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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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After 9/11, Jewish volunteers kept watch over the dead. 25 years later, the grief remains.
In the aftermath of 9/11, New Yorkers found countless ways to help. They lined up in record numbers to donate blood, delivered meals and medical supplies to first responders, and opened their homes to strangers with nowhere else to go.
And then there were the people who sat with the dead.
Starting on Sept. 20, 2001, Jewish volunteers took four-hour shifts at the city medical examiner’s temporary morgue in lower Manhattan, reciting psalms and keeping watch over the remains.
Without fail, a member of the Jewish community was there — 24/7, for more than seven months.
They were sitting shmira, fulfilling the Jewish tradition of staying with the dead from the moment of passing until burial. The volunteers — some of them college students — sat with and prayed for each of the victims, whether or not they were Jewish.
“Right after 9/11, all the way down till the next May, it was never a missed moment,” Rabbi Allen Schwartz of Congregation Ohab Zedek, which organized the shmira, told the Forward. “We never had a problem filling a spot.”
A congregation responds
Like many houses of worship, Congregation Ohab Zedek, an Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side, mobilized after 9/11. Congregants collected masks, filled boxes with clothing, and set up an assembly line to make sandwiches for those in need.
Schwartz also recognized the importance of shmira — determined that the horror of 9/11 would not interrupt the tradition that brings dignity to the dead. He asked a congregant, recently retired shoe salesman Armin Osgood, to coordinate.
“When Rabbi Schwartz asked you to do something, you did it,” Osgood, now 91, told the Forward. “There was not a question at that point.”
Osgood sketched out a schedule on a big yellow legal pad and began filling it in with names. Many Ohab Zedek congregants signed up. Others heard about the effort through word of mouth, sometimes from friends of friends. Some traveled from out of state.
The group included people with different levels of religious observance. All that mattered to Osgood was that they were willing to help.
“People called, and they said, ‘I don’t speak Hebrew. I can’t read Hebrew.’ I said, ‘So read the Psalms in English.’ ‘Well, I’m in a congregation where women wear pants.’ I said, ‘So wear pants,’” Osgood said. “Nobody gets excluded. If they want to do it, I’ll find a way.”
Ely Razin, 35 at the time, was among the Ohab Zedek congregants who volunteered. He took a shmira night shift, reciting tehillim next to the remains and trying to concentrate on the meaning of the ancient words.
“It helped me feel like I was doing something,” Razin told the Forward. “The act of shmira, in and of itself, somewhat gives you a sense of personal peace.”
Rabbi Schwartz took a weekly Friday morning shift, where he found himself providing spiritual comfort to people of all faiths. He befriended a Protestant minister who was often there to pray with bereaved families. Once, a Catholic family, unable to find a priest, asked Schwartz to say the last rites.
Unfamiliar with the Catholic tradition, Schwartz recited the Jewish memorial prayer kel maleh rachamim in English.
“I don’t know what their last rites look like, but I said the [Jewish] prayer we say at the funeral,” Schwartz said. “So it was a kiddush Hashem. That was a very meaningful moment.”
Keeping the chain
Keeping the morgue staffed 24/7 was no easy task. It was even more difficult on Shabbat — partly because Ohab Zedek, on the Upper West Side, was too far from the morgue in lower Manhattan to walk.
An Ohab Zedek congregant reached out to Jessica Russak-Hoffman, then a senior studying English at Stern College, Yeshiva University’s women’s college. Its dormitories were within a few blocks of the morgue.
“My dad always said, ‘If a mitzvah lands on your lap, you’ve got to pick it up,’” Russak-Hoffman said. “So I grabbed a clipboard, and I went outside and started recruiting.”
She ended up enlisting more than a dozen women. One was Judith Kaplan, then a junior at Stern, who often took the midnight-to-4 a.m. shift — spending many Friday nights as a college student at the morgue.
Kaplan’s nearby apartment became a home base for the volunteers. She cooked lunch and dinner for those sitting shmira, many of whom were missing communal Shabbat meals to take their shifts.
“It’s not everybody’s cup of tea to do this kind of thing, so you have to find someone who has the stomach for it, and the emotional capacity for it,” Kaplan said. “This is not an easy mitzvah.”
As the months went on, the group had fewer volunteers. Kaplan began taking eight-hour shifts, sometimes in the dead of winter and in the middle of the night. Stern College security guards accompanied her on the walk to the morgue.
“I felt a very big responsibility,” Kaplan said. “I felt very strongly that if we can’t find someone to sit, then I have to do it. I didn’t want to break the chain.”
Russak-Hoffman also took night shifts. She recalled how, whenever a first responder’s remains were identified, everyone would pause, stand and pay their respects.
For Kaplan, those moments underscored how the Jewish volunteers had become part of the broader recovery effort. Shmira, she emphasized, was never about distinguishing Jewish victims from others.
“They could have told me that every single Jewish body was identified, and I still would have sat there,” Kaplan said. “It did not matter what your faith was or what your culture was — we were all there for the same reason.”
