Liking Boardwalk Empire a lot. One thing you really do see is that interestingly (and this is borne out by re-studying Herbert Asbury's The Gangs of New York), the era in which you could get entire collects of Jewish "gangsters" was an earlier one; what we're seeing in 1920 is more "mob" action--smaller and meaner, little knots of Italians built around family or familial relationships, with rotating groups of young Irish and young Jews clinging to the sides.
Granted the "big guy" in New York who we see is Arnold Rothstein, but A) he's coming out of a gambling/book-keeping background which has him acting as unofficial consigliere and matchmaker for other mob leaders and B)he's still not working with only other Jews, since his right-hand guy is "Lucky" Luciano. And the older, more established mobs are all Irish, because by the 1910s/20s, the Irish have moved up to being the backbone of city infrastructure, doing all the jobs nobody else wanted and thus getting to run the graft machine: They're labour, they're firefighters, they're managing supply and demand, they're (like Steve Buscemi's "Nucky" Thompson) City Treasurers, with brothers who run the police force and Senators making back-room deals with them.
One way or the other, it's a young man's profession, so I was right: No generational Jewish family-based mobs, not least because the first thing that seems to happen when good Jews go bad is that their fathers disown them. Asbury says, of "Little Augie" (one of the last "true gangsters" in Ne York, supposedly), that he was buried with a tombstone which said he was 25 even though he was 34, because "it had been nine years earlier that he had taken control of the gang, and on that same day, his father had declared him dead."
no subject
Granted the "big guy" in New York who we see is Arnold Rothstein, but A) he's coming out of a gambling/book-keeping background which has him acting as unofficial consigliere and matchmaker for other mob leaders and B)he's still not working with only other Jews, since his right-hand guy is "Lucky" Luciano. And the older, more established mobs are all Irish, because by the 1910s/20s, the Irish have moved up to being the backbone of city infrastructure, doing all the jobs nobody else wanted and thus getting to run the graft machine: They're labour, they're firefighters, they're managing supply and demand, they're (like Steve Buscemi's "Nucky" Thompson) City Treasurers, with brothers who run the police force and Senators making back-room deals with them.
One way or the other, it's a young man's profession, so I was right: No generational Jewish family-based mobs, not least because the first thing that seems to happen when good Jews go bad is that their fathers disown them. Asbury says, of "Little Augie" (one of the last "true gangsters" in Ne York, supposedly), that he was buried with a tombstone which said he was 25 even though he was 34, because "it had been nine years earlier that he had taken control of the gang, and on that same day, his father had declared him dead."