The story you are about to read is about two Jewish boys born and raised in The Bronx who, as youths, gravitated to the street as juvenile delinquents, street thugs, and ultimately, rise to become among the biggest and most important kingpin’s in New York’s policy-rackets. Brothers Samuel and Morris Schlitten came from a hardworking religious Jewish family. Growing up they were poor kids living in a Jewish ghetto in Bronx County. But Sammy and Morris yearned for more. Much more. They refused to live in squalor or resign themselves to a lives of humble poverty.
Early on they decided to buck the system and leave school to seek their fortune on the mean streets of their neighborhood. They quickly gravitated to delinquency and petty criminality to feed themselves. But they eventually graduated to bigger things becoming involved in the bootlegging racket and other criminal activities, including gambling, which would become their life’s work and the key to their future success. By at least the late 1940s, they started booking numbers bets and operating their own mobbed-up gambling operation in The Bronx. Less than a decade later, they were widely recognized as being among the biggest and most successful policy-racket kingpin’s in the city, operating one of the most lucrative numbers networks around, and key Cosa Nostra associates who worked with several important members of the Gambino and Genovese Families.
What follows is the life story of the Schlitten brothers and a deep-dive into their underworld careers.
Sammy Schlitz
Samuel (Sammy Schlitz) Schlitten — aka Sam Schlitten, Sammy Shell, and Samuel M. Shell — was born in Upper Manhattan on January 14, 1910. It appears that Sammy was the second oldest of five sons born to Abraham Schlitten and Sally Wachtel. The boys were, in age order: Harry, Samuel, Henry, Morris and Louis.
On October 10, 1933, at the age of 23,, he married a young woman named Chana “Jennie” Zwillich at a ceremony in The Bronx.
By 1940, he and Jennie were residing at 1020 Boynton Avenue. By the late 1940s, they was residing with their children at 2181 Wallace Avenue.
By the mid-1950s, he and his wife was known to have had moved from The Bronx out to Nassau County, Long Island, buying an expensive home at 1482 Park Street in the exclusive beachfront community of Atlantic Beach.
By that point in time, the mid-1950s, Sammy was at the top of his game and considered to be an underworld executive of sorts, heading up one of New York CIty’s largest and most lucrative illegal gambling networks.
Often Imitated. Never Duplicated. Button Guys of The New York Mafia...There's Only One!
