Jacob Orgen

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Jacob Orgen

Jacob "Little Augie" Orgen (* 1894 in Austria ; † 16th October 1927 New York City ) was an American mobster and head of the "Little Augie", a street gang that during alcohol Prohibition in the United States forced labor disputes supported. Today it is included in the Kosher Nostra .

Life

Orgen, born under the name Jacob Orgenstein, comes from a Jewish-Orthodox middle-class family in Austria and became generally known through the Slugger War laboratory in New York City. After Benjamin Fein's arrest and conviction in 1917, Orgen formed his own gang, the members of which were also known as the "Little Augies".

Orgen managed to recruit potent members such as Louis Buchalter , Jacob Shapiro and Jack Diamond. Orgen was allied with Solomon Shapiro and both were active in the Garment District , the district in which many “ sweatshops ” of the clothing industry were located.

In 1923 a gang war broke out on the strike of the district laundry workers. Orgen's opponent was Nathan Kaplan , who was shot by Louis Cohen (aka Louis Kusher) on August 28, 1923 . With that, Orgen and his gang became the dominant force in the city's “laboratory racketeering” .

Orgen began to use his racket monopoly for other purposes and got into alcohol smuggling, among other things. With Jack Diamond he ran whisper bars ( English speakeasy ). In any case, the basis of business had changed as the incidents of the labor disputes were investigated by the state. This began the infiltration of the unions by the mobsters, as Meyer Lansky had ordered. Orgen stayed with the old business model.

Since he did not follow the instructions on the one hand and had developed into a competitor in alcohol smuggling on the other hand, Orgen was probably murdered on October 16, 1927 by his former followers Louis Buchalter and Jacob Shapiro. In the " drive-by shooting " and which was bodyguard of Orgen, Jack Diamond, wounded. Buchalter and Shapiro were initially arrested on suspicion of crime, but not convicted.

consequences

Jacob Orgen was buried by his father in Mount Judah Cemetery . His tombstone incorrectly states the age of his death at 26, even though he was 33 years old at the time of his death. His father - as a devout Jew - had already declared his son dead at the age of 26, because at that age he had taken over the management of the gang of thugs.

Under Buchalter , Meyer Lansky’s instructions were implemented, the unions were infiltrated, and the original racket service expanded into a killing machine that carried out murder assignments as Murder, Inc. for the National Crime Syndicate in the 1930s.

literature

  • Albert Fried: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York 1980, ISBN 0-231-09683-6 .
  • James M. O'Kane: The Crooked Ladder: Gangsters, Ethnicity and the American Dream. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, (New Jersey) 1994, ISBN 0-7658-0994-X .
  • Davis Pietrusza: Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series. Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York 2003, ISBN 0-7867-1250-3 .
  • Patrick Downey: Gangster City: The History of the New York Underworld 1900-1935. Barricade Books, New Jersey 2004, ISBN 1-56980-267-X .
  • Robert A. Rockaway: Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel & Co. Life stories of Jewish gangsters in the USA. Konkret Literaturverlag, Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-89458-170-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert A. Rockaway: Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel & Co. life stories of Jewish gangsters in the USA. Konkret Literaturverlag, Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-89458-170-0 , pp. 145ff.
personal data
SURNAME Orgen, Jacob
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Augie, Little (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mobster in New York City
DATE OF BIRTH 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Austria
DATE OF DEATH October 16, 1927
Place of death New York City