Meyer Shapiro was born in Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville in 1908. Along with his brothers Irving and Willie, Meyer Shapiro led a gang of Jewish mobsters that controlled the local loan sharking, gambling, and extortion operations. The neighborhood of Brownsville …

Maier Suchowljansky, better known as Meyer Lansky, was born to Polish parents on July 4, 1902, in Grodno, Poland. (Grodno is located in present-day Belarus.) In 1911, the family emigrated to the United States, settling on the Lower East Side …