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‘Married to the Mob,’ but under a chuppah: A new memoir details a Jewish family’s crime ties
(New York Jewish Week) — The Geiks weren’t your typical Bronx working-class Jewish family.
One brother ran a mob-protected trucking company in Manhattan’s Garment District. Another brother, an NYPD detective, chauffeured organized crime couriers around the city with illicit cash. Their kid sister visited a Las Vegas casino where the tween was set up with a couple of slot machines in a private room.
And a close family friend was sent up the river for killing a notorious Jewish gangster.
Meet the family whose close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz,” a memoir just published by Alan Geik.
Dutch Schultz was the mob name of Arthur Flegenheimer, the Jewish bootlegger and numbers racket kingpin who left this mortal coil in October 1935 at the Palace Chop House in Newark. The triggermen were two Jews, members of the organized crime group Murder Inc. Mendy Weiss and Charles “Bug” Workman, the Uncle Charlie of the memoir’s title, did the hit.
Workman, who reportedly killed more than 20 people before pleading guilty to the murder of Dutch Schultz, was not a blood relative of author Alan Geik. But Workman grew up with Geik’s father on the Lower East Side and was so close to the Geik family he was considered an uncle. The author was in his 20s when he first met Workman, after the hitman was released from a New Jersey prison in 1964.
“I would never think of calling him anything but Uncle Charlie,” said Geik, 80, a retired TV producer and radio host who lives in Las Vegas.
In addition to diving deep into Workman’s story, the book also explores how Jewish mobsters and their hangers-on fought antisemitism, beat up Nazis and helped a fledgling Israel acquire arms for its War of Independence.
“These were people, from the first generation of Jews in America, who fought back against antisemitism in the streets,” Geik said. “Their parents fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe. They were not going to let it happen again and they didn’t.”
Geik’s book joins a crowded shelf of histories and memoirs of the Jewish mob, including “But He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters,” by Robert A. Rockaway, and “Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams,” by Rich Cohen. Like those books, Geik’s family history provides a sort of reverse image of typical Jewish immigrant stories: Instead of scrapping their way up from New York’s Jewish enclaves into retail and the professions, Geik’s family joined a criminal counterculture.
Alan Geik’s family’s close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in a just-published memoir, “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz.” (Sonador Publishing)
Books such as Geik’s “really put a personal experience to this whole world that we all know about, the world of New York mobsters,” said Larry Henry, author of a monthly column for the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. “The public’s appetite for mob stories is insatiable.”
“Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz” describes a tangled family tree ripe with, well, rotten apples. Geik’s father, Lou, was not actually in the mob but did reap benefits from his ties with organized crime, Alan concedes. Lou Geik was one of several individuals who delivered mob cash to Workman’s family over 23 years.
“Uncle Charlie felt indebted to my father,” said Geik.
The author’s father is cited as a source for many of the anecdotes included in the memoir. Geik said that while his father’s business relied on mob protection, Lou Geik didn’t have “that extra whatever-it-took to be a really hardened criminal” — a trait, he said, his own older brother Bernard also lacked.
“My brother always wanted to be a gangland figure,” said Alan Geik. “So, instead my brother became a policeman.”
An ultimately very corrupt policeman. Bernard Geik joined the force in 1962 and resigned in 1971 after serving in the notorious Special Investigative Unit, which, as depicted in the book and the motion picture “Prince of the City,” devolved into an extortion ring. After resigning from the NYPD, Bernard Geik was arrested for bribery and bribe-taking in 1974. He reportedly pleaded guilty but served no time.
The disgraced detective went to work at his father’s trucking company. According to the author, his brother was one of the detectives provided by a supervisor to drive their Uncle George and other mobsters around town when they were transporting mob money in New York.
Uncle George Gordon was a real uncle. Gordon is allegedly one of the gangsters the actor George Raft modeled himself after for his roles in 1930s and ’40s crime melodramas. For decades, beginning at a casino and speakeasy near the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan, Gordon had a big hand in organized crime’s gambling operations, supervising enterprises in Florida, the Midwest, Las Vegas and Havana.
