It was early May in 1933, and one of America’s most notorious gangsters was lying low in Sullivan County, passing the time with a couple of bodyguards in a secluded hunting lodge in White Lake.

 Before the month had ended, however, Waxey Gordon, public enemy number one, would be arrested without incident by federal authorities and NYS Police.

 The well publicized arrest was the culmination of Gordon’s longstanding feud with Meyer Lansky, and established Lansky as the winner in what had become known in mob circles as “the war of the Jews.”

 Waxey Gordon, whose real name was Irving Wexler, was born in 1886 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In “The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America,” Albert Fried writes that Gordon’s Polish-American immigrant family was large and wretchedly poor. Waxey “had by early adolescence left public school for good to spend all his time on Lower East Side streets where he excelled as a pickpocket.”

 In fact, his nickname came from fellow delinquents who claimed he could remove a victim’s wallet as if it were coated with wax. He was first arrested in 1905, and was pinched three more times before 1910, serving jail time for each collar. Broad shouldered and powerful, he gave up picking pockets to become a “schlammer” for labor racketeer Dopey Benny Fein. He was arrested again in 1914 in the shooting death of a municipal court clerk, but was acquitted at trial. Later that same year, Gordon was convicted of beating and robbing a man and was sentenced to two years in Sing Sing.

 Following his release from prison in 1916, he worked as an enforcer for various gangs, eventually making the acquaintance of the infamous crime kingpin Arnold Rothstein and beginning a lucrative bootlegging career.

“Gone was the schlammer and gunsel of yore. He was reborn Irving Wexler, free-spending New York businessman, owner of real estate, and stocks, and other properties of a vaguer nature,” Fried wrote.

    With Prohibition came the rise to power of younger gangsters, including Meyer Lansky. Lansky and Gordon became bitter rivals, and each made numerous attempts to gain control of the other’s empire. Lansky eventually won the war by using his brother Jake to funnel damaging information on Gordon’s finances to the IRS. Federal prosecutors, buoyed by their success in convicting Al Capone on similar charges, immediately moved to file tax evasion charges against the nation’s new number one criminal.

Gordon was charged with concealing an income of over $1.4 million in 1930, while paying the government just $11 in taxes. He immediately went into hiding in Sullivan County, where he owned property, including, some believed, a share in the venerable White Lake Mansion House. Eventually, word of his hideout was leaked to authorities.

“On Friday, the Special Intelligence Division of the Department of Internal Revenue, headed by Hugh McQuillan, who has unearthed most of the evidence against the tax-evading racketeers in this district, got a tip that Gordon was in hiding in the general vicinity of White Lake,” the New York Times reported on May 22.

Joseph Harvey and Michael Malone of the Department of Justice were dispatched to Sullivan County. Upon their arrival, they booked rooms at the Mansion House, where they met up with Trooper Thomas Mangan.

“Discreet inquiries about the hotel revealed that an unidentified man had rented for the season a hunting lodge on the hotel property, about three weeks ago, for $1,500,” the Times revealed. “Such high rent in these times was a matter for talk and the agents took note of it. They learned that the cottage was inhabited not by the man who had leased it, but by three strangers who had not figured in the signing of the lease. The agents also learned that the tenants of the hunting lodge were living in complete isolation. They had bought no supplies in the village, not even groceries, were taking no telephone calls, and were receiving no mail. They had a fast speed boat tied up at the dock in front of the lodge, which is about a half mile from the hotel proper. They had a fast and new automobile.”

By eight o’clock Saturday night, the agents had decided that Gordon was one of the three strangers living in the lodge, but a violent thunderstorm interrupted their plans for an arrest. The storm ended by about ten o’clock and within a half-hour a contingent of agents and troopers had set up around the lodge. They could clearly see men moving about in some of the rooms, but it was impossible to tell how many were inside. They decided to wait until daylight before proceeding further.

“At ten o’clock (Sunday) morning the agents, Sergeant Mangan and four mounted men from Liberty Barracks descended on the lodge,” the Times reported. “The building, standing in a clearing well off the road, was surrounded by the troopers and the agents went in with the sergeant.”

Gordon’s bodyguards, both armed, were apprehended without incident. “In an adjoining bedroom, a dark, thick-jowled man was still fast asleep,” the Times reported. “His chin and cheeks were black with two days’ growth of beard, his mouth was open, and he was snoring. It was the great Waxey himself, anything but a romantic figure.” Gordon was dressed in expensive silk underwear, and had a loaded pistol under his pillow.

When awakened by police, he blinked, but said nothing other than “well...”

“His face went kind of white and pasty,” Harvey told the Times. “He didn’t say another word. He kept his mouth shut.”

It was an inauspicious end that would forever link the notorious Waxey Gordon with the Mansion House, White Lake, and Sullivan County.

John Conway is the Sullivan County Historian and a founder and president of The Delaware Company. Email him at jconway52@hotmail.com.