The Kosher Capones tells the fascinating story of Chicago’s Jewish gangsters from Prohibition into the 1980s. Writer Joe Kraus traces these gangsters through the lives, criminal careers, and conflicts of Benjamin “Zukie the Bookie” Zuckerman, last of the impartial West Aspect Jewish bosses, and Lenny Patrick, eventual head from the Syndicate’s “Jewish wing.”

Both of these men linked the first Jewish gangsters of the neighborhoods of Maxwell Street and Lawndale to the notorious Chicago Outfit that about The Kosher Capones: A History of Chicago’s Jewish Gangsters emerged from Al Capone’s legal confederation. Concentrating on the murder of Zuckerman by Patrick, Kraus introduces us to the various models of arranged crime they represented, a raft of mainly forgotten Jewish gangsters, and the changing nature of Chicago’s political corruption. Hard-to-believe anecdotes of corrupt politicians, seasoned killers, and in-over-their-heads legal operators spotlight the magnitude and importance of Jewish gangsters to the tale of Windy City mob rule.

With an eye for the dramatic, The Kosher Capones takes us deep in the hidden society and offers glimpses of the men who ran the Jewish criminal community in Chicago for a lot more than sixty years.