Despite the various accounts written of this powerful and colorful figure of the early part of the last century, few people have actually heard of Morris Abraham ‘Two-Gun’ Cohen. A glance into the Encyclopedia Judaica reveals that he really did exist, offering but a brief description of his origins and his life.
It is an article that was passed on to the Chronicle written by the American Rabbi Marvin Tokayer that details what he describes as a “truth is stranger than fiction” story of a man “frequently and referred to as ‘the uncrowned Jewish king of China’.”
Moishe Abraham Cohen was born in London’s East End in 1887, to poor Orthodox Polish immigrants. “Fat Moishe” was a bad youngster, a pickpocket and street kid who ended up in a reformatory, but stuck to his criminal ways.
Indeed Moishe was such an embarrassment to his family and the community that at age 16 he was shipped off to a relative in Saskatchewan, Canada, in the hope that he would come right. But that didn’t happen. Instead he became a peddler and gambler, and even potentially violent gun-toting crook.
