Joseph Stacher

Who was Joseph Stacher?

Joseph "Doc" Stacher was a Jewish syndicate leader who helped bring together the Jewish and Italian Mafia into a national organized crime syndicate.

Born in Letichev, Ukraine around 1902, Stacher immigrated with his family to the United States in 1912. As a teenager living in Newark, New Jersey he became known as a pushcart thief, later befriending future Jewish gangsters such as Meyer Lansky and Abner Zwillman. By the 1920s Stacher was running much of Zwillman's gambling operations.

In 1931, Stacher helped Meyer Lansky organize a conference of Jewish organized crime leaders at the Franconia Hotel, which later would see the alleged merging of the Jewish and Italian Mafia into a national crime syndicate. Running West Coast and Caribbean gambling operations for Lansky during the 1930s, as well as becoming a silent partner of movie studio Columbia Pictures in the late 1930s, Stacher would later supervise gambling in Las Vegas, Nevada, particularly the Sands and Fremont Casinos.

Stacher continued running Mafia gambling operations until 1964, when Federal authorities arrested him for tax evasion. While the US government was in favor of deporting him to his native Poland, federal law prohibited deporting anyone to a communist-controlled country. However, because of the "Law of Return", Stacher was allowed citizenship in Israel and successfully immigrated there in 1965.