Speak Easy But Carry a Big Gat (1925)

Al Capone relied on him. So did Detroit’s Purple Gang and other Prohibition-era underworld syndicates. Traffickers like Albert Phillips, AKA David Bram, helped keep America from becoming too sober during the Roaring Twenties.

Bram specialized in bringing whiskey as well as narcotics across the Canadian border. As a teenage delinquent in New York City’s east side, Bram made ends meet by picking pockets. A short stint in the army failed to straighten him out, so when Prohibition became the law of the land a year later, an entirely new criminal enterprise—liquor smuggling—opened up to him. An on-again, off-again resident of Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York, the nomadic smuggled / drug peddler, made a good living until authorities collared him in Kansas City in 1918, which led to a five-year prison term for selling narcotics.

Five years was just too long for Bram, who managed to escape. He was captured in Minneapolis but once again slipped away. He remained on the lam for almost a year.

In September 1925, he turned up…in the front passenger seat of a Packard in the Big Apple’s upper east side. The driver of the Packard had collided with a taxi at the intersection of 98^th Street and First Avenue. When the taxi driver emerged from his car, three men leapt from the Packard, shouted a few threats, and fled the scene. The driver summoned a police officer, who discovered Bram’s body in the passenger seat with blood still oozing from two bullet holes in his right temple. His trouser pocket contained a wad of banknotes totaling $1,430.

Bram, it appeared, had angered the same vengeful mob that hit Morris Grossman, a smalltime hood from the lower east side. Less than a month earlier, Grossman’s charred remains were removed from a burning inferno that was once a luxurious sedan. He had been shot in the temple by a group of hit men masquerading as detectives who wanted to question him.

New York police identified Bram through fingerprints and by comparing the photograph from a wanted circular to the dead man’s face.

The former drug and whiskey smuggler was the victim of a gangland-style slaying that had “retribution” written all over it. Underworld informants told G-men that Bram was silenced after he tipped Prohibition agents as to the existence of the “Bootlegging Headquarters” of Irving Wexler, AKA Waxie Gordon, in Times Square. The raid netted thirteen, but the king fish—Wexler—had sailed out of New York on the Majestic. Wexler, a career criminal and former lieutenant of lower east side gangster “Dopey Benny” Fein, was a dangerous man to double-cross. And it appeared that that is just what Bram had done when he tipped federal agents about Wexler’s operation in exchange for the $1,400 in his pocket.

United States Attorney Emory Buckner, however, denounced the story as a mere rumor and claimed the first time he had ever heard Bram’s name was in news items about the slaying. Whatever motivated the murder, it appeared that the three-man hit squad was taking Bram’s body to the East River when their car collided with a taxi.

Police managed to trace the sedan to one Samuel Rappaport, who was arrested in the Times Square raid made possible by Bram’s tip. Rappaport, however, had an explanation. The previous July, he had lent the car to a friend, John K. Polichek, from whom it was apparently stolen. Rappaport subsequently reported the vehicle as stolen, a claim that was verified by official records. Police reached a dead end after interviewing Polichek.

The bankroll of $1,400 in Bram’s pocket kept bothering investigators. Why, they wondered, would hit men leave the money behind? They kept digging and discovered that just before Bram’s execution, he had attempted to purchase $1,400 in drugs with the intent to sell it, but somehow the deal went bad. The drug ring circulated the rumor that Bram had turned-state’s-evidence by tipping agents about the Times Square headquarters, essentially marking him for death. The $1,400 was his pay, which the drug dealers claimed was marked money. This explained why the hit men would leave the money behind.

The life and death of David Bram provides a good glimpse of the turbulent era when people partied in speakeasies kept wet by gangs of bootleggers.