The Real ‘Noodles’ Was the Most Dangerous Gangster Behind ‘Once Upon A Time in America’ Movie

 

 

 

October 1st, 1980, Manhattan, New York. A man named Hershel Goldberg dies quietly in a small apartment, 78 years old. His name barely known outside his own family and a director in Rome who’d been hunting his story for years. No headlines, no funeral procession, no flowers from old crews, just a body in the city and a manuscript he’d written in a prison cell at Sing Singh 30 years earlier.

 That manuscript was called The Hoods. And before he was buried, that book had already done what Goldberg himself never could. It had crossed an ocean, landed in the hands of an Italian filmmaker, and convinced him to spend 13 years of his life making one movie. One movie about Jewish kids from the Lower East Side who grew up to steal, drink, kill, and disappear.

 This wasn’t a novelist’s dream. This wasn’t fiction dressed up as memory. Goldberg had lived it. Born in Kiev in 1901, brought to New York at four years old by his parents Israel and Celia. He grew up in the tenement south of Houston Street when the Lower East Side was the most densely populated patch of Earth on the planet.

He dropped out of school young. He picked pockets. He ran with crews. He went to prison. And somewhere in the middle of his bid at Sing Singh, he sat down with a pencil and started writing the only kind of book he’d ever be remembered for. He called himself Harry Gray. He hid behind that name for the rest of his life.

 This is the story of how a forgotten Jewish gangster turned his crimes into a novel. How that novel became Sergio Leone’s White Whale. and how the real world behind Once Upon a Time in America was not a dream sequence in an opium den. It was a grid of streets between the East River and the Bowery where boys with names like Lepka, Waxy, Monk, Bugsy, and Meyer learned that the fastest way out of poverty was a pistol, a barrel of beer, and a willingness to do what nobody else would do.

 But here’s what the movie doesn’t tell you. The real Lower East Side mob wasn’t a small crew of five friends robbing speak easys. It was the laboratory where modern American organized crime was actually invented. Before Lucky Luchano, before the five families, before the commission, it was the Jewish kids from these tenementss who figured out how to turn liquor into an industry.

 And the man who wrote the book that became the movie watched it happen from the inside. You have to understand the world. Hershel Goldberg was born into the Lower East Side in 1905 was not poor. It was something past poor. Five and sixtory tenementss with no plumbing on the upper floors. Sweat shops on every block stitching shirt wastess for 14 hours a day.

 200,000 people per square mile in some sections. The densest human population ever recorded on American soil. Russian Jews, Polish Jews, Romanian Jews, Italians starting to spill in from the south, Irish hanging on at the edges. The streets smelled of horses, fish, and burning coal. The boys played craps in alleys, fought with bricks over corners, and learned three languages before they learned to read.

 Goldberg’s gang, the one he wrote about, the one that became Noodles and Max and Paty and Cockey on screen, was a composite. Some of it was him. Some of it was the kids he ran with. And a lot of it was borrowed from the real crews working those same blocks at the same time. Because in 1917, when Goldberg was 16 years old, the Lower East Side had already produced a generation of professional criminals who were about to inherit the richest illegal market in human history.

 Take Monk Eastman. The name on the most repeated version of his story is Edward Austerman. Born around 1875 in Brooklyn. By that account, the son of a Jewish restaurant owner who probably never imagined his boy would become the most violent street boss in New York. By the early 1900s, Monk Eastman commanded an army of 1,200 street criminals operating out of the Bowery and the blocks east of it.

 He had a flat skull, cauliflower ears, a neck like a fire hydrant. He carried brass knuckles in both pockets and a blackjack down his sleeve. His gang fought a pitched gun battle against Paul Kelly’s five-pointers under the elevated railway arch on Rivington Street near Allen Street that ended with three dead and seven wounded. The cops broke it up.

 Eastman went to sing Singh in 1904. When he came out, the streets had moved on without him. But Monk Eastman mattered for one reason. He proved that a kid from the slums could run a Jewish crew that rivaled anything the Italians or Irish had put together. Every boy on the Lower East Side knew his name. Goldberg knew it. The kids who’d become Bugsy Seagull and Meer Lansky knew it.

