by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

In technique, the sepia-toned, carefully crosshatched drawings in Montrealer Pat Hamou’s exhibit Six for Five recall underground cartoonist R. Crumb’s portraits of blues and country-music icons. But the word “contract” meant something very different for Hamou’s subjects.

Subtitled An Illustrated History of the Jewish Criminal 1900-1940, the exhibit offers portraits and brief accompanying biographies of figures from a largely forgotten time and place. Overshadowed by the Italian Mafia in the public imagination, and starved of new recruits by assimilation and upward mobility, the American Jewish mob nonetheless remains a fascinating, unsettling and frequently funny chapter in Hebraic history, one that triggers contradictory feelings.

“They existed for a brief period of time,” says Hamou, “40 years, not even a lifetime. They were for the most part the result of immigration to America, and this was a way to crawl out of the poverty most of them came from. They, or their parents, fled from persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe. They found themselves in this strange new world and grabbed what they could, in whatever manner they could.

“I don’t agree with what they did at all, I hate violence. Just about all of them paid for their crimes in the end—except maybe Meyer Lansky. Yet I couldn’t help but draw parallels between these guys running around Brownsville in Brooklyn, or the Lower East Side towards the end of their reign, and far away in the land from where they came, cousins were being hustled into ghettos and concentration camps around the same time. They are such extremely different examples of how Jews are viewed. One as the aggressor, and one as the victim.”

Shabbos, bloody Shabbos

Hamou made a point of opening his show in October, the month of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. “I couldn’t help but think what may have gone through some of their heads when this holiday rolled around. How do you attend your nephew’s Bar Mitzvah one night, then go out and cut someone up into 20 pieces the next? How many Yom Kippurs would these guys need for a clean slate?”

Already a big film noir and gritty crime-novel buff, Hamou latched onto Rich Cohen’s ’98 book Tough Jews in a big way. “Once I dug in—wow. Guys like Abe ‘Kid Twist’ Reles and Harry ‘Pittsburgh Phil’ Strauss were pretty out there. Tough as nails, cold and calculating, completely involved in their own worlds and own laws. Visual alarm bells sounded soon after. If you look at pictures of these guys, most of them have really fascinating faces. Something about people back then, maybe it was the way they were photographed, everybody looked way older than they actually were. Abe Reles looked more ape than human—flat-faced, these huge hands that resemble spatulas and this awful parted kinky hairdo. He was basically a walking, breathing caricature of what a tough-guy gangster would look like.”

While the big-time machers like Dutch Schultz and Arnold Rothstein bookend his rogue’s gallery, Hamou was primarily drawn to the lesser-known, lower-tier characters like Strauss, Reles and their colleagues in the notorious Syndicate hit squad Murder Inc. “The puppets are generally more interesting than the puppeteers,” Hamou points out, fingering the likes of Samuel “Red” Levine—“a practicing Orthodox, wore a yarmulke under his hat at all times and would never kill on the Sabbath. If he did, he would wear the talith, the prayer shawl, over his shoulders and pray before making the hit. That’s some pretty messed-up morals.”

But finding visual references wasn’t that easy. “What’s on record to work from are mostly mug shots. I thought it would be interesting just to focus on them, eliminate backgrounds or any other diversion. Stare into their faces, which may have a story to tell. They are all done in the same manner and tones of colour, to create a one-ness to the whole thing. It’s pretty much like walking into a police line-up.”

At Casa del Popolo from Oct. 2–31, vernissage
on Sunday, Oct. 2, 6 p.m., free