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Joseph Silver | |
|---|---|
 Silver in 1909 | |
| Born | Józef Lis 1868 |
| Died | 1918(1918-00-00) (aged 49–50) |
| Cause of death | Execution by firing squad |
| Occupation(s) | Pimp Criminal Businessman |
| Known for | Jack the Ripper suspect |
| Spouse(s) | Hannah Opticer Hannah Vygenbaum Rachel Laskin |
Joseph Silver (bornJózef Lis; 1868–1918) was a Polish gangster active in the late 19th century and early 20th century. A career criminal, Silver was involved inorganized crime, specificallyhuman trafficking andprostitution rings throughoutEurope, theAmericas andSouthern Africa, oftentimes supported by corrupt law enforcement, becoming known as the "King ofPimps".[1]
Silver's family, on both his paternal and maternal side, wereJewish tobacco merchants and hailed fromDziałoszyce andOpatów respectively, in what is nowŚwiętokrzyskie Voivodeship. His father Anzelm Lis was born in 1849 inChmielnik while his mother Hanna Kweksylber was born in 1850 inStaszów. They separately moved toKielce in 1863, married in 1866 and lived primarily in atenement on Hipoteczna Street (now Wolności Square). Silver was born in 1868 as the third of nine children (five girls and four boys) and raised withYiddish as the household language.
The marriage of Silver's parents was marked by dysfunction. Hanna had several extra-marital affairs, resulting in the birth of Silver's younger brother Jacob in 1873, who was knowingly raised as Anzelm's son. Anzelm, a tailor by trade, was active in petty crime, being involved in the smuggling of alcohol and tobacco, and is known to have acted in at least one robbery on a fur store, but despite being identified, he was released without punishment after the arrest. The couple divorced in 1892, but they still shared living space, eventually reconciling in 1912. South African historianCharles van Onselen posits that Silver'smisogyny was influenced by his mother's infidelities.[2]
His original Polish name "Lis" means "Fox". His alias "Silver", was a reference to his mother, whose maiden name was Kweksylber, derived from the German surname Quecksilber, both meaning Quicksilver. He was also known as Joe Liss, Joe Eligmann, James Smith, Joseph Schmidt, José Silva (also Silves), J. Cosman, Charlie Silver, Charles Greenbaum, Abraham Ramer and Ludwig.[3]
At age 15, Silver, following the footsteps of several cousins, left Poland, obtained a passport on 14 August 1884, and entered theUnited Kingdom sometime in 1885, beginning his criminal career in theEast End ofLondon, where he also started taking on numerous aliases and began cooperating with corrupt police officers for his personal gain, until leaving for theUnited States in 1889. InNew York City, he served two years atSing Sing prison for aLower East Side burglary in which he stole $1.50 (equivalent to $52 in 2024) and a silk shawl. Silver was released on 12 October 1891 and according to his own testimony, supported by police records, he ended up working as a "special agent" for NYC'sSociety for the Prevention of Crime [de]. Between 1893 and 1894, Silver was involved in criminal activity inPittsburgh and in 1895, Silver fled New York for London, where he went on to run abrothel nearWaterloo station. Shortly after, he was tried for rape, but acquitted on a technicality before serving a sentence inHM Prison Pentonville andHM Prison Wormwood Scrubs for petty larceny. While in London, Silver was recorded asmarrying three times: Hannah Opticer, Hannah Vygenbaum, a.k.a. Annie Alford, and Rachel Laskin a.k.a. Lizzie Silver, all of them fellow Polish Jews from Opatów, his mother's ancestral home, whom he had forced into prostitution beforehand. Silver was known to mistreat his wives, as well as the prostitutes and sex slaves that labored in his brothels, regularly subjecting them to sexual assaults. Contemporary accounts, as well as three of the four known photographs that exist of Silver which showed that his face was riddled with deep pockmarks, indicated that he contractedsyphilis in the 1890s.
In 1898, Silver, along with his third wife Rachel Laskin, appeared in theSouth African Republic. InJohannesburg, he operated a network of cafes, cigar shops and police-protected brothels, with the sex workers at the latter being primarily composed ofJewish women that were trafficked from parts ofEastern Europe, steadily expanding his criminal reach within the country, including to the cities ofKimberley,Cape Town, andBloemfontein. He based his activities out of an establishment called the American Club, located on Sauer Street, which was described as housing "a trade union of pimps in coded, telegraphic and postal communication". During his time in South Africa, Silver frequently engaged inlitigation and wrote vehement letters to newspapers who reported on hisracketeering. The majority of his aliases appear to date from his period in South Africa. Silver's brutality was noted to escalate, with him once punishing a disobedient prostitute by subduing her withchloroform and threatening to pour irritatingblue vitriol into her vagina and in 1898, he intimidated Lillie Bloom, a prostitute who had threatened to expose Silver's abuse to the authorities, by telling her in front of police that he would "slit [her] belly open" in Yiddish, which the officers did not understand. Silver continued to cooperate with police to maintain his connections and get rid of competitors, often providing anonymous testimony for criminal trials regarding burglary or theft. Nevertheless, Silver was briefly imprisoned inOld Fort Prison, where he raped aZulu inmate, an act which, according to van Onselen, led to the coinage of the derorgatory term "impimpi" as a police informer inSouth African English slang, and "AmaSilva" as a prison term for a procurer, specifically one who provides young white males as sex partners, to imprisoned members of theNinevites.[4] In 1905, Silver left forGerman South West Africa, setting up illegal brothels inSwakopmund andWindhoek, for which he was convicted in 1906 and sentenced to three years imprisonment, of which he served two. Afterwards, he left the continent for Europe again, leaving behind his wife, who was subsequently admitted to a mental asylum inPotchefstroom, where she died in 1945.[2]
After arriving inNeumünster, Silver headed forParis, where hismugshot was taken by French authorities police in 1909. For a year, he ran prostitution rings inAntwerp,Brussels,Liège, andAachen. Silver moved toBalvanera,Buenos Aires in 1910 and conducted human trafficking operations for his brothels in Europe within neighboringChile, largely in the area betweenSantiago andValparaíso, in addition togun-running, while working as a police officer. Silver's last official residence was inRio de Janeiro, where he lived between 1914 and 1916, although he was known to occasional stay in New York City and London.[2]
In 1917, during the late stage ofWorld War I, while Silver was in Europe, he was recruited by the newly formed Russian government to act as a spy inAustria-Hungary. Silver was caught inAustrian Galicia and held in a prison inJarosław, where he was shot forespionage in the spring of 1918.[2][3]
In 2007, Charles van Onselen claimed in the bookThe Fox and The Flies: The World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer and Psychopath that Silver was the infamousJack the Ripper serial killer in theWhitechapel murders in 1888, citing their shared "pathological misogyny" and apparent desire "to exploit and humiliate" prostitutes inspired byEzekiel 23:25, also alleging that Silver was motivated by a twisted interpretation ofTevilah instead involving the bathing in the blood of prostitutes, a claim that has been characterized asantisemiticblood libel.[5] Building on the assertion, crime authors connected him to Lewis Lis, a shopkeeper who owned a business in Plumber's Row nearWhitechapel, and Joseph Isaacs, a potential suspect in the murder ofMary Jane Kelly, claiming that Isaacs was another one of Silver's aliases, both based largely around their shared names. Critics note, among other things, that van Onselen provides no evidence that Silver was even in London during the months the murders took place and that the accusation is based entirely upon speculation. Van Onselen has responded that the number of circumstances involved should make Silver a suspect.[1] He would have been 20 at the time, much younger than contemporary suspect descriptions of Jack the Ripper.
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