ABE RELES FIRST met Louis Lepke on March 3, 1933. Reles’s features already hinted at the sneering condescension that would mark his middle years, the kind of face people hate at first sight. “If a total stranger walked up to Kid Twist and, without a word, bashed him in the face, I could understand it,” Assistant District Attorney Burton Turkus later wrote. “That was the reaction you got from one look at him.”
Reles must have been nervous. Who in the underworld was more important than Lepke? Sure, there was Lansky and Luciano, but those guys lived in a different world, the stratosphere, where violence and street fights were just nostalgia. Reles, Goldstein, Strauss, Maione, Abbandando—these were working-class thugs. How could they identify with the elegance of Luciano, the temperament of Lansky? But Lepke, he was different. In Lepke, Reles must have seen a mirror of his own story, his own brutality raised to the highest power.
When they met, Reles and Lepke were separated by a desk, and by other things, too: age, reputation, motivation. Reles was looking to impress an older man, take the next step, move up; Lepke was looking to fill an order placed by Lansky and Luciano, who had asked him to recruit an execution squad for the Syndicate. As far as Lepke could tell, no killers were better suited for the task than Reles’s gang. Since they weren’t affiliated with any of the crime families, they were untouched by the old rivalries; since they were ethnically mixed, their victims could not gripe about Jews killing Italians or Italians killing Jews. And by so thoroughly dispatching the Meyer Shapiro gang and so easily handling the jobs Lepke had already given them, the gang proved themselves first-rate killers. By the time he met Judge Louis, Reles already had the job.
For Lepke, meeting Reles was something of a risk. For a man like Lepke, meeting anyone is a risk. Talking in person is not the same as sending word through a middleman like Louis Capone. It’s the difference between a man coming to court saying, “I heard . . .” and a man coming to court saying, “I saw . . .” So Lepke was probably careful that day, steering clear of specifics. He probably just wanted to get a good look at Reles, an impression. Could he work with this man? Could he trust him? What he saw was a hungry young thug, someone desperate to climb. And desperation was something Lepke could work with.
Over the next several months, as Reles and the boys tended their own business, the specifics of the Syndicate’s murder operation were worked out. From now on, the troop would kill only for the Combination. In return they were given a free hand in Brownsville and East New York. That was their territory. No questions asked. They could use any muscle necessary to protect this territory. They were also given the concession to crap games throughout Brooklyn. And, of course, they were paid. For Syndicate killing, the boys were kept on a retainer at $250 a week, or twelve grand a year. For an especially spectacular killing, they might receive a bonus or a gift, some small sign of appreciation.
What’s more, they now had something like underworld guidance counselors, older, powerful men to look after their interests. While Lepke took on the Jewish members of the gang, the Italians answered to Albert Anastasia, an important Brooklyn thug. Though Reles, Strauss, and other Jewish gangsters spent lots of time with Albert A., there was always a sense that Jews should tend to Jews, Italians to Italians. Though Jews and Italians worked together, they never confused the other with themselves. Jewish and Italian gangsters somehow sensed they were each following their own plotlines. In the future, as these lines diverged, the gangsters and their offspring would remember each other fondly, as you remember someone you spent a summer with as a boy.
At work, the troop followed a line of command as obscure and tricky as the Russian criminal code. The whole thing would start with a grievance. One gangster is mad at another gangster, some humiliation or double cross or breach of etiquette. Tempers flair. Threats are made. Someone decides to go to a boss with the matter, and soon a court date is set. A few days later high-ranking mobsters gather in a hotel room or clubhouse. The judges at the trial, depending on the severity of the matter, might include Meyer Lansky, Ben Siegel, Frank Costello, Joey Adonis, Louis Lepke, Vito Genovese. Each gangster is represented by counsel, usually another gangster who thinks himself especially eloquent.
The judges hear it all out, nodding, frowning. And then the room is cleared, the door closed, and voices can be heard murmuring on the far side. Sometimes there is shouting or pleading. The gangster lawyers are called back into the room and told the verdict. Sometimes the whole thing is dismissed. Other times a gangster apologizes or agrees to pay the injured party.
Still other times, when there has been a double cross or a ratting out, the judges bring back a death sentence. A few days later Lepke talks with Albert A., who talks with Louis Capone, and then the phone rings in the candy store. The troop spends whole days in there, playing cards, overcoats thrown over chair backs. They wear pinky rings, their cuffs turned back on dark hair curling around gold watchbands. They enforce not only Syndicate law, but their own law, rules they have drawn up for Brownsville. If they hear some young crook is defying their law, they might give him a scare, forcing him into a car, driving him out to a weedy, end-of-the-world beach on the south shore of Canarsie or Plumb Beach, walking him to the edge of the white-capped waters of the harbor. On the other side, beyond the docks and sheds of Neponsit, they can see hills. “Like the scenery?” one of the troop might ask. And before the kid can answer, they say, “How would you like to be part of it—permanent? You want to make money in Brownsville, you do it through us. Got it?”
When such warnings are ignored, a member of the troop might rush out of the candy store and into the street, find the punk, push him against a wall, shoot him. Or else take him on a drive to talk things over, and no one hears from him again.
