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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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With anti-Arab campaign ad, Netanyahu stoops to new moral and political lows
Israeli election campaigns have often been ugly. They have featured exaggeration, fearmongering and outright deception. But even by those standards, the first major campaign advertisement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, posted on Netanyahu’s X account on Tuesday, managed to shock much of the country.
The AI-generated video depicts former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, who has become the standard-bearer for the opposition, walking through a sunlit field toward a young Jewish man before passing him by to embrace Mansour Abbas of Ra’am, the United Arab List, instead.
The young man looks strikingly like Eisenkot’s son, Gal, who was killed fighting in Gaza in late 2023 — although Likud insists he isn’t meant to. Strictly speaking, there is enough difference to sustain the protestations. The young man has longer, wavier hair than Gal Eisenkot did — just enough, perhaps, to preserve plausible deniability. Yet almost everyone I know believed they were watching a father joyfully approaching his slain son, seemingly restored to life, only to ignore him in favor of an Arab political leader at a time when Arab political participation in Israel is particularly contentious.
The only possible explanation: Likud wants their campaign to be as mean as possible. Or perhaps that they believe that anything that creates a buzz — and therefore distracts from the governing coalition’s disastrous and controversial policies, including a wildly unpopular recent legislative blitz — is a good thing.
And buzz there is. The perception that a father’s personal loss had been weaponized for electoral gain struck many as a line that simply should not be crossed. “This is Netanyahu, and this is his machine of incitement”, wrote Einav Zangauker, whose son was held hostage in Gaza by Hamas, on social media. “This isn’t politics,” Zangauker added, but rather “an attack on a bereaved father and an assault on his dignity. It is the lowest of the low.”
“I turn to elected representatives, activists, and all candidates from all parties, and demand that you do not cross red lines. Do not turn rivals into enemies,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said. “I call on the people of Israel, in a clear voice: Remember that elections are not a civil war.”
But even if one puts aside the controversy surrounding the young man altogether, the advertisement remains deeply troubling. It is, at its core, an exercise in incitement against Ra’am — and, by extension, against the very idea that Arab citizens may legitimately participate in governing Israel.
Abbas himself accused Netanyahu of “trying to incite between different parts of society”; about a fifth of Israelis are Arab, and the ad was obviously trying to delegitimize collaboration with the parties who generally represent them.
From Likud’s perspective, that too is logical — so long as they ignore the goal of Israel remaining a democratic country in which component ethnic groups live in harmony. It’s logical because Arab parties have always been part of the opposition to Likud and the chances are high that Eisenkot might need them, even passively, to successfully craft a coalition after the Oct. 27 election.
This isn’t just dangerous. It ignores the essential role that Arab parties have played in building toward a strong Israeli future.
Ra’am, under Abbas, has been the most integrationist Arab party Israel has ever seen. Abbas broke with decades of Arab political orthodoxy by arguing that Arab citizens should seek influence through practical cooperation with whichever Zionist government Israelis elected. He has repeatedly recognized Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people while demanding full equality for its Arab citizens.
Whatever one thinks of his politics, these choices have represented one of the boldest experiments in Jewish-Arab partnership since the state’s founding.
That experiment briefly succeeded. Ra’am joined Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid’s coalition in 2021 and demonstrated that Arab participation in government could become something ordinary rather than revolutionary.
More awkward still for Likud, Netanyahu himself spent some weeks after the 2021 election attempting to persuade Abbas to support — or even participate in — his own coalition. Those negotiations failed for one principal reason: Far-right firebrand Bezalel Smotrich — now Netanyahu’s finance minister — refused to countenance a government dependent on an Arab party. Without Ra’am, Netanyahu lacked a majority.
It is therefore surreal to portray Eisenkot’s willingness to work with Ra’am as somehow beyond the democratic pale, when not so long ago, Netanyahu himself tried to do precisely the same thing.
Nor should anyone pretend that Arab parties suddenly became relevant because of Eisenkot. Since the emergence of today’s political blocs, Arab parties have almost invariably belonged to the anti-Likud camp. Any center-left coalition aspiring to govern has depended, directly or indirectly, on their parliamentary support. That is not a distortion of Israeli democracy. It is one of its enduring structural realities.
Which brings us to the larger significance of this episode.
Many Israelis have long predicted that this Likud campaign would barely concern policy at all. They expected, instead, an effort to delegitimize any prospective change government by portraying it as illegitimate because it relied on Arab parties. They expected renewed attempts to cast Arab political participation as inherently suspect. They expected emotional manipulation to substitute for argument and personal attacks to eclipse serious debate. Some feared renewed efforts to discourage Arab turnout and disqualify Arab parties from the ballot.
That appears to be exactly what they’re getting.
The remarkable thing is not merely that Likud produced this advertisement, but that doing so was effectively its first act of the campaign, which kicked off after the Knesset recently went into recess.
Before voters had heard competing visions for Israel’s economy, security or diplomacy, the country’s governing party chose to launch its campaign by inflaming fears about Arab political participation while employing imagery that countless Israelis immediately interpreted as mocking one father’s unbearable personal loss.
By the next day, competing ads using a similar aesthetic were put out by opponents of Netanyahu. One depicted Netanyahu on a similar field running past a soldier to hug a Haredi politician holding a sign that says — as many Haredi anti-draft protesters chant — “we’d rather die than serve.”
One reason AI is so attractive to political strategists is because it blurs responsibility. Images can be carefully engineered to evoke a conclusion while remaining just different enough to deny that such a conclusion was ever the intention. The technology offers something every spin doctor craves: emotional impact coupled with plausible deniability.
“I do not think we can allow this to continue,” lamented David Lau, a former chief rabbi of Israel, who has served in the military. “We must stop all these disputes, all this talk, and all these behaviors. This path does not lead to building anything. It does not lead to peace. It is a bad path, and I am even more concerned about the next generation.”
It is entirely possible that this advertisement will prove to have established the moral tone of the campaign. Israel deserves better.
The post With anti-Arab campaign ad, Netanyahu stoops to new moral and political lows appeared first on The Forward.
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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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