Retail Gangster

CHAPTER ONE

AS FAR BACK AS HE CAN REMEMBER, SAM E. ANTAR RECALLS WATCHING cash pile up on his uncle’s kitchen table. After every trip out of town, his uncle would place the stiff-sided valise onto the table, snap open the brass latches, and out would come the cash.

Uncle Sam—Sam M. Antar—was pretty much head of the family by the mid-1960s, when his nephew started hanging around. Sammy, as he was known in the family, was a slightly built, bookish kid. His father, Sam M.’s younger brother Eddy, wasn’t around much. Most days he was two hours away in downtown Bridgeport, the fading Connecticut city where he had a children’s clothing store. Sam M. and his sons—Eddie, Allen, and Mitchell—became a kind of surrogate family. They lived not far away, in an attached house on East Third Street in Gravesend, a tranquil Italian-Jewish neighborhood in southern Brooklyn. Sam M. was gone a lot as well, but unlike Eddy he was not tied to a store in a dismal city. Sam M. would be traveling through the country, doing business, cutting deals, and would return not beaten down by demanding customers but “like Marco Polo,” with tales of the great and the peculiar that he encountered on the road. Then he would unload the cash.

Sam M. was the eldest son of Murad Antar, the family patriarch. Becoming the head of the family was a birthright, and the cash piling on his kitchen table in Gravesend brought him to that status while he was in his forties. Murad was revered as part of the generation that had come to America from Syria decades earlier. He had done well for decades, but by the mid-1960s his financial fortunes were on the wane. By the late 1970s he owned a sprawling house on Ocean Parkway, not far from Sam M., but not much else. Unlike Murad, a quiet and reserved man, Sam M. was outgoing and bombastic. He was a window trimmer—a designer of store window displays—and that gave him insights into retailing opportunities everywhere he went. He started buying into stores in the 1950s, and by the 1960s Sam M. had a string of part-owned stores from Brooklyn to Jersey City to Nogales, Arizona, selling everything from shoes to toasters to transistor radios.

The window-trimming business and the stores were lucrative, or so he used to say. He claimed to net $10,000 to $20,000 from each of his window displays, good money at the time, though there’s no way to know for sure, and Sam M. had a tendency to embellish. Many years later, a federal judge would conclude that he had “obtained a rather clear sense of [Sam M.] as hardworking, ambitious, and highly intelligent. I also found him to be a skillful and inveterate liar.” Still, the cash was real enough. He may have lied about how much was in the piles, and if so, what of it? He was accountable to no one, not his family, and certainly not the Internal Revenue Service.

Sam M. would swiftly and expertly sort the bills into denominations, count them, and put them in stacks. Two rubber bands meant fifty to a bundle. Most of the stacks had two rubber bands. A single rubber band meant fewer than fifty bills, and the number would be written in ballpoint pen on the top bill of the stack. He would climb a stepladder in the bedroom closet, lift a loose ceiling panel, and carefully place the cash in the space above it. Or he would put the cash in a file drawer or carefully layer the bills inside a radiator cabinet, snug against the pipes. Some of it went to the bank, and some went to his wife Rose to run the house. But most of the cash went into the ceiling, the bed, or whatever other hiding places were available.

This was the nehkdi, as it was known among Syrians, and it offered a number of benefits. The principal one was, of course, that it was not shared with the government. Employees would get paper bags of cash, off the books, sparing everyone involved the nuisance of paying payroll taxes. Since their wages were tax free, without withholdings, employees would take home more money—quite a bit more—than they’d have gotten from employers who paid the same salaries but had a more fastidious approach to the tax laws. Having all that cash around was no big deal. Sammy later recalled: “It wasn’t something explained. Our dads didn’t sit us down and say, ‘This is nehkdi.’ We just saw and copied, as kids always do. It was part of our early childhood development: reading, writing, and skimming.”

A story was told in the family about the time Murad was carrying thousands of dollars in cash on him and believed that somebody was following him. So he left it in a store run by a fellow Syrian. He said, “Do me a favor, can I just leave this bag here?” The man had the bag for more than a month and a half, two months. He finally called up Murad, who said, “Oh, I forgot the money.” People leave their checkbooks absentmindedly, and Murad did the same with his cash. That was the message of the story, that and the fact that, at times, the Antar family elder did very well financially.

Nehkdi and aversion to paying taxes were a leftover habit from Ottoman Syria, where few services were provided to the populace by the Turkish rulers except conscription and taxation. Murad and his wife Tera left Syria for America in 1920. It was a good time to get out.