 Lepki Bukalter, born in 1897 on the Lower East Side, grew up hearing those stories. They were the bedtime fables of the ghetto. By the time Goldberg was a teenager, a new face had taken over. Waxy Gordon, born Irving Wexler in 1888, also on the Lower East Side, also a son of Polish Jewish immigrants. Waxi got his nickname because he picked pockets so smoothly his fingers slid in and out of marks like they were greased with wax.

 By the time he was 20, he’d done a stretch in sing for picking pockets. By 30, he was a labor slugger, an extortionist, and a coming man. And when January 17th, 1920 arrived, and the Volstead Act made alcohol illegal in the United States, Waxy Gordon was already perfectly positioned to do what came next. This is the part the movie hints at, but never explains.

 Here’s how prohibition actually worked on the Lower East Side, broken down the way the men running it would have explained it to you over coffee at a corner cafeteria. The opportunity, the federal government banned the sale and manufacture of alcohol, but it didn’t ban demand. 60 million Americans still wanted a drink. New York City alone had an estimated 32,000 speak easys operating at the peak of prohibition.

 Double the number of legal saloons before the ban. The market wasn’t going away. It was going underground. And underground meant whoever controlled supply controlled everything. The inside connection. Waxy Gordon partnered with a Detroit man named Big Maxi Greenberg who had the contacts to bring scotch in by ship from the Canadian border and from Rumrunner fleets parked three miles off the Long Island coast in international waters.

Gordon raised the capital. The legend never fully proven but widely repeated is that Gordon convinced Arnold Rothstein, the gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series to bankroll the operation with 75,000 in startup money. The execution. Trucks left the docks at Sheep’s Head Bay and Brighton Beach, loaded with crates of Canadian whiskey.

 They moved at night in convoys of three or four with cars in front and behind as scouts. The booze went to warehouses on the Lower East Side and in Hoboken. From there, it was cut. A barrel of real scotch could be stretched into three barrels by mixing it with grain alcohol, caramel coloring, and water. That tripled the inventory.

Then it went out to the speak easys. The money. A bottle of real scotch cost about $4 to import. Cut and resold. It brought $18 on the street. The speak easy charged a dollar a glass. There were 20 glasses in a bottle. That bottle generated $20 at retail off $4 of cost. Multiply that across hundreds of trucks and thousands of speak easys and you can see why Waxy Gordon was by 1925 pulling down an estimated $2 million a year in 1925.

That’s roughly $ 35 million in today’s money annually from one man’s operation. The problem, two problems actually. The first was that everybody wanted in. Italian crews under Joe Maseria and Salvator Marenzano. Irish crews in Hell’s Kitchen under Madden. The Bugs and Meer mob, the Reos, the Diamonds. Every block in Manhattan was contested ground.

 The second problem was the federal government. There was a young attorney named Thomas Dwey who by 1933 would put Waxy Gordon on trial for tax evasion. Dwey proved Gordon had declared roughly $8,000 in income for a year in which he had actually pulled in well over a million. The jury took 51 minutes to convict. Gordon got 10 years.

 That’s how prohibition really worked on the Lower East Side. And that’s the world Hershel Goldberg lived through. He saw the rise of Waxy Gordon. He saw the apartment buildings on Rivington Street where the cutting houses operated. He saw the trucks rolling at 3:00 in the morning. He watched neighborhood kids who’d been delivering ice in 1919, owning suits and packards by 1924.

And he started writing it down. But the boys who took it further than anyone, the ones who actually built the architecture of modern organized crime came up out of the same tenementss. Two of them above all. Their names were Benjamin Seagelbomb and Meer Suchilansky. The world would come to know them as Bugsy Seagull and Meer Lansky. Lansky was the brain.

 He’d been born in Grudnau, Russia in 1902. Brought to the Lower East Side as a boy, and by the time he was a teenager, he was running floating crap games on Madison Street. He was small, skinny, bookish. He could do compound interest in his head. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t waste a word. Seagull was the opposite.

 Born in Brooklyn in 1906, raised partly on the Lower East Side, he was tall, beautiful, and homicidally violent. He once chased a kid down Delansancy Street with a fire iron because the kid had insulted his sister. The two met as teenagers on the corner of Hester and Foresight. They never really separated again. They built what came to be called the Bugs and Meer mob.

It operated out of a garage on Canon Street where they kept stolen cars, guns, and a crew of about a dozen young men ready to be hired out for contract work. They did protection. They did hijackings. They did murders for hire. And they did them with a discipline nobody had seen before. While other gangs were still fighting over corners with knives and bricks, Lensky was studying ledgers.

 He understood before almost anyone else that the future of crime wasn’t muscle. It was logistics, distribution, volume. Spread the risk across multiple markets and reinvest the profits into legitimate fronts. By 1927, the Bugs and Meer crew were running booze convoys from Long Island into Manhattan. They had alliances with the Italians, specifically with a young Sicilian named Salvatoreé Lucania, who would soon rename himself Charles Luchiano.

 The four of them, Lansky Seagull Luchiano, and a man named Frank Costello, would within a few years build the framework for what became the National Crime Syndicate, the Commission, the Five Families, the whole machinery of 20th century American organized crime. And the seat of it was a garage on Canon Street and a friendship between two Jewish kids who’d grown up six blocks apart.

 This is what Sergio Leone fell in love with. Not the gunfights, not the speak easys, the friendship, the four young hoods walking home through the snow on Hester Street, the loyalty that bound them as boys, and the betrayal that destroyed them as men. When Leone read Harry Gay’s novel in the late 1960s, he didn’t see a gangster story. He saw a memory poem.

 He saw childhood. He saw the architecture of regret. He spent the next 13 years chasing the film rights, raising the money, casting, recasting, fighting with studios, and finally getting Robert Dairo and James Woods into the suits. He tracked Goldberg down and met him in person. By most accounts, including those Leone himself gave to Italian journalists, Goldberg was a small old man living quietly, a paranoid recluse who showed up to meetings looking over his shoulder.

 Leone said he never quite knew how much of the hoods was real and how much Goldberg had borrowed from the streets around him. He decided it didn’t matter. The atmosphere was real. The grief was real. Here’s the part that most documentaries leave out. While Lansky and Seagull were building syndicates, another Lower East Side kid was building something far darker.

 His name was Louis Bukalter. They called him Lepka, a Yiddish dimminionive for Lewis his mother had used when he was small. He was born February 6th, 1897, the seventh of 11 children in a hardware store family on the Lower East Side. By the time he was 18, his father was dead. His mother had moved to Colorado for her health and Lepki was on his own.

 Lepki went into the rackets through the labor unions. The garment industry centered just north of the Lower East Side in the blocks around 7th Avenue and 38th Street was the largest manufacturing sector in New York. Thousands of small shops, cutters, pressers, truckers. Lepka and his partner Jacob Shapiro known as Gura because nobody could understand him through his Yiddish accent except when he said the words get out of here which came out as gura dahir took over the unions one local at a time.

 They beat strike breakers. They threatened owners. They demanded a piece of every dress sold in New York. By the mid1 1930s, Lepki was pulling in an estimated 5 to10 million a year just from the garment district. But Lepki’s real contribution to American crime was an idea. He helped formalize what came to be called Murder Incorporated. Murder, Inc.

 was the enforcement arm of the National Crime Syndicate. A standing crew of contract killers headquartered in the back of a candy store at the corner of Saratoga and Leavonia Avenues in Brownsville, Brooklyn that took assignments from bosses across the country. The crew was about a dozen men. Their names included Abe Relis, Harry Strauss, known as Pittsburgh Phil, and a Jewish gunman named Mendy Weiss.

 They were estimated by the prosecutors who finally took them down to have committed between 400 and a thousand murders between 1930 and 1941. Almost all of them were never charged because the killers had no personal connection to the victims. The contracts came down from anonymous bosses. The bodies were left in stolen cars in vacant lots in Queens.

 Lepki was by 1937 the most powerful and most hunted criminal in the United States. Jay Edgar Hoover’s FBI made him the target of the biggest manhunt the country had seen. He went on the run for two years, hiding in Brooklyn apartments and the back rooms of bakeries. On August 24th, 1939, he surrendered to the columnist Walter Winchell on a dark street near Madison Square Park.

