Charles 'King' Solomon

Charles "King" Solomon (1884-January 24, 1933) was a Jewish racketeer who controlled New England's bootlegging, narcotics and illegal gambling during Prohibition.

One of the earliest crime figures in New England's history, Solomon immigrated from his native Russia as a boy settling with his family in Boston's West End. The son of a local theater owner, Solomon and his three brothers came from a middle class background and, during his teenage years, worked as a counterman in his uncle's restaurant. However, by his early 20s, he had had become involved in prostitution, fencing and bail bonding prior to Prohibition.

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By the early 1920s, he controlled the majority of illegal gambling and narcotics such as cocaine and morphine before expanding into bootlegging with Dan Carroll during Prohibition owning many of the cities most prominent speakeasies including the Cocoanut Grove nightclub. He enjoyed extensive contacts throughout the underworld including the Bronfmans in Canada as well as associates in New York and Chicago.
Although never indicted on bootlegging charges (due to his political connections), he was tried on narcotics charges in 1922. Represented by editor and general councilor of the Boston American Grenville MacFarlane, which had then been crusading against drug abuse, he was later acquitted of charges. He would however served thirteen months of a five year prison sentence at Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for intimidating a witness into perjury for his narcotics trial. During his imprisonment, a request for his transfer to a prison closer to Boston was made by Boston Congressmen George H. Tinkham and James A. Gallivan.

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Attending the Atlantic City Conference in 1927, Solomon was one of the several leaders in the "Big Seven" who helped negotiate territorial disputes and establish policies which would influence the later National Crime Syndicate in 1932. Solomon continued to control illegal gambling in New England until his death on January 24, 1933 when he was killed in Boston's Cotton Club by rival gunmen [1]. His territories were eventually divided up among his lieutenants Joseph Linsey, Hyman Abrams and brothers Max and Louis Fox.

The King, in his glory at his Cotton Club in the South End. He was as big as they came in Boston. He beat a narcotics rap in 1922, but was convicted of suborning perjury during the trial and sentenced to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta where Whitey Bulger would later take part in LSD experiments. Fortunately for the King, two Boston Congressmen, one of whom was James Gallivan (as in Gallivan Boulevard) intervened so that he could be moved closer to home.

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He was soon released and in 1927 took part in the famous summit of Jewish ganglords in Atlantic City. As Prohibition neared its end in 1933, it behooved numerous other factions in the Boston underworld to eliminate the King. One night he was in the men’s room of the Cotton Club when gunmen burst in and opened fire. The cops asked the dying Solomon who did it, to which he responded only, “Those dirty rats!”
The reputed rats’ names: Coyne and Burke.

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