11 minute read
COVER STORY: OF VICE AND MEN
In his latest book, The Incorruptibles, author Dan Slater '96 explores how Jewish immigrants ran, ruled and even tried to reform New York's turn-of-the-century underworld.
OF VICE AND MEN
By Joel Hoekstra
Illustrated by Owen Davey—Folio Art
It’s a chilly morning in December, and Dan Slater is visiting the Tenement Museum in New York. The museum is located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which a century ago was the most crowded neighborhood in the world, largely comprised of Jewish immigrants who had fled persecution in Eastern Europe. Poor, uneducated and often unable to speak much English, most new arrivals found lodging in cramped tenements where up to a dozen people might sleep in the same tiny apartment, dreaming of brighter days ahead in America.
A museum docent leads Slater and others down a dark hall and up a rickety staircase to a second-story apartment with few windows and no plumbing. The space, with rough-hewn floors and cockeyed door frames, is furnished like a typical tenement of the early 20th century. Laundry dangles from a line over a castiron stove. A bassinet is wedged between a table lined with crocks and an ironing board piled high with fabric swatches. Many Jewish immigrants, the guide explains, spent long days stitching collars, cuffs and other pieces onto shirts, dresses and suit jackets—an extension of the city’s garment industry.
As the tour drifts down the hall, Slater lingers for a moment, takes out his phone and snaps a picture of a heavy metal tool. “A cutting shears,” he explains, then adds darkly, “or a weapon.”
As the author of a recently published book set on the Lower East Side, Slater sees the neighborhood through a unique if grisly lens. The Incorruptibles, released by Little, Brown and Company last summer, references the tenements, the garment industry, the religious views and immigrant cultures that shaped the area in the early 20th century, but the book’s primary focus is the Jewish underworld of the same era—a place where stabbing a stranger with scissors wasn’t unthinkable.
A work of nonfiction, The Incorruptibles is built from facts but written to evoke the drama of fiction. The narrative chron- icles the rise of two young men as they navigate the world of gamblers, thieves, prostitutes, gangsters, horse poisoners and racketeers. Slater spent seven years working on the book, often uncovering secrets locked away in archives for decades. His research unearthed surprising connections, unpublished writings and covert communications. But one of the biggest twists in the tale was unexpectedly personal.
“It took me a minute to connect the dots,” he recalls. “But when I did, it was amazing.”
WRITING 9 TO 5
Slater, along with his wife and their two young boys, lives in the Connecticut countryside, about an hour-and-a-half drive north of New York. Their house, built in 1740, occupies five forested acres, and Slater often spends at least an hour each day outdoors, chopping wood, clearing paths, planting trees or making play structures for his kids. A few years ago, he transformed the attic above the garage into a studio where he writes, reads, paints and practices yoga. “Creativity can take a lot of forms, but I write every day,” he says. “I try to treat writing like a job—working nine to five. It’s just an expectation for myself.”
But Slater didn't always imagine himself as a writer. His parents, both doctors, married in the late 1960s and in 1975 moved to the shores of Lake Minnetonka, where Slater was born. Shortly thereafter, his parents split and spent the next decade deadlocked in an acrimonious divorce. In 1985 a Minnesota family-court judge issued an opinion in the case of Slater v. Slater, describing the family as “extremely dysfunctional.”
"As a kid, it was hard to imagine myself as anything at all,” Slater says. “I didn't really cultivate long-term ambitions because, being from a dysfunctional family, you don't see a bright future. You don't have much on which to build a vision of your adulthood.”
CREATIVITY CAN TAKE A LOT OF FORMS, BUT I WRITE EVERY DAY. I TREAT WRITING LIKE A JOB—WORKING NINE TO FIVE. IT'S JUST AN EXPECTATION FOR MYSELF.
Differences aside, however, his parents did agree on at least one thing: the value of books. “I read the Beverly Cleary books and the Choose Your Own Adventure series,” Slater recalls. “A big book for me was John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which I read at 16. The first nonfiction topic I fell in love with, though, was baseball history. I would read biographies of Mickey Mantle and Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. I loved those stories—and they often took place in New York.”
The Big Apple became a source of fascination. Slater recalls visiting the city for the first time as a second grader, seeing the Statue of Liberty with his maternal grandfather and shopping at FAO Schwarz with an uncle. Movies like Big and Wall Street, Ghostbusters and Working Girl, set against the backdrop of the city, were among his favorites.
In 1996, Slater enrolled at Colgate University in upstate New York. The school’s proximity to New York City made it an attractive choice, but in hindsight, Slater says the true benefit of his time at college sprang from the hours he spent in a class called Living Writers. “It was actually the only English class I took,” he recalls. “We met twice a week. The class would discuss a book on Tuesday, and then on Thursday you’d get to interview the author, agent or editor. It had a profound effect on me.
“I loved to read, and this was a class all about reading. I thought, these are the people I want to be around."
Still, in the end, he majored in international relations and, after brief stints interning at National Geographic, hiking the Appalachian Trail and working as a cook in Idaho, decided to go to law school. It seemed like a safe bet. “I still wasn’t brave enough to say, ‘I’m going to be a writer,’” he says.
Law school led to a wellpaying job at a prestigious firm in Manhattan. But Slater’s curiosity about the writing life lured him into a job at the Wall Street Journal, where he blogged about legal affairs and wrote columns and stories for the paper. He recalls the incredible training he got there, but also the stress. When he was eventually let go in a wave of layoffs, he embarked on a freelance career and grew more comfortable admitting, if only to himself, what he truly wanted to do: write books. After publishing an article about the history of online dating for GQ, he landed a book contract on the same topic. (Oddly enough, Slater’s parents had been matched up by a computer dating service at Harvard University in the 1960s—an anecdote that gave him a personal take on the topic.)
