Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 462 - Murder, Inc.

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

In the 1930s, an association of primarily Italian mafiosos and Jewish organized crime gangsters, based in Brooklyn, was formed for the purpose of putting distance between the underworld figures ordering hits, and the people carrying out those executions. This organization would come to be known as, Murder Incorporated. And this is their insanely violent story, loaded with crazy characters and their colorful nicknames. Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch-related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast.Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch.

In 1940 and 1941, New Yorkers and Americans as a whole were shocked, fascinated, and vastly entertained by a series of high-profile mob-related murder trials coming out of Brooklyn. The borough's courthouse was packed with spectators alternately gasping and laughing at the outrageous defendants and witnesses with names like Kid Twist, Pittsburgh Phil, Happy, and The Dasher, and their bizarre stories of mayhem and murder that immediately got reprinted in newspapers that flew off the shelves all around the US and across the world. In a time when entertainment was overwhelmingly defined by wholesome radio shows like Little Orphan Annie and Chase Golden Age Hollywood movies like The Wizard of Oz and

It's a Wonderful Life, the trials of these gangsters were the exact opposite of that. Sorted, seedy, a glimpse into the underworld of New York and its seemingly unstoppable spread. The trial earned the gangsters a pithy collective nickname too. Murder Incorporated. Given to them by Brooklyn reporter Harry Feeney. Others would call these guys by a different, more down to earth name. The Brownsville Boys. Not quite as titillating. They'd originated in the Brooklyn neighborhood

of Brownsville, where the gang's leader, Abe Kid Twist Rellis, had cut his teeth doing all kinds of errands as a batboy. Pretty clever and funny name at the time for a gangster's assistant or protege. For about the age of 14 or 15, Relles wanted nothing more than to be a mobster. He delighted in petty theft, stick-em-ups, and helping his fellow mobsters get one over on legitimate business owners. Some people just develop a taste for mayhem early on and nothing else ever satisfies him. Soon, Relles and his gang, about 20 or so full-time members, including Harry Pittsburgh Phil Strauss, Harry Happy Mayonne, Martin Bugsy Goldstein, and Frank the Dasher Abendondo, moved into the

slot machine racket. And while it was lucrative, they didn't find all the riches they'd hoped for when all was said and done. But there was more money somewhere else. And more importantly, to some of these men, infamy, respect, fear, and prestige, too. Murder. Through their contact, Louis Capone, one of the few gangsters in this story that doesn't seem to have a colorful nickname, they got to know Charles Lucky Luciano, the infamous mobster who'd taken over from the old guard of old-style strictly Italian mafiosos and formed the Syndicate, a multi-level, multi-ethnic underworld conglomerate. Sometimes high-ranking members of the Syndicate needed rivals taken out, police informers

punished and potential witnesses silenced, all without the cops being able to trace it back to the men in charge. And that's where Murder Incorporated came in. Murder Incorporated was just one small part of this system, but thanks in part to the trial, they would become known as possibly the most bloodthirsty faction in the history of New York's underworld. But by the late 1930s, the tide was turning against gangsters in New York. People were sick of coming across dead bodies in burnt out cars, sick of being caught in the crossfire of shooting wars, sick of toiling for a legitimate wage when others were flying high on cash earned through mostly violence and intimidation.

And that led to some of the most infamous prosecutions of mobsters in United States history. Made even more infamous because the prosecution's star witness was Abe Kid Twist Rellis himself. The bloody story of Abe and Murder, Inc. in today's Gangs of New York, Hey, I'm murdering here! edition of Time Suck. This is Michaeling here! Addition of Time Suck. This is Michael McDonald and you're listening to Time Suck. Happy Monday and welcome or welcome back to the cult of the curious. I'm Dan Cummins, suck nasty, rainbow stargate denier, flat, not fizzy, non-carbonated bean.