But when it was a killing for the Syndicate, everything was meticulously planned. Nothing left to chance. The killers were chosen as carefully as the starting lineup for a World Series team. The hit men then went all over town, looking for the best place to finish the mark. Then murder weapons. A couple of local kids were then pulled from the corner and sent out to steal a car: a kill car that would carry the mark and later the corpse. Then a getaway route was chosen—every turn, every stop the car would take after the murder was planned. A second car, a crash car, would ride behind the kill car. If cops or rivals gave chase, the crash car would block the way or supply backup.
Sometimes the members of the troop were forced to improvise; that’s how it was with Puggy Feinstein. Albert A. had put word out that Puggy had to die. Maybe he had done something he wasn’t supposed to. Maybe he had pissed off the wrong guy. Or maybe he owed something he could never repay. Who knows? He had to die, that was the important thing. But no one, not even Albert A., knew what Puggy looked like. Buggsy Goldstein had met Puggy a few years before but could not picture him. And the others—Reles, Pittsburgh Phil, Dukey Maffeatore, a kid who ran errands for the gang—they didn’t even have that. They had nothing but the name. So there they were, looking for a finger man, someone who could point out the mark, when who should walk in on their nightly card game but Puggy Feinstein.
Puggy made his name years before as a small-time prizefighter. He was one of those boxers who takes nothing from the ring but a nickname. Some fighter had flattened his nose, and he was ever after known as Puggy. After leaving the ring, Feinstein rented an apartment in Borough Park and each month made his rent gambling on cards and horses. He bet and lost; he bet and won. Because of a woman he once tried to go straight; because of a woman he could not go straight. One day, when things were especially tight, he borrowed fifty-five dollars from a small-time Brownsville shylock named Tiny Benson.
A few months later he got a couple of his Borough Park friends together and drove to Brownsville. Puggy wanted to pay back Tiny. At around ten P.M. Puggy and his friends walked into the back of the candy store. Goldstein, Reles, Strauss, and Dukey Maffeatore were playing cards. It was like one of those westerns where the strangers come in and no one even raises their eyes. “Hey, Buggsy,” Feinstein said. “Remember me? We met a long time ago. My name is Puggy Feinstein.”
“Puggy, huh?” said Goldstein, looking up. “Sure, I remember you. Hey, guys, this is Puggy Feinstein. Remember, I mentioned him. What’s up, Puggy? What brings you to Brownsville?”
“I’m looking for Tiny Benson. I owe him some money. I thought he might be here.”
“No, Puggy, he’s not here,” said Buggsy.
Strauss nudged Reles. “That’s Puggy,” he whispered. “You can tell by his kisser.”
“Tiny’s not here,” said Strauss. “But we can take you to him. Hey, Buggsy, take Puggy in your car and drive him over to see Tiny Benson. You know where Tiny is, right?”
“Sure,” said Buggsy. “Let’s go.”
Never go with strangers, especially if those strangers have names like Kid Twist, Buggsy, Dukey, Pittsburgh Phil; not names you hear and say, “Here are fellows I can trust.” Still, this was just what Puggy did; he followed Buggsy Goldstein and Dukey Maffeatore from the store into a maroon Pontiac. Before leaving, Puggy told his friends to wait, that he would be back shortly.
As Puggy talked to his friends, Reles said, “Now that we got him, what are we going to do with him?”
“Well, you’re moving anyway,” said Pep. “Let’s take him to your house.”
“Are you crazy?” said Reles. “My house!”
“What’s the difference?” said Pep. “I won’t make no noise. Once I mug him, you know, he stays mugged.”
Buggsy broke in: “My wife told me she’s going over to meet Rose [Reles’s wife] and go to the movies with her.”
Pep told Buggsy and Dukey to drive Puggy around for at least an hour before bringing him to Reles’s. Pep and Reles then went to Albert A.’s clubroom in Ocean Hill to make sure it was okay to take Puggy off the corner. “What are you doing?” asked Reles at one point. “You want to burn up our own corner?”
“What the hell,” said Albert A. “Take him however you can take him. Just take him.”
So they went back to the Kid’s house, which was supposed to be empty. Buggsy’s wife and Rose Reles were supposed to be at the movies, but here they were. “I thought you were going to the pictures,” said the Kid, throwing his coat over a chair. Pep went to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of milk.
“We missed the picture,” said Rose. “Besides, there’s nothing to see.”
The Kid gave each lady a fifty. “Find something to see,” he said.
The Kid’s mother-in-law was asleep in a bedroom in the back of the house, but it was okay. This was a railroad flat; between the old lady and the living room were three rooms, six doors.
“All right,” said Pep, setting down his milk. “Let’s get ready.”
Pep told Reles to get rope and an ice pick. Reles rummaged through the kitchen, garage, and bedroom and found nothing. At last he made his way through those six doors and woke the old lady. “Hey, Ma,” he said, kneeling by the bed. “Ma, where is the rope we used up at the lake last summer for the washline?”
“In the cellar in the valise,” the old lady whispered. Reles went for the rope and then, a few minutes later, was again kneeling in the dark. “Hey, Ma,” he said. “What about the ice pick? Where the hell is the ice pick?”
“In the pantry,” she told him. “The ice pick is in the pantry.”
