Bummy Davis vs Murder, Inc.

BUMMY DAVIS VS. MURDER, INC. The life of Al “Bummy” Davis was so intricately interwoven with a time, a place and a unique phenomenon, that he became the personification of a slice of history. His is the story of an immigrant Jewish community whose old country fears, values and traditions served as the nurturing grounds of both the Jewish mob world and a boxing world dominated by warriors wearing satin trunks embroidered with the Star of David. Born as Albert Davidoff to observant Jewish parents one week after Prohibition became the law of the land, Al “Bummy” Davis was a guy who drew a lousy hand. Admired and respected – even idolized by those who knew him, he was a pariah to much of the rest of the world. He was a tough kid with a big heart who became fair game for the media hucksters and promotional hustlers who vilified and maligned him in their effort to satisfy the cravings of their Depression-era public that thirsted for heroes. There cannot be heroes without villains to feed off. Coming from the same tradition-bound immigrant ghetto, direct spawns of Prohibition, was a psychopathic band of killers who came to be known as Murder, Inc. Getting their start as teenagers hired as strongarm-men for the then-mob-warlords of Brownsville, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles and his young associates, Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss and Martin “Buggsy” Goldstein, with devious minds and blazing guns fueled by insatiable greed, eventually deposed their bosses. It did not take long for the hardworking Jewish storeowners, peddlers and businessmen to realize that what they had run from in the old country, being terrorized and plundered by hordes of hateful Cossacks had once again caught up with them in their new homeland, turning their dreams to nightmares. Only here it was worse. In the old country they were tormented from those outside their community. Here they found a new breed of young Cossacks who attacked from within the walls of their own homes. Abe Reles and his cohorts feasted upon the friends, neighbors and shopkeepers of their own parents. No one was exempt. Bummy was not looking to be a hero or champion any causes. He was simply a guy who did not want to be pushed around. And when it came to pushing around, that’s what this Jewish mob did best. With an uncontrollable hair-trigger temper as his trade-mark, it seemed inevitable that Bummy Davis and Murder, Inc. were on a collision course. Unable to understand a world that shunned him, he stood up to it eyeball to eyeball, jaw-to-jaw and his inevitable clash with Murder, Inc. results in a breathtaking encounter and an historic result that could never have been predicted.