True Crime NYC
Dan Slater ’05 Tells the Untold Story of New York’s Early Underworld in The Incorruptibles
Lawyer-turned-writer Dan Slater ’05 explores the secret history of an off-the-books band of Lower East Side Jewish crime fighters at the dawn of the 20th century in his new work of nonfiction, The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld, published on July 16.
This isn't the first yearslong project researching the criminal underworld for Slater, a former Wall Street Journal legal affairs reporter. His previous nonfiction work, Wolf Boys, investigates the story of two American teenagers recruited as killers for a Mexican drug cartel and their pursuit by a U.S. detective. It is currently in development with 101 Studios for a television series.
In The Incorruptibles, Slater tells the story of the 1910s, before the likes of mobsters Arnold Rothstein and Meyer Lansky rose to the fore of organized crime, when gambling, smuggling, prostitution, theft, corruption, and a world of violence was infiltrating downtown New York, particularly in the overcrowded Lower East Side ghetto. Eastern European Jews were among the gangs and syndicates in control, and corrupt cops and Tammany Hall politicians were on the take. “As that reputation for vice grew, antisemitism and an anti-immigrant sentiment also grew,” Slater said. “There was a call to close the borders, especially to Jewish immigrants.”
Dramatic action was needed to restore the Jewish community’s reputation, and a circle of powerful, established uptown German Jews, led by financier and philanthropist Jacob Schiff, took the lead. Skirting the crooked confines of Tammany, they established an off-the-books vice squad of young Jewish men from the Lower East Side who knew the players and the neighborhood from the inside. Dubbed The Incorruptibles, the group was led by 21-year-old Abe Shoenfeld, the son of a well-known reformer and union leader. The squad soon established a broad network of informants and held raucous raids, searches, and seizures that, Slater said, “put the Fourth Amendment aside.”
Slater follows the Incorruptibles from their formation to being incorporated and subsequently ejected as a special NYPD vice unit, to the later rise of a new mobster class. “What we discover about this reform movement, like a lot of revolutionary movements, such as prohibition, is once you have success, things can get out of hand; it’s hard to know where to stop,” Slater said.
Slater became intrigued by this moment in history while doing research for a magazine story he was writing about a contemporary group of rogue rabbis who beat up men who refused to give their wives a “get,” the biblically mandated bill of divorce. “A footnote in a book I was using for that research mentioned the pre-World War II Lower East Side and the uptowners who were embarrassed by the violence of the downtown community,” Slater said. “It got me thinking about the history of violence in the New York Jewish community and the ancestors we didn’t know.”
For The Incorruptibles, he did a deep dive into the archives of New York newspapers, including a slew of Yiddish-language editions; trial transcripts from the Manhattan criminal courts of the era, archived at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice; oral histories from the New York Public Library’s collections; and group leader Shoenfeld’s own writings in the reports he created for the uptowners who organized the squad.
As a Brooklyn Law student, Slater said, “I was interested in crime and criminal law, but not more than any other area. I loved First Amendment law, and if I had been a great lawyer, I would have wanted to pursue appellate cases. But although I loved studying the law, the practice of it was not in my heart. Storytelling has always been a part of who I am.
“Yet without my legal background I would never have been able to have the jobs I’ve had, or to navigate a legal transcript. And Brooklyn Law is where I first learned how to write,” he added. “I had a great legal writing professor, Mike Donofrio, who taught me how to write persuasively and actively. My writing became very tight. One of the journeys I’ve traveled as a writer has now been to let a little air in, to not have such a hard-driving style. It’s easier to let go than to develop that style. And BLS gave me a solid foundation.”
Watch the video book trailer.