Playboy's History of Organized Crime Part VII: Murder Inc.

Gang buster on the go!

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Lepke gives up to Hoover!

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Dewey and O'Dwyer hit mob murderers!

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Kid twist reles: Canary sings but can't fly!

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Crime does not pay!

March 22, 1940, was like most days at the Brooklyn district attorney's office on the fourth floor of the borough's Municipal Building. There were 100 or more cases in various stages; some attorneys were getting set for court appearances, others were just beginning the painstaking research that might lead to indictment. At 5:30, as much of the staff was preparing to go home, a call came for Burton Turkus, chief assistant district attorney. A dark-haired, dark-eyed, obviously pregnant woman in a beige coat with a wolf-fur collar had walked into the outer office and was demanding an interview. Turkus went out to meet her and recognized her immediately. Her name was Rose Reles. She told Turkus, "I want to talk to the district attorney personally." William O'Dwyer, a former countycourt judge, had just been elected chief prosecutor of Brooklyn. The assistant D.A. led Mrs. Reles directly into O'Dwyer's office. "My husband," she nervously announced, "wants an interview with the law."

Her husband was Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, a small, squat, hard-eyed thug, and the law had been practically salivating to talk to him, without much expectation of doing so. Reles was not the kind of hoodlum who turned into a canary. In 1940, he was 32 and had been in trouble more than half of his life. His rap sheet ran over several pages and listed 42 arrests in the previous 16 years--six for murder, seven for assault, six for robbery or burglary, and others for possession of guns, possession of narcotics, vagrancy, disorderly conduct--almost every crime in the book. And he had already served six prison terms without emitting so much as an implicating whisper.

So Reles was a tough guy who had never cracked before and who nobody thought would crack now, in the early months of 1940, despite a new murder charge against him. The charge had come about through bizarre circumstances: A smalltime crook named Harry "The Mock" Rudolph was sitting on Rikers Island in the East River serving time for a minor crime that didn't even warrant the train trip up to Sing Sing or one of New York's other major prisons. While in his cell, Rudolph fretted, fumed and then, for reasons not even he could later explain, started talking of some crimes he knew about, particularly the 1933 murder in Brooklyn of an old friend, a no-account thief named Alex "Red" Alpert. That seven-year-old murder had so faded into obscurity that the detectives who went to interview Rudolph had first to check the files to make sure there had, indeed, been such a crime and then to check out the circumstances. What little the yellowed records showed was amplified by Rudolph, who then gave the police the names of the killers: Reles, Martin "Bugsy" Goldstein and Anthony "Dukey" Maffetore, all three of whom were known quite well to the cops--Goldstein had been arrested 34 times, Maffetore 15, their records rivaling Reles'. Without corroboration, the Rudolph story was not enough to convict, but it was enough to get indictments and the O'Dwyer office did just that, charging Reles, Goldstein and Maffetore with the murder of Alpert. Hoping that at least one of them would crack, confess and implicate the others, the three were lodged in separate jails in different parts of the city. Then, under the direction of Turkus, the Brooklyn prosecutor's staff began rigorous interrogations that covered practically every unsolved crime in the previous decade in Brooklyn.

It was Reles, the toughest of them all, who finally broke. The word from his wife sent Turkus scurrying to Manhattan, where Reles was sprung from his isolated cell at The Tombs. Like Rose, he refused at first to talk to anyone but O'Dwyer. In the privacy of the district attorney's office, he declared that he was completely unworried, that he could never be convicted of anything, because all O'Dwyer had was the testimony of Rudolph, and under New York law, the testimony of an accomplice must be corroborated "by such other evidence as tends to connect the defendant with the commission of a crime" and / or the testimony of a nonaccomplice. O'Dwyer had neither.

Why, then, had Reles demanded the interview? He was concerned that a lengthy investigation might well turn up corroborating evidence to support Rudolph's story and that at any trial his record would certainly turn both judge and jury against him. Some years earlier, when he had been convicted of a relatively minor crime, the judge had said, "Reles is one of the most vicious characters we have had in years. I am convinced he will eventually either be sentenced to prison for life or be put out of the way by some good detective with a couple of bullets."

Reles knew, too, that many of the gangsters who had cooperated with crime buster Thomas E. Dewey, the famous special prosecutor who became Manhattan district attorney, had received immunity from prosecution and the chance to start a new life. Reles was certain that the new Brooklyn district attorney, competing for headlines with Dewey, would be just as receptive and no less generous to anyone who could advance him professionally. So he had come to O'Dwyer to strike a bargain. "I can make you the biggest man in the country," he declared.

Then he lapsed into silence. He would talk no more unless the room were cleared and he were strictly alone with the D.A. O'Dwyer agreed. In their private conference, Reles presented O'Dwyer with nonnegotiable demands. He wanted what Dewey had given his witnesses--immunity from prosecution, dismissal of all charges pending and the guarantee that once he had kept his promises he could walk out the door a free man. If O'Dwyer would do all that, he would tell everything he knew and would testify fully in court; otherwise, he'd silently go back to The Tombs and take his chances. O'Dwyer hedged for a moment, talked to Turkus nervously and then accepted.

