The Incorruptibles
A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld
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Praise for The Incorruptibles
“Required Reading.” — New York Post
“A singularly worthy read.” — BookPage
“Beyond compelling.” — Booklist
“Unrivaled…Pitting colorful mobsters against earnest reformers in a battle of wits and gunfire, Slater’s diverting narrative of New York City’s Jewish gangland in the early 1900s doubles as a slyly sophisticated primer on an overlooked chapter of American crime history.” — New York Times
“A deeply researched and fluidly written…corrective to the conventional picture of what life was like on those mean streets.” — Wall Street Journal
“Thanks to a treasure trove of previously little-plumbed archival material and a fabulous sense of narrative, Slater brings the reader fully into the New York City of the 1910s, when big cons and horse poisoning were about to give way to bootlegging and World Series ‘fixing’….Slater’s act of historical reanimation is both urgent and entertaining, one that uncovers, but does not moralize about, a shadowy world of avarice and naked ambition that still made room for the possibility of hope. It’s a harbinger of how America would transform over the next century and beyond.” —AirMail
“A true story that reads like a sweeping historical novel filled with dynamic personalities and surprising details.” — BookBub
“A nonfiction history of New York City crime that reads like a compelling mystery novel.” — Denver Post
“While discussing a serious topic, The Incorruptibles was also great fun to read. This is popular history at its best.” — The Reporter
“Mr. Slater’s book is profusely illustrated…It’s a rare trove and illustrates the book perfectly.”—The Jewish Standard
“Slater’s narrative, full of twists and turns…yields not just a gripping crime story—though it certainly is that—but also a richly detailed, informal social history of New York between the Gilded Age and the Jazz Age that, apart from its scholarly rigor, is also highly readable.”—Kirkus
“If you want to visit the New York Lower East Side of our great-grandparents, the tenement world of sweatshops, hop joints, and Jewish gangsters, you can build a time machine or read this wonderful book. In prose nearly hallucinatory in its clarity, Slater dramatizes the uptown-downtown battle that created our modern world.” — Rich Cohen, author of Tough Jews
The harrowing, true-life tale of an immigrant underworld, a secret vice squad, and the rise of organized crime.
In the early 1900s, prior to World War I, New York City was a vortex of vice and corruption. On the Lower East Side, then the most crowded ghetto on earth, Eastern European Jews formed a dense web of crime syndicates. Gangs of horse poisoners and casino owners, pimps and prostitutes, thieves and thugs, jockeyed for dominance while their family members and neighbors toiled in the unregulated garment industry.
But when the notorious murder of a gambler attracted global attention, a coterie of affluent German-Jewish uptowners decided to take matters into their own hands. Worried about the anti-immigration lobby and the uncertain future of Jewish Americans, the uptowners marshalled a strictly off-the-books vice squad led by an ambitious young reformer.
The squad, known as the Incorruptibles, took the fight to the heart of crime in the city, waging war on the sin they saw as threatening the future of their community. Their efforts, however, led to unforeseen consequences in the form of a new mobster class who realized, in the country’s burgeoning reform efforts, unprecedented opportunities to amass power.
In this mesmerizing and atmospheric account, drawn from never-before-seen sources and peopled with unforgettable characters, Dan Slater tells an epic and often brutal saga of crime and redemption, exhuming a buried history that shaped our modern world.
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