Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (13 page)

Murder Inc.

W
ith his conservative, smartly tailored appearance and genial smile. Frank Costello reinvented himself to his society friends as a successful gambler-investor—an average nonviolent businessman. Like much of his life, Costello’s public persona was a fraud. Staying on top required all Mafia bosses to maintain death squads that guarded their flanks and guaranteed that their edicts would be enforced. The Prime Minister was no exception.

Whenever violence or threats were required to protect his assets, Costello often counted on Willie Moretti, a longtime hoodlum buddy from Prohibition days and the Masseria gang. Moretti lived in northern New Jersey and headed a rugged crew of cutthroats who could roam anywhere. Another private deadly resource available to Costello and other Mafia hierarchs was a band of professional contract killers that a newspaper reporter would one day dub “Murder Incorporated.”

Spawned by Jewish gangsters, this murderous arm of the Mafia was mainly the brainchild of Louis Buchalter, better known by his shorter nickname, “Lepke.” He was one of four sons brought up in New York’s Lower East Side. In his boyhood, the storied neighborhood was a densely populated, turbulent warren of tenements, sweatshops, peddlers, pushcarts, and immigrants striving to survive. It was also a swirling carnival for every species of criminal.

Buchhalter’s nickname stemmed from the Yiddish diminutive “Lepkele,” Little Louis, his mother’s favorite name for him. Despite the family’s poverty, his three brothers were well educated and became, respectively, a rabbi, a dentist, and a pharmacist. In contrast, by the time Lepke Buchalter finished the eighth grade he was a well-schooled mugger and an accomplished pickpocket. Sent as a juvenile to reformatories and prison for robberies and thefts, in 1920, at age twenty-three, he was released just in time for the advent of Prohibition. Slightly built and physically unimposing, Lepke signed on as a strong-arm enforcer for Arnold Rothstein and other Jewish gangsters, mainly for strikebreaking duties in the Garment Center.

By 1927, Lepke had shot his way to the top of a predominantly Jewish gang, the Gorilla Boys, and learned it was more profitable to take over union locals than to work solely as a strikebreaker. That way he could cash in from both sides, terrorizing and shaking down both owners and unions in the garment, fur, trucking, and bakery industries.

The Gorilla Boys’ murderous record was known and appreciated by the Mafia’s high command. Albert Anastasia gave the contract to assassinate Dutch Schultz to Lepke, who dispatched three of his accomplices to finish off the Dutchman.

In the 1930s, many garment manufacturers operated factories and shops in Brownsville, a largely Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. Lepke hired a local gang of young killers and loan sharks to handle his garment-industry rackets there. The Brownsville gang had earlier committed murders on request and come under the hegemony of a major Mafia figure in Brooklyn, Albert Anastasia. Known by the honorific “Don Umberto,” Anastasia, a notable in the Vincent Mangano borgata, hit upon a novel plan for carrying out Mafia murders, which was endorsed by Costello and the other Commission members. With Anastasia relaying orders through Lepke, the “Boys from Brooklyn” would be paid to track down and slaughter victims the Mob wanted eliminated. Thus Jewish killers, rather than Italians, would take all the risks but would be ignorant about the motive for the murders. Even if the hit went awry and the assassins were arrested, they would have no information or evidence to implicate the Mafia in their crimes.

A standard formula was used for most freelance contract murders in New York and out of town. An assassin would meet someone who would “finger,”
point out, the intended target, who would then be whacked at an opportune moment and place. The hit man would leave the area immediately, and the local associates of the victim would have ironclad alibis.

Long before he took over Murder Inc., Anastasia, a native of southern Italy, had made his mark in New York’s Mafia by his psychopathic enjoyment of watching suffering victims die. He relished the private honorific his mates bestowed on him, “the Executioner,” which the press later transformed into “Lord High Executioner,” borrowing the title from Gilbert and Sullivan’s
The Mikado.
Anastasia and his brother Anthony “Tough Tony” Anastasio (a made man who spelled his surname differently) dominated Brooklyn’s waterfront for the Mangano borgata through Anthony’s position as the head of Local 1814 of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and Albert’s squad of bruisers and gunmen.

