When envisioning the real-life Nucky Johnson, however, throw out any idea of the diminutive, squeaky-voiced Buscemi. Johnson was 6-foot-1 and close to 250 pounds, with a ruddy bald head and a booming, jovial voice. In his white suit and shiny spats, he strode the Boardwalk like he owned the place, because he did. In his dual role as county treasurer and sheriff, he collected tribute from every brothel, betting parlor and speakeasy in town.

The arrangement was great for everyone – the tourists, the cops, the hoteliers, everyone but the joyless hypocrites who didn’t know how to have a good time. “We have whiskey, wine, women, song and slot machines,” Johnson once said, in a classic explanation of why organized crime exists. “I won’t deny it and I won’t apologize for it. If the majority of the people didn’t want them, they wouldn’t be profitable and they wouldn’t exist. The fact that they do exist proves to me that the people want them.”

Enoch Lewis Johnson, high-living hedonist, unashamed friend to mobsters, hustlers and gamblers, came from rural WASP roots. His parents, of English-Scotch ancestry, farmed the sandy soil of the Pine Barrens. Johnson’s father became the Atlantic County sheriff, and passed the job to Nucky as a family heirloom. In 1909, the young man of twenty-five was sworn into office; just two years later he was the county Republican chairman.

 Johnson held power by being creative on Election Day. Atlantic City had a high transient population of hotel workers who lived there only in the high season, and Johnson was padding the voter rolls with thousands of their names. Every election, these citizens were recorded as voting the GOP line en masse, regardless of whether they actually cast a ballot. In 1911, the Democratic reform administration of New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson indicted Johnson for voter fraud. A friendly hometown jury promptly acquitted him.

 Johnson’s steady stream of payoff money turned into a gusher when Prohibition became law in 1920. His domain included some of the Jersey Shore’s best coves in which rumrunners could hide. Nucky’s police guaranteed protection for smuggled booze. Gangsters such as Luciano, Joe Adonis and Longie Zwillman showed their gratitude by wining and dining Nucky when they were in town.

Johnson was only in his thirties when his wife died, and after a decent period of mourning, discovered he enjoyed the bachelor’s life. The boss arose every afternoon in his hotel suite at the crack of 4 p.m. He ate a dozen fried eggs for breakfast, donned one of his hundred suits, pinned a fresh red carnation to his lapel, and went out to the Boardwalk to hold court with followers. Then he bounded into his powder-blue limousine and made the rounds of Atlantic City night life. A showgirl was always on his arm, while headliners such as Sophie Tucker and Jimmy Durante sat at his table. Johnson handed out $400 tips along with bon mots. His most quoted aphorism was a complaint that his best dates were already taken by smooth young musicians: “Every time I kiss a blonde, I taste a saxophone.”

Never one to care what society thought of him, Johnson was at his most daring during the celebrated national gangland conference of May 1929. The event got off to a rocky start when the mobsters tried to check into a restricted hotel, using Anglo-Saxon aliases that Johnson had supplied. A hotel clerk took one look at them and refused to put them up. Nucky came to the rescue. He then ordered the crowd of heavies back into their limousines and spirited them to his own hotel, the Ritz-Carlton.

The Atlantic City conference was a landmark in mob history, forging the first successful links in what became a national crime syndicate. The event was less fortuitous for Johnson. A newspaper photographer snapped him walking the Boardwalk with Capone, and no one believed it when the boss claimed the picture was a forgery. A barrage of bad publicity followed. In the late 1930s, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt went after the boss. Treasury agents investigated him for the same crime that nailed Capone – tax evasion. He was an easy target, for he lived like a millionaire while drawing a county salary of $6,000.

More about Nucky and his downfall — along with other infamous Garden State gangsters such as Joe Adonis, Longie Zwillman, Nicky Scarfo, Vito Genovese and Albert Anastasia — can be found in “Notorious New Jersey.”

In the first 72 hours after the kidnapping, the radio networks issued 300 bulletins — giving birth to the new profession of news broadcasting. Police forces across the nation mobilized to help. Less helpfully, hundreds of bogus sightings of the baby poured in every day — along with phony ransom demands and letters from cranks and con men offering to help locate the victim.

Of course, the baby was dead from the beginning — either deliberately killed by the kidnapper or dropped when he descended the ladder from the Lindbergh home’s second story. The suspected kidnapper, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, would be tracked down to the Bronx in 1934 by his spending of ransom bills. He was executed in 1936.

The Norwegian oil tanker Varanger was just 28 miles off Wildwood when a German U-boat, the U-130, fired five torpedoes at it. The ship exploded in a roar heard as far away as Atlantic City and sank to the bottom in minutes. Amazingly, all crewmen survived.

By the time the great German sub blitz of 1942 was over, however, 19 vessels had been sunk and 360 people killed off the Jersey Shore. Most, like the Varanger, were easily spotted because they were silhouetted by brightly lit coastal towns, and easily targeted because they failed to sail in protective convoys.  

That didn’t stop rumors from spreading about Nazi spies serving as spotters from the roofs of Asbury Park and Atlantic City hotels, or careless crewmen giving away their position by telling girlfriends of their destination. During this suspicious era, a new slogan came into vogue: “Loose lips sink ships.”

The former New Jersey state senator had vanished while scuba diving in September 1985, not long before he was to be sentenced for his crimes. While authorities investigated a presumed drowning, Friedland had actually fled to Europe with his girlfriend and was living in luxury off money he ripped off from the Teamsters pension fund.

 Friedland’s last-chance offer to avoid justice by converting to Islam (the Maldives will not extradite a Muslim citizen) failed. He ended up serving 15 years in prison.

On Dec. 1, 1933, a federal jury found the Paterson-based bootlegging baron guilty of tax evasion — the second big mobster to be found guilty of that offense after Al Capone.

On Dec. 5, Prohibition was repealed — the end of the golden era for organized crime,

The same day, Waxey’s son, Theodore — the white sheep of the family, then attending medical school — was killed in a car accident.

On Dec. 6, Gordon was sentenced to seven years in prison.

The Republican official had been convicted earlier that year of stealing $140,000 from his partner in a gas-station business and abusing his office by shaking down convicts in drug-forfeiture cases. While awaiting sentencing at home in Montgomery Township, he cut off his electronic monitoring bracelet and went on the run.

Eight days later, Bissell was found by the marshals pointing a gun at his head. After several minutes of negotiations, he finally declared: “I can’t do 10 years,” and blew his brains out.

The erratic Dutchman brought on his own demise with his plan to assassinate prosecutor Thomas Dewey, a move the rest of the crime syndicate feared would bring undue heat upon themselves. To protect themselves, the mob whacked Schultz instead.

Schultz died at Newark City Hospital 22 hours after being shot. Among his last words, spoken in delirium to a police stenographer: “Oh, oh, dog biscuit, and when he is happy he doesn’t get snappy!”