[1] He was ready to cross the Atlantic to claim the Orteig prize but a court battle over who was going to be in the airplane allowed Charles Lindbergh to leave first.

He joined his father in selling scrap metal, later forming his own company buying and recycling World War I surplus brass shell casings.

[2] Levine hired pilots Bert Acosta, Erroll Boyd, John Wycliff Isemann, Burr Leyson, and Roger Q. Williams at $200 a week to perform a series of publicity record attempts for the company.

His Bellanca designed prototype aircraft, named Columbia, was ready for weeks, The co-pilot for the effort, Lloyd W. Bertaud, was displaced to accommodate Levine and went to court to be reinstated.

Levine got the order lifted just hours after Charles Lindbergh, in the Spirit of St. Louis, had left Roosevelt Field on Long Island.

The following day Levine announced that his airplane would fly farther on a $15,000 transatlantic flight challenge from America to Germany and carry a passenger.

[4] On June 4, 1927, the Columbia took off on its transatlantic flight from America to Berlin, Germany with Levine as the first passenger to cross the Atlantic in an airplane.

[8] While Levine was in France following the record flight from New York, Mabel Boll "the Queen of Diamonds" tried to persuade him to fly her to America in the Columbia.

After a series of bad business investments and losses in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Levine was sued by the federal government for a half-million dollars in back taxes.

In 1934, after his release, he was charged with illegally smuggling a German-Jewish refugee from a Nazi concentration camp into the United States[1] and spent 150 days in jail.