Reles was immediately put under round-the-clock police guard in a suite at the Hotel Bossert in Brooklyn, near O'Dwyer's office, and later moved several times, ending up at the Half Moon Hotel at Coney Island. Each day, he was taken to the office, where he poured forth a torrent; the first gush, to be followed by many more, lasted 12 days and killed 25 stenographic notebooks.

"I can tell you about fifty guys that got hit," Reles boasted. "I was on the inside." (According to Turkus, by the time Reles finished, he had talked about more than 200 murders all around the country, murders of which he had personal knowledge. O'Dwyer was somewhat more modest in his recollections; he said that Reles cited only 83 murders.) Reles told his enthralled listeners he would provide witnesses, sometimes an accomplice and sometimes even a nonaccomplice, to corroborate his stories, and he promised also to show Turkus where to find corroborating evidence.

Then he began to give the details. "He had the most amazing memory I have ever encountered," Turkus said. "He could recount minutely what he ate at a particular meal years before, or where he was and with whom, and all without a single reference or reminder of any kind. And investigation proved him entirely accurate, down to the last pinpoint check, on every detail he mentioned.... The Kid rattled off names, places, facts, data on one manslaughter after the other, days on end, without once missing up. He recalled not only the personnel involved but decent people who had an unwitting part in some angle of the crime." Reles also spewed out everything he knew about organized crime--how the Mob had taken over the Garment District, both the manufacturers and the unions, and how it maintained its control through extortion, threats, bribery and murder; the intimate workings of the underworld's juice-loan operations. He was a limitless font of knowledge and data about a score of rackets and a legion of hoodlums who specialized in intimidation, assault and murder--Harry "Happy" Maione, Harry "Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss, Frank "The Dasher" Abbandando, Seymour "Blue Jaw" Magoon. Vito Gurino, Albert "Allie" Tannenbaum, Charlie "The Bug" Workman, Louis Capone (no relation to Al). Emanuel "Mendy" Weiss, Maffetore and Goldstein.

But what made Reles so valuable was not this parade. He had been a man in the middle ranks, between the bosses and the troops; he had taken orders and transmitted them to others; he had been a trusted aide of Louis "Lepke" Buchalter; he was privy to the thoughts and decisions of such top men as Albert Anastasia, Benny "Bugsy" Siegel, Joe Adonis, Charlie "Lucky" Luciano, Vince Mangano and others. "We are like this with the Purple Mob," he told Turkus, holding his fingers together as he cited the terrors of Detroit. "We work with Bugsy Siegel in California and with Lepke and the troops he's got. We are with Charlie Lucky. With the Jersey troop, too, and Chicago and Cleveland."

If anyone at that time still had doubts that crime had been organized and that on the national scene there was an interlocking directorship, Reles dispelled them. He and his group of enforcers and killers were employed directly by the national Syndicate, but their services were also available, on a contract basis for a fee, to any member of the Syndicate anywhere in the country. They provided custom murders with any weapon--a gun, a knife, an ice pick, a bomb, a garrote--and they would even rob or hijack to order. Their work was so good and so efficient, Reles boasted, that "all the big shots were satisfied."

Reles opened a door and the authorities rushed in eagerly. Armed with his testimony, and with evidence he showed them where and how to get (including long-missing bodies buried in Sullivan County in the Catskills), O'Dwyer's office and the Brooklyn police swept up almost everyone Reles named and proposed for many a one-way ride in the electric chair. This inspired more singing, and the star of the new crooners was Allie Tannenbaum, whose own string of (continued on page 187) Murder, Inc. (continued from page 124) murders was as long as Reles', maybe even longer. In exchange for his evidence and testimony, he, too, was promised immunity and eventual freedom. (After his performance, Tannenbaum faded from view, abandoned his occupation as hired killer and later turned up as a respectable salesman in Atlanta.)

And so the murder prosecutions began and, as Reles had predicted, quickly transformed O'Dwyer from a little-known D.A. into a famous crime buster, a man to equal Dewey. All of which caused concern, but also amusement, in the higher ranks of the underworld Syndicate, particularly among Frank Costello and his friends; they had supplied thousands of dollars and crews of hardnosed workers for O'Dwyer's campaign and, for reasons of their own, would continue to support his political interests in the future.

With Reles the star witness, Maione and Abbandando both went to the electric chair for the brutal murder of a loan shark named George "Whitey" Rudnick--they had stabbed him 63 times with an ice pick and knives, shattered his skull and then, for good measure, strangled him. But, as Reles explained it, Rudnick had earned his fate; he had been a stool pigeon and Lepke had ordered his end.

