The Incorruptibles & Organized Jewish Crime in New York City in the Early 20th Century

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the capital of Jewish America, was the most crowded neighborhood on earth, with over 700 people per acre. On some blocks, the population density was an astounding 1600 people per acre. The extreme crowding led to disease, unemployment, risk of fire, educational challenges, poverty, and inevitably, crime. Those who could find work were often exploited by their employers, working long hours for little pay, in dangerous and unregulated environments. It was in these conditions that the deadliest industrial disaster in New York City history occurred. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in Greenwich Village, not far from the Lower East Side, on March 25, 1911, killed 146 garment workers, most of them recent Jewish or Italian immigrant women and girls. With so few options, some residents turned to crime, from pickpocketing and prostitution, to running underground casinos and protection schemes. One of the kingpins of organized crime in Manhattan was Arnold Rothstein, born on January 17, 1882. Rothstein's father Abraham, the owner of a cotton goods wholesaler was known as Abe the Just, because of his generous philanthropy, and his skill in mediating disputes. Arnold had no interest in following his father's footsteps, instead operating an off track betting business and then a casino. He was known as the Big Bankroll, financing cons and fixing sporting events like horse races. Part of the success of criminals like Rothstein was due to the corruption of cops in the NYPD, who would, for a fee, look the other way or destroy evidence. If the NYPD wasn't going to solve the problem, someone else needed to. In 1908, German Jews uptown formed the New York Kehillah, named for a Hebrew word meaning community. It was also called the Jewish community of New York City. They tapped Rabbi Judah L. Magnes as chairman. The German Jewish population uptown had immigrated earlier, and was well established in the city. They had long provided charity for the more recent Jewish immigrant population from Russia, building hospitals, orphanages and settlement houses on the Lower East Side. After the very public murder of bookmaker Herman Rosenthal, by Jewish gangsters in 1912, the Kehillah became concerned about the effect that public attention on Jewish crime would have on proposed anti immigrant legislation. Just a few years earlier, NYPD police commissioner, Theodore Bingham had published a piece blaming what he called Russian Hebrews, saying that Jewish people were responsible for half the city's crimes. In the wake of the ensuing scandal, Bingham was forced to retract his claims, blaming unreliable statistics. Rabbi Magnes suggested to the Kehillah that they organize a vigilance league to put pressure on the corrupt police department to do something about the crime. The Kehillah tapped Abe Shoenfeld, son of labor leader, Meyer Schoenfeld to lead the effort. In 1911, Abe, then only 20 years old, had begun freelancing as an investigator for reform committees, writing reports on prostitution in the city. But he was frustrated that the reports never changed anything. Rabbi Magnes met with Shoenfeld just weeks after the Rosenthal murder, and he piqued Shoenfeld's interest, saying, "Investigation without action is a habit that ranks high among the credentials of hell." As a first assignment, Magnes gave Shoenfeld $2,500 to identify an NYPD cop who was being paid off by Dollar John Langer, then the biggest East Side gambler. Shoenfeld succeeded. After other early successes, New York Mayor William Gaynor, agreed to bring Shoenfeld and lawyer Harry Newberger into the NYPD. In 1913, Newberger was named third Deputy Police Commissioner, and Shoenfeld, keeping a lower profile, was officially his secretary. In the NYPD, they joined forces with trusted cops, like Honest Dan Costigan and Isabella Goodwin, the NYPD's first female detective. Together they were "The Incorruptibles," those who couldn't be bought. The Incorruptibles  quickly set to work, raiding casinos, capturing drug dealers, chasing after pickpockets, and crusading against prostitution rings. Shoenfeld continued to write up reports for the Kehillah, who in turn continued to provide funds for the operation. Sometimes, though, their efforts were closer to vigilantism than policing. As Shoenfeld once told the team,  "I don't think we should be very much enamored with the possibilities of court convictions, because it seems that in most important cases, we cannot get them. My firm belief, however, is that since the means justify the ends, we should admit for the present time that it is necessary to fight the evil with less law and more force." Regardless of their tactics, they were successful in fighting crime in the Lower East Side. Perhaps too successful, as the disruption of the criminal element destabilize the economy of the neighborhood. Mayor Gaynor died suddenly of a heart attack in September, 1913, and his elected successor, John Purroy Mitchel, had no interest in keeping Newberger and Shoenfeld in the NYPD. The Incorruptibles disbanded in February, 1914. That spring, Newberger and Shoenfeld set up a private office funded by the Kehillah, but as Europe headed toward war that summer, the Kehillah lost interest in the vigilance committee, turning its attention abroad. By 1917, they stopped funding Shoenfeld and Newburger altogether. The Incorruptibles may have folded, but crime didn't. Arnold Rothstein continued his criminal enterprise. Although never convicted, he was suspected of having paid off eight members of the Chicago White Sox to throw the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds, and when the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the manufacture, sale or transportation of alcohol went into effect in January, 1920, Arnold Rothstein recognized it as a business opportunity. And he became one of the biggest bootleggers in the nation. Rothstein was so notorious that he inspired the character of Meyer Wolfsheim in the 1925 novel, "The Great Gatsby." Rothstein's downfall came at the end of a gun barrel. He was murdered in 1928. After publishing a novel in 1927, Abe Shoenfeld shifted his investigative direction, working for the American Jewish Committee from 1938 to 1964, gathering intelligence on anti semitic organizations and individuals. He died in New York City in 1977 at the age of 86. Joining me now is writer Dan Slater, author of, "The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld."

