Whitey's Kid: An Autobiography

By Dr. Bernard Koire

Whitey's Kid is an autobiographical memoir of Dr. Bernard (aka "Bernie") Koire (1928 - 2018), the son of a notorious Jewish gangster, decorated Korean War veteran, and one of the pioneering plastic surgeons of Beverly Hills.

Bernie grew up in Kensington, Pennsylvania-up the Delaware River from Philadelphia. It was a 20

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glass Spider Publishing
• Release date: Mar 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781957917252

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Epilogue by Family, Including Daughters Alison Brustein & Hillary Lester

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Copyright ©2023 Hillary Lester and Alison Brustein

ISBN: 978-1-957917-24-5 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-957917-25-2 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023900301

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

www.whiteyskid.com

Cover design by Judith S. Design & Creativity

www.judithsdesign.com

Published by Glass Spider Publishing

www.glassspiderpublishing.com

This book is composed entirely of Bernie’s personal writings, which have never seen publication until now. In the process of putting this book together, we endeavored to present the stories in chronological order. Since the entries were written over the course of several years, they include some repetition in order to maintain the integrity of his words. In addition, while we know that much of what Bernie wrote actually happened, we can’t verify the truth and accuracy of everything in these pages.

PART I: THREE-BLOCK UNIVERSE

1. Whitey’s Kid

I was five years old in 1933 when my older brother Michael and I were exploring the dashboard of my father’s new black Ford. We loved pushing and pulling every handle and knob—it was our play tank. Suddenly, the trunk flew open. When we ran around to the back of the car to close the trunk…

Mom, Mom! We found two dead bodies in the trunk of Dad’s car!

I told that son of a bitch not to bring his work home! Mom screamed

Yep, there they were: two dead men. One was shot in the head, and the other had bullet holes through his chest and left shoulder. Curious, I pushed on his chest and blood came gurgling out of the wound. Their bodies were cold and stiff.

Mom spun away from the front door of our brick-faced row house and ran up our wooden staircase to the second-floor bedroom. She woke Dad out of a deep sleep. Before he was really awake, she started in, scolding him about how the boys are now finding dead bodies in the car.

He got up out of bed, mumbling, They deserved it.

Calmly, he had a couple of cups of coffee. I overheard him tell Mom that he would pick up a friend to help him get rid of the bodies. They would bury the bodies somewhere off the highway in New Jersey where the soil was sandy and the digging was easy. Dad returned late that night. It’s done, he told Mom.

There was a price for being Whitey’s Kid. No questions were to be asked. Answers were never offered. It’s done.

Whitey was a member of the Jewish Mafia in Philly. To outsiders, it was called Philadelphia - the cradle of democracy. To us, it was our piece of the American dream - two blocks by three blocks in immigrant-laden Kensington. My father’s real name was Herman Cohen, but everybody respectfully called him Whitey. . The leader of the Philly Jew Gang at that time was Meyer Lansky.

My father was born in the Ukrainian town of Bila Tserkva. For what it’s worth, that translates to White Church. Bila Tserkva is located on the Ros River approximately fifty miles south of Kyiv. The town was founded in 1032. Jews first settled on Ukrainian territories in the fourth century B.C.E. in Crimea and among the Greek colonies on the northeast coast of the Black Sea.

Herman, my father, was the oldest of eight children: Harry, Charlie, Benny, Abie, Fanny, Morris, and Katie. His father, Max Cohen, was an accomplished cabinetmaker and repaired fine antique furniture. He was, at times, called upon to do work for the Czar in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Herman was six years old when his parents put him on a Russian freighter as a cabin boy. Although he never had formal schooling, he learned to speak and write eight languages. He knew Russian, English, French, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Romanian.

He was a stocky, strong, intelligent, and fearless young man. By the time he was twenty years old, he was an accomplished seaman and an officer on his ship. He also had earned enough money to bring his whole family from the Ukraine to the United States. He left the service and, with the rest of his family, settled in Philadelphia.

In the beginning, to earn a living, my father sold fruit from a horse and wagon on the streets of North Philadelphia. Later, as his business improved, he opened a fruit store in the Girard Hotel in downtown Philadelphia.

Not so coincidently, the Girard was headquarters for a significant numbers racket operated by the Meyer Lansky mob. Hidden in the lap of luxury at the Girard, the Jewish mob set up shop circa the 1920s.

