Irving Wexler was born on the Lower East Side of Manhatten sometime around the year 1889, (his exact birthdate is not known). When he was a kid, he began a life of crime by committing petty crimes. He became an expert pickpocket thus giving him the name "Waxey" because he would pick a persons pocket so well that it was as almost as if there was wax on the wallet.

As his reputation began to grow, and Waxey began to grow, he began to get noticed. Another gangster named Arnold Rothstein, who had a keen eye for talent, saw that Waxey Gordon could be an asset to his organization. So he hired Gordon to work for him.

Gordon worked his way up the ladder in Rothstein's organization and he eventually ran all of Rothstein's bootlegging operations along the East Coast. As Gordons finances began to mount, he soon aquired enough money to purchase numerous breweries and distillaries along with owning several speakeasies. He began livng the luxurious life by living in various New York Hotel suites along with owning a mansion in New York and one in Philadelphia.

But in 1928 Gordon's successful life would peak and gradually begin to decline. This was due to the fact that his mentor and rabbi, Arnold Rothstein had been murdered. So Waxey Gordon had to form new alliances with other powerful mobsters. He hooked up with Charlie " Lucky" Luciano and Meyer Lansky. But Gordon and Lansky did not see eye to eye over how the bootlegging operations and the gambling perations were run. Eventually their fued grew so big that a gang war ignited between the two and lives were lost on both sides of the war. Lansky, being the business minded man that he was, realized that the war was becoming a costly war. So with Luciano's consent, Lansky provided then New York Distict Attorney Thomas E. Dewey with information that eventually lead to a conviction of tax evasion for Waxey Gordon. He was sentenced to ten years in prison.


Upon his release from prison, and with too many years passing him by, Waxey Gordon realized that many of the connections that he had made before going into prison were mostly gone. So he started on a new journey as a salesman using the name Irving Wexler.

However resisting a life of crime was too difficult for Gordon, so he set up shop in New Jersey getting involved in illegal gambling. Bootlegging was no longer an option, so instead Waxey Gordon began dealing narcotics.

In 1951 Waxey Gordon made another costly mistake in his life. Only this time he did not make that mistake with one of his fellow mobsters. Instead he approached a gentleman hoping to make a deal where he would provide Heroin to this gentleman. The man turned out to be an undecover policeman. When Waxey Gordon realized that he was screwed, he offered all his money to the undercover policeman in exchange for letting him off the hook. Gordon had only dug the hole that he was now in, that much deeper. The policeman refused and instead arrested Gordon.

Waxey Gordon was tried and eventually convicted on the drug dealing charges, and was sentenced to serve 25 years at Alcatraz prison. However Gordon would not serve anything even close to the 25 year sentence because on June 24th, 1952, he died of a heart attack while serving out his sentence at Alcatraz prison.




Don Cardi

Thats a nice post to round up 10,000 posts congrats

Thank you Mr. DE NIRO. I had wanted to make a milestone number post like 10,000 a special one in either the Godfather Trilogy or the Oraganized Crime - Real Life thread.



Don Cardi

Post whore.

Well at least I did it with a gangster topic that relates to what these boards are all about and not by making a post warning someone to "stop it now" or a "go play in the sandbox" or "You're now on vacation" type post.

Damn! I just realized that I could have reached it much faster if I had posted over in the POST COUNT GAME topic in the game thread!





Don Cardi

Smartass.

(wooo hooo ... another post for ME).

(Sorry to hijack your thread).

Hey don't forget. I have Moderator capabilities in this forum.

You keep it up and I'll have to send YOU on a little vacation!



Don Cardi

Very nice bio as usual, DC. Thanks! And congrats on 10k posts. SC may have the witty repartee, but there's no way he can match your creative spelling.

Eur a gude mann, Turnbull.

Just reviving some bios for new people who are interested in torganized crime to see.

I am currently writing a biography of Waxey. This is based as much as possible on contemporary sources, including newspapers, FBI and Treasury Department files, the US census, etc. I have found that many of the secondary works which touch on Waxey's career are unreliable and do not square with contemporary evidence.

