Jacob Katzenberg
American mobster
Jacob "Yasha" Katzenberg (born c. 1888) was an organized crime figure in New York who supplied narcotics to mobsters including Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Waxey Gordon, Charles "King" Solomon, Harry "Nig" Rosen, the Torrio–Capone organization as well as mobsters in Detroit, Kansas City and St. Louis.
Biography
Born in Russia, Katzenberg grew up in Manhattan's Lower East Side and, by the mid-1920s, he had become involved in drug trafficking with Arnold Rothstein helping purchasing heroin from Europe and establishing pipelines into New York for distribution throughout the rest of the country. Following Rothstein's death in 1928, Katzenberg was readily enlisted by Luciano and Louis "Lepke" Buchalter to obtain heroin for their own operations as well as bootleg liquor.
During the early 1930s, following regulations by the League of Nations for countries to reduce drug production to meet domestic medical needs, the availability of narcotics began to decline and Katzenberg traveled to Asia following the end of Prohibition in 1933. Returning to Brooklyn, he established an opium processing plant on Seymour Avenue (reportedly backed by Buchalter and Meyer Lansky among others rumored to be partners in the operation) along with several others.
In December 1935, authorities discovered the plant following an explosion which destroyed much of the manufacturing equipment. However, agents with the Federal Narcotics Bureau were unable to obtain enough evidence to press charges against Katzenberg and his partners. Meeting with Buchalter and Lansky, the three agreed that he and Buchalter would continue smuggling narcotics from Hong Kong and Shanghai into the United States through connections with officials within the United States Customs.
“Jacob Katzenberg” enters the record as american mobster. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jacob, Katzenberg and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1677544. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1888, 1928, 1933 and 1935.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jacob Katzenberg” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.