MANY OF THE GANGSTER CHARACTERS IN THIS STORY are based on real people who populated the brutal crime scene in New York in the thirties. Dubbed by the press as “Murder Inc.,” their reign of terror in the New York underworld is well documented. Pittsburgh Phil Strauss, known as “Pep,” got the electric chair, along with Bugsy Goldstein, on June 12, 1941. “Lepke” Buchalter got the chair on March 4, 1944. Abie “Kid Twist” Reles, who snitched on his pals, fell from a high floor of the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island while being guarded by six law enforcement officers just as he was about to testify against his fellow gangsters. Albert Anastasia was shot while getting a haircut in the Park Sheraton barbershop on October 25, 1957, and Frank Costello died of a heart attack in a New York hospital on February 18, 1973 at 81.

As for the Catskills, the era dominated by those famous hotels such as Grossinger’s, the Concord, the Nevele and numerous others and were collectively known as “the Borscht Belt,” have passed into history along with the famous “tumlers” who arguably invented contemporary American humor.

The mountains, of course, are still there.