And you are listening to Time Suck. Hail Nimrod, hail Lucifina, praise be to good boy Bojangles and glory be to our songbird Triple M, Michael motherfucking McDonald. One quick thing before I am off, as many of you I'm guessing have heard on Sunday, June 29th on Canfield Mountain here in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, which is just a few miles, Canfield is from where Lindsay and I live, a lone gunman, 20 year old Wes Roley, someone who wanted to be a fireman apparently, we don't know much about him as I record this, set a fire, and then

started shooting at the firefighters when they showed up to put it out. Two locals were gunned down in cold blood. Frank Harwood 42, a battalion chief with the Kootenay County Fire and Rescue Department where he was a 17-year veteran of the department and battalion chief John Morrison 52 of the Coeur d'Alene Fire Department who have been with the department for more than 28 years. And Dave Tisdale, 47, a 23-year veteran of the Coeur d'Alene Fire Department, was also shot and wounded. May the two victims who did not make it rest in peace, and may we never forget their service

and sacrifice. The community here is hurting. We will be dedicating our August Bad Magic donation to the best fund that is going to be set up for the families of the first two responders who died doing what they do, putting out fires so that people and property don't get hurt. So disturbing. I'd say I'm shocked, but I'm not as we've learned here over and over, crazy and violence. It's not limited by zip code. This shit can unfortunately happen anywhere. Thanks to a bunch of you,

especially in the Cult of the Curious group on Facebook for reaching out, making sure Lindsey and I and the kids were okay. Take care of each other, enjoy the good times while you still have a meat sacks. Just sat down to record, literally immediately following, watching the funeral procession drive by

and pay our respects as they did drive by with so many others. So sad but also so beautiful to see the community come together and the face of this tragedy. Just literally right before I sat down, they drove right by where we are here at the Suck Dungeon, drove down Sherman Ave. And man, yeah, just so tragic, so senseless, and so sad that this shit happens all the time. And now let's have some escapism. I'd like it.

Let's talk about some tragedies that time has thankfully softened a little bit since they happened damn near a century ago now. ["Spring Day"] near a century ago now. And actually before I go further, thanks to all our first responders for doing what they do and for all you with dangerous jobs out there who do so much to keep the rest of us safe. You don't get thanked enough and definitely on my mind today. Okay, a little hard to get a clear story on Murder Incorporated, especially since there was no actual corporation or corporation equivalent.

Again, that was just a catchy term hatched up by an imaginative reporter. I gotta say, pretty cool term. The real organization was the National Crime Syndicate, aka the Syndicate, but even that organization, it's not like it was like some LLC or S-Corp, just made up of different crime families whose associations with one another were, you know, fragile, loose at best, and they did a lot more than authorized murders. Despite the Syndicate being a relatively recent criminal organization working in a time when we had radio, print media, even TV, document, the sensational events, stories about the group were actually so sensational that reporters and eyewitness accounts, you

know, they jumbled up a lot of facts with a lot of exaggerations. The first attempt at a narrative history about all this, E. E. Rice's Murder, Incorporated from 1949, consists mostly of gruesome photographs and wild claims. How many murders did the gangsters connected to the syndicate, aka Murder Incorporated Commit, Rice speculated? Maybe a thousand. Maybe ten thousand. The way Rice wrote it, the battle between Murder Incorporated and law enforcement was

like a primordial battle between good and evil. On one side was the big mob, secret and sinister, which created the syndicate known as Murder Incorporated a totalitarian combination. Opposing this stood the district attorney vastly outnumbered but plucky and brave. According to Rice the instrument chosen by Providence to fight the big mob was Thomas E. Dewey Manhattan's special prosecutor and district attorney at the time a juvenile district attorney he wrote. Actually Burton Tuckus, the Brooklyn assistant DA, did most of the prosecuting of Murder Incorporated and he published his memoir of the case Murder Incorporated, titled that as well, in 1951.

Co-written with journalist Sid Feder, Murder Incorporated was a bestseller and indeed the only people who knew more than Burton Tuckus about Murder Incorporated were the Murder Incorporated gangsters themselves. Yet Tuckus and Fedder's account must be handled with caution as historian Robert Lacey argues. Written in a hard-boiled pulp detective style, structured as a battle to the death between the courageous lawmen and bestial predators, filled with dialogue that may be accurate or reconstructed or absolutely completely invented, Murder Incorporated is, as Lacey observes, half documentary, half soap opera. And then

