The Incorruptibles

A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld

By: Dan Slater

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

Length: 9 hrs

Publisher's summary

This harrowing tale of early twentieth century New York reveals the true stories of an immigrant underworld, a secret vice squad, and the rise of organized crime.

In the early 1900s, prior to World War I, New York City was a vortex of vice and corruption. On the Lower East Side, then the most crowded ghetto on earth, Eastern European Jews formed a dense web of crime syndicates. Gangs of horse poisoners and casino owners, pimps and prostitutes, thieves and thugs, jockeyed for dominance while their family members and neighbors toiled in the unregulated garment industry.

But when the notorious murder of a gambler attracted global attention, a coterie of affluent German-Jewish uptowners decided to take matters into their own hands. Worried about the anti-immigration lobby and the uncertain future of Jewish Americans, the uptowners marshalled a strictly off-the-books vice squad led by an ambitious young reformer.

The squad, known as the Incorruptibles, took the fight to the heart of crime in the city, waging war on the sin they saw as threatening the future of their community. Their efforts, however, led to unforeseen consequences in the form of a new mobster class who realized, in the country’s burgeoning reform efforts, unprecedented opportunities to amass power.

In this mesmerizing and atmospheric account, drawn from never-before-seen sources and peopled with unforgettable characters, Dan Slater tells an epic and often brutal saga of crime and redemption, exhuming a buried history that shaped our modern world.

©2024 Dan Slater (P)2024 Little, Brown & Company

Critic reviews

“An extraordinary glimpse into old New York’s cauldron of crime, labor, and the Jewish immigrant experience—Slater draws on the recollections of reformers and gangsters alike to put you right in the rooms and the alleyways.”—Paul Collins, author of The Murder of The Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars and Blood & Ivy: The 1849 Murder That Scandalized Harvard

“What a great book! The Incorruptibles is a true-crime page-turner that I could not put down. Even those who think they know a lot about the history of organized crime in New York City will know so much more after finishing this fascinating book.”—Tyler Anbinder, author of Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York

“If you want to visit New York’s Lower East Side of our great-grandparents, the tenement world of sweatshops, hop joints, and Jewish gangsters, you can build a time machine and set the destination to 1912, or read Dan Slater's wonderful book The Incorruptibles. In prose nearly hallucinatory in its clarity, Dan Slater dramatizes the uptown/ downtown battle that created our modern world as surely as the Spanish American War did. It's nothing but characters, this book—episodes and dazzling excitement."—Rich Cohen, author of When the Game Was War: The NBA’s Greatest Season and Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams