Jewish-American organized crime (sometimes called the Jewish Mob, Jewish Mafia, Kosher Mafia, or the Kosher Nostra—a play on words of Cosa Nostra), emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the late 19th century in New York City, Monk Eastman operated a powerful Jewish gang that competed with Italian and Irish gangs, notably Paul Kelly's Five Points Gang, for control of New York's underworld.
In the early 1920s, stimulated by the economic opportunities of the Roaring Twenties and later, Prohibition, organized crime figures such as Arnold Rothstein were controlling a wide range of criminal enterprises. According to crime writer Leo Katcher, Rothstein "transformed organized crime from a thuggish activity by hoodlums into a big business, run like a corporation, with himself at the top." Rothstein was allegedly responsible for fixing the 1919 World Series.
Read more about Jewish-American Organized Crime: Origins and Characteristics, Jewish-American Organized Crime and Israel
Famous quotes containing the words organized and/or crime:
“The Red Cross in its nature, it aims and purposes, and consequently, its methods, is unlike any other organization in the country. It is an organization of physical action, of instantaneous action, at the spur of the moment; it cannot await the ordinary deliberation of organized bodies if it would be of use to suffering humanity, ... [ellipsis in original] it has by its nature a field of its own.”
—Clara Barton (1821–1912)
“Has anyone ever told you that you overplay your various roles rather severely, Mr. Kaplan? First you’re the outraged Madison Avenue man who claims he’s been mistaken for someone else. Then you play the fugitive from justice, supposedly trying to clear his name of a crime he knows he didn’t commit. And now you play the peevish lover stung by jealously and betrayal. It seems to me you fellows could stand a little less training from the FBI and a little more from the Actors Studio.”
—Ernest Lehman (b.1920)