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 and/or life:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“The true poem is not that which the public read. There is always a poem not printed on paper,... in the poet’s life. It is what he has become through his work. Not how is the idea expressed in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist. His true work will not stand in any prince’s gallery.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)