LOUIS LEPKE HAD been two years in hiding, the back rooms and basements of Brooklyn. By 1940, when German tanks were rolling east, into the patchwork farms of the Ukraine, Lepke was losing his mind. His perceptions, distorted by months of confinement, ran red. From hidden rooms, everything on the street looked like a threat. He was not really that different from Joseph Stalin, a dictator surrounded by yes-saying sycophants, ruling from a throne in his mind. Lepke’s paranoia was getting the best of him. Beginning in the late thirties, he directed a purge, killing off anyone he considered an enemy, anyone who might testify against him. In Brownsville the heady days of summer had run out into the long evening of autumn.
Lepke’s orders were carried out by the troop, Brooklyn boys who wound up as little more than agents of another man’s aggression. Bodies turned up in vacant lots and ditches and backseats: Leon Scharf (November 10, 1938); Isadore Friedman (January 29, 1939); Joseph Miller, a former Lepke business partner (March 30, 1939); Albert Plug Shulman, who was taken for a ride by Allie Tannenbaum and Knadles Nitzberg (April 28, 1939); Irving Penn, who, winning a kind of reverse lottery, was mistaken for someone else and filled with bullets (May 25, 1939); Hyman Yuran, who once ran a dress company with Lepke and was found in a lime pit near Loch Sheldrake (August 21, 1939); Max Rubin, who had told Joe Rosen to forget his candy store and get out of town, was shot in the head (survived); Moishe Diamond, an obese, Polish-born teamster, was shot six times on the street by Happy Maione and Albert A.; Puggy Feinstein, who was killed by Strauss and Goldstein in the Reles living room. And so many others, at least thirteen men unseated from everyday life. In those days, reading the crime obits was like glancing at bar mitzvah announcements in the Forward, only instead of passing into adulthood these young men were passing out. “It is apparent that the Lepke mob is waging a war of extermination against its former and some of its present members,” said Tom Dewey.
Lepke was trying to destroy government cases, steal witnesses from prosecutors, but his purge may have had the opposite effect. He may have created cases where there were none. All the killing created a jumpy, hostile environment, where assassins were locked in a race with cops: who gets the informant first? Men who might otherwise have not spoken to the cops now sought them out. What choice did they have? Once under Lepke’s suspicion, they were as good as dead. It was the station house or the morgue. For some, their last days were a heart-thumping flight, a mad dash to beat the bullets to the cops. A few years later, when Lepke was tried and convicted, it was easy to view him with sympathy: the Man Gnawed to Death by Rats. But it was his fault—he created an atmosphere where a man must become a rat to survive. That’s how it was with Greenie Greenberg, anyway.
Big Greenie grew up with Lepke and Gurrah on the East Side. He worked his way up in the rackets, breaking strikes, keeping order. In the twenties he spent summers at Loch Sheldrake, watching Allie Tannenbaum cut from the dining hall to the woods, where the boys taught him to fight. It was Greenie who got Tannenbaum his first job with Lepke, leading him from his upstate idyll to rough-and-tumble racket life. Greenie had been with Lepke through it all, planning, scheming, late night meetings in smoke-choked dives, shirt collars curled with sweat. So when the heat came on, Greenberg stood out like a target, something the cops might aim at. Lepke gave him the same old choice: Dead or out of town.
Greenberg went to Montreal. He was soon out of money. He sent word to the boss. Rather than simply ask for funds, he laced his request with a threat. “I hope you guys are not forgetting me,” he wrote. “You better not.” He was like Moses hitting the rock instead of asking it for water. “We all liked Big Greenie, but this was disloyalty,” Doc Stacher later told Uri Dan. “Allie Tannenbaum was told to bump him off.”
But when Allie got up to Canada, Greenie was gone. Tannenbaum chased Greenie to Detroit and lost him in Chicago. He went to wait in New York. For the next few months Greenberg was heading west, disappearing here, reappearing there. He followed dotted lines across the map, passing through towns in the dead of night, always a step ahead of the killers.
In the fall of 1939 Ben Siegel found Greenberg. Bugsy was thirty-six and living at 250 North Delfon Drive in West Los Angeles. He had come west a few years before from Scarsdale, New York, where he lived with his wife and daughters. He was sent by the Mob to put the L.A. underworld in the Syndicate. He was also invested in legitimate concerns, things to throw off the cops, like a hot dog machine company he owned with Longy Zwillman. “You put in ten cents and get a hot dog in cellophane, electrocuted, mustard,” he told police. (Considering what would soon happen to many of Siegel’s associates, I find his use of the word “electrocuted” oddly prescient.) Hardly a crime was committed in Los Angeles without Siegel knowing about it. So when Greenie ran out of country, washing up in Los Angeles, it did not take Bugsy long to find him; Greenie was living in a house at 1094 Vista Del Mar in Beverly Hills.
When news got back to Lepke, he put together a plan, something diffuse, a hit broken into a dozen pieces, a Cubist work in which the cops would never find the killer. Tannenbaum took a car from New York to New Jersey. At the airport in Newark he met Longy Zwillman, who gave him guns and $250. Allie took a train to Philadelphia, where he bought cartridges for the guns. He caught a plane at an airfield in Camden, New Jersey, and was met several hours later at Los Angeles Airport by Frankie Carbo, one of Siegel’s men. Carbo left Allie at an apartment. A few hours later Siegel showed up. Everywhere Bugsy went, palm trees followed him through the door.
A few days before, Bugsy sent his driver, Whitey Krakow, to Hollywood and Vine, a corner where local wiseguys hung out just like back home. Krakow found Sholem Bernstein out there. He was in town visiting friends. Krakow pulled Sholem aside. “Ben Siegel wants you to clip a car.” Sholem stammered. He was on vacation. He did not know the terrain and was in no mood to be a criminal. Krakow said it was an order from back east. “If you don’t take my word for it, call up New York,” he said. “Ask your friend Strauss.”
A few days later Sholem dropped off an Oldsmobile. Bugsy said the car was all wrong; Sholem would have to clip another. Sholem listened, nodded, left the room, and headed east. When Siegel realized what had happened—that Sholem ditched—he became enraged. Quitting a job halfway, that was like abandoning someone midheist, what Mendy Weiss had pulled on Bug Workman. It was capital. After Greenie is dead, we take care of Sholem.
Ben Siegel worked out several days a week at the YMCA in Hollywood. Sit-ups, pull-ups, handball, massages. I like to imagine him there, figuring out the Greenie hit as some beefy guy pounds his back. A friend of Bugsy’s would drive getaway. Tannenbaum, Carbo, and Bugsy himself would fill the contract. Bugsy was not expected to go along on the hit. He was one of the top members of the Syndicate, as big as Lepke or Lansky. He had only to sit back and give orders, which would keep him at a safe remove from the cops. Yet when the plans were laid, the weapons and getaway chosen, when Bugsy had only to wait for the call—We got him—he instead went along. Why? For the same reason other men go to the track. Because for Ben Siegel, killing was guaranteed fun.
In Bugsy, a film starring Warren Beatty, Greenberg is played by Elliott Gould as a doughy gangster who has hit bottom. There is a melancholy to this character, the desperation of those who wonder: Why me? The real Harry Greenberg could have had no illusions. He was complicit in every step of his demise. He had lived in crime, risen and fallen with its numbers. He was now having his own violence returned to him—fulfilling his destiny, the climax for all true gangsters. On November 23, 1939, the killers waited near his house. Greenie had no fight left in him. All those days on the road, knowing the realities of life had shrunk from years to hours, must have glazed his eyes and slowed his heart. He was shot dead in his own car. A driver took Allie up the coast to San Francisco, where he caught a plane to New York. “It was announced at a meeting that Ben Siegel had taken care of the matter personally,” reads a police report. “The information, in effect, was that there was nothing to disposing of Greenie and not to listen to any stories.”
A short time later, at a meeting in Jack Parisi’s house—Parisi gunned for Albert A. and years earlier took Reles target shooting upstate—the gang discussed Sholem, how he ditched on Siegel. Anastasia was there, and so was Mendy Weiss, Louis Capone, Pep Strauss, Reles, and Siegel, who made a special trip. In my mind, the action resembles the court scene in Planet of the Apes, with orange orangutan faces peering at chimp barristers as Charlton Heston looks on in chains. “Siegel was so worked up he prosecuted personally,” Burton Turkus writes in his book, Murder, Inc. “When he finished, there seemed to be no rebuttal against his deadly indictment. Walking out on a contract carried a death sentence.”
Who will speak for the accused? Reles stood. In the way people like my father (businessmen, lawyers) dream of being gangsters, of meeting each setback, each humiliation, with a sneer and a shove, a threat of violence; gangsters like Reles dreamed of being businessmen, lawyers, whipping every enemy with words, and not caring a stitch about the getaway. It is a kind of transitive property, a formula that connects the lower and higher orders: George Raft dreaming he is a real gangster as Ben Siegel dreams he is a real movie star. Reles told the gangsters about Sholem, how he wanted to fill the contract but could not, how he was called on by a deeper loyalty. “When orating,” writes Turkus, “the Kid was in a class by himself.”
“The same day Ben gave him the contract, Sholem got word from New York that his mama is going to cash in,” Reles told the gangsters. “Sholem is a good boy. His mama is dying; he figures he should be there. You all know how a mama is. It makes it easier to go if her boy is sitting by the bed, saying nice things. So Sholem does not even think about the contract. He didn’t think of nothing. He lams out of L.A. and hustles home to be with his mama when she checks out. He drives day and night. All he wants is to hold her hand. He is a good boy. And that, gentlemen, that is why Sholem left town. Not on account of ducking the contract. But on the account his mama is kicking off.”
“There was not a dry eye in the house,” writes Turkus. “The judges did not even leave the bench to deliberate. The verdict was acquittal—unanimously.”
In Brooklyn, the pressure was greater all the time. The faces on the street were fewer and fewer, a thinning mass, wood on a lathe. Being seen in the wrong window, the wrong door, meant the end of your adventures. And the cops were still combing the streets for Lepke, which put a freeze on all the old rackets. Sooner or later the detectives caught up with every thug who might have something to say. The cops would arrest a hood for some bullshit thing, and try to make a deal: Give up Lepke or we get you. Many of them made bail, then fled. Dead or out of town. Gangsters were being driven farther and farther from New York, clear across the map, where the blacktop turns to dust and everyone stars in his own personal western. Maybe no thugs went farther than Buggsy Goldstein and Blue Jaw Magoon.
Goldstein was a founding member of the troop. Short, dark, vicious. His walk was a side-to-side bulldog gait. Blue Jaw was a young troop member. Over the years he and Goldstein had become great friends. Probably they were friends for the same reason other people are friends. Killers are not just killers, you know. So when Lepke sent word—Dead or out of town—they went together, two men in a sedan, a car you see coming from a long way off, then—whooosh—is gone. It must have seemed like a dream, faces and colors, a desert over every rise, a party in every city, dry-mouthed and bleary in the morning. There are so many places you can go, vanishing into the flow of everyday life, where the cops can’t find you, where Brooklyn won’t look: they rolled into Canada, that outland of moose and poker and booze; they haunted the nightclubs of Chicago; they passed weeks in the safe houses of Kansas City, some well-paid politician holding the door; they ran all over the Midwest, roads running through fields and farms; and old heroic Texas, twangy music, hills rising likes notes, the road a trumpet blast disappearing over the rise. The boys were taking a victory lap, a last tour of the nation, like the Shah going hospital to hospital around the world. “Buggsy and I left Brooklyn and traversed the entire country in our travels, even entering Canada,” Magoon later said. Their clothes must have become frayed and caked with dust.