As Pep was stashing the ice pick and rope behind a chair in the living room, a door opened and in came the old lady. “You seem to be working so hard out here, I thought I could fix you something,” she said.
“No, thank you,” said Pep. “Why don’t you go back to sleep?” He said this in a way she understood. As she disappeared into the back of the house, Reles turned on the radio, something soft and sweet, perfect for a winter night.
Buggsy Goldstein was driving Puggy around, pretending to look for Tiny Benson. “No, he’s not here. Damn, I thought sure this is where he’d be.” More than anything, the Brownsville Boys were great actors, con men who knew just the words to put a mark at ease. “Hey, I know where Tiny is,” Buggsy said. “He’s at the Kid’s place. Let’s run over and get this done with.”
When Buggsy and Dukey led Feinstein into the living room, Pep stepped from the shadows and got Puggy around the neck. Here is what Puggy must have been thinking: What kidders! Or: What a story this will make! Or more likely: I’m fucked. He probably did not realize he was already half-dead. As Pep held Puggy, the Kid poked him with the ice pick. Buggsy and Dukey were beating on Puggy, punching and kicking. And Puggy was fighting back, trying to get Pep’s hands off his neck. He sank his teeth into Pep’s left hand. Pep screamed. Reles turned up the radio. Pep pulled Puggy to the floor and sat on his chest. He looped the rope over Puggy’s neck, legs, hands. Over the years, this became Pep’s specialty. The more Puggy moved, the tighter the rope got. As the Kid, Pep, Buggsy, and Dukey watched, hands on their knees, huffing and puffing, Puggy strangled himself to death.
“Look at this,” said Pep, holding up his hand. “That bastard bit me.”
As Buggsy and Reles carried the body to the car, Pep went to the bathroom for iodine. The men then grabbed a can of gasoline and got in two cars: kill car, crash car. They decided to take the body to the municipal dumps. There was always something burning on the dumps, so who would notice one more fire? But Buggsy got all turned around, and they instead wound up in one of those residential colonies in the flats near Canarsie, a city in the weeds. They dragged the body into a field, doused it, threw a match, and drove away.
A woman living in the development spotted the fire and came running with a bucket of water. She put out what she thought was a nuisance fire set by neighborhood kids, only to see a charred face looking back at her. Bad dreams. When the cops came all they got was a watch and some teeth, but that was enough to identify Puggy.
All the while, Puggy’s friends were waiting around the candy store. At midnight they decided Puggy probably got a ride home from his new pals. But when they reached Borough Park—no Puggy. So they went back to Brownsville, where Buggsy, Pep, Reles, and Dukey were again in back of the candy store, playing cards. After most murders, the killers went back to the store. They watched, with narrowed eyes, everyone who came through the door. “Have you guys seen our friend Puggy?” one of the kids asked.
“No,” said Buggsy. “He left. You know what, fellas? It’s late. You should be in Borough Park.”
News of Feinstein’s death made the morning papers. Another body in the weeds. Another Mob killing. Criminals killing criminals. A few days after that, the New York Daily Mirror ran a letter from Sydney Levy, a lawyer who had grown up with Puggy:
I desire to write a few words concerning Puggy Feinstein.
Puggy and I played punchball together in the neighborhood. He was a small fellow and wanted to be a big shot. So, we took different paths. But both paths are so closely entwined that we should understand those who take a path that we just miss. He, too, had a fine background.
Last year Puggy enthusiastically told me how he was going straight. . . . The cause of his return to his proper environment was that he was in love with a respectable Flatbush girl.
But after he had bought the furniture and planned the wedding, a neighborhood boy went up to the girl’s folks and told them of Puggy’s past. This broke up the match and broke his heart.
He reverted to type. And now I read Puggy was a torch-murder victim.
He was a swell punchball player.
Most of the killings were done out of town, in some city clear across the country. Some gangster in a place like Chicago or Detroit would call Lepke or Lucky or Lansky with a problem, a rival who wouldn’t fall in line. If the big boys agreed to take care of the problem, the phone in back of the candy store would ring. All you see is a hand holding the phone, the side of a face, lips pursed. A few days later one or two killers are on a train, heading west, rails clicking under the wheels, platforms singing by. Arriving in town, the killers were met by a member of the local mob. Probably they did not hold a sign reading “Abraham ‘Kid Twist’ Reles, Syndicate Killer.” Who needed it? The local thug would spot someone like Abe Reles right away. Into the small, unsophisticated Depression-rocked farming towns of Middle America came the gangsters, in dark cashmere coats and hats, leather gloves, silk scarves.
The local thug came to welcome the killer, but also to help. The gangster was to kill a man he had never seen, so the local was to finger the mark. He usually pointed out the mark from a distance, across a crowded street, coming out of a store or restaurant(“That’s him! That’s him!”)—the poor unsuspecting bastard. Over the next few days the killer made a study of the mark’s habits—Where does he go? Who does he see?—laying down a murder plan. His nights were spent in a hotel or rooming house by the train tracks, the kind of place that caters to transients. When the moment was right, the killer packed his bags, checked out, made his move.
