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like this,” Louis Minsky answered. “
If
I fire him, I’ll have to hire a new man. This
schmendrick
has stolen so much already that he doesn’t need any more. But if I hire a new man, he’ll have to start robbing me from scratch. I’ll lose twice as much!”
    The Minsky patriarch continued to study the Talmud in his spare time, but the old country was loosening its grip. He filled his closet with hand-tailored suits, fastened a diamond stickpin to his lapel, and carried a silver-topped cane. Tammany Hall, the unabashedly corrupt political machine that had ruled New York since the end of the Revolutionary War, took notice of Louis and asked him to run for alderman of the Sixth Ward—what better way to secure the Jewish vote than to make a hero of one of their own? “The politicians used to come fishing on the East Side,” one resident recalled, “because they had a raw crowd—a crowd that was not polished yet. They could make them into a frenzy. They would talk about capitalism, and socialism, and sweatshops. The problems were always there, and Tammany Hall was always on your tongue.”
    Louis Minsky knew that the Tammany politicians, who put a price tag on every city position from janitor to judge and collected millions of dollars in graft, were largely responsible for the horrific conditions in the Lower East Side. But if elected, he could ensure that his fellow Jews and neighbors—the future songwriters George and Ira Gershwin and actor Eddie Cantor among them—received their share of the ten thousand pounds of turkey, six thousand pairs of shoes, and eight hundred tons of coal Tammany doled out annually to supporters. He won handily, and supporters dubbed him the “Mayor of Grand Street.”
    The new alderman began his tenure confident he could mend a broken system from within. Never once did Louis suspect his own constituents of contributing to the disrepair, until one of them, a poor tailor from his hometown back in Russia, duped the alderman into supporting his wife after he’d allegedly abandoned her and their five children. The tailor and his wife, a witting accomplice, lived off the alderman’s own dime until neighborhood gossips ratted them out.
    Alderman Minsky was hurt—“I would spend $10,000, if I had it, rather than pay that alimony,” he said—but the incident marked his transformation into a true Tammany man, with all the cunning and treachery that title implied. A few years later, Louis declined to run for reelection but kept his connections, and then devised a scam of his own. A friend hired him to solicit accounts for the Grand Street branch of the Federal Bank, promising a kickback on all new deposits. In March 1904, another poor tailor from the neighborhood wandered into the bank.
    “Hello,” Louis greeted him. “Do you know who I am?”
    “No.”
    “Why, I am the ex-Alderman, and I supposed everybody on the East Side knew me. I am the boss of this bank … and my bank is the safest in the world. You ought to put your money in it.”
    The tailor deposited his entire savings of $555, and Louis found dozens more just like him. The kickbacks having been duly handed over, the bank failed within weeks, andLouis was arrested on a charge of grand larceny. The ex-alderman swiftly put his marketing savvy to work, announcing that he himself had made a deposit in the bank just a half hour before it went under. Furthermore, he would pay 50 cents on the dollar to all customers who had accounts of $100 or less.
    “I will have stories in all the papers about my philanthropy to the poor people,” Louis confided to his lawyer. “And I will have pictures of myself, and everybody will think I am a very fine man.”
    A fellow Tammany man posted bail, the press let the story drop, and the scandal fizzled, especially in the Minsky household. To his sons and two daughters Louis Minsky was always above reproach, fully within his right to dispense advice and pass judgment on their respective paths in