Organized Crime's "Murder Inc"
Albert Anastasia: "Lord High Executioner" of Murder, Inc
In the early 1930s, Jewish-American labor racketeer Louis Buchalter and Italian-American gangsters Charles 'Lucky' Luciano and Johnny Torrio, the former boss of the Chicago Outfit and mentor of New York native Al Capone, entered into an alliance. Luciano's Jewish-American associates Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky formed "Murder, Inc.", a group of button men who would be on call 24/7 to handle any "problems" that afflicted la Cosa Nostra.
Murder, Inc., originally was a group of mostly Jewish-American hit-men from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Operating out of the back of a candy store, they proved highly effective in maintaining mob discipline and eliminating problems such as eye-witnesses and recalcitrant marks. The band of brothers-in-arms eventually were used to fulfill most murder "contracts."
After Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky (the latter widely regarded as the financial brains of organized crime in America) moved on to other, larger pastures, control over Murder Inc. was ceded to Buchalter and Albert Anastasia, who was known in underworld circles as "The Mad Hatter" and, more ominously, "The Lord High Executioner".
Boss of Murder, Inc.
The group of killers known as Murder Inc. was credited with carrying out many contract killings throughout the country, including the slaying of Jewish-American bootlegger and northern New York State crime boss Dutch Schultz at the Palace Chophouse, on October 23, 1935. The Schultz killing was a major event for Anastassia and Murder Inc., signaling their arrival as a major force in organized crime. (Louis Amberg was murdered by the group the very same day.)
Murder Inc. may have been responsible for as many as a thousand contract killings nationwide, carried out by such button-man as future canary Abe 'Kid Twist' Reles (played by Peter Falk in the 1960 movie Murder, Inc., which brought him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod) and Frankie Carbo, who later established himself as "The Czar of Boxing". (The Mafia, via Anastasia, Carbo and Carbo's partner, Mafiosi Blinky Palermo, took over the sport of boxing and manipulated the odds and fixed the fights according to abet their bookie operations. Carbo ran New York boxing, which WAS boxing until the 1960s - when he and Palermo were convicted and sentenced to prison - from his New York bookie operation.)
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (whose director J. Edgar Hoover denied the existence of the Mafia until 1957, possibly as he may have been open to being blackmailed due to his alleged homosexual proclivities), managed to hook Lepke Buchalter on a narcotics trafficking charge in the mid-1930s, after he had successfully avoided arrest due to the bribing of federal judges and the Mafia's political connections. Murder, Inc. was also investigated by New York City special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, as one of the many targets of the "Syndicate" that Dewey was dedicated to obliterating.
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