there were the actual soap operas, numerous fictionalizations that appeared in the years following the trial. There were programs like Crime Doesn't Pay that ran on TV from 1950 to, or excuse me, ran a radio from 1950 to 1952 and Mr. Arsenic that ran on TV in just 1952. And then there were films like 1951's The Enforcer, which Humphrey Bogart stars as the crusading district attorney at war with the mob. In these books, programs, and in subsequent retellings, Murder, Incorporated has been framed as the enforcement arm of Lucky Luciano's National Crime Syndicate, a multi-ethnic, closely connected American

confederation of several criminal organizations, mostly the Italian American Mafia and the Jewish Mob. But even that wasn't really the case. These gangsters had hundreds, if not thousands of contacts, whom they hired for contract kills and they weren't actually all organized into some big private army. For one thing, that would have left a massive, very easy to follow trail for whatever law enforcement wasn't already in the pockets of these gangsters. It would have been blatantly obvious who was bumping off who, when, and why.

An organization that, well, organized, would be built to be taken down in a major way once it was infiltrated. For another thing, just because Lucky Luciano organized the syndicate, that didn't mean that all the high-up mobsters were all buddy-buddy simpatico. Lucky himself had risen to prominence by executing his former bosses, making shady deals, double crossing one person after another until none of the old guard, or mustache-peets, loved that title as they were known, were still around. Deep distrust didn't go away, and it would have been foolish for any individual mafioso to trust everyone else with the management

of their enforcement arm. The Corps of Murder Incorporated was essentially a gang of young dudes from Brownsville, primarily Jewish, who'd come of age in a time when gangsters were on the silver screen and in real life a potent source of fascination and fear. These young men who'd grown up in abject poverty and felt neither kinship with their old world Jewish roots or a sense of identity as an American, organized crime was the next best thing. A place where you could come, you know, become someone hugely powerful, make money, gain a reputation, and a cool nickname while you're at it. A lot of fucking nicknames back in Brownsville this time. Led by a young man named Abe Relles, kid twist, the Brownsville boys became friends with a gangster named Louis Capone, no relation

to Al Capone, and that was what led them to cross paths with Lucky Luciano, the underworld's biggest boss. Did a few jobs for Luciano but were mostly worried about protecting their own territory in Brownsville until 1935. That year Thomas Dewey, a young lawyer, would launch a full-scale attack on the mafia and on Lucky Luciano in particular, attempting to do what no lawyer had done before, put a mobster away on a charge other than tax evasion. To do so, Dewey needed witnesses, people who could testify as to how mobsters operated, taking their money and intimidating or even murdering those who didn't regularly

hand it over. And that made the underworld very nervous. How many people had they all fucked over? How many were now waiting in the wings, ready to go to Tom Dewey at the slightest provocation? A gangster named Louis Lepke Bucalter, who'd ran the trucking racket for years, was especially nervous. He had a couple people in mind that he liked to prevent from ever talking to the prosecutor. And that would lead to Murder Incorporated pulling off its biggest hits yet and also the ones that would bring them down. Before we jump in today's timeline, into today's timeline, following Abe kid Twist Relis and other Brownsville boys, let's first understand how murder incorporated

came to be. By going back to the organized crime area we're probably most familiar with the Italian mafia. To really understand the Italian mafia we got to go back a long time to Sicily when it was conquered by the Roman Empire by 27 BCE. Well over 2 000 years ago the year Augustus became emperor local rule on the island had been savagely crushed after two centuries roughly of some sort of Roman rule on at least part of the island. Rebels were sent to Sicily's mine, the Colosseum in Rome, or simply crucified. Due to subsequent invasions over the next few centuries by Greeks from Byzantium, Vandals from North Africa, Ostrogoths, Arabs, Normans, Sicilians began to truly hate rule and distrust anyone who wasn't also Sicilian.