Kelly  10:54  
Hi, Dan, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dan Slater  10:57  
Hi, Kelly. Thanks for having me.

Kelly  10:59  
Yes, I'm excited to talk to you. So I want to start by asking how you got interested in this topic. You've written a couple of other books, but they were on other topics, so how you got started on this? 

Dan Slater  11:10  
"The Incorruptibles" came about in I think what what is sort of a common way for for subjects to come about, especially for nonfiction people. It was through research on a previous project. I was researching a story about six or seven years ago, that I hoped would become a book, but it became a magazine piece. And it was about a group of Orthodox rabbis in the tri state area, New York, New Jersey, who had a little gang, and their their sort of sideline in the underworld was assaulting husbands who refused to give their wives religious divorces. So in the Orthodox world, for a woman to be released from the bonds of marriage, the husband has to sign a contract. This is a biblically mandated thing that goes back 1000s of years. So I was researching that story, and I was reading a lot about the history of violence in the Jewish community, and in my reading and research, I came back often to this period in New York City before World War I, you know, the Jewish underworld of the Lower East Side. And the Lower East Side was a subject I often I was, I was interested in going back to my childhood, didn't yet even know that I had my own roots there, something I found out later. But I stumbled upon this amazing story of a vice crusade that was essentially sponsored and launched by these wealthy people who lived on mainly the Upper East Side, you know, the Uptowners, the Gilded Age people who lived in mansions. They were the German Jews, who arrived in the US a few generations before the Eastern European refugees. And they were kind of embarrassed, but by, you know, what was happening. And so they wanted to wipe out the crime downtown. And they took it upon themselves to do so. So that that was the kernel of the story that I you know, that I sort of found in like a footnote. And it was really seductive. I had to know more. And that was, that was the beginning of the project that set me on this six year path of research and writing. And it's going to culminate in a couple of weeks when the book comes out. So it's exciting. 

Kelly  13:29  
Can you talk some about the research that you did, the sources that you were able to tap into, because you end up being able to get incredible detail into this? So you know, where are you pulling from? 

