Abe Plisco was one of the out-of-town gangsters who reporters spotted at Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery during the 1938 funeral of Washington D.C. gambling kingpin Carroll Peyton “Nubby” Nuckols, who committed suicide to avoid prison. The gathering of mobsters for Nuckols' funeral in Richmond represented a homecoming for Plisco, too.
Plisco was born in Ukraine in 1901, and his Russian Jewish parents emigrated to America when he was six years old. The Plisco family ultimately settled in the Richmond area, where Abe’s father, Berman, operated Plisco’s Shoe Store in downtown Richmond for many years. The family lived above the store at the corner of Adams and Broad streets.
As a teenager, Abe Plisco worked at a nearby grocery store, and later ran the projector at a Petersburg movie theater. On Christmas night in 1922, Plisco was critically injured with a skull fracture when the car he was riding in overturned (or “turned turtle,” as the local paper reported) in a crash while leaving the Camp Lee military base en route to Petersburg. A local newspaper offered few other details of the accident other than noting only minor injuries were suffered by the driver.
The newspaper hinted that 21-year-old Abe Plisco was not expected to survive his injuries, but he recovered and moved north to Washington, where he joined a fast crowd of bootleggers running liquor from suburban Maryland into D.C. and northern Virginia. On the streets of Washington and in the pages of D.C.'s daily newspapers over the next four decades, stories about Plisco’s frequent run-ins with the authorities often included references to his jarringly offensive criminal alias: William “Jew Boy” Dietz.
FBI records indicate Plisco faced a series of arrests in Washington, D.C. on various bootlegging charges between March 1927 and 1931. Plisco first got widespread press attention in Washington in May 1929 when he was shot three times during a 2:30 A.M. brawl at a notorious gambling den in D.C.’s Maryland suburbs. Told he was likely to die, the critically wounded Plisco “steadfastly refused to squeal,” according to a front-page article in Washington’s Evening Star newspaper: “A man in whose pockets were found nearly $1,000 [the equivalent of $15,000 in 2021 dollars] lies in Sibley Hospital, Washington, with little chance of recovery from bullet wounds in his abdomen and left leg, his lips tightly sealed to repeated police questioning about a fight in the Prince Georges Inn, formerly Ram’s Horn Inn, near Chillum, Md., early this morning… Police described the gun fight in which William ‘Jew Boy’ Dietz was probably mortally wounded as a ‘row between bootleggers and gamblers.’”
Plisco eventually would recover, and he came to police attention again in 1931 when he was charged with reckless driving after his car struck and killed an 11-year-old schoolboy near Bladensville, MD. He avoided manslaughter charges after police determined he crashed and nearly overturned the car in an effort to avoid hitting the child.
FBI records indicate Plisco was arrested on bootlegging and weapons charges in January 1931, drunk and disorderly charges in April and June 1931, and assault charges in December 1931, when he was arrested during a police raid on a cigar store that concealed an illegal bar elaborately outfitted with gambling equipment.
Newspaper coverage of the raid, and Plisco's arrest earlier that same week during a late night bar brawl, reached the desk of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who hand wrote this instruction to his agents at the bottom of the news clippings: "Keep your eye on this case and don't allow any monkey business to happen... He [Plisco] has so much influence that he may get out of this without a jail sentence." It appears that's exactly what happened.
By the spring of 1937, Plisco had taken over and enlarged D.C.’s Mob-backed racing wire founded by Sam “Fat Man” Beard, who had taken up residence at the Atlanta federal prison after being convicted on tax charges. Like a huge spider web, Plisco’s National Telecast Service received closed-circuit track information – jockeys, track conditions, scratches, and more importantly, race results – and redistributed the information through multiple telephone lines into dozens of small-time bookie joints and illegal betting parlors across the city.
Controlling the real-time track information gave Plisco the opportunity to occasionally delay the release of race results just long enough to place his own winning bets on races already run. Plisco also leveraged his wire operation into another profitable side hustle: it appears he telegraphed the racing results to Harry Donovan in Richmond and other numbers bosses across the region, who used pari-mutuel payout numbers to set the winning number combinations for their illegal lottery games each day.
Plisco’s National Telecast Service operated from a suite of offices in the posh Albee Building, about one block from the White House and the Treasury Department in the heart of Washington’s financial district. By early 1937, authorities had correctly pegged Plisco’s operation as the beating heart of D.C.’s illegal sports gambling syndicate. Federal agents rented a vacant office in the Albee Building and spent four months monitoring and mapping the telephone traffic emanating from Plisco's offices.
"When the agent listened in, he heard the racing information going out to clients other than the cafes and restaurants and other places who might receive the telephonic broadcast and be inside the law because there was no violation of the District statutes,” The Washington Post reported. “According to the Office of the District Attorney, the establishment received the racing information and then broadcast it five minutes later. But a minute after the results were on hand, a number of clients in the city who took bets got the service by telephone. The broadcast followed, but in the meantime, bets had been taken.”