Alan Geik isn’t the only keeper of his family’s convoluted story. His sister Iris has her own memories of growing up mob-adjacent, such as when she and her parents were Gordon’s guests at the Stardust Hotel in Vegas when the mob was running its casino and skimming cash from the profits. Gordon wanted Lou Geik to work there.
According to Iris, Gordon posted a guard outside a private room in which she had been ensconced with a couple of slot machines. The 13-year-old was “mesmerized” by the slot machines. Her mother was initially unaware of what was going on.
“Uncle Charlie” Workman, seen in 1941, pled guilty to the 1935 murder of mobster Dutch Schultz and was given a life sentence. (NYPD)
“I was having a blast,” Iris Geik said. “I’ll never forget when the door flung open and my itty-bitty mother came in with a big guard behind her. She immediately made me stop [playing with the slot machine] and give back the money I had won.”
Iris Geik, now a privacy lawyer in the Boston area, has written hundreds of pages of her own memoir about the wives and girlfriends of the Jewish gangsters, tentatively titled, “The View From the Women’s Table.”
“Their lives were complex but they were also heimische Jewish women,” she said, using the Yiddish word for cozy and familiar. She and her father eloped because they were a mixed couple: Her mother Reba was a Sephardic Jew and her father was Ashkenazi.
Geik remembered that as a child she noticed a newspaper article about a family friend being arrested. She said, “Mom! Mom! Look, we’re famous.” To which her mother replied, “That’s infamous, dear.”
Geik said that on several occasions her mother observed: “There are no second-generation Jewish mobsters. Jews don’t make gangsters out of their children.”
Reba Geik had been involved in caring for two of Iris’ aunts who lived in Brooklyn while they were dying. Those acts of kindness had a profound impact on Uncle George, the casino supervisor.
After the aunts passed away, Gordon always stood when Reba entered a room, Iris said. “My mother was very honored by that because he was such a big shot.”
Throughout her life, Reba Geik remained close to Sylvia Lorber, a friend from her teenage years. Lorber was the only mob mistress her mother would spend time with, said Iris. Lorber was the paramour of two Jewish gangsters: Benny Kassop, the brother of Murder, Inc. gunman Sammy Kassop, and Sam “Red” Levine, an observant Jew who wore a kippah under his fedora. Levine won the affection of Lorber while the Kassop brothers were in Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in Ossining, New York.
“Sylvia was a hell of a lot of fun but my mother worried about her,” Iris said. “Sylvia told me her stories, which were kind of glamorous when she was young but sad when she was older.” After spending 20 years with Levine, Lorber couldn’t attend his funeral. Sylvia Lorber stopped talking to Reba Geik in her last years.
Jewish gangsters do, on occasion, display some altruism in Alan Geik’s memoir. Take Moe Dalitz, the head of the Cleveland Syndicate. He was a major bootlegger during Prohibition whose flotillas of illegal liquor on the Great Lakes came to be known as The Little Jewish Navy. His family ran legitimate laundry businesses in Boston and Detroit. Too old to be drafted during World War II, he enlisted at the age of 42 and was commissioned as a lieutenant. Dalitz ran the military laundry service on New York’s Governor’s Island — but declined to bunk in the island’s barracks, opting instead to stay at a swanky hotel overlooking Central Park.
Then there was Johnny Eder, a major source for Geik’s narrative. Eder was part of the Lower East Side teenage crime crew that included Uncle Charlie and Uncle George. As an adult he was a major fence for stolen jewelry and always had a bag of stolen rings on him. Eder also had many connections at City Hall and in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.
According to Geik’s account, Eder was the mob’s representative to the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force in Palestine. Eder arranged meetings in the noisy kitchen of the Copacabana, a mob hangout, between Haganah agents and mobsters and others described as “former wartime U.S. intelligence agents” working to secure weapons for Israel’s War of Independence. (The late Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s longtime mayor, would tell a story about passing cash to an intermediary at the Copacabana, who brought the money to an Irish sea caption with a ship full of munitions bound for the Holy Land. The bagman, according to Kollek, was Frank Sinatra.)
