Murder, Inc.

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Murder, Inc. was painted on the leather jacket of an American airman whose B-17 was shot down over Nazi Germany on the 26th of November 1943. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had the jacket's artwork photographed, and the picture circulated around the world. Adolf Hitler condemned the "gangster language" on a soldier's uniform.

  The phrase had traveled a long way from its source. It named a New York criminal outfit that served as the enforcement arm of a national alliance of mobsters between 1929 and 1941. Its men came from poor and working-class Jewish and Italian neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Estimates of its contract killings run from 400 to 1,000.

  How did street gangs become a standing murder service for crime bosses across the country? What did a candy store in Brooklyn have to do with it? And when the organization finally fell, who brought it down, and what became of the man who talked?

  156

• 2. The Syndicate's Enforcers

  ›

  In the early 1920s, the New York Jewish mobsters Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel founded a gang called the Bugs and Meyer Mob. It was the forerunner of Murder, Incorporated.

  The Sicilian mafioso Charles "Lucky" Luciano then created The Commission. He grew close to his friend Lansky and to the Jewish Mob generally. Their alliance across ethnic lines became known as the National Crime Syndicate. Soon afterward, Siegel and Lansky disbanded their old gang and helped form the new enforcement group.

  Louis "Lepke" Buchalter was its original head, and he handed down orders from the syndicate's board of directors. Joe Adonis occasionally did the same. Albert "The Mad Hatter" Anastasia, an underboss in the Mangano Family, ran day-to-day operations as the "Lord High Executioner". Lepke's longtime associate Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro assisted him.

  The ranks combined several crews. Buchalter's labor-slugging gang came in through a partnership with Tommy "Three-Fingered Brown" Lucchese. Another group of enforcers from Brownsville, Brooklyn, was led by Martin "Buggsy" Goldstein and Abe "Kid Twist" Reles.

  Recruits came from the gangs of the Lower East Side and from the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brownsville, East New York and Ocean Hill. The group worked out of Rosie Gold's candy store, at the corner of Saratoga and Livonia Avenue in Brooklyn. Its clients were mob bosses all around the United States.

  The killers drew a regular salary as a retainer. On top of that they earned an average of $1,000 to $5,000 for each killing, and their families received money too. Harry Strauss was the most prolific of them, with over 100 murders to his name. Some historians put his total as high as 500.

  1511

• 3. The Dutch Schultz Contract

  ›

  In October 1935, Dutch Schultz demanded a contract on the prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who was leading an all-out effort to put the mob out of business. The syndicate board refused. Its members feared that Dewey's murder would provoke public outrage and an even fiercer campaign against the rackets.

  Schultz had openly defied the syndicate before, and he vowed to ignore this ruling and kill Dewey himself. The board turned the problem around. Hitmen Mendy Weiss and Charles Workman were handed the assignment of killing Schultz.

  On the 24th of October 1935, they tracked Schultz to the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey. With him were his associates Otto Berman, Abe Landau and Lulu Rosenkrantz. All four were shot. Berman, Landau and Rosenkrantz died almost immediately, while Schultz clung to life until the following day.

  Workman stayed behind in the restaurant. Weiss escaped with their driver, Seymour Schechter. Weiss was later executed in the electric chair, in 1944, for a different murder.

  Workman's reckoning came in New Jersey. He was indicted on the 27th of March 1940 and extradited in April 1941. When his trial opened in June 1941, the first two state witnesses, a restaurant bartender and a woman outside the building, could not identify him. The next day, Reles and Albert Tannenbaum testified against him.

  A female friend of the slain gangster Danny Fields then took the stand under a pseudonym. She said Workman came to her apartment the day after the shooting and asked Fields to burn his clothes. She also said he talked openly about being left behind in the restaurant.

  The defense opened with Marty Krompier, a close associate of Schultz who was shot in Manhattan the same night. Krompier said Tannenbaum had told him he did not shoot him because he was in New Jersey killing Schultz.

  Then Workman's alibi fell apart. A Manhattan funeral director, brother-in-law of the late Fields, had testified that Workman was working for him at the time. He took it back. Workman changed his plea from not guilty to no contest, and the same day he was sentenced to life. He was paroled on the 10th of March 1964, after 23 years in prison.

  Dewey, the man Schultz wanted dead, first came to prominence prosecuting Murder, Inc. cases. He went on to be elected the 47th governor of New York.

  5255606289

• 4. Silencing Witnesses

  ›

  In 1932, a man named Abe Wagner informed on the crime syndicate to the police. He fled to Saint Paul, Minnesota, and put on a disguise. It did not save him. Two killers, George Young and Joseph Schafer, found him and shot him. They were later caught, and Bugsy Siegel failed to get them released.

