The Kosher Capones: A History of Chicago's Jewish Gangsters by Joe Kraus

Author:Joe Kraus [Kraus, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Criminals & Outlaws, Biography & Autobiography, 20th Century, History, United States, Jewish
ISBN: 9781501747328
Google: xAGPDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell
Published: 2019-10-15T13:54:15+00:00

III

If you look at a map, Maxwell Street is a lot closer to the Loop than it is to Lawndale. Benny Zuckerman, Davey Miller, Julius Anixter, and most of the other gangsters of Lawndale moved from Maxwell Street as part of a demographic shift, leaping, as it were, the three miles in between. Where they turned left—assuming they were facing north—the young Jack Guzik turned right and found his way just south of the Loop to the Levee where the Capone gang was getting started under Jim Colosimo. There were opportunities everywhere if you had patience and a mind for detail, and Guzik had both. The work was dirty, much of it involved prostitution, but it was lucrative and, barring a little grease on the thumb, it provided enough money to give him security. He would wind up working with plenty of Jewish gangsters over the years—he’d even hire a young prizefighter named David Yaras to be his driver/bodyguard sometime in the 1930s or early 1940s34—but he’d make a name for himself as the most consequential Jew in the history of the Italian-dominated Syndicate.

Crime was a family business for Guzik, just as it was for fellow Maxwell Street kids Jules Portugese, Benny Zuckerman, and, a little later, Lenny Patrick. In addition to Harry and Alma, his brothers Sam and Joseph had long careers as Syndicate bookies,35 and his father, Max, was a functionary in the 1st Ward that Hinky Dink Kenna ran.36 In the years before Thompson became mayor, when Carter Harrison made his peace with reformers by cracking down on gambling and vice everywhere but the Levee, there was a kind of proto-Syndicate, a pooling of resources through the jaunty Ike Bloom and onto Kenna.37 Harry Guzik emerged in the forefront of that group—a 1912 report called him one of the “big eight of the levee”38—and Guzik was clearly a collaborator. The Levee had striking community rituals—Kenna would oversee an annual 1st Ward ball that brought the city’s elite next to its grubbiest criminals, and Bloom notoriously marched his prostitutes into the heart of the city to insist that vice had its legitimate place39—and Guzik came of age as part of its everyday business of corruption.

In a widely told story, since it’s chapter one of the Scarface saga, Colosimo moved to the fore as the Levee declined, slowly pulling his peers into the larger organization he controlled.40 When, as the saying went, “his head got too big for his hat,” and he married a would-be society woman and opera singer, someone—Capone/Camonte in the Ben Hecht version, Frankie Yale according to most contemporary historians41—killed him in his own restaurant. That left Torrio to take over, and he used his position as chief of the city’s largest gang at the dawn of Prohibition to pull together the confederation that would emerge as the Syndicate. His top muscle, so the reputation went, was Capone, while his top “greaser” was Guzik. And, as it happened, the two got along famously.

The friendship between Guzik and Capone is the stuff of legend.

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