November 12th, 1941. 6:50 a.m. Coney Island, the Half Moon Hotel, room 623. Abe Reles was dead. He lay on a lower roof of the hotel. His body was shattered. A knotted bedsheet flapped from the window six stories above him. He was under 24-hour police protection. Six detectives were guarding him.
They said he tried to escape, but dead birds do not fly. The whole fall took 3 seconds. This was not just another mobster. Reles was the guy who treated murder like a corporate desk job, who went home to his wife every night at 6:00 p.m. sharp, and who personally oversaw the enforcement wing of the National Crime Syndicate.
He wanted to legitimize the business of death. Instead, he got a raise. This is the story of how a small crew of street thugs from Brooklyn became the official hit squad for the American Mafia, from backroom candy store meetings to nationwide murder contracts, from making millions to the electric chair.
This is the rise and violent fall of Murder, Incorporated. But here is what the history books do not tell you. Reles did not just kill for money. He built a machine that carried out over 1,000 untraceable murders, and he almost got away with it. You have to understand. Brooklyn in the 1920s was a breeding ground for violence.
The streets of Brownsville and Ocean Hill were packed with desperate kids looking for a way out. That is where we meet Abe Reles. He was 33. He stood 5’2. He wore elevator shoes to look taller. He brought his wife flowers every Friday, but on the streets, he was known as Kid Twist, the most vicious operator in the neighborhood.
Reles ran with a tight crew. Martin Goldstein, 32. They called him Bugsy. He had a nervous twitch in his left eye. He attended synagogue on high holy days. He was known as a guy who would snap your arm for looking at him wrong. Harry Strauss, 30. They called him Pittsburgh Phil. He wore custom silk suits.
He meticulously manicured his nails every Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. He was known as the most reliable killer in New York. These guys were independent contractors. They ran slot machines. They ran loan sharking operations. But they had a problem. The Shapiro brothers. Meyer, Irving, and Willie Shapiro ran Brownsville.
They had the money. They had the political connections. They had the cops on their payroll. Reles and his crew were just nuisances to them. The Shapiros decided to send a message. One night in 1930, Meyer Shapiro cornered Reles and his girlfriend. He dragged her into an alley. He assaulted her.
He left Reles beaten on the pavement. That was a fatal error. Reles did not go to the police. He went to war. Over the next 12 months, Reles and his crew hunted the Shapiros. Irving was shot 14 times outside his apartment. Time of death was 5:47 a.m. Investigators recovered 14 shell casings. Meyer was found in a basement with a bullet in his head.
Willie was buried alive in a sandpit in Canarsie. He suffocated in 8 minutes. That war changed everything. Reles and his boys took over Brownsville. They were no longer street kids. They were bosses. And people started to notice. Remember this name. Louis Buchalter. They called him Lepke.
Advertisements
He will become important in 15 minutes. Lepke was 42. He was soft-spoken. He drank warm milk every morning for his stomach ulcer. He was known as the architect of the garment district rackets. In 1931, the Mafia was restructuring. Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky were building the National Crime Syndicate. A ruling commission for all organized crime in America.
But a government needs a military. Luciano and Lansky needed an enforcement arm, a group of killers who were detached from the Italian families, a squad that could be deployed anywhere at any time with zero trace back to the bosses. Lepke went to Luciano. He told him about the Brownsville Boys.
He said they were ruthless. He said they were efficient. Luciano agreed. Murder Incorporated was born. But that is not the crazy part. The crazy part is how they operated. This was not random street violence. This was a corporation. Let us break down their contract murder scheme. The opportunity was simple. The syndicate needed untraceable kills.
Local hits drew local police heat. The inside connection was Albert Anastasia. He acted as the bridge between the Mafia bosses and the Brownsville crew. He received the orders. The execution was highly structured. If a mobster in Chicago needed someone gone, he contacted the syndicate. Anastasia passed the contract to Reles.
