Investigation as “The Essex Market Court Gang.” One of its chief rulers was Martin Engel, Tammany leader of the Eighth Assembly District. The “king” of this Jewish district was a man named Solomon who had changed his name to the less revealing one of “Smith,” and who became known as “Silver Dollar Smith” because of the fact that he ruled his little empire from the Silver Dollar Saloon, which gained its name from the silver dollars that were cemented into the floor of his place of business. This saloon was just opposite the Essex Market Court, which was thronged daily by hordes of Yiddish criminals, the bondsmen, false witnesses and lawyers.
Let not the fastidious reader deem it unnecessary to linger longer round the old police court at Essex Market, for out therefrom came a word which has fixed itself in common English speech—the term “shyster,” by which a certain type of lawyer is described. A Clinton street lawyer named Scheuster, whose practices were quite characteristic, made himself very obnoxious to Justice Osborne. Whenever another Yiddish lawyer attempted a shady trick, the judge would openly denounce it as “Scheuster practice,” and so it came that the first men in the profession to bear the name “shyster” were the Yiddish lawyers of Essex Market Court.
To make a nasty story brief, the Max Hochstim Association became the first organized White Slaver group in America, and the revelations made by the Lexow Committee are shuddering glimpses into that lowest form of depravity—a coolly conducted, commercialized, consolidated traffic in women. The traffic was made to yield dividends to politicians, to Tammany Jews in particular. The Ghetto became the Red Light District of New York. The first man to undertake the export trade in women with foreign countries, especially South America, was a man who later became a Tammany notable.
The surprising fact is that, although these matters are written in official documents, and although the same matters have been written into the