CHAPTER SIX
The army that Lansky had in mind, the boys from Murder, Inc., were the sort who enjoyed shoving a snub-nosed .38 in a guy’s gut or slicing him in half with a rat-a-tat-tat tommy gun. In a fair fight, some of them might not excel.
So Meyer took the boys to a dilapidated abandoned warehouse on Westchester Avenue in the Bronx to take lessons in pugilism from boxer Bobby Gleason so they could handle themselves when they ambushed Nazis. Once word got out that tough guys were needed, Lansky pulled walk-ins, stone-fisted fellows eager to wring a Nazi’s neck.
Gleason was certain he was about to be whacked when Lansky and the fellas came into his gym, and he quickly agreed to get the gang in shape to throw combinations free of charge. (Gleason’s Gym still exists, although it has moved several times and now makes its home on the waterfront in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn.)
Truth be known, the lessons were mostly an exercise in team building. A hood with a baseball bat or a pipe in his hands didn’t need to punch, and those who did punch usually held with their left and pounded away with their right, a maneuver that would get you nowhere in the ring.
In order to understand Murder, Inc., you have to understand the old Sicilian Mafia concept of a sette. Back at the start of the twentieth century, the Mafia often didn’t do its own killing. They contracted out. Certain hoods with a killer’s skill set were organized into a sette, a secret society in its own right with its own initiations and rituals. That included, of course, the pledge of omerta, which says keep your lip zipped or sleep with the fishes. The American version of the mob got away from the sette concept for a while. Crews did their own killing, and the result was everybody killed everybody until it was a mess. Civil wars were terrible for business.
Along with setting up the Five Family system in New York City, Luciano and Lansky reinstituted the traditional sette. Now, if someone couldn’t pay back the loan or was skimming the profits and needed to be taken off the board, the guy with the actual beef stood down. All hits needed to be approved from above. If someone needed to be whacked, you told the boss, and the sette took care of it.
The sette didn’t care who it whacked. They were pros. Personal feelings had nothing to do with it. In the long run, the sette system prevented internal problems from affecting business. Luciano set up his sette, Murder, Inc., both outside the Five Family structure and outside the Italian mob structure as well. Both Italians and Jews were recruited. For Jewish killers, Luciano went to Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, who ran a gang of killers that he’d himself gotten from Abraham “Kid Twist” Reles, another son of an immigrant from Brownsville, Brooklyn, with forty-nine arrests on his record.
Lepke Buchalter was another of Lansky’s childhood buddies. Lepke, which is Yiddish (Lepkeleh) for “Little Louis,” was born in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in 1897, son of Russian-born Jews. He was one of thirteen kids, so it was easy for him to slip away and hang out on the streets. It could take his parents days before they took a head count and discovered he wasn’t home. Any discipline he might have been receiving evaporated when he was still a child. His dad died and his mom ran off. After that, Lepke became a king on the streets. He teamed up with another delinquent, Jacob Shapiro, and they worked as a team, stealing and extorting. Lepke’s specialties were mugging and pickpocketing. He was first arrested at age fifteen for stealing a door-to-door salesman’s sample case. A judge thought some fresh air might do the kid some good, so he was sent to live with a cousin in Connecticut, but he robbed stores there, too, and ended up in a reform school in Cheshire.
As a teenager Lepke had a gang called the Gorilla Boys. It was said that he had extortion on his breath and always had plenty of craps money by levying tribute from pushcart peddlers. He developed a nice eclectic resumé, with crimes involving furs, garments, baking, trucking, drug smuggling—and murder. Back in New York, a second bust at age twenty-one sent him to the Big House in Ossining. After prison, he was a grown man, wearing the formal attire of a businessman. He was recruited by Arnold Rothstein, and his stock went up. Lepke liked to stay in the background and for many years wielded great power without publicity. He ran Brownsville.
Among Lepke’s contributions to Western Civilization was his coining of the word hit to mean a contract murder.
Outside of being a thief and a homicidal maniac, Lepke wasn’t a guy you’d figure to be a criminal. He was happily married to Betty Arbeiter Wasserman, a divorcée with a son. It was by all accounts true love. Lepke didn’t fool around with women and wore conservative suits. He had a downright cheerful countenance and a nonchalance best symbolized by the way he wore his fedora perched atop the crown of his head.
What Lepke did when he went to work was another matter. At work, he was best known for his sadism.
