It acted as a wake up call for the masses of society in that it showed them, for the first time in almost a decade, that vice and organized crime in Montreal was real.
Public opinion and an increasingly involved press put pressure on the police to begin taking real action against vice within the city.
[16] In 1930, Harry Davis and Charles "Charlie" Feigenbaum, another Romanian Jewish immigrant, teamed up with Pincus Brecher, their New York connection, to smuggle European heroin and cocaine into Canada and the United States.
[17] The smuggled drugs were hidden amongst rolls of imported silk and other commodities, and were delivered to Davis and Feigenbaum from ships leaving from Europe for Montreal.
[17] Feigenbaum and his son were leaving his brother and sister-in-law's house at 4510 Esplanade Ave when three gun men exited a Hudson sedan and shot at him.
All gambling and book-making parlours also had to give a share of their profits (usually around twenty percent) to the "edge" for protection since he would act the negotiator between institutions of vice, politicians and the police.
[19] Davis’ quick return to the underworld, and the sense of entitlement he brought with him annoyed members of the Italian and Jewish communities who had taken over the gambling brackets in his absence.
[18] Louis Bercovitch (alias Joe Miller) shot and killed Harry Davis in front of his gambling parlour at 1224 Stanley the afternoon of July 25, 1946.
[23] Following Bercovitch's arrest, a large number of subpoenas were issued in the underworld as a result of an increased demand from the public to hold an inquiry on police corruption.
Like other ethnic groups within the city, notably the Italians and later on the Irish, Eastern European Jews were prominent members of Montreal's underworld.
Prior to the takeover of Montreal's vice rackets by members of the Italian-American mafia in the early 1950s, many of the city's gambling and bookmaking operations were run by Jewish syndicates during the 1930s and 1940s.
[19] It was the Eastern European Jewish immigrants who arrived in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as their offspring, who were the city's major bookmakers, loan sharks, illegal gambling house operators and, to a lesser degree, drug dealers.