Author Alan Geik’s father-in-law, Lou Lenart, left, and other fighter pilots in front of Avia-S-199 plane. Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to the Holy Land for use in the War of Independence. (Courtesy of Boaz Dvir)
Alan Geik has a very personal connection to the creation of the Jewish state. His late wife Nina was the daughter of Lou Lenart, a World War II fighter pilot who served in the U.S. Marines. Geik’s memoir details how the elder Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to Palestine for use in Israel’s War of Independence. Lenart’s story was featured in Nancy Spielberg’s 2014 documentary “Above and Beyond,” about the creation of the Israeli air force.
The story of how Jewish gangsters used some violent muscle against Nazi sympathizers in New York has been told before in historical accounts, but one episode in Geik’s memoir is particularly dramatic. A pair of Jews attended a Bund rally at Camp Siegfried on Long Island, a summer camp that taught Nazi ideology, and were offered a ride back to the city by a Nazi sympathizer who they ended up beating senseless in Brooklyn.
Alan Geik was not really hungry when he met Meyer Lansky at a Central Park hotel in the late 1950s. The gangster asked the 15-year-old nephew of George Gordon if he wanted a pastrami sandwich. Geik declined. Then Lansky, who struck Geik as an “older Jewish man who I knew was really powerful,” suggested that they split one. It was an offer that Geik did not refuse.
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The post ‘Married to the Mob,’ but under a chuppah: A new memoir details a Jewish family’s crime ties appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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All 25 Jewish Lawmakers in US House Sign Statement on ‘Grotesque’ Antisemitic Bondi Beach Shooting
Rabbi Levi Wolff lights a menorah at Bondi Pavilion to honor the victims of a shooting during a Jewish holiday celebration at Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams
Every Jewish member of the US House of Representatives on Monday signed a bipartisan statement condemning the prior day’s antisemitic mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, decrying the “grotesque” act of mass murder.
“On a night meant for celebration, Jewish families in Australia, gathering in joy and peace on the first night of Hanukkah, were grotesquely targeted with hate and murderous intent. Sadly, this attack does not come as a surprise to the Jewish community of Sydney who have been raising a clarion call for local and national authorities to take concrete steps against a rising tide of antisemitism,” read the statement co-signed by the 25 lawmakers.
“We stand in solidarity with the Australian Jewish community and together extend our condolences to the family and friends of the people murdered and are praying for the complete recovery of the dozens wounded, and the entire Jewish community feeling besieged,” the statement continued.
The signatories of the letter were members of both main political parties: Reps. Brad Sherman (D-CA), Becca Balint (D-VT), Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), Steve Cohen (D-TN), Randy Fine (R-FL), Lois Frankel (D-FL), Laura Friedman (D-CA), Craig Goldman (R-TX), Daniel Goldman (D-NY), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Sara Jacobs (D-CA), David Kustoff (R-TN), Greg Landsman (D-OH), Mike Levin (D-CA), Seth Magaziner (D-RI), Max Miller (R-OH), Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Brad Schneider (D-IL), Kim Schrier (D-WA), Eugene Vindman (D-VA), and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL).
The attack, which is suspected to have been carried out by a Muslim father-and-son duo from Pakistan, targeted Jewish families which gathered to mark the first night of Hanukkah. The murder spree left 15 people dead, including a 10-year-old child, and more than 40 others wounded. Australian authorities described the incident as a hate-driven assault aimed squarely at the Jewish community, as Jewish institutions across the US and the world were placed on heightened alert.
Monday’s statement, a rare show of bipartisan unity, was led by senior lawmakers including Sherman, along with Democrats and Republicans who stressed that defending Jewish life is not a partisan issue. The statement called on political leaders worldwide to take concrete action to protect Jewish communities and to reject efforts to excuse or normalize antisemitic rhetoric under any guise.
“Antisemitism is a cancer that eats at the core of society, whether in Australia, the United States, or anywhere it is allowed to take root and grow. We join leaders around the globe in condemning this evil act and in calling for justice, peace, and unwavering support for those affected. We also call on all leaders to do better standing up to antisemitism, bigotry, and hate. We must also do better in our work for a world where everyone can celebrate their faith and traditions free from discrimination and fear,” the statement read.
