Frank “Don Cheech” Scalise

Frank Scalise with Lucky Luciano in Italy

The murder of Frank "Don Cheech" Scalise remains, like many other Mafia murders, unsolved. But even more than most, the hit is tangled in a web of mob intrigue that almost certainly can never be unraveled.

A close ally of Lucky Luciano since Prohibition days, Scalise was part of the Mangano family and aided Albert Anastasia in wiping out the Mangano brothers so that Anastasia could take over the crime family. In fact, Scalise and Anastasia had long been partners in murder.

According to Luciano, in August 1930 they had killed Peter "the Clutching Hand" Morello on his orders. (It was perhaps the most important killing of the Castellammarese War, since Morello was the adviser of Joe the Boss Masseria and, as Joe Bonanno put it, "the brains of his outfit." Luciano felt the same way about it and knew that once he had Morello killed, Joe the Boss would be relatively easy.)


Anastasia and his underboss Don Cheech were inseparable through the years and were constantly involved in all sorts of deals, shady even by Mafia standards. It was certain that in 1954 Scalise and Anastasia started selling memberships in the Mafia to eager applicants for $40,000 to $50,000 when the "books" or membership rosters, were opened for the first time since the early 1930s. It was said that Scalise collected about 200 of these kingsized kickbacks.

Now the guessing game begins. One theory has it that when Anastasia heard the accusations against his underboss, he angrily ordered his murder, and Scalise was cut down by four bullets in the neck and head as he was buying fruit at a favorite Bronx fruit stand (this was the model for the attempted assassination of Don Corleone in the The Godfather). Another theory was that the murder was ordered by Anastasia not out of anger, but to prevent further speculation that he, Albert A., was getting a cut of the membership kickbacks.

Another theory holds Scalise innocent of the charge, claiming that Vito Genovese, as part of a campaign to discredit Anastasia with whom he was involved in a struggle for control of Mafia affairs in New York, had cooked up the plot. Anastasia, the theory goes, simply outmaneuvered Genovese by having Scalise killed, a bit of double-dealing not beyond the Anastasia character.

Still another theory maintains that Genovese had Scalise killed and then spread the word that Albert had done it. Since one of the gunmen was almost certainly Jimmy "Jerome" Squillante, a very close associate of Genovese, the Genovese theory looks best.

However, none of the Scalise murder theories is conclusive. Scalise was also known to be involved in drug smuggling, and it was said that he had welshed on his responsibility to reimburse his underworld partners when the government grabbed a heroin shipment. For that reason, Scalise was marked for death.

In any event, Genovese profited most from Scalise's demise, it being a fairly common tactic in the Mafia to knock off an enemy's most powerful supporter before going after the main target. It had been done in the case of Joe the Boss Masseria and in 1957 was shortly to be the case with Anastasia.

Confusion or no, the death of Frank Scalise was not without its touch of "honor." His brother Joe quickly vowed vengeance, but then noticed that Anastasia was staying rather quiet about matters. Joe Scalise dropped his vow and disappeared for a number of weeks, reappearing only when the word went out that all was forgiven, that it was understood he was merely expressing normal filial devotion.

Shortly after he came out of hiding, Joe Scalise was invited to a party at Squillante's home. Joe unwisely accepted and was barely inside the door when the boys fell on him with sharp knives. His corpse was butchered down to smaller pieces and carried outside to a waiting garbage truck. (Squillante bossed the New York garbage-collection racket at the time.)

Gangster movie : Scarface

Scarface (1932)

The Godfather was the Mafia movie of the 1970s, and one that has done much to form the public conception of organized crime today. But it was not the first popular film to do so.

Scarface was made in 1932. Preceded by two noteworthy crime movies, Little Caesar and Public Enemy—the former patterned after the exploits of Chicago's Cardinelli gang and the latter after that city's O'Banion Gang—Scarface enjoyed the greatest impact because of a notorious curiosity about and fear of Al Capone. Accurate about the scar, there remained questions about its authenticity—especially from Al Capone himself. At least Capone saw few similarities—and sent a couple of torpedoes to check out the facts.

