Organized
crime has always been a part of American society. Over
time, criminal gangs and mafias became more secretive,
more regimented,
and more powerful. By the 1920s, gangs began teaming up with one
another and this process coalesced in the 1930s with the foundation
of the National Crime Syndicate and their henchmen Murder Inc.
As
immigrant groups came to America in search of a better life, the
nativist-minded citizens
were openly hostile to them and often refused to give them work. A
small number of those immigrant groups turned to crime as a fast and
easy way to make money and progress on the social ladder. The Irish,
the Chinese, and the Russians all had their own little mafias. Over
time, the crooks, thugs, and extortionists realized they had plenty
to gain from protecting each other in urban tribal bands. Criminal
gangs grew to protect themselves
from the police and each other. One of the ethnic groups knowing for
breeding criminal gangs was the Jewish people but in terms of
notoriety and fame, the Italians, particularly southern Italians and
Sicilians, far outshone all the others. Those
Sicilians were called the Mafia and the term has since been used to
describe any group of disreputable people ever since.
The
Mafia worked primarily out of New York City and the surrounding
areas, though their shadowy presence was known to be all over
America. By the 1920s, several families of the Mafia were doing
business and becoming a more potent social force. That is when the
Jewish gangsters Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel formed their own mob
and took on the “Moustache Petes”, the old guard of organized
crime bosses so-called because of the long, drooping moustaches many
of them wore.
The Castellamarese War had begun. The bosses were all gunned down and
their gangs taken over by the Young Turks as they were called. Lansky
and Siegel next pitched the idea for a gangster oriented corporation
to mob bosses all across the country and the National Crime Syndicate
was born. Often referred to as The Syndicate, other prominent bosses
like Lucky Luciano and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter joined. Unlike the
Mafia who only worked with Sicilians, The Syndicate was more
a politically correct, multi-ethnic
operation
and
a transnational cartel. The crime families would no longer fight each
other but instead combined their lurid talents and skills to fight
the police, the
law, and the
government.
The
Syndicate acted as the governing council of the organized crime
underworld. They needed a team of soldiers to carry out their orders
while they called the shots and sat back to collect their money.
Lucky Luciano put together Murder Inc. for that purpose.
Based
out of a dismal little candy shop in Brooklyn, owned by Rosie
“Midnight Rose” Gold, Murder Inc. were an elite, street-level
squad of hitmen who carried out orders passed down to them from their
superiors.
Abe “Kid Twist” Reles gave
commands. The suave and fashionable Harry “Pittsburgh Phil”
Strauss had as much of a passion for expensive clothes as he did for
homicide; he became the most prolific killer with a possible 500
corpses to his credit. Murder Inc. got involved in all manners of
crime, being proficient at gambling, drug trafficking, bootlegging,
prostitution, extortion, and labor union racketeering. Most
significantly though, their specialty was murder. The professional
thugs were paid a monthly salary and then given a fee for each
contract to kill. The victims were mostly men who had stepped on the
Syndicate’s toes or posed an existential threat to their
organization.
The
most famous of Murder Inc.’s hits was the killing of Syndicate
executive Dutch Schultz. The
U.S. attorney Thomas Dewey began paying close attention to the
Syndicate and had begun preparations for taking them down. Dutch
Schultz proposed to the Syndicate that they assassinate the lawyer to
end the investigations. But they unanimously decided not to carry out
the plan out of fear that the hit would only bring closer legal
scrutiny to their conspiracies. Schultz, however, decided to act on
his own. He hired some street-level criminals for the
surveillance
of Dewey’s habits. The bosses learned of the plot to kill Dewey so
they cornered Dutch Schultz in the bathroom of the Palace Chop House
in Newark, New Jersey. When the police arrived, Schultz and three of
his men were lying on
the floor
in expanding pools of blood.
While
Murder Inc. were responsible for
a long list of crimes, some were more eccentric than others. One
night in 1939, Puggy Feinstein was taken for a ride by Kid Twist
Reles, Buggsy
Goldetsin, and Pittsburgh Phil. Feinstein had been running a gambling
operation and the Syndicate boss Vincent “The Executioner”
Mangano had put the squeeze on him, demanding a 21 percent cut of the
profits or else. Puggy Feinstein refused so Albert Anastasia
contacted Kid Twist Reles and commanded him to rub Feinstein out. On
the evening of the hit, the four men arrived at Kid Twist’s
mother-in-law’s house. As she prepared for bed, he asked her for a
clothesline and an ice pick. He told her to sleep well as she entered
her bedroom and closed the door. Kid Twist went into the living room,
turned up the radio to hide any incriminating noises
and
had Goldestein and Pittsburgh Phil bring the victim in. They
proceeded to strangle him with the clothesline while Pittsburgh Phil
poked holes all over his body with the ice pick. They cleaned up the
mess, ate a snack, then put the dead body in the trunk of the car.
