The Starker: Big Jack Zelig, the Becker-Rosenthal Case, and the Advent of the Jewish Gangster

by Rose Keefe, Patrick Downey (Foreword)

Selig Harry Lefkowitz, alias Big Jack Zelig, was New York's first great gangster boss. Like many of his pre-Volstead contemporaries, his historic impact has been overshadowed by Al Capone and Murder Inc. He is listed in today's crime anthologies primarily because four members of the gang, along with corrupt cop Charles Becker, died in the electric chair for the July 1912 murder of gambler Herman Rosenthal. In New York City from 1908 to 1912, however, Zelig inspired admiration and fear, and he was synonymous with the word 'gangster.' New York editor Herbert Bayard Swope recalled that The Starker (Yiddish for 'Big Boss') threw terror into the heart of the New York underworld like no one has before or since."" Based on dozens of interviews and years of painstaking research, ""The Starker"" introduces readers to a story from New York's criminal past that is dazzling in its audacity and criminal in the success of the people responsible for the murders in covering up their own crimes.""

Genres: True Crime, Crime, Nonfiction, History, Biography

320 pages, Hardcover

First published February 15, 2008

About the author

Rose Keefe is the author of three vintage True Crime books. Guns and Roses- the Untold Story of Dean O'Banion, Chicago's Big Shot Before Al Capone and The Man Who Got Away: the Bugs Moran Story were based on interviews with surviving relatives of Dean O'Banion and George 'Bugs' Moran as well as such primary resources as arrest records, FBI files, and confidential investigator reports. As part of her research for her third book, The Starker: Big Jack Zelig and the Becker-Rosenthal Case of 1912, she interviewed the descendants of Jack Zelig, Charles Becker, Dopey Benny Fein, and Abe Shoenfeld. She is currently at work on the biography of Dopey Benny Fein, New York's first real labor racketeer.

Rose has written on the subject of vintage crime and cold case files for national and regional periodicals, and is a frequent guest on radio and television programmes dealing with America's criminal past.

Reviews

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another Jewish Gangster book I have read, hopeing to find some of my family embedded within. The title character Jack Zelig and quite a few of the other colorful characters in this book come from an area very near where some of my family lived, and moved to the neighborhood where my grandfather moved to when he come to this country. I read about some of the same streets that my father told me about when I was a kid. the main timeline was the 1890's thru the early 1920's.
Several of the earlier New york gangsters are talkes about. The type of crimes, the way that thay rose to the top, the time thay did in prisons, and of course how thay died.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Big Jack attack. The Starker is the best book yet on NYC's pre-prohibition era gangland. Having researched this time period myself I was excited by the wealth of new information Rose Keefe discovered. Who knew Zelig was such a complex character? A great bio as well as a new look at the Becker-Rosenthal case. The foreward was pretty cool to ;)

[Kristi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Those of you who know me know how much I love the mafia/gangster stories and this one wasn't that bad. The two things I didn't like was that the author was on the wordy side, taking a page (or two) to describe something that could have been written in under one page; and the second thing is, as is the case in almost all these kinds of books, there are WAY too many characters to keep track of. Some did stand out so you didn't have to go hunting down where you had "seen" them before but these were few and far between.

I would only recommend this book to people who are very into this genre because it just becomes too much to take in after awhile.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very detailed and interesting account of Big Jack Zelig, the Becker-Rosenthal case and gangsters of Manhattan's Lower East Side 1880 - 1915.

I would love to see Rose Keefe write another book covering gangsters of the Lower East side during the next period say 1918 - 1930. There are many gangsters from these years whose story has not yet been told and who led lives which are extraordinary by today's standards.

[dan_rtype · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book about early New York gangsterism. The author did a great job weaving together newspaper stories from the day with the scant oral history that remains from eyewitnesses of that era. I imagine it's very hard to do a biography of a gangster who lived over 100 years ago and died when they were only 24! I still feel like we're missing a lot but I got a glimpse of the man and his dark charisma. The second half of the book focuses on the Becker-Rosenthal case which is the main reason Jack Zelig wasn't totally forgotten unlike some of his contemporaries. Still, I found the second half lagged a bit.

[Juliet Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rose Keefe once again knocks it out of the park with a sensational account of Big Jack Zelig's life and death, from his work with Monk Eastman to his occasional acts of altruism towards his fellow Jews. In addition, Keefe delves into the Becker-Rosenthal case which I was vaguely familiar with, having read a book about Rothstein. She also manages to humanize corrupt police officer Charles Becker, no easy feat. A fascinating true crime novel that sheds light on a little known gangster.

[Nancy Beiman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the definitive history of the Rosenthal murder case's most enigmatic witness. It's a great history of the early Jewish gangs on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I can now see why my grandfather, who would have encountered Zelig and the others, never talked about his childhood.

Zelig was a good/bad man, a 'man of principle' in a world that had none.
I would love to see this book made into a film.