Dan Slater - The Incorruptibles

31:32So Lillian and Antonia were these two Russian Jewish immigrant girls on the Lower East Side. Lillian was known as Lily and Antonia was known as Tony or Tony the Tough eventually in the underworld. And they were best friends. And early on in the book, they sort of get split up at a central event in the narrative. Tony takes one direction and Lily goes in another. Lily doesn't become a prostitute, but in a way, that's the thing she's trying to avoid. As many of the girls were, they were like, just as long as I don't become a prostitute, a lot of them were just trying to avoid that feat. Lily ends up falling, though, for a young kind of gambler gangster figure who, again, she's 17.

32:26He's probably 20, 21 at the time. These are young folks. And she was very pretty. He was very handsome. And they had quite a romance. But then that romance and the marriage and the honeymoon period become interrupted by by a murder, not of either of them, but a murder that they or at least her husband becomes attached to. And and so we follow them through that. And this would be Lefty Louie. Obviously, we're talking about Lefty Lefty Louie Rosendirk. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think he said that he was a pretty good baseball player is why they call them Lefty. And you obviously baseball comes up quite a bit because that was a popular sport.

33:12And as we know from our main character, Rothstein, it was easy to gamble on and also game, as we'll talk about later. Abe Schoenfeld, you know, he goes from his dad, Mayor. You know, he kind of grows up with his reform father and he kind of comes to the front of your story. He's got some daddy issues because reform doesn't really end up transforming the community is I think what is his young frustrations are. So he's excited. He finds that excitement doesn't do really anything. And so he's kind of this young man is what I took from your story that isn't really seeking to do anything. He's not really passionate about anything because that passion's died from what he saw his father work on.

33:53Is that a fair way of thinking about Abe as a younger man? I wouldn't say his passion had died. He'd become frustrated. Disillusioned, maybe? Disillusioned, frustrated, anger. When I hear passion die, I think it was someone giving up. He was never anyone. He would never give it up. That would have been a waste for him. He was always going to be in it, but he'd become very jaded. And of course, he was so young when this was happening, a 21-year-old can become very jaded with the world once they start to see how things really work. And of course, Abe had a very fast childhood because he was really thrown into it having the father that he had.

34:39So, he was privy to so much more of how the world worked because his father was who he was and they had all these well-known figures trotting through trying to do their home on the lower side. Well, so I, another idea that I kept pulling out of your story was incentives. Incentives cause weird things. I mean, you think of like the prostitution incentives, other people weren't making some of those markets, you know, per se. And therefore that's why this, this immigrant group would step into that. Also their legacy, like we talked about, but even the laws cause perverse incentives. You mentioned like the man act that comes about on its face.

35:17you'd look at the law and say, oh, that's a good thing. We're trying to correct a problem of the past. But then the criminals look and say, well, I know how to use this law. What was the Mann Act and what did it also cause that was, I'll call it perverse and unexpected? Yeah. So, the Mann Act is really interesting because today we don't hear about it too often. the last time i think i heard about it was like the elliot spitzer scandal um 15 years ago or so i'm sure it's come up since then but that's just last time i remember hearing about it but the mad act is interesting because it was the first time that a vice regulation that an anti-vice regulation hopped to the federal level it was the first federal anti-vice law passed in 1910 and it was aimed at trying to regulate prostitution.

36:11And what the law actually did was it made it a crime to transport a woman across state lines who is not your wife, I believe. So extremely broad, extremely broad. And what it did is it opened up space for this new kind of scam where you could sort of cohol a guy or into meeting a woman he liked. And she asked, oh, can we go across to Atlantic City and spend a night at a hotel on the boardwalk? And he says, oh, sure, baby. Then they're in the hotel and, you know, some guy who she works with, who's pretending to be her husband, busts through the door and says, what are you doing with my wife? And they go, oh, my God, I didn't know.

37:01Oh, I say, all right, well, we're going to we're going to get you for a violation of the man act if you don't pay up. And so that was called the Badger game. OK, and the Badger game was big for, I think, a while. So let's talk about the Uptowners really quickly, because the other character that comes in via the Uptowners, obviously, Temple Emmanuel was central in the Jewish community in New York at the time. Judah Magnus is the rabbi there, which for those of you that don't know it, rabbi just is a word for teacher. But so he's leading the congregation there at the synagogue and he's getting frustrated, you know, is what I gained from your book.

