Joseph “Doc” Stacher (born Gdale Oistaczer, 1902-1977) was a “a genial, shrewd, witty gent” who could be “homicidally tough,” wrote “Voice of Broadway” columnist Jack O’Brian (Monroe News-Star, March 17, 1977). Closely aligned with fellow Jewish Mobsters, Meyer Lansky and Abner “Longie” Zwillman, this immigrant had “galvanic” power and extreme wealth.

Here are some facts about Stacher that provide insight into the man and his life in organized crime.

1) Stacher was involved in various gambling businesses in North and South America, from slot machine distribution and bookmaking to casino ownership and management.

2) Throughout the years Stacher owned various pieces of real estate and commercial enterprises. His many assets included two homes, one in Beverly Hills, California and the other in Orange, New Jersey; nightclubs in California; hotel-casinos in Las Vegas, Nevada and New York (oftentimes, as a silent partner); and assorted other businesses. He even owned a hidden stake in Columbia Pictures. With Zwillman, Stacher owned Runyon Sales Co., which manufactured and distributed automatic coin-operated machines.

“[Stacher] was worth many millions (some experts’ estimates say he still can put his canny hands on upwards of $100 million at any given, or taken, moment,” wrote O’Brian (Monroe News-Star, 1971).

3) Between ages 22 and 26, while an active member of the Bugs and Meyer Mob during the 1920s, Stacher racked up a slew of arrests and charges:

1924, November 26:     breaking, entering and larceny
1926, April 21:               assault and battery
1926, August 18:           assault and battery
1927, June 7:                atrocious assault and battery
1927, July 11:                atrocious assault and battery
1927, August 15:           robbery
1927, December 4:       interfering with an officer guarding a still for federal authorities
1927, December 9:       atrocious assault and battery
1928, May 29:               an “open charge,” which later was dismissed

4) At Lansky’s request, Stacher organized a 1931 meeting, at the Franconia Hotel, of all of the top New York-area Jewish mobsters. They decided, at the conference, to join forces with the U.S.-based Italian Mafia. Charles “Lucky” Luciano, representing the Italian Mafioso, agreed, and the National Crime Syndicate was formed.

5) Stacher first got in tax trouble in 1952, when the Internal Revenue Bureau (IRB) claimed he owed $340,000 (about $3.6 million today) in unpaid taxes for the nine years between 1933 and 1941. After the IRB issued liens against him, Stacher paid the amount in full.

6) In the same year, a federal grand jury in New York indicted Stacher on charges of illegal gambling and conspiracy in connection with the Arrowhead Inn (which he’d owned with Lansky during the 1920s). After successfully fighting extradition from Nevada for a year, Stacher eventually returned to The Empire State in 1953 and pleaded guilty to 20 charges. He was fined $10,000 ($104,000 today) and given a one-year suspended jail sentence.

7) The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) revoked Stacher’s citizenship in 1956 and sought to deport him. This was because he hadn’t not disclosed his criminal record on his citizenship application 26 years earlier. The INS could not return Stacher to his homeland (what now is Poland), however, because federal law forbade deportations to Communist countries.

8) Stacher pleaded guilty, in 1964, to two counts of evading payment of federal taxes. He was fined $10,000 and given the choice of going to prison or leaving the country. He opted for the latter and sought refuge in Israel. Its Law of Return, passed in 1950, granted every Jew the right to immigrate there and become an Israeli citizen.

9) A rabbi/member of the Knesset, or Israeli parliament, defrauded Stacher. Worried that Israel would refuse him citizenship, Stacher asked friend Frank Sinatra to seek help from this politician who owed the crooner a favor. Also, Stacher donated to the same man $100,000 ($897,000 today) to be used for charitable purposes. The rabbi/Knesset member, though, used the money to build the Central Hotel in Jerusalem.

“Outraged at being ripped off, Stacher sued in a court case that drew headlines and laughs throughout the country,” reported Mafia Stories. “Israelis were amused that such a giant figure in American crime could be so taken by a meek-looking rabbi.”

Eventually, Stacher recouped the money.

10) Stacher passed away in a Munich, West Germany, hotel room on February 28, 1977, reportedly from a heart attack, and his body was transported back to Israel. There, only eight people, all men, attended his funeral. He was buried secretly and the name on his grave was changed to conceal his interment site.

——————————

Sources

The maximum security, federal prison opened in 1934 on Alcatraz Island, 1.25 miles from the coast of San Francisco, California. The facility housed 1,576 of the U.S.’ most dangerous felons, treatment of whom was, at times, brutal and inhumane there. Over time, the penitentiary infrastructure deteriorated to the point where it needed rehabbing. The U.S. government deemed it more prudent to build a new prison rather than overhaul Alcatraz and closed it in 1963.

