Arthur Kasherman (ca. 1900 – January 22, 1945) was a publisher of the Public Press, Newsgram and other alternative newspapers in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the 1930s and 1940s. He saw himself as a “vice crusader” publishing fearless exposés about corruption and gangster rule in the city, while others derided him as a blackmailer who threatened to write defamatory articles about people if they didn’t pay him off. He was the third of three newspapermen murdered in Minneapolis between 1934 and 1945. No one was ever punished in Kasherman’s death, but the brazen killing came during the mayoral election season and helped elect Hubert Humphrey on a clean-up-the-city platform. Early life Kasherman was born in Russia and immigrated to the United States when he was about 10 years old. He grew up in the heavily Jewish enclave of north Minneapolis and graduated from North High School. He wanted to be a lawyer and attended the Minnesota College of Law. But his legal career was derailed when he got caught up in a corruption investigation in City Hall. He was jailed for contempt of court when he refused to name his confidential sources about a gangster’s payoff of the Minneapolis police chief. His reason: he was a “newspaperman.” From then on, Kasherman fancied himself a crusader against the criminal activities controlled by Twin Cities' Jewish-American organized crime with the collusion of corrupt policemen and politicians. Kasherman ran a long-shot campaign for mayor in 1931, but he devoted most of his efforts to the gritty, blog-like world of the scandal sheet and alternative press. Tangles with authority Kasherman worked for a time with Howard Guilford, the muckraking, often scurrilous and bigoted publisher of the Saturday Press and the Twin City Reporter. Like Guilford, Kasherman found himself on the receiving end of the city’s censorship efforts when authorities confiscated his newspaper twice in 1931. Kasherman was also hit over the head with an iron pipe. As if Kasherman needed more evidence of the dangers of practicing his kind of journalism, his old mentor, Guilford, was murdered in a drive-by shooting in 1934. The next year, another publisher who had written about ties between gangsters and government, Walter Liggett of the Midwest American, was slain in an alley in front of his family. In 1936, Kasherman was arrested in a sting operation in which a brothel operator accused him of shaking her down for $25