Reles was the lead canary, too. When Pittsburgh Phil Strauss and Buggsy Goldstein got the chair for garroting and cremating a smalltime gambler named Irving "Puggy" Feinstein. Just why Feinstein was killed Reles wasn't too sure. The murder, he said, had been done on orders from Anastasia, who had been given the contract by Mangano, co-boss with his brother Phil of the Brooklyn family in which Anastasia was chief lieutenant. All Reles knew was that "This guy crossed Vince in something." Inexplicably, nobody bothered to follow up this enticing bit of testimony. Neither O'Dwyer nor anyone else ever asked either Anastasia or Mangano what they knew about Feinstein.

It was Reles, backed up by Tannenbaum, who pinned the murder of Dutch Schultz on Charlie Workman. When Workman heard all the testimony, he changed his plea to guilty and got off with a life sentence instead of the chair.

But these were all small-timers, as far as the prosecutors were concerned. They made headlines and reaped some good publicity. But Dewey had gotten Luciano, and if O'Dwyer were to match him, he had to nail somebody of like stature in the underworld. The man he was racing Dewey for now was Louis Lepke.

His mother had called him "Lepkeleh," an affectionate Yiddish diminutive meaning Little Louis. But when people talked about Lepke, they did so not with affection but with fear. By late in the Thirties, with Al Capone and Luciano in prison and Schultz buried, Lepke was perhaps the most notorious criminal in the United States, the object of a massive manhunt spurred by offers of rewards for his capture dead or alive.

Buchalter had been born in 1897 on New York's Lower Last Side, one of several children of poor Jewish immigrants who were barely scratching a subsistence out of a small hardware business. As a child, he earned himself a reputation as a proficient sneak thief who pilfered from every neighborhood candy store. He was still a child when his father died and most of the family moved West, to Denver. Lepke stayed behind, living with one relative and then another, and finally quitting school and going out on his own. On his own meant following a career in crime; by the time he was 18, he had been arrested three times for burglary and had served a two-month sentence at the Cheshire Reformatory in Connecticut. Within the next four years, operating in and around New York City, he was arrested several more times and served two sentences in Sing Sing. But after that, it would be 20 years before he would see the inside of a cell again. Despite 11 subsequent arrests for crimes ranging up to and including murder, between 1919 and 1939 his record was not stained by a single lasting conviction.

The fortune to be made in booze had attracted most of the young hoodlums his age at the beginning of Prohibition. But not Lepke. He and another young thug, Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro, took a different route to wealth and power. Both relished the use of strong-arm methods--the blackjack, the gun, the bottle of acid, the knife, anything that would lead to a flow of blood. As one associate of the time commented, "Lep loves to hurt people."

In the early Twenties, they linked up with a third young advocate of violence, Jacob "Little Augie" Orgen (who was shot down in 1927), and set up shop as strikebreakers for hire to Manhattan garment manufacturers fighting the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. They were so good at their work that soon they were serving both sides, hiring out also as union organizers and then taking control of union locals.

Racketeering in one industry quickly leads to racketeering in others, as Lepke and Shapiro were quick to perceive. Bread was a common necessity, but bread made stale by long delays in deliveries was not good for much more than stuffing turkeys. So Lepke moved in on the bakery-drivers' union and then put the pressure on the bakers to pay up, a penny or more a loaf, to get their products delivered fresh to market. The bakers paid. Lepke moved on. Working with Willie Bioff and the Chicago mob to gain control of the movie-projectionists' union, he extorted millions from motion-picture moguls. By the mid-Thirties, his industrial racketeering had spread clear across the New York economic scene. He was extorting, threatening, controlling to one degree or another, on his own and in combination with others, the leather business, the handbag makers, the shoe makers, the milliners, taxis, poultry, cleaning and dyeing, restaurants and more. There were official estimates that legitimate businessmen were paying Lepke between $5,000,000 and $10,000,000 a year for the right to operate without interference.

This much had been known or suspected for several years. But not until Reles started singing did the authorities begin to appreciate Lepke's position in the Syndicate and his role as chief enforcer of discipline and internal policy. It was to Lepke that his peers turned when the need arose to enforce underworld rules, and his efficiency in doing so won him the title The Judge.

Yet there were indications that Lepke would not retain his power and stature for long. Unlike Meyer Lansky and Costello, or even his ofttime Garment District partner Tommy Lucchese, Lepke was not content with a life in the shadows. He relished the spotlight, loved reading about himself in the newspapers. He lived lavishly and conspicuously, almost courting attention. Thus, when Luciano went off to Dannemora, it was only natural that Lepke would be the next target for the ambitious Manhattan prosecutor Tom Dewey.

Lepke's troubles stemmed not merely from Dewey. There were others who wanted him just as badly, including the Federal Government. So tight was Lepke's noose around several industries that the Justice Department had succeeded in indicting him and Shapiro for restraint of trade in violation of the antitrust laws. In 1936, both were convicted, sentenced to two years and fined $10,000. Shapiro took the rap and went to prison, and then picked up an additional term when later convicted of extorting bakers. But Lepke appealed, went free on $3000 bond and then disappeared while the courts listened to his lawyers. A Federal appeals court overturned his conviction in 1937.