  When Dewey began investigating Buchalter in the 1930s, the group turned to killing witnesses and suspected informants. On the 25th of May 1937, four killers garroted George Rudnick with a sash cord and stabbed him repeatedly with an ice pick. The only reason was a suspicion that he was an informant.

  On the 1st of October 1937, killers shot and seriously wounded Max Rubin, a former associate of Buchalter. Rubin had disobeyed an order to leave town and "disappear", which would have kept him from being summoned as a witness. Three alleged victims from 1935 were Morris Kessler and the brothers Louis and Joseph Amberg.

  Vito "Socko" Gurino had a narrower job. He was assigned to eliminate witnesses against the Brooklyn group known as the Combination. First he tried to persuade Angelo "Julie" Catalano, a small-time gangster who had seen the Rudnick killing, to hide out on Long Island. Police picked up Catalano on a Brooklyn street shortly after the syndicate bailed him out.

  On the night of the 29th of March 1940, Gurino used a corrupt contact, Queens County Deputy Sheriff William Cassele, to get into the county's civil prison. Cassele forced Joseph "Joe the Baker" Liberto, a material witness in the Rudnick case, to meet with him. Liberto said he was pushed against a wall in his cell and threatened with death if he cooperated with the District Attorney.

  Later, an acquaintance drove Liberto to a farmhouse on Long Island. Convinced he was about to be killed, Liberto climbed out through a window.

  Gurino spent much of 1940 hiding out in New Jersey. Police arrested him on the 12th of September 1940 at the Church of the Guardian Angel in Manhattan, where he was screaming hysterically in fear for his life. He soon confessed to three syndicate murders and implicated himself in four others.

  In March 1942, Gurino pleaded guilty to three murders, and in April he was sentenced to 80 years to life. He died of a heart ailment on the 22nd of April 1957 at Dannemora Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

  721239395

• 5. The Informers Turn

  ›

  In January 1940, Harry Rudolph, a professional criminal and police informer, was held as a material witness in the murder of Alex Alpert. Alpert was a 19-year-old minor gangster, shot in the back on a street corner in Brownsville on the 25th of November 1933.

  Rudolph talked with Brooklyn District Attorney William O'Dwyer. His account gave O'Dwyer first-degree murder indictments against Abe Reles, Martin Goldstein and Anthony Maffetore.

  Special Prosecutor John Harlan Amen then told O'Dwyer that another prisoner, acting for the syndicate, had reportedly offered Rudolph a $5,000 bribe to "put Reles and Goldstein on the street". O'Dwyer said Maffetore learned of the offer. After several talks with New York City Detective John Osnato, Maffetore decided to turn state's evidence.

  Osnato had little faith in Rudolph's story. Rudolph had been paid for information in other cases that proved false.

  Maffetore said he had no part in the Alpert murder, but he admitted driving in six gangland killings. He then convinced Abraham Levine to talk. Reles was next to cooperate with the District Attorney's office.

  Once Reles agreed, first-degree murder indictments followed in Brooklyn, in the Bronx and in upstate Sullivan County, in the Catskills. More members of the Combination joined the list of cooperating witnesses, including Albert Tannenbaum, Seymour Magoon and Sholem Bernstein.

  Rudolph never testified in any trial. He died of natural causes in the infirmary at Rikers Island in June 1940.

  Reles did not live to see the end of the case. On the 12th of November 1941, he fell to his death from a room at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island, even though police were guarding him. The official verdict was accidental death. By then he had already testified in several trials.

  1014174591

• 6. Verdicts and the Electric Chair

  ›

  In May 1940, Harry Maione and Frank Abbandando became the first members of the Brooklyn Combination to face a murder trial. The charge was the ice-pick killing of George "Whitey" Rudnick in a Brooklyn parking garage. Harry Strauss was also indicted. After first agreeing to cooperate with the District Attorney, he was severed from the trial.

  On the 15th of May 1940, Reles testified. He said Strauss had claimed to have learned that Rudnick was a police "stool pigeon". Reles waited outside the garage while Maione, Abbandando and Strauss were inside with Rudnick.

  When Rudnick was believed dead, Abbandando called for Reles and summoned Catalano to help move the body. Rudnick was still alive. Strauss resumed with the ice pick, and Maione finished the job with a meat cleaver. The next day, Catalano, who drove the car carrying the body, confirmed Reles's account. Maffetore and Levine testified that they stole the car.

  Maione offered an alibi. He and 14 witnesses said he was at his grandmother's wake that night. The funeral home's undertaker and embalmer said he was not there. One of his chief witnesses admitted that he lied under oath on orders from Maione's brother, whom he feared.

  On the 23rd of May 1940, both men were convicted of first-degree murder, which carried a mandatory death sentence in the electric chair. New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals, overturned the conviction by a 4-3 vote in December 1940. A second trial began on the 10th of March 1941. At one point Maione lost his temper and threw a glass of water at Reles.

