Murder Incorporated
By Joseph Bruno
(Image of Murder, Inc.)
The year was 1931. The bloody Castellammarese War, a brutal conflict that had gripped the New York underworld, had finally reached its violent conclusion. Its two figureheads, Joe "The Boss" Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano, lay dead, victims of a meticulously orchestrated betrayal led, in part, by the ambitious Lucky Luciano. From the ashes of this war, a new era of organized crime was about to dawn.
Luciano, alongside the brilliant Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky, conceived of a revolutionary concept: a nine-member National Crime Commission. This wasn’t a traditional hierarchical structure with a single, all-powerful boss. Instead, it was a council designed to transcend ethnic divisions and foster cooperation amongst the most powerful criminal elements. The leadership was shared equally among a carefully selected group: Luciano himself, Lansky, Lansky’s ruthless enforcer Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, Frank Costello, Joe Bonanno, Vincent Mangano, Joe "Adonis" Doto, Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, and Buchalter’s trusted lieutenant, Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro. Notably absent was the volatile Dutch Schultz (Arthur Flegenheimer), whose unpredictable nature made him too great a liability for the commission’s carefully calculated operations.
The National Crime Commission, in its design and function, mirrored a legitimate corporation, complete with a separation of powers. Each member held specific responsibilities that didn’t encroach upon the authority of others. This structure allowed the Commission to operate with remarkable efficiency, generating substantial profits from a variety of illicit activities. But to ensure the smooth running and profitability of this criminal enterprise, a more specialized and sinister entity was required: Murder Incorporated.
The Commission recognized that maintaining its power and profitability sometimes required actions that were, shall we say, less than savory. Specifically, it involved the elimination of individuals who threatened the flow of cash into the Commission’s coffers. To address this need, they established a separate, dedicated branch of the Commission whose sole purpose was the execution of those deemed expendable by the bosses. This was Murder Incorporated.
(Image of Louis Lepke Buchalter)
At the helm of this deadly organization was Louis "Lepke" Buchalter. The press dubbed it Murder Incorporated. To aid Lepke in his grim responsibilities, the Commission appointed Albert Anastasia, a man known as "The Lord High Executioner," as his right-hand man. Lepke, ever cautious, never directly ordered a hit. Instead, he relied on trusted intermediaries like Mendy Weiss and Louis Capone to relay the final instructions to the chosen assassins.
This layered approach was designed to shield Lepke from direct involvement, ensuring that no incriminating evidence could ever be traced back to him. For a time, this strategy proved remarkably effective. However, Lepke’s success wouldn’t last forever; he was destined to make a critical error.
Lepke and Anastasia’s first priority was to assemble a team of highly skilled and ruthless killers. Through Louis Capone, who enjoyed a close relationship with Anastasia, Lepke had been cultivating a group of particularly cold-blooded individuals, some of whom seemed to relish the act of killing itself. These men were known as "The Boys from Brownsville." While they weren’t the only assassins employed by Murder Incorporated, they formed the core of a network that would eventually encompass as many as 100 freelance killers. These men were placed on a steady weekly salary (starting at $125) and were expected to be ready to carry out a hit at a moment’s notice.
These killers were sometimes rewarded with bonuses for jobs that were particularly well-executed. They were also permitted to operate within designated territories, profiting from gambling, loan sharking, hijackings, and even kidnappings. Crucially, even if a member of Murder Incorporated went weeks or even months without performing an assassination, their weekly salary continued to arrive without fail.
Let’s delve into the key players who made up the ranks of Murder Incorporated.
One of the most significant figures, and perhaps the biggest headache for Lepke, was Abe "Kid Twist" Reles. Reles, along with his childhood friend Martin "Buggsy" Goldstein, had seized control of all illegal rackets in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn by eliminating the three Shapiro brothers: Meyer, Irving, and Willie. To accomplish this, Reles enlisted the help of Harry "Happy" Maione and Frank "Dasher" Abbandando of the neighboring "Ocean Hill Hooligans." Soon, other ruthless killers, such as Harry "Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss, Vito Gurino, and "Blue Jaw" Magoon, were brought into the fold, transforming the Boys from Brownsville into a formidable group of assassins. The key to their rise from local thugs to major players in the underworld was Louis Capone, a Brooklyn restaurateur with close ties to Albert Anastasia.