Dan Slater  13:40  
Yeah, thanks. The sources, the source material on this project was amazing. I had never done a narrative before that was exclusively historical. I dealt with history in previous books. But I was always writing on modern day themes, writing about people who for the most part, were, you know, still around and alive, and I could do interviews with them and go see where they lived and, and everything. Here, there was no one to speak to. This was really the world of our great grandparents, and even a little bit older than that. So, you know, you go into the archives. And so there were library archives, and they consisted of all different kinds of material. I did come across some unpublished memoirs, including one by my main character. There was a memoir by the wife of one of the other main characters, and although it had been published, it hadn't really been read. So there were those memoirs, there were the oral histories on file at the New York Public Library. Those were an incredible resource. And one of my best resources was a cache of trial transcripts, at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan on 59th St. They have an incredible collection of trial transcripts there from the courts in Manhattan. And the dates on those, I think the earliest are like 1893, and the latest ones are about 1927. So they cover about a 30-35 year period. But the bulk of those transcripts are from years that kind of were right around when my story was happening, like 1908, to about 1915. And many of those transcripts dealt with, you know, the stories that I was going to be telling in the book. So trial transcripts, as you know, journalists know, trial transcripts are just incredible sources, because it's it's, it's your one chance to hear from the actual people. And these are people who don't live in the overworld. They don't deal with media, they don't do interviews, they often lack formal education. And so everything is very raw and very unfiltered, which is what what you want when you're trying to write. You want to cut through the filters. So there was the oral history, there were the trial transcripts, and then another amazing resource what and this is not original, but I felt like I had a great way into it technologically, was newspapers. I think, I think ancestry.com purchased newspapers.com. And I don't, I don't know exactly, but I feel like that happened about a decade ago, because ancestry was finding that people would sign up for ancestry. And they would get the names of their relatives and their forebears. And the first thing they want to do is to search for them in newspapers. So in the past decade or so newspapers.com has been bulked up a lot. They have sunk a lot of money into that. And every week, it continues to grow and grow the database. And the search engine is very good. It's very powerful. And there were a couple of years there during the writing process when it was sort of those dark political years of 2018, you know, 19, when I just couldn't read modern day newspapers anymore. And I actually stopped my New York Times subscription for a couple of years. And instead, I just sat down every day, and I read newspapers from 1911, '12, and '13. And it was it was just amazing, because I knew on a granular level, what was happening in a given week or month during the period that I was writing about. And a lot of that stuff wasn't directly pertinent to the narrative, but it it sort of influenced my understanding of what was happening in the context of the story.

Kelly  17:49  
So let's talk about that context a little bit, then. So the Lower East Side of New York at this time, it's crowded, really crowded. Yeah, there's a lot of people trying to trying to make a living. What is this like that's going to give rise to these people in your story and the events of your story?

Dan Slater  18:09  
So the interesting thing about the context of this story, and the Lower East Side, and you know, the ghetto of the Lower East Side, was that by about 1910, the Lower East Side of New York, and we're talking about, you know, south of 14th Street, east of the Bowery. I don't know how many square miles that area is, but it's not huge. It was the most densely packed urban area in the world. There were some square blocks that had over 1000 people on the square block living and the people who lived there, were fleeing or had fled from another ghetto, which was a much different kind of a ghetto, not the most densely packed, but the largest in terms of area. And that was the Pale of Settlement, which was the western part of Russia, that bordered, you know, Poland and stuff. And that was where the Jews of Russia were forced to, to, to, to to live and they were slaughtered during pogroms, over many, many decades during during the 19th century. So you have people that are fleeing the largest ghetto, and then settling in the most densely packed one. And in both of those places, there had been a criminal underworld as there as there is when you have marginalization and poverty. So that was that was the context that gave rise to the story that I'm telling in "The Incorruptibles."

Kelly  19:42  
One of the interesting things that happens, of course, is some of these things are legal to begin with, and then they are criminalized and people have to sort of shift what they're doing is legal and all of a sudden illegal or that you know, they're moving into different spaces. Could you talk a little bit about that out as the the landscape of politics changes, as the laws themselves change, what that does to the criminal element in the city? 

