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Israel Mattes was born in Russia and he arrived in Pittsburgh in 1906, along with his mother and four brothers. Abraham Mattes, Esther’s husband and Israel’s father, had come to the city three years earlier. Within 20 years, Israel and his younger brother Nathan became two of the city’s best known Jewish racketeers. Two other brothers, Ben and Sam, also had brushes with the law. This post explores Israel Mattes’s short life and tragic death in a dark Squirrel Hill parking garage.

The Mattes Family

Abraham Mattes (1872-1940) worked in several trades after settling in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. City directories and census schedules show that he worked as a locksmith, electrical laborer, and insurance salesman.

Esther Mattes (1876-1926) joined her husband in Pittsburgh after landing in Baltimore with her five sons Moses, Benjamin, Nathan, Israel, and Simon. According to surviving records, Esther only worked in the home and had no known outside occupation.

Abraham lived at 619 Kirkpatrick Street when the rest of his family arrived. Four years later, a census enumerator recorded the family living in a rented home at 2104 Bedford Avenue. The family continued living there until the 1920s when Abraham and Esther moved to Highland Park where they rented a home at 1118 N. St. Clair Street.

Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, Abraham worked as an agent for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. His sons married and moved away; Esther died in 1926. Abraham lived in the rented home until he died the first week in January 1940.

The Birth of a Racketeer

Unlike other Hill District Jewish organized crime syndicates (loose affiliations of racketeers working together for mutual profit), the Mattes family doesn’t appear to have been dynastic, like the Angels,  Sigals, and others. Only Abraham and Esther’s children appear to have entered Pittsburgh’s underworld informal economies: liquor, gambling, and political corruption. This post focuses on Abraham and Esther’s third-oldest son, Israel. Future posts will explore other family members.

Israel Mattes was born in Gaisin, Russia (now Ukraine), in 1899. He was 12 years old and attending school when the 1910 census was taken. When he registered for the draft during World War I, Israel said that he was a clerk with the National Tube Company working on the 20th floor of the Frick building in downtown Pittsburgh. Israel’s first appearance in Pittsburgh newspapers appears to have been in 1919 when he was sworn in as a Pittsburgh police officer.

The police gig appears to have been short-lived. Less than a year later, when the 1920 census was taken, Israel was 20 years old and still living with his parents, brothers, and two younger sisters. In January 1920, Israel told the census enumerator that he was a chauffeur.

By 1925, Israel was going by the name “Irwin Mattes” and he was running with some of Pittsburgh and West Virginia’s best known bootleggers: Hyman Darling (Pittsburgh) and William Lias (Wheeling). In October 1925, Mattes and Harry “Kid” Angel testified as character witnesses for the flamboyant Darling at his Wheeling trial for violating federal Prohibition laws. The Pittsburgh Press described Mattes as a “sandwich stand” proprietor.

The second half of the 1920s were golden years for Pittsburgh’s racketeers as they got wealthy from bootlegging and from a new type of lottery game: numbers. Pittsburgh’s newspapers are silent on Israel/Irwin Mattes emergence as a racketeer and the extents of his exploits.

In June 1931, Pennsylvania state police and federal prohibition agents raided the Mattes home on Niagara Street, a brick duplex in South Oakland. Irwin and his wife, Freda, were renting the brick duplex. They lived there with their children, Earl, Doris, and Aileene, according to the 1930 census. Though Irwin told the census enumerator who visited April 5, 1930, that he was a “merchandise jobber,” prohibition agents two months later seized 12 pints of beer in the raid on his home.

A Suicide and Lots of Questions

About two years later, the Mattes family moved to a home at 5886 Hobart Street, less than one block west of Shady Avenue. The Matteses rented the end house in a brick fourplex with Craftsman detailing — hardly the “bungalows” described in real estate advertisements for them. Built in 1920, according to Allegheny County tax records, the pair of homes at 5886-90 Hobart had been rental units since at least 1927.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, access to historical archives is limited to digital sources. Those sources offer no clues to Mattes’s rise in Pittsburgh’s rackets nor to the circumstances leading up to Friday October 25, 1935. According to newspaper accounts, that afternoon Mattes entered a garage beneath the Terrace Court apartments and killed himself.

