CRIME: Laughing Matter

The humorous aspects of premeditated murder are almost identical with those of custard-pie comedy: connoisseurs of both can enjoy the victim’s splendid initial innocence, his growing disbelief and alarm, and, finally, his absurd response to the inexorable offices of fate. It takes a trained mind to really appreciate the drolleries of the rubout, however; when the gaudiest murder of the year was staged one morning last week in the barber shop of Manhattan’s Park Sheraton Hotel, nobody in the U.S. was as well qualified to enjoy its subtleties as bulky, greying Albert Anastasia—onetime Lord High Executioner of Brooklyn’s Murder Inc. But this time Al was straight man rather than critic.

Al managed to be pretty funny in his new role, although doubtless not as comical as the fellow his practical jokers once threw into a lake, alive, weighted down with slot machines. At 55, Al was ripe for the part; he had grown rich, fleshy, imperious and sentimental on the rewards of death. He wore the big tipper’s air of assurance as he walked into the bright, mirrored, roomy barber shop and ordered a haircut; he closed his eyes contentedly as he felt the clippers on his thick neck. He was completely oblivious of two dark, sallow men who entered with their hats on, after him. Each of the pair wore the sort of dark, metal-rimmed glasses affected by highway cops. Each wore a scarf over his mouth. Each wore a black glove on his right hand, and each black hand gripped a pistol. They pushed the barber aside and stood on either side of the chair.

Also Bay Rum. Al’s eyes were still closed when the first bullet made a hole in his pudgy left hand. Both gunmen fired at him. Another slug went through Al’s clothes, made him jump as though he had been hit with a baseball bat, and bloodied the soft, warm, white, middle-aged flesh of his right side. Al just had time to realize he was being killed. He kicked out in such convulsive fright that he broke the chair’s metal footrest. Then he lurched up in adenoidal agony and knocked over a bottle of bay rum. The two men who were killing him went placidly on with their work, and when Al crashed to the floor he was a pleasantly scented cadaver—a five holer, as it were, and badly in need of a new head.

The killers inspected the remains with professional care. Then they joined the horrified barbers, customers and shoeshine boys who went bursting into a hall off the hotel lobby. They left Al as evidence that history repeats itself—he had gotten it in the same hotel in which Gambler Arnold Rothstein was shot back in 1928.

Also Ice Picks. Al had earned the honor. A murderous, grasping and illiterate slob, he had thwarted the law for 40 years, twisted the politics, and opened the economic veins, of the greatest city in the world. He had done it, at bottom, simply by killing people, personally and by proxy, with ice picks, knives, pistols, the garrote and the bludgeon.

Al, who was born in Tropea, Italy (real name: Umberto Anastasio), started his career almost as soon as he jumped ship in New York in 1917 to become a dock-walloper on the Brooklyn piers. In 1921 and 1922 he spent 18 months in the death house at Sing Sing for the murder of another longshoreman named George Turrello. The experience taught him the efficacy of wholesale death; when his lawyer got him a new trial, his pals killed off so many witnesses that Al was released. After that he prospered; the waterfront offered, as it still does, wonderful opportunities in pilferage, shakedowns, strikebreaking and extortion. He met a lot of other rising young men: Al Capone, Louis (“Lepke”) Buchalter, Lucky Luciano. He was often arrested (murder, 1928; murder, 1932; murder, 1933), but never convicted. A stool pigeon named John Bazzano, who took an interest in him in 1932, was found cut into stew meat in a burlap bag.

Out the Window. When the mobs syndicated, after Prohibition, Al became “The Law”—his Brooklyn mob handled executions for the chieftains of the underworld. Some victims went into the Hudson in concrete kimonos. Some were buried in quicklime in a Lyndhurst, NJ. chicken yard that the boys used as a private cemetery. In all, Al was credited with 63 corpses during this phase of his career. He never paid a day in jail for them. Abe (“Kid Twist”) Reles sang about Murder Inc., in 1940, but Reles, though locked in a Coney Island hotel room and guarded by cops, somehow managed to fall out the window and kill himself before Brooklyn Prosecutor Bill O’Dwyer saw fit to bring Al to trial Al disappeared and joined the Army (he trained soldiers as longshoremen during the war), and for “clerical reasons,” the “wanted” card with Al’s name was removed from the files of the New York Police Department.

After the war Al built a tile-roofed, Spanish-style mansion at the edge of the Hudson River palisades in New Jersey, built a loft. metal fence topped by barbed wire, installed lights and Doberman pinscher watchdogs, and settled down to the good life. He went to race tracks and took the sun in Florida and Hot Springs, Ark. This existence was interrupted in 1954 when the Government charged him with evading a paltry $12,000 in federal income taxes. Before the matter was settled two Government witnesses, an elderly couple, disappeared from their bloodstained Miami house. Al got off with a year in Milan, Mich.

In the Box. Still, Al grew to resent reference to the vulgar necessities of his sort of life. So did his brother, Tough Tony, who ran the Brooklyn piers for him. “Murderer?” Tony once rasped to a reporter. “He kill anybody in your family yet?” Al was proud of his children and became a heavy spender in New York toy stores. He was mourned last week, however, in a very narrow circle. Only Tough Tony gave any public display of grief. When a New York Daily News reporter called him and announced that Al had been shot to death, Tony said: “What the hell kind of a joke do you call that?” “It’s no joke,” said his informant. “Oh, my God,” moaned Tony. “Oh, my God. No … no … no.” He hurried to the hotel and threw himself, weeping hysterically, upon his brother’s corpse.

But servants at Anastasia’s home seemed unmoved at the news (although a maid did set the dogs on reporters), and Al’s family decided not to ask the Roman Catholic Church to bury him (another brother, the Rev. Salvatore Anastasio, is a Bronx priest). He was put away quietly in a plain old $900 coffin—although another brother, Joe, got a $6,000 box when he passed on (of natural causes) last year, and $15,000 worth of flowers to boot.

On the Way Out. Only the New York cops seemed genuinely stirred. Al had hardly been lugged out of the hotel before they were questioning the first of hundreds of underworld characters. The two killers had dropped their pistols on the way out; one was a .32 Smith & Wesson, the other a .38 Colt which originally had been sold in the Middle West in the 1930s. That was all anybody knew. The police were intensely curious as to why Al’s bodyguard, one Anthony Coppola, was in a drugstore across the street when Al was ventilated. Anthony was just doing what his kind always does; he was having a cup of coffee.

There were dozens of theories: that it was Al who had ordered Frank Costello shot last spring and that he had paid the price; that a new, young mob was responsible for both the Costello and Anastasia shootings; that Al had declared himself the new “boss” of Manhattan garment-district rackets and doomed himself in the process.

At week’s end it was only possible to wonder who in what city tenement or guarded country home was laughing hardest at the joke on Al—who had gotten the chair at last.