(Image of Albert Anastasia)
When Anastasia, along with Lepke, was tasked by the Commission with forming Murder Incorporated, Anastasia approached Capone and asked, "What about Reles and his boys from Brownsville? Are these guys capable of doing what needs to be done? No questions asked."
Capone assured Anastasia that Reles and his crew were cold-blooded killers who were efficient and effective. Capone’s only concern was the animosity between Reles and Maione, who considered themselves the top two leaders of the group, loathed each other, and harbored deep distrust.
Despite their personal differences, Reles and Maione managed to function as a highly effective killing machine. Under the direction of Anastasia and Capone, the Murder Incorporated killers operated with a meticulous approach that made detection almost impossible. The key to their success was a combination of corroboration and separation of powers. The bosses would bring in multiple individuals to handle different aspects of each job, with each person unaware of the involvement of the others. Yet, each individual’s involvement was so crucial that they would be considered an accomplice, rendering their potential testimony useless in court if they ever decided to cooperate with law enforcement.
For example, suppose a man named Joe Schmoe from Illinois was targeted by Murder Incorporated. The organization would hire one person to steal a car for the getaway. A second person would be tasked with acquiring the necessary firearms. A third person would act as the "finger-man," identifying Joe Schmoe to the actual shooters. Then, of course, there would be a getaway driver and a driver of a "crash car," a legitimately registered vehicle that would intentionally collide with a pursuing police car or a civilian vehicle after the hit. The purpose of the legitimate car was to allow the driver to claim it was merely an accident, while the shooters escaped in the stolen vehicle. (Crashing a stolen car into a police car was obviously not a prudent strategy.)
The brilliance of this system was that each participant in the murder had limited knowledge of the other individuals involved. The car thief wouldn’t know who purchased the guns, and neither of them would know who the actual shooters were, and so on.
(Image of Brownsville Boys)
Of course, Lepke and Anastasia didn’t rely solely on the Boys from Brownsville to carry out all of their dirty work. They needed other killers to handle a variety of jobs in different locations. One such killer was recruited from an unlikely source: the Loch Sheldrake Country Club in the Catskills, located in upstate New York.
The Loch Sheldrake Country Club was owned by Sam Tannenbaum, who had previously owned a grocery store on Orchard Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The Loch Sheldrake was a high-end resort that catered to wealthy Jewish families during their summer vacations. Lepke and his associates were frequent visitors. Among the gangsters who mingled with the legitimate businessmen were Lepke, his partner Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro, Shimmy Salles (a bagman for Lepke’s rackets), Curly Holtz (a labor racketeer), and "Big Harry" Greenburg, who partnered with Lepke and Shapiro in various garment center scams.
Gurrah Shapiro, a burly and intimidating figure, was a character in his own right. He was also perfectly capable of pulling the trigger when necessary, much like Lepke. Whenever Shapiro was angry, which was often, his favorite expression was, "Get out of here." However, his gravelly voice made the phrase sound like "Gurra dahere," which earned him the nickname "Gurrah."
Sam Tannenbaum had a teenage son named Allie, whom Sam was grooming to eventually take over the family business. Sam employed Allie at the hotel, having him wait tables or set up beach chairs by the lake. Sam didn’t pay Allie to ensure he wouldn’t run off to his old haunts on the Lower East Side of Manhattan until after the summer season. As the owner’s son, Allie Tannenbaum was invited to all the parties hosted by the Jewish gangsters. There, he got a taste of what it was like to be around people with money to burn, making him a prime target for recruitment into their world of murder and mayhem.
One day, after the summer season of 1931 had ended at Loch Sheldrake, Tannenbaum was walking down Broadway in Manhattan when he ran into "Big Harry" Greenberg.
Greenberg asked Tannenbaum, "Do you want a job?"
"I could use one if it pays," Tannenbaum replied.
