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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 Holocaust Torah that survived a Mississippi synagogue fire was brought there by the state’s only survivor
When firefighters cleared Beth Israel Synagogue after an arson attack this month, the library floor was slick with water and ash. Prayer books lay swollen and blackened. Smoke clung to the sanctuary walls.
Two Torah scrolls burned. A third Torah did not.
That Torah, displayed for decades in a glass case near the front of the synagogue, survived unscathed. Its presence at Beth Israel was not incidental. It was brought to Mississippi by Gilbert Metz, the state’s only concentration camp survivor — a man who retrieved it from Europe and brought it to the American South. It, too, had survived the Nazis.
“The million dollar question is: How in the hell did he get to Mississippi?” his grandson, Joseph Metz, recalled in an interview on Tuesday.
From Auschwitz to Jackson
Gilbert Metz was born in 1929 in Alsace-Lorraine, France. At 13, the family was forced into hiding. When people fled Nazi Germany, they often gathered silver or jewelry. Gilbert’s mom packed her prayer books and Rashi commentary instead. She had taught her son Hebrew and Talmud, and she refused to leave those books behind.
They snuck back and forth to their summer home in northeastern France, but were eventually captured by the Nazis and sent to an internment camp. From there, a 14-year-old Metz and his family were sent to Auschwitz. His mother and 10-year-old sister were murdered in the gas chambers shortly after their arrival. His father later met the same fate.
Metz survived multiple concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau, and was liberated by American troops in April 1945. He was eventually bar mitzvahed after the Holocaust at 16, a delayed rite marking a childhood interrupted and then resumed.
Relatives who had settled in Mississippi sponsored Metz to come to the United States. He finished high school in Natchez, attended Tulane University, and served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War — at one point having to reapply for citizenship after being deployed overseas.
He eventually moved to Jackson, where he raised a family and became a traveling salesman before co-founding Metz Industries, a wholesale lingerie business that sold brassieres, hosiery and feather boas to stores across the region — the work of an ordinary American life rebuilt mile by mile. He and his wife, Louise, were married for more than 50 years.
Bringing the Torah to Mississippi
In 1992, Robert Berman, a longtime congregant and former Beth Israel president, heard about an international effort to restore and redistribute scrolls damaged, desecrated or orphaned during the Holocaust. He and his sisters, Joan and Brenda, along with their families donated the funds to acquire one. Shul leaders decided there was only one person who should retrieve it.
Metz and his son, Lawson, traveled to London to bring the Torah back to Jackson. At a restoration warehouse, he was shown piles of scrolls — some burned, some torn, some riddled with bullet holes — many painstakingly pieced together from fragments. They chose a Torah rescued from Prague and took turns carrying it on their laps during the international flight.
Other Torahs rescued from the Holocaust made similar southern journeys, to congregations in Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Joseph Metz said his grandfather felt honored to be the one chosen from Beth Israel to collect the Torah, and that bringing it to Mississippi was closure for him — a full-circle moment.
A welcoming committee from the shul — including Berman, the rabbi and others — greeted the Metzs and the Torah at Jackson’s airport. “They sang prayers,” recalled Berman, now 94.
Beth Israel held a dedication ceremony at the synagogue and the Torah was installed in a glass case near the front doors, where it remained for decades. The words “Memory sustains humanity” is etched across the top of the case. Next to it hangs a photograph of Metz as an adult wearing the yellow star he was forced to wear under Nazi rule.
The scroll is displayed unfurled to a chapter in Exodus that comes after the Red Sea has closed behind the fleeing Israelites and before the Ten Commandments are given — a narrow span of time when survival has been achieved but meaning has not yet arrived. The scroll has remained that way for years, suspended between catastrophe and covenant.
“The congregation understood exactly whose story that Torah represented,” said Stuart Rockoff, a historian and longtime member of the 165-year-old Beth Israel. “This was a synagogue with one Holocaust survivor.”
Behind its building, Beth Israel also maintains a Holocaust memorial garden, dedicated to Metz and to Gus Waterman Herrman, a U.S. Army officer from Mississippi who fought in Europe during World War II and later became a philanthropist. The garden, which features stained-glass sculptures and is used for Yom HaShoah commemorations, was not damaged in the fire.
Berman’s daughter, Deborah Silver, had her bat mitzvah and wedding at the synagogue. She’s now a jazz singer, nominated for a Grammy this year, and plans to perform charity concerts in New York City and Jackson to benefit the shul. “We will be back,” she said, “and we will recover.”
