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.
From Wikipedia
Abner "Longie" Zwillman (July 27, 1904 – February 26, 1959) was a Jewish-American mobster who was based primarily in North Jersey. He was a longtime friend and associate of mobsters Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. Zwillman's criminal organization was a part of the National Crime Syndicate and mainly operated from the 1920s to the 1950s, with its peak in the late 1930s.
Zwillman was the founder of the New Jersey Minutemen, a militant anti-fascist group which operated in Newark, New Jersey from 1933 to 1941. They were antagonists of the pro-Nazi German American Bund and the Christian Front.
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