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During the 1930s, a group of killers operated in the shadows of America’s growing organized crime networks.
They carried out assassinations, silenced witnesses, punished rivals, and helped powerful mob bosses maintain control while remaining several steps removed from the violence.
Their existence blurred the line between street gangs and a professional criminal bureaucracy, and their downfall exposed just how organized murder had become.
Learn more about Murder, Inc., on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Following the passage of the 18th Amendment in 1919, alcohol was banned from being sold, manufactured, or transported in the United States. This was a horrible development for the alcohol industry and a windfall for organized crime.
Prohibition allowed criminal organizations to profit from the sale of illegal liquor, resulting in massive profits and the formation of highly organized criminal enterprises.
The Prohibition period lasted only about a decade, but the criminal organizations it created persisted long after it ended.
As these criminal organizations operated outside the law, they often had to use violence or the threat of violence to enforce behavior. Occasionally, they would have to remove someone completely.
Contrary to what you might see on movies and television, killings didn’t happen all the time in organized crime, but they did happen. When someone, especially a member of a mob family, had to be taken out, it was often best if someone else handled the task so it couldn’t be traced back to the person who ordered the hit.
In an effort to meet the demand for these killings, the organization known as Murder Incorporated was formed.
Murder Inc first became active in 1929, with its origins in the cooperation between the Italian Mafia and the Jewish Mob. The group acted as the execution squad of the National Crime Syndicate.
It is believed that the predecessor to Murder Inc. was a gang known as the Bugs and Meyer Mob, a Manhattan-based Jewish-American Street Gang run by mobsters Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky.
The early versions of the Bugs and Meyer Mob were formed to serve as protection against the Italian and Irish Gangs in the area. However, once formed, they quickly became involved with bootlegging and other criminal activities. They also became heavily involved with Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Frank Costello, who were involved with the Italian Five Point Gang.
The National Crime Syndicate is believed to have been formed in 1929 at a meeting between top-ranking underworld figures in Atlantic City, New Jersey. During the meeting, informal agreements were made among different crime families, which helped eliminate violent turf wars, delineate territories for each group, and aided in the consolidation of each family’s power.
As a result of the meeting, a commission was formed to govern organized crime under agreed-upon set of rules and resolve any disputes between members.
While major crime families were part of the Syndicate, the individual groups still acted independently, just under the guidelines they had established. This plan was especially important due to the impending repeal of prohibition. If Prohibition were repealed, which it was in 1933, organized crime would lose a large source of income.
The National Crime Syndicate served as the foundation of Murder Inc. After the gang alliance, Lansky and Siegel pushed the syndicate to create a special group that could handle enforcement issues.
There were two heads of murder Inc., Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and Albert “Mad Hatter” Anastasia.
Buchalter was born in 1897 in the Lower East Side of New York. The origin of his nickname can be traced back to his mother, who called her son “Lepkeleh,” which meant “Little Louis” in Yiddish. As his friends and family heard the term over the years, they shortened the nickname into “Lepke.”
Buchalter had a difficult life from a young age. His father died when he was 12, and his mother decided to move to Arizona, leaving him in New York City to live with his sister.
Buchalter was in and out of reform schools and prison for several years. After being released from prison in 1922, Buchalter connected with his childhood friend, Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro, who was a mobster.
The duo joined forces, and they began to take control of the garment industry unions. Buchalter and Shapiro would use their control over the unions to threaten strikes and demand that factory owners pay them weekly. The connection to the unions also allowed them to draw on the unions’ bank accounts.
The other head of Murder, Inc., was Albert “Mad Hatter” Anastasia.
Anastasia was born in 1902 in Italy. He lived with his eight siblings until the end of World War I. His father was a railroad worker during the war and died when Albert was young.
In 1919, Anastasia and three of his brothers decided to enter the United States illegally. They did this by abandoning the freighter ship they were supposed to be working on.
Once in the United States, he and his brothers took up work in New York City, where they served as longshoremen on the Brooklyn Waterfront.
It didn’t take long for Anastasia to get into trouble. By 1921, he was convicted of murdering a fellow dock worker and was sentenced to death. However, he got out of this conviction due to a re-trial the following year, which he won after four of the initial witnesses brought forth by the prosecution had vanished.
Later in 1928, he was charged with murder in Brooklyn; however, nothing ever came of this as the witnesses who were set to testify against him in court either refused or disappeared.
By the late 1920s, Anastasia had become a leader of the International Longshoremen’s Association, a labor union in Brooklyn. There, he allied with a Sicilian crime boss named Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria.
Anastasia later became involved in the Castellammarese War, which was a gang war between the Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano.