Reles dispatched killers from Brooklyn to Chicago. They used stolen cars. They used untraceable weapons. The local Chicago mobsters provided the hotel and the weapons. The killers did the job, dropped the guns, and took a train back to New York. The money was strictly regulated.
The killers received a regular salary, $150 a week. They also received bonuses up to $5,000 for high-profile targets. The problem was the chain of command. Too many people knew the links. When one link broke, the entire system collapsed. They ran this massive operation out of a tiny shop, Midnight Rose Candy Store in Brooklyn.
Mrs. Rose Gold ran the counter. She was 60 years old. She sold egg creams and newspapers to children. In the back room, Reles and Anastasia handed out murder contracts. Harry Strauss became their star employee. He traveled the country. He carried a suitcase with a change of clothes and a piece of rope.
He never carried a gun on a train. That was too risky. He improvised. If he needed to kill a guy in Detroit, he used a local knife. If he needed to kill a guy in Miami, he used a fire ax. He committed at least 30 murders personally. Some say it was closer to 100. They perfected the crash car technique.
This is how they managed to escape in crowded cities. The opportunity arose because police response times were getting faster in the 1930s. The inside connection was corrupt local precinct cops who gave them the patrol routes. The execution required two vehicles. Car A contained the shooters. Car B trailed 30 ft behind.
After the hit, Car A sped away. If a police cruiser gave chase, Car B intentionally intercepted the cops. They caused a massive accident. The money was extra hazard pay. Crash car drivers got an extra 500 US dollars per job. The problem was obvious. It left the crash car driver trapped at the scene.
They had to rely on corrupt judges to dismiss the reckless driving charges. By 1935, Murder Incorporated was at the height of its power. They were untouched. They erased anyone who threatened the syndicate. Witnesses, rival gangsters, informants. Consider the hit on Puggy Feinstein. Puggy crossed Anastasia.
Reles gave the contract to Strauss and Goldstein. They invited Puggy to a house in Brooklyn. They offered him a drink. Then they pinned him down. They tied him up. They burned him alive. The forensic report noted that the fire burned for 45 minutes. He was unrecognizable. Or, consider Walter Sage.
He was running slot machines for the syndicate in the Catskills. He started skimming the profits. Reles found out. He sent a crew upstate. They took Sage for a drive in the woods. They stabbed him with an ice pick 32 times. They tied a slot machine to his body. They threw him in a lake. The body sank 20 ft to the bottom.
They were making millions. They felt invincible. But, arrogance always breeds mistakes. Here is where it gets interesting. Louis Lepke Buchalter was making a fortune. He ran the Garment District extortion scheme. The opportunity was that the garment industry relied on non-union labor and vulnerable truck routes. The inside connection was that Lepke controlled the labor union presidents.
The execution was brutal. Lepke ordered his unions to strike. Factories stopped producing. Lepke then approached the factory owners. He offered to break the strike that he secretly started. If they refused, his men poured acid on their expensive fabric. The money was astronomical.
Lepke extracted $1 million US dollars a year from the Garment District. The problem was greed. The fees bankrupt the factory owners. So, they went to the authorities. Thomas Dewey was the special prosecutor in New York. He built a massive case against Lepke. Dewey wanted to destroy the syndicate. Lepke went into hiding.
For 2 years, he moved from safe house to safe house. He was terrified. That terror turned into paranoia. Lepke started ordering hits on his own men. Anyone who could potentially testify against him was targeted. He ordered the death of 12 of his own associates. One of those targets was a man named Danny Red. Danny was a loyal soldier, but Lepke did not trust him.
Lepke sent a crew to erase him. They shot Danny outside his home. He bled out in 4 minutes. This internal purge sent shock waves through the organization. The hit squad was turning on itself. The loyalty was gone. It was every man for himself. Meanwhile, a new district attorney took office in Brooklyn, William O’Dwyer. He realized that to take down the syndicate, he had to take down the Brownsville boys.