Lepke might not have wanted to look like a gangster, but he sure knew how to act like one. On October 15, 1927, he proved that he could kill without emotion as he whacked his old friend Jacob “Little Augie” Orgen—not to be confused with Anthony “Little Augie” Carfano, who wasn’t whacked until 1959—at the corner of Norfolk Street and Delancey. Orgen was a pedestrian. Lepke hopped out of a car, shot him four times in the guts, and got back in the car. Lepke went on to become a hero to Jewish kids across New York City, a guy who didn’t take shit from anyone, a Jew who fought back.
By all accounts, Lepke didn’t have a temper. He maintained an even strain even as he dispatched his latest victim. It was that chilliness, that cold blood, that scared everyone, even his closest friends. He could turn on them at any moment, and he could do it without raising his blood pressure.
To operate the sette, Luciano named his longtime right-hand man, Albert “Lord High Executioner” Anastasia, who ran the Red Hook piers in Brooklyn and would one day be boss of his own crime family (now known as the Gambinos).
Anastasia and Lepke worked together well at first, and their crews lived together as one. Ofttimes, they played a group game of Strangers on a Train and traded their assignments. Lepke would send guys to fix waterfront issues, and Anastasia would use his men to police Lepke’s garment industry in Brownsville. Police saw a pattern in which Jewish guns killed Italian thugs, and vice versa, and they couldn’t make any sense out of it. It looked like the Jews and Italians were at war.
According to Lansky, Lucky Luciano said that all members of the sette, Italians included, were available for the Nazi-busting fun, but Lansky said no, thanks.
“It was a matter of pride,” Lansky said. “It was a job for Jews.”
There may have been a matter of trust involved, too. The Italian mobsters as a rule hated Mussolini because he was anti-Mafia, but Italy and Germany were on the same side, and it only took one rat to ruin a surprise attack.
And so Meyer Lansky fought Nazis with an all-Jewish roster. They were:
Emanuel “Mendy” Weiss, a big man born in New York in 1906 who could handle himself in a bar fight. He killed with his hands and brutally overpowered his victims. If you asked him what he did for a living, he’d say he had a dual vocation: “I’m a kidnapper and a choker.” He was a psycho among psychos, capable of robbing a woman while holding a gun on her baby.
Abraham “Kid Twist” Reles, whose nickname was passed down from Max “Kid Twist” Zwerbach, a turn-of-the-century torpedo. Reles earned the name because he looked younger than he was and, before switching to the ice pick, his favorite way of killing was wringing a man’s neck like a barnyard chicken’s.
Twist was born in Brownsville, only a few blocks from Murder, Inc.’s headquarters, the son of a garment worker. He stayed in school through the eighth grade before taking to the streets and hanging out with his childhood pals Buggsy and Pep, who we’ll soon meet. During Prohibition, he made a living moving hooch but was smart enough to never touch the stuff.
Twist always had an expression of desperation on his oval-shaped face, like a werewolf who’s just noticed the full moon. He had large features with big dark eyes, thick eyebrows, and slightly blubbery lips. His hair was thick, black, and wavy. His cigars were well chewed and wet.
Twist became a maestro of the ice pick. It was said he could dispatch a man so neatly that the same coroner who puked when he saw Pep’s handiwork would mistake the cause of death in a Twist murder for cerebral hemorrhage. He was a sucker puncher, both literally and metaphorically. No matter what the scenario, he believed in the sneak attack.
Martin “Buggsy” Goldstein, class clown, always cracking a stupid joke, even as he was icing some poor slob. “I know, I know, you need me like a hole in the head,” he’d laugh as he held a .38 to a sweaty man’s temple. And then he’d pull the trigger. Goldstein grew up on the same block as Kid Twist. The nickname meant nuts, off his rocker, and in this case, it was well earned. Goldstein came off as shy and gentle until it was killing time. Then he’d get the job done efficiently and effortlessly, same as if he were swatting a fly.
He’d been with Kid Twist for as long as anyone could remember. Even in grade school, they were having criminal competitions, seeing who could steal the most stuff. They went full-time truancy, and both got popped for sticky fingers. They were active enough to attract the attention of the grown-up hoods and joined the farm system for Brownsville’s lucrative rackets as an entry. There were other guys in Twist’s gang back then, charter members—Big Head, Fatty—but who knew where they ended up? Buggsy stuck.
Buggsy was a guy of whom you did not want to be on the wrong side. Even if you were on the right side of him, there was reason to steer clear. At least twice, Buggsy and his partner-in-crime Seymour “Blue Jaw” Magoon—nicknamed because of his cobalt-colored five-o’clock shadow—were sent out to whack one guy and instead whacked another by mistake. Simultaneous to Buggsy and Blue Jaw’s participation in anti-Nazi activities, they went out to shoot a recent parolee named Matthew Kane and ended up killing a financial district investigator named O’Hara. Call that “the Big Oops.” The only one who didn’t call Goldstein Buggsy was his long-suffering mother, who called him Mot’l.
