The Life and Times of Jewish Heroin Kingpin

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.

He had little supervision at home. His father Irving had died when Herbie was only one year of age, and his mother Cecilia didn’t have the wherewithal to properly raise and deal with him. It would soon lead him astray.

Herbie Sperling mugshot

He was always in trouble in school or on the streets with the cops and was sent to a juvenile reformatory at the tender age of 13 for truancy. He banged around in his early years as a bar bouncer and even boxed as a featherweight.

By his mid-teens, he was already dealing heroin in Manhattan. In fact, in 1958 when he was only 19 years old, he was arrested in a major narcotics case along with Genovese Family soldier Joseph Valachi and other top mafia traffickers - including Vito Genovese himself.

Young Sperling was thought to have been getting his drug supply from Valachi.

He got married early to a girl named Josephine Chiaremonte, and by the early 1970s, as he started earning better on the streets, he moved his wife and their three sons out to the South Bellmore section of Nassau County. There, Sperling indulged himself buying expensive cars, two luxury boats he docked by his home that he liked to cruise the waters of the Great South Bay in, and reportedly - even an original Picasso painting.

Underworld lore has it that when he was a kid growing up Downtown, mafia boss Vito Genovese had met and taken a liking to little Herbie.

He was soon allegedly being utilized by older neighborhood racketeers to run numbers, carry a few packages of dope across town to various customers, and other similar tasks easily performed by a young, mob-star-struck kid. Hence, his later arrest with Genovese and his minions.

Vito Genovese

Herbie was short - only 5-feet 5 inches tall and barrel-chested with a frame like a fire-plug. Sperling was built solid. He was said to have been fast with his hands, and by the time he was a young man, he was said to have developed a ferocious, hair-trigger temper. When angered, Herbie would think nothing of plunging a blade into a rival's chest or smashing a skull with a tire iron.

He was also generally known to have a foul mouth and wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. And he had no issues voicing his hatred of rats and stool pigeons. He once said in a magazine interview “What happened to honor? As a kid, I was taught that being a tattletale was a bad thing.”

In his early years while earning his stripes and growing his underworld reputation, New York City law enforcement suspected Sperling of committing several murders whether at the direction of his mafia superiors or by his own design.

During his rise to become one of New York’s most voracious narcotics merchants, he was also said to have committed several additional killings to maintain his power and position by instilling the fear of God in his associates and subordinates.

A good example of this was the murder of his close aide Louis Mileto - not to be confused with that other infamous Louis Mileto. This Louis Mileto was identified as a drug courier in Sperling’s organization.

In February 1972, Melito's body was found stuffed in the trunk of a burning car near Monroe New York, about an hour north of Bellmore.

He had been hacked to death with an ax, decapitated, and both hands had been severed at the wrists.

The medical examiner was only able to identify him through dental records after finding his teeth in his stomach - which he apparently had swallowed during the savage beating.

This by the way is what is known in the underworld as a “buckwheats” beating.

Melito was supposedly killed for having had the audacity and bad judgment of having “tapped” into several packages of heroin he was supposed to deliver to Sperling’s drug customers.

And he was murdered just five days after getting out on bail after being arrested for selling heroin in New York City.

Herbie Sperling while he was active

A little over a year later in April 1973, Herbie Sperling himself was arrested along with 90 others for operating a huge narcotics network that smuggled heroin and cocaine into the U.S. from Italy, France and South America.

It was then distributed on the East coast through various dealers.

Herbie was accused of being a narcotics kingpin and at teh very top of the network which operated out of a Bronx social club called the Beach Rose.

That July, after a very public trial lasting 19 days, Herbie Sperling was convicted on drug conspiracy charges.

He wasn't too happy about it either even though he apparently leapt from his chair and clasped his hands over his head in a triumphant gesture after the verdict was read.

He was also apparently very vocal during the trial as well.

When the judge was insructing the jury at the start of his trial, Sperling yelled out that the judge had failed to accept "proof the United States District Attorney manufactured this case."

And another time during the trial, Sperling shouted out Youre a liar after a prosecutor said something he didn't agree with.

In September, while at the Federal House of Detention in Manhattan awaiting sentencing, Sperling called up a NY newspaper to give his side of the story after the newspaper ran a series of interviews with Louie melito's wife Cecile. She was the main witness at Sperlings trial and provided much of the evidence that got him convicted..

Calling himself the Baron of Bellmore, he called Melito's wife Cecile a liar - denied killing her husband, and claimed he wasn't in the junk business.

I'm no lily white guy that runs to church every Sunday he said but I'm not in the junk business. I'm a bookmaker. I declared a 208,000 thousand dollar income on my taxes for last year.

Why should I be in junk and take all the chances when I can earn 250 grand from bookmaking?

He also insisted that he was framed - a refrain he continued to play even on the day he was sentenced.