The screenplay had been written by Ben Hecht for Howard Hughes's studio. One night there was a knock on the door of Hecht's Los Angeles hotel room, and two sinister-looking hoods confronted him with a copy of the screenplay.


"You the guy who wrote this?" one demanded. Hecht had to admit he was.

"Is this stuff about Al Capone?"

"God, no!" Hecht assured them. "I don't even know Al." He rattled off the names of Chicago underworld characters he had known in his reporter days—Big Jim Colosimo, Dion O'Banion, Hymie Weiss.

The Capone emissaries were appeased, one announcing: "O.K. then. We'll tell Al this stuff you wrote is about them other guys." As they started to leave, however, the other one had a thought. "If this stuff isn't about Al Capone, why are you calling it Scarface? Everybody'll think it's him."

"That's the reason," Hecht replied. "Al is one of the most famous and fascinating men of our time. If you call the movie Scarface, everybody will want to see it, figuring it's about Al. That's part of the racket we call showmanship."

This was a readily accepted explanation. If there was anything the Capones appreciated it was a scam. "I'll tell Al. Who's this fella Howard Hughes?"

"He's got nothing to do with it. He's the sucker with the money."

"O.K. The hell with him." Placated Capone's hoods departed.

The power structure of Chicago was not nearly as placated about Scarface however. As Ralph Salerno and John S. Tompkins have noted in The Crime Confederation, "The movie was so explicit in its exposure of municipal corruption that the city of Chicago banned it until World War II."

John Scarne

John Scarne

An internationally recognized authority on gambling, John Scarne was perhaps closer than he ever admitted to the forces in the national crime syndicate. That he met many of them in the capacity of gambling expert and helped them set up casinos that were cheat-proof—by the customers—was readily understandable.

Scarne had great value to the gambling interests. His oft-proclaimed statement—that because of his skills he was barred from gambling in Las Vegas—made him the perfect shill, inferring to the public that the casinos could be beaten. But above all, Scarne clearly was himself fascinated by his contacts with mobsters—a fascination that has befallen many others.

Through the years, Scarne was acquainted with the likes of Arnold Rothstein, Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Erickson, Albert Anastasia, Willie Moretti, Jake Lansky, Abe Reles, Santo Trafficante and countless others. And he was forever denying there was anything called the Mafia and the national crime syndicate.


In a curious book he wrote in 1976, The Mafia Conspiracy, Scarne expounded his thesis that attacks on any Italian organized crime figure were nothing more than anti–Italian-American Mafia frameups by the federal government, determined to deprive the ethnic group of its civil rights.

Despite his track record as a best-selling author with some 18 books to his credit, Scarne could get no publisher to handle The Mafia Conspiracy, in which crime family boss Joseph Colombo was characterized as "the great Italian-American Civil Rights leader." Scarne claimed he had put up $50,000 of his own money to publish the book, but there were those who saw it as a mob apology, something the mob would gladly have financed.

The book is a bizarre document, clearly demonstrating Scarne's respect for—or awe of—Meyer Lansky, yet at the same time revealing a certain ethnic frustration, recognition of the fact that the Jewish elements within organized crime constituted the dominant factor in bigtime gambling, whether in Las Vegas, Cuba, Florida or upstate New York.

Scarne noted that Tampa, Florida, crime boss Santo Trafficante was merely a part owner in some gambling enterprises in Cuba and that the Hotel Capri Casino was "the only one of the nineteen Havana casinos operated by an Italian-American group." In his desire to clear the Mafia of importance in Cuba, Scarne ignored the fact that Meyer Lansky allowed many Mafia families to have pieces of his many enterprises.

In his book Scarne defended Lansky from charges made by the government, especially those made by informer Vinnie Teresa that Lansky was involved in gambling casinos in England and the paymaster to various mafiosi running lucrative gambling junkets. A cynic might suspect that Lansky may well have aided in the book's publication.

Lansky was a realist who understood the value of denouncing harassment of the mobs in terms of bigotry. Men like Lansky and Moe Dalitz could claim they were victims of antiSemitism, so why not offer the Mafia the same sort of defense? And Lansky would have been shrewd enough to tolerate even an outburst or two from Scarne.

