November 12, 1941
Abe “Kid Twist” Reles was a high roller in the Syndicate’s assassination wing, Murder Incorporated. Louis Buchalter, Jacob Shapiro and Albert Anastasia ran the organization, but Reles and his gang—the Boys from Brownsville—were the main executioners. When someone needed rubbing out, Reles and his boys did it with relish. But Reles also has another claim to fame: he’s the stool pigeon who finally brought down the murder squad.
Reles and his gang liked to ply their trade in creative ways. Generally contracting for out-of-town killings so that they couldn’t be traced to the victim, the group would tail the mark for a while before getting down to the hit. Once ready, they would use a variety of methods to get the job done—Reles favoured using an ice pick, for instance.
So good was the assassination squad that they became notorious during the 1930s and it’s believed that Murder Inc. was responsible for nearly one thousand killings, many of them unsolved. All that changed in 1940, though, when Reles found himself implicated in a murder dating all the way back to 1933.
Hauled up on murder charges, it didn’t take long for Reles to decide what to do. Facing conviction and execution, Reles concluded his best bet was to name names, a lot of names—all the names. Thanks to Reles and his near-eidetic memory, the authorities were able to close a lot of gaps, lowering the boom on Mendy Weiss, Louis Capone, Dasher Abbandando, and even Louis Buchalter himself, to name but a few. All of the aforementioned got the chair.
And Reles wasn’t done yet. He was about to put the finger on Albert Anastasia as well—though not if Anastasia himself had anything to say about it, of course.
Reles was being sequestered at the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island. There was practically a brigade of cops keeping an eye on the mobster. But that didn’t stop Reles from falling to his death from a window of the hotel on the morning of November 12, 1941. Coincidentally, or not, he died the day before he was to testify against Anastasia.
The official ruling of the time was that Reles had climbed out of the window—either as a prank or to try to escape—and that he’d accidentally fallen. But nobody actually believes that. It’s far more plausible that Anastasia bought off the cops and had his men enter and take care of Reles or the cops had done the job themselves. The mug-shots of Reles before his death show a man whose eyes are round with terror. Reles was a marked man and he knew it.
After his literal fall from grace, Reles became known as “the canary who could sing but couldn’t fly”. And the charges against Albert Anastasia? With Reles no longer around to testify, they were dropped.