Standing before U.S. District Judge Milton Pollack, who had asked Sperling if he had anything to say before imposing a sentence, Herbie pulled out a 6-page statement from his suit pocket -- and he didn't mince words.

He told the packed courtroom in his 15-minute diatribe that "anyone who came here to see me beg or plead is in the wrong courtroom. I'm asking the court for nothing.

He also told the the court he was framed by lying witnesses, by scum of the earth federal agents and by prosecutors who he said were the garbage of the human race.

And then he turned his wrath on the judge.

"I know that I will get the maximum because it's all part of the frame up" Sperling told the court.

"I'm completely innocent of all the charges against me. You know in your heart that I could not be involved in these narcotics transations."

And just to just to stick it to the judge a little more he said "You are a disgrace to the robes you wear." I got neither a fair trial or justice….As you take my life, I am and always will be a better man than you.

Then he handed out his own saying, "I sentence you to think about me the rest of your life. May God have mercy on your soul"

Authorities didn't call him a showman for nothing.

But none of it phased Judge Pollack who responded with, “Mr. Sperling has eloquently requested a fair and just sentence” before handing him a life sentence ensuring that Herbie Sperling would never again see the light of day.

As a side note, according to Cecile Melito when she showed up at trial, which Sperling hadn't been expecting, he apparently turned white, but then recovered, smiled at Cecile, and blew her a kiss. She interpreted this as the "kiss of death."

She then went into hiding fearing for her life but was still able to give that NY newspaper an in-depth interview that was published only days before Sperling was sentenced.

Sperling, by the way, was never charged with Louis Melito's murder.

Even while he was behind bars, Herbie Sperling still managed to make headlines.

His name figured into the 1977 contract murder of fellow narcotics kingpin Vincent Papa, who was serving his own decades-long sentence for heroin trafficking at the same federal prison as Sperling. At the time, Papa was suspected of turning informant.

Vinny Papa

Sperling was accused of hiring three fellow inmates to kill Papa because the underworld had discovered that Vinny was providing prosecutors with evidence of corruption within the New York Police Department.

Papa had started naming names of policemen and detectives as well as police higher-ups involved theft of over 400 pounds of heroin and cocaine from the Police Property Clerks Office evidence room in Lower Manhattan.

A little background - Much of the heroin stolen from the evidence room had been sitting there for nearly a decade and was from the case infamously known “The French Connection.”

Sperling's killers had caught Papa as he entered the prison exercise yard one morning.

Momentarily out of view from prison guards, they pounced on Papa and repeatedly stabbed him to death with homemade shanks until he collapsed in a pool of blood on the ground.

Sperling was subsequently charged with the murder but later acquitted at trial.

The Sperling surname once again came to the forefront when Herbie’s own son Nicholas was indicted in 1983 for trafficking heroin, along with Beverly Ash the girlfriend of notorious former West Harlem heroin kingpin Nicky Barnes and several of his minions.

From behind prison walls, Herbie and Nicky Barnes had conspired to start moving kilo quantities of heroin again.

It seems that old habits die hard.

But Barnes had secretly turned informant hoping to reduce his life sentence.

So, he started providing information to authorities about the drug deal which included Sperling's son Nicholas and Beverly Ash…but also later included - with the help of Nicky Barnes - an undercover DEA agent.

It would result in a drug conviction for the 23-year-old Nicky Sperling. Beverly Ash was shot to death in a Harlem bar while on bail awaiting the start of her trial.

And Nicky Barnes? Well, that's a story for another day.

As another side note, Sperling's middle son Gus was arrested in 1986 for being part of a huge heroin network operating out of the Lower East Side. Indicted along with him was the Dean of Dope Dealers for the Lucchese Family - none other than Joe Beck DiPalermo himself- who was at that time already 79 years old.

Later, while behind prison walls

In a 1994 jailhouse interview he gave to “Prison Life” magazine, Sperling admitted that he wasn’t innocent of the narcotics conspiracy charge he was convicted of

“I’m not innocent." He said, "But life without parole? That’s nuts!”

He added: "What I got is a slow death sentence. They’d be doing me a favor if they put me in the electric chair and ended the story once and for all.”

Sperling had already been incarcerated for 21 years at the time of the Prison Life Magazine interview. And he would serve 24 more years before his story finally ended.

Herbert Herbie Sperling died on July 3, 2018, of natural causes in a Massachusetts hospital near the Devons Medical Prison Facility where he spent his final years. He was 79 years old.

News of his death

He had been serving a life sentence with no chance of parole and had been incarcerated for over 45 years straight since his federal conviction on “narcotics kingpin” charges way back in 1973. He had been brought to a nearby hospital in Ayer, Massachusetts, where he died.

Until next time...”The Other Guy!”

Herbert (Herbie) Sperling – “One Crazy Tough Jew!”

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