They called the men they were about to kill “rats” or “bastards” or “no good rat bastards.” They convinced themselves all marks are guilty, have it coming, that they are bringing not some random death, but a kind of justice. In this way they took the sting out of their crimes, turning the mark from person into object. The last thing the mark sees is the face of a stranger, his last minutes a mystery. Men were killed in fields, hallways, alleys. Harry Strauss killed a mark in a movie theater in Jacksonville, Florida, as the picture played. While the killing was taking place, the local hoods, everyone with a motive, made sure they were somewhere in public, witnesses all around, an iron-tight alibi. Before the cops even found the body, the killer was on a train heading east, the country turning red out the window.
In the coming years, Harry Strauss killed more than thirty men in over a dozen towns and cities, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, Detroit. He traveled with a small leather case that held pants, silk underwear, a white shirt, a gun, and a rope. He was in the tradition of the Jewish peddler, the ambitious immigrant who moves west with the country, traveling dirt roads, like Levi Strauss, hoping to sell canvas tents but instead cutting and sewing them into the first pairs of jeans. Pittsburgh Phil was like that, only it was all reversed. He was the aggressor, not the victim: a killer in a strange land. “Like a ball player, that’s me,” he later explained. “I figure I get seasoning doing these jobs here. Somebody from one of the big mobs spots me. Then, up to the big leagues I go.”
The Syndicate had invented contract killing. A stranger arrives, kills, is gone. The local cops are left with nothing—no motive, no suspect—nothing. By the mid thirties the contract killer had become a national character, like the frontiersman or logger, who embodies aspects of the American personality. To some he was a kind of existential cowboy, riding the line between being and not, the mysterious stranger of Mark Twain who carries death in his pocket. To others he was a city-spawned monster, a Catholic or Jewish immigrant who has broken free from his slum to ravish a Protestant countryside.
Ernest Hemingway anticipated the emergence of this character in his 1927 story “The Killers,” which tells of big-city mobsters entering a lunch counter in a small midwestern town, waiting for a mark named Ole Andreson. The killers pass the time with George, who owns the counter, Nick Adams, and Sam, the black cook. The killers are Jews; they could be members of the Reles troop.
Their faces were different, but they were dressed like twins. Both wore overcoats too tight for them. They sat leaning forward, their elbows on the counter. . . . Both men ate with their gloves on.
After a while, George asks the men: “What are you going to kill Ole Andreson for? What did he ever do to you?”
“He never had a chance to do anything to us. He never seen us.”
“And he’s only going to see us once,” Al said from the kitchen.
“What are you going to kill him for, then?” George asked.
“We’re killing him for a friend. Just to oblige a friend, bright boy.”
“Shut up,” said Al from the kitchen. “You talk too goddam much.”
“Well, I got to keep bright boy amused. Don’t I, bright boy?”
“You talk too damn much,” Al said. “The nigger and my bright boy are amused by themselves. I got them tied up like a couple of girl friends in the convent.”
“I suppose you were in a convent?”
“You never know.”
“You were in a kosher convent. That’s where you were.”
A few pages later the killers are shown as the strangers they are in this town:
The two of them went out the door. George watched them, through the window, pass under the arc-light and cross the street. In their tight overcoats and derby hats they looked like a vaudeville team.
Damon Runyon, working with the same material, came away with a different story. From New York City, where Runyon lived, these men seemed less objects of scorn than amusement, even pride. Some Americans have always felt a kind of pride for their gangsters—men who cannot be broken. In his 1932 story “Delegates at Large,” which first appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine, Runyon writes of some Brooklyn boys, led by a man named Harry the Horse, who headed west to fill a contract: “There is no doubt that Harry the Horse has a wild streak in him and is very mischievous,” Runyon writes. “[Harry] is always putting Spanish John and Little Isadore up to such tricks as robbing their fellow citizens of Brooklyn and maybe taking shots at them, and sometimes Harry the Horse personally takes a shot or two himself.”
Little Isadore, telling his story, then gives a pretty good description of contract killing:
We go to Chicago by special invitation of some very prominent parties out there. I will mention no names but these parties are very prominent indeed, especially in beer, and they invite us out there to take care of a guy by the name of Donkey O’Neil, as it seems this Donkey O’Neil is also in beer in opposition to the prominent parties I speak of.
Naturally, these parties will not tolerate opposition, and there is nothing for them to do but to see that Donkey O’Neil is taken care of. But of course they don’t wish him to be taken care of by local talent, as this is a very old fashioned way of transacting such matters, and nowadays when anybody is to be taken care of in any town it is customary to invite outsiders in, as they are not apt to leave any familiar traces such as local talent is bound to do.
When reporters first got a sense of what was going on, of just what the Brownsville troop specialized in, they gave the boys a nickname: Murder Incorporated. And that’s what they were, a corporation dealing in death, who had organized killing along the lines of modern business. In the thirties the troop killed dozens of men across the country. Bodies turned up in fields, lakes, dumps. The details of these murders must have run together in the minds of the killers, creating a single, perfect murder the killer could go over in his head just before sleep. Street, sky, pistol, approach, getaway, the car running past vacant lots and dark houses, out to some lonely railroad platform, and the long ride home.
I don’t want to glamorize what these men did. They were killers. They killed as if there were no consequences, so for a lot of them there weren’t. Just errands between vacations. Their development had jumped the rails. And yet, looking at how Jews were everywhere being treated, the abuse they took and would continue to take, I cannot help but admire some part of their story. Here were men who had no idea Jews are supposed to be weak, so they weren’t. This was the 1930s, the last years of the European part of Jewish history, an era that saw Jews leave their ghettos, cut their beards, give up their God, deny their uniqueness. And maybe the gangster was the dark side of that story, an instinctive twitch from something that was dying.
“When all was said and done, they were nothing more than professional assassins,” Albert Fried wrote in The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. “They were too crude to come within miles of the gangland summit occupied by Lepke and the Syndicate leaders, by those who presided over vast business concerns. In that sense they were a monstrous throwback to the old Lower East Side gangsters from Monk Eastman to Little Augie.”
A few years later, Burton Turkus, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted many of these men, asked Reles how he could kill with such ease. “Did it ever bother you?” asked Turkus. “Didn’t you feel anything?”
“How did you feel when you tried your first case?” Reles replied.
“I was rather nervous,” said Turkus.
“And how about your second case?”
“It wasn’t so bad, but I was still a little nervous.”
“And after that?”
“Oh, after that I was all right. I was used to it.”
“You answered your own question,” said Reles. “It’s the same with murder. I got used to it.”
A few months after Reles joined the Syndicate, Louis Capone came by the candy store. He asked Rose to send out the Kid. The men talked on the corner in the early fall, leaves falling around them. “Listen here,” said Capone. “Tomorrow you be in front of Albert A.’s place in Ocean Hill.”
“What for?” asked Reles.
“Albert will tell you what for,” said Capone.
The Kid drove to Ocean Hill the next morning, Pitkin to Van Sicklen, the kosher butchers giving way to Italian bakeries. Two of Albert’s gunmen, Joe Coppola and Jack Parisi, were waiting in front of the clubhouse with a car. They told Reles to get in. They drove along the water. “Where are we going?” asked Reles.
The men up front looked at each other. Maybe one of them smiled. “Target practice,” said Parisi, who was small and dark.
“Target practice?” asked Reles.
“Sure,” said Parisi. “The boss wants to make sure you can shoot. If you can’t, we gotta teach you.”
“Oh,” said Reles. He must have fallen into his seat and sighed. Target practice. Well, he was part of the Syndicate now. A local boss. A torpedo. So he had to go through Syndicate training, the same way a manager of the Home Depot must go through Home Depot training.
A few hours out of the city, the road began to climb through the trees. From the top of a rise, they could see fields, houses, silos, barns. Newburgh, New York. The valley had attracted immigrants. Italian could be heard in the stores and fields—a Sicilian town hiding upstate. They could see the road rise on the far side of the valley and disappear into the hills.
A few miles on, they turned from the highway onto a dirt road with tall grass growing between the tire tracks. The road ended at a house. An old man was sitting on the front porch. He raised pheasants. He was a mysterious old man. People in town said he had once killed someone in New York City. He had been hiding up here as long as anyone could remember. The only person he still knew from the old days was Albert Anastasia. Albert would sometimes come up to the farm, the kitchen light burning late into the night. Other times the farmer hid Albert’s or Lepke’s men on the lam.
The old man led the gangsters to a beat-up building that sat on the edge of a field. He opened the padlock on the door. The building was filled with weapons: rifles, shotguns, pistols. “Enough ammunition to fight a war,” Reles later said.
The old man took down several weapons and led the gangsters out back, where he had set up a crude shooting range. The old man would pick up a gun and say something like “If you have to shoot a person from a window across the street at this distance, here’s the gun you want to use.” He then showed the men how to aim and fire the weapon. The gangsters took turns. They shot until the sun went down.
They spent the night at the Italian hotel in town. They went back to the farm the next morning and shot guns until they ran out of ammunition. When the last bullet was fired, Parisi looked at Reles and said, “Well, I guess you’re a pretty good shot.”
The Brownsville Boys were being brought, step by step, into the Syndicate. There were phone calls, meetings, jobs. Each encounter, whether they knew it or not, was a test. They were being gauged for skill, intelligence, loyalty. With each test passed they moved further into the fold. Secrets were revealed. By the mid-thirties Lepke was even sharing his gunmen with the Brownsville Boys. It was sometimes hard to tell the gangs apart, as Reles, Goldstein, Strauss, Maione, and Abbandando were seen everywhere with Lepke’s best torpedoes, underworld legends, the toughest Jews in America: Albert Tannenbaum, Charlie Workman, Mendy Weiss.
Not only did the killers work well together, they liked each other. They had more in common with each other than they did with the big machers, like Lepke or Albert A. They were foot soldiers, doing the dirty work. Some of them did this work as a means to an end, but others did it because they liked it. They did not want to be in some office, playing businessman. They wanted to be on the street, chasing shadows. Lepke’s boys were soon honorary members of the Reles troop. Some took vacations with the Brownsville Boys. Some even moved to Brooklyn and hung around the candy store. As much as Reles had joined the Syndicate, the Syndicate had joined Reles.
Of all the new gang members, maybe of all gangsters everywhere, my favorite is Albert Tannenbaum. I like Albert because his experience makes the most sense to me. Most of the other gangsters (Kid Twist, Pep) lived lives that now seem as mysterious and archaic as stories in the Bible. When I try to imagine their world, I can see it only in black and white. They went into crime out of necessity or boredom, or maybe it was in their nature. They were vicious men. But Tannenbaum was different. He fell in with criminals in a way I can imagine happening to me. He hung around gangsters—at first, anyway—because he was young and they were the coolest people around. Being exposed to someone too cool at too young an age is dangerous. The too cool person can act like a strong magnetic field, screwing up your bearings, ruining your compass. When he was around these gangsters, Tannenbaum, then in his teens, was so excited he talked and talked. He talked so much they called him Tick-Tock; they said his mouth went like a clock. He is the only gangster I know of whose nickname is entirely benign.
Albert had a dark, narrow face, a comically long nose, sad eyes, and a tightly furrowed brow. Over the years, the choices he made seemed to turn up on his face. Flipping through his mug shots is like watching time-lapse photos of a city going to seed, weeds coming up through the sidewalks. He was five feet nine and weighed just 140 pounds. Born in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, on January 17, 1906, he had three siblings: Irving, who would later move to Georgia and become a lampshade salesman; Solomon, who would make his name in motion picture supplies; Jean, who would wait tables at Enduro, a restaurant on West Thirty-ninth Street. In 1908 Albert’s father, Sam Tannenbaum, who ran a general store in Pennsylvania, moved his family to Orchard Street on the Lower East Side.
Sometime before the First World War, Sam Tannenbaum got together enough money to buy a resort in upstate New York. Many immigrants dreamed of doing this—buying a piece of land in the country. In much of the old world, Jews were forbidden to own property. So, for many of them, land became a kind of grail, a dream, something worth fighting for. After all, they had come from places like Russia and Poland, where governments and currencies rose and fell, where land was the only thing worth a damn. My father used to quote an ad for a land development firm that summed up the views of many of his ancestors: “Banks may fail, women may leave you, but good land goes on forever.” In the first years of the century, lots of Jews withdrew their faith from God and reinvested in a parcel of land. Sam Tannenbaum put his cash first in a campground in Rock Hill, New York; then, when he sold that, he bought the Loch Sheldrake Country Club.
The land around Loch Sheldrake is all hills, valleys, gorges, and woods full of deer and beaver and hunters on trails, straight or curved, that open on moonlit or sun-dappled lakes. By car it is about three hours north of the city. I am not sure what the grounds of the country club looked like, but I have a pretty clear picture in my head, a picture formed by old stories and ghostly snapshots my grandparents took at similar resorts in the Catskill and Pocono Mountains. I see the club as a clearing in the woods; lights on a green hillside; a cavernous mess hall ringing with accents; a life guard standing at the edge of a rocky shore; a gloomy bathhouse smelling of dead fish. Going to the bathhouse with a bar of soap was a ritual, a pleasant memory, which made later talk of European Jews being gassed in bathhouses only more horrible.
The Loch Sheldrake Country Club, and other resorts scattered upstate, were just full of Jews. They drove up after Memorial Day in wagons loaded with luggage. Crossing the Willis Avenue bridge, they could feel the road open, the sky unfold. And soon they were rolling over a narrow gravel path to the lodge, where they were met by friends from summers before. At night they sat smoking on porches, looking at the woods. Fathers, who worked all week in the city, drove up each Friday night, a ritual better observed and with more meaning than the lighting of the candles. These places were teeming with Communists and Zionists and anarchists and Socialists and Democrats and even a few Republicans. At night, after the kids were asleep, the discussions were lively. It must have sometimes seemed less like they were upstate than at some Black Sea resort, with pious old men and preaerobics, full-bodied balabustas in huge, one-piece, cover-all bathing outfits pinching daughters, calling them real bathing beauties and their sons little Romeos. “What a little Romeo my son is, romancing the bathing beauties.” There were dozens of such upscale resorts, like the Concord, the Nevele, the Royal, Grossinger’s. Other families stayed at kochalayns, cottages with communal kitchens. And those poor souls stuck sweltering in the city were left to dream of a weekend in the Jewish Alps.
By the time I was a kid, all that was left of this world were summer camps for Jewish kids scattered around the lakes of the upper Midwest. These camps had Indian names, like Ojibwah, Kawaga, Apachee. I went to Camp Menominee, in Managua, Wisconsin. We had a cheer: “Easy, Izzy, Jake, and Sam, we’re the boys who eat no ham. Matzoh, matzoh, that’s our cry; matzoh, matzoh, ’til we die. Yeah, Menominee!” Looking over the names of these camps, which advertised each Sunday in the Chicago Tribune, my father would shake his head and say, “You think Indians send their kids to Camp Goldberg?”
When he was old enough, Allie began spending his summers at the resort. Probably he waited tables in the dining hall or set up beach chairs at the lake. It must have been fun for him, being the son of the owner, having the run of the place. And Sam Tannenbaum must have been happy with the connections his son could make. The club serviced a ritzy clientele. It was not cheap. Almost everyone on the beach represented a success story. But Allie looked past all these men, seeing instead those other success stories, men who were the loudest in every room, took the best tables, were impressed by no one, and carried with them a cloud of laughter. Even in the woods, where the life of the city was just a noise in the distance, the most glamorous men were criminals.