But also Sicilians began to take advantage of other Sicilians during all this chaos brought to the island by one conqueror after another. There was rarely a settled period of law and governance, which meant that local landlords began to expand their powers, abuse their powers. To counter that, local peasants began to form self-, abuse their powers, to counter that. Local peasants began to form self-help organizations who could fight back against, you know, these landlords. And then eventually the landlords came to the peasants leadership with a suggestion. Why not join together and mutually terrorize all those below them? And that's what happened. And organized

crime syndicates were born and the working working-class, law-abiding citizens were getting fucked. By the time Italy reunited in the mid-19th century, Sicily had been stuck in this way of doing business for hundreds and hundreds of years. And around that time too, tens of thousands of Sicilians were beginning to take off for the US. Many of them leaving in part to get the hell away from all this madness. but the island style of organized crime would follow them. Within a few years of their landing, Sicily's criminally minded began to terrorize their

fellow immigrants and how much would that suck? To travel across the ocean, start a new life, get away from all this shit, only to have the worst of your old life follow you. Various extortion societies, colloquially known as the Black Hand Societies, started sending letters written in mockingly deferential tones requesting that their recipient pay up large sums of cash. Or else they and their families would be dust before the end of the week. And they weren't bluffing. Newly arrived immigrants who weren't part of the crime organizations often found that it was just easier to pay up than resist.

And the U.S. which simply did not have the resources at the time to police a major influx of immigrants that were a million per year coming into the country by the beginning of World War I and most of them were Italian. They relied on the ward boss system to keep law and order. A ward boss, also known as a ward healer, was a local political operator who controlled a ward, the smallest political unit in the city, and acted as a key link between the political machine and the voters. They were responsible for gathering votes, distributing patronage, jobs and favors, and providing other services to residents in exchange for their support.

In the ward boss system of major cities like New York, crooked politicians like Boss Tweed controlled the flow of jobs, housing, and money into various districts. These jobs were filled by elections, which meant that more votes were very valuable to these men. The Mafia, they could drum up a lot of votes. In that way, the Mafia began an unholy alliance between East Coast politicians, especially in places like New York City, and organized crime. The Mafia were politically useful in a variety of ways. In addition to drumming up votes, by the beginning of the 20th century, they could also help with labor disputes, which were in full swing.

Workers often went on strike, leading employers to attempt to wrangle them either by threatening dismissal from their jobs or by calling in troops. The Mafia introduced a third way to end these strikes. Shitting on strike workers grandparents faces. They figured out that they snuck into workers homes while these workers were striking and pushed their grandparents, their weak elderly grandparents to the floor and then held them down and literally shit onto their old crying blubbering faces. When the strikers came home, well they'd hear about that. They'd hear about how their sweet sweet nannas, dear papas, have been degraded and told if they didn't want to get their faces shit on again their

grandkids needed to get back to fucking work. This third way is highly effective. At most gangsters would only have to shit on the face with someone's papa or nana or both seven eight times and then the workers wills would be broken and they would do what they were told. Genius. I mean I have to imagine this would still work today. If you want to get someone to do whatever you you know told them to do, well, you'd probably find their grandparents, shit on their faces, and mission accomplished. Okay, for real now. The mafia did actually introduce a third way to end the strikes.

You could hire their goons to assault labor leaders or outright kill them, and drive the strikers underneath them back to work under threats of more violence or through more demonstrated violence. Employers could call the local gangsters, who might start off by quote, slamming labor leaders, which meant they'd wrap a piece of metal pipe up with some newspaper and beat the fucking shit out of the target with it. Union leaders rapidly realized they would have to fight fire with fire if they wanted to push back against this new violent tactic. And in a move that would change the face of crime in America, they now also started going to local gangsters to pay them for protection from other gangsters.

And now with another way for gangsters to make money, more gangsters started to appear, right? Supply and demand, baby. Create a demand, supply will inevitably follow. And then the real racket that increased the number of organized crime members to their highest ever level started with the onset of Prohibition in 1920. With the sale and manufacture of alcohol prohibited, mobsters eagerly stepped in to provide people with drinks and places like speakeasies in which to consume them and this was how the Italian Mafia began to truly dominate America's criminal underworld. But the predecessor to Murder Incorporated specifically was not

actually the Italian Mafia that they would work you know do so much work for. Murder Incorporated was born out of the Bugs and Meyer mob founded by Jewish mobsters Meyer Lanksky and Bugsy Siegel in the early 1920s. Born Mayor Suchkal Janksky I think in Poland in 1902. Meyer Lankski, I can see why he anglicized it, who would come to be known as the Mob's accountant one day, moved to the Brownsville section of Brooklyn when he was still a little child. It was a fascinating, exciting place, teeming with immigrants from all over the world. Lankski later told Yuri Dan, his biographer, I love to walk around and see things I'd never seen before, like peaches and