But the heat on Lepke was still intense. A grand jury, directed by the Manhattan district attorney, indicted Lepke and Shapiro for bakery extortion; the Justice Department announced that it was rewriting the antitrust indictments with the intention of bringing him to trial on new racketeering charges; and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics entered the picture as well. It had uncovered evidence that Lepke was the man behind a massive narcotics-smuggling enterprise that involved extensive bribery of United States Customs agents and had managed to smuggle at least $10,000,000 worth of heroin into the country from the Far East.

Surrounded by so much trouble all at once, Lepke decided to extend his vacation--not a vacation from business or even from New York but merely from public view. In 1937, he sought help from his close friend Anastasia, who sheltered him in several places in Brooklyn during a two-year nationwide manhunt. More than 1,000,000 wanted posters were distributed all over the country. Dewey, calling Lepke "the worst industrial racketeer in America," announced that he would pay $25,000 to anyone who brought the gangster in, dead or alive. And J. Edgar Hoover, apparently alarmed that so many others--Dewey, Narcotics Bureau director Harry An-slinger, New York City police commissioner Lewis Valentine--were stealing the headlines from him, chimed in with a $5000 reward for "the most dangerous criminal in the United States," although the only claim the FBI had to him was as a fugitive from justice suspected of crossing state lines. There were rumors that Lepke was hiding out in Florida, Arkansas, California, Chicago, that he had left the United States and was in Cuba, Poland, the Far East.

But nobody could flush him, and as the search intensified during 1938 and into 1939, investigators took the extraordinary step of questioning his friends in the underworld. An agent went to Havana to see Lansky, then in the process of developing his Caribbean gambling empire with the aid and partnership of Cuban president Fulgencio Batista. Lansky dismissed the Federal man with a smile; it had been years since he had seen Lepke, he said, and all he knew about the wanted man was that he wasn't in Havana. When Costello was interviewed, he, too, professed complete ignorance. Longy Zwillman was called before a special grand jury in Newark. "I know Lepke for a long time," Zwillman said, "but I haven't seen him in three, four years. So far as I know, he was a pleasant fellow and clean morally." The investigators even went up to Dannemora to talk to Luciano. He laughed at them.

But a good many people knew exactly where Lepke was and what he was doing, and that his continuing underground existence was beginning to make him paranoid. He saw signs in every word and action that others were trying to encroach on his domain, and he was taking steps not merely to repel the invaders, real or imagined, but to strengthen his own position at others' expense. At times during these years, Reles served as Lepke's chauffeur and bodyguard, and he told of the night in 1938 when he drove Lepke from his hide-out to a Brooklyn meeting attended by Anastasia, Lucchese, Willie Moretti, Jerry Catena, Zwillman and several others. Lucchese had demanded the session and he wanted to know what Lepke was doing in the Garment District. When Luciano had been around, Lepke had always been co-operative. But now Luciano was in Dannemora and Lepke was tightening his personal control of the garment industry, even from his hide-out, and trying to squeeze out Lucchese and others who had worked so closely with him through the years. And he was doing the same thing in his other rackets. Lucchese demanded that Lepke start respecting the old agreements, especially since these were backed by the national Combination, but Lepke refused to listen. He took the position that everyone was trying to cut him out. "Nobody moved in on me while I was on the outside," Reles quoted him as saying, "and nobody's gonna do it just because I'm on the lam. There's no argument. The clothing thing is mine." And with those words, Lepke rose from his chair, stalked out of the room and ordered Reles to drive him back to his sanctuary.

There, surrounded by his and Anastasia's guns, Lepke continued to rule his empire and muscle in on friends he believed were trying to take it for themselves. And he was trying to cover his tracks. It was his theory, voiced often and loudly, that while Dewey and the Federal Government could both build up strong cases against him, those cases would collapse without the testimony of certain vital witnesses. So, Reles explained to Turkus, "Lep gave us eleven contracts for witnesses when he was on the lam. We knocked off seven of them."

It became a race between Lepke's killers and the forces of the law. Could Leake be tracked down and captured while there were still live witnesses to testify against him? Hoover sprang FBI agents from other jobs to pursue Lepke; agents of the Narcotics Bureau intensified their hunt; Dewey's men and special squads of Valentine's New York City police devoted full time to the search.

Then another tactic was tried--heavy pressure on Lepke's underworld colleagues. Bookies who had been operating comfortably, paying off police and politicians, were suddenly being raided and jailed; well-protected betting banks and numbers operators now found cops camped on their doorsteps. Underworld figures of any note were rousted, brought in for questioning, harassed continuously. The authorities deliberately fostered the rumor that the heat would continue, would be stepped up even more, that the gangsters would no longer have room or time to breathe, let alone operate, unless the Lepke problem were brought to a satisfactory conclusion. When some civil liberties groups protested to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia about the unconstitutional harassment by police, he summoned Commissioner Valentine to the meeting, turned to him and said, "Lewie, these people claim you violate the Constitution."

Valentine replied, "So do the gangsters." With that, La Guardia sent the civil libertarians packing.