Every few weeks they got off the highway and rolled through some southern or western or midwestern town where farmers and mechanics and factory hands in loose-fitting overalls or workclothes watched these dudes from the East make their way down dusty streets to the Western Union office, where Mendy Weiss sent the wire. A few hundred dollars. A few more weeks on the lam. And back on the road, rocking and roaring. They hit California like a couple of sight-seeing yokels, guys who return from Mexico in sombreros. “In California, we met Moe Suss, an actor in small and extra parts,” Magoon said. “We also met Mack Grey, chauffeur of George Raft. Of gangland characters we knew Ben Siegel and Meyer Lansky, two of the chiefs of the major Combination. Siegel was in California at the time of our sojourn. Buggsy [Goldstein] wanted to go see Siegel, but I declined. I said, ‘What the hell do we want to let anyone know we are here for?’ ”
People found out anyway. After a few days on the coast, a letter arrived from Strauss. “He told us to get out of Hollywood,” said Magoon. “Because everyone in Brownsville knew we were out there and Lepke did not care to have us apprehended.” So the boys were back on the road, heading southeast, the lights of Juarez, a border town at night, and into Mexico, roads running like water down a drain. The lines of the North gave way to a tangle, colors running together, and at last they reached the other side, lammed it farther than anyone, the end of the underworld. There must have been a moment when they imagined staying, taking a Mexican wife, living in an adobe house, growing fat and satisfied and parched by sun, Brooklyn just a story told in town. I hear the gringo was a killer in the North. But soon they were back on the road, going the way they came, north, then east, going and going, and the road stretched ahead.
They watched the country roll back out the window, desert to plains to prairie to soft Hudson Valley hills, old stolid farms of the Northeast, rain on slate roofs. The road began to climb through the trees. From the top of a hill they would see the fields and silos of Newburgh, New York. A dirt road took them to a house. An elderly man sitting on the porch. This was Albert A.’s friend from the old days, the man who years before had taught Abe Reles to shoot. All the while, as the boys ran all over the continent, as Dutch Schultz was shot in a toilet in Newark, as Lucky Luciano was sent to prison, as Lepke, driven to basements, left a scatter of marks, this farm was up here waiting, impervious to time.
Magoon and Goldstein stayed several days in a guest cabin. Each night they played pinochle with the old man, purposely losing a dollar or two. “In this way we paid for our stay,” said Magoon. One night Goldstein went to retrieve a money order in town. The attorney general’s office had intercepted the wire, and the local cops were waiting. In jail, Goldstein slipped someone five dollars and a message for Magoon: Flee! The message was instead given to police. The cops reached the farm at midnight. When they asked Magoon his name, he said, “Harry Levinson.” The police then showed him a mug shot of Goldstein. They studied Magoon’s face. When he seemed to recognize the man in the picture, they brought him to jail. For many of the gangsters who got out of town, the road away from Brooklyn in the end led right back to the cramped cells they had been avoiding all their lives. Better than the lime pit in Loch Sheldrake.
Lepke could not stay forever in hiding. The heat on the street was greater all the time. In New York alone there were twenty-five detectives out looking for him. And ambition. Flat-out ambition is also part of the story. The federal and state governments were locked in a race not unlike the race that sent Russia and America into space. Who will conquer the moon? Who will conquer Lepke? As a leader of the Republican Party, Tom Dewey was working to unseat Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. If Dewey apprehended Lepke, it would show that his government could do something FDR’s could not. Lepke was also thought to hold some of the Roosevelt administration’s darkest secrets. Sidney Hillman, a member of FDR’s kitchen cabinet who once headed the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, was said to have been in cahoots with Lepke, to have commissioned schlammings. If Dewey made the arrest, he might strike a deal with the gangster, a deal that would embarrass Roosevelt and put a Republican in the White House.
As autumn drew near, it seemed Lepke’s best chance was to bargain, playing the feds against the state, striking a deal before the election, while his value was still high. Perhaps more anxious for a deal than even Dewey or J. Edgar Hoover were other gangsters: Lansky, Adonis, Costello. Hoover was threatening the bosses, saying he would arrest everyone unless someone gave him Lepke.
In the fall of 1939 Moey “Dimples” Wolensky came to see Lepke in hiding. Wolensky was a Jew from the old neighborhood, had long worked with Lepke and Lansky, looked like the number eight (round face, round body), was on the fringe of every conversation, in the corner of every room. He told Lepke he had gotten word from the G-men: If Lepke turned himself in, he would be tried for narcotics running only—a crime that would put him away for no more than ten years. A promise: No way would Hoover turn him over for trial to Dewey. Within a few days, Lepke must have set up and knocked down a dozen arguments. When he went for advice to Albert A., the gangster said the deal sounded screwy. He tried to get Lepke to see it from the point of view of the street, with the eyes of a free man. To Anastasia, only one thing was certain: As long as they can’t get you, they can’t hurt you. Once you surrender, the best deal in the world won’t mean a thing. In the end, it probably came down to this simple truth: What was Lepke’s life like now? All the hiding, all the running around, was it really that different from life in prison?
On August 5, 1940, Walter Winchell received a telephone call at the Stork Club. (Some say the call came elsewhere.) The Stork, at 3 East Fifty-third Street, was one of the hottest spots in town, a haunt of that immortal class of club-goer that seems to survive every rise and fall in the city. On brilliant nights they would arrive in limos and roadsters, leave keys with a valet, follow a broad back through the ropes and into the clink of glasses, voices, laughter, athletes, film stars, politicians, a collection of prewar night life, bold colors bleeding from made-up faces into the air. The place was put on the map years before by Winchell, when he went on the radio and called it “New York’s New Yorkiest Place.” He was there several nights a week, gathering stories for his column.
Winchell had softly handsome features, a picture never quite in focus. In the twenties he wrote for a number of papers before launching “On Broadway,” a column for the New York Daily Mirror. The column, filled with things seen and heard, foibles of even the grandest celebrity, seemed to invent gossip, a culture that over the years has become American culture—what happens when the frontier spirit is locked in cities. By 1940, when Winchell got the phone call, his column was being syndicated in hundreds of papers around the country, and he could be heard each week on the radio.
When Winchell got to the phone, the voice on the other end was clipped, mysterious. “Don’t ask me who I am,” it said. “I have something important to tell you. Lepke wants to come in. If he could find someone he can trust, he will give himself up to that person. The talk around town is that Lepke will be shot while supposedly escaping.” The voice told Winchell to contact his friend J. Edgar Hoover and get a guarantee that Lepke could come in unharmed.
Winchell could not identify the caller, but it was likely Albert Anastasia. Once Lepke decided he would (probably) turn himself in, Anastasia, though he was against surrender, handled the arrangements. He was concerned with Lepke’s safety. There were still $50,000 on his head. What would prevent some freelancing headhunter from taking a potshot? By surrendering to Winchell, Lepke hoped to get some assurance of safety. He was placing himself under the protective umbrella of celebrity. Nowadays, the prospect of killing both a media star and a criminal, maybe with a single bullet, would line the street with marksmen.
And there may have been another reason for choosing Winchell. What celebrity could better understand Lepke? The lives of the men, ambitions and dreams, seemed to reflect each other. Winchell too descended from Jewish stock, with roots in the Lower East Side. When discussing his own ethos, he could even sound like a gangster. “When someone does me dirt (after I’ve helped him or her) I return the compliment some day,” Winchell wrote in his autobiography. “In the paper, on the air, with a bottle of ketchup on the skull. I don’t make up nasty things to write about them. I wait until they get locked up for taking dope or pimping and then I make it public. Vindictive? You’re gahdamb’d right! You botcha me, I botcha you!” In many ways, Winchell seems a precursor of the next generation, Jews who kept the ethos but shed the violence, who gave back twice again what they got.
On August 6, 1940, Winchell went on the radio and said, “Your reporter is reliably informed that Lepke, the fugitive, is on the verge of surrender, perhaps this week. If Lepke can find someone he can trust (I am told), he will come in. . . . I am authorized by the G-men that Lepke is assured of safe delivery. . . .”
Over the next several days, Winchell received many calls at the Stork—gangsters working out a deal. Will Lepke be protected? What kind of sentence can he expect? All the while, Winchell was rushing from the Stork to the Waldorf-Astoria, where Hoover had taken a room. Late one night, the mysterious voice asked Winchell if he had his car with the four lamps, which referred to the fog lights on Winchell’s car. More than just choosing a vehicle they would recognize, the gangsters were probably giving Winchell a warning: We know you better than you know us. At three-thirty that morning, Winchell, following gangster directions, drove through the Holland Tunnel and out to the New Jersey flats. He rolled around some vacant lot out there, headlights illuminating pavement. After fifteen minutes he got spooked and came back to Manhattan. He later decided the gangsters were making sure he would not be followed.
After a few more weeks and a few more errands, Hoover got fed up. He went to the Stork, where he found Winchell surrounded by admirers. Winchell must have seen him coming from across the room, a gunslinger in an old western. “I am fed up with you and your friends,” said Hoover. “They can make a fool out of you, but they are not going to make a fool out of me and my men.”
“They aren’t my friends, John,” said Winchell.
“They are your friends,” said Hoover. “And don’t call me John. I’m beginning to think you’re the champ bullshitter in town. You can tell your friends that if Lepke isn’t in within forty-eight hours, I will order my agents to shoot him on sight.”
Winchell later said he was on the verge of tears. His credibility, his career, everything was on the line. He had wed his fate to the whim of hoodlums. Later, when the phone rang, Winchell related Hoover’s threat—how he’d promised to shoot Lepke. “You people haven’t been able to find him for two years,” said the gangster. “How you gonna find him in forty-eight hours?”
A few nights before Lepke came in, Mendy Weiss called Albert Tannenbaum to a meeting. Lepke was still not sure he would surrender. If he did not come in, he knew there would be trouble. Some of the other bosses had sent a message. All this hiding was generating too much heat; cops were everywhere; no one could conduct business. They wanted Lepke to accept the deal. When Allie showed up, he was met by Weiss and Little Farvel Cohen. “I’m glad to see you,” said Mendy. “We may have some trouble on our hands. Have you seen Workman?”
“No,” said Allie. “He’s not up in the mountains and he’s not at home. But if I search, I can probably find him. Why? What’s the trouble?”
“Lepke got a message,” said Weiss. “Walk in or else.”
Tannenbaum went to see Lepke, who was staying at a house on Third Street in Brooklyn. Allie asked if it was true: “Can the other bosses make you surrender?” Before Lepke answered, I imagine him sitting on the arm of a couch and sighing, like the father of a girl I once dated did before sharing a hard fact of life.
“When you’ve been around as much as me, when you’ve seen the things I’ve seen, you know what an ultimatum like that means, how serious it is, and what’s on the other side of it,” said Lepke. “These guys are strictly for themselves. They did it once before, and they wouldn’t hesitate to do it again,” he said, probably referring to the murder of Dutch Schultz. “To save you kids from a lot of trouble, the best thing would be to just walk in.”
Mendy and Allie went to see Anastasia. They sat in a car outside his house, afraid to go in. Mendy was sure everyone was against Lepke now, and against his men, too. He knew Anastasia had a soundproof cellar and was afraid he would be shot down there. Mendy drove to a restaurant and called Albert, who came over to talk. Albert said he would go along with whatever decision Lepke made. The next morning the boys found the boss a new apartment, a place hidden from both cops and other gangsters.