bananas and other exotic fruits. I had no money to buy anything. I saw some other boys stealing, but I always remember my mother telling me not to touch anything that did not belong to me. Shortly after moving to Brownsville, the Lankski family moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which wasn't exactly a step up. It was still filthy and crowded with multi-generational families sharing apartments or just a couple of rooms. Yetta, Meyer's mother, would often forgo food for herself when the family didn't have enough to feed everyone. Each week she would scrimp and save for chullent, this traditional meal of potatoes and eggs, beef, beans, and vegetables.

On the Friday before the Sabbath, Meyer's mother would hand the chalent to her eldest son. It was Meyer's job to take the dish down to the local bakery because the family didn't have an oven large enough to fit the dish. Proudly carrying the family's Sabbath dinner and a nickel to pay the baker, Meyer would walk down to Lancy Street past the small storefronts, push cart vendors, and street corner craps games. And on one fateful Friday, young Meyer, who had vowed that one day his family would have wealth, he decided to risk the nickel on one of those street corner games. Although he'd never gambled before, Meyer

had often watched in fascination as the Irish and Jewish immigrants played with what looked like a fortune to the youngster. Confident that he would win and would be able to return home with more money for his family than they had given him when he left, Meyer placed his bet and promptly lost. Devastated, now with no money to bake the chalent, instead of vowing to never play again, not forgetting his ass reamed by his mom and beat by his dad, and feeling terrible, Meyer vowed instead to learn how to win this damn game. And now, over weeks of carefully watching others play, he started to notice that other men would often stop by the craps games, collect winnings from the bankers manning the games.

Also noticed that the bankers were using shills, men with whom the bankers were in cahoots to get others to play the game. In addition to taking notice of these mysterious men running the games and making the real money, he also learned how to play the crooked game as best you could. Finally he played again and this time he won. But Meyer's dad who toiled in a sweatshop to feed his family not happy about it. He didn't want his son to be a gambler. He decided that Meyer needed to excel in school. He wanted him to grow up and become a mechanical engineer. But as Meyer studied and prepared for his bar mitzvah as he did well in school to make his dad happy,

he also began living a secret life, becoming street smart as well as book smart He'd now learned how to play craps very successfully and soon kept a stash of winnings in his mattress winnings It just kept growing as he grew up He also saw that the Jews of the Lower East Side were frequent targets of the organized Irish and Italian gangs violence Wasn't so much about anti-semitic assault as it was an attack on less organized, law-abiding immigrants. And now he starts to think about how he might be able to fight back. Unlucky for him, he's about to meet just the right person to partner up with. Benjamin Bugsy Siegel.

Bugsy was another Jewish boy from nearby Williamsburg who'd gotten involved in organized crime as a young child, threatening to set pushcart owners' merchandise on fucking fire unless they paid him a dollar. And for that he earned the nickname Bugsy because people said he was quote, crazier than a bedbug. The two met when Meyer Lansky, returning home from school one day, witnessed a street craps game break out into a fight when police whistles were heard. As the law drew near, Lanksky forced Siegel to drop a gun that Siegel was trying to pick up from the ground in the chaos.

Bugsy was apparently pissed off about the loss of the gun, presumably someone else grabbed it, but he also respected Meyer's moxie in confronting him and the two became fast friends. Like attracts like. 1917 Meyer left school for good just a few weeks shy of his 15th birthday. His dad determined not to let his son slip into the criminal underworld quickly got him a job as an apprentice in a tool-and-die operation. Still hoping Meyer would one day become that mechanical engineer. Funny thing was Meyer was very good at his new job. Real good. The supervisor told him he had golden hands. But also with his skills the supervisor said in 20 years you could be making a dollar an hour. And Meyer essentially thought fuck that noise. He knew he could make a lot more money

than that and make it right now if he dedicated himself to gambling full-time. After work Meyer was a regular at a craps game run by Udy and Willie Albert, and soon he started diving deeper into organized crime. Within a few short years, Lanksky was known to various union organizers around the city as a man who would do violence for a price. It was this type of crime that would first land Lanksky's name on the police blotters. In 1918, 16-year-old Meyer Langske was charged with felonious assault, only to have the charges dismissed. But then soon after getting away with beating the asses of workers just wanting better wages and conditions, Langske is arrested again, this time for disorderly

conduct, possibly because he was trying to become a pimp. He pled guilty to the charge and was fined just $2. And with that, he decided to turn to crime full-time, along with his friend Bugsy. He'd never take a straight job again the rest of his life. Sorry, Pops. Meyer figured that the two of them would be a great pair. Meyer was the Brains, Bugsy was the Braun. Together they would form a group, the Bugs and Meyer Mob. It would grow to include Meyer's younger brother, Jacob,

and the three were then joined by Meyer, Mike Wassel, Samuel Red Levine, Irving Taboo Sandler, and Joseph Dock Statcher, amongst several others. After buying a car and truck rental garage, the gang used it to store stolen goods and then things quickly turned violent. The gang's MO would become extorting money from Jewish moneylenders and storekeepers, as well as Irish and Italian shop owners and gamblers. One veteran New York detective described Siegel as seeming to like to do the job himself. He got his kicks out of seeing his victims suffering, groaning, and dying.

Damn. As much fun as it is to dig into these old gangster stories, and as easy as it can be, to fall into glorifying them with some form of hero or I guess maybe anti-hero worship, important to remember that these guys in real life were huge pieces of shit. A lot of the people they beat up and or killed were not other gangsters who had it coming in some sense. Most were not. They were just regular blue collar workers, often immigrants, barely scraping by and just trying to live live straight honest lives. All the various criminal activities of the Bugs and Meyer mob put them on the radar of another much bigger much more feared and

connected criminal, the infamous Lucky Luciano. Charles Lucky Luciano, born Salvatore Luciano in 1897 in Sicily, probably did more to create the modern American mafia than any other single man in history. He moved to the US around the age of 10 and was recruited into gang life early, joining Manhattan's infamous Five Points gang as a young teen. We talked about them a few years back in the Irish Mob Suck, episode 343. Man, remember the brick bats? Those guys used to bash each other's skulls in around the streets in New York City? Fucking brick bats those guys used to bash each other's skulls in around the streets in New York City? Fucking brick bats.

Still makes me sick to my stomach to think about, right? Big piece of brick, just some rocks dropped into a sock or some other piece of cloth or whatnot, swung into or thrown into someone else's face or the back of their skull. Just brutal. These guys didn't only fire shots at each other from around corners or from behind cars, they got into each other's faces and just viciously brawled. Truly men of violence. Around the start of Prohibition in 1920, Lucky was recruited as a gunman by Giuseppe Joe the Boss Masseria and a few years later, Luciano, he goes to work for Arnold the Brain Rothstein, another seminal figure in early organized crime

and the supposed fixer actually of the Major League Baseball's 1919 World Series. Games that cost shoeless Joe Jackson one of the best hitters to ever play ball the second half of his career. And it would be what kept him out of the Hall of Fame ever since. Anyway, with the onset of Prohibition, Rothstein had realized there was a lot of money to be made but he wasn't the type to get his hands dirty. He wanted partners who would do that. Specifically, he wanted two up-and-coming gangsters, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lanksky, whom he'd met at the bar mitzvah of a son of a mutual

friend. And Luciano and Lanksky, they'd actually met a couple years prior. There's some dispute over exactly how they met, but one story has it that Lanksky stumbled upon Siegel and Lucky having a brawl over one of Lucky's sex workers. Lankski, the story goes, hit Lucky over the head with a tool from his apprentice's box and stopped the fights. But Luciano would remember meeting Lankski when Lucky's gang tried to shake down Lankski, who told him in no uncertain terms to go fuck themselves. Okay, little man, Luciano reportedly said, you get your protection for free.

