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The largely Jewish-American and Italian-American gang known as Murder, Inc. and becoming affiliates of the Italian-American Mafia.

At the same time, the Jewish bootlegging mob known as The Purple Gang dominated the Detroit underworld during prohibition, while the Jewish Bugs and Meyer Mob operated in the Lower East Side of New York City before being absorbed into Murder, Inc. According to crime writer Leo Katcher, Rothstein "transformed organized crime from a thuggish activity by hoodlums into a big business, run like a corporation, with himself at the top." Rothstein was allegedly responsible for fixing the 1919 World Series. In the early 1920s, stimulated by the economic opportunities of the Roaring Twenties, and later the Prohibition, Jewish organized crime figures such as Arnold Rothstein were controlling a wide range of criminal enterprises, including bootlegging, loansharking, gambling, and bookmaking. It was one of the most violent gangs of the early 20th century and became famous for the murder of gambler and gangster Herman Rosenthal. Another notorious gang, known as the Lenox Avenue Gang, led by Harry "Gyp the Blood" Horowitz, consisted of mostly Jewish members and some Italian members (such as Francesco Cirofisi).

In the late 19th century in New York City, Monk Eastman (who himself was most likely not Jewish) operated a powerful Jewish gang that competed with Italian and Irish gangs, notably Paul Kelly's Five Points Gang, for control of New York City's underworld. The last two of these terms are direct references to the Italian Cosa Nostra the former is a play on the word for kosher, referring to Jewish dietary laws, while the latter is a calque of the Italian phrase Cosa Nostra (Italian for "our thing") into Yiddish, which was at the time the predominant language of the Jewish diaspora in the United States. It has been referred to variously in media and popular culture as the Jewish Mob, Jewish Mafia, Kosher Mob, Kosher Mafia, and Kosher Nostra or Undzer Shtik ( Yiddish: אונדזער שטיק). Jewish-American organized crime initially emerged within the American Jewish community during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.