Looking back
There would never be a moment when all the victims’ remains were identified. But at some point, identifications slowed. Schwartz decided to end the shmira on Lag B’Omer — a Jewish holiday that marks the end of a mourning period.
But for so many of the volunteers, the shmira’s conclusion was not the end of mourning.
“I definitely spent the next 20 years looking at open sky and expecting planes to go by and hit things,” said Russak-Hoffman, who now lives in Seattle. “Every time a proper commercial plane went by without context, it flashed me back.”
Razin, who now lives in Israel, said similar emotions resurfaced for him after the Oct. 7 attacks. Sitting shmira is considered chesed shel emet, the highest level of mitzvah because it is truly selfless, as the dead cannot repay the act. But Razin came to understand that the ritual also serves the living.
“They’re there to help not only the person who’s departed, but the people who are left behind,” Razin said. “It put a frame around something that otherwise was incomprehensible and monstrous.”
For Kaplan, who now lives in Jerusalem, the experience was formative. The tehillim — its pages now held together with a hairband — became a keepsake of that time. She has since brought the prayer book to her wedding and to the birth of her child.
“That’s how meaningful the experience was for me,” she said.
Schwartz plans to reflect on 9/11 and its aftermath in his Rosh Hashanah sermon this year, which falls on Sept. 11. Twenty-five years later, he said, the volunteers’ mitzvot offer a reason for hope.
“This was barbaric evil on the part of some people, but it really brought out the most incredible goodness in many more people,” Schwartz said. “We shouldn’t give up hope in mankind.”
The post After 9/11, Jewish volunteers kept watch over the dead. 25 years later, the grief remains. appeared first on The Forward.
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The Disappearance of the “Reel”: Why Online Slots No Longer Look Like Slot Machines
For more than a century, a slot machine was easy to recognize. Three reels. A lever. A row of fruit, bells or lucky sevens. Pull, spin, stop. Even someone who had never played one knew exactly what the machine was supposed to do.
Open a modern online slot today and things can look rather different. Symbols fall from the sky. Winning icons explode. Grids change size. Multipliers appear from nowhere. Sometimes there is barely anything that looks like a reel at all.
So, when exactly did slots stop behaving like slot machines?
The reel survived its own disappearance
The change did not happen overnight. Mechanical reels began losing their practical importance decades ago.
In 1976, Fortune Coin Company developed an early video slot using a modified 19-inch Sony television. Instead of watching actual wheels rotate behind glass, players watched electronic representations of reels. The physical reel was gone, but designers kept its visual language. It made sense. Players already understood it.
Digital technology eventually made that imitation unnecessary. A screen does not have to obey the laws of a spinning cylinder. Once developers embraced that fairly obvious fact, slot design became much stranger — and more creative.
A good milestone is NetEnt’s **Gonzo’s Quest**, released in 2010. Its Avalanche mechanic made winning symbols disappear before new ones dropped into their places. One wager could therefore produce a sequence of cascading results rather than the familiar spin-stop-spin rhythm. The game still had a 5×3 layout, but the screen was beginning to behave more like a dynamic puzzle board.
Then the grid started fighting back
The next step was to make the reels themselves unstable. Big Time Gaming’s Megaways feature was a big sample. The launch of Bonanza in 2016 helped to build a system with the number of symbols on the reels being variable, creating up to 117,649 winning combinations. It was then licensed to many other developers, and Megaways was the result.
It’s a significant design change. With the old machines, players would need to watch the set paylines. Current games can have them grasp clusters, varying reel heights, tumbling sequences or symbols wherever on a grid. The similarity, but the old machine is a distant cousin.
One such sweet bonanza is Sweet Bonanza 1000. In Pragmatic Play’s 2024 title, players earn prizes for getting 8 or more matching fruit or candy symbols with a 6×5 grid. Symbols are removed and other symbols drop and when you get a multiplier in the bonus round they can be worth 1000x. It remains a slot game, but in terms of graphics, it has much more in common with a cascading mobile puzzle game than a traditional three-reel game. The reel has not exactly died. It has been chopped up, covered in candy and taught new tricks.
Why designers abandoned the old machine
There is a simple reason: screens offer freedom.
A mechanical reel has physical limits. A digital grid does not. Developers can make symbols disappear, expand, split or trigger another sequence without asking players to press spin again. Themes can also become part of the mechanics rather than decoration pasted around three rotating wheels.
Recent releases show how normal this language has become. Pragmatic Play now openly describes games using terms such as “cluster-pays,” “tumbling reels” and “multiplier spots.” Big Time Gaming continues producing Megaways titles built around changing symbol configurations and cascades.
And perhaps that answers the original question. A slot stops *looking* like a traditional slot when the reel is no longer the main visual event.
But it does not necessarily stop being one.
The reel has become less a piece of machinery than a design ancestor. You can still see its DNA in columns, symbols and randomized outcomes. What changed is the canvas around it.
The funny part is that the slot machine escaped its physical cabinet only to discover it never really needed the reel in the first place.