During this conflict, Anastasia was involved in a plan to trick and murder Masseria that was hatched by Masseria’s lieutenant, “Lucky” Luciano. He went through with his part of the plan, and for his loyalty, he was placed as one of the leading members of the enforcement branch of the National Crime Syndicate.
The nickname of Matt Hatter came from his insane ambition, psychopathic tendencies, and unpredictable, volatile behavior. Anastasia was known for being ruthless, and the media and his fellow mobsters portrayed him as someone more than willing to use violence to solve literally any problem. This instability gave him the moniker of Mad Hatter.
The services of murder Inc. were available to any member of the national crime syndicate anywhere in the country. Those victims of Murder Inc. were members of the syndicate themselves or people associated with criminal activities who murdered for the sake of business.
The members of Murder, Inc. were paid a basic Salary as well as a freelancing fee for any hit they carried out. This could be anywhere from $1000 to $5000.
The headquarters of Murder, Inc. was in a candy shop known as the Rosie Gold Candy Store in Brooklyn; inside, there were several payphones along the back wall. While waiting for their marks, the members of Murder, Inc. would enjoy the product until the phone rang, giving them the details of the hit they needed to part in.
According to testimony given after the organization’s collapse, murder orders were usually transmitted through several layers. A senior boss might communicate with Buchalter, Anastasia, or another trusted figure. An intermediary would select a crew, provide information about the target, and arrange weapons, transportation, surveillance, and payment.
The killers frequently worked in teams. One man might identify the target, another steal a car, another serve as driver, and one or two others perform the killing. Using several participants spread responsibility but also created a serious weakness: every additional participant was a potential witness.
The weapons and methods varied. Victims were shot, stabbed, strangled, beaten, drowned, or killed with ice picks. Bodies were sometimes left in cars or streets, but attempts were also made to conceal them in remote locations, vacant lots, or buildings.
Murder Inc.’s best-known murder is considered to be the killing of Dutch Schultz. In 1935, Schultz had openly defied the organization after they had refused to take the contract that would kill Thomas Dewey, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York who would later become governor of New York and the Republican nominee for President in 1948.
Dewey was outspoken on his desire to put the mob out of business. While a hit might have made some sense, members of the syndicate feared that assassinating Dewey would spur public outrage, thereby leading to more effort devoted to dismantling their criminal enterprises.
Choosing to disregard the syndicate’s ruling, Schultz ordered a hit on Thomas Dewey through Murder, Inc. Ultimately, the contract resulted in the assassination of Schultz himself by the organization.
Murder Inc first came to the attention of law enforcement in the early 1930s by a mobster named Abe Wagner. He attempted to escape the mob, fearing the repercussions of revealing this information, but they eventually found and killed him.
Dewey’s showdown with the mob happened a bit later on. Despite first being made aware of the organization in the early 1930s, the puzzle pieces didn’t begin to fall until the late 1930s. This is largely because law enforcement was slow to connect the dots.
Many of the high-ranking members of the syndicate were being put away by Thomas Dewey. With these new arrests, police began to learn more about Murder, Inc.
One of these arrests was of Abe “Kid Twist” Reles in 1941. As a founding member of Murder, Inc., Reles was eventually arrested for murder. He chose to cooperate with authorities as a witness, which led to numerous first-degree murder indictments against his former associates.
Despite being under heavy police protection after providing his confession and assistance, Reles died under highly suspicious circumstances when he plummeted from his hotel room window. The official investigation, however, concluded that his death was merely an accident.
Following Reles’s confession, the head of the operation himself, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, was tied to numerous killings and stood trial alongside many Murder, Inc. associates who faced charges like racketeering, burglary, and murder. Faced with the threat of the death penalty from prosecutors, many members chose to confess, while the state built a compelling case specifically against the mob leader.
Buchalter was ultimately convicted and executed in 1944, making him the only major American mafia boss to receive the death penalty.
As for Anastasia, Reles’s death caused the case against him to collapse. Because Reles was the main witness to his crimes, he was never able to be convicted. Anastasia took over the remains of Murder, Inc., but was ultimately killed by rival mobsters in 1957. No one was ever arrested for his assassination.
The moniker “Murder, Inc.” by which the organization is known today was originally coined by reporters Asa Bordages and Harry Feeney. As the mob bosses were successfully brought down, the nickname was adopted by newspapers and rapidly caught on with the public.
Murder, Inc. is frequently said to have been responsible for 400, 500, or even 1,000 murders. However, none of these figures can be verified.
Murder, Inc. was never quite the formal, nationwide corporation that newspapers and, later, popular culture made it out to be. Movies that depict assassination organizations like those in John Wick were, in some ways, inspired by Murder, Inc, even if the reality was never quite like that.
Nonetheless, it was a real and deadly network that showed how organized crime had transformed murder into a business tool.