Harry Strauss, also known as “Pep” Strauss, “Big Harry,” and “Pittsburgh Phil,” although he’d never actually been to Pittsburgh. Strauss had a face chiseled from stone, and he rarely changed expression, that expression being one of impatience. He was big, strong, and ruthless. He wasn’t much for arithmetic.
“How many guys you killed, Pep?” someone might ask.
“Do you ask the baker how many black-and-whites?” Strauss would reply with a glare.
Later, it was said he’d killed upward of a hundred men. The number could easily have been twice that.
Strauss was a homicide artist with a variety of styles. It depended on his mood. He experimented with a rope, knife, gun, ice pick, bare hands, disemboweling. He was an interesting guy, with an iron stomach.
Buggsy Goldstein used to joke, “You could make a coroner puke, Pep.”
Strauss was a guy who had formulated a strict moral code, the breaking of which meant instant justice, with him as the judge, jury, and executioner. As historian Rich Cohen first observed, Strauss’s behavior was intrinsically Jewish. He seemed to be emulating the God of the Old Testament.
Albert “Tic Toc” Tannenbaum was in. Born in a small town in Pennsylvania, Tannenbaum moved with his family to New York’s Lower East Side when he was three. They moved again to Brownsville, where Tic Toc did the bulk of his growing up. He was different from his Murder, Inc. comrades in that he hadn’t been a street kid. He’d finished school, worked in the garment district, and then at a country club owned by his father. He didn’t know from the rackets until he was twenty-five years old and began hanging out with Lepke’s crew. He might not have been a born killer, but he took to it quickly and became a trusted member of Murder, Inc. right up until the day he turned blabbermouth.
Charles “Bug” Workman had a screw loose, as his nickname would imply. He was short, with curly hair, and claimed twenty notches on his gun, every victim a gangster. With him, there was no collateral damage. He grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a small apartment crawling with siblings. He quit school before high school and took to the streets, just for the fresh air. He was popped for the first time at age eighteen for stealing twelve bucks worth of cotton off the back of a truck.
“It fell off!” he complained.
Bug was in his early twenties when he met Lepke, and he made a living busting up picket lines. His biggest claim to fame was being in on the Dutch Shultz hit on October 23, 1935, at the Palace Chop House on East Park Street in Newark. Schultz was at the urinal in the men’s room when Bug shot him in the back. Bug was in and out of jail during the 1930s, but never for anything close to murder. His biggest bust was for breaking the nose of a cop who’d just given him a speeding ticket. He claimed that base pay for Murder, Inc. guys was $125 a week, with bonuses. He was out of jail just in time to fight Nazis.
Jacob Drucker was another ice pick man. His most famous kill came during the summer of 1937, when Anastasia sent Drucker and Irving “Big Gangi” Cohen to the Catskills to burn Walter Sage, a former Twist gunman turned gambler. They took Sage for a ride, stabbed him thirty-two times with an ice pick, then tied his body to a slot machine and a rock and dumped him into Swan Lake near the town of Liberty, New York. The weight failed to keep the body from bobbing to the surface, and it was found on July 31. The police had no trouble identifying Sage’s body because his fingerprints were on file from when he was twice arrested for murder in Brooklyn a few years earlier.
The killers kept their mouths shut, even after they were caught in 1940 (well after the anti-Nazi campaign) and put on trial. Cohen was acquitted, but Drucker drew twenty-five years and died in Attica in 1962.
There were dozens of others in the Brownsville sette, killers whom time has forgotten. Guys who killed and were killed, the bodies lost in Jamaica Bay or in a landfill. Only a couple of them lived to be old.
They didn’t call themselves Murder, Inc., at least at first. That was something that came out of the newspapers. But they earned their name—and their money. They were nothing if not prolific, and guys who’d failed in some way to do the right thing were being disappeared on a nightly basis.
Headquarters for the sette was the back room of the Midnight Rose Candy Store in Brownsville, an ordinary-looking storefront at the corner of Livonia and Saratoga Avenues, underneath the elevated portion of the Number 3 subway train. There was a window in the front so neighborhood kids could buy the penny candy without going inside the store. Most customers didn’t go in. Cigarettes, newspapers, they went through the window, too. The ones who did go inside tended to slink like coyotes. There was a movie theater on one side and a shoe repair shop on the other, ten paces from the Saratoga Avenue subway stop. Also on the block were a Jewish deli, hosiery dealer, barbershop, and a pharmacy where the backroom potions of cocaine and codeine guaranteed regular customers.