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With Jewish New Yorkers on edge, Julie Menin says new protections will help keep them safe over High Holidays
As Jewish New Yorkers prepare for the High Holidays amid continued worries about rising antisemitism, City Council Speaker Julie Menin says her historic role as the chamber’s first Jewish leader has become even more important than she expected when elected in January.
In an exclusive interview with the Forward earlier this week, Menin pointed to her synagogue-protection law and successful fight against the Met’s John Galliano exhibition as proof that having a Jewish leader with a powerful bully pulpit matters.
“It’s incredibly important at this pivotal time,” Menin said. “We need to be standing up loudly, clearly, unequivocally in the fight against antisemitism.”
Many Jewish leaders see Menin, 58, as a check on Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose rhetoric on Israel and handling of antisemitism have strained relations with parts of the Jewish community.
Mamdani has met in recent weeks with Jewish leaders and visited the Orthodox-populated neighborhood of Borough Park. The administration was expected to release a comprehensive citywide strategy to combat antisemitism before the High Holidays. Mamdani’s spokesperson did not respond to an inquiry about the rollout timetable. Menin said that City Hall has not briefed her on its plan.
Services at synagogues across the city this year come against a backdrop of rising antisemitism. Synagogues already spend millions of dollars a year on security, a reality her children have noticed, Menin said. Recent NYPD statistics showed that in the first seven months of 2026, anti-Jewish incidents rose 8.5%, and 57% of the reported hate crimes in the city involved Jewish victims. “This has now become the new normal,” she said. “It’s terrible. It is just shameful that we have entered this new era.”
Menin is scheduled to speak at Central Synagogue, the site of an antisemitic attack last month, at its evening services before heading to a friend’s home, where she and her eight-year-old daughter will bring an apple pie they bake together as an annual tradition.
A High Holidays test
Menin said she hopes the Council’s recent efforts to combat antisemitism will help Jewish New Yorkers feel safer and more protected as they head to synagogues for the High Holidays.
One of Menin’s first legislative priorities after taking over the Council was a package of bills that included protest protections for houses of worship, a hate-crime reporting hotline, Holocaust education initiatives and additional security assistance. “I do see that we have made some real progress,” Menin said.
The most controversial part of Menin’s agenda focused on limiting protests outside synagogues. The Council ultimately passed legislation requiring the NYPD to develop a plan for establishing a buffer zone when demonstrations involve harassment, intimidation or physical threats. Mamdani, who had raised concerns about restricting protests, allowed the synagogue measure to become law without his signature.
The law now faces its first big test. The High Holidays coincide with the annual United Nations General Assembly, which is expected to draw protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, encouraged by Mamdani.
Menin said the new law should help protect people entering and leaving synagogues if tensions rise around Netanyahu’s visit, and demonstrations cross the line into intimidation. “I think that bill is really important in terms of making a difference to assure congregants of their safety and security as they enter and leave,” she said.
Asked directly what she would say to Jewish New Yorkers who remain worried about Mamdani, Menin avoided criticizing the mayor by name. But she also offered a pointed message about the political climate. “It is incumbent to ensure that the rhetoric is turned down,” Menin said, because there remains a “heightened sense of fear within the Jewish community.”
On Wednesday, Mamdani and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a lifelong member of Central Synagogue who spoke at services after the attack, announced increased NYPD security outside synagogues and other Jewish institutions for the High Holidays. Mamdani acknowledged that some Jews are “understandably afraid to come together and celebrate openly,” and said their safety “during these sacred days is of the utmost importance to our administration.”
The power to speak out
Menin has also used her position to speak out beyond the Council chamber, pointing to her recent fight over a Metropolitan Museum of Art planned exhibition as an example of the power of her bully pulpit.
Menin scored a significant victory as fashion designer John Galliano — who has a history of antisemitic remarks — bowed out following mounting criticism. Menin said she privately warned museum officials before the exhibition was announced that she would oppose it. She later went public after realizing that others who objected were reluctant to speak out.
“They might have been upset by the decision, but they weren’t comfortable speaking out,” Menin said. “We can’t shy away from speaking out. We have to be loud.” Menin called the development “a huge victory in the fight against antisemitism.”
A wish for unity
When Menin became speaker in January, she told the Forward that she hoped to use the position to help bridge some of the deep divisions in the city. Nearly a year later, she said that mission has only become more urgent.
Menin traced her own path into public service to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when her Lower Manhattan business was devastated. She later chaired Community Board 1 and became involved in efforts to rebuild the neighborhood. What she remembers most from that period, she said, was a sense of unity that she believes New York has lost.
“Right now, it just feels very divided and very divisive,” Menin said.
As she approaches her first Rosh Hashanah as speaker, her wish for the new year is for some of those divisions to ease.
“As we really focus on the issue of atonement, we need to figure out how we can ensure the safety and security of the Jewish community at this very, very difficult time,” Menin said. “It’s my fervent hope and wish that we can try to galvanize the community together, and that we can bring along many of our allies who are not Jewish as well.”
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