Surviving another act of antisemitism
Saturday’s fire at Beth Israel is being investigated by federal authorities as a possible hate crime. A local teen, Stephen Spencer Pittman, confessed to igniting the blaze.
The bulk of the damage was concentrated in the library and administrative offices, which are also home to the Institute of Southern Jewish Life. It’s the same part of the building targeted in a 1967 Ku Klux Klan bombing.
After the fire, the congregation moved the Torahs to the nearby Northminster Baptist Church, which offered its space. There, five Torah scrolls from the sanctuary were carefully unfurled and laid out across long tables, allowing soot and smoke to dissipate.
On the advice of a sofer, a ritual scribe, the Holocaust Torah was not unrolled.
“It’s extremely delicate,” said Sarah Thomas, Beth Israel’s vice president. She said it appeared to have no visible damage and is now wrapped and stored for safekeeping until the congregation is able to move back into the building.
The Torah’s survival can be explained without invoking a miracle: it was protected by its glass case and by where it stood. Still, for those who know its history, the moment carried weight.
What survives
Gilbert Metz spent decades speaking publicly about his Holocaust experience. His oral testimony is preserved in Holocaust archives, and his story has been taught in schools across Mississippi.
That inheritance was also ritual: For decades at Beth Israel, the shofar on the High Holidays was blown by Metz’s son, Lawson, and later by his grandson, Joseph.
Joseph Metz — now the president of the Jewish federation in Mobile, Alabama — has written a book about his grandfather’s survival, Behind the Silent Doors — a phrase Gilbert used to describe the gas chambers. Joseph regularly appears at Holocaust remembrance events and in classrooms. When he does, he pins his grandfather’s yellow star to his jacket before he speaks — the same object that once marked Gilbert for death now marking the story as one that refuses to disappear.
Metz, who died at 78 in 2007, bore the tattooed number the Nazis assigned him at Auschwitz for the rest of his life: 184203. Joseph and his sister, Caroline, each later chose to replicate the number on a tattoo of their own, as an inheritance. He said his grandfather survived so the story would not end with him, but be carried forward.
The Torah Metz carried across an ocean — and across a lifetime — remains.
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This California synagogue was just vandalized with anti-Zionist graffiti, one year after being destroyed by wildfire
(JTA) — The remains of a synagogue in southern California destroyed in last January’s Eaton wildfire were vandalized over the weekend with anti-Zionist messages.
The rabbi of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center and the Anti-Defamation League decried the vandalism as antisemitic.
“The vandalism of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center is antisemitism — full stop,” ADL Los Angeles senior regional director David Englin said in a statement. “This was a deliberate act of hate meant to intimidate a Jewish community already rebuilding after last year’s fire, and it comes at a time when antisemitism is already at unprecedented levels in California and nationwide. Targeting a synagogue is simply unacceptable and represents an attack on our entire community.”
Photographs of the graffiti showed that it was scrawled in black spray paint on an exterior wall fence and read “RIP Renee” followed by “F— Zionizm” [sic].
This is the remaining outside wall of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center. The Temple burned down last year in the Eaton fire. Intersectionality in all its glory. pic.twitter.com/4Z3CbfdUVl
— Gregg Mashberg (@gregg_mashberg) January 12, 2026
The first words appeared to be a likely reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old unarmed Minneapolis resident shot whose killing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement is igniting a nationwide spate of anti-ICE activism.
Anti-Zionist graffiti has been painted on synagogues around the country over the last two years amid a spike in anti-Israel sentiment during the war in Gaza.
The vandalism came days after congregants from the Conservative synagogue gathered at the burnt site of their spiritual home to commemorate one year since the wildfire tore through their synagogue. Dozens of members also lost their homes or were forced to evacuate due to last year’s fire, which was the second-deadliest in the state’s history.
The vandalism also came a day after an arson attack at a Mississippi synagogue that had been bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1967 in retaliation for the rabbi’s involvement with civil rights activism. The man charged with the crime said he targeted that synagogue due to its “Jewish ties.”
No suspect has yet been named in the Pasadena vandalism, which the Altadena station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department first received a call about on Sunday at 9 a.m.
“Acts of antisemitism and hate have no place in our diverse communities,” Altadena Station Captain Ethan Marquez said in a statement. “Crimes motivated by bias impact far more than a single victim, they harm the sense of safety and unity of our entire community. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department takes all hate-motivated incidents seriously and is committed to thoroughly investigating these acts and holding individuals accountable. The community of Altadena has endured significant hardship over the past year and acts of hateful vandalism will not be tolerated.”
