Delis, Dons, and the Kosher Nostra: How South Florida Became the Gangsters’ Winter Capital

By Michael Kelman Portney

I. Paradise for Criminals

Every retiree dreams of Florida. The difference is that some of them brought the mob with them.

By the mid-1980s, South Florida wasn’t just a vacation spot — it was the national retirement home for organized crime. From Miami Beach up through Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, and Boca Raton, the sunshine state became a strange kind of neutral ground: Jewish mobsters, Italian capos, Midwestern bookies, and union fixers all eating lunch in the same damn delis.

What Vegas was to greed, Florida was to discretion. No turf wars, no body drops in alleys — just condo towers full of men who used to own half of Newark. They called it open territory, which meant no single family could claim it. So they all did.

If you could sit at a table in the right place — Rascal House, Wolfie’s, The Forge, or Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast Restaurant — you could watch the entire postwar American underworld stroll in for dinner.

II. The Kosher Nostra Arrives

The “Kosher Nostra” wasn’t a separate mob. It was the Jewish branch of the same criminal tree — the accountants, financiers, and fixers who made the Mafia run like a corporation. From the Prohibition days of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel to the gambling empires of the fifties and sixties, Jewish gangsters had been the brains behind the operation. By the 1980s, they were its elder statesmen.

Lansky had already chosen Miami Beach as his last stand. He spent his final years there quietly — gray suit, small frame, walking Collins Avenue like a banker on vacation. He’d eat at Wolfie Cohen’s Deli almost every morning. Bagel, cream cheese, black coffee, a five-dollar tip. No entourage. Just the Godfather of Organized Crime sipping coffee while tourists asked for autographs. He never hid. He didn’t have to. Florida was the one place on earth where every wiseguy understood the code: keep it civil, keep it quiet, keep it profitable.

The men who followed Lansky down south weren’t killers. They were financiers, bookmakers, casino investors, men who owned vending machine routes or leased pinball machines that were actually disguised slot operations. They’d made their money in Chicago, Cleveland, Minneapolis, or yes — even Montana. When the law got too close, or when they were too old to run, they moved south. Not to hide, but to live out their days among their own.

III. Fort Lauderdale: The Quiet Center

The reason Fort Lauderdale mattered wasn’t that it was violent. It’s that it wasn’t.

By the 1980s, Fort Lauderdale was where you went to stay out of trouble while still knowing where to find it. For the mob, it was an insurance policy. The FBI and NYPD couldn’t follow everyone to Broward County, so Fort Lauderdale became a crossroads — a place where bosses could meet without the baggage of their home turf.

This is where the networking happened. Not in smoky back rooms, but in daylight: on golf courses, in condo clubhouses, at steakhouses with linen napkins. The old distinctions — Jewish, Italian, Irish — melted away under the Florida sun. These were men with arthritis and cholesterol problems, reminiscing about the days when you could make twenty grand off jukebox routes and slot conversions.

What they shared was history and habit. They had built empires out of vending machines, cigars, jukeboxes, and cash-only restaurants. Fort Lauderdale’s suburban sprawl gave them cover — plenty of parking, no curious reporters, and no corner kids watching who came and went.

For men like my grandfather Zollie Kelman, it would’ve been ideal: a place where the gaming world’s old guard could mingle with distributors, electronics suppliers, and syndicate veterans. The racket of counterfeit Pac-Man boards and slot machines that crisscrossed the Midwest almost certainly had its winter counterpart in Broward County. Every gangster with a hardware connection eventually ended up at the same Florida restaurants, talking about the same business in the same half-coded language.

IV. Lunch as a Business Meeting

Myron Sugerman — the last self-described Jewish gangster of his era — once said that mobsters didn’t hold formal summits. They had lunch.

They’d meet at a deli or Italian restaurant, talk “shop,” and pretend it was coincidence they all happened to be in town. There was nothing cinematic about it: no smoky rooms, no bodyguards at the door. Just corned beef sandwiches and whispered math about who owed who.

Florida was full of these joints. Wolfie’s, Rascal House, and Pumpernik’s on Miami Beach were practically extensions of the National Crime Syndicate’s boardroom. Meyer Lansky’s table at Wolfie’s was legend. Alvin Malnik — Lansky’s lawyer and protégé — owned The Forge, a glitzy steakhouse on 41st Street that mixed Sinatra’s crowd with mob financiers and political fixers. If you were someone in the business, you showed up eventually.