Thus Scarne identified Ohio's ruling gambling syndicate as the "Jewish Mob," headed by the likes of "Morris Kleinman, Moe Dalitz, Louis Rothkopf, Samuel Tucker and Thomas J. McGinty—all nonItalians." Scarne carried his conspiracy theory further, declaring: "It's my judgment that Senator McClellan and Senator Lausche introduced the Senate bill to outlaw the mythical Mafia simply as a diversionary tactic to protect the non-Italian mobsters operating in their home states of Arkansas and Ohio."

Scarne's book is not without value as a sociological document. Scarne would not have written it in the 1940s or 1950s or even the 1960s; by the mid1970s he could because of the ethnic succession taking place in organized crime (although it is not the ethnic succession spoken of by such observers as Daniel Bell).

When the national crime syndicate was formed in the early 1930s it was predominantly a mixture of two ethnic groups (and of course remains so to some extent today), the Italians and Jews, and the Jewish gangsters may have been more dominant than the Mafia.

The ethnic succession that arose was simply an aging process, as the Jewish gangsters accumulated wealth but saw no need for establishing a succession to their empire. Of Moe Dalitz it was said by crime expert Hank Messick, "Moe thinks you can never get enough." Lansky also believed in the "more" philosophy, actively raking in crime profits into his late 70s.

However, the Jewish mobsters neither established nor wanted a structured empire. As Jewish ranks thinned—by the ravages of age rather than bullets— the Mafia, with its structured organization, with positions to be filled, simply moved into the vacuum, so that the Mafia influence in organized crime expanded. As the mafioso influence grew, Scarne was even safer expounding his "there ain't no Mafia" line and citing what was now rapidly becoming the ghost of Jewish gansterism.

Dutch Schultz

Dutch Schultz

It happened at an important meet of mob leaders in the mid-1920s before the syndicate was formed. In the midst of serious discussions of criminal matters, Dutch Schultz, one of the flakiest of the big gang leaders, couldn't resist sticking it to Joe Adonis, a gangster always vain and proud of his good looks and star quality. Schultz, at the time, had the flu and had been ordered by his doctor to stay in bed, but he showed up at the meet.

When Adonis dropped a cute remark in the discussion, Schultz, looking to top him, suddenly pounced on him with a hammerlock and breathed right in his face, saying, "Now, you fucking star, you have my germs." As it happened Adonis did indeed catch Dutch's flu, and for a week, his voice hoarse, he kept telephoning Lucky Luciano to see that Schultz stayed out of his way. It was hardly a matter of epic import, but it illustrates the problems the world of organized crime would face with the unpredictable, "unorganizable" Dutchman.

If organized crime connotes anything it is that the rackets have to operate by some universally accepted rules. For Schultz there were no rules—other than those he liked or made. Those who broke his rules ended up dead; not only was he the flakiest of the bosses, he was also the most cold-blooded. In the end, he had to be "blown away" himself because he threatened the delicate balance between the syndicate and the authorities, and organized crime demands a certain respect for law and order.


Schultz, whose real name was Arthur Flegenheimer, was born in the Bronx, New York City. He had a minor record until the 1920s when he blossomed out as one of the many protégés of early criminal mastermind Arnold Rothstein. Schultz soon ran a gang that took over much of the beer trade in the Bronx.

He was already flaky but also tough and mean, and he actually may have had a keener sense for potential sources of new racket revenues than even Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. It is difficult now to determine whether it was Lansky or Schultz who first saw the enormous potential offered by penny-ante numbers in Harlem.

In any event it was Schultz who moved in aggressively on the independent black operators there and with unremitting violence turned them into his agents in a new multimillion-dollar racket. Through a mathematical genius named Otto "Abbadabba" Berman, he figured out a way to doctor the results of the numbers game so that the smallest possible payout was made.

Not even his own gangsters liked or respected Schultz, but they did fear him. His payroll for torpedoes and the like was probably the lowest in the city, and he flew into a rage whenever a gunman asked him for a raise. Only Abbadabba got really big bucks, $10,000 a week.

Berman had to threaten to take his mathematical skills to other mobsters unless he got the money. If he had left, Schultz doubtlessly would have exterminated him, but that would hardly have solved the problem of a huge drop in income, so the Dutchman turned magnanimous and paid him.

Mobsters looked down on Schultz. A dapper dan Schultz was not. Luciano once told an interviewer in disdain, "The guy had a couple of million bucks and he dressed like a pig." Schultz himself told an interviewer, "I think only queers wear silk shirts. I never bought one in my life. A guy's a sucker to spend fifteen or twenty dollars on a shirt. Hell, a guy can get a good one for two bucks!"

Luciano also said of Schultz: "... he worried about spending two cents for a newspaper. That was his big spending, buying the papers so's he could read about himself."

Schultz actually was an avid newspaper reader. He allowed he had taken the name of Dutch Schultz because "it was short enough to fit in the headlines. If I'd kept the name of Flegenheimer, nobody would have heard of me." Schultz could as well go bananas over what was written about him. He once verbally laced into New York Times crime reporter Meyer Berger because he had described him in a story as a "pushover for a blonde."

"What kind of language," the gangster raged, "is that to use in the New York Times?"

Actually, Schultz wasn't all that offended. There was only one way to do that. His notorious "mouthpiece," Dixie Davis, later said of him: "You can insult Arthur's girl, spit in his face, push him around—and he'll laugh. But don't steal a dollar from his accounts. If you do, you're dead."

Among those who are most popularly thought to have done so (and died for it) was the homicidal Legs Diamond. Having survived several murder attempts by Schultz and other mobsters, he became known as the clay pigeon of the underworld. When he was finally put to sleep permanently, in a bed in an upstate hotel room, Schultz commented: "Just another punk caught with his hands in my pockets."

Schultz fought a no-quarters war with Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll, a former underling who sought to feed his ambitions by taking over part of Schultz's empire. On February 8, 1932, Coll found himself trapped in a telephone booth by men generally held to have been Schultz machine gunners.

Wiping out Coll gave Schultz an added measure of prestige in the syndicate, and no one else gave serious thought to knocking him off, although certainly Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky wanted to take over his beer and policy rackets. In addition, they knew Schultz was too erratic and sooner or later would jeopardize them all. But Uncle Sam seemed to come to the rescue by indicting Schultz for income tax evasion.

While Schultz was out of circulation awaiting trial, the other syndicate members moved to take over his rackets, with Lansky and Longy Zwillman in New Jersey getting cooperation from Schultz's right-hand man, Bo Weinberg. Then in a shattering development, Schultz beat the rap and came back to claim his empire. All the syndicate men could do was claim they were minding the store.

Schultz squinted at them, indicating that sooner or later he'd settle that score, but his immediate attention fell on Bo Weinberg, who he suspected as being the traitor within his ranks. Weinberg disappeared. One story holds that Schultz killed him with his bare hands, another that he put a bullet in his head, and still a third that he had Bo fitted with a "cement overcoat" and heaved into the Hudson River while still alive. Schultz was capable of any of the above.

There is an excellent chance that war would have broken out shortly between Schultz and Luciano, Lansky, Zwillman and others, but again the law interfered, this time in the form of special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who in his war on vice and racketeering had turned his main focus on Schultz in 1935. All around, Schultz saw his operations stunted and his revenues decreased. He knew only one answer to that: Kill Dewey.

Schultz went to the national board of the syndicate with his demand that Dewey be assassinated. The mobsters were all shocked except for the kill-crazy Albert Anastasia who saw merit in Schultz's idea, totally unmindful of the heat to be generated in the murder of a prosecutor. Even Anastasia backed off when he realized the implications. Schultz's request was dismissed.

He stormed out of the meeting, warning defiantly: "I still say he ought to be hit. And if nobody else is gonna do it, I'm gonna hit him myself."

His attitude sealed his fate. The boys voted a quick contract on him, with Anastasia backing the idea.

On October 23, 1935, Schultz, Abbadabba Berman and two enforcers, Lulu Rosenkrantz and Abe Landau, were having a business meeting and meal at one of Schultz's favorite hangouts, the Palace Chop House and Tavern in Newark, New Jersey. Schultz got up from the table and went to the men's room.

While he was there, two gunmen entered the Palace. Their technique was picture perfect. One of them checked the men's room on the way in, and seeing a man at a urinal, shot him. This was to prevent the killers from later being surprised from behind. Then they shot the three Schultz men at the table.

It was then that the hit men discovered that Schultz was not at the table. Remembering the man in the john, they found it was Schultz. The gunman who had done all the shooting, Charles "the Bug" Workman, paused long enough to clean out the money from Schultz's pockets and fled. Amazingly Schultz was able to stagger to a table where he fell unconscious.

Schultz lived a couple more days in the hospital but did not name his killers, instead talking mostly gibberish with considerable mysterious mumblings about all the money he had hidden.

Eventually Workman was convicted in the Schultz rubout and did 23 years in prison. He never said who had ordered the Dutchman killed. The Bug probably didn't even know such details.

Seven Group

1920's gangster

The bloodletting that accompanied the onset of Prohibition has never been accurately measured, but it was inevitable when suddenly the prospect of enormous profit was dangled before basically not-too-well-to-do criminals.

With the end of World War I, there weren't all that many opportunities available for organized criminals. The political bosses did use them to control elections, but unfortunately elections did not come around every month. In the old days the political bosses accepted the responsibility of seeing after their criminal cohorts in "slow periods," putting them to work as bouncers, as shills for gambling joints and whorehouses, and so on.

However, this too was changing as reformers—bluebloods, businessmen, the middle class, leaders of various ethnic groups— were demanding a cleanup. In more and more parts of the country political leaders could not operate in such blatant style any more. They had no more use for the criminals and no reason to support them.


The Volstead Act of 1919 dramatically altered everything. For criminals, there was a new opportunity for making millions. Gangsters slaughtered old buddies to take over bootlegging rackets, and explosions of gunshots and bombs filled the air of almost every American community of almost every size.

Yet with exceptions here and there, by the late 1920s peace had settled on the bootleg world. It came through the Seven Group.

Forward-thinking gangsters had decided all the warfare was interfering with making money. There had to be peace in obtaining liquor and there had to be an end to gangs hijacking each other's supplies. The answer lay in some sort of organization that could constitute a central liquor buying office to handle all orders for booze and give everyone a fair share.

This system would reduce the deadly competition for supplies and the inordinate protection costs for shipments. This would leave the individual bootleg gangs with more than ample time and resources to take care of any freelance hijackers who might be foolish enough to continue to carry out raids.

Who deserves credit for originating the idea is difficult to tell, but it was probably either Arnold Rothstein, often called the Brain, or Johnny Torrio, also called the Brain. Certainly both of them—and Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano—were all boosting the idea by 1927.

The organization known as the Seven Group, since it was originally comprised of seven separate power groups, included Luciano and Frank Costello from Manhattan; Joe Adonis from Brooklyn and parts of Manhattan; Longy Zwillman from New Jersey and Long Island, New York; Waxey Gordon and the rising Nig Rosen from Philadelphia; Nucky Johnson from Atlantic City; Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, the protection "enforcers"; and Torrio who came out of his Brooklyn retirement to offer organizational advice.

When peace suddenly broke out in the midAtlantic area as the Seven Group established its authority, other gangs around the country clamored to join, among them those bossed by Moe Dalitz in Cleveland, King Solomon in Boston and Danny Walsh in Providence. Even Al Capone was attracted but the Chicago gang wars had gone on too long to be simply switched off by an appeal to reason. By the end of 1928 there were at least 22 gangs in the Seven Group.

By that time Rothstein had been murdered, apparently not because of a gangland plot against him, but over a huge gambling debt that he had welshed on to professional gamblers. That did not stop the momentum of the Seven Group and it led to the next logical step in the solidifying nationwide criminal link— mafioso, Italian, Jewish, Irish, Polish or whatever.

In 1929 the underworld held a vital conference at Atlantic City where plans for new criminal enterprises and cooperation after the end of Prohibition were discussed. Had it not been for the success of the Seven Group such a conference would not have been held and the confederation of the gangs around the country might never have come to fruition nor created the national crime syndicate.

Tom Reina

Tom Reina

Few killings illustrate the sinister twists that are possible in Mafia intrigues as well as the case of Tom Reina, whose murder on February 26, 1930, is considered by most crime historians to be the start of the bloody Castellammarese War.

It is a simplification to call the Castellammarese War a two-sided affair. True, the battle was primarily between the New York Mafia factions of Joe the Boss Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. But a third, and ultimately decisive force was Lucky Luciano and the Young Turks (aided by the important Jewish mobsters under Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel), who conspired to defeat both sides. They danced back and forth in cunning maneuvers to weaken both foes.

Reina was an important Masseria partner, albeit not an enthusiastic one. He was casting friendly eyes toward Maranzano—especially after Masseria began pressuring him for a cut of his rackets. Through allies serving under Reina, especially Tom Gagliano and Tommy Lucchese, Luciano, himself also allied with Masseria, learned of the Masseria plans to assassinate Maranzano supporters Joe Profaci and young Joe Bonanno.


Since Luciano was counting on Profaci and Bonanno in his future national crime syndicate, he wanted to prevent their deaths, and equally he did not want Reina to defect to Maranzano since that might tilt the contest too much in the latter's favor. Therefore the Luciano forces decided Reina had to be killed.

In his so-called Last Testament Luciano claims, "I really hated to knock off Tom Reina, and none of my guys really wanted to either. Reina was a man of his word, he had culture, and he was a very honorable Italian." This need not be taken as pure gospel. Luciano gained the allegiance of Gagliano and Lucchese by promising them the Reina empire.

On the Wednesday night of his murder, Reina, as he did once every week, had dinner at his aunt's home on Sheridan Avenue in the Bronx. When Reina left the house, Vito Genovese, a Luciano underling, was waiting. Reina was surprised to see him but started to wave his hand at Genovese. As he did, Vito blew his head off with a shotgun.

Joe Valachi would later marry the dead Reina's daughter, but his information on the Reina assassination, as on a number of other matters, was of only limited value.

Abe “Kid Twist” Reles

Abe “Kid Twist” Reles

When Abe Reles, a Brooklyn gangster, was picked up by police in 1940, he sported a rap sheet with 42 arrests accumulated over a 16-year period. Hauled in on charges of assault, robbery, burglary, possession of narcotics, disorderly conduct and six charges involving murder, he nevertheless had done only six minor stretches, with never a single major conviction.

Reles might well have eluded conviction again. The law didn't know the real Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, a man who had personally taken part in at least 30 murders. The law also did not know there was such a thing as an organization later to be dubbed Murder, Incorporated, the enforcement arm of the new national crime syndicate.

Some cops knew about something called "the combination," which linked up a great many Jewish and Italian mobsters, but that such an organization had a special troop to handle assassinations was something they had not even guessed. Murder, Inc., did exist and had by then handled something like 400 to 500 murders in the 1930s.


But once Reles started singing in what was called the most remarkable "canary act in underworld history," goggle-eyed investigators cleared up 49 murders in the borough of Brooklyn alone, many of which they hadn't even known had happened. Reles knew; he had been in on the ground floor when Murder, Inc., was created.

He qualified as a second-rung leader in Murder, Inc., standing just below such top leaders of the extermination "troop" as Louis Lepke and Albert Anastasia. As an underworld stool pigeon, he was much more highly placed than Joe Valachi, for instance, and his information was much more accurate.

When Reles was picked up in 1940 along with other major and minor members of Murder, Inc., on suspicion of homicide, Kid Twist started worrying that someone else of importance might start talking. He opted to save his own skin by talking first. His deal with prosecutors: He would not be prosecuted for any murder he participated in provided he revealed it, divulged all the details and named all his accomplices.

Then Reles started talking. He said that such troop members as Pittsburgh Phil, Happy Maione, Dasher Abbandando, Charlie Workman, Mendy Weiss, Louis Capone, Chicken Head Gurino and Buggsy Goldstein, to name some, were sent on murder assignments not just in New York but all around the nation, at times to knock off characters whose identities they didn't even know. Reles (like Pittsburgh Phil) was proud of his handiwork and often trekked down to Times Square after a job to pick up an out-of-town paper to find out just who some of his victims were.

