The Last Jewish Gangster: Myron Sugarman and the Myth of the Victimless Crime

By Michael Kelman Portney

I. The Gentleman Outlaw

America loves its criminals tidy.
The violent ones—Capone, Gotti, Escobar—get mythologized as monsters. But the “gentleman gangster”? He’s something else. A rogue with ethics, a capitalist with street instincts. That’s where Myron Sugarman fits.

Born into Newark’s Jewish underworld, he wasn’t a killer or extortionist. He was a businessman—his word, not mine—selling what people already wanted: jukeboxes, slot machines, and a shot at the jackpot. He called himself the “last Jewish gangster,” but he was really the last salesman in an empire built on vice.

Sugarman’s crime wasn’t bloodshed. It was giving people a way to gamble when the government told them not to. A victimless crime, he’d say. But that phrase—victimless crime—is a moral sinkhole. Because every vice has a cost. It just hides in different ledgers.

II. The Jewish Mob: Brains Over Bullets

To understand Sugarman, you have to understand his lineage.
The Jewish mob was never the same animal as the Italian Mafia.

The Italians ran protection rackets and drug routes. The Jews ran numbers, gambling, nightlife. They were middlemen in the vice economy—operators, not enforcers. Meyer Lansky, Longie Zwillman, Bugsy Siegel—they built infrastructure. They didn’t need violence because they ran the economy behind it.

The Jewish mob had moral branding. They said they didn’t hurt “civilians.” They fought Nazis in the streets, they funded Israel’s birth, they paid off cops so poor neighborhoods could have a little action. Even Sugarman himself bragged that his father and Lansky’s crew helped Simon Wiesenthal hunt Nazis.

III. Myron Sugarman: The Coin-Op Czar

Sugarman’s story reads like a hybrid between Horatio Alger and Tony Soprano.
His father, Barney “Sugie” Sugarman, was already in the business—jukeboxes, vending machines, pinballs. When Prohibition hit, those machines became fronts for gambling.

Myron inherited the hustle. By the time he was fifteen, he was collecting coins from jukeboxes in Newark bars. By twenty-one, he was shipping machines to Europe, turning the black market into an international network.

He sold “bingo pinballs”—basically disguised slot machines—and later became the biggest distributor of illegal gaming devices in the world. When authorities banned interstate gambling machines, he just broke them down into parts and smuggled them piece by piece.

His innovation wasn’t violence. It was logistics.

Later, when Pac-Man hit in the early 1980s, Sugarman saw the next frontier—selling counterfeit arcade boards. He got caught, of course, and did 19 months in federal prison. His reaction?

“I never did anything legitimate—I had principles.”

That line says everything. In his mind, crime wasn’t immorality; it was independence. The government was the bigger thief, the casino the real crook. He just got there first.

IV. The Morality of Vice

So let’s ask the hard question:
If no one’s physically hurt, is it still wrong?

Philosophers have wrestled with this since Socrates.
Jeremy Bentham said the moral test of any action is whether it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain. By that logic, Sugarman’s machines were harmless fun. A cheap thrill, a dopamine loop.

John Stuart Mill refined it: freedom ends where harm begins. You can smoke, gamble, or screw yourself senseless—as long as you’re not hurting anyone else.

But “harm” is slippery. A rigged machine hurts the poor bastard who thinks he’s lucky. A bribe hurts the honest worker who can’t compete. A society addicted to shortcuts erodes trust, one deal at a time.

Sugarman didn’t pull triggers, but he helped normalize corruption.
He helped teach a generation that ethics are negotiable if the price is right.

That’s not victimless. It’s just delayed impact.

V. The Victims You Don’t See

When Sugarman called his crimes “victimless,” he meant no blood, no trauma, no bodies in trunks. Fair enough. But every black market has a downstream cost.

The victims weren’t the gamblers. They were the bartenders forced to host illegal machines. The cops paid to look away. The honest vending operator who couldn’t compete without mob ties.

Corruption isn’t a single wound—it’s mold. It creeps into institutions, infects incentives, and makes dishonesty feel like common sense.

Sugarman didn’t destroy lives. He degraded standards.

That’s the real danger of victimless crime. It redefines normal. It teaches everyone that the law is optional if you’re clever enough to get away with it.

VI. Crime as Capitalism’s Shadow

Here’s the dirty truth: the Jewish mob didn’t invent that logic. They just copied it from America.

The only real difference between Myron Sugarman and Wall Street is who gets the headlines.
When Sugarman skimmed coins off jukeboxes, he was running a cash-flow business. When banks gamble with derivatives and lose your pension, they’re called “systemic.”

Both play the same game—privatize the win, socialize the loss.
Both sell addiction: one in neon, one in spreadsheets.

Sugarman himself saw it clearly. When gambling became legal, the state didn’t abolish his business—it nationalized it. Slot machines became casinos. Numbers rackets became lotteries. The only difference was the logo on the license.

The mob was capitalism without paperwork.
Capitalism is organized crime with a lobbyist.

VII. The Myth of the Noble Crook

Myron Sugarman liked to say he was “born in the wrong era.” He believed the mob had honor—men of their word, codes of conduct, loyalty above profit.

But that nostalgia is a trap. There’s no morality in hierarchy. Just a chain of exploitation with better suits.

The Jewish mob saw itself as cleaner than the Italians, more civilized, less bloody. Maybe they were. But their power still came from the same source: monopoly. You control the routes, the cash, the access, and you decide who eats.

Sugarman’s romanticism hides a brutal truth: the Jewish mob was an empire of gatekeeping. A system of invisible taxes on vice, just like Wall Street taxes aspiration today.

There’s no such thing as a victimless monopoly. Somebody always pays.

VIII. The Cultural Guilt

The Jewish mob carries a unique tension:
a people defined by persecution, now dealing sin for survival.

Sugarman often described his father’s generation as “street Jews” — men who fought fascists with fists, who turned toughness into identity. To them, racketeering wasn’t betrayal; it was adaptation. America didn’t offer equity, so they manufactured it underground.

That’s the paradox of Jewish gangsterism.
They were rebelling against oppression and replicating it. They internalized the logic of power that had once been used against them.

Sugarman defended it as tribal protection. “We took care of our own,” he’d say. But tribal ethics are dangerous—they sanctify corruption when it’s in the name of survival.

That’s how mobsters turn into politicians. And how crime turns into policy.

IX. Who Gets to Sin?

The phrase “victimless crime” is really a privilege test. It asks: who can afford to bend the rules and still be admired?

When a poor man sells weed, he’s a criminal.
When a CEO sells opioids, he’s a philanthropist.
When Sugarman fixed machines, he went to prison.
When states legalized gambling, they called it “revenue.”

The morality didn’t change—just the marketing.

Sugarman was punished for being early to the idea America later embraced: that you can legalize vice and call it industry.

He was the prototype for the modern entrepreneur—self-made, nonviolent, morally flexible. The Jewish mobster became the tech founder. Both preach disruption. Both hide exploitation behind innovation.

X. What the Mob Taught America

The Jewish mob didn’t just reflect America—they taught it how to function.

They mastered soft power. They showed that control doesn’t come from fear, but from indebtedness. They invented the idea of “everybody eats,” a pragmatic corruption that mirrored what modern corporations now call “stakeholder capitalism.”

Sugarman’s empire was a microcosm of the American system:

• Cash flow over conscience.

• Efficiency over ethics.

• Loyalty over law.

He didn’t kill the American dream. He embodied it.

XI. The Cost of Doing Business

So who’s the victim?

Maybe it’s the ideal of fairness itself.
Every “victimless crime” chips away at faith in shared rules. It tells the next generation that only suckers play straight.

That’s the legacy of men like Myron Sugarman. Not violence, not tragedy—erosion.
A slow cultural rot that replaced moral clarity with cleverness.

He wasn’t wrong that the state became the biggest gangster. But that doesn’t make him innocent. It just means he and the state were competing for the same rackets.

XII. The Last Jewish Gangster

Today, Sugarman is in his eighties. He tours synagogues and universities, telling stories about Lansky, Zwillman, and “the old days.” He’s proud, articulate, still convinced he was a force for good.

He calls his memoir The Last Jewish Gangster.
But he’s really the last believer in a dying myth: that you can be both outlaw and moralist.

He built an empire on the claim that his crimes didn’t hurt anyone. And maybe they didn’t—not immediately. But the legacy of “victimless” hustles is a country that no longer knows what a victim is.

When everyone’s gaming the system, justice becomes a punchline.

XIII. Epilogue: The Real Crime

In the end, Myron Sugarman’s life is a mirror.
He shows us the American delusion—that corruption can be civilized if it wears a suit, that exploitation becomes noble when it’s clever.

He wasn’t the worst of the gangsters. He might’ve been one of the best. But that’s the problem. His version of morality—smart, loyal, self-serving—has outlived him. It’s now the operating system of the country.

The victimless crime was never about slot machines or fake Pac-Man boards.
It was about the illusion that some people can sin without consequence.

There’s always a victim.
Sometimes it’s the person feeding quarters into a rigged machine.
Sometimes it’s the idea of honesty itself.