The largest Syrian Jewish community was not in the fabled city of Damascus but the less celebrated, but equally ancient, walled city of Aleppo. It was the commercial hub of northern Syria, a way station on the Silk Road to China, and had been home to a sizable Jewish community since biblical times. Most Jewish residents were employed in the souks or ran tiny mercantile businesses and lived in the cramped Bahsita, the Jewish quarter. But wherever they lived, they were subjected to discrimination. Christians and Jews were dhimmis, second-class citizens, “tolerated but not equal.” A special tax, the jizya, was imposed on the Jewish and Christian minorities. But Muslim Syrians were not exempt from the Ottoman obsession with taking their money.

The pashas—provincial governors—bought their titles and demanded tribute from their subjects like Mafia dons. Pashas “were sent to ‘squeeze’ the inhabitants of the town, and they were ‘squeezed’ themselves in return,” a nineteenth-century British consul remarked. Jewish communal life under the Ottomans was changing at the dawn of the twentieth century—for the worse. Jewish people had avoided conscription, and the forced assimilation that came with it, by paying a special tax, but that was ended by the Young Turks in the early twentieth century. Then came World War I and still more violence and hardship. A good segment of Jewish Syrians flocked to New York, where they were a tiny minority in a great sea of Jewish refugees fleeing oppression in Eastern Europe.

The center of Syrian Jewish life in early-twentieth-century New York was a dreadful street on the Lower East Side that was “quite unfit for human habitation,” according to a New York Times editorial published after conditions had improved somewhat. The noise alone made life on this street difficult to bear, but its inhabitants—the poorest of the poor—had little choice. Allen Street was barely thirty feet from curb to curb (twenty-four feet, according to one account), yet the city rammed through the Second Avenue Elevated train line in 1880. That civic improvement gave “the street of perpetual shadow” an ambience “more of a tunnel than a street.” Opium dens abounded, and Allen Street had the highest concentration of brothels in the city. One writer observed that “there beneath the roar [of the elevated trains] an open market in human flesh is conducted. In front of every house there stand women of every age and they call to passerby to buy their flesh.”

Murad and Tera arrived in New York Harbor on June 20, 1920, on the SS France. They traveled second class, as was far more common for immigrants than is now assumed. Doing so meant one disembarked in Manhattan and, unlike third class, avoided the nasty uniformed inspectors at Ellis Island. Murad was listed on the manifest as seventeen and a “teacher.” Actually, he was a twenty-year-old merchant, an occupation shared by the bulk of Syrian Jewish immigrants in Syria and in their new home. Syrians avoided the dismal, low-paying garment-assembly plants that abounded in the city and were the principal employers of Jewish “greenhorns.” Instead, they usually went into business for themselves. If they had some capital, they opened modest stores. If they didn’t, they became peddlers, selling tablecloths, handkerchiefs, and other dry goods from pushcarts and handcarts. A rabbi who worked with Syrian immigrants observed that “though there are many poor in the community, it is on the whole comparatively prosperous.”

The two communities, Syrian (they called themselves “S-Y”) and Eastern European (known unaffectionately among the Syrians as “J-Dubs”), went on divergent paths in America. “Eastern European Jews showed almost from the beginning of their arrival in this country a passion for education that was unique in American history,” observed Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in their 1970 book Beyond the Melting Pot. “My son the doctor” became a cliché, but not among the Syrians. “The Syrian immigrants, unlike their Eastern European counterparts, did not leap to the educational opportunities which the Ashkenazeem [immigrants from Eastern Europe] sought for their children,” observed a Syrian Jewish writer, Joseph A. D. Sutton. Their reluctance stemmed from the assimilation that came with education. Syrian immigrants “wished to avoid as much as possible the acculturation and assimilation of their children, ‘Americanization,’ that had affected almost all other ethnic and religious immigrant groups.” They largely succeeded, and one result was that S-Ys retained a strong Jewish identity and a vibrant religious life into the twenty-first century. That has long been a source of great pride within the community.

Another by-product of the resistance to assimilation was occupational. Though Syrian Jewish youth began pursuing professional careers as the years passed, Sutton noted in 1979 that “as a rule many follow enterprises similar to those of their fathers.” That meant joining the family business, which was usually retail, or starting one themselves. “By conforming to their fathers’ mores they could look to comfortable and remunerative places in the parents’ businesses, and eventually to becoming their successors,” he wrote. “Why, then, abandon the traditional mode of life of the Syrian community with its many rewards and satisfactions?”