Each year, in the first days of summer, the gangsters would pile into sedans and drive north. Reles had a summer home in White Lake, New York. A lonely little shack, a light in the woods, a path to a lake, a line holding colorful clothes. In the winter this same line was used to strangle men. The gangsters spent afternoons reading magazines or comic books or else ran around the woods trying to kill animals with handguns. At dinner they introduced themselves to other guests as labor organizers or said they were in the garment industry or trucking or importing. Away from the dining hall, the respectable clientele must have whispered, “Guess what he does in the city?” Among the Jewish success stories who spent summers at Loch Sheldrake were Greenie Greenberg, Louis Lepke, and Gurrah Shapiro. For most kids, summer vacation meant the beach, sand castles, cookouts. For Albert Tannenbaum, summer vacation meant gangsters.
Allie met Gurrah at the resort in the summer of 1925. Gurrah, with his gruff voice and hard eyes, must have been easy to spot among the regular clientele. Allie was drawn to him the way most young men are drawn to power. He was impressed. Gurrah introduced him to Lepke and Greenberg, who saw in the kid someone they could teach, who would reflect their greatness. Allie also had something concrete to offer: intelligence. Over the years, he had come to know the terrain around the camp, paths and roads, caves and gulches, shortcuts.
There must have been a moment when Sam Tannenbaum realized his son was rejecting his example. But what could he do? Lepke and Gurrah were teaching the boy something new: to be tough. When Allie found himself in a tricky situation, when he felt threatened physically, he must have swallowed his fear and asked himself, “What would Gurrah do?” For a lot of young men, the idea of the tough Jew was something you could hold in your pocket, something to keep you calm, like a religious icon. Of course, Allie did not know the gangsters could lead him only halfway: they could take him away from home, but how could they get him back?
One afternoon in the late twenties, Allie was in the city, walking along Broadway, killing time. He was going to be a senior at Bushwick High School in Brooklyn and worked part-time at the College Shop, a haberdashery on 113th Street in Manhattan. As he crossed 32nd Street, someone called to him. It was Greenie Greenberg, who worked for Lepke. Greenie asked Allie if he needed work. Sure. Who doesn’t? So Greenie sent Allie to a dress factory downtown, where the workers were on strike. Lepke had charged Greenie with breaking the strike leadership. Allie was to go to the factory, say he was a worker, and sit in the sewing room. When members of the leadership turned up, he would tell them to leave. If they refused, he would use force, saying he was doing it for Lepke and Greenberg.
Allie liked the work. It was more fun than selling hats, and he was good at it. He quit school. His three years at Bushwick High still made him one of the best educated members of the Mob. He was well spoken and had the kind of perfect penmanship taught in public schools before World War II. He wrote in clear, concise sentences. Brains were always an asset to the gang, and Allie rose through the ranks. He was soon moved from the street to the Perfect Coat Company, a downtown factory where Lepke had an office. He was put on the payroll at $125 a week. Allie was just like other young, ambitious personal assistants, only he did not go out for coffee or salads or take dictation; he went out stink bombing or strike breaking or schlamming. And he was soon running with other Lepke guns, like Mendy Weiss and Charlie Workman. And, bit by bit, he was becoming a killer. Over the years, he had a hand in at least six murders. How he went from a worker at his father’s resort to an East Side killer is a mystery. Somewhere in that mystery is wrapped the secret and allure of crime.
Albert Tannenbaum also did some freelancing, hiring himself out to whoever had the cash. In 1931 he went to work in Brownsville for some brothers who were fighting a war with young upstarts. When Meyer Shapiro shot up Buggsy Goldstein’s pool hall, Albert was driving the car. It was Albert whom Reles saw at the wheel. Louis Capone later introduced the men, making them shake hands like a couple of kids after a schoolyard fight.
By the time Reles and Lepke were working together, everyone was friends. When Albert’s sister got married in the thirties, Reles was on the guest list, as was Charlie Workman, Buggsy Goldstein, Harry Strauss, and Mendy Weiss. In the coming years, the bond among the gangsters, Jews and Jews, Jews and Italians, was strengthened at such parties. They were like underworld summits. The guest list alone could give you a sense of how things were going, of alliances and feuds.
Things probably peaked in 1935, at the bris of Charlie Workman’s son, Solomon. The Workmans lived on Avenue A and Fourth Street, in what is now the East Village but was then still the Lower East Side. They lived in an apartment house: a few rooms, window, airshaft. Guests began arriving in the afternoon. It was midwinter, so the ladies probably wore fur, their coats piled high on a bed. The living room was full of shoulders, smiles, hairdos. Some of the most important criminals in America were crowded into the apartment: Lepke, Gurrah, Moey “Dimples” Wolensky, Longy Zwillman, Reles, Strauss, Goldstein, Dasher, Maione. Good gangsters don’t talk business around wives, so if there was anything important to say, one gangster probably took another to the bedroom and talked next to the coats. Maybe they felt the pile, making sure no one was hiding there.