One function the store served for the community was that it had a phone, at a time when most people didn’t. Making or receiving a call cost a nickel. For a piece of candy, some kid would run and tell so-and-so that they had a call down at Rose’s.
“Midnight Rose” was a hit song from 1923, then a Broadway musical five years later, but in this case the name referred to Mrs. Rose Gold, proprietor, who earned her nickname by keeping her store open at all hours, making it the only thing open on Saratoga Avenue after midnight.
Rose was illiterate but a racketeer in her own right—numbers, girls upstairs—and she knew how to keep her foul mouth shut. She had an adult son named Samuel Siegel, who operated the Brownsville shylock racket. Asked to testify regarding the goings-on in her back room, she said she had no idea what her boys were up to. That was their business.
One of Rose’s favorite scams involved rich housewives who liked to play cards. When a woman would get in debt, she’d get money from a shylock. If she couldn’t pay it back, she was tricked out. If she wasn’t a desirable trick, she’d be given an opportunity to rat out rich-blooded card games that the thugs could then raid, rob, and/or skim. If Rose needed to teach someone a lesson, there were always eight to ten lesson teachers in her back room, usually itching for something to do.
By 1938, Murder, Inc. was no longer at its strongest. As with any endeavor that dangerous, there had been attrition. By the time Judge Perlman was recruiting Jewish toughs to shlom Germans, the Law had already taken Lepke off the board. The man who ran the Brownsville rackets began having troubles that wouldn’t quit in 1936. Looking back at it, Lepke couldn’t figure out what he could’ve done differently. He ordered his boys to whack a guy named Rosen, which they did, but when the police leaned on the local hoods, someone spilled and said Lepke ordered the hit because Lepke thought Rosen was a rat. And for that, Lepke was a wanted man. He went on the lam. It was during this period that the battles with the German American Bund took place, and it is unlikely that Lepke came out into the open air long enough to take part.
It is believed that only Anastasia knew where Lepke was. Lepke might have been hiding, but he wasn’t suffering. He was living above Louis (no relation) Capone’s Oriental Danceland banquet hall on Stillwell Avenue in Coney Island, growing a large mustache, going out every day and walking the beach, gaining twenty pounds on Nathan’s hot dogs.
During the time Lepke was on the lam, Murder, Inc. had been busy. It is estimated that between sixty and eighty men who knew a guy who knew a guy who might’ve testified against Lepke were eliminated during that stretch—strangled, ice-picked, shot, stabbed, buried in shallow graves, and covered in quicklime.
But even as the witnesses disappeared or floated ashore, the heat on Lepke’s friends grew. The NYPD distributed wanted posters for Lepke, with his photo front and side and this description: “Eyes, piercing and shifting; nose, large, somewhat blunt at nostrils; ears, prominent and close to the head; mouth, large, slight dimple left side; right-handed; frequents baseball games.”
Cops were everywhere, leaning on guys: “Where’s Lepke? Tell me where Lepke is and everything goes back to nice.”
The boys at Midnight Rose’s could feel the heat at the backs of their necks, so Anastasia convinced Lepke to give himself up, promising that the legal business would be quick and painless and that he’d be back on the street with a snap of the fingers. The fix was in, Anastasia assured him. Lepke agreed, and Anastasia did nothing but cross his arms as Lepke was convicted of first-degree murder and sizzled in Ol’ Sparky at Sing Sing, the richest man to ever be executed in the United States.
Like many big-time gangsters, Lepke tried to keep his criminality a secret from his wife and son, but the best bet is that at some point before the executioner flicked the big switch and sparked Lepke into eternity, they figured it out.
Of the boys Lansky chose to fight Nazis, a surprising number had been Bar Mitzvah-ed. Even those who never made it out of grammar school had gone through the ritual of becoming a man, being tutored in Hebrew, “reading” (phonetically but without understanding the meaning of the words) a section of the Torah in the synagogue, and acting happy when he received the requisite fountain pen at the reception after.
Buggsy Goldstein claimed his mom’s curvaceous cousin had given him a blow job after his Bar Mitzvah, but nobody believed him.
Tannenbaum said he had placed his first bet after receiving five dollars at his Bar Mitzvah. “I took it to Lukey Litsky”—the well-known Brownsville bookie—“and blew it on a horse,” Tic Toc said with nostalgia in his eyes. That one everybody believed.