Who would think a nice boy from Glencoe, who graduated from New Trier High School, would be fascinated by mobsters? But stories of the underworld, told by his Brooklyn-born father, are just what captured Rich Cohen’s imagination. Out of those stories came “Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams” (Vintage, $13), Cohen’s romantic glimpse into the world of the Jewish wiseguys. On a recent visit to Chicago, Cohen, a regular contributor to Rolling Stone magazine, spoke with Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor:
Q–Your father was an important influence on this book.
A–Yeah, they are really my father’s stories . . . the real stories behind my father’s stories. (I wanted to find out) why my father, who I say is a man who has never broken a law he didn’t consider really stupid, would be so interested in these Jewish gangsters who died in the electric chair when he was a little kid, and in some screwed up way kind of admired them.
One of my father’s best friends growing up, and still, is Larry King, whose real name is Larry Zeiger, whose nickname was “the Mouthpiece” when he was a kid because he wouldn’t shut up.
You might remember that Larry used to have this all-night radio show, on Mutual. Here, it was on from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. And my dad used to go on the show a lot, and I would stay up and listen. And Larry would often, late at night, tell these stories about his youth in Brooklyn (in which) my dad figures prominently as a bit of a delinquent. And the stories just seemed so interesting to me and so far removed from Glencoe and from New Trier and everything. They seemed really romantic. So finding out about the gangsters was a way for me to be able to write about the Brooklyn of my father’s childhood.
Q–You depict a very different Brooklyn than Doris Kearns Goodwin did in her Brooklyn memoir, “Wait Till Next Year.”
A–Right. My Brooklyn is through my father’s stories. The stories that he told me are still the best stories I know, and he is still the funniest person I know. I am a lot younger than Doris Kearns Goodwin. And it’s looking back on the neighborhoods of our fathers and it’s sort of like a lost world.
Q–How did your family get from Brooklyn to Glencoe?
A–Well, my dad married my mom. He was just out of the Army, and he got a job working at All-State Insurance. And they just started transferring him. It’s like one of those movies where the dotted line goes all over the map. And eventually they transferred him to this All-State building out on the Edens Expressway.
He was the only Jewish employee at that office at that time. And he used to announce his arrival by saying, “Company Jew passing through!” And we lived in Libertyville and we were the only Jewish family in Libertyville at that time. One year my mom came to my sister and said, “Good news, there’ll be another Jewish kid in school next year.” And my sister said, “Who?” And my mom said, “Your brother Stephen.”
One reason we moved to Glencoe was we could go to religious school and we could go to temple and get bar mitzvahed. Then my dad went out on his own and became a speaker. And then, when I was in 8th or 9th grade he wrote this book, “You Can Negotiate Anything,” which to me was like a distillation of all the lessons you could get from his Brooklyn stories. So I always thought he kind of has a philosophy of life that the book is about, which is never trust authority, kind of.
Q–His storytelling led you to become a storyteller?
A–Yeah. I don’t know if it’s just growing up around him or if it’s like you inherit it–the problem of always wanting to be the one talking and be the center of attention. I am the youngest child. My brother is the same way. My sister sits back and laughs at us. I think that to be in my house, to be heard, you had to wrap up whatever you were going to say in the form of some sort of story with a punch line.
Q–How were Jewish gangsters different from other gangsters?
A–One big difference with Jewish gangsters is that they did not pass it on to their children. You never got anything like John Gotti Jr. in the Jewish underworld, because they basically wanted for their kids what my parents wanted for me. They wanted their kids to go to medical school, law school, all that stuff. For them crime was a shortcut to the American Dream.
The Jewish gangsters moved to Central Park West, to big buildings with co-op boards. And they disguised themselves as businessmen. They never wanted to be, really, gangsters. They wanted to be successful Americans. And the only way they saw they could earn that fortune was in a crooked way, a criminal way. So that was what interested me.
Q–Were there any other books that you looked to as models?
A–Well, for me the biggest model, honestly, was the way my father tells stories. It begins with my father and friends talking about gangsters and it ends with them talking about gangsters. So, in my head, I always imagine that the whole book is their conversation acted out.
Q–Other than oral history, what kind of research did you do?
A–There is this municipal archive in lower Manhattan, which is where all these cases against these guys, where all the evidence was put. And there were incredible transcripts and wiretaps, you could actually hear what they sound like. And even physical evidence. There’s a gangster I wrote about named Plug Shulman, who was killed by Murder Inc., and I actually held the bullets that killed Plug Shulman. They were in an envelope as evidence. It came from an autopsy. They were to be matched up with the murder weapon.
Q–How long did it take to write the book?
A–A couple years. But I feel like I have been hearing the stories since I was 6 or 7 years old.
Q–Who was your favorite Jewish gangster in Chicago?
A–Nails Morton. Do you know about Nails Morton? He was said to have made the West Side of Chicago safe for the Jews. When he wanted to start a fight with another gangster, he would claim that he had heard them say something anti-Semitic. He was in the gang that was fighting Al Capone. In Chicago there were Jewish gangsters in both gangs, whereas in New York it was really the Jewish gangsters in one gang. But in Chicago it was actually a much more ethnically diverse underworld.
The story about Nails Morton is he sort of wanted to become an aristocrat. After surviving all these gang wars, he started riding horses in Lincoln Park. He was bucked off a horse and kicked in the head, and that’s how he died. And the guys in his gang went and took the horse out of the stable, brought it back to the spot, and shot the horse. He’s probably the only gangster to die that way.