37:41He's frustrated because he can see what should be done in the community as the rabbi. And yet in his position, it doesn't seem like he can really go to the uptowners and push for change. Is that a fair way of thinking about Judah Magnus's frustration? Magnus was also frustrated. And I think that's it. It kind of made a lot of sense that the story I'm telling in the book really gets going when Magnus and Abe finally sit down again. Because they both have been trying to figure out how to crack the nut of the Lower East Side underworld. old Abe as a young reformer who was living down there, Matt as a rabbi who is serving various populations in the city.

38:27Matt has been trying for years to get the uptowners to pool their resources and their money to stamp out the underworld because he thought it was just an incredible shame that Jewish Sheenow girls who lived in the same city as them were prostituting themselves. How could we allow this to happen? How can we not stop this? So he was a real crusader and he was a real crusader. And when they meet each other, they figure out how to start to change the game a bit. We hope you're enjoying the podcast. You know, we work hard putting together this show, but we work even harder for our investors at Smead Capital Management.

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39:41I love the, you know, you're telling where Magnus is getting together with Abe and they're effectively funding, almost like a seed business. And he cuts them, he gives them$2 ,500. By the way, you have to multiply that by about 25. Yeah, no, it's a massive amount of money. Modern day money, yeah. Yeah, so he's funding Abe to go out and do his investigative work. And it's a huge deal of money. And Magnus is giving him this money and there's no tracing. Like, hey, there's no receipts. Here's your money. Deal with it as you will. And so it's like this massive covert operation, to your point, to go against the underworld.

40:20Explain the graft, though, that was going on in the New York Police Department at the time. Because it's one of these things where Abe is kind of independent. He has Magnus' support. He has the money from the uptowners. But, I mean, not even the police were trustworthy at the time. Yeah. So, like I said, you had these sort of underworld fraternal organizations that handled the payoffs and they handled it in a very professional, rote kind of a way. The money would arrive every month or whenever they had to pay it. And that money would be taken in usually by the police department and funneled up to the top.

40:56So, yeah, that was what kept the crime aligned. You know, you need to have the cops agree to let you do business. And so it was very hard to when when Abe begins to get this vice crusade going, that is kind of the narrative spine of the story of the book. He has to figure out how to solve a lot of problems. But one of the problems is if the mayor wants to install us in the police department to continue our work, how do we make sure that we're working with people who have the same agenda as we do? Sure. So that he gets connected up with Neuberger eventually in your story. And this is, you know, Magnus Neuberger and Abe becomes this, I'll call it triumvirate.

41:45And then also they end up both Abe and Neuberger end up in the police department. But they're really kind of like this standalone unit fighting crime. And they get to pick 20 of their own men, if I remember correctly. it was an odd cast or what I'll call a motley crew based on what your book says yeah Abe Abe is 21 years old at this time and he's been given this incredible offer which is to conduct a vice crusade out of the NYPD and to basically control the entire thing himself And so he wants to be able to pick his own cops that he's going to work with. And, and the question is, well, how would it, how did a 21 year old know which cops to pick to work clean?

42:37Like, how do you have that intelligence at that age or at any age for that, for that matter? And of course, the answer is he grew up on the streets. I mean, he was raised amongst the underworld. He knew a lot of his friends, Lefty Louis Rosenberg, who ends up becoming a gangster in the story and plays an interesting role in the story. Louis was his best friend when they were younger. So he had friends on both sides of the law. He knew the Lower East Side block by block. He knew all the cops. He had all the information about about who was who. So he was able to put together a squad of 2020 NYPD who, you know, helped him.

43:21And that was they were kind of they were they were they were the incorruptibles, along with a cast of folks who were never mentioned in the book. Sure. All the people Abe was hiring and paying to feed him information. But he wasn't – this wasn't like – I think of like the untouchables, right? Like I think of that whole story coming out of Chicago where they go and pick these really young and unadulterated police officers to go out and fight Capone. That's not what Abe did. Abe in some cases picked former grafters that were taking payments for the mob. He picked a grafter who he had earlier in the story outed.

44:01Sure. Squealed, as you talk about in your story. Squealed on this guy. And so and then later he ends up picking this guy to be on his squad. It's an odd pick, but he inherits many ideologies from his father and sort of rules of life and sayings and things like this. And one of the ideas that he got from his dad is, if you want to get anywhere in this world, you need to be an ex. You need to have some other skill. You need to be coming from some other world in order to do well in a new field. And so, he was always conscious of people's background and what that background could bring to the war on vice.

