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Only one figure anchors this date: Abner "Longie" Zwillman, born in Newark in 1904 and destined to become one of the most powerful organized crime figures in the northeastern United States. Rising from the streets of the Third Ward during Prohibition, Zwillman built a bootlegging empire that brought him into close alliance with the national syndicate being assembled by figures like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. His reach extended into legitimate business, politics, and law enforcement — the kind of deep institutional entanglement that made men like him far more durable, and far more dangerous, than ordinary street criminals. He died in 1959 under circumstances officially ruled a suicide, though few who knew him believed it.

July 27, 1904 - Abner Zwillman

Zwillman rose to prominence during Prohibition as one of the most powerful organized crime figures on the East Coast, building a bootlegging empire that funded decades of criminal enterprise in New Jersey. His longevity in the underworld owed much to his political connections and his alliances with figures like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, helping to shape the national organized crime network of the mid-twentieth century. His career also produced one notable historical wrinkle: he founded the New Jersey Minutemen, a group that physically disrupted Nazi Bund meetings and operations in the 1930s, complicating any simple portrait of the man.

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