And when another group came to complain that mobster Ciro Terranova was being prevented from even entering the city, La Guardia told Valentine, in the group's presence, "Terranova has a perfect right to come into New York City. Let him come in, by all means. Wait until he gets to 125th Street--and then go to work on him." Whether La Guardia's actions were part of the pressure to bring about the surrender of Lepke or just the mayor's well-known style of law enforcement is impossible to say. But such harassment had its effect, especially when the word spread that the heat would dissipate once Lepke was in the hands of authorities.

For Lansky and Costello, and for others as well, this was an opportunity to solve a number of problems with a single stroke. Both had worked with Lepke since the early Twenties and had grown to despise his violence, braggadocio and contrariness. Moreover, if he were put away, the heat presumably would be turned off; not only would business return to normal but Lepke's empire would be thrown into the hopper to be parceled out among the other leaders.

So, in secret council with Lucchese, Zwillman, Moretti, Adonis and other leaders, Lansky and Costello argued that Lepke must be persuaded to come out of hiding and surrender. If he could not be so persuaded, they said, then the problem would have to be solved in the classic Lepke fashion--kill him. The only voice to defend Lepke, to argue that he had served the Combination too long and too well, was that of Anastasia, who would soon win the public title Lord High Executioner of Murder, Inc. Not only were Anastasia and Lepke old friends and partners in the enforcement/murder business but Anastasia hated Lansky. He could not abide the man's display of knowledge, his polished manners, his superiority, his preachments against force, his condescension toward Anastasia in particular and Italians in general.

Despite Lepke's liabilities and the power of Lansky, nobody wanted to go to war with Anastasia; but somehow he had to be persuaded. The one man he might listen to was Luciano, who had been the boss when he was free and who still wielded power from his isolated cell in Dannemora. Costello took the problem directly to Charlie Lucky in the Dannemora visiting room, where the two hammered out a plan. What Lepke most feared was falling into the hands of Dewey. On the basis of Dewey's prosecution of Luciano and his general demeanor, Lepke was convinced that the racket buster would send him away forever and, indeed, Dewey was proclaiming that he had enough on Lepke to put him in prison for 500 years. Lepke was less concerned over the Federal indictments. He knew he was certain to be convicted in Federel court, but he was sure that even on a narcotics charge, he would get off with only a couple of years. So the plan was to persuade Lepke that a deal had been struck with the Government; if he turned himself in to Federal agents and stood trial for narcotics, the Feds had promised they would not turn him over to Dewey.

Now a go-between had to be found who could convince Lepke that such an arrangement had been made, and Lansky had just the man. His name was Moe "Dimples" Wolensky, a shady character who had worked in gambling enterprises at various times for both Lepke and Lansky, who was trusted by everyone who knew him and who was known to have contacts with the law. Wolensky was sent to Lepke's hide-out with the message that the national Syndicate had worked out a fix with J. Edgar Hoover. If Lepke would surrender personally to Hoover (thereby embellishing the G man's reputation, which was suffering from competition and continuing failure to track Lepke down), Dewey would never get his hands on him.

Lepke bought this idea. But Anastasia didn't. He continued urging Lepke to hold out; as long as he was free, he was safe; in the hands of the authorities, anything could happen. Once more, Luciano intervened. Through Adonis, he sent word to Anastasia that the deal was set, that business demanded Lepke accede to it and that Anastasia, despite his misgivings, go along. At last, Anastasia agreed and even took a hand in the melodramatics that followed. Contact was made with Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist of the New York Daily Mirror and a close friend of Hoover's. Winchell was advised that he could share in the glory if he would get in touch with the FBI director and help work out the details of the surrender.

Just before ten o'clock on August 24, 1939, a sweltering Manhattan summer night more than two years after Lepke had disappeared, a car driven by Anastasia stopped at 101 Third Street in Brooklyn, picked up a passenger wearing his coat collar upturned and huge sunglasses to hide his face. Anastasia drove rapidly across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. At Fifth Avenue and 28th Street, he slowed, spotted a parked car and pulled to the curb a short distance beyond. The rear door of his car opened, the passenger stepped out, paused for a last word with Anastasia and then walked rapidly to the waiting parked car. When he reached it, Winchell, behind the steering wheel, leaned across and stared at him intently. Then he turned to his stocky companion in the back and said, "Mr. Hoover, this is Lepke."

Hoover nodded, reached across and opened the rear door, motioning Lepke to enter. "How do you do," he said brusquely.

"Glad to meet you, I'm sure," Lepke said as he slid into the car next to Hoover. Any pleasure he might have felt at the meeting immediately vanished. With Hoover's first words, Lepke discovered that there was no fix, no deal, at least where he was concerned--or that Hoover either wasn't admitting to a deal or didn't know about one. Lepke was informed that he would be tried promptly by Federal authorities on the narcotics charge. Lepke expected that. Then, to Lepke's horror, Hoover said that after the trial, he would be turned over to Dewey for prosecution on bakery-racket charges. "I wanted to get out of that car again as soon as I heard," Lepke later said. But that was impossible. For, as Winchell turned on the car lights and started the engine, a fleet of cars, filled with FBI agents, pulled out of every side street and nearby parking space, surrounded Winchell's car and escorted it to the FBI offices.

(If Lepke had been taken, so, too, had Dimples Wolensky. As soon as they learned that the deal was a phony, Lepke's friends began to search for him. The search took time, but in 1943, on orders of Anastasia, Wolensky was shot down on a Manhattan street corner.)

Within a month of his dramatic surrender, Lepke was convicted of narcotics conspiracy and sentenced to 14 years in Federal prison at Leavenworth. Hardly had sentence been pronounced when the shaken gangster was turned over to Dewey, who saw him as another stepping-stone on the road to Albany and, ultimately, the White House. Using all the legal legerdemain at his command, Dewey tore the stunned Lepke to shreds in the courtroom and obtained a sentence that matched Luciano's--30 years to life. Then Lepke was returned to Leavenworth to serve out the time he owed the Federal Government before paying his even greater debt to the state of New York.

But there was more to come for Lepke, and for Anastasia and Siegel. By now, Reles was singing his song in Brooklyn to ambitious O'Dwyer, whose political objective was the city-hall chair occupied by La Guardia.

On the basis of evidence supplied by Reles and Tannenbaum, O'Dwyer in May of 1940 demanded that the Federal authorities turn Lepke over to him to stand trial, along with Mendy Weiss and Louis Capone, for murder. The murder was that of a Brooklyn candy-store owner named Joseph Rosen in 1936. Rosen had once been an uncooperative trucker in the Garment District and Lepke had put him out of business. Instead of accepting this gracefully, Rosen started telling friends he was going to take his grievances to Dewey, and word of this soon got back to Lepke. According to Reles, Tannenbaum and a couple of other canaries, Lepke gave the Rosen contract to Weiss, Capone and Strauss, and the three fulfilled it in Brooklyn one morning in September 1936 by filling Rosen's body with 17 bullets.

Turkus prosecuted Lepke, Weiss and Capone in the fall of 1941, with Tannenbaum as the key witness. Reles had been scheduled to testify but was to die mysteriously before his opportunity came. He didn't die soon enough to save Lepke, however, especially with Tannenbaum still warbling. Lepke, Weiss and Capone were all convicted and on March 4, 1944, the three died in the Sing Sing electric chair.

Reles' death did save Siegel and Anastasia, however. His testimony was the key to putting both in the death house.

In the course of their narratives, Reles and Tannenbaum had talked often about the demise of a onetime Lepke enforcer named Harry Greenberg and variously known as Harry Schacter and Harry Schober but more familiarly called Big Greenie. When the heat was on Lepke early in 1939, Greenberg took off for the cooler climes of Canada. Unfortunately, he soon ran short of funds and hinted to the boys in New York that if he didn't get some money, he might decide to return for a little talk with Dewey.

That was a mistake, and Tannenbaum was given the contract to correct it. By the time he reached Canada, however, Big Greenie had disappeared. He surfaced a little later in California, where Siegel had taken up residence in 1937 as the local overlord for the national Combination. In those days, the West Coast was still considered virgin territory, and who better to deflower it than the great underworld lover, Siegel? He had traveled West several times, had liked the climate, the women, the easy money of the movie colony. He had talked constantly about its potential and had found open ears among his Syndicate associates in the East, particularly Zwillman, who was in love with Hollywood and with one of its biggest stars, Jean Harlow. So Siegel went West, where he was an immediate success and an immediate celebrity, becoming close friends with scores of Hollywood personalities, including George Raft, Wendy Barrie, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant and many more (some of whom would later put their money into Siegel enterprises).

Celebrity that he was, Siegel was first and foremost a member of the Syndicate, privy to its lore and responsive to its bidding. When he learned of the fugitive Greenberg's presence in California, he hurried East to confer with Adonis, Zwillman and company. Siegel offered to take on the contract himself. But Tannenbaum had been awarded it, so he was dispatched West, with Siegel's help and logistical support. In Tannenbaum's possession were two guns stolen from a New Jersey warehouse and delivered to him personally by Zwillman as he boarded his plane. Once in Los Angeles, Tannenbaum made a couple of tries at Greenberg but failed. So Siegel brought in another gunman, one Frankie Carbo (who later would come to prominence as the manager of several boxing champions and contenders). On November 22, 1939, Tannenbaum drove Carbo and Siegel to 1804 Vista Del Mar in Los Angeles shortly after dark. A second car, driven by a friend of Siegel's, no gangster himself but a thrill seeker who relished the company of the notorious, a man named Champ Segal, parked a short distance down the block. Each night, adhering to a fixed schedule, Greenberg made his only trip out of doors, a short drive to pick up the newspapers. He had already left when Siegel, Carbo, Tannenbaum and Segal arrived. As they waited, Big Greenie's old Ford turned the corner and pulled up in front of the house. As Greenberg stepped out, a door of the waiting car flew open, Siegel and Carbo stepped out, pulled out the two guns Zwillman had sent West with Tannenbaum and emptied them into Greenberg.