Why indeed. So it was unremarkable that all of the Antars’ six children went to work in stores in their teens, and that only Eddy finished high school. Though assimilation was anathema, American values were embraced. Military service was not feared as it was in Syria, and S-Y lads eagerly joined up after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Sam M. and Eddy both served in the Army in Europe during World War II, with Eddy seeing fierce combat with the engineers during the final bloody months of the conflict. Another son, Norman, served during the Korean War.

After the war, Sam M. married Rose Tawil, the daughter of an S-Y dry-goods salesman. Sam turned twenty-five in May 1946, ready to take his place in the community. The couple settled in Brooklyn near their parents, and began to raise a family. Their first offspring was due at the end of 1947. Many prospective parents agonized about naming the baby, but the process was simplified for Syrian Jewish people. The firstborn son was named after the father’s father. The secondborn son was named after the mother’s father, and similar rules applied to girls. This resulted in duplicative names, so S-Ys used spelling variations to avoid confusion.¹

The community’s naming conventions were more than usually important for Sam M. Antar—because he didn’t follow them. A boy was born to Sam M. and Rose on December 18, 1947. He should have been named Mark, which was how Murad was usually Anglicized. Instead, Sam M. and Rose named their newborn baby boy Eddie, which was Ezra Anglicized.

This departure from tradition raised eyebrows, but Sam and Murad had a ready explanation. Murad’s long-dead brother Ezra had appeared to Murad in a dream. Ezra had died young in the late 1930s, leaving an infant son, Solomon. The boy had barely known his father. Ezra, deceased but fearful, was concerned that Solomon might not follow custom when he grew up and had kids. What a shame it would be if no child were ever named after him! Ezra pleaded with his brother. If Sam M.’s first child was a boy, could he please name the baby after Ezra? Murad woke up in a cold sweat. Of course he would comply with this small, understandable request from the Great Beyond.

The “dream story” was a beautiful, sentimental tale, and it was also a lie. Sam M. had a secret. Few in the family knew that he couldn’t name his baby Mark because he already had a son—his true firstborn son—and had given him that name. Sam M. had already been married and divorced. And his first wife was an affront not just to Murad and Tera, but to the entire Syrian Jewish community—not because of anything she had done, but because of who she was.

Public records sketch out an intriguing if incomplete account of Sam M. Antar’s secret family. It’s a story that has its roots in the Levant and the quest for a better life in America, very much like Murad and Tera’s voyage from Aleppo.

Early in 1942 Sam was employed at a linen shop in Akron, Ohio, probably owned by Murad or a family friend. An hour’s drive away in Youngstown, a young woman named Matile Aeube had recently broken with her husband, with whom she’d had three children. She was from Zahlé, a Greek Catholic town in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, and had immigrated with her new Syrian American husband in February 1930. Matile was young. Very young. The ship’s manifest gives her age as seventeen, but public records establish that Matile was fourteen when she arrived in New York Harbor on the SS Byron, and apparently was a child of thirteen when she married Joseph Davis back in Lebanon.

The Davises moved to Youngstown and proceeded to have children. The first, a daughter, came when Matile was fifteen. A son and another daughter followed. Joseph struggled to support the family, working first in a candy shop and then as an elevator operator in a downtown office building. The latter job was paying a paltry $1,200 a year in 1940. Marriages survived in less bleak circumstances back then, but this one did not. They divorced sometime after the Census taker came by in April 1940. Then Matile somehow, somewhere, met Sam M., and by the end of 1941 she was pregnant. They were married in Albuquerque on February 25, 1942, and settled in Los Angeles, where Matile had dreams of becoming a dancer. She came without her three children, who remained in Youngstown with her ex-husband.

It’s easy to imagine the horror felt by Murad and Tera at their eldest son marrying a Christian Arab woman who was six years older, divorced, already had three kids, and was three months pregnant with his child. The Syrian Jewish community was adamantly opposed to intermarriage even when the non-Jewish spouse converted. In 1935 a Syrian beth din rabbinical court in Brooklyn expressed outrage at Jewish-Gentile unions and forbade all marriage-related conversions, which it described as “absolutely invalid and worthless.” Any such person, their spouse, and their offspring were not to be accepted in the community. This was not a small matter for a young Syrian Jewish man, especially if he intended to follow traditional career paths as Sam M. surely did.