44:45Sure. Something that really affected Abe's father was the death of Herman Leibowitz. This ends up being a central event to your story in the end, because it affects his father deeply. Nothing happens at that time. But then later, that becomes convicting evidence and really what puts people away. can you kind of teach our listeners about the interplay between, you know, obviously his father's pain for a dear friend and how that gets rectified through his son? Yeah. So what you're what you're asking about has a lot to do with the shifting nature of the Jewish labor unions on the Lower East Side.

45:26Back in Mayor Schoenfeld's day in the 1890s, there was not a lot of violence involved in the strikes. The manufacturers often accused the unions of using violence in their strikes, but there really wasn't much. That starts to change in the early 1900s when you have a new crowd of Eastern European Jewish refugees coming from the Pale of Settlement. because if you came to new york in 1903 or 405 or 606 that means you had stayed in the pale for a very long time and you had dealt with a lot of excuse my language but horrific shit sure and horrific oppression and you had witnessed people die and you'd been uh victims you know victimized by massacres you had you may have uh joined some kind of rev you know uh revolutionary organization You may have fought in the streets.

46:22It was a different breed of people who came at the end of the immigration phase. They're the folks who'd survived in that hell for the longest. And they had very different opinions about the role of violence in basically industrial life. It's that if you wanted to survive, you had to meet that you had to be uncompromising. And so there was a lot of violence at that point that started to creep into labor relations. And it's one of the reasons that Abe's father doesn't want to be part of the unions anymore at a time when Abe himself insists on standing by them regardless of what of what they do.

47:04So this labor issue, I mean, it's kind of funny because when I started to work on the story, I saw how divided Abe and his father were over this labor issue. And it was harder for me to grasp because even though, of course, it's still an issue today, it tends not to be the thing that really divides people. We argue over other stuff. Sure. But I had to keep reminding myself that during this time, that issue was the central issue at the dinner table. And and so Abe and his father end up fighting a lot over that. And indeed, the violence of the Jewish labor unions from about 1910 to 1914 or 15 was just crazy.

47:47The interesting part is Abe ended up coming around to his father's view because he realized that the labor unions weren't just fighting for what labor wanted. they were actually a shill for the crime that was going on because the, obviously the pimps or, you know, these criminals were part of the labor unions. They were integral to stirring up problems whenever needed as well. As Abe, you know, goes through all this and labors through what he's striving for. He continues to see that strong connection between labor and crime. I want to ask another thing because like, to your point, you know, It's what we debate and divides us.

48:27Okay, so let me throw out another one to you. I kind of have this a little bit in my notes, but it just comes to mind right now. You talk a lot about how big the corporate trust era was and really this idea of a corporation or what we know as a C-Corp today, how powerful that was at that time. To use the Sherman Antitrust Act, which is something that you mentioned Ida Tarbell in your story. Breaking Rockefeller is a wonderful book out there that accounts a lot of what Ida Tarbell did, for example. The Sherman Antitrust Act was written, to paraphrase it, it talks about power and vast combinations that disrupt the social order, is what it says.

49:04And I guess my question to you is, at that time, with the power in the hands of corporations, and you give some of the statistics of how much wealth and or power in the economy they had, do you look in your storytelling and think that that did have a direct tie to the disruption in the social order that we're seeing here in the lower east side or in new york at the time did that have an effect on the social order yeah yeah i think you had this uh you had a crazy wealth disparity there was a lot of reason to be angry if you labored in these industries like garments minds sure yeah i mean it was the employment circumstances were were just terrible i mean they were beyond anything we know today you know it wasn't slavery we can't compare those things sure it it was it and i'm not even i'm not even going to say it was a form of bondage i don't want to go that far either because no one had to work in any at any place but if you were an outsider if you were a newcomer if you lacked a certain level of education uh you were consigned to this world where there were pretty much no protections sure so i guess so here'd be my question to kind of flip that you know i think this is a gilded age in business when i say business i mean really big business you think of like stock market valuations the concentration of that things of that nature.

