Uncategorized
‘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.
—
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.
Uncategorized
US Owners of Irish Soccer Team Fire Chair for Saying Ireland Should Not Compete Against ‘Genocidal’ Israel
Soccer Football – UEFA Nations League Draw – Brussels Expo, Brussels, Belgium – Feb.12, 2026, General view during the draw. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
The director and co-chairperson of the professional Irish soccer club Drogheda United has been fired after saying that Ireland should not compete against Israel in the upcoming UEFA Nations League and that the Jewish state should be “banned and boycotted by all.”
The Trivela Group, the American investment firm that owns the League of Ireland team, said in a statement on Monday that Joanna Byrne was dismissed and thanked her for her “longstanding and ongoing dedication to the Club and its success.” The move came after Byrne said in February that the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) should not play their scheduled UEFA Nations League match against Israel and accused the Jewish state of committing a “genocide” against Palestinians.
Ireland was drawn to go head-to-head against Israel and will play an away game against the Jewish state on Sept. 27 before hosting the Israeli team in Dublin on Oct. 4.
“Trivela Group can confirm that, pursuant to its authority as sole shareholder of Drogheda United FC, Joanna Byrne has been removed by Trivela Group as a director of the Club,” read a statement posted on Drogheda’s website. “At this time, the Board of Directors consists of Benjamin Boycott, Marc Koretzky, Barton Lee, and club CEO Rian Wogan. Mr. Boycott for the time being, will serve as the sole Chairperson, and the club will look to appoint a local director and Co-Chair in due course.”
In a Facebook post on Monday, Byne reiterated her “strong stance” that Ireland “should not play Israel in the UEFA Nations League while a genocide against the Palestinian people continues.” She called her firing a “cold, underhand move by Trivela, initiated in the dark of the night, which was planned and coordinated without any consultation with me. This is symptomatic of the way they do business.”
“I am deeply committed to Drogheda United and want to see it flourish,” she added in part. “I will continue to elevate it, and the League of Ireland more broadly at every opportunity.”
Byrne is the Sinn Féin spokesperson on culture, communications, and sport. Drogheda United was the first League of Ireland Club to appoint a female chairperson.
In February, after the FAI confirmed that it would compete against Israel in the UEFA Nations League, Byrne released a statement denouncing the decision. She noted that the FAI submitted a motion to UEFA in November to ban Israel from its European club and international competitions.
“In November, the FAI voted to submit a motion to UEFA to ban Israel … That was the correct moral and principled position to take,” she said in February. “Therefore, I am extremely angry and dismayed that the FAI have confirmed they will play against Israel. It appears that their morals, and principled position, was only on paper – not in actions where it counts. Israel should not be in this competition.”
“UEFA should have expelled them as soon as Israel went into Gaza on a genocidal, ethnic cleansing mission that has seen tens of thousands of innocents murdered, including hundreds of sports men and women,” she added. She said Israel “should be treated the same as Apartheid South Africa was, and be banned and boycotted by all.”
Byrne also accused the UEFA of having “double standards” for banning Russia after it invaded Ukraine in 2022 but not banning Israel following its military actions in Gaza. Israel launched a military campaign against Hamas after the Palestinian terrorist group invaded southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, massacring 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages to Gaza.
“I hope the FAI knows the furor that will be coming for them from the Irish football fans – the vast vast majority will not want to see our Boys In Green in the same stadium as the Israeli team,” she said in her statement at the time. “I have said it before when I was asked about Israel’s participation in Eurovision and in other sporting fixtures and I will repeat it again now: Israel is an apartheid state who have engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide. Their behavior cannot be accepted or normalized.”
After she made the anti-Israel comments in February, Bryne claimed the board of Drogheda United said her position as chairperson of the club “was no longer tenable” because of her remarks. The board also expressed “an expectation that I would resign, something I have told them that I intend to resist,” she added.
Trivela Group confirmed last week that it issued a written instruction demanding she resign as director and co-chair of the club.
Uncategorized
Bahrain Pushes UN-Backed Action for Hormuz Shipping; France Tables Rival Text
A map showing the Strait of Hormuz is seen in this illustration taken June 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
UN Security Council members have begun negotiating resolutions to protect commercial shipping in and around the Strait of Hormuz, including a Bahraini draft that would authorise the use of “all necessary means” — language France has warned will be difficult to adopt.
The move underscores mounting regional concern that Iran could continue to threaten the strategic chokepoint, which carries about a fifth of global oil supplies and underpins Gulf economies.
Shipping through the waterway has already slowed to a near‑halt after Iran struck vessels amid its conflict with the United States and Israel.
Diplomats said Bahrain‘s draft, seen by Reuters and backed by other Gulf Arab states and the United States, uses diplomatic language to authorize force.
France circulated a more conciliatory alternative text, also seen by Reuters, and diplomats said talks were under way to assess whether the two drafts could be reconciled.