“I enjoyed doing that book,” Slater recalls. “It got a lot of buzz, but the media chatter didn’t really translate into book sales. So I kind of stepped back and said, ‘Ok, if I continue doing this, what do I really want to write about?’”
UNCOVERING THE UNDERWORLD
The lunch menu at Russ & Daughters Cafe is full of traditional Jewish foods: bagels, smoked fish, bialys, pickled herring, matzo balls and noodle kugel—but they’ve been fancied up to attract the well-heeled crowd that now lives and works in the Lower East Side. “How do you feel about chopped liver?” Slater asks.
The cafe is an offshoot of a nearby deli that’s been in operation since 1914. Its location, between Orchard and Allen streets just north of Delancey, was the epicenter of Jewish life in New York before the community moved uptown. Farley Chase, Slater’s agent, has lived on the Lower East Side for a decade but says The Incorruptibles made him see the century-old remnants in his neighborhood. Russ & Daughters is a prime remnant: a century ago, bagel-and-lox joints like it, known as “appetizing stores,” were ubiquitous. “The neighborhood’s legacy is still apparent,” Chase says. “There are fossils of the old life.”
Asya Muchnick, the editor at Little, Brown who worked with Slater on The Incorruptibles, agrees: “I recently walked down Allen Street with a friend and said, ‘Did you know this street used to be wall-to-wall brothels?’”
Fossils and ghosts come alive in The Incorruptibles. The book conjures a world where corruption was rampant and murders were commonplace. Slater focuses on two young men, Arnold Rothstein, a gambler, and Abe Shoenfeld, a reformer, as they respectively fuel and fight the spread of vice throughout the city. “Dan is just a fantastic storyteller,” Muchnick says. “I don’t think most people appreciate how much effort goes into narrative nonfiction. The research and the facts are important, but you have to tell the story in a way that keeps the plot moving.”
The Incorruptibles is Slater’s third book. (Wolf Boys, about a pair of American teens who became assassins for a Mexican drug cartel, was published in 2016.) The idea behind the book has roots in a magazine piece he wrote in 2019 about a modern-day gang of Orthodox rabbis. In search of context, he read up on the history of Jewish crime and returned often to New York City in the early 1900s. References to Rothstein appeared frequently (he was alleged to have fixed the 1919 World Series), but Shoenfeld was referenced only obliquely as “a private detective” and a “knowledgeable vigilante.”
Intrigued, Slater dug deeper and discovered that, at the age of 21, Shoenfeld had been retained by wealthy uptown Jewish reformers to infiltrate and eradicate crime and vice downtown in the poor Lower East Side ghetto. He also discovered Shoenfeld’s papers had recently been donated to the American Jewish Historical Society. “When Dan discovered Abe had an unpublished biography…well, that was the Ark of the Covenant,” Chase says.
Slater learned to expect the unexpected as he mined archives in New York, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., Berkeley and even Jerusalem and Austin, Texas. (When a collection of glass negatives and photos depicting life on the Lower East Side went up for auction in early 2020, he purchased about 600 items, 69 of which were printed in The Incorruptibles.) But he didn’t anticipate that the book’s narrative would intersect with his own family’s history.
Slater’s maternal grandmother had once traced her German-Jewish lineage and self-published a book on the topic. From her account, Slater knew his first American ancestor was Jacob Klee, who emigrated from Germany to Pittsburgh in 1846.
Midway through his research on The Incorruptibles, Slater came across a story about a men’s suit manufacturer in New York who had sparred with the local Jewish labor union regarding hiring practices. When Shoenfeld’s father, who empathized with the manufacturer, learned that union thugs were planning to bomb the company, he asked his son to intervene and arrange for police protection of the factory. But Shoenfeld refused, and days later the company, Klee & Co., went up in flames. The owner was Jacob Klee’s son, Slater’s great-great-grandfather.
MAKING HISTORY PERSONAL
The tour of the Tenement Museum is finished, so Slater stops at the museum shop to see if The Incorruptibles is in stock. He chats up the manager and signs a few copies of the book. National sales of the hardcover have been solid, and Slater has been traveling around the country to promote the book. Among the constituencies that have taken an interest in the tale are bookstores and book clubs, museums and law schools, synagogues and Jewish community centers.
YOU HAVE TO KNOW YOUR HISTORY AND WHERE YOU COME FROM. WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO BE BLIND TO THE PAST?
A few readers have questioned his focus on the Jewish underworld. Given the rise in antisemitic incidents across the U.S. and Europe and the October 7 attack on Israel, why cast light on the seamy side of Jewish history?
“You have to know your history and where you come from,” Slater responds. “Why would anyone want to be blind to the past? If you’re going around saying you’re Jewish yet there are whole swaths of your history you don’t know, then what does that mean?”
Hiding history doesn’t make it go away. And we can learn from it, even if it makes us flinch. To that end, Slater’s next book, a memoir of healing from childhood trauma, won’t center on gangs or cartels, but it will draw on firsthand accounts, court transcripts, archives and interviews—his usual path to uncovering a narrative thread.
“It’s funny,” Slater says. “I’ve spent a long time writing about other people. I do feel like, ‘Hey, maybe it’s time for me to step up.’ If I’m going to be writing about and judging other people, maybe I should put myself out there.”
Joel Hoekstra is a writer and editor based in Minneapolis.