Detectives with the department’s Major Crimes Bureau will be taking over the investigation, the Altadena station said in a statement.
During the fire recovery process, PJTC, a century-old congregation, welcomed a new senior rabbi, Joshua Ratner, a former lawyer who became the synagogue’s permanent religious leader in August.
A representative from the synagogue did not respond to a request for comment. But in an email to congregants, Ratner described the vandalism as “hateful and antisemitic.”
“It was devastating in many ways,” Ratner said about the graffiti to The New York Times. He also told the newspaper that in his prayer for the dead over the weekend’s services, he had included Renee Good’s name.
Local political figures joined in condemning the vandalism.
“I am horrified by the vandalism of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, especially coming just days after we marked the one-year anniversary of the Eaton Fire that tragically destroyed its entire campus,” Rep. Judy Chu, a Democrat who represents the district in Congress, shared on X. “For over a century, the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center has been a beloved community institution and safe haven for our Jewish neighbors and loved ones. I stand with the congregation and the Jewish community as we await the results of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s investigation. Hate has no place in the San Gabriel Valley.”
The Jan. 5 commemoration was the first time most congregants had been back to their synagogue building since last the fire. For the past year, services have been held in a neighboring church; Hebrew school services have also been held offsite. PJTC is home to about 450 member families, mostly from Pasadena and neighboring Altadena.
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Australian writers’ festival collapses — and apologizes — after boycott over disinvited Palestinian activist
(JTA) — The organizers of an Australian literary festival pulled the plug on this year’s event on Tuesday, after nearly 200 authors said they would boycott over the disinvitation of a Palestinian-Australian author and activist who has justified “armed struggle.”
The board of the Adelaide Writers’ Week announced last week that they had disinvited Randa Abdel-Fattah, saying they felt her presence “would not be culturally sensitive” in the wake of the Bondi massacre, where 15 people were killed by two gunmen at a Hanukkah event.
Following the board’s announcement, roughly 180 of 240 writers slated to appear at the festival announced they were boycotting it over the decision, including British author Zadie Smith and former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
On Tuesday, the festival’s board put out another statement, apologizing to Abdel-Fattah, announcing that all but one of its members had resigned and canceling the writers’ week altogether.
“We also apologise to Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah for how the decision was represented and reiterate this is not about identity or dissent but rather a continuing rapid shift in the national discourse around the breadth of freedom of expression in our nation following Australia’s worst terror attack in history,” the statement said.
Abdel-Fattah rejected the apology in a statement on X.
“I refuse and reject the Board’s apology. It is disingenuous. It adds insult to injury,” she said. “The Board again reiterates the link to a terror attack I had nothing to do with, nor did any Palestinian. The Bondi shooting does not mean I or anyone else has to stop advocating for an end to the illegal occupation and systemic extermination of my people — that is an obscene and absurd demand.”
While the board did not cite specific statements by Abdel-Fattah in its initial decision, Australian Jewish groups have called for her exclusion from public appearances in the past, citing a March 2024 post on X where she wrote that “armed struggle is a moral and legal right of the colonised and brutalised.”
Jewish Community Council of South Australia public and government liaison Norman Schueler, who called for Abdel-Fattah’s removal in a letter to the festival’s organizers, condemned those that boycotted the festival.
“I think for everyone who has dropped out that it’s rather pathetic because that means they agree with what Dr Fattah is on about… Namely, that Israel should not exist,” Schueler told The Adelaide Advertiser.
The dustup comes as Australia’s parliament prepares to consider harsher speech laws devised in the wake of the Bondi massacre.
Louis Adler, a Jewish Australian and the director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, announced her resignation in an op-ed in The Guardian where she said the disinvitation of Abdel-Fattah “weakens freedom of speech and is the harbinger of a less free nation.”
“I cannot be party to silencing writers so, with a heavy heart, I am resigning from my role as the director of the AWW. Writers and writing matters, even when they are presenting ideas that discomfort and challenge us,” wrote Adler.
Another Jewish board member, Tony Berg, had announced his resignation in October, appearing to cite Abdel-Fattah’s invitation.
“I cannot serve on a board which employs a Director of Adelaide Writers’ Week who continues to deal with the board inappropriately and who programs writers who have a vendetta against Israel and Zionism,” wrote Berg, according to the Australian outlet InDaily.
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