30

Murder Inc.: The Mafia’s Own Private Death Squad

Earlier in this book we took a look at Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, the grubby street urchin who murdered his way to the top of the American Mafia in the early 1930s. Once there, Luciano moulded the Mafia into a modern organisation comprising five main New York families, all going about their business and reporting back to the board of directors as any huge corporation registered on the stock market would do.

Soon the Mafia became the largest organisation in America and operated without the authorities having a clue that it even existed, until Joe Valachi started singing to a congressional committee 30 years later in 1963. It was only then that America heard the words Mafia, Cosa Nostra and the Syndicate for the first time.

In 1931 Lucky Luciano became the Mafia’s first Capo de Tutti Capi or ‘Boss of all of the Bosses’, and eventually his power reached out across all of the Mafia families throughout every state of America. Luciano held ultimate power over every Mafia member in America and to defy his orders invariably meant death, as murder was the only certain way the Mafia could guarantee the secrecy of their organisation.

In this chapter we are going to take a look at how Charlie Lucky maintained the Mafia style of law and order through an organisation that eventually became known to us as Murder Inc.

Once in supreme power of the Mafia, or the Unione Siciliane as he preferred it to be known, in order to keep it under control, Lucky Luciano set up an internal ‘death squad’ that would act upon every deadly whim of the Board of Directors, or ‘the Commission’ as they called it. The Commission consisted of the heads of the five New York families and non-Sicilian advisers such as the Mafia’s Jewish accountant Myer Lansky and the Jewish assassin Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, who later went on to create Las Vegas.

To head up the death squad, Luciano appointed his trusted friend and ally Albert Anastasia, a ruthless Sicilian crime boss who had bashed and murdered his way up from the docks to become the most feared enforcer in the underworld. Luciano’s choice was a good one. Anastasia’s specialty was murder. Over the years he had become infamous for the way he disposed of bodies and the feared ‘one-way ride’ and ‘concrete shoes’ were just a couple of Albert’s colourful inventions.

Extremely honoured to be working so closely with the revered Capo de Tutti Capi, Mad Albert went about his new position with great enthusiasm. His first appointment was Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter, a Jewish gun for hire whose specialty was having anyone murdered for a price. Lepke, whose nickname came from an abbreviation of Lepkeleh or ‘Little Louis’ in Yiddish, had had a long association with the Mafia but had never been placed in a position of such trust before. After all, the orders came from the top and Lepke would be the one who was receiving them. It was a special place of honour.

But in their wisdom, the Commission placed strict guidelines on their death squad which must be adhered to at all times, otherwise the assassin could very quickly become the victim. First, outside hits and civilians were out of bounds. Killing police, politicians and reporters would only bring down the heat, and that wasn’t what the Commission wanted. They killed only other mobsters, in the belief that investigators would not bother to look too hard for the killer, rationalising that the world was a better place without the deceased anyway. What was another dead gangster, more or less.

Second, they killed other mobsters only for good business reasons. Personal disputes such as affairs of the heart and internal family squabbles were no business of the Commission. They also didn’t encourage torture, just straight in and out killings that wouldn’t attract any unnecessary attention to the fact that there was an organisation out there cleaning up its own backyard.

And third, they made sure that it would be exceptionally hard to trace back to who had actually given the orders for the hit. The hitman may be picked up and, having no good reason to be killing the target other than for money, should he decide to sing then the trail would never lead any further than the fellow soldier who had been instructed to give him the hit. And even though the orders for as many as 400 murders over the years came directly from the Commission, not once did their origin ever reach the ears of the authorities.

Outside of that, other factions of the Mafia didn’t have to get any vendettas sanctioned by anyone other than their immediate local superiors. They could kill whoever they liked and run the risk of being caught locally. Lepke’s death squad operated strictly at the behest of the Commission. While the Mafia knew of its existence, outside of that no one knew a thing.

Lepke chose his assassins well. Murderers who would be slipped an envelope full of cash and some instructions. Colourful characters with bizarre names such as Vito ‘Chicken Head’ Gurino, ‘Blue Jaw’ Magoon, Abe ‘Kid Twist’ Reles, Frank ‘the Dasher’ Abbandando, ‘Pittsburgh Phil’ Strauss and ‘Happy’ Maione.

Even when Lucky Luciano was arrested in 1936 and sent to prison for 50 years, the death squad kept on killing people. But with Luciano away, Anastasia started breaking the rules and suddenly all sorts of dead bodies began turning up all over New York, lots of them ordinary people who Albert had simply taken a disliking to. Anastasia was also openly associating with Lepke and his killers. Sooner or later something had to give.

It did when one of the top hitmen, Abe ‘Kid Twist’ Reles – who got his nickname from the way he habitually chewed on candy bars – was pulled in on suspicion of homicide.

On the promise that he wouldn’t be prosecuted if he squealed, Reles told the police that he had taken orders to murder directly from Albert Anastasia and Lepke Buchalter in person. Reles then went on to confess to 49 murders in the Brooklyn district alone. The press aptly dubbed Kid Twist’s employers Murder Inc.

With the Kid as their star witness, the cops rounded up Lepke and Anastasia and threw them in the slammer. But Reles was mysteriously killed when he allegedly tried to escape via his eighth-floor hotel window where he was under 24-hour, six-policeman guard. They could never explain how his body was found 20 feet off the building alignment.

But it was too late for Lepke. Others now had also given him up. Lepke and several of his associates went to Sing Sing’s electric chair soon after. But with Reles dead, there was no case to answer for Albert Anastasia and he was set free. It was almost as though Albert had saved the biggest gangland hit of them all for himself. On 25 October 1957, as he sat in the barber’s chair at the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York, two gunmen ushered the barber away and filled Albert Anastasia full of lead.

I guess he would have been proud of that.