October 25th, 1957. The Grasso Barber Shop, the Park Sheraton Hotel, 877th Avenue, Midtown Manhattan, 10:15 in the morning. Albert Anastasia settled into the barber’s chair. He was 55 years old. He was the boss of what would become the Gambino crime family. He was the founder and operational director of Murder Incorporated, the enforcement arm of the National Crime Syndicate, responsible, by conservative estimates, for between 400 and 1,000 contract killings across the United States.
He was called the Lord High Executioner. He was called the Mad Hatter. He was considered by the FBI to be one of the deadliest criminals in American history. He was getting a haircut. His bodyguard, Anthony Coppola, was not in the shop. He had stepped outside. Why he stepped outside, whether he was told to, whether he was bribed, whether the departure was arranged in advance as part of what was about to happen, was never definitively established.
The barber draped a hot towel over Anastasia’s face. He reclined in the chair. He could not see. Two masked men walked through the front door of the barber shop. They shoved the barber aside. They opened fire. 10 shots. Anastasia was hit multiple times. He rose from the chair. Wounded and disoriented, he lunged at his attackers, but attacked their reflections in the mirror instead of the men themselves.
The glass eyes of a dying man who could not tell the real from the reflection. He fell to the floor of the barber shop. The barber’s chair sits today in the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. The blood stains still visible on the upholstery. 14 witnesses were present in the barber shop that morning.
100 detectives were eventually assigned to the case. No one was ever charged with the murder. The case was never officially solved. But the real answer has never been a genuine mystery to anyone who understood what was happening inside the American Mafia in 1957. The barber chair was not the beginning of this story. It was the last destination of a man whose every decision over the previous 5 years had made him more enemies than he could manage simultaneously.
This is the story of how Albert Anastasia ended up in that chair and why multiple powerful men decided in the same year that he needed to die. To understand why Anastasia was killed, you have to understand what he was, not as a historical figure, as a specific and operational presence in the world of organized crime in 1950s New York.
He was born Umberto Anastasio on September 26th, 1902 in Tropea, a coastal town in Calabria, the southernmost region of mainland Italy. He came to America as a teenager working on cargo ships. He jumped ship in Brooklyn. He was 15. He had no money, no English, and no legal standing in the country he had arrived in.
Within a few years, he had a criminal record, a network of dangerous associates, and a reputation as someone who would kill without hesitation or remorse. His early arrests on murder charges produced an outcome that became part of his legend. In 1920, he was convicted of the murder of a longshoreman on the Brooklyn waterfront and sentenced to death.
He spent 18 months on death row at Sing Sing. Then the four witnesses against him disappeared before his retrial. No witnesses, no conviction. He walked. The experience of having witnesses disappear before they could testify against him became both a personal strategy and a professional one. Anastasia would spend the next 30 years ensuring that the people who could put him away found reasons to be unavailable when courts came calling.
He became the operational director of Murder Incorporated in the 1930s, the enforcement arm that Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky and the heads of the five New York families used to manage disciplinary problems across the assembly, National Crime Syndicate. Murder Inc. operated out of a candy store in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
It received contracts. It fulfilled them. By multiple estimates, it carried out between 400 and 1,000 murders across its operational lifespan. Anastasia ran the killers. He also participated directly in killings when the specific situation required it. He was one of the four gunmen who killed Joe the Boss Masseria at the Nuova Villa Tammaro Restaurant in Coney Island in April of 1931, the murder that ended the Castellammare War and cleared the way for Luciano’s commission. He was present.
He fired. He walked away. He was, in the specific vocabulary of organized crime, a man who got things done. The things he got done were murders. He got them done efficiently, repeatedly, and without apparent psychological consequence. And in 1951, he decided he was done being the underboss. Vincent Mangano had been the boss of what is now called the Gambino Crime Family since the early 1930s.
Anastasia had been his underboss for that entire period, second in command to a man he appears to have found increasingly intolerable. The specific nature of the conflict between them is not fully documented, but its resolution is. In April of 1951, Vincent Mangano’s brother Philip was found shot to death on a Brooklyn beach.
Vincent Mangano himself disappeared the same day and was never found. Nobody was ever recovered. The case was never solved. Anastasia presented himself to the commission and claimed the bosses chair. He argued with the specific kind of logic available to a man who had just eliminated the alternatives that Mangano had been plotting against him first, that self-defense had required preemptive action.
The commission, lacking evidence to the contrary and facing the reality that Anastasia was now running the family, regardless of whether they approved, accepted his explanation and ratified his position. He was now the boss of his own family. He had gotten there by eliminating the man above him, a pattern that would eventually repeat itself in the other direction.
