Phillip Grossel

• Reference: FamilySearch Family Tree - SmartCopy: Oct 31 2017, 16:36:17 UTC

Spent time in Sing Sing (Ossining, New York) and Dannemora (Clinton, New York) Prisons in New York State.

March 5, 1937
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle from Brooklyn, New York ·
Page 2

Hotel rauxed Phillip Grosael to change his mind about resigning as secretary of the Metropolitan Restaurant and Cafeteria .... when he first learned I gangsters were attempting to dominate it, Grossel told the Jury In the restaurant racket trial. The charge made by some of New York's leading restaurants that they had been coerced by gangsters into joining the Metropolitan Restaurant and Cafeteria Association was challenged today by Phillip Grossel. secretary-treasurer of the association and a defendant in the restaurant racket trial, who told the Jury In Supreme Court Justice McCook's Manhattan courtroom that the restaurant owners had helped organize the association as a means of uniting their strength against labor unions and for price agreements and cooperative buying. The restaurants not only used the headquarters to plan a united front against labor unions, he said, but also held conferences with the labor leaders In the association rooms to discuss wages and hiring and firing in those places where the union was too strong to ignore. It is the State's contention that the Metropolitan acted in concert with the Dutch Schultz gang and officials of Local 16, Waiters Union, and Local 302, Cafeteria Workers, to shake down restaurant owners for $2,000,000 a year. Grossel, third of the eight defendants to take the stand, said he left school at 14 and worked his way up In department stores to silk buyer. In 1931 he became a free lance broker in silks. The depression was on and things didn't go so well in the next two years. It was at a bridge party In December, 1933, that he met Samuel Furstenberg, a fugitive defendant In this case, and talk veered to business conditions. Furstenberg told him, he said that he was organizing a restaurant owners service company for co-operative buying and asked him if he would like to try his hand in that venture. Grossel agreed."