50:35But I wouldn't make the case that, you know, the to your point, the working structure of today is obviously vastly different, it's far better. Thank God, what a blessing. But do you still look at today's circumstance and say, some of the things we're seeing, as an example, like if you look at male unemployment, you know, working age men are not working like the past. Do you see symptoms of things like that? And say there are parts of the wealth that's been accrued in this country that are affecting i'll call it the soul of our country and thus our workforce possibly today yes yeah i mean i think here i think inequality absolutely rips us apart um you know as far as the the soul uh i i do think that the culture of of achievements the culture of busyness in this country um has has an enormous impact on our souls that i i think we're maybe just beginning to understand now sure because the other thing that i thought of a lot was you know you're talking about when drugs were criminalized in in their infancy um nowadays we're decriminalizing drugs and yet the social implications aren't changing I'll use fentanyl as illegal, but that's a rampant drug that's affected, to your point, the soul of our country, particularly young men.

52:06We're decriminalizing various drugs for various reasons in various states. And I guess the question is, are we going to get any different outcome than cocaine at an earlier time? Because this drug idea is floating around our labor markets, whether we like it or not, like it was back in the early 20th century. Yeah, I think maybe there's going to hopefully be some happy, not happy medium, but some regulatory medium that we find instead of going way to one way or way to the other. Sure. I do think that vice and human impulse, biological impulse are just that they are eternal. Sure. Or there's not, you cannot regulate that.

52:49I don't think there might not be an answer to it. I just tried to think a lot of the themes that your book touches, right? Yeah. Um, you know, like, you know, I think I mentioned this before, but like, is prostitution a lot different than 20 something and 30 something girls, uh, year old girls getting naked and in front of a, you know, a video camera on their computer for only fans. Is there a big dispersion in the, what kind of activity now, by the way, is it legal? It's completely legal. The question is it right? I think, and that's what the book talks a lot about. What's right for the community.

53:20It's one of those. I mean, what would you've read the book? what would mayor gainer say what would mayor william gainer the mayor of the city say because he to my mind gainer was kind of the moral backbone center of of the story and his whole point was you can't regulate this stuff and the people who try to usually are corrupted to begin with or get corrupted in the process there's going to be prostitution because there always has been there's going to be someone to pay for some version of it always sure and the question is how to kind of minimize minimize the fallout i think from when using using the incorruptibles i mean they kind of follow and i was going to see if you would agree with this they kind of follow a walk softly but carry a really big stick okay and sometimes don't always walk softly so i think you tell stories of, of, I mean, they're coming in.

54:18Uh, I think you tell a story of one of the drug dealers, his wife quickly like swallows a vial of cocaine and she literally is swallowing glass and to make sure that she doesn't die from this glass, they don't like rush her to the hospital. They pour oil down her throat to keep her alive. Yeah. It doesn't really, her life wasn't that important outside of just the testimony it got. So it was just like a means to an end, to your point, to do whatever's needed. They would come in and smash up places. And so it's suddenly like, you know, the vigilante was starting to get as tough as the criminals.

54:58Is that what? The Fourth Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the constitutional law against unreasonable search and seizure took a huge hit when we had vice regulation come along. Sure. The number of Fourth Amendment violations and consequent Supreme Court precedent that eases the laws, they were eviscerated by vice prohibition because you can't have, say, a war on drugs without being able to um you know violent violent people's fourth amendment up and down sure um so yeah well and i also like you mentioned some of the great technology that was coming about at the time like wiretapping i i mean this was this was awesome i didn't know wiretapping i would assume wiretapping showed up in like the 40s or something like that well and and here they are talking about this new technology by one of the detectives i think in the police department where he's, you know, teaching these people how to tap into the phone lines in the basement and, you know, listening into the criminals conversations where not even the criminals know that they're just giving away all the information, something that unless you have a search warrant nowadays is highly illegal for a police department to do.

56:19But at that time, you know, until law had evolved to that, this was just, you know, par for the course with this new technology yeah yeah there wasn't i think the first um the first case i saw challenging kind of early wiretap technology didn't come along until about 1916 or 17 um so it took five six years for for the for for the laws to catch up on that so abe and his people and this anti-vice squad of is they did benefit from this sort of transitional period where vice went from being totally unregulated to being regulated hey i want to give a big shout out to everyone who's been working so hard on the show you know we recently hit the top 10 investing podcasts on apple podcasts and even number one in the business category in several countries as you may know this show is brought to you by Smead Capital Management.