The Terrace Court apartments are located less than 500 feet from the Mattes home — a two-minute walk. Built in 1924, they offered modern appliances, heating, a trash incinerator, and limited maid service at what the owners described as “Pittsburgh’s Best Address.”

 

According to newspaper accounts, Mattes used a handgun to shoot himself in the head while sitting behind the wheel of his car inside the garage. “A Negro attendant, John Anthony, heard the shot but believed it to be backfire from Mattes’ motor,” The Pittsburgh Press reported. “It was several minutes later that Anthony walked over to the car and found Mattes dead, blood streaming down his face.”

Mattes was 36 years old.

Police investigators found an unsigned note in Mattes’s pocket, addressed to his wife, Freda:

Dear wife—I am committing an act of God. The doctors have no hope for me, so it is better for me to leave you than live and be chained to an asylum.

You certainly were all that a person could expect from a wife. God bless you and our small children.

No one knows what I have gone through. I tried my best to break out of this but it was in vain. Wish I could stay with you and shoulder our responsibilities.

I am not a coward; you have enough duties without having me on your mind, too.

See Bill often. Keep you chin up, My head filled up about the 15th and until then I thought I could break out of this.

An inquest found that Mattes was suffering from delusions that he had an incurable heart disease. Those delusions, said investigators, drove him to commit suicide. The coroner wrote that Mattes’s cause of death was a “gunshot wound of the head, self inflicted while temporarily insane.” Deputy Coroner John Artz told the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph that a specialist had assured Mattes that his heart was “perfectly sound.”

Though newspapers described Mattes as “The Big Six of gambling circles,” there were no explanations for how he got that nickname nor what his role in local gambling rackets might have been. There were no follow-up articles after the initial suicide coverage in local newspapers. Mattes’s photograph was never published in local newspapers.

Israel/Irwin Mattes left behind his 35-year-old widow, Freda, and their four children: two daughters, Doris (7) and Aileene (5) , and two sons, Earl (8) and Jerome (3).

Freda continued renting the Hobart Street house after her husband’s suicide. She and one of her sons figured in an unusual postscript that might shed light on the role Pittsburgh’s elected officials played in local organized crime rackets.

In 1937, Freda Mattes received a $7,500 payment from the city as compensation for an injury to her son. According to newspaper coverage, then-five-year-old Jerome had fallen into a hole in 1936 in the street in front of the home and was injured. Freda claimed that Jerome had gotten a “bone infection” from the incident.

Freda sued the city and received the payout in what was called a “consent verdict.” The following year, the payment was one of several suspicious uncontested settlements that the city paid, according to subsequent city council and grand jury investigations. “During the investigation of the consent verdicts by City Council last summer, it was disclosed that Montefiore Hospital records of the ‘history’ of Jerome’s case had been altered.”

Freda’s windfall might have been an example of how Pittsburgh’s elected officials and law enforcement officials took care of the families of some of the city’s top-tier racketeers. By the time of the payment, multiple elected officials, law enforcement officers, and city and county appointees had been removed from their posts and prosecuted for various acts of corruption, ranging from liquor law violations to gambling to voter fraud.

Israel/Irwin’s own brother, Sam, was one of the county officials snared in 1920s and 1930s voter fraud schemes. Sam Mattes ultimately was convicted in federal court and sentenced to serve his term at the then-new Lewisburg federal penitentiary.

The End? Not so fast

This excursion into #Mobsburgh requires lots of follow-up research after access to archives is restored. Some questions to consider: Why did Mattes leave the Pittsburgh police force so soon after joining? What was the full range of his liquor- and gambling-related activities? And, as we’ll seen in the next #Mobsburgh post, what were Israel’s connections to his younger, and more notorious, brother’s enterprises.

Stay tuned.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

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