Among the 1,576 criminals for whom The Rock was home for some duration are five Mobster-gamblers. They are:

Whitey Bulger

In 1956, at age 27, James Joseph Bulger, Jr. (1929-2018) Bulger found himself locked up in the U.S. Federal Penitentiary, Atlanta, facing 20 years for armed robbery of several banks and truck hijacking. When the warden learned the inmate had been plotting to escape, he had Bulger transferred to Alcatraz in 1959. Bulger remained imprisoned there until 1962, then served the rest of his time at two other federal prisons. He was paroled in 1965.

Subsequently, he was an enforcer for the Winter Hill Gang in Somerville (near Boston), Massachusetts. By 1979, he’d became the boss and controlled a large part of Boston’s bookmaking, drug dealing and loansharking operations. While in power, he sanctioned numerous murders and turned FBI informant in 1975.

Bulger went into hiding in the mid-1990s, thereby landing on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list. He eluded capture until 2011, after which he was tried and found guilty of 11 murders, federal racketeering, extortion and conspiracy.

After FBI agents found and arrested Bulger, he told CNN, “If I could choose my epitaph on my tombstone, it would be, ‘I’d rather be in Alcatraz,'” CBS in San Francisco reported (Aug. 12, 2013).

Frankie Carbo

Paul John Carbo (1904-1976) began his life of crime as a gunman for the New York-based Murder, Inc. enforcement-for-hire group. (He was arrested 17 times for murder and rumored to have assassinated Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.)

Eventually, Carbo became a member of the New York City Mafia’s Lucchese crime family, a partner in a New Jersey bookmaking ring and a corrupt boxing promoter.

“Frankie Carbo had become the Mob’s unofficial commissioner for boxing and controlled many fighters,” Gary Jenkins wrote in Gangland Wire. In that role, he illegally generated revenue from stealing part of boxers’ purses, fixing bouts and gambling on those.

One of Carbo’s various boxing extortion schemes involved muscling in on the promotional rights to boxer Don Jordan after he won the world welterweight championship in 1958. Carbo was caught threatening promoter Jackie Leonard and convicted of conspiracy and extortion in a trial Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy prosecuted.

The feds sent Carbo to Alcatraz with a 25-year federal prison sentence. When the penitentiary closed in 1963, Carbo was relocated to the McNeil Island Corrections Center in Washington.

Charles Carrollo

For many years, Charles Vincent Carrollo (1902-1979) was the Kansas City Mafia’s lug man, collector of the tax it charged the gambling houses to operate. The Combine controlled a $20 million ($307 million today) a year gambling business in the city as well as other rackets. When the boss John Lazia was assassinated, Carrollo took over as the top dog.  

His reign was short-lived, though, because soon after, he was convicted separately of tax evasion, mail fraud (using the U.S. postal service to promote a gambling scheme) and perjury for lying on his naturalization form. While doing his eight years at the U.S. Federal Penitentiary, Leavenworth, he was caught trafficking narcotics and liquor into the facility. For that, he was sent to Alcatraz in 1943, where he stayed until he was granted parole in 1946.

Mickey Cohen

After 20-plus years of working for the National Crime Syndicate in Los Angeles, Meyer Harris Cohen (1913-1976) lost his battle with the Internal Revenue Service in 1961. At age 49, he was imprisoned at Alcatraz for a 15-year stint for evading and underpaying his federal income taxes.

He served three months there then bonded out, the only Alcatraz prisoner to do so. After six months of freedom, he had to go back. Twenty-eight days after his return, fellow inmates John and Clarence Anglin escaped the supposedly impenetrable island prison. Allegedly, Cohen had arranged for a boat to pick up the brothers and for help getting them to South America.

“All of these big named people — Mickey Cohen, Whitey Bulger — they all wanted somebody to try it and make it,” one of the Anglin’s nephews, David Widmer, told a news outlet in 2016. “If somebody made it, they would all get out.”

Cohen’s involvement in gambling went back to his years in Chicago during Prohibition. There, he worked for the Outfit, both running card games and other forms of illegal gambling and as an enforcer.

Eventually, Meyer Lansky and Louis “Lou” Rothkopf sent Cohen to the West Coast to help Siegel gain control of the territory. There, Siegel and Cohen established a horse racing wire service, launched operations in bookmaking, other gambling, prostitution and drugs, and controlled the labor unions.

Bumpy Johnson

Ellsworth Raymond Johnson’s (1905-1968) career in illegal gambling started with shooting dice for money as a youth. Later, as the head of organized crime in New York’s Harlem, he ran a $50 million ($750 million today) a year numbers, or policy, game, in an alliance with Charles “Lucky” Luciano.

To obtain that business, Johnson “ran roughshod over the numbers bosses of Harlem, giving them the option of working for him or losing their businesses altogether,” reported the New York Post (Sept. 23, 2019). “Most accepted the former and took $200-per-week ($3,000 a week today) salaries, forsaking the thousands they earned on their own.”

Johnson expanded his empire to narcotics, which led to his 1953 conviction and 15-year prison sentence for selling heroin. Ultimately, he served 10 years, at Alcatraz.

—————————————-

Photo of Alcatraz Island: by D. Ramey Logan, from Wikimedia Commons 

Sources