Selig Harry Lefkowitz, alias Big Jack Zelig, was New York's first great gangster boss. Like many of his pre-Volstead contemporaries, his historical impact has been overshadowed by Al Capone and Murder Inc. He is listed in today's crime anthologies primarily because four members of his gang, along with corrupt cop Charles Becker, died in the electric chair for the July 1912 murder of gambler Herman Rosenthal.

In New York City from 1908 to 1912, however, Zelig inspired admiration and fear, and he was synonymous with the word gangster. New York editor Herbert Bayard Swope recalled that "The Starker (Yiddish for 'Big Boss') threw terror into the heart of the New York underworld like no one has before or since."

Irony and tragedy often join forces, but the way they combined in the Becker-Rosenthal affair is harrowing. Becker's job was to eradicate the Manhattan gangs. Yet the city's most powerful gangster, Jack Zelig, was prepared to testify for him and save him from the electric chair. But when Zelig was murdered before he could take the stand, Becker was consequentially doomed.

The question is, Who ordered Zelig killed -- and why?

The answer is revealed by Rose Keefe, who follows Zelig's story from his childhood in New York's Russian-Jewish slums to his enlistment in the Manhattan gang wars (1905-10) to his ascendancy to the top of the New York underworld. Keefe reveals that Zelig's murder was a political assassination, not retaliation for an alleged robbery, as legend has claimed. For the first time, the truth about who ordered Herman Rosenthal murdered, and why, will be revealed.

Based on dozens of interviews and years of painstaking research, The Starker introduces readers to a story from New York's criminal past that is dazzling in its audacity and criminal in the success of the people responsible for the murders in covering up their own crimes.