My Review* of Jonathan Wilson's "The Red Balcony"

An Assassination on the Beach

 

In the evening June 16, 1933, Haim Arlosoroff, the political director of the Jewish Agency, was brutally murdered while taking a walk with his wife on the Tel Aviv beach. Arlosoroff had just returned from Germany where he negotiated the Transfer Agreement which enabled 50,000 Jews over the next three years to leave Germany conditioned on them turning over their resources to be used to pay for German exports to Palestine. To this day the mystery of who killed Arlosoroff is unsolved, and it is at the core of Jonathan Wilson’s “The Red Balcony” which takes us to the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Safed, cities I know well.

 

Wilson’s protagonist is Ivor Castle a young Jewish graduate of Oxford University who is hired to assist the lead defense counsel Phineas Baron. Castle’s first job is to secure the witness testimony of Tsiona Kerem, a very Bohemian artist who he instantly falls in lust and then in love with her, some of which is played out on her red balcony. Kerem is far more involved than first we are first let in on.

 

Castle is helping to prepare the defense for the two accused killers, Aaron Stavsky and Ze’ev Rosenblatt, both of whom are associated with Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist grouping.  Jabotinsky’s group opposed the Transfer deal because it meant doing business with the Nazi devils and it worked to undo the boycott of German goods. Both defendants are ultimately acquitted and to this day the crime has yet to be solved with other potential assailants being hard-lined Arabs who opposed Arlosoroff’s peacemaking and the Nazis because of Arsololoff’s alleged affair with Goebbels’ part-Jewish wife.

 

There are two other interesting characters in the book. A Charles Gross, an Oxford contemporary of Castle’s who is very close to Revisionist Zionism. We also have Gross’ cousin, the Baltimore socialite whose father is very much involved in helping to fund the Transfer Agreement.

 

One of the things I really lied about the book is Wilson’s description of the Palestine Mandate in the hiatus between the Arab riots of 1929 and the Great Arab Revolt of 1936. You get a very real sense of what the state in the making was like in the guise of a crime thriller.

*- Amazon has yet to post this review. Amazon just posted at this URL An Assassination on the Beach (amazon.com)

 

 

My Amazon Review of Michael Shnayerson's : Bugsy: The Dark Side of the American Dream"

 

The Rise and Fall of Bugsy Siegel

 

Michael Shnayerson tells the story of how a Jewish eastside kid under the tutelage of legendary mobster Arnold Rothstein rose to be among the top bootleggers in the 1920’s. By 1930 Bugsy Siegel along with Lucky Luciano and his boyhood friend Meyer Lansky became the triumvirate of organized crime. Siegel was instrumental in the formation of Murder Inc. and along the way he paid for his brother’s medical school training. Siegel was hands on in murder, rapes and robberies, a true gangster.

 

He moved from New York City to Los Angeles and with the aid former gangster and now actor George Raft, Siegel become the toast of Hollywood. His Hollywood good looks certainly didn’t hurt. Just as Hollywood found fascination with the radical left in the 1960’s, in the 1930’s Hollywood was enamored with the gangster in their midst. Remember that Warren Beatty played him in the movie, “Bugsy.” Meantime his wife and two daughters were living in the toney Scarsdale suburb of New York City.

 

Shnayerson offers up his belief as to why the Jewish gangsters were far more sensitive to the rise of Nazism in Germany than the Jewish community as a whole. His explanation is that the gangsters knew how violent people can be.

 

Although Siegel get all of the credit for the creation of postwar Las Vegas, much of the credit goes to his partner Billy Wilkerson, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter and nightclub impresario. Siegel took over Wilkerson’s Flamingo project, which was to become the first modern Las Vegas hotel/casino. However, the problem was that Siegel was a horrible construction boss and the project suffered from huge cost over runs that were funded by the Mob. When the Mob suspects Siegel and his girlfriend Virginia Hill from skimming their money, at a Havana meeting in 1946 Luciano and Lansky order up a hit on their one-time buddy.

 

The hit was accomplished in June 1947, a crime that was never solved. Shnayerson offers up his theory as to who actually did it.  This is a fast-paced book well worth the read. I only wish he spent more time on Mickey Cohen, Siegel’s longtime Los Angeles accomplice.

For the full Amazon URL see: The Rise and Fall of Bugsy Siegel (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Henry Hemming's "Agents of Influence...."

Churchill’s Man in New York

On the 36^th floor in the Rockefeller Center International Building (630 5^th Avenue) at the elevator bank for the offices of Capital Research there is a small plaque commemorating the work of William Stephenson for his efforts to bring the United States into the war against Nazi Germany. It was out of those offices in 1940 and 1941 that Stephenson ran a vast apparatus to influence an isolationist America to enter the war. 

Henry Hemming tells the story of how a boy who was born in Winnipeg, Canada’s red-light district grew up to be a World War I ace flier, established a successful business in the booming 1920s British radio industry which then morphed into a European-wide investment company. The information network that he established caught the eye of MI-6 led to his recruitment to head-up British efforts in the United States. What makes the book especially interesting is that William Stephenson was the author’s grandfather’s godfather. So in a way through family lore, Hemming is connected to his protagonist.

It is in New York that Stephenson establishes a far reaching network that encompasses the pro-intervention Century Group, Wendell Willkie and future advertising mogul David Ogilvy who was then working for the Gallup Poll. His most important connection was with Bill Donovan whom he convinces of the need for the U.S. to establish a centralized intelligence agency and it is with that connection Stephenson gets access to the White House. Stephenson schools Donovan on the art of intelligence. Donovan initially establishes the Office of Information Coordination, which morphs into the Office of Strategic Services and then in 1947 becomes the CIA.

Stephenson faces off against his German counterpart Hans Thomsen who out of the German Embassy was in the business of funding pro-German groups, funding supportive Congressmen, most notably Hamilton Fish of New York and feeding speech and newspaper article ideas to the pro-German aviator Charles Lindbergh.  

We see that in 1941 Stephenson engaged in the same tricks that the Russians used in the 2016 elections.  He generates “fake news”, funds pro-intervention groups, sabotages pro-German and anti-intervention groups, forges documents and plants articles in the New York Herald Tribune which for all practical purposes became an arm of British intelligence. Along the way we meet song writer and expert forger Eric Mashwitz and Ian Fleming who would later write the James Bonds spy novels.

Hemming, utilizing recently declassified sources, tells Stephenson’s life story with great verve. It still remains a wonder how Stephenson pulled everything together and managed to move American public opinion, along with the facts on the ground and in the Atlantic, towards intervention prior to Pearl Harbor.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R17KRNE7A0VOBM/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv