New Book on L.B.'s ‘Shady Side' Earns Historian’s Praise

A new book titled Scoundrels by the Sea: The Sullied Past of Long Beach Politicians, Swindlers, Bootleggers—and Worse doesn’t sugarcoat the city's sometimes shady past.

So says historian Roberta Fiore of the 364-page paperback that was written and self-published by Paul Jackson, the editor and publisher of a defunct Long Beach weekly newspaper, the Long Island Independent. Fiore, who co-authored the book Long Beach: Images of America, called Scoundrels “enviable” in the quality of its research.  

“It’s a very informative, very well researched tell-all book,” she said. “... It’s very viable, very true, very detailed, and has things that I haven’t been able to find out for years, like people’s names.”

Jackson, who was also worked for the New York Herald Tribune and Esquire magazine and penned Our Town, Our Time: Long Beach, L.I., in the 1930s and WWII, will sign copies of Scoundrels and read excerpts from it at the museum of the Long Beach Historical & Preservation Society on Sunday.

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Amazon.com’s listing of Scoundrels reads: “It traces the extraordinary life of Senator William H. Reynolds, the Brooklyn builder and politician who turned the desolate sandbar on the Atlantic Ocean into a thriving city.” It then list some of the book’s more notable “scoundrels”:

• Doc Hirshberg who operated his own little Ponzi scheme at the same time he was fundraising for the new Long Beach Hospital.

• William Cahn, the Nassau County District Attorney, who was jailed for double-billing on his travel expenses.

• Larry Knohl, the convicted embezzler, who was the most notorious and most audacious of the scoundrels who lived in Long Beach.

For years, Fiore has consulted an unauthorized biography of Sen. Reynolds as her self-proclaimed “Bible” on Long Beach’s early history. But of Jackson’s book, she said: “He tells a lot of the same stories but he proved them. He had resources that impressed me.”

One of its stories that she found fascinating involved a police chief, Morris Rosner, whose career was erased from the police department’s records. “They had no records of him,” Fiore said. “He was part of the Jewish mafia and they called upon him for his background in the [Charles] Lindbergh baby kidnapping case.”

In an adult education class on Long Beach history that she has taught for the past 15 years, Fiore always tells the stories of the unsolved murder of Starr Faithfull, a high society woman who was found dead on Minnesota beach in 1931, and the police patrolman who shot and killed the city’s mayor in 1939. “That’s about as scandalous as I get,” she said.

“What he [Jackson] has done, is he goes right into the 1960s,” she added, referencing a scandal in his book that involved Phil Kohut, a Democratic leader who pocketed $23,500 in graft when the city purchased parking meters, according to Amazon’s listing.

In an effort to drum up interest for the signing event Sunday, Jackson, who now lives in Manhattan, delivered 10 copies of his new book to the museum after he published it in October. They soon sold out, though, to students of Fiore’s adult education class.

“I’m waiting for Sunday to get a copy for myself,” she said, “because I even lent out his autographed copy to me.”