🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7554sn$k6t$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
 <jqhart7888@my-dejanews.com> wrote:
>
><snip>
>       The Bronfmans have also had many other adventures,
>   which may be related in a future post.
>

Why?

Bob Valentine

Interesting story. Any further information about dirtbag gangsters
would be most welcome.

Mike

In article <7554sn$k6t$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>, jqhart7888@my-dejanews.com 
wrote:
>
>
>   A long tradition of keeping Slavic peasants
>   inebriated is reflected in many names from the
>   shtetl: Winiarz, Winiarski (for making wine, a legal
>   cover and side business) and  Gorzelnik (the making
>   of vodka or other hard liquor, the dominant business
>   and usually illegal).  One such humble-looking dynasty
>   was the Bronfmans.
>
>   After yet another crackdown on moonshine by the Tsar
>   in 1889, the Bronfmans relocated to a distant yet
>   familiar environment.  They set up shop selling booze
>   to German farmers on the border of Saskatchewan
>   and Montana, the easier to escape the jurisdiction
>   more rigorous at the moment.  Of the four children,
>   Abraham, Alan, Harry, and Samuel, Sam proved to
>   have the most chutzpah, changing the face of
>   the Bronfmans' new-found continent.
>
>   In 1916 Sam and Harry moved back east and opened a retail liquor
>   outlet in Montreal.  The duo are also reported to have started up a
>   chain of "little hotels": according to Bronfman parter James
>   Rutkin, "they sleep very fast.  They rent them quite a few times
>   a night."
>
>   Sam also had stills across Canada near the U.S. border, for instance
>   at his parents' old haunts at Yorkton and Regina, Saskatchewan
>   and a liquor warehouse at Govenlock six miles north of the border
>   on the Wild Horse Trail.  The single-store town of Govenlock made a
>   fortune on  bootlegging, starting illegally when Canadian provinces
>   went dry, then booming when the tables reversed and the U.S. went dry.
>   Another major smuggling point crossed from Manitoba to North
>   Dakota.
>
>   South of the border, in 1919, the 18th Amendment (Prohibition) was
>   passed empowering  the Volstead Act.   Samuel Bronfman made such
>   a fortune bootlegging, all along the U.S./Canadian border but
>   especially from Quebec, that Lake Erie became known as the "Jewish
>   Lake" for his famous speedboats.  He joined forces with Meyer Lansky,
>   "Waxy" Gordon (Irving Wexler), Lucky Luciano, and a host of other
>   mobsters to become the major liquor distributor  in the United States.
>
>   Canada's Parliament also passed in 1919 some restrictions against
>   hard liquor, specifically labelling it a drug.   Harry Bronfman
>   found the loophole: he got a pharmacy license and renamed the
>   family business the Canada Pure Drug Company.
>
>   Samuel Bronfman had problems with the petty racketeers who drove
>   the trucks  across  the  border.  They were too greedy, too numerous,
>   and not trustworthy kinfolk.  Meyer Lansky's Murder, Inc. provided
>   the  essential service of weeding their ranks.
>
>   Bronfman's exports gave birth not only to the modern Mob, but also
>   to modern money laundering, according to financial expert J. Orlin Grabbe:
>
>  Exporting alcohol to the U.S. was not illegal in Canada; it was only 
>illegal to import it from the U.S. side.  Naturally those writing checks  to
>pay for imported Canadian booze didn't like to be so obvious as to  make them
>out to  Bronfman. So the Bronfmans opened up an account  at the Bank of
>Montreal under the fictitious name "J. Norton". Since no  one knew anything
>at all about J.  Norton, money could be wired to this  account from the U.S. 
>Or U.S. cash or checks could be used to purchase  a bank draft made  out to
>"J. Norton" at any branch of the Bank  of Montreal. These drafts could then
>be deposited into the bank  account of any Bronfman-controlled company. The
>company treasurer  would see the name "J. Norton" and credit  the payments to
>the  company's U.S. Booze account.
>
>   Lansky, along with Bronfman and his partners Tibor Rosenbaum
>   and Louis Bloomfield, set up money laundering rings between
