Louis Lepke

Louis "Lepke" Buchalter--the nickname Lepke means "Little Louis" in Yiddish)--was one of the top Jewish-American gangsters of the Depression Era and the only major mob boss to ever have been executed by authorities for his crimes. He was born February 6, 1897, on Manhattan's Lower East Side. His introduction to crime was pushcart shoplifting, and he had already served two prison terms by 1919. He and his friend Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro strong-armed their way to control of the unions representing garment workers on the Lower East Side, enabling him to shake down factory owners by threatening to hit them with strikes. Control of the unions also guaranteed income and capital by diverting union dues and bank accounts. From their base in the garment industry, Buchalter branched out into shaking down other area businesses with his protection racket. Though he was later to enjoy greater power and income from his ventures after becoming a major mob boss, he kept control over the garment industry unions as they were so highly lucrative. In the early 1930s Buchalter and Italian-American gangsters Lucky Luciano and Johnny Torrio--the former boss of the Chicago mob and mentor of transplanted New Yorker Al Capone--allied themselves. Luciano's Jewish-American associates Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky formed "Murder Inc.", a group of professional killers 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 "torpedos" from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Opeating out of the back of a candy store, they proved highly effective in maintaining mob discipline and eliminating problems such as eyewitnesses, informants and "customers" unable or unwilling to pay loan sharks. The band of brothers-in-arms eventually were used to fulfill most murder "contracts." As Siegel and Lansky (the latter widely regarded as the financial brains of organized crime in America) had moved on to other, larger pastures, control over Murder Inc. was ceded to Buchalter and Albert Anastasia (known in underworld circles as "The Mad Hatter" and, more ominously, "The Lord High Executioner".) The group of killers 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 in Newark, New Jersey, on October 23, 1935. The Schultz murder was a major event for Buchalter and Murder Inc., signaling their arrival as a major force in organized crime (another Jewish mobster, Louis Amberg, was murdered by the group the very same day). Among Jewish-American gangsters, Buchalter arguably was the most violent and the most feared. He reportedly killed as many as 100 men himself, and may have ordered 1000 or more hits, nationwide, from his underlings, which included 'Abe Kid Twist Reles' (played by Peter Falk in Murder, Inc. (1960), which brought him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod) and Frank Carbo, who later established himself as "The Czar of Boxing" (the Mafia, via Anastasia, Carbo and Carbo's partner Blinky Palermo, took over the sport of boxing and manipulated the odds and fixed the fights to abet their bookmaking operations. Carbo ran New York boxing, which WAS boxing until the 1960s, when he and Palermo were convicted and sentenced to prison). The FBI--whose director J. Edgar Hoover denied the very existence of the Mafia until 1957, possibly due to their blackmailing him because of his alleged homosexual proclivities--investigated Buchalter during the early 1930s, but he managed to avoid arrest due to the bribing of federal judges and the Mafia's political connections (until the Richard Nixon administration, the Mafia was associated with the Democratic Party. Gore Vidal, in one of his essays, estimated that organized crime provided approximately 15% of the Democratic Party's budget in the 1960s. In mobbed-up cities like Chicago, a Democratic Party ward headquarters was synonymous with local Mafia headquarters/clubhouse). The FBI continued to hound Little Louis, anxious to convict him on a narcotics trafficking charge, while New York City special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey went after him as one of many targets of the "Syndicate" he was dedicated to obliterating. Fearing the implacable Dewey (who would use his fame as the country's most successful crimebuster, the man who put away Lucky Luciano and other organized crime bigwigs, to the state house in Albany and two bids for President as the Republican nominee in 1944 and '48), Buchalter was tricked by a childhood friend into surrendering to federal authorities on a narcotics trafficking charge on the stipulation he would not get turned over to Dewey. Convicted, he was sent to Leavenworth for 14 years, later extended to 30 because of Lepke's involvement in union racketeering. After being arrested for murder, "Kid Twist" Reles turned informant for New York state authorities in 1940 and fingered Buchalter for four murders, including that of Brooklyn candy store owner Joseph Rosen, a former garment industry trucker, in 1936. Reles, himself a professional killer who was