He assigned his best detective to the case, John Amen. Amen started picking up lower-level associates. He squeezed them. In 1940, Amen arrested Abe Reles. They charged him with a murder from 1933. Reles sat in an interrogation room. He knew the rules. You do not talk. You do the time. But Reles was tired. He had a wife.
He had kids. He knew Lepke was killing anyone who could be a witness. Reles realized that if he went to prison, Lepke would have him killed behind bars. Reles faced a choice, stay silent and die, or talk and live. On March 23, 1940, Abe Reles made the decision that destroyed the mafia. He opened his mouth.
He did not just give them a few names. He gave them the entire corporate structure of Murder Incorporated. He detailed the contract system. He explained the crash cars. He gave them the locations of the bodies. He named the shooters. He named the bosses. The authorities were stunned. They had no idea the operation was this massive.
Reles confessed to 85 murders personally. He implicated his best friends, Harry Strauss, Bugsy Goldstein, Mendy Weiss. O’Dwyer moved fast. Police raided the Midnight Rose candy store. They swept through Brownsville. They arrested Strauss and Goldstein. They arrested the entire hit squad. The trials began. Reles took the stand.
He looked his former friends in the eye. He testified against Strauss. Strauss tried to fake insanity in the courtroom. He chewed on leather straps. He hummed loudly during the testimony. The jury did not buy it. Reles testified against Goldstein. Goldstein sat there in his tailored suit. He showed no emotion.
The verdicts came back guilty. Strauss and Goldstein were sentenced to death. On June 12, 1941, they walked to the electric chair at Sing Sing prison. Strauss went first. He refused a final meal. The executioner pulled the switch. 2,000 volts coursed through his body. Time of death was 11:06 p.m.
Goldstein went next. He was dead by 11:14 p.m. But Reles was not done. The ultimate prize was Louis Lepke Buchalter. Lepke had surrendered to the FBI hoping to avoid state murder charges. But Reles gave O’Dwyer the evidence to charge Lepke with the murder of a candy store owner named Joseph Rosen.
Lepke was furious. The syndicate was panicking. If Lepke went down, he might flip on Luciano and Lansky. Reles had to be silenced. Which brings us back to the Half Moon Hotel. November 12, 1941. Reles was scheduled to testify against Lepke in 2 weeks. He was guarded by six detectives from the New York Police Department. The room was secure.
The door was locked from the inside. At 6:50 a.m., Reles went out the window. The official police report stated that he was trying to escape. They claimed he tied two bed sheets together, anchored them to a radiator, and tried to lower himself to the street. They said the sheets snapped.
But the forensics told a different story. The knotted sheets were too short to reach the ground. Reles was 5 ft 2. The window sill was high. And the trajectory of the body indicated he was thrown, not dropped. His body landed 20 ft away from the wall of the building. You do not land that far away if you slip.
You land that far away if you are pushed with extreme force. The Mafia had reached the police. The syndicate paid $50,000 US dollars to the police captain in charge of the detail. The guards simply went to sleep or they helped throw him out. The truth died on the pavement with Abe Reles. The press gave him a new nickname, the canary who could sing but could not fly.
Even with Reles dead, the damage was done. His earlier testimony, combined with the testimony of other informants who followed his lead, was enough to convict Louis Lepke Buchalter. Lepke stood trial for the murder of Joseph Rosen. He was found guilty. He appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court.
He lost. On March the 4th of 1944, Louis Lepke Buchalter sat in the electric chair. He was the only major American mob boss to ever be executed by the state. The reign of Murder, Incorporated was over. The Brownsville boys were dead or in prison. The syndicate had to entirely restructure their enforcement operations.
They realized that centralized murder was too dangerous. It created too much exposure. Albert Anastasia survived the fallout. He went on to become the boss of the Gambino family, but karma is patient. In 1957, Anastasia was sitting in a barber chair at the Park Sheraton Hotel. Two men walked in with scarves over their faces.
They shot him 10 times. He died instantly. The men who built the most efficient killing machine in American history all met violent ends. They chased money. They chased power. They thought they could outsmart the system by turning murder into a business.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