The first years of his rule were relatively stable. He was allied with Frank Costello, who had emerged as the most politically powerful figure in the New York underworld, a man known for his judicial and political connections, rather than his willingness to commit violence personally. Costello and Anastasia formed a complementary partnership.
Costello provided the political infrastructure. Anastasia provided the muscle that made challenging either of them unwise. Their mutual enemy was Vito Genovese. Vito Genovese had been forced to flee America in 1937 to escape a murder charge and had spent the war years in Italy where he donated to Mussolini’s fascist party and was knighted as Commendatore and supplied cocaine to Mussolini’s son.
He had returned to the United States in 1945 after two key witnesses in the original murder case were found dead before trial. He had been acquitted and gone back to work. He wanted power. Specifically, he wanted control of the Luciano family which Costello was running in Luciano’s absence and which bore Luciano’s name.
Genovese had been the family’s underboss before his flight to Italy. He believed the top position was his by right of seniority and by the organizational history that had been interrupted by a murder charge and a decade in exile. Costello stood between him and that position. Anastasia stood beside Costello. Since 1946, Genovese had been building toward a move against Costello.
He had been assembling alliances, identifying points of leverage, waiting for the political climate to shift in his direction. The obstacle was consistently the same, Anastasia. Nobody in the New York underworld was eager to move against Costello while Anastasia was positioned as his protector. But by 1956 and 57, Anastasia had begun accumulating enemies of his own with an efficiency that suggested he was not thinking clearly about the long-term consequences of his actions.
The first and most publicly damaging was the Arnold Schuster affair, February 18th, 1952, Brooklyn, New York. Arnold Schuster was a 24-year-old textile worker and amateur detective who had spotted Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber who had escaped from prison and been on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list on a Brooklyn subway car.
Schuster had followed Sutton, confirmed his identity, and contacted police. Sutton was arrested. Schuster was featured on the news as a civic hero who had recognized and turned in one of America’s most wanted criminals. Anastasia was watching the television coverage from his home. He flew into a rage.
He told people around him that he hated squealers. He could not stand the idea of a civilian turning in a criminal to the police. The fact that Sutton had no connection to organized crime was irrelevant to Anastasia’s fury. The principle of someone talking to the authorities was enough. He ordered Schuster killed. Three weeks later, on March 9th, 1952, Arnold Schuster was shot twice in the groin and once in each eye on a Brooklyn street. He was 24 years old.
He had no criminal record. He had no connection to organized crime. He had done something that most people would consider civic virtue. The murder shocked the entire structure of American organized crime. Not for moral reasons, for practical ones. Every major organized crime figure in the country understood immediately what the killing of Arnold Schuster represented.
It was an attack on a civilian who had cooperated with law enforcement in a completely unrelated matter. If mob bosses started killing civilians who talked to police about ordinary crimes, crimes that had nothing to do with organized crime, the the from law enforcement and from politicians would be exponentially more aggressive than anything the organizations had previously faced.
The public outrage, the political pressure, the investigative resources that would be directed at the mob following the murder of innocent citizens going about their ordinary lives, all of it was unmanageable and unnecessary. Lucky Luciano, who managed his American interests from Italian exile, was reportedly furious. Meyer Lansky, who had built carefully calibrated relationships with law enforcement and politicians that depended on a certain level of discretion, was furious.
The commission was furious. Anastasia had ordered the murder of an innocent man because he did not like seeing someone on television talking to police. The reaction across the National Crime Syndicate was unified. Anastasia had acted dangerously, irrationally, and in a way that threatened the entire organizational structure.
The man known as the Lord High Executioner had executed someone whose death served no purpose beyond the satisfaction of his own irrational anger. Nobody forgot it. Nobody forgave it. The second problem Anastasia created for himself was more directly operational. He was selling Mafia membership. The formal induction into La Cosa Nostra was supposed to be one of the most carefully controlled processes in the organization structure.
A candidate had to be Italian. He had to have demonstrated loyalty and capability across years of association. He had to be vouched for by existing members who staked their own standing on the candidate’s reliability. The commission had to approve. The process was supposed to ensure that only men who could be trusted entered the inner circle.
Anastasia was accepting cash payments reported at $50,000 per induction in exchange for membership regardless of the traditional vetting requirements. He was inducting men who had not been properly vetted, whose loyalties had not been tested, and who had essentially purchased a criminal credential that was supposed to represent something earned rather than bought.