 He thought he’d be facing labor raketeering charges. Instead, after a witness named Abe Relis flipped and started talking about murder, Lepki was charged with the 1936 murder of a candy store owner named Joseph Rosen. He was convicted and sentenced to death. On March 4th, 1944 at Singh Prison, Lewis Lepka Buchalar became the only major organized crime boss in American history to die in the electric chair.

 He was 47 years old. This is the world Hershel Goldberg wrote about, not from a distance, from inside it. The Hoods, published in 1952, is a 590page brick of a book written in the voice of a narrator called Noodles, a Jewish kid from Delansancy Street who grows up running booze, robbing diamond merchants, and watching his friends die one by one.

 Some of the characters are clearly drawn from real men. Some are composits. The book is full of casual anti-semitism, casual misogyny, casual violence. It is not a literary masterpiece. It is something rarer. It is a memoir written by a man who was actually there. Goldberg himself stayed in the shadows for the rest of his life. By most accounts, he served prison time and wrote much of the book while incarcerated at Sing Singh.

 He took the pen name Harry Gray to protect his family. It was his brother Hyman Goldberg who carried the familiar by line at the New York Post, a syndicated food columnist who wrote as Prudence Penny. Hershel never wanted the spotlight. Leone tracked him down and met him in a New York coffee shop where Goldberg refused to use his real name and asked Leone to leave separately so they wouldn’t be seen together on the street.

 Goldberg told Leone the men he’d written about were still out there, some of them still dangerous, still listening. Leone took 13 years to finish the film. He turned down The Godfather to do it. He cast Dairo as Noodles, James Woods as Max, Elizabeth McGovern as Deborah, and a young Jennifer Connelly as the child Deborah dancing in the back room of her father’s deli.

 He shot in Brooklyn, in Montreal, in Venice, and in Rome. He spent $30 million in 1984 money. The American distributors cut his nearly 4-hour film down to 2 hours and 19 minutes and rearranged it into chronological order. The reviews were savage. Leone refused to recut it to their satisfaction and watched the American release fail.

 He went home to Italy and never made another film. He was developing a movie about the siege of Lennengrad when he died of a heart attack on April 30th, 1989. He was 60 years old. What’s left of the world, Goldberg wrote about the tenementss still stand. The fire escapes still climb the brick faces on Orchard Street and Rivington and Delansancy.

 The cafeterias are gone. The garment shops are gone. The speak easys were boarded up by 1934, the year after prohibition ended. Waxy Gordon died in Alcatraz of a heart attack on June 24th, 1952, about 6 months into a 25-year sentence for narcotics. Bugsy Seagull was shot to death in Beverly Hills on June 20th, 1947, sitting on a sofa reading the Los Angeles Times.

 Meer Lansky died of lung cancer in Miami Beach on January 15th, 1983. Owning, by his own quiet admission, an empire estimated by the FBI at $300 million, but officially worth almost nothing on paper. He died, the saying goes, with $37,000 in his bank account and the secrets of half the 20th century in his head.

 and Goldberg, the man who’d watched all of it, who’d run with the small crews on the bottom of that pyramid, who’d done his time and come home and sat in a prison cell with a pencil. He went to his grave on October 1st, 1980, almost completely unknown. He never saw the film. When he died, Leone hadn’t even started shooting it. That’s the real story behind Once Upon a Time in America.

 It is not the story of five friends in an opium den. It is the story of a generation of immigrant kids who got off boats at Ellis Island and walked into the worst slum in the Western Hemisphere and learned that the only letter out was painted in blood. Some of them built syndicates. Some of them died in the chair.

 One of them lived to be 78 and wrote it all down. The movie is a dream about that life. The life itself was not a dream. It was Henry Street at 3:00 in the morning. A kid named Lepki watching a man named Monk Eastman walk past the candy store window and a future being decided in the silence between them. The mafia we know today, the families, the commission, the rules, the rituals.

 All of it was assembled by men whose first criminal lessons were learned in Yiddish on streets where they spelled the word gangster with a K. The Italians inherited the empire. But the blueprint was drawn on the Lower East Side. And the man who put it into a book, the man Leon chased across 13 years and an ocean, was just another kid from those streets who happened to survive long enough to remember.

 If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment. Which forgotten Jewish gangster from the old Lower East Side should we cover next? Waxy Gordon, Lepki Buhalter, or the man who never told anyone his real name, Hershel Goldberg.