The Essex Market Court Gang

Immigrant Jews of the shadier type organized an association called The *Max Hochstim Association*, which was known during the Lexow Investigation as *The Essex Market Court Gang.* One of its chief rulers was Martin Engel, Tammany leader of the Eighth Assembly District. The "king" of this Jewish district was a man named Solomon who had changed his name to the less revealing one of "Smith," and who became known as "Silver Dollar Smith" because of the fact that he ruled his little empire from the Silver Dollar Saloon, which gained its name from the silver dollars that were cemented into the floor of his place of business. This saloon was just opposite the *Essex Market Court*, which was thronged daily by hordes of Yiddish criminals, the bondsmen, false witnesses and lawyers.

Let not the fastidious reader deem it unnecessary to linger longer round the old police court at Essex Market, for out therefrom came a word which has fixed itself in common English speech—the term "shyster," by which a certain type of lawyer is described. A Clinton street lawyer named Scheuster, whose practices were quite characteristic, made himself very obnoxious to Justice Osborne. Whenever another Yiddish lawyer attempted a shady trick, the judge would openly denounce it as "Scheuster practice," and so it came that the first men in the profession to bear the name "shyster" were the Yiddish lawyers of Essex Market Court.

To make a nasty story brief, the *Max Hochstim Association* became the first organized White Slaver group in America, and the revelations made by the Lexow Committee are shuddering glimpses into that lowest form of depravity—a cooly conducted, commercialized, consolidated traffic in women. The traffic was made to yield dividends to politicians, to Tammany Jews in particular. The Ghetto became the Red Light District of New York. The first man to undertake the export trade in women with foreign countries, especially South America, was a man who later became a Tammany notable.

The surprising fact is that, although these matters are written in official documents, and although the same matters have been written into the record of every similar investigation which has been made, Jewish leaders persist in denying that the leaders in this particular form of depravity are Jews. When the United States Government made a nation-wide investigation, it found and recorded the same facts. The New York Kehillah came into existence as a defense organization at a time when the exposure of the Jewish White Slave traffic threatened to overwhelm the New York ghetto.

The *Max Hochstim Association* was not the only organization of its kind. The other was the *New York Independent Benevolent Association*, which was organized in 1896 by a party of Jewish white slave dealers as they were returning from the funeral of Sam Engel, brother of Martin Engel, Tammany leader of the red light district.

The gangs that formed the backbone of Tammany power in the slum districts were made up of "cadets." Their principal field of operation was the cheap dance halls. Paul Kelly's gang originated in the halls about lower Broadway. Monk Eastman's gang grew strong in the Russian Jewish District below Delancey street. And Kid Twist's gang developed close to a dance hall for Galician Jews on the far East Side. All of these three were Jewish gang leaders. They were slavers as their forbears were in the days of Rome's decline; they were bootleggers before the days of prohibition; and they constituted a strong support of the international narcotic ring which to this day has defied the law by corrupting the officers of the law.