France‘s Foreign Minister Jean‑Noel Barrot told lawmakers that there was little certainty Bahrain‘s bid to permit the use of force — a power the Security Council can grant under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which allows measures from sanctions to military action — would win enough backing among member states. “The coming days will tell,” he said.
BAHRAINI RESOLUTION DETAILS
The Bahraini resolution describes Iran’s actions as a threat to international peace and security.
It would authorize countries — acting alone or through voluntary multinational naval coalitions — to use “all necessary means” in and around the Strait of Hormuz, including in the territorial waters of countries along its shores, to ensure passage and to prevent moves that block or interfere with international navigation.
It also expresses readiness to impose measures, including targeted sanctions.
Bahrain‘s Ambassador to France, Essam al-Jassim, told Reuters discussions were at an early stage.
“External protection has clear limits. International coalitions help secure sea lanes and stabilize markets, but their response remains largely reactive,” he earlier told a defense forum in Paris.
“They do not address, for example, escalating state-backed attacks, and without doing so, disruptions will persist.”
The Bahraini and US missions to the United Nations did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The text “demands that the Islamic Republic of Iran immediately cease all attacks against merchant and commercial vessels and any attempt to impede lawful transit passage or freedom of navigation in and around the Strait of Hormuz.”
FRENCH RESOLUTION MAKES NO MENTION OF IRAN
Diplomats said there was little prospect of such a resolution being adopted by the Security Council as Iran’s partners Russia and China were likely to veto it if necessary.
A Security Council resolution needs at least nine votes in favor and no vetoes by Russia, China, the US, Britain, and France. The Russian and Chinese missions to the United Nations were not immediately available for comment.
France on Monday submitted its own draft, taking a more conciliatory tone and aiming to build broader support within the council.
President Emmanuel Macron, who has suggested having a UN framework for any action in the Hormuz, has refused to take part in any immediate operations to secure the strait, saying that international efforts could only happen once hostilities calm, insurance and shipping firms are consulted and with Iran’s consent.
The French resolution makes no mention of Iran and is not under Chapter VII. It “urges all parties to refrain from further escalation, calls for a cessation of the ongoing hostilities in the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman, and calls for a return to the path of diplomacy.”
Rather than authorizing action, the text encourages states with an interest in commercial maritime routes in the strait to coordinate strictly defensive measures — including escorting merchant vessels — in full respect of international law, including the law of the sea.
Uncategorized
Airstrikes Target HQ, Leader of Iran-Backed Shi’ite Militia Umbrella Group in Iraq
Mourners carry the coffin of Saad al-Baiji, the Popular Mobilization Forces’ Anbar operations commander, who was killed in airstrikes that targeted a PMF site in Iraq’s western Anbar province, during his funeral, in Baghdad, Iraq, March 24, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ahmed Saad
Airstrikes hit a headquarters of Iraq‘s umbrella group for Iran–backed Shi’ite militias and a residence belonging to its leader on Tuesday, killing at least 15 fighters in an escalation of US-Israeli strikes on one of Tehran’s main regional allies.
At least 30 other people were wounded in the strikes on a headquarters of the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq‘s Euphrates valley province of Anbar, according to medical officials who said some were in serious condition and the death toll could rise. Reuters filmed ambulances bringing the wounded to hospital in the regional capital Ramadi during the night.
The dead included the PMF’s operations commander in the province, Saad al-Baiji. Later on Tuesday, a large crowd of angry mourners carried his coffin and portraits through the streets of Baghdad.
Two security sources said the strikes had hit the PMF headquarters during a meeting attended by senior commanders.
A separate airstrike hit a residence belonging to the PMF’s leader Falih al-Fayadh in the northern city of Mosul. He was not present at the building which he uses only during visits to the city, according to the two security sources. A PMF statement said its office in the city was destroyed and one fighter wounded there.
Such damaging strikes against the PMF create political difficulty for Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al‑Sudani, who has to walk a careful line maintaining the support both of Washington and of factions in the Shi’ite-majority country that are aligned with Iran.
Sudani ordered an emergency meeting of the Ministerial Council for National Security to be convened, said a statement from the Iraqi military’s joint operations command.
The statement said the 15 PMF fighters were killed in a “US-Zionist airstrike”, the first time Iraq‘s military has blamed Israel alongside the United States for bombing the PMF.
The PMF, known in Arabic as Hashd al-Shaabi, is an umbrella group of mostly Shi’ite paramilitary factions that was formally integrated into Iraq‘s state security forces and includes several groups aligned with Iran.
Tehran-backed armed groups have launched attacks on US bases in Iraq and the US embassy since the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran on Feb. 28. Washington has had an influential presence in Baghdad since its 2003 invasion that overthrew dictator Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, and replaced him with Shi’ite-led governments friendly with Iran.
The US-Israeli war on Iran has spilled across Iran‘s borders, with Tehran launching strikes on Israel and Gulf Arab states hosting US military installations, while Israel has carried out attacks in Lebanon following cross-border fire by Iran-aligned Hezbollah.