Why Carbo and Tannenbaum participated is easily explained; they were, after all, hired killers doing their job. Not so easily explained, though, is why Siegel decided to participate and dirty his executive hands with the actual commission of a violent crime. A couple of years later, Los Angeles County deputy district attorney Arthur Veitch offered his own theory to a grand jury seeking to indict Siegel. "In gangster parlance," he declared, "Siegel is what is known as a 'cowboy.' This is the way the boys have of describing a man who is not satisfied to frame a murder but actually has to be in on the kill in person."

It was more than a year later that Tannenbaum told the story of the murder of Big Greenie to Turkus. It was good and convincing, but not convicting, for Tannenbaum had been an accomplice. But then, as usual, there was Reles, a nonpar-ticipant, to come through with corroboration. He said he knew all the details from the very beginning. Turkus turned the evidence over to California authorities and then, with O'Dwyer's approval, flew Reles and Tannenbaum to Los Angeles to testify before the grand jury. Five murder indictments were returned, against Siegel, Carbo and Segal as participants and against Lepke and Weiss as the men who had given out the contract.

When the police went to arrest Siegel and Carbo, they were nowhere to be found. When they finally picked Siegel up at his Beverly Hills mansion some months later, he professed no concern. His scores of Hollywood friends visited him regularly in jail, where he was permitted almost complete freedom, and on several occasions he even walked out of the jail to spend a night on the town. Then in December 1940, the newly elected Los Angeles County district attorney, John Dockweiler, moved for dismissal of all the indictments. He announced that he had learned that a prime witness had lied, so he didn't have a solid case. What others learned was that Siegel had contributed $30,000 to Dockweiler's campaign. (It was later rumored that Siegel became so impatient at Dockweiler's delay in dismissing the indictments that he demanded a refund--and got it.)

If Dockweiler had no desire to prosecute, others wanted to very badly. Requests were made to O'Dwyer to ship Tannenbaum and Reles back to the Coast for a new grand-jury appearance and new indictments. At first, O'Dwyer refused. There were too many other calls for their services in his own jurisdiction, he explained, and he didn't want them 3000 miles from Brooklyn, where they might get lost. The California authorities persisted, and finally in September 1941, O'Dwyer relented to the extent of letting Tannenbaum but not Reles make another trip West. New indictments were obtained, this time naming only Siegel and Carbo, and once more Siegel went underground. But not for long. Suddenly, in October, he turned himself in. Then even more suddenly, in November, Reles--and the case against Siegel--went out a sixth-floor window. Once more, Dockweiler asked for dismissal of the indictments and Bugsy went free again to build the Syndicate's empire on the West Coast. (Carbo was later tried for the Greenberg murder, but the jury, after deliberating for 53 hours, could not reach a verdict.)

The death of Reles also sprang Anastasia. Throughout his marathon ramblings, he had frequently described Anastasia as the man who not only ordered killings but participated in some of them. Tannenbaum, too, talked constantly about Anastasia. Unfortunately, much of what they said was only rumor that they could not substantiate. Anastasia had been good at covering his tracks. He had, it seemed, slipped up only one time, but what Reles knew about that incident could have sent him to the electric chair.

For a number of years, Morris "Moishe" Diamond, the business agent for a teamster local, had been resisting the encroachment of the racketeers into his Garment District bailiwick. By early 1939, he was so distressed by the gangster take-overs that he started threatening to talk to Dewey. Anastasia wasted no time. He not only ordered Diamond's extermination but personally gave the order to shoot when Diamond was cornered on a Brooklyn street in May 1939. One of those present had been Tannenbaum.

Reles had not been there, but he could corroborate: He knew the participants and had heard their accounts of the killing; he had been present when the murder was planned and, most important, he had heard Anastasia give the orders.

It seemed to be O'Dwyer's big moment. Not only was he ready to convict Lepke but he was about to get Anastasia as well--and make Dewey look like a small-timer by comparison. His office, O'Dwyer announced, had the "perfect murder case" against Anastasia, and he ordered the arrest of the underworld's Lord High Executioner. Only Anastasia, predictably, couldn't be found. Embarrassed, O'Dwyer issued his assurances that as soon as Anastasia was arrested, he would be tried, convicted and sent to the electric chair.

But before anyone could arrest the fugitive, Reles took his mystery flight and the case collapsed. On Wednesday morning, November 12, 1941, Reles was comfortably ensconced in his bed in room 623 at the Half Moon Hotel at Coney Island, waiting for his summons to appear at the Lepke trial. As usual, his door was open. He had his regular guard--18 men, divided into three shifts, had been assigned to protect him. Sometime before seven in the morning, the hotel's assistant manager thought he heard a thud on the extension roof beneath Reles' room but paid no attention to it. Sometime close to seven, a detective looked into Reles' room and the Kid was in bed, asleep. At ten after seven, Detective Victor Robbins checked. This time, the bed was empty, the window was open and Reles was gone. He rushed to the window and looked down. What he saw, 42 feet below on the extension roof, was the twisted body of Reles, fully dressed, two knotted bed sheets nearby.

