mamdani is helping define the expectations that progressive activists may place on the 2028 presidential candidates as the party continues to debate its approach to Israel and Gaza.
Despite the backlash, Mamdani insisted his position would not affect how he governs for Jewish New Yorkers.
“I know that there are Jewish New Yorkers who agree with my analysis; there are those who disagree with my analysis,” Mamdani told the Forward. “ And my responsibility to them is to ensure that they are cherished, they are celebrated, and they are safe in their city.”
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