“Jews around the world will continue to gather this week to celebrate Hanukkah and its story of religious freedom and defiant optimism,” the statement continued. “As we light the menorah each night and remember the miracle of the festival of lights, let us proclaim that light is stronger than darkness, right is stronger than might, and justice is stronger than tyranny. Wishing all Jewish communities and the world around us strength and peace.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the attack as an act of antisemitic terrorism and reiterated that assaults on Jews abroad are inseparable from the broader campaign of hatred against the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Netanyahu also chided Australian leadership, pointing to a letter he sent the government which warned that their recognition of a non-existent Palestinian state could encourage more violence.
Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese defended his government’s decision to recognize “Palestine,” saying, “overwhelmingly, most of the world recognizes a two-state solution as being the way forward in the Middle East.”
Critics have argued that a two-state solution should be reached through negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians rather than preemptive unilateral declarations by other capitals.
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Dutch Police Arrest 22 After Anti-Israel Protests, Vandalism at Amsterdam Venue During IDF Cantor Performance
Anti-Israel protesters clash with police outside Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, breaking through barricades and setting off smoke bombs during a demonstration against a performance by the IDF’s chief cantor. Photo: Screenshot
Dutch police arrested 22 people on Sunday after anti-Israel protests outside an Amsterdam concert hall erupted into violent clashes during a performance by the Israel Defense Forces’ official cantor.
Around 200 demonstrators gathered outside Amsterdam’s famed Concertgebouw to protest a performance by Shai Abramson, the IDF’s chief cantor, who has previously performed at several Israeli military ceremonies.
Even though Abramson was originally scheduled to lead the Concertgebouw’s annual public Hanukkah concert, the venue canceled his appearance last month following backlash over his ties to the Israeli military.
After the announcement sparked international outrage, the Concertgebouw offered Abramson the chance to perform at two private concerts later that evening while skipping the main Sunday afternoon concert.
Widely circulated on social media, footage showed anti-Israel protesters chanting antisemitic slogans, breaking through barricades, and carrying signs with inverted red triangles — a symbol used in Hamas propaganda to mark targets.
“October 7, 2023: The day indigenous people rose up against their occupier,” one of the signs read, referring to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Paar demonstranten gooiden een hek om. Paar agenten van de arrestatie-eenheid hebben ze met hulp van de ME uit de groep gehaald. Dat ging er hardhandig aan toe pic.twitter.com/dxtxPg1jsQ
— Jesper Roele (@JesperRoele) December 14, 2025
As riot police worked to contain the crowd and maintain public order, protesters set off smoke bombs, leaving one officer with minor injuries, Dutch News reported.
Local law enforcement arrested 22 people for offenses including violating assembly rules, possessing fireworks, and resisting arrest.
Het was een orgie van Jodenhaat, vandaag op het Museumplein en vlak voor de ingang van het #Concertgebouw, waar Holocaustoverlevenden werden uitgescholden voor nazi’s. Met instemming van een tokkie in toga.
Dit is racisme, dit zijn de nieuwe nazi’s, dit is het pure Kwaad. pic.twitter.com/Ho8DC9dQ4y— Bart Schut (@bpschut) December 14, 2025
On Monday, the anti-Israel group Pal Action NL claimed responsibility for vandalism at the concert hall, sharing photos on its Instagram account showing red paint splattered across the walls.
“Last night, after Het Concertgebouw allowed IOF war criminal and official cantor of the Zionist settler colony, Shai Abramson, to perform, some activists decided to pay a little visit,” the group wrote in its post.
“Het Concertgebouw now has Palestinian blood on their hands, and it will take a LONG time to wash away …” the statement read. “A warning to all other venues and institutions in the country considering platforming Zionists, don’t. Or we will be visiting.”
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Antisemitism Threatens US National Security, Analysts Warn
From left to right: Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Scott Doran, Hudson Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship Walter Russell Mead, and Hudson trustees chair Sarah Stern. Photo: Screenshot.
Geopolitical competition, the rise of artificial intelligence, and declining faith in the capitalist economic model and liberal democracy are contributing to the resurgence of antisemitism taking place across the Western world, some of the leading foreign policy experts in the US said on Friday during a conference held by the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.