Dan Slater  20:11  
So at the heart of the story in the book is this vice crusade, this war on crime that was led by a bunch of reformers, people who wanted to wipe out the underworld of the ghetto for one reason or another. So you had the wealthy uptowners, who are the assimilated Jews who just wanted to blend into America. They had done very well here, and they wanted to keep doing well. And they wanted to continue to overcome social anti semitism and to be accepted. And these eastern European refugees from Eastern Europe, you know, their coreligionists were giving them a bad name. So they wanted to wipe out, you know, the crime. The interesting thing about this story is that as that very personal narrative is unfolding, it's unfolding against the backdrop of, as you say, the establishment of a bunch of new laws that are meant to wipe out vice as well. And one of a couple of the trends that gave rise to those laws were the prohibition movement for alcohol, which begins back around the time of the Civil War, and that had been trying to get going for decades, without much success. And it starts to gain traction in the 1890s, at the same time, that prostitution and the spread of venereal disease is becoming a big social issue, around 1900, 1903, 1904. And about the prostitution debate, the center of that was the Jewish prostitution on the Lower East Side. It was a very organized world, there was like a, you know, a union/fraternity of pimps, who gathered at a local cafe on Second Avenue and they were actually incorporated under New York state law. They had bylaws and a constitution that provided for you know, unemployment and burial rights for you know, their members. It was a big industry. And so in the first decade of the 20th century, you see the rise of these new laws against vice, first at the state level, and then eventually at the federal level. So for instance, around I think 1906, you first see marijuana made illegal at the state level, I believe in DC and California. And then that began to spread. You see alcohol become illegal at you know, the state level. And then you see a federal law that tries to get at prostitution come around around 1910. And so these laws are kind of coming into being at the same time, as you know, the group of people in New York and in other cities are trying to wipe out the underworld. So those laws obviously became a tool for for them and a tool that helps them at the beginning. And then as we see later comes back to kind of bite them in the butt a little bit.

Kelly  23:26  
Let's talk about this main group of incorruptibles. So you've got, as you mentioned, there's financing that's from the German Jews in the Upper East Side. There is these people who become at various points embedded within the police department. But that's tricky because of course, the police are corrupt as well. So you know, what, what is sort of the the main heart of this and their, their mission changes a little bit over time, but you know, what, what are they coming together to do?

Dan Slater  23:56  
Yeah, so I would say that the story I'm telling in the book begins with a guy named Abe Shoenfeld, who is a young man born to Hungarian Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side. And he's born in the 1890s. And he is the son of a very prominent reformer, a guy named Meyer Schoenfeld, who comes here, as many Hungarians did, as many Russians did as a tailor. And the, the, the Hungarians were kind of like the aristocracy of the Lower East Side. They were a little bit arrogant. They came from a country that was known for its tailors. So when they got to New York, they were the most sought after tailors in the garment industry. And so Abe's dad was kind of prominent in the garment business, and he eventually becomes a union leader in the 1890s when Abe is a baby. And he led some of the first garment strikes, and so Abe was raised  around around this world of activism. Eventually, when Abe was about 10, in the early years of the 20th century, his father takes a pivot. And he pivots to, he says, "Alright, I have not made any success here really in the garment industry, advocating for labor rights and stuff." That was very, very hard to do because he was not backed yet by any laws. Employers were pretty much not regulated by anything. There were no laws against child labor. There were no laws regulating factory safety, etc, etc. And so Abe's dad pivots to vice reform in the early 1900s, but again, has a lot of trouble making headway because of the corrupt political and law enforcement system at at the time. The Jewish underworld was notoriously very well organized, because the people operating in it were coming from generations and generations of marginalized ancestors, who had done similar things in Russia, and before that elsewhere. And they knew how to organize an industry, whether it was completely legal, completely illegal, or somewhere in the middle. And so that, that industry, whether we're talking about the gambling business, the prostitution business, that generated lots and lots of money. And so the underworld is very closely aligned with Tammany Hall and the politicians. Tammany also had a lot of influence over the police department. And so it was hard to make headway in 1901, 1905. But by the time 1911, 1912 comes along, things have changed. There are now laws that are regulating vice. And that's when our, when you know our character Abe is 20, 21 years old. And that's when our story really starts to get going. Abe is sort of identified by the wealthy uptowners as a young man who could be helpful in accomplishing what they want to accomplish. And that's when he gets sort of you know, called in and assigned the job of trying to clean up the underworld of the Lower East Side, which at the time, surely seemed to him and everybody else like a very unlikely project. And we follow the book, the book follows him through that.