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57:57I'll use Magnus's quote. I think this is my favorite quote of your book. You mentioned his quote where he said, quote, shall the race be stained and blotted in reputation or shall its members rise to moral heights such as their history might lead America to expect them to do, end quote. You know, the other thing that comes out of this story, and I'll call it the story of the Jewish people, but I really think it's a story of America. Yes, I agree. Which is, if I do something wrong, let's say, I'll call that sin in the Jewish context, the word, if I do something, if I sin, your book proves it doesn't just affect you.

58:39It directly affects your family, your legacy, the community around you. And I would argue as an American, your country, the idea that it's just mine and it doesn't affect anyone else. I think your story through the Jewish people shows in so many ways, it affects a lot of people around you. And so while we're talking about these individuals and the vice they're doing, or the prostitution that's coming on these girls, that was all personal decisions that affected everywhere and everyone. Would you agree with that view? Because I know in today's world, it's like, oh, I have my anonymous, I can be so anonymous on the internet, I can say whatever I want on X and I can be mean or hurtful or whatever that is.

59:22And yet it doesn't affect anybody. But I don't think your story would lend us to believe that. It does. It's funny. And yeah, the way the way that we affect our world is through interpersonal communications with each other and the ways that we we affect each other on a personal level. So I would say that, yeah, you know, it's it's about personal responsibility when it comes to vice. It's also about personal responsibility when it comes to being a banker or an industrialist or a business owner who is dealing with employees and trying to think of fairness. We're making their own decisions about what is right.

1:00:05Um, so, and, and it's interesting because Abe's, Abe's father, when he started getting into sort of, you know, the, the, the, the, the anti-prostitution business, um, trying to eradicate prostitution, he would say that industrial slavery is white slavery. Meaning that if you are going to be a factory owner or a garment industry industrialist and pay your employees dirt and treat them like dirt, then you might as well be the pimp. Sure. Yourself. Sure. I'm going to pull another quote out here out of the book because I loved this. This was like so reaching into the COVID era. Quote, as a rule, politicians made a fuss about crime only when they sought to seat an incumbent.

1:00:51End quote. Right. I mean, we just went through COVID. We watched crime pick up massively in a lot of cities, particularly, let's just say, New York. Mayor Adams pretty much got voted in as a former police officer wanting to fix crime. Has anything changed in 100 years, 120 years? Yeah, I mean, it's always been this incredible political thing. And if you're trying to unseat somebody, call them weak on crime. if you're if you're the incumbent don't mention crime sure so yeah yeah and i think of like the presidential race it's like to just change crime with like border crossings and it's really the same discussion to your point that's another theater and it's related obviously the theater of order that's part that's what my last book was about yeah um let's see so uh the other thing too is the old saying is there's no atheist in a foxhole.

1:01:50Lefty Louie taught us that everyone knows who God is on the death chair. Can you explain, you know, Lefty Louie is obviously indicted. Lily, you know, who we talked about earlier, her and Tony, this was her, you know, boyfriend turned husband. And it's a, you know, very sad thing for her. But Louie has the rabbi there. Again, we're still in this greatly Jewish context. The rabbis, they're reading him his last rites and he is calling out to God. Would that be fair? You have to remember that Louis was a top Hebrew scholar, the son of an Orthodox man and a very brilliant kid. So, yeah, he was all that and a gangster.

1:02:38Yeah. And that was not a common end. And Lily was also reared in a somewhat of a kind of holy roller kind of context, too. I remember they had the book of Josephus. They passed back Josephus' histories back and forth. It was a book that they both liked. It was a book that she brought to him when he was in prison. And it was a book that he sent back to her after he's executed. Um, so it, it was always interesting to me and really intriguing to me to think that these, these folks, they also had these, this strong connection to the, to the past, um, maybe a much stronger connection than we tend to have today.

1:03:27Because remember, these were, these were ghetto kids. Yeah. You know, they were, they, they were, they were unique ghetto kids because it was a culture that valued education. Mm. Um, but they didn't have much education. They didn't have much formal education. They usually dropped out of school pretty much in junior high and they were reading Josephus. So that's, that's, that's, I think super interesting. And something I think I glossed over earlier as we get towards the later part of the book is obviously Abe, you know, Tony was a girl he was in love with, wanted a date, but, you know, she was a prostitute.