  Both men were convicted again on the 3rd of April 1941 and sentenced to death on the 14th of April. The Court of Appeals upheld the second conviction on the 8th of January 1942. Maione and Abbandando were executed at Sing Sing prison on the 19th of February 1942.

  A different trial began in September 1940. Harry Strauss and Martin Goldstein stood accused of strangling the bookmaker Irving Feinstein on the 4th of September 1939. His body was set on fire and left in a vacant lot.

  Reles said Anastasia ordered the killing because Feinstein had supposedly "crossed" Vincent Mangano. He testified that he, Goldstein and Strauss killed Feinstein in his house. Reles's mother-in-law said that Reles and Strauss asked her for an ice pick and clothesline earlier that day. At the house she heard loud music covering a commotion in the living room, and she heard Strauss say he had been bitten.

  Seymour Magoon, Goldstein's former bodyguard and driver, backed up the story. He said Goldstein told him that night that he, Reles and Strauss had killed "Puggy" Feinstein. Goldstein and "Duke" Maffetore burned the body shortly afterward.

  Goldstein's attorney chose to offer no defense. Strauss's attorney claimed his client was insane, and Strauss played the part. Briefly allowed on the stand, he refused to take the oath and was "babbling incoherently" as he was led away. At the defense table he began chewing on the leather strap of a briefcase.

  The jury convicted both men of first-degree murder on the 19th of September 1940, and they were sentenced to death a week later. The Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions on the 24th of April 1941, again by a 4-3 vote. Strauss and Goldstein were executed in the electric chair on the 12th of June 1941.

  The biggest name was still to come. Lepke Buchalter, Emanuel Weiss, Louis Capone, Harry Strauss, James Feraco and Philip Cohen went on trial together on the 5th of August 1941. The list shrank quickly. Cohen's murder indictment was dropped after a federal narcotics conviction brought him a 10-year sentence. Feraco had vanished without a trace and was presumed killed in 1940 or 1941. Strauss had already been executed.

  Picking a jury for Lepke proved hard, and the trial did not actually start until October 1941. Among the witnesses were a teacher and the underworld turncoat Sholem Bernstein, who had been marked for death after refusing to carry out a murder contract.

  On the 30th of November 1941, Lepke, Weiss and Capone were convicted. The Court of Appeals upheld the convictions by a 4-3 vote in October 1942. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Lepke's appeal in February 1943. In March 1943, it reversed itself and granted a review. In June 1943 it upheld the conviction.

  One obstacle remained. Lepke was serving a 14-year federal sentence, so New York needed the federal government to turn him over. He kept appealing against both the death sentence and the transfer. Lepke, Weiss and Capone were executed at Sing Sing prison on the 4th of March 1944.

  2935384889

• 7. Cases That Slipped Away

  ›

  In the 1939 film Golden Boy, Abraham Levine spotted a familiar face in a ringside crowd scene. It belonged to Irving Cohen, who had fled to California after the murder of the racketeer Walter Sage and found small roles in films. Tourists had found Sage's body floating in Swan Lake, New York, on the 31st of July 1937. It had a slot machine frame and a 30 pound rock tied to it.

  Levine, the chief prosecution witness, said Sage was stabbed 32 times with an icepick in a car with Cohen and Jacob Drucker. He and Harry Strauss followed in another car. During the struggle, Sage grabbed the steering wheel and wrecked the car, and Drucker stabbed Cohen once in the arm. Levine said he watched Drucker wipe the icepick clean before helping dispose of the body.

  Cohen told a different story on the stand. He said Levine had stabbed him as he walked home from a casino, on Drucker's orders, because he refused to pay 25% of the profit from a game of chance he operated. He was acquitted on the 21st of June 1940.

  Drucker, a suspect in four murders in the Catskills, was a fugitive for over three years until the FBI located him in Delaware. He was convicted of second-degree murder on the 5th of May 1944 and received 25 years to life. He died in Attica prison in January 1962.

  Irving Nitzberg, whom the Combination had brought in from the Bronx, was tried for the murder of Albert Shuman on the 9th of January 1939. Three accomplices carried the case: Reles, Tannenbaum and Magoon. Reles said Shuman was killed for cooperating with an inquiry into Lepke's labor racketeering. He said he planned it with Lepke, then a fugitive, and Mendy Weiss, and that Anastasia approved bringing in an outsider.

  Magoon said he stole the car on Reles's orders. Tannenbaum said he drove, picking up Nitzberg and Shuman on the pretense of a robbery. Nitzberg, in the back seat, shot Shuman twice in the back of the head when Tannenbaum gave a signal.

  Nitzberg was convicted on the 23rd of May 1941 and sentenced to death. On the 10th of December 1941, the Court of Appeals overturned the conviction by a 4-3 vote. It questioned the use of non-accomplice witnesses, promised leniency, to back up Reles, Tannenbaum and Magoon.