Kelly  27:38  
From the setup, people might be thinking, "Okay, well, there's clearly bad guys, the you know, the the underworld and there's, there's good guys. There's Abe, and there's the Incorruptibles." But it's really so much more nuanced than that. And that really comes through in the story that you're telling, that you've got people who yes, are bad guys, quote, unquote, but are offering protection in a way that the police aren't. You've got The Incorruptibles, but then, you know, as they go along there, their methods and motives start to shift a little bit. So can you talk a little bit about that? And about writing through the nuance of these people who are complicated and there the situations are complicated?

Dan Slater  28:21  
Yeah, that's a great question, the sort of, you know, the gray area of it all. Abe starts off as a vice crusader, as an anti vice crusader. This is the sort of the legacy that he's inherited from his father, and from the people of the generation before him. And the goal at first or rather, the motivation at first is it's really a feeling of shame. You're a Jewish guy in the ghetto. You know, the girls that you went to school with are getting turned out on the street. There's prostitution all over. Every address on Allen Street, contained a prostitute of one kind or another, if not a full blown brothel. It was everywhere. And there were also other things that went along with ghetto life that were embarrassing and shameful that he felt that there was too much noise. He felt that the streets were disgusting. And he had to walk through, you know, the fish market on Delancey Street and, you know, ankle high in the, you know, the muck and he just wanted to see things nicer, and he wanted the Jewish people to have a better reputation in America. So that's the original motivation. That was part of like the dream. If I could have anything, I would have more of an upright, upstanding neighborhood. But then what happens is he attains this position that he'd never imagined obtaining. And he has a level of success with it that he never imagined having. And I think with a lot of people, like for instance, like a revolutionary, you start off with the dream. And you go for it. And part of the dream is obtained. But then you kind of don't know when to stop. How far am I going to go? How far am I going to push it? And this young man who's kind of an angry 21 year old, who's very brilliant, and all of a sudden has unlimited resources at his back, 10s of 1000s of dollars that he's been given by the German Jewish uptowners, and you know, $50,000 at the time to Abe was, you have to multiply that by about 20 to get today's dollars. So imagine handing like 21 year old guy half a million bucks, and saying, "We don't, we don't need the receipts, just go." And then you have the mayor installing him in the NYPD and letting him hand pick his own squad of cops. So he's got all this power, and he has a limited time he knows to accomplish what he wants to accomplish. So we do see him push the envelope. So it goes from I want to clean up my neighborhood to I want to basically change human biology, so that we don't have any, any more gambling or any kind of prostitution at all. He didn't like movie theaters, because movie theaters were these often pretty disgusting places, where a lot of bad things happened inside the movie theater. It wasn't just the corruption of crime films. It was worse than that. He didn't like the dance halls. He didn't like saloons. And so we see him push and push and push. And so the mission definitely changes throughout the book throughout the story of the book. And what's interesting about Abe's personal story is that it does mirror the larger story of the reform movement. Because just like Abe goes too far, the country too eventually goes even further than Abe, and say, "We're going to stamp out alcohol entirely." And that, of course, leads to the very return of the thing that he originally set out to, to eradicate.

Kelly  32:16  
Could you talk a little bit about the women in this story? They're not the main characters, but there's some really important women who show up throughout this story and are in some cases, the ones who leave a memoir or record or that really helps us sort of get into that, like, what is everybody else thinking? 