Even in hard times, the Brooklyn piers were a treasure chest for the two brothers and the Mangano family. Most longshoremen were not steadily employed by stevedoring companies, and jobs were parceled out by ILA foremen at shape-ups when ships docked. Kickbacks to foremen from workers needing jobs were routine, with a large portion of the payments funneled to Tough Tony, who appointed the foremen. All of the Mob’s bread-and-butter gambling and loan-sharking rackets on the waterfront were monopolized by Albert the Executioner. And inside knowledge about valuable cargo entering and leaving the harbor provided ripe opportunities for big-time hijackings and thefts.

For about five years, the contract-murder plan operated smoothly for the Mafia and Lepke. By the late 1930s, Lepke had about 250 musclemen working for him in labor rackets and loan-sharking, and in a drug-trafficking ring dealing in heroin brought in from Asia and distributed throughout the country. About a dozen Boys from Brooklyn, proficient with guns, ice picks, and ropes to shoot, stab, and strangle their prey, carried out the bulk of Murder Inc.’s assignments.

Murder Inc.’s corporate name was invented by Harry Feeney, a reporter on the old
New York World-Telegram.
Among the Jewish contingent of savage-tempered slayers were Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss, who, upset by slow restaurant service, pierced the eye of a waiter with a fork; Charles “the Bug” or “Handsome Charlie” Workman, who finished off Dutch Schultz with one blast from his .45 caliber pistol; Philip “Farvel” Cohen; Abe “Pretty” Levine; Samuel “Tootsie” Feinstein; and Seymour “Red” Levine, whose religious piety compelled him to decline assignments if they fell on the Jewish High Holy Days.

The killing machine of Murder Inc. was partly integrated, and Anastasia
sometimes called upon a corps of Italian-American assassins, including Harry “Happy” Maione, Frank “Dasher” Abbandando and Vito “Chicken Head” Gurino, who sharpened his skills by shooting off the heads of live chickens.

Unlike the frightening Albert Anastasia, his partner in murder, Lepke appeared unintimidating, with soft brown eyes and a mild voice. His passion for reading, spending nights at home with his wife and young son, and playing golf, instead of carousing with boisterous flunkies, brought him a collegial nickname that he liked, “the Judge.” This outward demeanor was totally deceptive. Ordering murders was part of his routine agenda, and he seemingly enjoyed participating in the gruesome ones.

Homicide detectives were never able to pinpoint the precise number of slayings committed by Murder Inc., but prosecutors estimated that the contract killers left a trail of at least sixty bodies. Some law-enforcement officials believe the total was far above one hundred, with most of the slayings in the New York area. There was also disagreement over how many were ordered by the Mafia and how many were killed solely for Lepke’s benefit or for other clients.

The efficiency of Murder Inc., and rumors of the Mob’s matchless death platoon reinforced in America’s underworld the terrifying effect of a Sicilian proverb: “Between the law and the Mafia, the law is not the most to be feared.”

Various techniques were used for Cosa Nostra rubouts, often depending on the motive for the slaying. An informer would have a canary or a rodent placed in his mouth as a warning of the harsh penalty meted out to “squealers” and “rats” for helping the police. Witnesses to crimes who had agreed to testify would have their eyes shot or carved out. And men who coveted or molested a female relative of a mafioso were killed and castrated.

Murder Inc. devised another technique to escape detection, patterned slightly on the death of Hamlet’s sleeping father, who was murdered by poison poured into his ear. The Boys from Brooklyn sometimes dispatched a victim by stabbing him with an ice pick deep enough in an ear to strike the brain, in the belief that a careless autopsy might attribute the death to a cerebral hemorrhage.

Santo Trafficante, the Mafia’s standard bearer in Florida from the early 1950s until his death in 1987, once explained to his lawyer, Frank Ragano, the reason why many corpses in Mob executions vanished. Ragano knew that Trafficante was allied with several New York families and that he and the northern mobsters used similar murder methods.