  In 1942, Nitzberg was tried again, with the now-dead Reles's testimony read to the jury. He was convicted on the 12th of March 1942. The Court of Appeals reversed again by a 4-3 vote, and this time it dismissed the indictment. The grand jury had heard only uncorroborated accomplice testimony.

  Jack "the Dandy" Parisi was acquitted of two murders. One victim was Morris Diamond, a Teamsters official killed in Brooklyn. The other was Irving Penn, a music-publishing executive killed in the Bronx. Penn died by mistaken identity. The intended target, Philip Orlofsky of the Cutters Union, had left home early to get a shave.

  Parisi was a fugitive for 10 years, until he was captured in Pennsylvania in 1949. Tannenbaum was brought in from Atlanta, where he reportedly lived, to testify. Jacob "Kuppy" Migden gave the wrong identification of Penn and was also a fugitive for years. In the middle of his own trial he pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree assault and received 5-10 years.

  Parisi's trials each ended with the judge directing a not-guilty verdict because the chief witnesses were accomplices with no corroboration. He died at home of natural causes on the 27th of December 1982, aged 83.

  Max "the Jerk" Golob was indicted with Frank Abbandando for first-degree murder in the killing of the gangster John "Spider" Murtha on the 3rd of March 1935. The only real evidence was the eyewitness account of Murtha's female companion. Golob was allowed to plead guilty to second-degree assault and received a maximum of five years.

  Sidney "Fats" Brown faced a sealed first-degree murder indictment in Sullivan County, New York. It was dismissed after Reles died, because Reles was the only witness. Brown was never arrested, and the identity of the victim was never made public.

  67727399100

• 8. Afterlives

  ›

  In 1942, Duke Maffetore and Pretty Levine, the two who had testified about stealing a getaway car, received suspended sentences. They had pleaded guilty to petty larceny. Murder, Inc. itself vanished within a few years, as so many of its members were executed or imprisoned.

  In June 1944, NYPD Lieutenant John Osnato, who had persuaded Maffetore to cooperate, retired after 28 years on the force. He died of a heart ailment on the 25th of November 1945, aged 55.

  Philip Cohen was murdered in 1949, several months after his release from federal prison. He had served seven years of a 10-year sentence for narcotics trafficking. In October 1950, the 37-year-old Maffetore was arrested for grand larceny as part of a nationwide auto-theft ring. On the 7th of March 1951, he missed a scheduled appearance in Queens County Court and disappeared. He was presumed murdered.

  On the 25th of October 1957, Albert Anastasia was shot and killed in a barber shop at the Park Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan. Law enforcement said East Coast organized criminals met afterward in Apalachin, New York, to divide up his rackets.

  The story then moved into entertainment. In 1951, Burton Turkus and Sid Feder published the book Murder Inc - The Story of the Syndicate. That same year Humphrey Bogart starred in The Enforcer, based on the trials, with advice from Turkus.

  The 1960 Twentieth Century Fox film Murder, Inc. was adapted from the book by Irve Tunick and Mel Barr. Stuart Rosenberg directed, and the cast included Stuart Whitman, Henry Morgan and Peter Falk.

  The Godfather universe of 1972 gives the name its own twist. There, Murder Inc. is the execution arm of the Roth Syndicate, a Jewish-American crime organization led by Hyman Roth, who is a former head of Murder, Inc. Sam Roth, Johnny Ola and Moe Greene appear among its members.

  Music borrowed the name too. Bruce Springsteen's song "Murder Incorporated" appeared on his 1995 Greatest Hits album. He had recorded it in 1982 for the Born in the U.S.A. sessions, but it went unused. Irv Gotti founded Murder Inc. Records, named after the criminal collective.

  Jay-Z, DMX and Ja Rule formed a Murder Inc. rap group, active between 1995 and 2000. A deadly feud involving that group, The Source magazine owner Benzino, 50 Cent and Eminem became the subject of Eminem's single "Like Toy Soldiers".

  Television kept the reference alive. In the 2010 Simpsons episode "In the Name of the Grandfather", Grampa says he was "as lonely as Estes Kefauver at a meeting of Murder Incorporated". The family stares blankly, and he tells them to look it up.

  In the 2017 series S.W.A.T., the hitman Tre, played by Amin Joseph, names his service Murder LLC in its honor. In the 2020 series Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, the recurring character Benny Berman belongs to the organization, and Meyer Lansky is named. On The West Wing, Toby Ziegler's father is a former member. The Sopranos references it in the episode "The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti".

  The poet Robert Lowell took the story somewhere quieter. His 1976 poem Memories of West Street and Lepke recalls his own time in jail and an encounter with Lepke of Murder, Incorporated in prison.

  518917