Prohibition Gangsters: The Rise and Fall of a Bad Generation

Chapter 4. Gangsters in the Surf [Includes Image Plates]

79 $ From Monday, May 13, to Thursday, May 16, in 1929, top gangsters in the Prohibition generation came to Atlantic City for a conference. Spring in the resort town was a perfect time for the gathering; the temperature was in the comfortable upper 50s, and the summer vacation season with its tens of thousands of visitors had not yet descended. There was still room on the Boardwalk, in hotels, and on the beaches. Many organizations traditionally chose this time of year to hold their annual conferences and galas in the resort. The same time as the gangster conference was town, the society pages of the Atlantic City Daily Press covered the arrivals of the New Jersey State Master Barbers, the New Jersey Bankers, the Grand Court of the New Jersey Foresters of America, the Catholic Daughters of America, the Junior Hadassah , and the Women’s Auxiliary of the Atlantic County Medical Society. The gangster conference was different; its arrival in the city received no coverage in the society pages or any other part of the newspaper during the meeting. The attendees did not wear nametags; there was neither printed agenda nor election of officers nor membership list nor minutes of the meeting . Given this secrecy, uncertainties about the event abound. In fact, there are two conflicting interpretations.One might be called the“big conference” view, which posits a sizeable attendance of top mobsters from around the nation who met to establish a national crime syndicate, but an emerging “small conference” interpretation believes the attendance was much less c h a p t e r 4 Gangsters in the Surf 80 Atlantic City Interlude and the goals more narrow. This chapter begins with the more traditionally accepted big view and ends with the revisionist small view—a situation that resembles the parallel universes about which physicists hypothesize. The Big Conference View According to that big view, the attendees included such established and frequently named leaders from the major crime capitals: Al Capone of Chicago; Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, John Torrio, and Joe Adonis of New York; Charles“King”Solomon of Boston; and Moe Dalitz of Cleveland. More names from more cities have been suggested too, and the total number varies from a dozen to more than thirty.Two intriguing absences from the list are the feuding New York City Mafia bosses Giuseppe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. It is likely that these firm believers in the purity of the Mafia did not wish to mingle with Jews and other non-Sicilians.Also striking is that nobody from the western statesandpossiblynobodyfromtheSouthattended.Inthelate1920s,themajority of the nation’s population and industry was concentrated in the Northeast and the Midwest. Similarly, until the post–World War II era no major league baseball teams resided west of St. Louis or south of Washington, D.C. This geographic imbalance extended to the world of organized crime. Nucky Johnson’s City WhyAtlanticCity?EvidentlythemobsterslearnedfromtheabortedCleveland conference of five months before that they needed a location where the police would not bother them and where they could be at ease. Probably no place in America could provide those benefits as well as Atlantic City. Although the ocean resort publicized itself as a haven for the elite upper classes, the city actually catered to the middle and lower classes, who flocked there mostly by train from Philadelphia and crowded into hotels and rooming houses. There were seven miles of Boardwalk to explore and amusement piers to enjoy. The master of the resort city was Enoch “Nucky” Johnson. Born into a politically active family in 1883, he was elected sheriff at age twenty-five, the Gangsters in the Surf 81 youngest in the state. In 1913, he was appointed as the treasurer of Atlantic County, a position he held for the next forty years. Johnson knew that his prosperity and Atlantic City’s were linked, and he made sure visitors got what they wanted—and what they wanted was the illicit and the exciting. A resident looking back on Atlantic City’s notorious period described the resort’s attitude: “If the people who came to town had wanted Bible readings, we’d have given ’em that. But nobody ever asked for Bible readings. They wanted booze, broads, and gambling, so that’s what we gave ’em.”1 Thus, Johnson protected speakeasies, brothels, and gambling dens, and those establishments paid him for his protective services. He also...