Jacob Orgen

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Jacob "Little Augie" Orgen (1894-October 16, 1927) was a New York gangster involved in bootlegging and labor racketeering during Prohibition.

Born to a middle class Orthodox Jewish family, Orgen became a well known labor slugger for Benjamin "Dopey Benny" Fein by the early 1900s. After Fein's conviction in 1917, Orgen soon formed his own gang, known as the "Little Augies", shortly after the gang war between "Kid Dropper" Nathan Kaplan and Johnny Spanish in 1919.

Quickly becoming a formidable rival, Orgen gradually built up a powerful organization which including members such as gunmen Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro, and Jack Diamond. Orgen, allied with Solomon Schapiro, would continue challenging Kaplan over labor slugging activities, particularly in the garment district, and in 1923, a gang war broke out after a dispute over striking "wet wash" laundry workers.

After several months of fighting, including a particularly violent gunfight of Essex Street resulting in the deaths of two bystanders, Kaplan was murdered by gunman Louis Kushner on August 28, 1923. With Kaplan's death, Orgen gained complete control over labor racketeering.

However, city officials soon began investigating union racketeering in New York which threatened to expose other criminal operations. In 1927, through intermediary Louis Buchalter (although some sources claim Meyer Lansky), Orgen was advised by Arnold Rothstein [1] in an attempt to persuade Orgen to concentrate instead on infiltrating labor unions instead of traditional labor slugging and strong arm tactics. Although Orgen had started to move into bootlegging, supplying Broadway night clubs and speakeasies with Diamond by 1925, Orgen refused to cease labor slugging operations.

On October 16, 1927, while walking on Norfolk Street in a Manhattan neighborhood on the Lower East Side, Orgen was killed by Buchalter and Shapiro in a drive-by shooting. Orgen bodyguard Jack Diamond was also seriously wounded during the attack. Buried in Mount Judah Cemetery by his father, who had disowned him after he formed the "Little Augies" in 1919, Orgen's cemetery nameplate reads simply "Jacob Orgen, Age 25 Years".

[edit] Further reading

Fried, Albert. The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. ISBN 0-231-09683-6
O'Kane, James M. The Crooked Ladder: Gangsters, Ethnicity and the American Dream. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1994. ISBN 0-7658-0994-X
Pietrusza, David. Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003. ISBN 0-7867-1250-3

[edit] References

Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928. ISBN 1-56025-275-8
Kelly, Robert J. Encyclopedia of Organized Crime in the United States. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000. ISBN 0-313-30653-2
Sifakis, Carl. The Mafia Encyclopedia. New York: Da Capo Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8160-5694-3
Sifakis, Carl. The Encyclopedia of American Crime. New York: Facts on File Inc., 2001. ISBN 0-8160-4040-0