Every scene had its ritual. You ordered the same thing, tipped big, and never wrote anything down. The waiter didn’t ask questions. Sometimes a “business associate” from Detroit or Cleveland would drop by. They’d talk about real estate or vending routes, maybe complain about the heat. Nobody mentioned rackets, but everyone knew why they were there.

These delis were neutral ground. A Gambino capo might sit three tables away from a Jewish bookmaker from Newark. It didn’t matter. The food was good, and the company was better. It was a social ecosystem that only worked because everyone followed the code. The moment someone brought attention — fights, drugs, headlines — they were done.

V. Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast: The Real Godfather Restaurant

Every underworld city has one location that acts like a magnet. In South Florida, that was Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast Restaurant in Hollywood.

From the 1950s through the early 1990s, Sonken’s place was the undisputed mob headquarters of the region. A dimly lit waterfront steakhouse that doubled as the national message center for organized crime. The FBI called it “the Southern headquarters of the mob.” The Senate called it worse.

Joe Sonken himself was straight out of central casting — a rotund Chicago native of Jewish descent who played both sides of the line. He was friendly with the Outfit, friendly with the Kosher boys, and smart enough to keep his name out of indictments. Gold Coast served stone crabs, prime rib, and a side order of omertà. Everyone went there: Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Philly. Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo of Philadelphia dined there when he wintered in Lauderdale. Russell Bufalino — the quiet don from Pennsylvania — was said to stop in daily when he was in town. Even John Gotti showed up in the mid-80s to kiss rings and make an appearance.

The restaurant was wired to the gills with phones and hidden booths. A pay phone in the corner was rumored to be a direct line to New York. Detectives who ran surveillance called it “the mob’s post office.” Bookmakers around the country would call Gold Coast to leave messages for men sitting at the bar.

Sonken ran the place like a country club for criminals. He hosted civic events, donated to the local high school, and occasionally ended up in court for buying stolen anchovies. He beat most of the charges. When his car rolled off the dock in 1986, people said it was an accident. Others said it was a warning. Either way, he came out of the water smiling — one basset hound short but still untouchable.

By the time Sonken died and Gold Coast shut down in 1994, an entire chapter of American organized crime closed with it. Gus Boulis bought the property, opened a new restaurant, and was later murdered in a mob-style hit. Florida eats its own.

VI. Condos and Country Clubs: The Retirement Network

It wasn’t just restaurants. Entire neighborhoods in South Florida functioned like informal mob lodges. Hollywood, Hallandale, Boca Raton, and Palm Beach became the snowbird branches of the syndicate.

Drive through Hallandale in the 1980s and you’d see it: towering condos like The Hemispheres and Golden Surf packed with men from Brooklyn and Newark who all somehow knew each other’s nicknames. They played cards, walked the beach, and looked harmless — unless you knew their résumés.

Hollywood Beach was “Little New York.” Boca Raton was “New Jersey South.” Every crime family had members there. The Genovese underboss Jerry Catena lived quietly in Boca for decades. Retired Teamsters bagmen lived up the street. So did independent gamblers and coin-machine operators from the Midwest. For guys like that, Fort Lauderdale was central: close to Miami for business, far enough north for peace.

The social calendar was predictable — golf on Tuesdays, lunch at Rascal House, synagogue on the High Holidays, poker on Fridays. Nobody called it networking, but that’s exactly what it was. They maintained the connections that mattered: who to call in Vegas, who had a trucking contact in Cleveland, who could get machines repaired without a paper trail.

Even the FBI knew the pattern. Surveillance reports from the 1980s describe “chance meetings” at Broward country clubs that were anything but chance. Bookmakers, ex-union officers, and former casino investors all bumped into each other at the same bars. They’d say hello, talk sports, and the next week money would quietly move between corporations that didn’t exist a month before.

This was the genius of the Florida operation. It wasn’t about violence or extortion. It was about continuity — keeping the network alive in exile. When law enforcement dismantled the Mafia’s northern empires, the survivors moved south, rebranded as retirees, and kept doing business under the radar. The sun, the condos, and the golf carts were camouflage.

VII. Jewish and Italian Alliances

If the Mafia had a Bible, Florida was its New Testament — the part where old enemies make peace.

Jewish and Italian mobsters had always had an uneasy alliance up north. In Florida, they became neighbors. They shared doctors, accountants, and deli counters. Meyer Lansky’s protégés invested with Sicilian families. Italian capos retired into Jewish neighborhoods because the property was cheaper and nobody asked questions. The line between “family” and family blurred.

South Florida made those boundaries irrelevant. The Kosher Nostra and La Cosa Nostra found common ground in three things: real estate, hospitality, and gambling. Real estate because everyone needed a place to hide their money. Hospitality because delis and restaurants made perfect fronts. Gambling because it never really ended — it just moved offshore, into the Caribbean and South America, often financed from Florida condos.

In the 1980s and early 90s, the most reliable alliances were financial. Jewish bookies from Newark or Detroit partnered with Italian distributors to launder money through Florida real estate. A condo development in Boca Raton might have half a dozen silent investors — all “retirees” from the old rackets. Everyone profited, and nobody talked.

It wasn’t glamorous. It was paperwork, golf, and quiet phone calls from the pool deck. But this was the last functioning piece of the national network. Florida became the meeting point between the fading old world and the emerging global one. The mob was transforming into something corporate, and Florida was its test market.

VIII. Decline and Transition

By the mid-1990s, the world had changed. Cocaine money dwarfed the old rackets. The “Cocaine Cowboys” of Miami didn’t play by the rules — they didn’t respect the old bosses, didn’t pay tribute, and didn’t care who got shot. Compared to that chaos, the Kosher Nostra’s gentlemanly lunches looked quaint.

Law enforcement, newly equipped with RICO statutes and better surveillance, began hammering the remaining organized crime networks. The FBI bugged restaurants, watched condo parking lots, and followed phone records. Operation Cherokee, one of Broward County’s biggest undercover stings, pulled the curtain back on the entire network in the 1980s. By the time the dust settled, the grand old days of deli diplomacy were over.

The old-timers kept meeting, but fewer every year. Sonken’s Gold Coast closed in 1994. Wolfie’s Deli shuttered soon after. Meyer Lansky was long dead. Alvin Malnik sold off parts of The Forge and faded into the world of legitimate business. The mob didn’t disappear — it retired. Or at least tried to.

But you can still feel it in South Florida. The ghosts linger in the architecture — the curved booths, the unlisted phones behind the bar, the quiet neighborhoods where half the mailboxes still have Italian or Yiddish surnames. Every so often a reporter digs up a connection between a modern Ponzi scheme or real-estate scandal and an old name from the 1980s. The roots never went away; they just grew under the sand.

IX. The Legacy of Sunshine and Silence

It’s tempting to romanticize this world — the idea of old mobsters eating bagels by the beach, reliving their glory days. But that’s nostalgia talking. These were men who built empires on intimidation and fraud, who corrupted unions, fixed fights, and skimmed millions from casinos. Their Florida exile was a reward for surviving the wars up north.

Still, you can’t tell the story of American organized crime without Florida. It was the endgame — the place where the country’s criminal elite turned into condo associations and bridge clubs. For the Jewish gangsters, it was also a return to something familiar: community. The same men who once ran numbers rackets in the Bronx now donated to local synagogues in Boca Raton. They aged into pillars of their neighborhoods, even as their pasts stayed buried.

In a sense, they achieved what every gangster dreams of — retirement without retribution. They won the long game. They died in bed, not in alleys. And the setting sun over the Atlantic became their closing credit shot.

X. Conclusion: Where the Families Met Family

When people talk about organized crime, they usually picture New York or Chicago — smoky rooms, thick accents, street-level violence. But the real story of how America’s criminal networks survived the 20th century is written in Florida sand.

Between 1980 and 1995, South Florida wasn’t just a haven for fugitives; it was the national meeting place of the underworld’s diaspora. Fort Lauderdale was its nerve center — discreet, middle-class, invisible. Miami Beach was its old-money wing. Hollywood and Hallandale were the bridge between the two. Boca Raton and Palm Beach were the finishing schools for mobsters who had learned to blend in with bankers.

The Kosher Nostra fit perfectly here. Jewish gangsters who had once operated out of Newark and Minneapolis found a cultural comfort zone: good delis, good weather, and plenty of plausible deniability. They didn’t need to run rackets anymore — just keep the phone numbers alive, just in case someone called.

And they did call. They called from Chicago, Cleveland, New York, even Montana. The connections that had once been built in nightclubs and backrooms were now maintained from golf carts and condos. The Florida sun melted away the rivalries, leaving behind the one thing that bound them all — survival.

As one retired detective put it years later: “If you wanted to find the mob in the 80s, you didn’t go to Little Italy. You went to the deli in Hallandale.”

That’s the whole point. South Florida wasn’t an escape. It was the final headquarters of an American empire built on loyalty, silence, and shared meals. The last supper of the old world.