CRIME: Murder, Inc.

CRIME Murder. Inc.

The underworld’s Gaudy Era, when that wealthy foursome, Lucky Luciano (prostitutes), Joe Adonis (bootlegging), Meyer Lansky (industrial rackets) and Jimmy Hines (politics), played golf at swank Hot Springs, Ark., ended around 1935. Dead was Gangster Vannie Higgins, who had owned and piloted his own airplane. Bootlegger Frankie Yale (Uale), bumped off, had been given a $50,000 funeral. Gunman Legs Diamond had at last been rubbed out, and his flowerlike Kiki Roberts, who had danced in Ziegfeld’s Follies, had gone back to dancing in a roadhouse for a living. In 1935 organized crime appeared to have hit the skids. But:

One day late in November, two years before, three men had cornered Alex (Red) Alpert, a Brooklyn, N. Y. hoodlum, in a yard on Van Siclen Avenue, shot him in the back and rode on down the street in a car. . . .

One night in May 1937, George Rudnick, known to the police as a stool pigeon, went riding through Brooklyn in a stolen car with some friends, who suddenly throttled him, stabbed him 54 times with an ice pick. . . .

On a day in July, the same year, the body of a certain Walter Sage was tied to a slot machine, dumped into Swan Lake in the Catskill Mountains of Sullivan County. . . .

One summer morning last year, Irving Penn, a respectable music publisher, who had the misfortune to resemble a man suspected of knowing too much about Louis (Lepke) Buchalter, was shot to death from a passing car. . . .

Those were a few. There had been many another in the past five years. Sullivan County, summer playground of many New York City mobsters, became a dumping ground for corpses. Organized crime had gone underground, but it went on. That was the situation when William O’Dwyer became district attorney for Kings County last January.

Born in County Mayo, Ireland, O’Dwyer had walked a beat as a New York City cop, had studied and practiced law, been appointed a magistrate, elevated to a county judgeship. His brother had been mortally wounded by three gunmen during a Brooklyn café holdup. District Attorney O’Dwyer took office with a deep hatred of gangsters. Forthwith he assigned a staff of men to go back into the murders of Alpert, Sage, Rudnick, Penn.

The “heat” was turned on in Brooklyn. With a shred of evidence here, an informer’s tip there, O’Dwyer’s men worked quietly & quickly, one by one rounded up a crowd of tightlipped, sullen men & women, took them into custody for questioning. Among them were two whose sullenness had more fear than courage: Abraham (Pretty) Levine, Anthony (Duke) Maffetore. Their fear was that they were going to be double-crossed, left by others to take the rap. They began talking. Foul was their story.

For six or seven years, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, around certain poolrooms, bars, candy stores where idle young hoodlums gathered to swagger, play the slot machines, a sinister kind of talent had been for sale at bargain prices: anything from roughing up and terrorizing a racket victim to “removing” a State’s witness, killing stool pigeons and underworld rivals. The killers worked for small pay: Pretty Levine, who told reporters he joined the gang at the age of 13, confessed he took part in the Sage killing for a net profit of one dollar.

This was how, Pretty Levine said, he earned his dollar:

Sage had been a youthful member of a gang whom the higher-ups had decided to liquidate. Levine, with a man named Irving (Big Gangi) Cohen and others, drove the unsuspecting Sage through Sullivan County until, on a deserted stretch of road, Big Gangi yanked out an ice pick, began plunging it into Sage’s body. A second gangster went to Big Gangi’s assistance, but missed his aim, stabbed Big Gangi who, thinking he was being double-crossed too, yelled in terror, leaped from the moving car, and fled into the woods of the Catskills. (Big Gangi made his way to Hollywood, foolishly advertised his presence there by getting a job in the movie Golden Boy.)

Based on the sickening revelations of Levine and Maffetore, murder indictments were handed up last week in Sullivan County against five men, including Big Gangi Cohen, who was promptly arrested in California. Lesser crimes were added to the gang’s midden-heap record: loan-sharking, extortion for “protection” of prostitutes, bookmakers, merchants, laundries, even women’s afternoon small-stakes card games all over Brooklyn. Nothing, apparently, was too picayune if it could turn a dishonest dollar.

Arrests last week came thick & fast: at week’s end, a score of men & women were in custody. Alleged Triggermen Frank (The Dasher) Abbandano and Maxie (The Jerk) Golob were identified as the murderers, five years back, of one John (Spider) Murtha. One man not yet in custody, said O’Dwyer, was the boss of the whole murderous business.

Hauled into jail along with punks and young hoodlums were: motherly Mrs. Lena Frosch, who owned a summer home at White Lake in Sullivan County, and was said to be head of a family bail-bond business; her husband Israel, her son-in-law Abraham Cohen; two alleged “vice presidents” of the organization, Martin (Buggsy) Goldstein, and runty, swaggering Abe (Kid Twist) Reles, notorious Brooklyn thug who once boasted: “I’ll take on any cop with pistols or anything else.” Rated a rat by the police, Reles sent word to O’Dwyer at week’s end that he would join Squealers Levine and Maffetore, was ready to squawk for a promise of clemency. Ready to listen was O’Dwyer. As Reles chattered his secrets, O’Dwyer’s men raked the underworld, closed in for the kill.