Titled, “Antisemitism as a National Security Threat,” the eight-hour event examined antisemitism as a challenge to the execution of a sound American foreign policy and a tactical advantage to “revisionist powers” such as China and Russia which aim to overturn the international order and supplant the US as the world’s leading superpower. Moreover, they stressed that the vanguard of the “new” antisemitism – Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes – are not new characters on the world stage but rather the latest iteration of a social type which has always emerged in periods of disruptive change to convert public uncertainty about the future into domestic upheaval.
One area that antisemites have identified as a stronghold is the rising field of artificial intelligence, Jude Rosenblatt, founder of an AI consulting firm, told attendees while appearing via webcam.
“The AI, unfortunately is quite antisemitic itself. We’ve done a lot of research about this. I can explain it in greater detail if you want, but it turns out that AI is very antisemitic and then when it undergoes safety training, it actually becomes more antisemitic. And it is very concerning that underneath the hood, AI is deeply antisemitic,” Rosenblatt explained. “But if it remains deeply antisemitic underneath the hood, then it’s going to, as it becomes more deeply incorporated into everything, people are going to increasingly lose agency to something which is antisemitic and is going to undermine all of our interests.”
The Algemeiner has reported extensively in recent weeks on how neo-Nazis, jihadi terrorists, and others have weaponized AI both to target the Jewish people and, more broadly, expand their propaganda, recruitment, and operations.
The conference also touched on the rise of the so-called “new right.” From the advent of the Cold War until the election of Donald Trump, the American right or “conservative movement” was associated with a “strong” and “active” American foreign policy consensus rooted in a pragmatic assessment of the national interest even as it often embraced a missionary project of spreading liberal democracy and capitalism around the world.
Recently, however, right-wing social media pundits such as Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes have argued for America’s retreating from the world stage by citing, implicitly and explicitly, antisemitic conspiracies which claim that Jews incite wars and social upheaval for profit and the pursuit of power. In doing so, they have uttered torrid encomiums to the leaders and governments of China, Russia, Venezuela, and Iran.
The lies and historical revisionism the new right promotes is poisoning public debate and creating a climate in which American leaders are incentivized to make poor strategic decisions for the sake of achieving short term political goals, according to experts.
“It started off with anti-Ukraine in the populist world,” Hudson Institute senior fellow and director of the Keystone Defense Initiative, Rebecca Heinrichs, said, speaking during a panel titled “The Grand Chessboard.”
“It’s antisemitism for the purpose of undermining Americans’ confidence in ourselves and in our post World War II role in the world. That is very dangerous because we can’t come to consensus on anything else we need from a grand strategy perspective if American scapegoat our problems to the Jews and if they believe that Israel is no longer an ally but it never was, and in fact that we were on the wrong side of World War II, which is now the narrative being pushed,” she continued.
The conference ended with a keynote address delivered by renowned scholar and foreign policy analyst Walter Russell Mead. An alumnus of Yale University, Mead’s most recent work includes his critically acclaimed examination of the US-Israel relationship titled, The Arc of the Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.
Mead discussed antisemitism across the ages as one consequence of utopian social engineering and its perennial quest to construct societies unalloyed by outsiders and nonbelievers.
“When you want to have a comprehensive political order that embodies all good things and lays out rules for how everyone should behave and think and so on, you sooner or later run up against those stubborn Jews who will not bend to the need of Baal, who will not sacrifice to the emperor or whatever the element of the coercive element of your utopia is,” Mead said. “Today in the Islamist Middle East, we see the same thing, a utopia. If everyone would just accept Islam and live in the light of these eternal truths, everything would be fine. There would be justice, there would be prosperity, there would be freedom. But there are Jews.”
He continued, “The European union’s vision of a world of peace in international order keeps getting disturbed by that traumatizing presence of a Jewish state that follows the logic of its own survival rather than the idealistic hopes and dreams that we see in Brussels.”
Mead concluded by arguing that the American tradition offers not only a guide for building a society which, while being imperfect, is inclusive to all but also an antidote to antisemitism.
“Other people reject the American idea of a free society in favor of some kind of a blood and soil nationalism. Again, you’re just not going to get there because it’s kind of obvious that we’re sort of diverse. We’ve got a bunch of people from whose blood and whose soil is it going to be there?” he said.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.