In my mind, the members of the troop have, at this point, begun to wilt and fade. They are people who have been up all night, whose eyes play tricks, who startle easy. The day after they found Lepke a new hideout, they drove to an auction on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. Eighth Street is now a shoe capital, with stores selling footwear from every era: platforms, wing-tips, pumps, spiked heels, flats, sandals, moon boots, moccasins. Manhattan absorbs styles, then, long after the moment is passed, continues to give them off, the way blacktop radiates heat even after sundown. The boys walked through the items set for sale, end tables, couches, ottomans, chairs, tables, looking for things that might serve a man well in hiding. They bought enough furniture to fill the hideout, made arrangements to pick up the stuff later, then walked off into the Village.
The next day Tannenbaum went to Loch Sheldrake. He was to wait there for word, a signal that would bring him blazing into the city. Lepke was scattering his pieces, hiding guns here and there. But in the end, Lepke must have known he stood no chance in a war. He was outmanned and outgunned. He would have to take on the cops and the other gangs. Gurrah was off in jail, and his own best days were behind him. The years in hiding had accomplished what his enemies never could: he was tamed, swollen at the cheeks and jowls, a man with not an ounce of energy left. A war would have been less a new beginning than a dramatic end, placing Lepke alongside those figures who fight instead of surrender—Texans at the Alamo, zealots on Masada, men whose last picture is an action shot. If Lepke had fought it out, how much more noble his end than the one that was waiting for him?
On the night of August 24, 1940, Winchell took a call at the Stork Club. A gangster told him to drive to Proctor’s Theater in Yonkers. As Winchell pulled up to the building, a car stopped alongside. It was full of men. Someone got out, his face covered with a bandanna. He told Winchell to head back to town and wait in a drugstore at Eighth Avenue and Nineteenth Street. At 8:55 Winchell was drinking a Coke in back of the store when a stranger motioned him outside. The stranger told him to call Hoover and have him wait in his car on Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street between 10:00 and 10:20 P.M. After the call was made, the stranger followed Winchell into his car and told him to drive. Winchell was at first too nervous to get the key into the ignition. At 10:15 the stranger told Winchell to stop at Madison Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. Winchell asked why he still had to be involved, why Lepke couldn’t himself surrender to Hoover.
“Lepke won’t do that,” said the stranger. “He doesn’t want to risk somebody shooting him for the fifty grand award before he gets to Hoover. If anybody hit you, it would raise a hell of a stink.”
As the stranger left the car, he took a chain from around his neck, kissed a gold Star of David, and handed it to Winchell, saying, “Give this to Lepke.”
At 9:00 P.M., Anastasia had come for Lepke at his hiding place. Lepke slid into the backseat of the car, and Anastasia went lurching off across Brooklyn. The boss was again disguised as a family man, with a woman and child at his side. His spaniel eyes were ringed and shadowed. His mustache hid a bent, uneven mouth. He wore a gray suit. They drove past the candy stores and newsstands of Brooklyn. Traffic, faces, streets going by. And soon they were crossing into Manhattan, where the lights of the financial district wink and shine. Lepke first crossed into the city years before, after his father died and his mother left him, off to the Rocky Mountains, leaving the boy to cross the bridge alone, steel blue arches and river scudding below. And here he was, all these years later, his true face hidden in the furrows of age, streaking toward surrender, a man of yesterdays taking a final drive through blocks he once ruled like a king. They drove by South Street, where pirates were once strung on the beach within view of excursion boats; by Cherry Street, where garment district looms still spun; by the courtrooms of Foley Square; by Chinatown; by the sinister East Side warrens of Monk Eastman and Arnold Rothstein. By 10:15 they had made it uptown. They pulled alongside a car idling softly, four lamps on dim, like a plane waiting out a storm on a runway.
Lepke slid alongside Winchell. At 10:17 they pulled in behind Hoover on Fifth Avenue. Hoover, who had a chauffeur, was in the backseat. Leaning in, Winchell said, “Mr. Hoover, this is Mr. Buchalter.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Lepke, getting in. “Let’s go.”
Albert Tannenbaum was still up in the woods. Sitting on a porch, feet propped on a rail, he would have seen the slope of a hill, a gray lake, a small curved shore on the far side. Maybe a sailboat tacked in the wind. What did Allie do? Probably he thought, waited, went on walks. The woods smell sickly sweet on August afternoons, everything overripe and bursting. He walked to town. When he came to a newsstand, the headline leapt out:—LEPKE SURRENDERS—like learning of your father’s death in the obits. And here he was, waiting in the hills like some island-bound Japanese soldier fighting a war that ended years before.
Not long after he surrendered, Lepke realized he had been double-crossed. There never was a deal with the feds. There never was a promise to keep the boss from Dewey. The story Dimples told was a fiction, something you tell children before they go to the dentist. Lepke faced federal charges in December. Convicted on narcotics violations, he was sentenced to fourteen years in prison—a trial pushed to the back of the papers by more pressing concerns. Lepke had come in a week before Hitler invaded Poland.
Lepke’s final days were a strange time for the troop. History is ending, and you continue on. Penny-ante heists, schlammings, crap games. And all the while the cops stayed after the boys, looking for any reason to run them in. For a decade the troop had been top dogs in Brownsville, a state within a state. A few months before Lepke surrendered, the police at last caught a break. Harry Rudolph, a small-time crook, a man in and out of jail, a thug doing time on Riker’s Island, sent a letter to the DA’s office in Brooklyn. He had a story to tell. Brought down in cuffs, Rudolph talked to Burton Turkus, a rising star in the office, about Red Alpert. In 1933 Alpert had been killed by thugs in Brownsville. Rudolph must have been excited as he spoke. Alpert had been Rudolph’s best friend, and he still held a grudge, a neighborhood scorn, what Reles and Goldstein once held for the Shapiros. But why did Rudolph wait so long, coming forward seven years after the murder? Probably for the same reason dud bombs dropped and lost in World War II suddenly explode. Because time had allowed a change, some shift in chemistry that again made the contents deadly.
Red Alpert was one of a legion of low-level thugs who work the fringes, outlanders moving crime to crime. In 1933, while robbing a neighborhood store, he happened across a large haul. Uncut stones. Not having connections to move the jewels, he set up a meeting with Pep Strauss. Alpert was hoping Strauss would act as middleman, buying the stones, then passing them to a fence. When Pep showed up, he had the smug indifference of a rock star meeting a groupie. He said he would take the entire haul for seven hundred dollars. “You know what you can do with your seven hundred?” said Alpert. “You can go to hell.” And that was it. A few sentences and Alpert’s fate was fixed. How could Pep take that crap in his own territory?
A few weeks later, after two failed assassination attempts, Strauss told the story to Reles and Goldstein. Jeez, Pep, the kid is only nineteen. You gonna kill him over a few dumb words? So Reles and Goldstein went to see Alpert, hoping to get the dispute squared away. After looking at the stones, Reles said he would take the entire haul for seven hundred. Alpert shook his head, saying, “I told Pep to hell with him, and to hell with you guys, too.” A few nights later, on November 25, 1933, Alpert was found dead. “I’ll tell you who did it, too,” Harry Rudolph told Turkus. “Those Brownsville guys—Reles and Buggsy. They took Red when he came out of his house.”
It was not a strong case. Rudolph was a criminal, a man trying to settle a score. In New York State the testimony of one criminal cannot alone put another criminal away. A story must be corroborated by a more trustworthy source. And still the cops pursued the Red Alpert murder case. It was part of a long-term battle they were fighting, arresting the boys again and again, hoping to harass or trick a member of the troop into a confession. A break in one case, they hoped, could solve a dozen others. So the next morning a few cops went to Brownsville, knocked on doors, stopped on corners, telling the local hoods to spread the word: Reles and Goldstein are wanted for the murder of Red Alpert. (Goldstein, after giving the police nothing on Lepke, was back on the street.) The police were also looking for Dukey Maffeatore, whom they had connected to the murder. When Reles and Goldstein got word—The cops are looking for you—they were probably not too concerned. Whenever anything bad happened in Brooklyn, detectives came looking for the boys. Between 1931 and 1940 Reles was picked up by the cops about once every seventy-eight days. Early the next morning the suspects went to the police station and surrendered.
Soon after the arrest, the cops went to work on Maffeatore. They put him alone in a cell. Sometimes they asked him questions or else told him about the other boys, how they were pinning everything on Dukey. They told him what he could expect of his final days: meal, walk, electric chair. It did not take long to break Dukey. He was just twenty-five years old, a comic book freak, a devotee of Li’l Abner and Superman. He came apart like wet paper, told the cops everything, how he got involved with the troop, stole kill cars, worked with Reles, Goldstein, Strauss. When Dukey said his partner was Pretty Levine, the cops picked him up, and he broke, too. The police soon had enough information to arrest most of the troop. Louis Capone, Happy Maione, Dasher Abbandando, Seymour Magoon, Phil Strauss, they were scattered in the jails of New York.
Reles was having a hard time in jail. He was physically worn down, and the monotony, the backbreaking sameness of incarceration, must have been hard on him. Prosecutors were moving him facility to facility, from Queens County Jail to Raymond Street Jail to the Tombs. Dank cells. Lost time. Variations on gray. In the Tombs he met up with Happy Maione, who was also an inmate. Maione was a tier above Reles. Before sleep, they would call to each other. Whenever Maione had the chance, he talked to Reles, standing before his cell until a guard chased him away. They also talked in the yard, beneath a faraway city sky, and in the jail chapel, whispering together as other inmates sang hymns. When a guard glanced over, they looked straight ahead and sang.
And then Maione was gone, off down the corridor, leaving Reles alone to think. And he had a lot to think about. Though he had been through many ups and downs, he was just thirty-four. He had a wife, a son, another child on the way. He had just opened a lunch counter, a place he hoped would carry his family toward the American dream. Now here he was, being run down by a crime he’d committed years before. What could Reles do? He saw himself as a clever man, someone who finds a way out of traps, who snickers at his guards, saying, “You can’t build a jail to hold me.” Yet when he sized up this predicament—life in prison or worse—his mind must have boggled. He was looking for loopholes, for scapegoats. So many gangs are broken this way—by a paranoid left alone in a cell.
In March 1940 the Brooklyn Eagle published a story about Pittsburgh Phil, how he was talking to the cops, giving up Reles to save himself. The paper was delivered to the Tombs, so Reles probably read or heard about the article. Though the story turned out to be false—it might have been planted to force the Kid’s hand—it must have fueled Reles’s paranoia: squeal or be squealed. He was pushed further down this road when his wife came to see him in the fall. Rose Reles told her husband she could not face life alone, two kids, no husband, and all those years. She begged him to help the cops, cut a deal, anything to get out of jail. “I knew Burton Turkus, the assistant district attorney on the case,” Ralph Salerno told me. “Turkus was figuring a strategy, talking to him and her, trying to get a break. So he takes a gamble and lets Mrs. Reles talk with her husband. She cries, pleads, the whole bit. By the time she is done with him, he is jumping to make a deal.”
Rose Reles went the next day to the DA’s office in downtown Brooklyn. She was small featured, faintly attractive, suspicious, the kind of woman who sits on the edge of chairs, pauses before mirrors, whispers in hallways. Her hair was swept up into a turban, and she wore a beige coat with a wolf collar. She asked to see William O’Dwyer, the Brooklyn DA. When Burton Turkus asked if he could be of help, she followed the instructions given her by Reles, saying she would talk only to the DA. Then she began to cry. “I want to save my husband from the electric chair,” she said. “My baby is coming in June.”