1. Waxey was born on January 19th, 1888. That is the date given on his death certificate, which I have a copy of. It is the date which Waxey always used.
2. Waxey was not a very good pickpocket. He was caught repeatedly and spent the first seven years of his criminal career bouncing in and out of jails in New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. His first arrest came in 1905, when he tried and failed to pick the pocketbook of a New York woman. The woman's husband, who was standing next to her, was a New York City police detective. Waxey was arrested in Philadelphia in 1908 when he tried to pick the pocketbook of another woman, a tough lady who ran a boarding house. She grabbed Waxey and held him for the police. Waxey only began to prosper as a criminal once he left off picking pockets and hooked up with a gang.
3. Arnold Rothstein was not Waxey's criminal mentor. Dopey Benny Fein was. Waxey joined up with Dopey Benny's labor racketeering gang in 1912 or 1913. Waxey quickly became Benny's right hand man and he remained so until he was arrested for assault and robbery in 1915.
4. Neither contemporary newspapers nor the exhaustive reports of Kehillah detective Abraham Shoenfeld mention any connection between Waxey and Rothstein during the years 1913-1917. There is some evidence of a business connection between the two men later on, but that does not mean that Waxey was a member of Rothstein's organization in any meaningful sense. Waxey was a criminal entrepeneur, and Rothstein was a criminal investor. Leo Katcher's biography of Rothstein has Waxey and Max Greenberg going to Rothstein in the fall of 1920 to get financial support for their rum-running scheme. Unfortunately, Katcher's book is unsourced and he does not say where he got this story from. Waxey later told law enforcement that he went into the alcohol business in 1921, not 1920. Max Greenberg left St. Louis permanently in 1921 or 1922, and he and Waxey purchased the Fourth Avenue Hotel around that time. There is some evidence that Max Greenberg had an earlier connection to Rothstein through an east side hood named Johnny Burt. This went back to 1919 when Rothstein was bankrolling Nicky Arnstein's bond theft ring. Patrick Downey, who is usually accurate, thinks that Rothstein only began to invest in Waxey's rum running around 1923, when it was already in full swing. According to Thompson and Raymond's "Gang Rule in New York," Rothstein did pay some of Waxey's garage fees and Waxey also took out a life insurance policy with Rothstein's agency. But Thompson and Raymond do not say where they got this information.
5. Waxey owned several hotels in New York, but he did not live in them. He did not own a mansion in New York either. He lived in several expensive New York apartment buildings between 1923 and 1933, including 160 Riverside Drive, 590 West End Avenue, 63 Central Park West, and 5 Prospect Place. After he became big in Jersey beer he spent a good deal of time in a suite at the Alexander Hamilton Hotel in Paterson, and he also had a residential address at 308 18th Avenue in Paterson. Waxey had a summer home on Monmouth Avenue in Bradley Beach, New Jersey, and he also spent time in White Lake, New York. I have seen no evidence yet that he ever owned property in Philadelphia, much less a mansion.
6. Since Waxey was never wholly dependent on Rothstein, I find it difficult to believe that Rothstein's death caused Waxey any special difficulties. On the contrary, all the evidence is that Waxey reached his greatest power and prosperity between 1929 and 1933, after Rothstein was killed.
7. The idea that Waxey and Lansky were implacable rivals and that they waged something called "The War of the Jews" from 1928 on is not borne out by the facts. Like the Sicilian Vespers Massacre, it is a myth. The FBI file on Lansky states that Lansky got his first big break in "the early twenties" when three men hired him to escort their booze trucks. Those three men were Charley Kramer, William Weisman (misspelled "Heisman" in the file) and Dutch Goldberg. Kramer and Goldberg were old east side hoods from the Benny Fein days, while Weisman was one of the Missouri gangsters who came east in Max Greenberg's wake. All three were members of Waxey's organization, and they probably hired Lansky not "in the early twenties" but in about 1924-1925, when Waxey's rum-running operation was at its height. As Patrick Downey points out in "Gangster City," Lansky was working closely with Waxey in 1930 when two of Lansky's men were wanted for shooting Federal agent John G. Finiello during a raid on one of Waxey's New Jersey breweries. Waxey did split later on with Lansky, Luciano, and the other shareholders in his Jersey beer syndicate, but that did not happen until April,1933 and the war which followed ended in late August 1933.
8. According to Joe Valachi, Waxey made peace after the murder of Morris Moll in August. Waxey did not go on trial for income tax evasion until November 1933. But if peace had been made on favorable terms (and Valachi did not say what they were), what motive could Lansky and Luciano have had for feeding information to the Federals? When Waxey was tried, the prosecution summoned Sally Moretti, Willie's brother, as a witness. Moretti was linked to Luciano, but instead of helping the prosecution to put Waxey away he proved completely uncooperative and was cited for contempt. The idea that Waxey's conviction was the result of a Lucky-Lansky plot first appeared over seventeen years after the fact in Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer's sensationalized "New York Confidential." The allegation lay untouched until the 1970s, when Gosch and Hammer shoved it into the unreliable "Last Confessions." Eisenberg and Dan passed it along because it made Lansky look like a criminal genius and made Waxey and Dewey look bad. Finally, the theory takes no account at all of the real work of the prosecution team. Waxey was up not only against Dewey and George Z. Medalie, but against Elmer Irey, Hugh McQuillin, and Mike Malone of the Treasury, all top investigators. Medalie's office included such brilliant attorneys as Barent Ten Eyck, William B. Herlands, and Murray Gurfein, all of whom went on to outstanding careers. This was a team of all-stars. Their investigation took over two years, during which they examined over 1,000 witnesses and 200 bank accounts. And of course neither Gosch and Hammer nor Eisenberg and Dan give any specifics about the alleged information which Lansky and Luciano passed along. I have not yet succeeded in obtaining the U.S. Justice Department's records in Waxey's case, but I will be very surprised indeed if anything in them bears out the Gosch-Hammer explanation for Waxey's downfall.

Great post Midtown. I don't believe the story that Lansky set up Gordon, the police ad others in law enforcement have a history of spreading those rumors. What is the "Kehillah " you mention regarding detective Abraham Shoenfeld?

I doubt that this particular rumor originated in law enforcement, but who knows just how these things get started. The New York Kehillah was a council set up in 1908 by the leaders of New York's Jewish community. Their goal was to combat Jewish crime and anti-semitism. To deal with the first, they hired a young investigator named Abraham Shoenfeld. From 1913 to 1915, Shoenfeld and his assistant detectives probed every aspect of Jewish crime and vice in the city, passing much of their information on to the police. Shoenfeld's reports are now held by the National Library of Israel, which was kind enough to send copies to me. Thanks to these, it is possible to follow the careers of Waxey and the rest of Benny Fein's gang almost from week to week for over two years. A book about Shoenfeld and the Kehillah has recently been published, "The Incorruptibles" by Dan Slater. I am sorry to say, though, that the book is not quite worthy of its subject.