He was generally known to have a foul mouth and a bad attitude, and he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. He also voiced his hatred of rats and stool pigeons. During his later years in prison, he was even heard lamenting, “What happened to honor? As a kid, I was taught that being a tattletale was a bad thing.”
Herbert (Herbie) Sperling was a poverty-stricken Jewish kid born on December 29, 1938, in the gritty Hells Kitchen section of Midtown Manhattan’s far Westside, to immigrant Jewish parents from Eastern Europe. By the time he was a teen, he was said to have relocated down to the Little Italy area around the 6th and 4th wards, where he would reside and hang around the area’s Italian hoodlums for the rest of his days.