Bernard Baff and the Kosher Killers

At the turn of the twentieth century, New York City’s Live Poultry Commission Merchants’ Protective Association thought they had fixed every inch of the city’s kosher poultry market in their favor. They paid off the wholesale jobbers and bought up nearly every stall in the West Washington Market. At the start of each week, they held meetings to decide what price the city’s Jewish residents should pay to get their kosher chicken. Whenever an aspiring poultry merchant tried to break the trust, they handed him a wad of cash as encouragement to find another calling. If someone needed more than cash to be convinced, the association might poison his horses as a warning.

In July 1913, Joe Cohen, a higher-up in the association, thought that Bernard Baff, who’d left the association and gone freelance, might be in need of a good scare. He found a group of Italian gangsters who were willing to drive to Baff’s house in Arverne, Queens, and put a bomb on the veranda. The bomb was a dud, the first of many failed attempts to scare the illiterate immigrant, who had proclaimed himself the “poultry king” of America’s biggest metropolis.

Read more in Issue 22 of Lucky Peach or on LuckyPeach.com