1:04:06So nothing ever came of their relationship. But obviously, Tony comes back into Abe's life as this person that really helps out, you know, the reform that they're trying to bring in the Lower East Side community. How high up did Tony get and what kind of information did she end up helping with with this vice squad? Tony became important to the Vice Squad. She's this interesting character who I discovered in the archives and whose life I pieced together. And her young life, as with a lot of characters in the book, her story goes back and forth across the legal fence. So sometimes she's operating in the underworld sometimes she's operating as a reformer and she's sort of following her own compass i guess whatever she thinks is right in the moment sure because she gets pretty close to mother hurts and ends up kind of being her downfall yeah let's see rothstein you know is kind of like you're the last kickoff you know in the book that you kind of finish with i think the most interesting part is not only just the story you tell of him really making it past much of you You know, as reformers, as Abe deals with this, he gets past a lot of that.

1:05:26A lot of other people go away, die off, go to jail, are dead in comparison. And here we have Rothstein. As you note, he fixed the 1919 World Series. What we now know is the Black Sox scandal. It was a jury trial. but then I think more importantly in the in pop culture where Rothstein ends up is in the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald can you kind of touch away like touch on maybe what Carraway says in the book or or what we're led to believe based on what's what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote what we're led to believe about Rothstein yeah yeah so Meyer Wolfsheim of course is the character in the Great Gatsby that was based on Arnold Rothstein, according to the author, F.

1:06:15Scott Fitzgerald himself said that. And it's, I think, importantly, he's not just a character in the book, but Fitzgerald himself later said that the Great Gatsby wouldn't have been written had Fitzgerald not met Arnold Rothstein. And Rothstein was, in a way, the figure that Fitzgerald began with when he was conceiving the novel. And Fitzgerald was known for using things in his life in his fiction. He was always self-conscious of that. He was always trying to invent more. His first novel, The Side of Paradise, was almost entirely autobiographical about his time at Princeton. and he wanted to be more of an inventor.

1:07:09But he had this amazing material that was right in front of him. And why invent when you have this amazing material in front of you? So what he was known for and what he did a lot in his career was he took a person he knew and turned him into a character, but he wanted to hide it a bit because he was a bit self-conscious about it. So his transformation of Arnold Rothstein into Meyer Wolfsheim is very classic Fitzgerald because he messes with all the details. He gives him nose hair and he gives him he makes him crack a joke about where he'd mole, you know, human molars for cufflinks. And he has him talk in this certain sort of downhill way.

1:07:50And those surface details, they really didn't have anything to do with the actual Arnold Rothstein. Sure. And but I but I do believe that Fitzgerald captured the essence of Rothstein through Meyer Wolfsheim. Sure. So then would that put would you put Lucky Luciano out as the great Gatsby then? Because that's who is helping him move the liquor. And based on what we know of the great Gatsby, that was the role Gatsby played was they moved. He moved the liquor for Wolfsheim. I wouldn't be surprised if if stop Fitzgerald and and his wife Zelda met Lucky. I'm they I I would bet on it that I don't know they did.

1:08:31Well, because I think you mentioned Lucky was very charming. I mean, even uptowners really were drawn to Lucky. Yeah. When they met him. He was an outlaw and prohibition. If you were wealthy and and you and you had money and you didn't have to worry about getting, you know, caught. this was the beginning of vice prohibition and prohibition turned the drinkers into sort of freedom fighters in a way and here was lucky who was supplying the booze and he could come to your party with the liquor out on long island and uh he could you know entertain all the women with his stories of boot bootlegging out on the high seas and shooting it out with the opposition and stuff and yeah, Lucky was very charming.

1:09:18And as far as Fitzgerald goes, Fitzgerald knew, I think, a lot of Lucky Bussianos. Might not have known Lucky per se, but he knew a lot of bootleggers. And one of them called him Old Sport, right? Which is the phrase famously that makes it into the novel. So Fitzgerald was very tuned into Rothstein's world. So I'm going through my notes. As I mentioned to you, I loved this book. I mean, there's so many notes that we didn't get to in our discussion. We didn't talk about bucket shops. We didn't talk about the candy stores and the heinous crimes that came out of that. We actually didn't touch much at Herman Rosenthal, even though that was a pivotal moment in the book and in Vice history, as you explained.

1:10:01So I would tell our listeners, there's just some incredible stories out of that. What do you think you would like to mention to our audience that we haven't talked about? I would like to point out one fact that I discovered in the course of writing this book that I hadn't known and that surprised me, but also makes a ton of sense. And I think it's an important fact to know today in our moment now. Now, prior to about 1945, if he would have said the word ghetto, no one would associate black or brown people with that word. The sole association would be Jewish. Going back centuries. Because the term was invented by Jews.