Dan Slater  32:34  
Yeah, there are a lot of incredible women in the story. One of my favorite characters that again, I stumbled across in sort of deep archival documents was Antonia Rolnick, whose nickname in the underworld is "Tony the Tough." And I feel like her story was, on the one hand kind of extreme. And on the other hand, I think it was pretty reflective of the plight of Eastern European Jewish girls, who came to the Lower East Side. They accounted for something like 80% of the garment industry's workforce. They usually left school around eighth grade, if they went at all. And they entered the business, worked in factories. The struggle that a lot of them faced was, was obviously poverty. And meanwhile there was this, this bustling prostitution industry around them everywhere. So for many of those girls, and again, I use the word girls, because we're talking about people that, you know, are 13,14,15,16. The, you know, the choice they faced or the pit that they were trying to avoid was, "Let's not become a prostitute. Let's not let our situation get desperate enough that we need to go there." And so that world was fascinating to me. Well, for many reasons, but one of the reasons is that if you went to somebody today, and you mentioned this time, and this place, New York City prior to World War I, the Reform Movement, if they've heard of any part of that they probably have heard of the garment industry and the strikes, because these were the girls who really galvanized the labor rights move, as well as the wealthy daughters uptown who hadn't yet really got their suffragette movement going. So the wealthy were looking downtown at the ghetto girls and saying, "Wow, they can teach us something about how to really organize, how to get attention for a cause." So these young women were amazing, and yet, they weren't all the Clara Lemlich and the Pauline Newman and the women that we that we read about today in the history books. Some of them wound up in the underworld. And so Tony the Tough was an example of that. And we see her you know, have a relationship with Abe when they're really young teenagers, and that doesn't work out. And she goes back to to prostitution. And then they keep sort of crossing paths again and again throughout the book. So she's an important figure and she's representative of that whole world, I feel like. Another woman in the story who lived a much different situation, but in some ways similar was the wife of Arnold Rothstein. Arnold Rothstein's wife was not really an operative in the underworld, but her husband was ended up being, you know, the king of it in many ways, and she was brilliant. She happened to be a great writer who wrote a book about her life with Arnold shortly after he died in 1928. And her book became a big source of material for me when I was trying to tell Arnold's story. Arnold, I would say is sort of the second main figure in in the book.

Kelly  36:07  
You mentioned earlier that you discovered you had a family connection to this area. Could you talk a little bit about that, and what it was like to sort of discover that and figure out how you fit into the story?

Dan Slater  36:19  
Yeah, that was over my kind of reporting years in my adventures as as a reporter, and a researcher, and a writer, I've definitely had some interesting experiences that a lot of journalists do. But this was one of the crazier ones. I had known that I had ancestors from this time, but not necessarily of this place. When I was in high school, my grandmother self published an autobiography, where she talks about her ancestors. And as far as my, my ancestry, on the whole, I'm 75%, Russian Jewish, so like the ghetto side. And then my maternal grandmother is the German Jewish thread. And so she was kind of raised in splendor on the Upper West Side, and she ended up writing a memoir about her family and our ancestors. And through that memoir, I learned that our ancestors had had had a garment factory that my triple great grandfather had established in the city of Pittsburgh, in the 1860s. What I didn't know is that he then handed the company to his son, who was my double great grandfather, who then moved the company to New York City in the 1890s, and really built it up. And the factory was right on the edge of the Lower East Side. It was a big, big factory, and they became very successful. And because of that success, they became a target of the labor unions. And so as I'm researching this, you know, story, and I'm trying to follow my main guy as he goes on this wide ranging crime fight, making his way through these different categories of the underworld, and finally comes up against these labor thugs. And I don't want to say too much more about that. But all the sudden, I stumbled upon this last name, that's not my own last name. But it did sound familiar to me from reading my grandmother's autobiography back when I was 17 years old or something. And that led to a whole discovery of characters that you could not make up, like the Boy Bomb King, for instance. And that was in trial transcripts, too. I mean, it wasn't just then that the you know, the discovery of that it started in an oral history. And then it led me to the archive of trial transcripts and all the sudden, I'm, you know, seeing the Boy Bomb King on the witness stand testifying to, to his deeds there. 