Greenberg smiled. "This one is for Lepke. You know what kind of a job it will be."
Tannenbaum shrugged and said he would do whatever it took to earn the kind of money that his gangster idols were throwing around.
Little did Greenberg know that he was hiring one of his eventual killers.
(Image of Allie Tannenbaum)
Tannenbaum began working for Lepke, initially earning $35 a week. His duties included general assignments such as slugging, strikebreaking, and planting stink bombs where they were needed. He later progressed to more important tasks, such as "schlammings," which meant he "schlammed," or cracked the skulls of union workers who weren’t following Lepke’s orders.
As Tannenbaum’s work output increased, so did his salary. Soon, he was intimately involved in six murders and helped dispose of the body of a seventh victim. Having "made his bones" in the murder business, Tannenbaum began earning an impressive $125 a week, more than he had made in an entire summer at his father’s resort. Because of his familiarity with the Catskills region, Tannenbaum’s job mainly involved murders and extortions in upstate New York. He was a valuable asset to Lepke in Sullivan County because he knew the back roads and numerous lakes where bodies could be disposed of. During the winter, Tannenbaum and his family vacationed in Florida, where he worked as a strong-arm man in several of Lepke’s gambling operations.
In the early 1930s, Lepke added another valuable asset to Murder Incorporated when he hired Charlie "The Bug" Workman.
"The Bug" was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1908, the second of six children born to Samuel and Anna Workman. Workman dropped out of school in the 9th grade and began roaming the streets of the Lower East Side, looking for trouble. At 18, Workman was arrested for the first time for stealing a $12 bundle of cotton thread from a truck parked on Broadway. As it was his first offense, Workman received only probation. The following year, Workman was arrested for shooting a man behind the ear over a $20 debt. By this point, Workman’s reputation on the streets was such that the man he shot refused to testify against him and even claimed he couldn’t truthfully identify Workman as the shooter. Frustrated, the police pulled up Workman’s file and decided he had violated his parole on the cotton theft, resulting in his being sent to the New York State Reformatory. Over the next few years, Workman was in and out of prison for parole violations such as associating with "questionable characters" and "failure to get a job."
In 1926, Workman became a freelance leg breaker, or schlammer, for Lepke’s union strike-breaking activities. He performed so well that in the early 1930s, Lepke placed Workman on his permanent payroll at $125 a week as a killer for Lepke’s Murder Incorporated machine. Lepke admired Workman’s cool demeanor, and after Workman carried out a few exceptional "hits" for Lepke, Lepke gave him the nickname "The Bug" because a person had to be crazy to kill with the calm detachment Workman displayed when performing his gruesome tasks. Workman’s other nickname, "Handsome Charlie," was given to him by members of the opposite sex.
For the next few years, Workman was in and out of trouble with the law. In 1932, he was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. In 1933, Workman was arrested again for assaulting an off-duty police officer after a minor traffic incident. All the while, his specialty was killing whomever Lepke instructed him to eliminate. After a hit, Workman enjoyed the fringe benefit of "sweeping out the pockets" of his victims. He often earned an extra thousand dollars or so for his efforts. On one occasion, he even found a ten-thousand-dollar bonus in the pants pocket of a victim he had just killed.
Lepke’s Murder Incorporated didn’t confine its activities to the New York City area. In fact, Murder Incorporated eventually employed between 150 and 200 killers across America, and it is estimated that these killers committed as many as 800 to 1,000 murders from the late 1920s until the organization’s demise in the early 1940s.
About the Author: A Vietnam veteran in the United States Navy, Joseph J. Bruno started in the newspaper business in the mid-1970s as a sports columnist for the New York Tribune. During the 1970s and ’80s, Bruno was an associate editor for Boxing Illustrated and a monthly contributor to Ring Magazine. In 1986-1987, Bruno wrote a sports column for the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, New York. Since then, he has written numerous articles for various magazines and books – both fiction and non-fiction. More information can be seen on his blog here: John Bruno on the Mob. Source: Ezine Articles (dead link.)
Compiled by Kathy Alexander, updated January 2024.
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