“First of all, if there’s no body, the police have a harder time finding out who did it,” Ragano recalled Traficante saying to him in a candid moment. “And number two, some guys do things so bad, you have to punish their families after they’re gone.” By punishing the families, Trafficante meant that there could be no church mass or burial for the victim; and under most state laws, the relatives would be unable to collect life insurance for at least seven years, when the missing man could finally be declared legally dead.

Lepke’s success was unhindered until, at the height of his power in 1938, he discovered that Thomas Dewey’s hound dogs were hot on his trail. The DA’s detectives and accountants uncovered leads indicating that through industrial rackets Lepke was extorting $5 million to $10 million a year from companies and unions. Dewey suspected that a percentage of Lepke’s take in Manhattan and Brooklyn was going to the Costello and Mangano families.

Deciding to employ Murder Inc. for his own personal use, Lepke went into hiding and gave Anastasia a list of potential “rats” that he wanted killed before Dewey reached them. At least seven possible witnesses against Lepke were wiped out. With federal authorities hunting Lepke on separate narcotics charges, the Commission decided the manhunts were creating too much law-enforcement pressure and it was time to sacrifice the fugitive before he endangered them. Like Dutch Schultz, Lepke had become a liability and a threat to the Mafia.

For some enigmatic reason, the Commission spared Lepke’s life. With the assistance of an intermediary, the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell, on August 24, 1939, Lepke surrendered to J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Winchell on his weekly radio broadcasts had urged the gangster to give up peacefully before he was gunned down in a shootout with the police or federal agents. Albert Anastasia drove Lepke from a hideout in Brooklyn to the rendezvous with Hoover and Winchell on a midtown Manhattan street, near Madison Square Park. Before Lepke agreed to come out of his safe house, Anastasia reportedly assured him that with the Mafia’s help, a deal had been negotiated that he would be tried only on federal charges, not by Dewey. The next year, Lepke was convicted on federal drug-trafficking violations and sentenced to fourteen years. But Anastasia had deceived him. Of course there was no Mafia pact with Dewey, who prosecuted him on a state indictment for extortion and tacked on a separate sentence of thirty years.

Lepke’s involvement with the Brownsville gang also surfaced; he was hit with an additional charge in Brooklyn that he had ordered the murder of an independent trucker before the man could inform on Lepke’s violent takeover of
garment-industry trucking routes. One of the brutal cogs in Murder Inc., Abraham “Kid Twist” Reles, was arrested for homicide in 1940 and, to save his neck, agreed to testify against Lepke and other members of the gang in cases brought by the Brooklyn DA’s office. (Reles obtained the Kid Twist moniker from his ability to deftly strangle an unsuspecting victim with one artful turn of a rope.)

Investigative leads from Reles, who possessed a photographic memory about dozens of contract slayings, were crucial in constructing a homicide case against Lepke in 1941 and condemning him to execution in the electric chair. Desperate to save himself, Lepke played his last card, reportedly offering to testify about organized-crime ties to one of the nation’s most prestigious labor icons, Sidney Hillman, the founder of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. Lepke asserted that from 1932 to 1937, he got a weekly retainer from Hillman that was normally passed along to him through henchmen. A portion of the payment, Lepke indicated, went to Luciano and other mafiosi who also had their hooks into the union and garment-industry rackets.

The payoffs were mainly for slugging or enforcement work against union and management troublemakers who were causing problems for Hillman. Lepke claimed that he occasionally met privately with Hillman, and that the labor leader once gave him a $25,000 bonus for helping his union win a tough strike. Lepke’s most serious accusation implicated Hillman in the 1931 murder of a garment manufacturer who had fiercely resisted a unionizing drive by the Amalgamated.

Lepke’s accounts were passed on to Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, the FBI, and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Two of Lepke’s butchers, Paul Berger and Albert Tannenbaum, who were under arrest on murder and other accusations, added substance to Lepke’s allegations by declaring that they could verify segments of his stories about Hillman.