One murder Reles "read about in the Times" was that of a loan shark named Whitey Rudnick. Working as a team Pittsburgh Phil, Dasher Abbandando and Happy Maione had stabbed him more than 60 times, smashed open his skull and, just to be on the safe side, strangled him. Reles was not exactly contrite about the Rudnick killing, announcing that Rudnick deserved what he got since "he was a stool pigeon."

Abbandando and Maione were to go to the chair for that one. Pittsburgh Phil was not prosecuted for the crime, but only because the prosecution had so many others to choose from. (Phil committed somewhere in excess of 100 Murder, Inc., rubouts.) Reles doomed Phil and Buggsy Goldstein for the vicious garroting of a gambler named Puggy Feinstein.

Reles provided so much information on the rubout of crime kingpin Dutch Schultz that one of the hit men, Charlie Workman, after reviewing the mounting evidence against him, switched to a plea of guilty to settle for a life sentence instead of the electric chair.

Kid Twist's grand jury testimony helped build a successful case against the great crime boss Louis Lepke as well as two important Lepke aides, Louis Capone and Mendy Weiss. They were convicted for the assassination of a garment industry foe named Joseph Rosen, but Reles was not around to testify at the trial.

He had taken part in several trials for more than a year, during which time he was kept under close protective custody on the sixth floor of a wing of the Half Moon Hotel in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. Sometime during the early morning hours of November 12, 1941, Reles jumped, fell or was picked up and heaved out a window to his death— this despite the fact that he was always guarded by six officers and was never supposed to be left alone in a room, even while he slept.

In Reles's room, police found several sheets tied together and proceeded to develop a variety of theories, some rather amusing. They said he was trying to escape, or climb down one floor so that he could then romp back upstairs and scare the daylights out of his guards in a malicious prank, or commit suicide.

If it were a suicide attempt Reles apparently wanted to climb down the sheets part way so that he wouldn't have to fall too far. The hitch in all the police theories was that the Kid's body had landed a good 20 feet away from the wall of the building, which would have made him a gymnast of near-Olympic abilities.

Twenty years later, an ailing Lucky Luciano, one of the chief founders of the national crime syndicate in the early 1930s, insisted that Frank Costello had set up Reles' demise and that $50,000 had been distributed within the police department to have Reles flipped out the window.

Years after that, interviews in Israel with Meyer Lansky and Doc Stacher confirmed Luciano's story, but the fee was $100,000 in all—evidently the wealth was not enjoyed only by members of the police department.

The syndicate at the time had not been averse to sacrificing all those who were electric chair–bound but wanted Reles's evidence halted before he doomed more, including Albert Anastasia and Bugsy Siegel. In later inquiries, William O'Dwyer, then the Brooklyn district attorney and later mayor of New York, was subjected to intense criticism for failing to prosecute Anastasia in what was described as a "perfect case" based on Kid Twist's testimony. O'Dwyer insisted the case "went out the window" along with Reles.

In the 1945 prosecution of Anastasia, O'Dwyer's performance was denounced by a grand jury as one of "negligence, incompetence and flagrant irresponsibility." In the words of the grand jury O'Dwyer was ... in possession of competent legal evidence that Anastasia was guilty of first degree murder and other vicious crimes.

The 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."

There were worse innuendoes swirling around Reles's death. Ed Reid, the prize-winning reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, charged that "Reles served several purposes besides being a fount of information about gang activities. Some of the information he gave out was used by unscrupulous persons connected with law enforcement in Brooklyn—to shake down gangsters."

Had Reles remained alive, other important members of the syndicate, beyond even Anastasia and Siegel, might have been nailed, and a far more lethal blow would have been dealt the crime syndicate. As it was, Murder, Inc., was smashed—as it existed in Brooklyn— but the syndicate continued to grow.

As for Abe Reles's epitaph, he was "the canary who could sing but couldn't fly."