They took Feinstein’s corpse to an empty lot and cremated it.
During the struggle, Feinstein had bitten
Goldstein’s
arm.
The teeth marks were used as corroborating evidence during the trial.
Earlier
in 1937, a more typical hit job happened when the gangster Walter
Sage was taken care of forever. Murder Inc. members Jacob Drucker and
Irving Cohen picked up Sage and told him they were taking him out for
some fun in the resorts of the Catskills. Sage was not aware that
they were being tailed by another car with Abraham Levine and
Pittsburgh Phil. They pulled off onto a forest road and forced Sage
into the front seat of the car that pulled up behind. Sage, knowing
he was in trouble, tried to grab the steering wheel so Drucker took
out his ice pick and tried to stab him but the ice pick went into
Cohen’s arm instead. The car crashed into a tree, so the four men
forced Sage to march down the road to Swan
Lake. They used ice picks to poke him so
full
of holes that
he resembled a wedge of Swiss cheese in tomato sauce.
Then
they
tied his body to the frame of a slot machine which they threw into
the water. Whether the slot machine was meant to be symbolic or
functional was irrelevant; the body floated to the surface soon
after. Meanwhile Cohen, thinking
Drucker’s jab in the arm with the ice pick was deliberate
feared
he was about to be the next to die due to a recent dispute with a
Syndicate boss, ran off and disappeared. Gangsters later spotted him
on the movie screen; Irving Cohen had escaped to Hollywood and got a
job doing bit parts in the movies and
otherwise living a tame life.
They thought it was funny seeing him wearing a police uniform, cast
in the role of a cop with one line in a crime film.
But
fortune is a whore that loves you one minute and leaves you tne next.
After some petty disputes with a Syndicate boss, Kid Twist Reles
realized he had seen a few too many crimes for his own good. There
might have been those who thought of him as a liability to the
cartel, rather than an asset. Kid Twist began to fear for his life.
He decided to turn state’s evidence and handed himself over to the
police. In the ensuing trials, he would act as a corroborating
witness to murder. The trials lasted for a couple years and Kid
Twist, along with a few others, took the stand to testify in a last
ditch attempt to survive
into middle age.
A few colorful moments took place. At one point Harry “Happy”
Maione lost his Italian temper and threw a glass of water at Kid
Twist’s head; while raving with fury, the police dragged Maione out
of the courtroom and he had to spend the rest of the trial restrained
in a cell. Pittsburgh Phil pleaded
insanity and tried to act crazy to stay out of trouble. When called
to the witness stand he spoke gibberish and tried to eat a briefcase
handle when he returned to his seat. The jury did not buy his plea,
especially because his insanity had a strange way of disappearing any
time he was not in court. At the end of it all, members from all
ranks of the Syndicate and Murder Inc. hierarchy were convicted of
racketeering related crimes. The majority of them were sent to live
in Sing Sing prison until their date of execution when they were
fried like eggs sunny-side-up in the electric chair.
Kid
Twist Reles got to live
for
a short time longer.
In 1941, police were holding him on the top floor of the Half Moon
Hotel in Coney Island as part of their witness protection program. As
the sun rose one morning, his dead body was discovered on the roof of
a smaller building beside the hotel. Instigators claimed that he had
gotten drunk and fallen out the window but some suspicions remained.
The body’s position and angle of descent suggested he had been
pushed and after searching his room, no alcohol was found but their
crude analysis determined there was a faint trace of some kind of
medicine in his stomach at the time of death. Did he really fall? Did
he commit suicide? Or possibly he stumbled while trying to escape?
Maybe a crooked policeman took a bribe to push him out
the window.
Murder
Inc. and The Syndicate dissolved and in 1957, Albert Anastasia called
a meeting in the Appalachian Mountains of New York to delegate
the remains of The Syndicate’s business holdings to all the mob
bosses who, thereafter, would operate on their own.
Reference
Turkus,
Burtun B. and Feder, Sid. Murder
Inc.: The Story Of the Syndicate. Da
Capo Press, New York: 2003.
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