The Dark Side of the Lower East Side

You know the Jewish history of Manhattan’s Lower East Side: pushcart peddlers, crowded tenements, Yiddish storefront signs. But Tablet has explored another world beneath all that—crooks, mobsters, thugs, and violent criminals.

The Hectic, Violent, and Relatively Short Life of Big Jack Zelig

The Lower East Side gangster would shake down shopkeepers before saving elderly Jews from harassment

byAllan Levine

The Lower East Side Madam

‘Mother’ Rosie Hertz ran a network of brothels in the early 1900s and spent years paying off corrupt cops—until she finally ended up behind bars

byAllan Levine

‘Marm’ Mandelbaum: Queen of the Fences

Overseeing an army of thieves and pickpockets on the Lower East Side in the late 1800s, she was ‘as adept in her business as the best stock-broker in Wall Street’

byAllan Levine

The ‘Firebug Brotherhood’ of the Lower East Side

For Isaac Zuker and other arsonists, defrauding insurance companies was a normal part of doing business in the late 1800s

byAllan Levine

All The Dark Side of the Lower East Side stories

The Brief Reign of ‘Kid Dropper,’ the Lower East Side Gang Leader

At 28, Nathan Kaplan was a legend. Four years later, he was dead.

byAllan Levine

The Ruthless Racketeer

In the annals of crime in New York City no one was feared more than Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter, who ordered the murders of dozens of men

byAllan Levine

A 1933 New York City Police Department photo of Waxey Gordon

The Beer Baron of the Lower East Side

Dubbed ‘one of the Prohibition era’s most sinister underworld figures,’ Waxey Gordon spent decades as a thief, gangster, tax cheat, and bootlegger before dying in prison

byAllan Levine

The Gangster Who Defended the Unions—With a Lead Pipe

‘My heart lay with the workers,’ said ‘Dopey Benny’ Fein, expert organizer and ‘shtarker’ of the Lower East Side

byAllan Levine

A Jew on Death Row

The tragic case of Pesach Rubenstein, sentenced to die in 1876 after a sensational murder trial

byAllan Levine