The Eastman Gang was the last of New York's street gangs which dominated the city's underworld during the late 1890s until early 1910s. Along with the Five Points Gang under Paul Kelly, the Eastmans succeeded the long dominant Whyos as the first non-Irish street gang to gain prominence in the underworld during the 1890s, and marked the beginning of a thirty to forty-year period of Jewish-American influence within organized crime in New York City.
Under the leadership of Monk Eastman, a well known bouncer and hired thug, the Eastmans would spend the next decade establishing a criminal empire in Manhattan's Lower East Side through criminal activities, including prostitution and illegal gambling, specifically operating stuss games, as well as later establishing political connections through Tammany Hall.
Read more about Eastman Gang: Early Years, Reign of Kid Twist, Zelig and The Final Years
Famous quotes containing the words eastman and/or gang:
“With a generous endowment of motherhood provided by legislation, with all laws against voluntary motherhood and education in its methods repealed, with the feminist ideal of education accepted in home and school, and with all special barriers removed in every field of human activity, there is no reason why woman should not become almost a human thing. It will be time enough then to consider whether she has a soul.”
—Crystal Eastman (1881–1928)
“We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies and peddlars.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)