A few days later Turkus signed Reles out of the Tombs and brought him to the DA’s office. Turkus recalled that encounter in his memoir, Murder, Inc. “I remember distinctly what I thought because I got the same thought every time I saw him afterward,” writes the prosecutor. “It was that I could name one thousand and one more delightful companions for a stroll down a lonesome road on a dark night. There was something about Reles’s physical bearing, a look in his eye, that actually made the hair on the back of your neck stand up.”
That afternoon Reles sat in O’Dwyer’s office, talking with the DA and his assistants, running through the merits of their investigation. In those days Reles wore a blue warm-up jacket zipped to the chin and smiled a fuck-you smile. He told O’Dwyer he had nothing on the boys, no facts, no witnesses. “You got no corroboration,” he said again and again. “But I’m the guy who can tell you where to get it. I can make you the biggest man in the country.” In exchange Reles said he wanted to “walk out clean.” The men stayed in the office until four that morning, working out a deal. In the end, Reles was given immunity; he would go free when the last case was tried. “I am not a stool pigeon,” he told Turkus. “Every one of those guys wanted to talk. Only I beat them to the bandwagon. They would be hanging me right now, if they had the chance.”
Reles could not see himself as a rat. He hated rats. He instead must have seen himself as a resourceful man, someone who had found a way out. No different from the other boys, just smarter. “They would be hanging me right now, if they had the chance.” When asked to explain his actions in court, Reles said, “I was expecting another child and had one already. I was disgusted with the way I was living. It was my life; I was fed up with my life.”
“Your conscience told you to make this change?” asked a lawyer.
“That is too deep for me,” said the Kid. “I just made a change.”
Telling his story, Reles was like a man on a couch, working through the past. He spoke compulsively, giving Turkus names, dates, details of his other life, where to look, whom to ask, sharing a secret he had kept too long. Reles told the prosecutor not only what happened, but how to make the case. The Kid’s testimony alone could not put a single thug away. He was a confessed killer, a man who would say anything to save his skin. So he told Turkus who could verify his stories—a man at a newsstand who saw the boys flee a scene, a gun dealer who sold them a murder weapon. When asked to recall the names of ten men he had killed, the Kid’s voice was low, gruff. “Joey Silver, Rocco, Irving Shapiro, Jack Paley, Whitey Rudnick, somebody by the name of Mummy, Moe Greenblatt, Jake the Painter.” He paused, then said, “How many is that, eight? Ruben Smith.” He could not remember the last name.
When word about Reles got out, a panic ran through the underworld. Gangsters across the country began to think back, trying to remember if they ever had any professional dealings with the Kid, like a man quickly tracing his past when he hears an old lady friend is writing a tell-all memoir. Never before had someone so highly placed in the Mob turned rat. The Kid knew all the secrets. He talked about the killing of Dutch Schultz, Puggy Feinstein, Greenie Greenberg, Joe Rosen, Moishe Diamond, about the lime pit in Loch Sheldrake, about the history of the troop, from the war with the Shapiros to the invention of contract killing. Reles talked about eighty-five killings in Brooklyn alone. His confession filled seventy-five notebooks.
When it was all set down, the Kid’s deposition read like a prose poem, the greatest hits of the Jewish underworld. When I look at those notes today, I am filled with shame—shame for Brooklyn, shame for the Jews. Not just for the crimes he committed, but also for the fact that, all these years later, he was singing to the cops. To most people, I suppose, the murders are where all the sin resides, all those bodies. But to me, turning rat only compounded what the Kid had done. It means his entire life, even the just battles, amounted to nothing. There never was a code, a boundary, a plan. When he cut his deal, he cast his vote for anarchy, where only the most fundamental laws of nature apply.
Reles’s treachery now seems inevitable to me, an indispensable part of the story. He is the Judas of the Jewish underworld, the man whose treachery makes the legend possible. Without Reles, the Brownsville Boys would have grown fat and bloated, tired crooks in tired cells, or else petered out in Miami Beach, old men with bullshit old men stories. They will instead live forever, always young, angry, tough. What else can such men do but flame out, bitter and betrayed, a storm washing the sky clean, leaving nothing but blue vistas behind?
With the information given by Reles, the investigators were able to coax others into cooperating. This was sometimes done in ways that today seem extraordinary. Albert Tannenbaum was living near Grand Army Plaza in Park Slope when he was arrested for some ancient crime, tried, convicted, and sent to Clinton State Prison in Dannemora. Seven years hard labor. He was alone up there, far from the other boys, hours ticking past. In the fall of 1940 he had a visitor. William O’Dwyer, the DA, had come from Brooklyn. He told Allie what he knew and asked if he would cooperate. When Allie said he was no rat, O’Dwyer asked him to come along for a ride. The DA checked the gangster out of prison, and off they went.
They drove a hundred miles, roads singing over hilltops, farms grooved yellow in the distance. O’Dwyer, who would soon be elected mayor of New York, was a red-faced, old-fashioned machine-built city politician. He knew how to change a person’s mind. It probably did not take Tannenbaum long to figure out where O’Dwyer was taking him—Loch Sheldrake, golden summer boyhood afternoons, Communists in the mess hall. They pulled off the road into a crowd of cops. Sholem Bernstein was in the middle of it all, telling the officers where to dig. The salt from the pit had eroded the bodies, but some of the features must have been discernible: jawbones, eye sockets. With a great heave, the cops pulled up the remains of Hyman Yuran, a corpse stinking on the autumn grass. The underbelly of Allie’s life had been exhumed. A few days later, when he told O’Dwyer he would cooperate, his prison sentence was suspended.
Why was the government able to make cases where before they could make none? Well, mostly because of Abe Reles. When the Kid turned rat, it was game over. Past confessors had mostly been small-time operators, thugs like Harry Rudolph who knew only part of the story, who had just one of the fragments Lepke broke murders into. Reles had the whole picture, so when he started talking there was a chain reaction, one confession leading to another, until the air was full of voices. Rats’ feet on broken glass. In just a few months, O’Dwyer and Turkus, who would actually try the cases, had turned several gangsters into informers: Dukey Maffeatore, Abe Reles, Sholem Bernstein, Albert Tannenbaum, Pretty Levine, Mickey Sycoff.
Over time, these men would serve the same basic function as Josephus, the treacherous Jewish general who fought Roman armies in the time of Herod. When things got rough, Josephus surrendered his troops, moved to Rome, became a citizen (Josephus Flavius), and wrote History of the Jewish War, a book that preserves a story that would otherwise be lost. Like Josephus, the turncoat gangsters quit a losing team in a time of duress; like Josephus’ book, their stories are the only thing that holds the past together, shedding light on a chaotic part of Jewish history. In the end, the rats destroyed their friends but preserved the legend.
When the nonratting members of the troop realized what was up, that they were being sold out by lifelong friends, they reacted in different ways. Some refused to believe it, blaming instead the cops and their bullshit stories. Others talked to their lawyers, looking for ways to poke holes in the stories the rats told. And then there was Strauss. Pep had always been the strictest member of the gang, a killer with a keen sense of old-time morality. When he heard Reles was talking, he told the cops he wanted to talk, too. But before he told his story, he needed time alone with the Kid. “Put me in with Reles, and more things will come back to me,” he said. When the cops denied the request, the truth came out: “I just wanted to sink my tooth into his jugular vein,” Pep said. “I didn’t worry about the chair if I could just tear his throat out first.” Maybe the most rational reaction was that of Mendy Weiss, who considered the situation, turned tail, and ran. He hid for a year, moving from Kansas City to Colorado, giving his name as James Bell, vice president of the Tungsten Mining and Development Company, Black Hawk, Colorado. The idea of Weiss, who was so New York (face, style, talk), selling himself as a western businessman was a joke even the cops could get. He was arrested in Kansas City on April 6, 1941.
By the time the trials began in spring 1942, the rats had been taken from the prisons and jails of New York and moved into a kind of fortress. How could the boys stay in lockup? For a rat, jail is more dangerous than the street, with a thousand inmates hoping to knife an informer. At home, even with a police guard, someone like Reles would have a life expectancy shorter than the Macedonian fruit fly, that fragile insect whose existence spans less than fourteen minutes. So the prosecutors moved the boys to the Half Moon, a hotel between East Twenty-eighth and East Twenty-ninth streets on the Coney Island boardwalk. The place was known as the rat suite. For the boys, the stay in the Half Moon must have been a painful irony, a replay of long ago Florida getaways, only now locked up in the resort, closed off from the outside that makes the inside so pleasant.
A complex was built for the informers on the hotel’s sixth floor, ten rooms that filled the east wing. Bedrooms. Sitting room. Living room. Kitchen. Suite 620. The front door was replaced with a bulletproof steel barrier: peephole, bar lock. The suite was guarded by a special police battalion, a unit headed by Captain Bals, a gray-haired, hawk-nosed New York cop. His unit consisted of eighteen officers, men assigned to guard the rats full-time: three shifts of six cops, each shift serving twenty-four hours, ten A.M. to ten A.M. When the boys went to sleep, a cop often sat in a chair in the corner. Sometimes a room was made up with three beds and a cop lay between two gangsters. “Machine guns and shotguns and what else they got,” Sholem Bernstein said of the suite. “When I go to sleep, two detectives sit in the room all night.”
For the rats in the suite, there was not much to do. They read the papers, talked. The prosecutors and the police guards did what they could to keep the informants sane. The cops stayed up talking with the boys and encouraged wives to visit. The guards bought Reles whiskey and sometimes even drank it with him. And the guards took the rats on outings, field trips to places like Heckscher Park in Nassau County, Long Island, where the boys played baseball and barbecued. I imagine the boys out there, smoke from the grill mounting into the night, stars in the east, Reles tearing around third and here comes the throw. But in the end there was really nothing to look forward to but the drama that would come in the courtroom, that would write the epilogue to so many Brooklyn lives.
The business of killing rides the wave of technology, grows with the nation, goes west with the country, on the trains and planes of America, blackjack to tommy gun, sedan to jet, always a step ahead of the cops, evolving away from the law like radioactive roaches, changing, melding, molding. The Murder Incorporated killers had grown out of the jazz age and the Depression, high and low. They had come up on speakeasies and shoot-outs, bosses and strikers. And now, with the coming of the Second World War, and the great unknown land beyond the war, their time was drawing to a close. Overtaken by the cops, they would soon give way to a new breed of killers, who would give way to a new breed of killers, who would give way to a new breed of killers, a chain stretching back to the pre–Civil War scrapes of the Dead Rabbits and the Plug Uglies and off into a future of cyberkillers and technothieves. For the Brownsville Boys, the story was winding down. Like so much of isolationist America, they would not survive the war. In Brooklyn the trains were all in; kill and crash cars parked in the garages; killers in the jails. This was the age of show trials. Well, here was another batch of killers ready for the dustbin of history.
On a morning he was to testify, Reles woke around six A.M., showered, shaved. Maybe he nicked himself. He put on a suit, knotted his tie. Maybe blood from the nick stained his color. He took an elevator down, cops sweeping him through the lobby into a car that whisked him to court. As the trials progressed and other gangsters came to see how damaging was the Kid’s testimony, they began to lay plans, ways to take him out of the equation. It was a great riddle: the Abe Reles question. Marksmen were brought in from Detroit’s Jewish underworld. The Purple Mob. They rented a room across from the Half Moon and set up a stakeout, dusty rooms clear through a rifle scope. When a rat wandered into the scope, a marksman would take him out. Pffft! Gone. But the guards were careful to keep the informers in the east wing only, rooms that looked out on nothing but sea. O’Dwyer learned of the marksmen and ran them off. When Turkus got word of a more sophisticated plot—a manufactured traffic jam would slow the car taking Reles to court; a sharpshooter would then kill the rat and his guards—he ordered an armored vehicle to shuttle the Kid back and forth.
Charlie Workman was the first of the boys to stand trial. Murder of Dutch Schultz. Brooklyn prosecutors let the rats testify for the state of New Jersey. Workman wore a dark suit to court. His eyes were black as buttons. He was already a different man, a captured criminal, vanquished. He was hung up by his own words, how he told everyone about the killing, vowing to get even with Mendy Weiss. Tannenbaum took the stand, telling what he could remember. Reles talked about a New Year’s Eve party where Workman griped about the hit. Workman’s parents sat in the gallery. His brother was there, too, a kid impressed by his older sibling.
Workman was found guilty and sentenced to life at hard labor. As he was led from court, he called over his brother. The conversation, overheard by a cop, hints at the future, an attitude that would help clear the landscape of Jewish gangsters. “Whatever you do, live honestly,” said Workman. “If you make twenty cents a day, make it do you. If you can’t make an honest living, make the government support you. Keep away from the gangs and don’t be a wiseguy. Take care of Mama and Papa and watch Itchy. He needs watching.”
Workman was sent to Trenton State Prison. A few months later, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he sent a letter to the feds, volunteering for a suicide mission. His offer was declined. Workman was paroled in 1964. He got a job in the garment center, his old stomping grounds, only now lugging a sample case instead of a gun. He was twenty-three years in prison.
After the Workman case, the convictions began to stream in, one, two, three, just like that. It was as if something had gone wrong, as though someone who was supposed to be born never was, like that movie It’s a Wonderful Life if the guy Jimmy Stewart played decided to stay unborn, and now the boys were living in some kind of historical oxbow, a place that is not supposed to exist. In 1941 Harry Strauss and Buggsy Goldstein went on trial before Judge John J. Fitzgerald for the murder of Puggy Feinstein, the ex-prizefighter killed with rope and ice pick in Reles’s living room. The gangsters wore their best clothes to court, dark suits, cuff links, mouths turned down, cold serious eyes sometimes laughing, playing the crowd, mistaking star-struck pedestrian sighs for true love. Everyone likes to watch a man die. Strauss glared at Reles as he testified. The Kid twisted a red bandanna in his hands. A defense lawyer, trying to cast the Kid’s stories in doubt, painted him as another con man trying to save his skin. “When you talked to the district attorney of Kings County, you were interested in escaping the electric chair, weren’t you?” asked the lawyer.
“Yes, sir,” said Reles.
When the attorney asked Reles why anyone should believe he was telling the truth, he said, “Because Judge O’Dwyer told me if he found out that I told so much as a lie, he would send me to the electric chair the same as the rest of them, and that is why I am telling the truth.”
After watching Reles on the stand, the judge had his own opinion. “For the record I will say this man never had a conscience when he killed men. He killed men as a business. He had no sympathies. He was killing other men for money. He is a living tiger.”
Each day in court, Reles was facing off against his oldest friends, those he had turned to when he was nobody, nothing. He was lashing at the forces that built him. For most people, such struggles take place in nightmares. But Reles was fighting his demons in the open, a stenographer taking it all down. Goldstein and Strauss sat side by side at the defense table. Goldstein had a million wiseguy teeth and a real underworld smile. His eyes were big, bloodshot, unbelieving. He leaned forward to get each word the Kid said, sat back, shook his head, looked at Pep, who just stared ahead, trying to bore a hole through Reles. Strauss had let his hair grow and now had it swept into a pompadour. Each day his eyes were smaller and colder, a star collapsing on itself. He was a human cold front, a personification of anger, an exclamation point out walking around.
As the weeks passed and it seemed clear the men would be convicted, each criminal reacted in his own way. Buggsy was growing, developing, evolving into the perfect movie gangster. When his old road companion, Blue Jaw Magoon, took the stand, Buggsy jumped to his feet. “For God’s sake, Seymour, that’s some story you’re telling,” he shouted. “You’re burning me.”
Strauss was turning inward, a man not connected to the world. He stopped shaving and showering. At one point, while at the Raymond Street Jail, he was forcibly shaved. The barber was told to use clippers only; no one trusted Pep around a razor. Mostly he sat mumbling in his cell. When guards came each morning to take him to trial, he refused to leave, holding the bars, screaming. When an attorney asked questions—“Did you kill him?”—he answered with non sequiturs—“Over easy, please. Plenty of toast.” There is a picture of Pep taken at this time, wearing a V-necked sweater, his hair long, his beard wild. When it ran in the newspapers, this picture was said to show a crazy man, someone who had lost his mind, but really he looks like professors I had in college. Insanity is like the high jump—they keep raising the bar.
At the time, Pep thought long hair alone could get him off the hook, dismissed as a nut, not fit to stand trial. He was a precursor, maybe even a model for, Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, the recently convicted head of the Genovese crime family, who for years wandered through Greenwich Village, muttering, in robe and slippers, a man telling the world, “How can I run an organized crime family? I’m a lunatic.” But Pep? His routine fooled nobody, especially not his friends. When Goldstein saw him in court, he said, “Geez, Pep, you make me sick to look at you.”
A few weeks after Goldstein and Strauss were convicted, they were back in court for sentencing. As the judge read their death warrant, Strauss looked on through hooded eyes. When the judge asked if the boys had any comment to make, Goldstein said, “Before I die, there is only one thing I would like to do. I would like to pee up your leg, Judge.”
The men were taken to Grand Central Station, where they would catch a train to Sing Sing. In those days this was one thing the condemned could look forward to, a last glimpse of Manhattan, the vaunted, echo-filled hall, ceiling and walls jumping away, sunlight breaking through faraway windows; briefcase businessmen; the scream of newsstand headlines; office girls in hats; the card shuffle of the departure board: Trenton, Camden, Philadelphia, Wilmington—a lonely windswept platform waiting for a traveler. As the men moved across the floor, they were surrounded by reporters. Cops cleared a path. Strauss moved through it like an exotic fish, a man who’s played crazy so long, he half believes it himself. Goldstein was maybe more relaxed, gratefully taking it in, one last boisterous mob to see him to the door. Before he ducked into the terminal, he turned and said, “Just tell that rat Reles I’ll be waiting for him. Maybe it’ll be in hell. I don’t know. But I’ll be waiting. And I bet I got a pitchfork.”
I have a picture of Strauss on the train a few hours later. He is wearing a rumpled gray suit over a T-shirt. He has not showered or shaved, and his greasy hair is pushed back. He looks like a singer out on tour or a killer out on an errand. He looks like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western, like Kurt Cobain in his first videos, like my father in pictures taken while he was in the army, like Yitzhak Rabin before 1948, like a kid I knew at camp and liked so much that I started to walk like him and borrowed his expressions: “decent,” “wicked,” “fuckin’ all right!” He looks like everyone I ever admired. Calm, cool, sane. He is looking into the distance, feet up, smiling. He is cuffed to Goldstein but hardly seems to notice, as though Buggsy is just an accessory, something that looks good with this particular outfit.
Goldstein and Strauss were executed on the night of June 12, 1941, just a few months after they were sentenced. After a last meal, they were led down the final mile, a tunnel of eyes. And now their lives were reduced to this last room, the place where all the trains, planes, cars, buses, highways, and hallways were leading. In pictures of the death chamber, the shadows are dark and heavy as liquid. I have seen electric chairs in movies and newsreels. On a tour of Angola State Penitentiary in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I even sat in an impotent old electric chair. What did I learn? That an electric chair is not a comfortable chair. It is really one of the least comfortable chairs I have ever sat in. Why should this be? After all, it is the last chair you will ever know, shouldn’t it at least be okay? In my opinion, the electric chair should be a La-Z-Boy or a recliner of some sort. When creating a death chair, here is the one word designers should keep in mind: comfort.
Strauss was electrocuted a few minutes after midnight. He washed and shaved. He had decided to go out sane. When he died, it was without a word, though I imagine him talking to himself: Okay, we got through everything else. We will get through this, too. Goldstein died a few minutes later, climbing into a still warm chair. For Buggsy and Pep, there was little chance for redemption. Execution came so soon after sentencing. How could they feel anything but hatred? Even at the end, their minds must have been occupied by anger, images of Reles warm in his hotel suite. A few days before Goldstein died, he told reporters, “Too bad I can’t hold Reles’s hand when I sit in the chair.”
Dasher Abbandando and Happy Maione went on trial early in 1941. They were charged with the murder of Whitey Rudnick. In courtroom pictures Abbandando looks sheepish, someone who does not believe in his own crimes. His lawyer was selling him as the all-American boy. Abbandando had once been a terrific baseball player, a professional prospect. “Ball players don’t kill people,” his lawyer told the jury. “In all my experience, I cannot think of a single baseball player who ever killed anybody.”
At his side, Maione was a shadowy presence. He was built like a human cannonball and wore beautiful suits and elegant ties. They called him Happy, an outdated, ill-fitting nickname. The mood of the trial was set by his anger, his fiery temper and antics. One afternoon, as he passed Reles in the hall outside the courtroom, he lunged at the Kid, yelling, “You stool pigeon son of a bitch. I’m gonna kill you. I’m gonna tear your throat out.”
When Reles mentioned Maione’s house on the stand, Happy, leaping to his feet, flung a glass at Reles. “You son of a bitch, leave my home out,” he yelled as the glass shattered against the wall. “You never was in my home.”
The jury brought back a guilty verdict, and the judge sent the men to die in Sing Sing. Appeals pushed the execution back to February 19, 1942, by which time Happy and Dasher at least had the satisfaction of seeing one of their enemies die.
By the time Abbandando and Maione were convicted, the rats had been locked in the Half Moon hotel for over a year. They were in those rooms hours, days, months at a time. The variety of their lives, the excitement of the underworld, hit, getaway, chase, had been reduced to three gears: eat, sleep, testify. The outside world was just something through a window or a story a cop tracked in from the street. The boys read newspapers, played cards, or argued. If my mom was staying in the suite, she would call the boys “the Bickersons” and tell them to knock it off. More than even prosecutors or cops, they had come to hate each other. Why? Because they were rats. Reles felt about Magoon the same as Goldstein had: “That’s some story you’re telling, Seymour, you’re burning me up!” And Magoon felt about Reles the same as Maione had: “You stool pigeon son of a bitch. I’ll tear your throat out!” Everyone hates a rat.
So did they hate themselves? I don’t think so. Everyone has reasons, justifications, for even the most treacherous things they do. Reles tells himself it is not his fault, that he is about to be ratted out himself, that his responsibilities as a father outrank his responsibilities as a gangster. And how can Tannenbaum find himself to blame when he was never meant for this life, when the boys tricked him down from the mountains, when taking the back door out is only the right thing? But such justifications have room for only one, and the others remain rats without reason. So what are you left with? Aimless gangsters who must pass the day with rats, in small cramped quarters, where you are forever being pulled by another’s gravity, where every cough, sigh, comment, cuts like glass. By the fall of 1941 the suite had become a maze, where each rat must find his own why and how to live, his own method to cut away the monotony.
How did Reles deal with life in the Half Moon? He became aggressive, obnoxious, impossible. He was like a class clown, a kid who fights schoolday tedium with pranks and wise-ass remarks. He stopped showering, did not change his clothes, smelled. He put on weight, his face filling like a balloon. He talked while he ate, making his point with a fork, spitting, in everyone’s business. At night he got drunk and abusive. He once insulted Sholem Bernstein’s wife. The next day Bernstein tried to knife Reles. You see, the rats were like fighting fish shut in a tank. They had all this energy and nothing to do. You know what they were like? Subjects in an MIT stress study. Reles, who was in failing health, would cough blood into a glass and leave the glass brimming with red phlegm on a windowsill. He was sick and spent many nights in a secret room in a nearby hospital. “I didn’t even like the idea of being in the same room with Reles,” said Tannenbaum. “He used to spit in his hand and cough in your face, and every time he would bring up a mouthful of blood, he would bring it around and show everybody. Then he would spit into a glass and wait until it got full until he got rid of it. I was under the impression he had consumption.”
Reles loved to play pranks, especially on the cops who were guarding him. No matter how far he went, he knew the cops would not retaliate. Reles, a star witness, could not be touched. Maybe it was unfair, but it was also fun. It was the Kid’s way of passing time, and also of showing the other boys he could still outsmart the law. The pranks were mostly like something from the thirties, boxcar afternoons, hobos rolling west. Reles would sometimes duck under a table to give a cop a hotfoot, slipping a lit match into his shoe. As the officer went howling around the room, Reles collapsed in laughter. If a cop was fool enough to fall asleep near a radiator, Reles would tie his shoelaces to the pipes. When he was in the mood for something simple, he would wad wet toilet paper into a ball and fling it in a cop’s face. “What’s that?” he might ask during a meal. When a detective turned to look, Reles would spoon pepper into his food. In addition to being a killer and a rat, Reles was a jerk. He used to tell his guards they couldn’t hold him, that he could leave whenever he felt like it. “You guys are tin badge cops,” he would say. “I can get outta this sardine can any time I want.”
Reles shut down and shut up only at night. He would listen to the radio for hours, voices fading in and out of dreams. On September 15 he was in bed early. His wife had come by before with a bottle of Rémy Martin brandy. “When I saw him, I was shocked,” Rose Reles later said. “He looked horrible. He didn’t have any hair. His head had been shaved in the hospital. I couldn’t say anything. I just looked at him. He didn’t even ask for the family.”
Reles took his wife to the bedroom. The other boys were playing cards in the living room. The whispering laughter of a couple getting drunk turned into shouting. Rose was sick of this life. She could see her husband only a few times a week, and even then with cops all around. Her kids did not have a father. The shouting was replaced by tears. “I never asked him, but he knew I wanted a divorce,” said Rose. “I told him it would be for the children. He told me to forget about it, to never mention it again. But that night I came with the intention of asking him. I knew he would never sign any legal papers, so I asked him if he would just sign a regular piece of paper, something saying I would never have to come to him for another signature. He looked at me. He must have thought I was crazy. He didn’t say anything after that.”
At eleven P.M. the boys in the next room heard the bedroom door open, saw Rose straighten her dress, wipe her eyes, and walk out. The Kid was sick, stir crazy, and now his wife, the one he was doing all this for, who got him to rat in the first place, was trying to break clean. When she walked out the steel door, he went into his room and shut the light.
Now and then a detective stuck his head in, and always there was Reles on his back, eyes closed, radio warbling. The radio was clear all night. It caught the sounds of the country, twangy jug playing Appalachia hillbillies, vaudeville Jews with lame take-my-wife gags, newsmen with nowhere voices, crooners, politicians, voices from Chicago, Colorado, Boston, make-believe cities with their own make-believe gangsters, baseball games, situation comedies. The religious programs were funnier than the comedies, with cracker evangelists talking about sin. In the early morning, the dial was a junkyard of choruses and maritime bands.
The police later made a list of the shows and personalities Reles might have listened to that night: Uncle Don on WOR; WPA in Action on WNYC; Movie Gossip on WMCA; sports with Clem McCarthy on WHN; army and civil defense with General George C. Marshall on WEAF; Li’l Abner, WJZ; Here’s Morgan, WOR; Amos ’n’ Andy, WABC; boxing on WOR; The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, WEAF; the Whitman Orchestra on WEAF; sports with Ed Dolley, WNEW; Are You a Missing Heir? on WABC; Keep ’em Flying, WMCA; news in Yiddish, WEVD; Jewish Philosophers, WEVD; Can You Top This? on WOR; Battle of the Sexes, WEAF; The Avengers, WHN; Bob Hope on WEAF; Red Skelton on WEAF; Youth’s Stake in the Fight for Freedom, WJZ; President Roosevelt’s Armistice Day Address, WOR; All-Night Jamboree, WEVD.
Also on that night (WABC) was an address by Sidney Hillman, FDR’s adviser and the former head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, who once worked with Lepke. If Reles heard Hillman talking of the workingman, optimism, the future, he must have felt the distance between success and failure, lucky and unlucky. The Kid had lived twenty years in the line of fire, betting it all, and where had it got him? A crappy little rat-infested Coney Island hotel suite, Sidney Hillman on the radio. At 7:10 A.M., when a cop stuck his head in the door, Reles was asleep.
On the morning of November 12, 1941, William Nicholson, head of the Brooklyn Draft Board, was sitting at his desk in Coney Island. The United States was just a few months away from war, and his mind must have been filled with the news from Europe. Looking up, Nicholson could see out his window, across Twenty-ninth Street to the Half Moon. The hotel was set back at the second floor, leaving the first-floor roof exposed. Nicholson saw something on the roof, a splash of color. He called the hotel manager and told him there was something on the roof.
Detective Viktor went to investigate. He stepped through a second-floor window and onto the roof. It was around thirty-five degrees that morning, with a thirty-mile-an-hour wind coming off the ocean. The body was maybe twenty feet from the wall, face to the pebbly roof. It was approximately eight A.M. The detective turned over the body. Abe Reles. Looking into the sun, Viktor could see the sixth floor, where a window was open. Reles had fallen five stories, forty-two feet from his room to the roof of the hotel kitchen. He landed first in a sitting position, breaking his spine at the fourth and fifth vertebrae. The fall also ruptured his liver and spleen, and his abdomen hemorrhaged, filling his insides with blood. It must have been a spectacular stunt, a cartoon cat of a fall. The Kid’s face was studded with pebbles. He was fully clothed. A checkered cap was stuffed in his back pocket. According to Edward Hefferan of the Brooklyn DA’s Office, one of the first people on the scene, “Reles was fully dressed including his shoes, and his costume was not such as he might wear around the room but more as he wore in court. His shoes were new.” Crime scene photos show Reles on his back, one arm pointing up, the other pointing down, a kind of necrophile’s disco dance. His shirt is open, his skin white and pasty. His rubbery face is full of cuts. Doctors said he may have lived for as many as thirty minutes after the fall. At his side are sheets cut into strips and knotted together. When asked if Reles had scissors, Detective Boyle said, “Yes, he used them to trim the hair in his nostrils.”
The hotel was soon awash in prosecutors and cops. Burton Turkus was there, and so was Captain Bals. They went to the suite to investigate. The Kid’s room was shadowy and cool, still geared for sleep. Reles slept in a single bed on a plain wood frame. The blankets still showed the shape of his body. Newspapers and empty bottles were scattered across the floor. The walls were high and white, and the plaster cracked and peeled by a leaky radiator. A wire was tied to the radiator, and the window was open. Looking out, the cops would see the low roofs of coastal Brooklyn, billboards, streets running to the sea. Looking down, they would see Reles, face small and unshakable, being lifted onto a stretcher. Seen from a dozen angles, through a dozen lenses, it still amounted to the same dead body.
Tannenbaum shared the room across the hall with Meyer Sycoff. “I had my alarm clock set for eight-thirty,” Allie later said. “I knew I had to go to court. I wanted to get up early, shave, and get dressed. About eight that morning, I heard a lot of doors banging. I opened up my door and walked out and saw the detectives excited. I asked, ‘What is the matter?’ And they said, ‘Abe went out the window.’ ”
News of the death flashed through the underworld. The New York Times ran a front-page story. “Behind him in the room, lights still burned,” it reads. “Behind him the little radio that had played all night still blared and babbled. The informant looking southward could see surf break against jetties. He could hear the dolorous clanging of the buoy as it rocked in the tide. He could see far down the deserted boardwalk. It was shrouded in morning mist.”
The death of Abe Reles was the last great scandal of prewar America. The story, which made front pages around the nation, was like something drawn up by underworld bosses. When Reles went out the window, he took with him cases against at least two major mobsters: Bugsy Siegel, Albert Anastasia. (Though Lepke had yet to stand trial for murder, Reles had already appeared before the grand jury, testimony that could be used in a criminal trial.) When the degree of the setback became clear, people wondered: How did this happen? How did a star witness, a man locked in a steel-doored fortress, a man under the protection of sixteen cops, at least one of whom is supposed to watch him as he sleeps, go out the window? The officers on duty that morning said they last looked in on Reles at 7:10 A.M. He was asleep. The head of the draft board spotted the body at 7:45. So whatever happened, happened in that half hour. When asked to explain their actions, what they had seen or heard in those thirty minutes, the police guards shrugged. They had been taking a leak or had gone for a smoke or else had drifted off to sleep. They did not know what happened.
Over the next few months the New York Police Department conducted a massive investigation. Detectives studied boxes of physical evidence and interviewed witnesses. “He had a smile on his face,” Tannenbaum said of the last time he saw the Kid. “But it was just his mouth that was smiling.” Reles’s body was examined, cut apart, examined again. In the end, however, even the most solid findings of the investigation would seem suspect. After all, the report relied mostly on the police guards and their boss, Captain Bals, men who probably had the most to hide.
So it fell to the public to ponder. It was a great game in New York, a public murder mystery, a riddle running through heads in the subway, solved at lunch counters, argued over dinner. The death of Reles was the Rubik’s Cube of the time, a puzzle on which everyone hopes to prove his wit. To this day, when I explain the death to friends who don’t believe in Jewish gangsters, their eyes go glassy. They raise a finger. They are thinking. They ask me to read back testimony. Now, you say Reles had only two dollars and thirty-five cents in his pockets when he died? In the months following the death, as people awaited and then digested the official police report, a kind of consensus emerged, explanations floated by unnamed detectives, excited journalists, busybody amateur sleuths. Everyone had a solution.
Some thought Reles died trying to escape, that he hoped to swing from the suite on a sheet like Batman. The sheets were cut into strips, tied into a rope, roped to a wire, wired to a radiator. Though this rope was only long enough to carry Reles down one floor, he could have gone through a fifth-floor window, down the stairs, out a door. But he seemed otherwise unprepared for escape. He had only a few dollars, and Reles would not try to flee broke. Besides, the sheets were not strong enough to carry him. An FBI lab later said they could hold no more than 110 pounds. Reles, who weighed 170, made his name by knowing such details, by plotting perfect getaways. And the knots holding together the sheets were loose, amateurish. One good tug would pull them apart. If the boys learned anything on all those hits, it was how to tie a knot. And what if he had made it to the street? Reles would have a target on his back in Brooklyn. Escape? Escape to where?
Others said Reles must have committed suicide. What did he have to live for? By betraying his friends, he cast himself into a void, a place without meaning or rules. And what if he did finally earn his freedom? What if he sat through all the trials, sent all his friends to jail? Then what? What kind of a world would he be returning to? The place he left, the anything goes life of underworld Brooklyn, was gone, destroyed by his very treachery. That was the irony of the decision made by so many of the informants. By ratting, they prevented themselves from returning to the very life they were saving. Freedom for such men was life on the run, a new name in some shit-kicker city. Dead or out of town. Now, on top of everything else, Reles finds out his wife is leaving, taking with her the children and the only thing that might justify his behavior: My responsibilities as a father outweigh my responsibilities as a gangster. And so the reasoning goes: With nothing left to live for, Reles, at thirty-seven, already in failing health, followed Pep and Buggsy and Happy and Dasher the way he had sent them.
But how do you explain the sheet that followed Reles out the window? Why did he take a hat? Why would a man want to make his suicide look like an escape attempt? And how did he get so far from the wall? Around twenty feet, as if he’d been shot from a cannon. Even if he got a running start, the Kid could not clear twenty feet. Besides, no one thought suicide was in the Kid’s nature. He was not morose, introspective, or self-pitying. He lived on the surface of life, waiting for the change that makes everything look different. Suicide is just not in the makeup of most gangsters. Any time you hear a gangster killed himself, you can turn the channel, knowing somewhere a killer is being congratulated for a job well done. When the suicide theory was brought to police headquarters, Captain Bals dismissed it. “[Reles] was more concerned about his physical well-being than anyone I know,” he said. “He was more in fear of harm from the outside, he never indicated that he would do harm to himself. My observation was this: I considered him cowardly that he would never hurt himself.”
Some figured Reles must have been killed by those with access—the other men who frequented the suite. He was hated by the cops and by his fellow rats. His every entrance was marked by a tightening in the gut, his every exit by a sigh of relief. Who knows? Maybe Tannenbaum, sick of glasses filled with blood, snuck in from across the hall and pitched Reles out the window. Maybe Sholem Bernstein, thinking of how Reles had insulted his wife, helped with the heavy lifting. And what about the cops? Men with wads of wet toilet paper still stuck to their faces, their soles still smarting from a hotfoot, their dinner still ruined by pepper? Why wouldn’t one of these men toss the rat out the window? “The detectives were not sorry to see Reles dead,” The New York Times reported. “They made no bones about this. He had been arrogant, surly, unclean in his habits. An internal condition, accompanied by frequent hemorrhage, which he took no trouble to conceal, heightened their distaste for the man.” When faced with such theories, Captain Bals defended his men, saying they would not jeopardize a case because they were grossed out. “The detectives were apprised of how important these witnesses were,” he said. “They were also made conscious of the fact that, by keeping people in confinement of this type, it required a lot of humoring, and that they were here to guard them and keep them in the best of spirits at all times.”
More sophisticated sleuths stayed close to motive: Who would most profit from the death? That is the killer. But it sometimes seemed half the city would profit from Reles’s end. There was talk of politicians, high-ranking Mobbed-up power brokers whom Reles might out. And what about the heads of the police department, bribe takers whose careers Reles might ruin? “Some people—politicians and minor officials—had a practical reason for their hatred of Reles,” Burton Turkus later wrote. “In this connection it must be recalled that John Harlan Amen, then conducting a special investigation of corruption, had requested District Attorney William O’Dwyer to ‘loan’ Reles to him for questioning on the subject of protection and official corruption.”
Of course, those with the most to gain were probably mobsters, men like Albert Anastasia and Bugsy Siegel, who must have seen the death of the Kid as a second chance. “As long as Abe Reles was alive we had a perfectly good case against Albert Anastasia,” William O’Dwyer said on the radio. “But the day Abe Reles went through the window, that particular case, for want of corroboration, was no longer a clear case.”
When they finished their investigation, the police department had come up with an entirely different explanation, something worthy of Mark Twain. According to the police, Reles died by misadventure. His plan? To swing on sheets down to the fifth floor, jimmy open a lock, climb through a window, come up the stairs, knock on the door of the suite. Hilarity ensues. The night before, the hotel front desk received a call from the suite, asking if the room below, 523, was occupied. It was not. Was this Reles making sure he had an empty room to bust into? Investigators also examined the fifth-floor window lock, looking for any evidence it might offer up. The tarnished brass lock is now in a box at the New York Archives in lower Manhattan, the office that houses the records of the state’s case against Murder Inc. Looking at the lock, holding it in your hand, sliding the mechanism back and forth, you can see how a slim device might keep a person from finding a way back into the world.
For weeks Reles had been calling his guards tin badge cops, saying he could leave any time he wanted. Well, here was a chance to prove it. Not only did the misadventure theory fit with Reles’s history of practical jokes, it let everyone off the hook. Who was to blame? No one but the Kid’s bad sense of humor. When the report was made public, the officers on duty that morning were demoted, but none were fired. Rose Reles, the last to talk to Reles, seemed to support the theory. One night years before, when Abe was staying at Louis Capone’s house, he played a similar prank. He was drunk upstairs, head spinning, walls flying away. He pulled a sheet off a bed, tied it down, went out a second-story window, feet finding ground. He stumbled home laughing. When questioned about her husband’s death, Rose remembered that night. “I think I am the only one who solved this mystery,” she said. “When you asked, ‘How come you weren’t surprised or shocked?’ I couldn’t have been because I suddenly remembered that night he had come down the bedsheet. He was in a stupor. He was amongst friends. He didn’t want to escape. When he came in, he just stared. He didn’t know why he did it.” The cops said the Kid had gone out the window with hopes of repeating the stunt. The fact that he was no longer the same man, that he was sick, overweight, depressed, that he would now be working six stories off the ground, did not seem to bother investigators.
When the report was made public, New Yorkers must have had a good laugh. All those interviews, all those tests, and this is what they come up with? Death by practical joke? Oh, don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a great way for a life to end. Death by practical joke is my all-time favorite way for someone (not me) to die. It is funny until someone loses an eye, and even more funny after. The people of Brooklyn must have felt lucky—they had lived to see yet another great example of Mob humor.
Even as America fought the Second World War, Reles continued to intrigue New Yorkers. There was always some fresh piece of news, some fact, some theory. He continued turning up in newspapers, beaming out from old photographs, refusing to stay dead. A true crime brochure put out after the war shows a too close photo of Reles above the words “His Death Haunts Underworld Kingpins.” Inside, the Half Moon is pictured at many angles, the sixth-floor window a speck in the sky. In 1951 Kings County Court launched a new investigation into the death. Though eighty-six witnesses were interviewed, the report shed little light. “Abe Reles met his death while trying to escape, by means of a knotted sheet which was attached to the radiator in his room,” it reads. “He fell to his death while suspended from or supporting himself on this sheet, when the wire parted as a result of his weight on it. We find that Reles did not meet with foul play and that he did not die by suicide. It would be sheer speculation to attempt to discern his motive for wanting to escape.”
Men familiar with the case came forward to dispute the findings. “On the basis of available data, I believe Reles was murdered,” wrote Burton Turkus in 1951. “Here is why I believe that Kid Twist Reles was murdered: A far greater number of persons wanted to see him dead than wished for his continued well-being. He was hated by every hood in Murder Inc., because he had helped the law. The very witnesses who were under guard in the hotel with him—mobsters all—despised him.”
For years after, the police department continued to receive letters from people convinced they had stumbled upon some new angle:
Did it ever occur to you Mr. O’Dwyer said, “Abe Reles was afraid to even cross the street for a cup of coffee without the aid of a cop.” Why then would he even attempt to commit suicide if he was afraid?
Confused
3/20/51
Dear Mr. Halley;
While in Florida, a man by the name of Max Bogan met a retired detective who said that he was one of the detectives who cut the sheet which Reles was descending on. By getting in touch with Bogan you might be able to get more information on the Reles murder.
SINCERELY (Prefer to remain anonymous)
Dear Mr. McDonald:
Would it not be possible to bring in the six policemen who were responsible for the murder of Reles and make them sing? This I know would stop these rumors going around and discover who ordered the boys to pitch him out.
In the coming years, as first-generation Jewish gangsters wilted in exile or jail, as their past slowly overcame their present, a more believable version of Reles’s death began to emerge. “It was Frank Costello who came up with the plan,” Doc Stacher told Uri Dan in Israel. “You mustn’t forget that Frank’s role all those years had been to bribe the police and other officials. Like the rest of us, Costello reasoned that if Reles could be silenced permanently, the case against Bugsy and maybe those against some of the others would be finished. . . . So he got to work and found out which room Reles was in at the Half Moon—not so hard because cops had a round-the-clock guard on it. But then Frank really showed his muscle. He knew so many top-ranking cops that he got the names of the detectives who were guarding Reles. We never asked exactly how Costello did it, but one night he came back with a smile and said, ‘It cost us a hundred grand, but Kid Twist Reles is about to join his Maker.’ ”
Meyer Lansky had his own version of the story. “The way I heard it was that Bals stood there in the room and supervised the whole thing,” he told Uri Dan. “Reles was sleepin’ and one of the cops gave him a tap with the billy and knocked him out. Then they picked him up and heaved him out.”
Even now, over fifty years after Reles went out the window, people still puzzle over the death. They receive the mystery on a low frequency, a station at the edge of the dial, a station that also brings news of lost pirate treasure and UFO sightings. You cannot go to Twenty-eighth Street and the boardwalk in Brooklyn without feeling Reles in the air. His death haunts Coney Island, setting it adrift, neither past nor present, a desolate strip of old immigrant America. The Half Moon is gone now, replaced by a massive two-building complex, a Jewish geriatric center, which seems fitting, as if the property itself has aged right along with Jewish America, from a wild, seafaring youth to a tottering walker-using dotage. People still stand in front of the property, though, pointing out where the suite once was, tracing with a finger the trajectory Reles followed from the window to the roof below. “Right there,” they say. “It happened right there.” And somehow they know what happened was more than the death of a single ratting mobster. What happened on this desolate flyblow strip, under the gulls and beyond the horns, the husk of amusements marking the distance, was the end of something, a way of life, a stage of history, a style that came from the Jewish slums of Brooklyn, where the corner boys learned to hold nothing back, to fight without shame or fear. The death of Reles was the great symbolic killing of the Jewish underworld. It was a sacrifice, an offering full of ritual and symbolism. It was a death to pay for all the other deaths, blood to wash the other blood clean. But did it mark the end of the tough Jew in America? No. Of course not. Tough boardroom Jews today crowd the lobbies of Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the Loop. But the death of Reles did mark the end of the beginning, the passage of the pioneer generation, a necessary finale, like the first stage of a rocket blowing away, letting the capsule glide into space.
Lepke went on trial in Brooklyn three days after Reles fell. The DA’s office had had a hard time putting the case together. After Lepke was convicted on federal narcotics charges, federal prosecutors were in no rush to turn him over to New York for trial. Though the Brooklyn DA had put together a strong case, the Department of Justice wanted Lepke to serve his federal sentence before releasing him to New York. “They had the worst time trying Lepke for murder because he’d been convicted on federal narcotics charges, and Franklin Roosevelt and his Department of Justice didn’t want to turn him over,” Ralph Salerno told me. Maybe FDR was reluctant to give Dewey access to the gangster, who, to save his own skin, might expose the corruption of a high-ranking federal official like Sidney Hillman. Dewey was planning to run against Roosevelt in the 1944 presidential election, and a federal scandal would help his cause. “If Lepke told the truth, he would say that when he was in garments, breaking heads for unions and everything else, one of the leaders he killed for was Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers,” Salerno went on. “Then Dewey could say, ‘The man I’m running against hired a man who hired Lepke to kill people.’ ”
The federal officials hemmed and hawed, raising objections, anything to keep Lepke out of New York. But when Reles began talking, elevating the DA’s case against Lepke from racketeering to murder, the feds had to turn over the mobster. Sheltering a murder suspect would be the biggest scandal of all. While in a jail awaiting trial, Lepke received a note from his old partner Gurrah Shapiro, who was serving his sentence in a penitentiary in Atlanta. The note was a one-line reference to the long-ago meeting where only Gurrah pushed for the killing of Dewey: “I told you so.”