Seeing an opportunity to make more money, Herman—now Whitey Cohen—slowly but surely became involved in the business of the Jewish mafia.

2. A Taste of Street Life, Kensington-Style

I grew up in Philadelphia in a section of the city called Kensington. It was a poor working-class neighborhood overflowing with immigrant Italians, Irish, and Jews.

Street life in our neighborhood around Albert Street when I was growing up in the 1930s was noisy and colorful. The air was filled with the odor of dozens of competing hucksters in pushcarts—or, if successful, in their horse-driven wagons. The graduates of the street hawking became small shop renters or owners that lined the streets. From seven in the morning to nine at night, this noisy churning of humanity refused to settle down.

Get your fresh tomatoes, a peddler would yell as he drove down the street in his fruit and vegetable laden wagon pulled by a sorry-looking nag.

Horse droppings were at a premium in my neighborhood. Mothers would send their kids out with pails and shovels to pick them up to be used as fertilizer in their window flower boxes. Every day, you’d see kids getting into fights over who found a piece of horseshit first.

The iceman came in the early morning in a horse-drawn wagon loaded with ice and hay to keep it from melting. He would look at the signs placed in windows indicating the amount of ice a family needed to keep their icebox cold for that day. Sometimes, the iceman would leave his ice pick in the wagon during a delivery, and we neighborhood boys would take it and chip away at the large blocks of ice and suck the shards. They were especially delicious on a hot day.

Paperboys delivered newspapers daily, tossing the morning edition carefully, making sure they landed on the proper steps. Ragmen strolled the streets calling out, Old rags and clothes! We buy old rags and clothes! There were also milkmen who drove in their white trucks, dressed in snappy, white uniforms and caps. They would deliver milk daily to their customers, as well as cream, butter, cream cheese and chocolate milk.

Peddlers who couldn’t afford to buy pushcarts had the option of renting them from wealthier businessmen who purchased licenses in bulk and rented them out for twenty-five cents a day, or $1.50 per week.

Troubadours and buskers and dime-store Romeos playing their guitars and singing love songs regularly strolled the streets begging for listeners to put a few coins into a cap held in their hands. They sang, chanted, cried, and laughed in Gaelic, Italian, Yiddish, and sloppy English. Sometimes, a listener from a second-story window would toss a coin that landed in the street, and the singer or his kid would scramble to pick it up.

I could smell the sweet scent of hair tonic if I walked past Connor’s Barber Shop on Kensington Avenue. Dad went there every morning for a shave. He had his own shaving mug with his name on it, and his own straight razor which was stored high up on a shelf waiting for his arrival.

In contrast was the garlicky odor coming from the pickle barrels inside Bernstein’s Delicatessen. Next door to the deli was the local bar where the smell of beer permeated the air and from where the noise of loud conversation and laughing spilled out onto the street at all times of the day. At night, frequent fistfights would occur there, and the police would be called to break it up and carry away the hotheads in their paddy wagon.

Around the corner on Oakdale Street was a German bakery. From there came the mouthwatering scents of cinnamon, sugar, and butter. The baker was a jolly man with a large black mustachio and beard. He or his wife would give a large free cookie to the kid of anyone who made a purchase.

Often in the mornings, Momwould send me over to buy a coffee cake or some cinnamon rolls for breakfast, and I’d ask for the free cookie with chocolate jimmies on it.

In the evenings, under a gas light when the weather was nice, our neighbors across the street would set out a card table under a large sycamore tree, the only one on the block. They sat on orange crates and played pinochle while smoking and laughing.

From time to time, during the day or night from a block away, you could hear the clickety-clack of the els or trolleys as they followed their fixed routes. The chimes from the bell tower of the Visitation Church tolled the hour loudly and clearly, which you could hear from its site on a nearby hill. We would all set our clocks by the chimes from that church.

Every day at five in the afternoon, the lamplighter strolled down the streets of my neighborhood. He would mount his three-step ladder, light the only gaslight on our block, dismount, and continue on his way. Every morning, right at seven o’clock, he cut off the gas, the flame sadly fighting to sputter out.

You could tell time by these reliable workers.

As night approached in my neighborhood around Albert Street, you could hear the radios blaring from each household. The sounds from our favorite radio shows—The Lone Ranger, I Love a Mystery, or The Green Hornet—would be in the air. So went just another day in my life on Albert Street.

3. Sadie the Lady

Her name was Sadie. She was my mother. In all honesty, I know very little about her childhood. Her maiden name was Berkowsky. She was supposedly born in New York City after her father, Mike, and mother, Dora, had emigrated from Lodz, Poland.

