Myron Sugarman was a Jewish gangster who cornered the unlawful slot machine market in Manhattan and Newark, New Jersey. He’s additionally a former Nazi hunter.
A brand new documentary on Amazon Prime Final Man Standing: The Chronicles of Myron Sugarmanthe 85-year-old sensible man describes his colourful presence as a member of ‘Kosher Nostra’.
The movie, directed by Johnny Caplan, additionally explores the struggle towards Jewish mob anti-Semitism. It chronicles America’s conflict towards the Nazis within the Nineteen Thirties and her function in aiding within the seek for Holocaust contributors after the conflict.
Newark Minuteman
Sugarman was, in his personal phrases, “the godfather of the unlawful slot machine enterprise.” and he was born in it. On the peak of Prohibition, his father, Bernie “Sugie” Sugarman, conspired with legendary Jewish gangsters equivalent to Abner “Longy” Zwillman, Bugsy Seigel, Joe “Doc” Stacher and Meyer Lancsey.
Based on Sugarman Jr., Sugie was concerned in every part from “pirating, boxing, fixing fights and thieves” to “jukeboxes, merchandising machines, pinball machines and slot machines.”
Within the Nineteen Thirties, Zwillman shaped an affiliation referred to as the “Newark Minutemen”. This affiliation was devoted to assaulting Nazi sympathizers, significantly Fritz his Kuhn’s short-lived German-American band social gathering. Kuhn proclaimed himself the “Hitler of the US”.
Sugarman recounts how the Minutemen threw a stink bomb right into a corridor the place Nazis gathered, ready for them to rampage with “monkey wrenches, baseball bats and brass knuckles.”
Younger Myron Sugarman was a intelligent child who graduated from faculty and will communicate six languages (“seven should you depend profanity,” he says). His father despatched him to Europe to begin an “export enterprise”. He developed it into the world’s largest provider of unlawful slots his machines.
“I used to be the largest smuggler within the nation and the trafficker of the Barry Bingo Machine,” Sugarman proudly says within the movie.
hunt mengele
Throughout his keep in Europe within the Nineteen Sixties, Sugarman knocked on the door of famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and requested how he may assist him. Wiesenthal replied that he wanted cash for his surgical procedure, and Sugarman started to fund it.
The 2 males grew to become agency buddies, and Sugarman was concerned within the seek for Nazi physician Joseph Mengele, who was dwelling in Paraguay on the time.
There’s at all times been this Jewish pleasure subject,” Sugarman says within the movie. “Jewish gangs wanted to indicate that Jews may be as powerful as different peoples. There was completely no id disaster. These Jews had been powerful, I used to be able to show it.”
Sugarman ultimately served time within the Nineteen Eighties for distributing counterfeit Pac-Man machines, however by no means apologized for his prison habits.
“I by no means did something proper. I had rules,” he jokes.
“Once they see one thing worthwhile, they take it from the gangsters and take it for themselves. Huge fish eat small fish. That is the best way it’s,” he says.
