The Mafia in Mexico (Part III)

Mafia in Mexico: The Mysterious Max Cossman

Cossman – like Diarte – was an enigmatic figure. His family – which still lives in the United States – has scant knowledge about his background or career. He was born in 1895 near Kiev in present-day Ukraine. He was of Jewish descent and spoke Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian. Like many Ukrainian Jews, his family moved to the United States to escape the pogroms of the early twentieth century. They set up in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Described by the FBN as 5ft 4, 140 lbs, of “slight build, with brown eyes, grey hair, a sallow olive complexion, and a neat dresser” his early life was fairly regular. He married a local Jewish girl. He worked for the big power company, Westinghouse Electrical and then as a printer for the Pittsburg Printing Company. .

In the late 1910s, something changed. (It is possible that it was the war. In 1917 he was listed as a conscript in the U.S. army). Whatever the reason around 1919 Max and his wife split. Max moved across the country to Los Angeles where he started to get involved in organized crime. Bootlegging alcohol seemed to be his specialty. When he reconciled with his wife and moved to San Francisco in 1923 his children remembered the police visiting the house and asking where they kept the alcohol. (One of the children – unaware of the new laws– apparently innocently answered, “In the basement, I’ll show you”). 

Cossman’s new career started to weigh on the family and by the early 1930s he had left home. He had also made the transition from smuggling booze to drugs. In September 1934 he was arrested with two other narcotics smugglers in Los Angeles. In a case, which neatly delineated pre-1940 drug smuggling routes, he was accused of bringing morphine from New York to California. The other defendants turned on Cossman in return for lighter sentences. He got two years in McNeil’s Island Federal Prison.  The next time he appeared it was in connection with the Diarte killing.

In Mexico the search for Cossman did not last long. `Three months after the murder a Mexicali bank clerk called the local police and reported that an American man was attempting to open an account with over 100,000 pesos in cash. It was not subtle. It rather put pay to the myth of Cossman, the master criminal. The Tijuana police rushed over and made the arrest.

Max Cossman arrested in 1944 for Diarte’s murder

Yet the bust did not go to plan. Cossman’s talents or at least his contacts now became more apparent. Under interrogation, he denied everything. More importantly he also managed to get an alibi for the day of the murder. He was not even in Tijuana, he claimed. He had been dining at Mexico City’s exclusive Tampico Club together with members of the capital’s secret police. Cops and waiters eagerly backed up his claims. Cossman got out on appeal just a month after his arrest. 

Despite his release it was pretty clear that Cossman had done it. The reason – it seems – was rivalry. Cossman worked for another U.S. gangster – Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Siegel was close to Meyer Lansky and had been part of the Jewish-American mafia. In 1936 he had moved to Los Angeles, where he moved into gambling, extortion, and real estate. (Most famously he would eventually help found the Las Vegas strip.)

He also got involved in bringing narcotics up from Mexico. Rumors started as early as 1938 when Siegel was named as one of the passengers on an ill-fated shark-fishing expedition off the Mexican coast. The trip had been a disaster; the sails had been shredded by a storm off Acapulco; the boat had been set adrift; and the sailors threatened to mutiny. A subsequent investigation quoted some of the sailors who claimed that they thought the entire expedition was “a mask for smuggling drugs to the United States”. (The same sailors – it should be said – had made other outlandish claims that they were trying to sell shark oil to the Nazis and digging for pirate treasure. The ship’s captain had dismissed them as “utter eye wash” and suggested that the sailors switch profession to “dime novelists”.)

Bugsy Siegel

But the big profits of the 1940s seemed to have generated a more serious interest. And throughout the period both the FBI and the FBN asserted that Siegel was “engaged in narcotic trafficking” and a “pleasure smoker of opium”. (Though they admitted that, ““he did not have the habit”). He was a frequent visitor to Mexico and bought a ranch outside Tijuana in 1946.  In 1944 they claimed he had had deposited a “large sum of money in a Tijuana bank with which to purchase 1245 cans of opium”. (It was the same money – one presumes – that Cossman was caught depositing in the Mexicali bank). Two years later, they claimed that he had funded the establishment of a heroin lab outside Guadalajara (where not coincidently Cossman now lived). And the following year they reported that he and Meyer Lansky had teamed up to “smuggle narcotics and diamonds across the Mexican border into the USA.”

It was this serious interest that put Siegel into conflict with the 107th Street mob. According to Orbe, he not only fronted Orbe and Cossman the money to make a vast initial opium purchase, he also ordered Cossman to take out the competition. This Cossman duly did. Siegel then organized or more precisely paid for the convenient alibi. 

Next Week, The Mafia in Mexico (Part IV): The Guadalajara Connection