1:10:51Sure. Who lived in Venice and were put on an island to live in the 1500s. that's where the term arose from. And what is a ghetto? It's a place where you put the marginalized people. It's a place where you can't sweep without a dustpan. I mean, the people have to go somewhere. And the ghetto is where they will go eternally. But these are the people that inspired the idea, the notion that is so eternal in our life. And I just think that it's important to know the origins of that word. When we think about the place of Jews in the world, the place of Jews in the history of marginalized people who are forced to live in a place because of marginalization and they have to figure out how to survive despite that.

1:11:49The Jews know that story. Arguably better than anybody else on the planet. Sure. When you're talking about the history of like the role the Jewish community played in courts and prior, the blessing out of those roles. If someone said to me, Cole, economically speaking, what would you like for yourself? I'd want to do something that no one else wants to do, because I know I'm vital to the system around me. And so I say that because at times they had to be the bankers when lending was not legal or not practiced by, say, the Protestants around them, for example. I always think to myself, gosh, what a blessing that the Protestants were too stupid to not do that and therefore left this great role for the Jewish people to play in society.

1:12:34And that's a blessing because it was needed in society at that time. I'll teasingly say this, passive investing is massive. I'm a fool that supposedly stock picks because no one thinks it's possible to do. What a blessing. No one thinks it's good for society to do, so I get to do it. And so I think of a lot of it. It's almost like I think of that as providential. Like God had a place for them throughout time in society. And the question is, what should they be doing that society wasn't choosing to do? And, you know, is prostitution what God wanted or is banking what God wanted, for example? Like I thought a lot of those kind of parallels of jobs not done by other people because of the either the black market nature of it or because it was considered improper for the society around them is what kept running through my head reading your story.

1:13:24I got a question for you. Have you had any calls for this book for movie studios? Because this I mean, there's some cool stories in here. Yeah. Yeah, I have. I think it's very promising for television adaptation. um the uh the manuscript is currently floating around in those circles and uh and you know we'll see what comes in time but um you know it's always i've had several things optioned by hollywood and developed and uh nothing has been made as of yet but i'm i'm starting to get uh more and more experience in the development process and uh i i hope something is going to come through soon we may see wolf boys as television series before we see the incorruptibles as a television series and it's funny in in a way the incorruptibles is kind of a prequel to wolf boys they're they're both about uh vice wars yeah they're both about the ghetto so that's that's my pitch to read both books nice nice what i agree i mean i think there's multiple stories i i could see like uh multiple seasons coming out of this book or where someone could do a whole, you know, a whole show and then take other storylines and run off of it directly from, you know, a story that starts in The Incorruptible.

1:14:43So I, I, I, it's, and it's a very uplifting story. I think of Tony and Abe, like it's such an uplifting story of how they better their community in the end. And it's very messy and complex and uncomfortable. Abe sitting in front of friends that he knows he's going to put in jail or probably cause their life to be shortened. And yet he goes through all that very complex, sticky relationships. Where can people follow you going forward, Dan? Are you active on social media? Where are places for them to follow you? Yeah. So at the moment, Instagram, the handle is by Dan Slater. And going to try to get my website up and running here with the tour dates.

1:15:26I'm going to be, I have about probably 20 events lined up between September, between this month and May, probably be adding more to that. And I'll be mainly on the Eastern seaboard, but also in the Midwest and the West coast as well. So follow me on Instagram. I put a lot of photos up on Instagram. I did acquire a lot of original images of the Lower East Side while I was writing the book, which was another really lucky thing. And so, yeah, anyway, but thank you for this wonderful conversation. Thanks for taking the book so seriously. And, uh, it was a fun book to work on for seven years. And I'm glad that I'm glad that, uh, that you liked it.

1:16:08Well, and maybe I'm just, uh, you know, as well, people would probably stereotype as a classic wasp, but maybe I'm just trying to rectify a bad legacy of the past. As you point out a couple of times in your book. So I'm atoning and trying to build a new legacy, you might say. Dan, your book reminds me of the power of legacy more than anything else. Your book, The Incorruptibles, reminds me that decisions we individually make, like we talked about in our lives, our children's lives, our community, our society at large are very important. We do not live in a vacuum and we are haunted by the past wrongs that drive us forward nonetheless, whether we like it or not.

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