Expressing shock and dismay, O'Dwyer ordered Police Captain Frank Bals, head of the O'Dwyer investigating staff and the man responsible for the safety of Kid Twist, to determine what had happened. This took Bals only a couple of hours. There was nothing unusual in the fact that Reles was alone in his room. Bals said, just as long as he was checked regularly by his guards, according to the normal routine, (Not so, Tannenbaum would later assert; he and Reles had never been alone while in custody; guards were always present, even when they were asleep.)

Reles' death, Bals concluded, was regrettable, but it was just an accident. Bals theorized that it could have come about in one of two ways. Reles had been attempting to escape, ergo the knotted bed sheets, and had fallen to his death when the sheets had given way. Considering that freedom was the last thing Reles needed. Bals's second possibility was equally plausible: Reles, a notorious practical joker, may have been trying to pull a good one on his protectors by sliding down the sheets to the fifth floor and then sneaking up the stairs and shouting "Peekaboo. I see you" at the cops. A third theory, which did not consider the knotted bed sheets, was advanced by oilier police officers in Brooklyn: Reles, stricken by his conscience and fearful of his future, had simply committed suicide.

Those, at least, were the official theories. Few believed them, not even members of the police department. There were plenty of rumors that made a lot more sense. The one that has lasted longest and the one that New York City police officials even today seem to unofficially believe is that the Organization paid handsomely for the murder of a dangerous informer. The Mob had plenty of friends, tightly held through the payment of regular stipends, both on the police force and in O'Dwyer's office--enough friends that it could arrange to have Reles and some knotted bed sheets thrown out just about any window in town.

The cops who had been assigned to guard Reles were put back in uniform and sent out to walk a beat. That was their punishment. And when O'Dwyer became mayor of New York in 1945. Captain Bals was appointed a deputy police commissioner. One of his jobs, high underworld sources maintain, and many high police officials believe today, was disbursing the regular payoffs from the Mob.

In any case. Reles was dead and so was the "perfect murder case" against Anastasia. But even worse were the indications that the old alliance between the politicians and the underworld was as strong as ever, maybe even stronger. It seems that during the 19 months O'Dwyer had been bragging about his case against Anastasia and supposedly looking for him. the district attorney had never bothered to obtain an indictment against him for the Diamond murder and had actually forbidden anyone on his staff to do so. O'Dwyer's explanation was that since Anastasia was a fugitive from justice at the time, there was no sense in seeking an indictment until he had been apprehended.

A few mouths alter Reles' fall, O'Dwyer took a leave of absence from the D.A.'s job to enter the Army (from which he would emerge in 1945 as a brigadier general, something of a hero, a political power and Tammany's candidate for New York City mayor). He left behind the final disposition of the Anastasia affair, a disposition based on a memo from Captain Bals: "In the case of Anastasio [Anastasia's real name], legal corroboration is missing.... On November 12, 1941, Abe Reles, who was under police guard in the Half Moon Hotel, Brooklyn, attempted to escape, and fell five stories, being instantly killed. This not only seriously hampered the investigation but deprived the state of his testimony and information. At the present time, the only testimony adducible against Anastasia is that of accomplices."

(In 1945, a Brooklyn grand jury had what may have been the final legal word on the Reles affair, though its impact was negligible. It charged that there had been "negligence, incompetence and flagrant irresponsibility" in the way the Anastasia case had been handled by O'Dwyer. "The undisputed proof is that William O'Dwyer [was] in possession of competent legal evidence that Anastasia was guilty of first-degree murder and other vicious crimes. This proof admittedly was sufficient to warrant Anastasia's indictment and conviction, but Anastasia was neither prosecuted, indicted nor convicted.... The consistent and complete failure to prosecute the overlord of organized crime ... is so revolting that we cannot permit these disclosures to be filed away in the same manner the evidence against Anastasia [was] heretofore 'put in the files.' ")

So Anastasia surfaced, returned to Brooklyn and was soon strutting about his waterfront domain with renewed confidence, aggressiveness and invincibility. He did not, however, remain there long. He was drafted into the Army and. as a technical sergeant, trained GI longshoremen at a camp in Pennsylvania from 1942 to 1944. In return for his services, the United States Government grained him American citizenship.

Within a month after Reles was buried, the United States was in the war. and while much of (he nation deprived itself in the drive for victory, the underworld fattened itself at the old games and at new ones. There were opportunities to gain a measure of respectability with a show of patriotism. There were opportunities to try to spring the boss, Luciano, from his prison cell to serve the war effort. And beckoning, too, in the years ahead, were the sun-washed shores of the Caribbean and the sandy cities of Nevada.

This is the seventh, in a series of articles on organized crime in the United States.