Over the next three months, D.C.’s illicit gambling industry would reel from a series of raids based on the information gathered through the Plisco wiretaps. By tracing the numbers called from Plisco’s offices, authorities were able to locate 65 gambling houses and round up 450 suspects – including indictments naming five D.C. police officers alleged to have provided protection for the racket. When agents raided Plisco’s home, they seized 15 slot machines, cash, and his wife’s $5,000 silver fox fur. Later, when Selma Plisco was arraigned on charges of evading customs duties on the imported fur, officers found $23,000 in cash in her purse.
“Touched off by the hastily executed raid last February on the elaborate Albee Building headquarters of Abe Plisco, alias Jewboy Dietz, from which telephone wires stretched like a monstrous web over the city, the other raids followed in rapid fire order,” according to a report in Washington’s Evening Star newspaper. “As the wires of the horse race information system, traced out by federal and local undercover men through months of patient tapping, guided the raiders, so they formed the ties binding together alleged gamblers and policemen in a single indictment charging a citywide conspiracy to violate the gaming laws.“
Fortunately for Plisco, the use of wiretap evidence was relatively new and legally controversial. A federal judge later would quash the arrest warrants, and prosecutors would reluctantly withdraw the indictments, after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that limited federal wiretaps to interstate telephone traffic. In Plisco's case, the D.C. judge ruled that the incriminating telephone traffic was intrastate: it never crossed beyond the boundaries of the District of Columbia.
Within a month, a truckload of property seized in the raids left a government warehouse and was returned to Abe Plisco, whereupon the Post reported he quickly reopened his business. Plisco playfully told a 1940 Census taker that he worked as a clerk at a horse track, and by the mid-1940s Plisco also was known to be running one of D.C.’s largest numbers operations.
He was nabbed by police on charges of operating an illegal lottery in 1945 and avoided conviction by compelling a co-defendant to take the fall. A similar 1947 arrest resulted in Plisco's conviction, a $1,000 fine and a two-year suspended prison sentence.
Around 1950, Plisco bought a wholesale flower business -- perhaps in an effort to mask his illegal gambling income. He would spend more than a decade fighting an IRS lien over $415,000 in unpaid gambling taxes from 1948, 1949 and 1950. Plisco v. Internal Revenue Service eventually would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against him.
In April 1952, as the nation found itself transfixed by the televised Kefauver Committee congressional hearings on organized crime, a U.S. Senate subcommittee convened similar hearings into organized crime in Washington, D.C. The locally televised hearings would highlight disgraced former D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Barrett’s longstanding personal and financial relationships with several local crime bosses, including Plisco.
“Suave gambler Abe Plisco refused to tell the Senate District Crime Subcommittee whether he made a gift valued at $1000 or more to each of four Metropolitan Police officers and former Police Chief Robert J. Barrett,” the Washington Post reported on April 18, 1952. “Plisco, with his attorney at his side, just wasn’t answering anything.”
Plisco -- with his dark hair, dark eyes often concealed by sunglasses, and faint scars on his chin and left cheek -- certainly looked like a gangster. And in his appearance before congressional investigators, he behaved like one, too. The transcript reveals Plisco acknowledged his name, age and address, but he was no more forthcoming than that. He declined to answer questions about when he moved to Washington, his occupation, where he got married or whether he had children. Plisco refused to say whether he liked baseball, ever went fishing, or had even heard of the State of Maryland or Nags Head, North Carolina. In all, the gambler invoked Fifth Amendment protection from self-incrimination a whopping 86 times.
Meanwhile, Plisco continued to run his numbers operations in Washington throughout the 1950s and 60s. In an interview with FBI agents in 1963, he said he had left the illegal gambling business and made his living wagering on horse races at tracks across the country. He claimed he could not hold a normal job because his eyesight was so poor.
In the fall of 1963, FBI agents had reason to closely track Plisco's travel by Trailways bus from Washington to Richmond, apparently for an overnight visit to see a relative recovering from an unknown ailment at Richmond's Grace Hospital. He overnighted in Richmond and briefly visited Richmond Amusement Company the next morning, formerly owned by his old friend and convicted racketeer Harry Donovan, before returning to D.C. by bus later that same day.
In July 1964, Plisco was arrested by D.C. police following a raid on an office where authorities found multiple telephones, "horse and other betting slips," and a "burn basket" along with lighter fluid and matches. Police estimated it was headquarters for a $4,000 a day illegal gambling operation.
Plisco was convicted on gambling charges again in 1970, fined $1,000, and sentenced to probation, including an agreement to leave Washington D.C. and never return. But just two weeks later, the 69-year-old was charged with violating local gambling laws yet again, when D.C. police seized $5,000 in cash, numbers slips, horse race betting forms, five telephones and an adding machine from his D.C. apartment. Local police told the FBI that "most of the furniture in the apartment as well as clothing had been removed," apparently in anticipation of Plisco's impending exile to Richmond. The sentencing judge promptly revoked Plisco's probation and immediately sentenced him to jail instead.
Following his release from prison, there are indications Plisco briefly resided in Richmond before apparently retiring in Palm Beach, Florida, where he died in 1983 at the age of 82.
There is one final, very intriguing element which ultimately ties Plisco back to his boyhood home in Richmond and to what evidently was a very close personal and business relationship with local numbers kingpin Harry Donovan: Abe Plisco is buried in the Donovan family plot in Richmond’s Forest Lawn Cemetery - the only non-family member included among its six graves.
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