Max Hochstim

Founder and leader of the Max Hochstim Association, also known as the Essex Market Street Gang

Here’s what I know about Max Hochstim: born in Krakow in 1868, he came to New York as a 10-year-old with his parents and siblings. In 1888, he married Annie Apple, whom he’d stolen away from his supposed friend. For the rest of his life, Annie remained Hochstim’s devoted partner—in crime. The couple had no children. Hochstim started out as a professional gambler when barely a teenager. From there, he progressed to thievery, mostly in the form of kickbacks and extorting protection money from poor Jewish immigrants trying to eke out a living in “his” territory. Going to the police only increased their troubles: the local beat cops were all in Hochstim’s pocket. All this, and he was not yet 30 years old! Some *boychik,* no?

Hochstim ran his rackets out of a saloon he owned at Delancey and Suffolk streets on the Lower East Side. One of his close associates was Marty Engel, a purveyor of kosher chickens. Hochstim and Engel ran a bail bond business at the Essex police court, right across the street from Engel’s chicken business. The Essex court was where all the poor souls—after having the misfortune to be picked up by the cops on the Lower East Side—ended up for arraignment.

Bail bonds were nothing more than a rip-off scheme, and Engel invested some of the money he made off it into a string of tenement houses on Allen Street that he used as brothels. In 1890, Hochstim traveled to Buenos Aires—like New York, Buenos Aires was then a popular destination for Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia. It was also a center for trafficking in unsuspecting Jewish girls that pimps were bringing over from Europe, in part because prostitution was then legal in Argentina. Hochstim spent a year in Buenos Aires before returning to New York, where he used all he had learned in Argentina to add pimping to his list of money-making ventures.

Hochstim was proud of how well he treated his girls. He fed them, clothed them, and never, ever fucked them. He also urged them to learn English. This was America, and you were nothing if you couldn’t speak English. Hochstim claimed that some girls even approached him from the gutter—rather than the other way around—and asked him to pimp them. He even taught his girls to save their money. So, he said, because of him, many were able to bring over their poor parents whom they’d left behind in Europe.

Hochstim’s intimate circle, besides criminals, included politicians; in late-19th-century New York, a man was often one and the same. Marty Engle, in fact, was also an alderman—the equivalent of a city councilman. Big Tim Sullivan, the Tammany boss they called “King of the Bowery,” made Hochstim a Tammany ward leader—quite an honor, that was—in exchange for delivering Jewish votes. Hochstim did such a great job that in 1901, he was sentenced to three years in Sing Sing for violation of election laws.

When he got out of prison, he and his wife Annie began buying up real estate. One of their purchases was a grand mausoleum in Washington Cemetery so that husband and wife could lie together in perpetuity in grand surroundings, commensurate with their perceived social status in the Jewish world. When Hochstim died in 1921, he was laid to rest there.