The other defendants turned on Cossman in return for lighter sentences. In a case, which neatly delineated pre-1940 drug smuggling routes, he was accused of bringing morphine from New York to California. In September 1934 he was arrested with two other narcotics smugglers in Los Angeles. He had also made the transition from smuggling booze to drugs. (One of the children – unaware of the new laws– apparently innocently answered, “In the basement, I’ll show you”).Ĭossman’s new career started to weigh on the family and by the early 1930s he had left home. 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.
Bootlegging alcohol seemed to be his specialty.
Max moved across the country to Los Angeles where he started to get involved in organized crime. Whatever the reason around 1919 Max and his wife split. In 1917 he was listed as a conscript in the U.S. He worked for the big power company, Westinghouse Electrical and then as a printer for the Pittsburg Printing Company. 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. Like many Ukrainian Jews, his family moved to the United States to escape the pogroms of the early twentieth century. He was of Jewish descent and spoke Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian. He was born in 1895 near Kiev in present-day Ukraine. His family – which still lives in the United States – has scant knowledge about his background or career. Mafia in Mexico: The Mysterious Max CossmanĬossman – like Diarte – was an enigmatic figure.
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