Joseph Linsey was an organized crime figure in Boston's underworld during Prohibition, associated with Joseph Kennedy and Meyer Lansky

Meyer Lansky

Meyer Lansky , known as the "Mob's Accountant", was a Polish-born American organized crime figure who, along with his associate Charles "Lucky" Luciano, was instrumental in the development of the "National Crime Syndicate" in the United States...

, and later became a prominent businessman and philanthropist, specifically his contributions to Brandeis University

Brandeis University

Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...

.

Biography

Born in Russia, he immigrated to the United States as a child and later grew up in Boston. After his father died, he went to work at the age of nine delivering groceries and later became appenticed as a meatcutter. At the start of Prohibition, the 21-year-old Linsey began bootlegging illegal liquor with Charles "King" Solomon from a front business, the National Realty Company. He also bought Canadian liquor from the Bronfman's and, although serving a year for violations of the Volstead Act

Volstead Act

The National Prohibition Act, known informally as the Volstead Act, was the enabling legislation for the Eighteenth Amendment which established prohibition in the United States...

, he was acquitted from his two later indictments on similar charges. He died in Florida of natural causes in 1994.

Further reading

• EIR. Dope, Inc.: The Book That Drove Kissinger Crazy. Washington DC: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992. ISBN 0-943235-02-2
• Etzkowitz, Henry and Peter Schwab. Is America Necessary?: Conservative, Liberal, & Socialist Perspectives of United States Political Institutions. St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1976. ISBN 0-8299-0090-X
• Fox, Stephen. Blood and Power: Organized Crime in Twentieth-Century America. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1989. ISBN 0-688-04350-X
• Fried, Albert. The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. ISBN 0-23109683-6
• Lacey, Robert. Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life. London: Century, 1991. ISBN 0-7126-2426-0
• Stein, Benjamin J. A License to Steal: The Untold Story of Michael Milken and the Conspiracy to Bilk the Nation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. ISBN 0-671-74272-8
• Summers, Anthony. Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1993. ISBN 0-399-13800-5