His underboss Frank Scalise was suspected of being the primary mechanism for these transactions, running the actual payments while Anastasia provided the authorization. In 1957, Scalise was shot to death on a Bronx street. When Scalise’s brother Joe threatened revenge, he was also killed, but the damage was done. The Commission’s rules about membership had been openly violated.
Men inside the organization who had earned their positions through years of demonstrated service were watching their status be sold to strangers. The institutional credibility of La Cosa Nostra’s membership structure had been compromised, and the third problem was Meyer Lansky. Anastasia had moved to expand his operations into the Cuban casino market.
He had opened gambling interests in Havana in direct competition with operations that Lansky had spent years building and that he managed on behalf of Lucky Luciano’s interests from American exile. Lansky was not a man who responded to competition by accepting it. He was the financial architect of the National Crime Syndicate, the man whose mathematical genius and his organizational connections had made him indispensable to every major mob figure in America since the 1920s.
His Cuban operations were a central component of the revenue structure he managed for Luciano. Having Anastasia set up competing casinos was not simply a business problem. It was a declaration that Anastasia considered himself outside the normal rules of organized crime’s territorial arrangements. Lansky went to Genovese.
The specific conversation that produced the Anastasia assassination conspiracy is not documented in the way that courtroom testimony or FBI surveillance would have documented it. What is documented is the outcome. Lansky, Genovese, and Carlo Gambino, Anastasia’s own underboss, reached an agreement that Anastasia needed to be removed.
The mechanism was elegant in the way that the most effective mob politics are elegant. Genovese needed Anastasia removed to clear his path to Costello. Gambino needed Anastasia removed to get the bosses chair for himself. Lansky needed Anastasia removed to protect the Cuban casino interests. Three different men with three different motivations had arrived at the same conclusion.
The coalition that formed around that conclusion was sufficiently powerful that the commission, or at least the relevant members of it, approved the operation. What Genovese offered Gambino was the specific inducement that turned Anastasia’s own underboss against him. The deal was simple. Help arrange the killing of your own boss and the family will be yours.
Carlo Gambino, who had served as Anastasia’s underboss, who had built his position inside the organization under Anastasia’s nominal leadership, accepted the arrangement and switched sides. He gave the contract to Caporegime, Joseph Biondo. Biondo gave it to a squad of Gambino-connected shooters led by Stephen Armone and Stephen Grammauta.
The triggermen on the morning of October 25th have been debated by historians and law enforcement for decades. Joey Gallo, the unpredictable Brooklyn gangster who would later be shot to death himself at Umberto’s Clam House, is the most commonly cited name. It has never been conclusively proven. What is not disputed is the morning itself.
October 25th, 1957. The Grasso Barber Shop, Park Sheraton Hotel, 10:15 in the morning. Anthony Copa stepped outside. The barber applied the hot towel. Albert Anastasia reclined in the chair with his eyes covered and his face wrapped in warm linen. In a state of relaxed vulnerability that the Lord High Executioner, the man who had ordered hundreds of murders across a 30-year career, had apparently decided was safe to inhabit.
Two masked men walked through the door. They fired. He rose and attacked the mirror. He died on the floor. The barber’s chair is in Las Vegas. The barber shop is a Starbucks. No one was charged. No trial was held. No formal accounting was ever produced in a courtroom. What happened next, however, tells you everything you need to know about who arranged it and whether the decision was considered a success.
Carlo Gambino became the boss of the family that now bore his name. He ran it for the next 19 years with the specific disciplined intelligence that Anastasia had never possessed. He discouraged drug trafficking. He kept his profile low. He drove a Buick. He attended mass. He died in his bed in Massapequa, Long Island in October of 1976 at age 74, having served less than 2 years in prison across a career that spanned five decades.
Vito Genovese achieved his immediate goal. Frank Costello resigned the family leadership after the assassination attempt in May of 1957 and Genovese took control of what became the Genovese crime family. His celebration was short-lived. The Apalachin meeting that he organized to formalize his new standing, held at Joseph Barbara’s estate in upstate New York on November 14th, 1957, just 20 days after the Anastasia murder, turned into a catastrophe when state troopers discovered it and identified over 60 of the most powerful organized
crime figures in America in a single afternoon. The public exposure and the law enforcement scrutiny that followed were precisely what everyone had feared from the Schuster murder five years earlier. Genovese was arrested in 1958 on narcotics charges, a prosecution that his former allies, including Gambino and Costello and Lansky, reportedly helped arrange by luring him into a drug deal with a government informant.
He died in federal prison in February of 1969. Meyer Lansky retained his Cuban operations until Fidel Castro’s revolution eliminated them entirely in 1959. He spent the rest of his life navigating between the United States and Israel, dying in 1983 at age 81.