seeking to avoid the electric chair for his own crimes, said he overheard the order for the Rosen hit given by Buchalter himself. New York City District Attorney William O'Dwyer, who planned to run for mayor, arraigned Buchalter and other of his Murder Inc. associates on the basis of Kid Twist's testimony to the grand jury. The trial of the Murder Inc. boss was scheduled for November 12, 1941, and Lepke was transported from Leavenworth to New York City to stand trial for the Rosen murder. However, on the morning of the trial, Reles--who was being by guarded by six New York City police officers in Room 623 of the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island--"fell" from the sixth-floor window to his death. The detectives said it was a suicide, but the angle of trajectory of his body indicated that he had been pushed or thrown out of the window. Albert Anastassia, the "Lord High Executioner" himself, had allegedly put a $100,000 bounty on the Kid's head, though it was widely believed that Mafia boss Frank Costello "touched" the detectives guarding the Kid, bribing them to ensure that Reles would never get to the courtroom to testify. What is known is that Kid Twist, the would-be "stool pigeon", became known after his death as "The canary who sang, but couldn't fly." Lepke had run out of luck, however. O'Dwyer obtained a conviction based on the testimony of another Murder, Inc. turncoat, Albert Tannenbaum. In December 1941 the jury convicted Buchalter of first-degree murder four hours after being handed the case for their perusal and judgment. Buchalter was sentenced to death by electrocution in the electric chair. In October 1942, the conviction and sentence was upheld by the New York State Court of Appeals, and New York City requested that Buchalter be turned over by the federal government for execution of sentence. Lepke put up the greatest fight of his life to avoid his fate, calling in favors from the Mafia's friends in the U.S. Justice Department and the court system and managed to remain at Leavenworth until January 1944, when he was turned over to New York. His execution was slated to take place on March 2, but it was postponed when the state's highest court of appeal decided on one final review. Gov. Dewey was forced to grant his former nemesis Buchalter, along with fellow defendants Emanuel Weiss and Louis Capone, a 48-hour reprieve. Ultimately, the court confirmed the conviction and sentence. Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, one of the most powerful figures in organized crime history, was executed at the state penitentiary in Ossining (the fabled Sing Sing) in the electric chair affectionately dubbed "Old Sparky" on March 4, 1944. He 47 years old. After Lepke's conviction Albert Anastassia was the sole boss of Murder, Inc., but with the incarceration and deportation of Lucky Luciano he moved up in the Mafia ranks, eventually taking over the Mangano Family (later known as the Gambino Family), after the family don, Anastassia's nemesis Vincent Mangano, disappeared. With Frank Costello's support, he was elevated to boss of the Magano Family after The Mad Hatter successfully claimed he had hit Mangano in self-defense, as the don was determined to kill him. Costello wanted Anastassia as a don in order to counter the ambitions of Vito Genovese, the real-life model for Don Corleone in The Godfather (1972). As a boss, Anastassia's brutal ways eventually worked against him. In 1952 he violated a cardinal rule of the mob--don't kill outsiders. Anastasia ordered the murder of one Arnold Schuster, a young tailor's assistant, after seeing Schuster on television taking credit for fingering fugitive bank robber Willie Sutton (the man who said he robbed banks because "that's where the money is"). In a rage, Anastasia ordered Schuster to be killed, telling his men, "I can't stand squealers! Hit that guy!" The murder of an outsider opened up the Mafia to unwanted public scrutiny. Genovese used the incident to begin undermining Anastassia, but it wasn't until Anastasia's own ambitions alienated Mafia kingpin Meyer Lansky (the inspiration for "Hyman Roth" in The Godfather Part II (1974)) that Genovese could act. When Anastasia horned in on Lansky's highly lucrative Cuban gambling operations, Lansky gave Genovese permission to eliminate the interloper, which Genovese arranged as part of his greater plan to undermine Frank Costello's role as "Prime Minister of the Mob" and establish himself as "Capo di tutti capi" ("Boss of Bosses"). On the morning of October 25, 1957, Anastasia was assassinated in the barber shop of the Park Sheraton Hotel (now the Park Central Hotel, on 56th Street and 7th Avenue) in New York City by two men wearing scarves. Anastasia's bodyguard was not on the scene, having decided to go for a walk after parking the boss's car in an underground garage. The Anastasia hit was carried out with an efficiency of which the Lord High Executioner's former Murder, Inc. partner, Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, surely would have approved.