The Incorruptibles

Like a Jewish Gangs of New York or a precursor to Eliot Ness’s classic The Untouchables, The Incorruptibles tells the incredible true story of one of early twentieth century New York City’s most powerful crime bosses and the Lower East Side crusader who leads a secret vice squad to take him down. Throughout the second decade of the twentieth century, the greatest city in the world was a maelstrom of corruption, violence, and a densely woven web of organized crime. In downtown New York City, gangs of Eastern European Jews and other immigrants jockeyed for power, giving rise to the most powerful crime syndicates in the United States—syndicates that kept a stranglehold on commerce south of 42nd Street. But when the violence rose to a peak in the year 1912 with the murder of gambler and state's witness Herman Rosenthal in the middle of Times Square, a coterie of influential uptowners of German Jewish descent decided to take the future of New York into their own hands. Summoning the vast wealth and power they had accrued in the industrial revolution, the uptowners marshalled a strictly off-the-books vice squad led by an ambitious twenty-one-year-old reformer named Abe Shoenfeld to take the fight to the heart of crime in the city. Over the next decade, Shoenfeld’s squad waged war on the sin they saw as threatening the future of their community, in the process taking down corrupt Tammany Hall officials, smuggling kingpins, pimps and madams, and the violent gangsters whose misdeeds dominated the years leading up to Prohibition. In this riveting account, Dan Slater tells the breathtaking true-crime story of the twentieth century's fiercest battle for the soul of New York City.