But He Was Good to His Mother - The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters by Robert Rockaway

Author:Robert Rockaway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-07-21T04:00:00+00:00

Longy Zwillman

Evelyn was dubbed “The Kiss of Death Girl,” a sobriquet newspapers apply to women whose lovers appear to die at a much faster rate than is normal. Phil eliminated anyone he thought could be a rival for her affections.

It appears, however, that Evelyn had earned this nickname before Phil met her. Evelyn was a luscious blond who seemed to attract violent men. In 1933, at the age of eighteen, she was at a dance with her then current boyfriend, Hy Miller, when another man was taken by her looks. He tried to cut in and Miller objected. A fight ensued and Miller was killed. A couple of years later Evelyn was dating one Robert Feurer, when she caught the eye of a Brownsville gangster named Jack Goldstein. When Feurer objected to Jack’s advances, Goldstein killed him. Goldstein became her new boyfriend.

One day in 1938, they happened to pass a Brownsville pool hall where Pittsburgh Phil saw them. Phil liked what he saw, and said so. Goldstein took offence at the remark and told Phil to buzz off. Phil went inside the poolhall, got a cue stick, and beat the daylights out of Goldstein. He then supplanted Goldstein as Evelyn’s new paramour.

Goldstein was later killed by Phil, but not because of Evelyn. A contract was put out on Jack because of his racket activities, and a number of hitmen, led by Phil, were assigned the job. The men hammered Goldstein into unconsciousness, but did not kill him. Instead, they brought him directly to Phil, who insisted on drowning Goldstein personally.

Pittsburgh Phil was Evelyn’s final victim. She was the last person to visit him in his death cell before he was executed for murder in 1941. Evelyn left off consorting with mob figures, married and faded from view.19

Phil had been put on death row by his erstwhile pal and fellow killer-for-hire, Abe Reles. Reles had been arrested in February 1940, along with several other Brooklyn hoodlums, for allegedly murdering a petty burglar and small-time crook named Alexander “Red” Alpert.

At the time he was picked up, Reles sported a rap sheet that contained 42 arrests, accumulated over a sixteen-year period, for robbery, assault, burglary, possession of narcotics and homicide. He never served time for any major charge.

Abe was squat and ugly, with thick, powerful fingers which he used to twist the necks of his victims. This skill earned him his underworld nickname, “Kid Twist.”20

Kid Twist started in racketeering in 1927 as a hooligan. He began murdering in 1930 when he put together his own gang to take over in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. He never s topped racketeering and he never stopped killing. According to his own account, he committed eleven murders, not counting the times he participated but didn’t pull the trigger, or the times where he held one end of the strangling rope but, as he claimed, “had not yanked it.”

Nothing fazed Abe. In 1934, he was sentenced to three years for assault, breaking a bottle of oil over the head of a garage attendant who hadn’t gotten to his car fast enough.

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