She came from a large family. Her older siblings were Morris, who was the eldest, then Katie, Lena, Annie, and Jenny. Then Sadie was born. Her younger siblings were Tessie and Maxie.

The family moved to Chicago, where Mike set up a store across the street from the stockyards making handmade leather boots for the cowboys. I never met my maternal grandparents, but they seemed to be a handsome couple judging by their marriage photographs.

Sadie was tall and slender and loved to dance—and boy, could she. Once, she entered a dance contest at Wonderland Ballroom in Chicago and won first place. She walked away proudly with a trophy for dancing the Charleston.

She cherished it and kept it on the mantel her whole life. Touching it was out of bounds for us kids when we were growing up - she would have killed us for just thinking about it.

On a visit to Philadelphia to visit her older sister, Katie, Mom was introduced to my father, Herman, at a local dance for young Jewish people. Of course, it made so much sense that they met while she was dancing. She never went back to Chicago. After a short courtship and engagement, Herman and Sadie were married.

At that time, my father was working on the circulation platform of the Philadelphia Inquirer loading newspapers on trucks. He was eventually fired from his job because of a dispute with his boss.

How would he make a living now? Then he realized there was good money to be made working the streets. He began selling fruit on the street with a pushcart. Soon after, he bought a horse and wagon. Eventually, he opened a fruit store at the Girard Hotel. It was there and then that he got a taste of the underworld of Philadelphia. It was a world my mother hated. The young couple was able to move to a row house on 1840 E. Albert Street. My older brother, Mike, and my younger brother, Lennie, were all born there in the living room. I was born at Temple University Hospital. It was almost a foreshadowing of things to come for me.

As a boy, I remember that my mom was a good housekeeper but a terrible cook. It wasn’t until I was older that I found out spaghetti was not noodles and catsup. On a hot day, a typical meal for dinner was cornflakes and milk. However, Mom was a great baker. She made delicious pineapple upside-down cakes.

Sadie gave each of us boys chores to do. I took care of the coal furnace. Mike took care of electrical problems. Lennie did carpentry and painting. My mother was a wonderful swimmer. In the summer, Dad would rent a cabin on the beach at Brigantine, New Jersey, and Mom taught us to swim in the ocean. Sometimes, she would put one of us on her back and swim far out into the waves.

The neighborhood ladies liked Mom. She would gladly mind their kids when needed and organize games for them. She would organize block parties on Albert Street along with Aunt Katie, who was her older sister. They would string up lights over the street and install loudspeakers from the windows for music and dancing.

Life was not easy for Mom with my father being Whitey the gangster. Our family was looked down upon. He was gone often for days or weeks at a time. She would have to bail him out of jail after he was arrested or hide him when the police came looking for him. When he did come home, they often fought.

One day when Lennie and I came home from school and walked through the screen door into the kitchen, we saw Mike sitting at the table and Mom crying. My parents had been arguing, and Mom was set to pour a kettle of boiling water on him. Dad pushed the kettle away from himself, and it spilled out on Mom’s right arm and chest, scalding her. She was badly burned and carried the scars for the rest of her life. This was just one visible price for living with Whitey.

Interestingly, my brothers and I each had different feelings about our mother. Lenny had unconditional love for her. I thought that she did the best she could. Mike thought that she was inadequate.

4. Home, Bittersweet Home

Don’t wake up the kids, Mom said, as the police rushed through the front door.

My brothers and I pretended to be asleep. The three of us slept together in one bunk bed—Mike on the top and Lennie and I on the bottom, nose to toes.

There had been a murder in the nightclub that my father owned, and he had come home to hide under our bed. The police searched everywhere but couldn’t find him.

This happened at my home on Albert Street where I lived from the time I was born on September 29, 1928, when I was nine. Even though everyone in the neighborhood was poor, our neighbors considered us below them because of my father’s criminal activities. They just plain wanted us out. Our home was a brick row house built around 1875 for factory laborers who worked in the weaving mills.

Our place was just like everyone-else’s—except they feared my father. This was low-income housing built in the 1800s to house the dirt-poor refuse of Europe, the new immigrants of the Industrial Revolution.

It was a narrow small house with two bedrooms on the upper floor, a kitchen and a parlor on the main floor, and a cellar that housed a coal bin and furnace.

Outside, attached to the kitchen,