The subject of Ron de Beaulieu’s new book is a notorious bootlegger with a talent for misdirection.
After one of Isadore Blumenfeld’s arrests, authorities said he used seven aliases. The author’s research unearths a few more. But history doesn’t remember him as “Joe Miller” or “Dr. Ferguson.” Instead, writes de Beaulieu — a Macalester College grad who lives in Minneapolis — Blumenfeld is most commonly remembered as “Kid Cann,” a handle he “grew to hate.”
“Minnesota’s Most Notorious Mobster: The Making and Breaking of Kid Cann” is a brisk, informative portrait of a crook’s heyday. Vice crimes, jury tampering, murder — Blumenfeld was credibly linked to these and more. Even his minor transgressions made news. In 1947, after a dispute at a hotel, the Minneapolis Tribune had the story and a dandy headline: “Kid Cann Gets Conked.”
In its broad strokes, Blumenfeld’s trajectory mirrors that of other American outlaws. Born in Romania, he moved with his parents to Minneapolis’ south side, near other Jewish immigrants. They were poor, and Blumenfeld quit school young. As a teen, he seems to have made a few cents as a pickpocket and by delivering coffee to a local brothel.
Forever after, he was a criminal hustler — a pimp, an owner of Prohibition-era distilleries and taverns, an associate of Meyer Lansky, the East Coast mafia kingpin. In short, he was an avatar of “gangsterism and ruthlessness,” as a probation officer wrote.
Today, Blumenfeld’s name is mud for his purported role in the city’s controversial midcentury transition from streetcars to buses. Blumenfeld owned stock in Twin City Rapid Transit Company (TCRT) during this period, but the suggestion that his criminal influence was behind the destruction of the streetcars is “unfair,” she writes, noting that TCRT had serious financial and management troubles, apparently unrelated to Blumenfeld.
De Beaulieu excels at placing Blumenfeld in historical context. It was hard for Jewish immigrants to find work in early 20th century Minneapolis, where some want ads read “Gentiles Preferred.” Local officials “seem to have concerned themselves more with the aesthetics of poverty than with the plight of impoverished people,” she writes, and did little “to help residents or their landlords improve the conditions” of poor neighborhoods.
Minneapolis was once awash in corruption, which de Beaulieu demonstrates by citing newspaper clippings and archival documents. Blumenfeld fit right in, bribing aldermen and beating charges that he perhaps killed a journalist, de Beaulieu shows, by paying off and intimidating witnesses.