>   the U.S., England, Palestine (later Israel), Switzerland,
>   Cuba, the Bahamas, and Canada, among many other locations.  They
>   became intimately familiar with the nature of bank account
>   control and the forgery of bank documents.
>
>   For such a scheme to work requires people at all stages of
>   handling large amounts of money who can be trusted: people of
>   the same kin and religion.  This forms a network of trust, of the
>   same kind that can be found among Chinese merchants in Souteast
>   Asia, for example.
>
>   All told, over half the bootleg shipped to the U.S. during
>   Prohibition was shipped by Samuel Bronfman.  One of the rivals
>   of Bronfman/Lansky partnership was a more famous but lower volume
>   bootlegger, Joe Kennedy.  That rivalry lasted long after Prohibition
>   ended, but that is another story.
>
>   In 1920 Lansky and Bronfman entered into collaboration with "Big
>   Maxie" Greenberg, a veteran Detroit mobster, and Arnold Rothstein,
>   who owned a chain of New York gambling casinos. Rothstein and
>   Bronfman bankrolled the operation, purchasing "safe" sites in Maine
>   to import liquor, while Greenberg went to St. Louis and "Waxy" Gordon
>   took over New Jersey.
>
>   In 1926, Sam and Harry Bronfman negotiated the Canadian
>   distribution rights for Distiller's Company Limited of
>   Edinburgh, London.  This giant British conglomerate
>   sold more than half the world's scotch, and the Bronfmans
>   became the official vehicle whereby they distributed
>   to North America.  DCL's board of directors included
>   Lord Dewar, Field Marshal Earl Haig, Sir Alexander Walker,
>   and so on.  While the Bronfmans in good shtetl tradition
>   laid low and painted for themselves a humble, put-upon
>   portrait, the British lords immortalized themselves as brand
>   names.  The next year, the Bronfmans purchased the old Canadian
>   firm of Seagram's, and began to experiment with "blended"
>   (i.e. watered) whiskey.
>
>   In  1929 Meyer Lansky, "Longy" Zwillman and Louis "Lepke" Buchalter
>   host a meeting of gangland bosses -- including Al Capone, Frank
>   Costello, Charlie "Lucky" Luciano and Johnny Torrio -- at Atlantic
>   City's President Hotel to hammer out a "cartelization" of territories
>   for activities that went far beyond bootlegging. This is the beginning
>   of "Crime, Inc."
>
>   In 1933 Prohibition was repealed. Meyer Lansky, Benjamin Siegelman
>   ("Bugsy" Siegel), Samuel Tucker, Moe Dalitz, Morris Kleinman and
>   Samuel Rothkopf, all of whom escaped prosecution, built a chain of
>   distilleries across the northern United States, selling millions
>   of gallons of alcohol to liquor manufacturers  without bothering to
>   pay excise taxes.  Bronfman, by now worth billions, kept making
>   and selling hard liquor, but also diversified into a wide range of
>   properties, including  Texas Pacific Oil Co. Inc, Ranger Oil,
>   Tropicana, and Dole.
>
>  The end of Prohibition brought major trauma as cash flows in need  of
>protection shrank and mobsters fought over the remaining heroin  and numbers
>rackets.  In 1936 "Dutch" Schultz (portrayed in movies  as a blond German
>villian, but really a black-haired Jewish neighbor  of Lansky and Rothstein),
>divulged plans to assassinate  Thomas E. Dewey, at that time U.S. Attorney
>for New York.  Buchalter and  Lansky had Schultz gunned down and his
>territory  divided among the  cartel.  Dewey then turned his agents loose on
>Buchalter and Shapiro.  The two went into hiding, and set about "eliminating"
>potential talebearers.  Over the next three years more than a hundred
>gangland figures  are purged by "Murder, Inc."
>
>   postscript:
>
>   Arnold Rothstein's son, Murray, would change his name to "Sumner
>   Redstone" and combine a wide array of U.S. media properties into the
>   mass media giant Viacom.  Samuel Bronfman's grandson, Edgar Jr. would
>   buy media giant MCA/Universal.  Both media houses heavily promoted
>   and widely distributed movies featuring Italian-Americans as
>   gangsters, conveniently leaving out the leading roles of their
>   forebears.   The Bronfmans have also had many other adventures,
>   which may be related in a future post.
>
>
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