Mob Town by John Bennett

Author:John Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300221954
Publisher: Yale University Press

CHAPTER 11

Gangs and Guns

Any reader of the daily papers these days might come to the conclusion that Chicago is the only place in which organised bands of desperate criminals ever existed. The public have a short memory.

Frederick Wensley, Detective Days (1931)1

Immigrant gangs

In the early part of the twentieth century, street gangs had become a major concern in the East End. With the continued arrival of Eastern European immigrants and their gradual absorption into the community, it was inevitable that they too would fall into the ways of criminality, forming close-knit and greatly feared gangs in the process, the most prominent – and most maligned – being the Bessarabians of Whitechapel. Known also as the Bessarabian Tigers or the ‘Stop at Nothing Gang’, the forty-strong group lived a life of violence, intimidation and extortion, even amongst their own fellow immigrants. ‘They levied a protection toll on timid alien shopkeepers, proprietors of coffee stalls and so on’, ex-Chief Inspector George Cornish later recalled. ‘The faintest shadow of protest on their part at this blackmail and the gang descended on them with force armed with guns, knives, and such weapons as broken bottles.’2

One potential victim, a man named Weinstein, proprietor of the Odessa café, had successfully fought off the gang with an iron bar when they attempted to extract protection money from him, and another local gang, named the Odessians in his honour, became the Bessarabians’ rivals. Tit-for-tat reprisals were common between the two sides, and resulted in a case of murder in 1902. On 4 October, a member of the Bessarabians, Samuel Oreman, picked a fight in a cookshop with a man named Cooksey Lewis; there had been bad blood between the two for some time, but on this occasion, Lewis was rather reluctant to take the bait. The situation, however, was inflamed by another man present, Henry Brodovitz, who expressed his intention to challenge Oreman in any ensuing fight; Oreman threatened to kill him if he did. The incident came to nothing, but hours later, Brodovitz went to the York Minster Music Hall in Philpot Street accompanied by brothers Israel and Hyman Coleman, and in the foyer they were spotted by Oreman, who had been at a performance there with fellow Bessarabians Max Moses and Barnett Brozishewski. The three men approached Brodovitz and his two companions and attacked them. The fight spilled out into the street and grew in size as more men joined in; apparently, a gang of Bessarabians had been trawling the Commercial Road looking for Odessians for much of the evening and word of the fight must have spread quickly. Before long, up to 200 individuals were involved in a rapidly escalating fracas. Oreman and Moses were armed with knives and bottles were being thrown, but there was little the sole policeman at the scene, PC Arthur Pryor, could do to disperse the violent mob. In the tumult, Moses stabbed Brodovitz, and the injured man fled to the nearby White Hart public house in Turner Street, where he died of his wounds soon after.

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