The trial began on September 15, 1941. Lepke was said to have ordered at least seventy murders. He was now on trial for one of those killings, the death of Joe Rosen, the Brooklyn man killed in his candy store. On trial with Lepke were two of the men who carried out the order: Mendy Weiss and Louis Capone. The testimony of Abe Reles, spelling out the mechanics of the Combination, was read to the jury. When it was Allie Tannenbaum’s turn to talk, he must have felt his stomach turn over. Tannenbaum was facing off against his old boss, the man who found him up at Loch Sheldrake, taught him to be tough, and gave him a life in the city. Allie probably killed his real father when he first went off with the gangsters, and now he was killing a second father. Double patricide. He told the jury about the day back in 1939, when he overheard the boss talking to Max Rubin, saying he was sick of Joe Rosen. “That bastard, he’s going around shooting his mouth off about seeing Dewey,” yelled Lepke. “He and nobody else is going any place and do any talking. I’ll take care of him.”
Then Max Rubin took the stand. He was handsome, white haired, patrician. He had tried to save Rosen, first telling Lepke the trucker was no threat, then telling Rosen to stay out of town. A few years later, when Lepke was purging the underworld, Rubin was shot in the head. He recovered and was now paying Lepke back. When Lepke’s lawyer tired to discredit Rubin, implying he was himself a crook settling a score, Rubin grew red with anger. “I am fifty-two years old,” he said. “Until I met that man Lepke, I never did anything wrong. And only to do him a favor, I got into trouble. I was never a murderer. You’re filthy swine to call me such names. I’m not involved in this thing. I came here voluntarily.”
When he finished talking, Rubin glared at Lepke, who had shaved his mustache and cut his hair and again looked like a man of the street, cool, calculating gangster eyes searching for the answer, adding the faces in the courtroom, soft heads in the jury box, fun seekers in the gallery, Rubin on the stand, and coming up with no answer. The jury convicted the defendants after six hours of deliberation. “Louis Buchalter, alias Lepke, for the murder of Joseph Rosen, whereof he is convicted, is hereby sentenced to punishment of death,” said Judge Tailor. “Within ten days from this date, subject to any legal impediments, the sheriff of Kings County shall deliver the said Louis Buchalter to the warden of Sing Sing prison, where he shall be kept in solitary confinement until the week beginning Sunday, January 4, 1942, and upon some day within the week so appointed, the warden of Sing Sing prison shall do the execution upon him.”
These were the final words on Murder Incorporated. Brooklyn had been swept clean of a league of killers, some gunned down in alleys, some lit up in the electric chair, some awaiting the death penalty, one out the window. Over the next few weeks, the rats still living in the Half Moon would quietly drift off, like college seniors after the last exam. They vanished into the fabric of American life, down roads that disappear at the horizon. Sholem, Meyer, Blue Jaw. I don’t know what became of them. I do know that Allie Tannenbaum turned up in Florida in the fifties and later in Atlanta, where he lived near his brother and worked as a lampshade salesman. When I think of Allie’s life, how he slipped into the underworld and then slipped away, I feel something like admiration for him. I admire Allie because he seemed to be in it for the adventure; because at the end he could not get along with Abe Reles, who repulsed him; because he never wrote his memoirs or served as a technical adviser on a movie; because, when he left, he was gone; because his nickname referred to his personality and not his prowess as a killer; because he changed with the country; because he was the kind of exciting young man who becomes just another ho-hum old man; because when speaking to a detective in 1996, I referred to him as “Albert,” and the detective corrected me, saying, “Allie”; because even in the worst picture he ever took, where he is shielding his face and frowning, his eyes are still smiling. I do not know if Allie lived long enough to see Israeli soldiers storm Entebbe. Probably he died before that. But Jews like him, who thrived on the same streets, in the same slums, who learned the same lessons and fought the same wars, did live to see the emergence of a strong Israel, and they must have seen it as something to rejoice over, proof that not everything the gangsters believed in was wrong.
Soon after the trial, Lepke, along with Capone and Weiss, took his last train trip. Looking out the window on the way to Sing Sing, I wonder if Lepke thought: That is the last oak tree I will ever see; there goes the last hill; look, it’s my last car with three people, my last road with two lanes. Lepke could still appreciate the old things: revenge, street justice. Even though it did not affect his case, he must have been happy when Reles went out the window. Also when Albert A. took care of Dimples Wolensky, paying back the traitor. Maybe God uses gangsters to visit justice on other gangsters. But Lepke was now more spectator than participant. He had been locked up for three years and spent the year before that in hiding. His gangster metabolism had slowed, and he was a strange sight in jail, a man whose demeanor does not fit his legend. He is the only boss in Mob history to receive the death penalty. Robert Lowell, the poet, who spent time in jail, saw Lepke in his final days and recorded his impressions in the poem, “Memories of West Street and Lepke”:
I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short
enclosure like my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothesline entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow (it’s really tan)
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate, double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.
I was so out of things, I’d never heard
of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“Are you a C.O.?” I asked a fellow jailbird.
“No,” he answered, “I’m a J.W.”
He taught me the “hospital tuck,”
and pointed out the t-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated’s Czar Lepke,
there piling towels on a rack,
or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden to the common man:
a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American
flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter Palm.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair—
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections. . . .
Fate seemed determined to push Lepke off stage, to render his closing moments invisible. His appeals would normally have made front-page news, but his conviction came on the eve of Pearl Harbor. So what happened over the next several months, the jockeying and deal proposing, was pushed to the wings by the European drama. Again and again the execution was delayed by appeals. Before a date could even be scheduled, the federal government had to pardon Lepke, excusing a debt he would not be alive to pay. The feds for a time stalled, perhaps concerned what Lepke would say when the federal government no longer had a hold on him. This battle was waged in the papers, in back, near the sports, until FDR at last signed the release. Then, as the weeks rolled by, Dewey went to work on Lepke, holding death over his head, a stick to beat out a confession. Living through these final days, Lepke must have remembered what Albert A. said while urging him not to surrender. As long as they can’t get you, they can’t hurt you. Once you surrender, the best deal in the world won’t mean a thing.
On March 2, 1944, Lepke, Weiss, and Capone had their heads shaved, were dressed in white socks, black shirts, white slippers, and black pants. A slit was cut in each left trouser leg for an electrode. The men were led to a grim holding tank. The boys could talk in this cell but could not see each other. They called it the dance hall. A death row guard asked Lepke what he would have for his last meals. For lunch Lepke said he would have steak, salad, fries, pie. For dinner: roast chicken, salad, shoestring potatoes. Capone and Weiss said they would have what the boss was having—these men would stick with Lepke to the end, leading him into the unknown, like Pharaoh’s servants.
After the meal, when that part was over and only the chair remained, a phone rang. In the movies it is a red phone, and the ringer echoes along stone corridors. A reprieve. Dewey had given the boys forty-eight more hours of life. “At least we get more good eats.” said Mendy.
A lot was written about Lepke in these last days. It was an ideal scenario for crime reporters: the Mob boss who goes out in nameless gray convict garb, no better than all the illiterate psychopaths who sat in the same chair; intrigue heavy like fog; time running out; the bleak factory grounds of Sing Sing, pale smokestacks reflected in the muddy Hudson; reprieves in the wind and everyone wondering, Will he talk? If Lepke did talk, he would be no better than the rats who put him there, no better than Reles and Tannenbaum. If Lepke did talk, he would be giving up the one thing the government could not take away: how he saw himself. He was a true gangster, the real thing, the child of Arnold Rothstein, the hoodlum who feels the bullet in his chest and still waves off the cops, saying, “I’ll take care of it my own way.”
After the execution was stayed, Lepke had a visitor. Tom Dewey sent the Manhattan DA, Frank Hogan, to cut a deal. Hogan wanted to know about the old days: Was the boss ever on Sidney Hillman’s payroll? Rumor had Lepke collecting three hundred dollars a week from the union chief. Did Hillman ever discuss schlammings or killings with Lepke? Rumor also had the men meeting at the Clinton Hotel in Manhattan. Lepke was desperate, frenzied, clinging to life, but he was no rat. “We reeled off one name after another and just drew blanks,” Hogan later said. “Lepke knew what he was doing every minute, even though he was two days away from the electric chair.”
“You ask, ‘How can he do it? He knows he’s going to die in the chair. How can he not make a deal?’ ” said Ralph Salerno. “Well, Lepke had a wife, a child, a brother. And even if he opened up, Dewey could not let him out of jail entirely. And then he would have to be isolated, or else he would be killed as a rat. So he would sit alone in a cell for the rest of his life. The Mob wouldn’t kill his wife, his son, his brother. But they wouldn’t take care of them, either. But if he kept his mouth shut, his wife, son, and brother would be taken care of.” Salerno smiled and said, “Lepke was what you call a macho gangster. “
The next morning the newspapers were full of rumors: “Lepke offered material to the Governor that would make him an unbeatable Presidential candidate,” reported the New York Daily Mirror. That afternoon, perhaps concerned by such stories, by the last image he would leave in the world, Lepke got word to the press: Be at the Depot Square Hotel in Ossining a half mile from Sing Sing prison. Around thirty reporters were there to meet Lepke’s wife at the hotel bar. She wore a lamb collar and dark glasses. “My husband just dictated this statement in his death cell,” she said, holding up a yellow legal pad. “ ‘I am anxious to have it clearly understood that I did not offer to give information in exchange for any promise of the commutation of my death sentence,’ ” she read. “ ‘I did not ask for that! The one and only thing I asked for is to have a commission appointed to examine the facts. If that examination does not show that I am not guilty, I am willing to go to the chair.’ ”
Lepke, Capone, Weiss—what were they doing with these last forty-eight hours? They were supposed to be dead, so now they were in the bonus. Did everything around them, floor tiles, veins in their hands, the little details that together make up the big detail of life, look sharp and clear? Did they notice the shadows their limbs cast on the wall? The way sound echoes? Or were their revelations interior? I don’t believe these men were necessarily unsentimental or unfeeling. Lepke and Weiss were raised as Jews, with the bar mitzvah at thirteen, the High Holy Days after, and they said they believed in God. This belief was not something they talked about. It was probably something they held in reserve, like a gallon of gas in the trunk. When they needed it, there it would be. Like most of us, they probably set the big questions aside, believing they would solve them later, when there was time. And who knows? Maybe there was time, and maybe they did solve them.
Sing Sing. Night. March 4, 1944. The months of delays had conditioned the boys to stops and starts, the politics of the chair. Even on the last day, they must have waited for the call, the reprieve that gives them one hour more. Who can believe in his own death? As the gangsters waited in the dance hall, their last meal done, the guards whispered together, deciding who would go first, a task as rarefied as setting a batting order. Capone would lead off. He had a bad heart, and what if he died before they could kill him? When the warden asked Capone for a last statement, he said nothing. Switch. Charge. Next. Mendy Weiss was strapped to the chair. “I am here on a framed-up case, and Governor Dewey knows it,” he said. “I want to thank Judge Lehman. He knows me because I am a Jew. Give my love to my family and everything.” Zap! And then Lepke, marching across the room and sitting down, the last seat on a crowded bus. When the warden asked for a statement, he instead took a final look around, maybe remembering every face, people he might have a chance to meet again. When the executioner pulled the switch, his head snapped back. His body rang like a bell. His thoughts flew off like birds. The last voice he heard was that of Rabbi Jacob Katz, singing Kaddish—the Jewish prayer for the dead.