Early Life
Benjamin Siegelbaum was born in 1906 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to a poor Jewish family from Letychiv, Podolia Governorate of the Russian Empire, in modern Ukraine. His immigrant parents, Max and Jennie, raised five children, including Ben, on meager wages. Siegel allegedly vowed that he would rise above that life. As a boy, Siegel dropped out of school and joined a gang on Lafayette Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and committed mainly thefts, until, with a youth named Moe Sedway, he devised his own protection racket: pushcart merchants were forced to pay him a dollar or he would incinerate their merchandise. Siegel had an extensive record of crime, including armed robbery, rape, and murder dating back to his teenage years.
Read more about this topic: Bugsy Siegel
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“A two-year-old can be taught to curb his aggressions completely if the parents employ strong enough methods, but the achievement of such control at an early age may be bought at a price which few parents today would be willing to pay. The slow education for control demands much more parental time and patience at the beginning, but the child who learns control in this way will be the child who acquires healthy self-discipline later.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder, so much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)