Kelly  38:55  
I've talked before to people who do history who are deeply into words and writing who then need something where they can do something physically creative. And so for some people that's like knitting or something, but I saw from your Instagram that you do stuff with woodworking and wood burning. I wonder if you could talk a bit about that, and the, for me, at least, like knitting is the this need to balance like the the brain part and doing something with my hands. Have you thought about that in that way is that you know, what, what is the relationship for you, if any at all between your different things that you do?

Dan Slater  39:34  
Yeah, so you and your listeners can probably tell a little bit just listen to me speak that I have a bit of a busy mind. And writing is a place to put that busy mind to work. And then around two or three or four o'clock, I leave the office, I go pick up the kids at school or the kids are already home and I want to go hang out with them. And then night rolls around and you're kind of in the house doing the home game thing raising your children and stuff. It's not easy for I wish it was easy, but it's not easy for me to switch gears, to just shut that off. Try to meditate every day, don't always get to it. Sometimes meditation is great, sometimes it doesn't accomplish quite what I wish it did. But I find that painting, drawing, wood burning, woodworking is a way for me to kind of not switch gears, but to put that and to sort of funnel that energy into something that is useful and something I can do with my kids. Because these are all things I do with my sons, my sons are not five and eight. These are these are things that came along recently, I wish that I had been doing them for longer, but we're talking about like, really just the last few years. And it just, it just helps me a lot. And I feel like it does help the writing too, anything to take your mind off for work even for just a few hours. So that you know, your subconscious can kind of work on the story a little bit without having to be always living the anxiety of it. So I love to woodburn and we work in the woods a lot. We have a playground out in the forest, it's about three acres that I you know, I maintain. I take down the dead trees. We build fun play structures out there. And so there's always wood slabs and things to do stuff with and then my wife has her gardens in the back. So there's always a planter to build or, or something. So yeah, we do we do a lot of that.

Kelly  41:37  
So "The Incorruptibles" is an incredible read. Can you tell listeners how to get a copy?

Dan Slater  41:43  
Yes, well the book comes out on July 16, and Little Brown is publishing it. And I just got my copies. It is a gorgeous book. In addition to the book itself, there are about second 67 photos in the book, there's two photo spreads of 16 pages each, so 32 pages of photos. And these are photos that that have never been seen before. You asked at the very beginning of our conversation about source material. And I neglected to mention, another crazy coincidence is that while I was working on this book, this amazing photo archive called Brown Brothers came up for sale. Brown Brothers was a photo news service that opened up in New York City in 1904. And it went strong for about 30 years, and then it shut down. And all the images produced by its photographers got put in a warehouse. And the images sat there for 70, 80 years. And the descendants of the Brown Brothers owners finally struck a deal. They sold the whole thing to an auction house in New Jersey and the auction house around 2019, 2020, shortly after I started working on the book, they began to sell off the images one by one on eBay. And so it was that was another just amazing resource because as I'm working on this book and writing about fairly obscure historical figures, like the horse poisoners, for instance, these photographs of the horse poisoners are coming up for for sale. And so I was able to acquire a lot of those. I was able to acquire hundreds of them. And about 60 to 70 of the best are in the book. So the book does have those. There's also a glossary of sort of underworld slang, in in the back of the book. So it comes out on the 16th. There's the hardcover, there's the ebook, and there's an incredible audio version, which is read by a fellow named Jonathan Todd Ross. He did a great job with all the characters and stuff. So it can be purchased wherever books are sold online or brick and mortar. Yeah, I hope you always hope it reaches an audience, right? You do this for readers. So please, I'm begging you. Check it out.

Kelly  44:07  
Well, Dan, thank you so much. This was it was a great read and a really fun conversation.

Dan Slater  44:13  
Thank you, Kelly. It was awesome to be here and to speak with you.

Teddy  44:45  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on twitter or instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know.  Bye!

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