In the other room, everyone was drinking or had just finished a drink or was about to have another. Stories were told, jokes. The boy was hugged, pinched, kissed. And at the center of it all, taking gifts and coats, was Charlie Workman. In pictures, most midcentury gangsters look like ancient, spectral figures, something from mythology. Charlie was not like that; Charlie looked modern, like someone you see at a Superbowl party, a big hit with the ladies. His eyes were black and deep as pools, something you try to find the bottom of. Neighborhood girls called him Handsome Charlie. Neighborhood boys called him Bug. In the twenties, in a bootlegging war, he was shot in the shoulder. The bullet pierced a nerve that ran down his arm, a wound that affected him until the end. If he held anything in his right hand for more than a few minutes (a beer, a gun), that hand would quiver and shake. It was one of those external injuries that mirrors something crippled within.
Charlie Workman’s may be the saddest story in organized crime. He would live to see his best friends betray him, his friends and enemies die, his way of life rebuked. He grew up on the Lower East Side, had a sister and two brothers, quit school after ninth grade. Though he worked for a time at his father’s bakery, he could not escape his nature. He had the gangster spirit. On fire escapes and tarry roofs, he grew accustomed to the simple logic of crime. Do or get done. When he was eighteen, he was arrested for stealing a twelve-dollar bundle of cotton off a truck on lower Broadway. A year later, while still on probation, he was charged with shooting a man behind the ear in an argument over ten dollars. He came to Lepke’s attention a few years later, during the summer strikes of 1926. He was a gifted schlammer. Lepke put him on the payroll at $125 a week.
Workman was often sent to kill rival bootleggers, assignments he especially liked. A successful bootlegger might carry as much as ten grand in cash, and Charlie was always cool enough in the siren-filled aftermath of a hit to go through the pockets of the corpse. When the cops got him, he would give his name as Jack Harris or Jack Cohen or whatever came to mind. He told people he was a Brooklyn undertaker or that he sold cars.
Workman was openly admired even by the top bosses. When he moved with his wife to Long Island, housewarming gifts came from around the country. His fireplace was a gift from Ben Siegel. A police report on him reads, “Charlie was on Lepke’s payroll as a triggerman. He was considered one of the best in the line. He can, if he will, give more information to the DA than all the other songbirds put together. Charlie’s wife was extravagant, keeping him constantly out of funds.”
Workman had spent many years in the Syndicate. By all accounts he should have climbed the ranks, from alley to boardroom, but he liked the street, so that’s where he stayed. When Lepke hooked up with the Brownsville Boys, Workman started killing with the troop. He was soon friends with Reles, Buggsy, and Strauss. He dressed in slick, downtown suits, beautiful shirts and hats, and was known as a dandy. He was someone you might make fun of (behind his back), then go imitate. Though he did not want to lead, people followed. He was an elder statesman to the troop, teaching by example. A few years later, a prosecutor asked Reles how often he would see Workman. “Whenever the occasion arose,” said the Kid. “When we had business together.”
“What is that business?” asked the lawyer.
“The murder business,” said the Kid. “The extortion business. All kinds of business.”
Workman was never very far from Albert Tannenbaum. When you looked for one, you found the other. They were best friends. They met in Lepke’s office, when both were salaried young gunmen. The friendship blossomed over a month spent together at the Park Beach Hotel in Miami. Each man was there for his own reasons. They spent days at the track or at illegal casinos in Broward County. In Manhattan they played craps each week at the Lincoln Republican Club on Allen and Forsythe streets. They moved with their wives into houses a few doors from each other on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, an underworld version of I Love Lucy. Wacky neighbors. Surprise drop-bys. Joint vacations.
The couples went north each summer, to the Ambassador Hotel in Fallsburgh, New York, or else to Edgemere in Rockaway, Long Island, where they took adjoining bungalows. In the winter they went to Florida, which is where they were when Charlie and his pregnant wife decided it was time to go home, that the baby would come soon. The Tannenbaums saw the Workmans off at the station, the train rolling through rail yards, signal towers cutting the sky into patches of color.
The Tannenbaums were home in time for the bris. Allie probably slipped an envelope into his best friend’s pocket—something for Solomon. Things seemed to be going well for Charlie. Here were his friends: Reles, Strauss, and Goldstein wandered the room, telling jokes. Here were his bosses: Lepke and Gurrah wandered the room, being told jokes. Here was his wife, whom he obviously loved. When he lived at 441 Ocean Parkway, he once beat up the superintendent for looking at her wrong. And here was Solomon Workman, about to be marked, the wound that begins every Jewish boy’s commitment to God.
At some point, the mohel, who conducts the bris, said the prayers. Prayers in Hebrew always sound so sad, songs of a lost people. Then the knife. The baby cried. Drinks were served. Music played. And slowly, glass by glass, the men gave themselves to the moment, rolling up sleeves, hugging, smiling. It was a frozen instant, the kind of afternoon people look back on. Outside, the sky turned black. Cars ghosted down the avenue to lower Manhattan, where, in courtrooms and offices, decisions were being made, decisions that would affect everyone in the room. In one way or another, all these men were marked by the violence that made them. Though they steered clear of the law, the harder they ran, the closer to it they came, running, to the very thing they were trying to escape—obituaries spread across front-page headlines.