And then Lankski supposedly shot back, shove your protection up your ass. I don't need it. The two, along with Siegel, then became good friends, right? One bad motherfucker respects another again. And now under Rostein, they were co-workers of sorts. Rostein wasn't only their boss, he was also their mentor. He taught them how to dress, how to choose clothes that weren't too flashy, how to have good manners so they could blend in with high society, make important friends, powerful and influential people, and not just be seen as common street thugs. Unlike other bootleggers who were interested in making a fast buck, selling shitty bottom

shelf bathtub gin, Rostein was intent on building a true network of bootleggers who would only sell the best booze that money could buy. He wanted something that would last. Rostein developed contacts with some of the best distilleries in the world in Scotland, who would sell him Grade A scotch and he would then transfer to another minion Irving Waxie Gordon in Philadelphia. Love all these nicknames. Rostein refused to allow his minions to cut the scotch with cheaper booze and he forbid them from ripping off one another. To defy Rosting meant courting death. Rosting, Blankski, Luciano, and Gordon, they developed a distribution system that made them all very, very rich men. A fifth of Scotch off the boat cost the bootleggers $2.20,

but would easily sell on the street for 15 times that amount. A full case of Scotch could cost them about 25 bucks but they could turn and sell it for a thousand dollars. However that didn't mean they were making you know $975 in profits. There were a lot of costs when it came to being a gangster. The supply of Scotch, other whiskey, had to be regular so customs and federal agents had to be controlled. That meant bribes, lots and lots of expensive bribes. They also had to have warehouses to store all the whiskey in. So Lanksky and Luciano went into the real estate business. And they needed bottles that looked like originals.

So they bought a bottling company. For labels that looked just like Johnny Walker, Hagen Hagen, Dewars, Lanksky bought a printing operation complete with color presses. All of this worked fantastically and turned Lanksky and Luciano into very close, very rich friends. This was despite the fact that many of the old guard of the mafia did not believe in associating with non-Italians. But Lucky liked that Meyer was different. The ethnic differences were sometimes a source of jokes between the guys. Once when Lanksky, Siegel, and Luciano and another Italian-American were meeting to plan an attack on a warehouse, Lengsky complained that the Jews were forced to take the risky jobs while the two Italians sat back and watched. And then Luciano said, what do you mean two Italians? Well one WAP, one MICK, and two Jews, just like in the neighborhood.

Lengsky stared at Luciano like he was nuts. What are you talking about? One WAP and one MICK. Where's the MICK? Luciano started to laugh, pointed at his Italian chum, Francesco Castiglia. He says, him. He's Irish. You know, Frank Costello. That was actually how Costiglia became Costello, a name later to be associated with the highest echelon of organized crime in New York City. Frank Costello, by the way, supposedly the main real-life mob boss who Marlon Brando's character in The Godfather, Don Vito Corleone, was based on. Meanwhile, Lanksky and Luciano, they were making a ton of money, money to be put into other illegal operations like gambling houses and bordellos. They also bought into established bookmaking operations, the first step in what

would become a nationwide gambling syndicate. Lanksky made them create what he called the Buy Money Bank with a nest egg of five grand, equivalent to about 80 grand today. It wasn't really a bank, more of an insurance plan. The five grand was taken by Frank Costello to politicians and police officers who agreed to look the other way when the gang came into their wards. In turn, they used it to ensure election victories. And of course, when that five grand would run out, they'd fill it right back up.

The buy money bank was sort of an investment plan that paid off big time for the guys. Costello started small, buying the politicians and cops and war healers in areas where the group was buying up bookies. The politicians in turn used the money to ensure election victories. By this time, the Italians and Jews of the Luciano and Bugs and Meyer gangs had attracted the attention of not only Arnold the Brain Rosting but of mob bosses Salvatore, Little Caesar, Maranzano man who led what would become the powerful Bonanno crime family and Joe the boss Masseria, Lucky's old boss and head of the Genovese family one of the most powerful American mafia families ever.

These two old guard Italians were currently fighting what would become known as the Castella Marisse War, a ruthless battle to see if the Italian underworld could be united under a single boss, a boss of all bosses. As a very powerful Italian crime figure himself, Luciano would end up being drawn into this battle despite his reservations over it He was drawn in when the brain rosting Luciano's business partner and dear friend his mentor was murdered November 4th 1928 gunned down while at a business meeting at Manhattan's Park Central Hotel Because he reportedly refused to pay money he owed from a three-day long high-stakes poker game the previous month a lot of money

$320,000. Equivalent to a little over six million dollars today. It's fucking quite the tournament. Rostein claimed that the game was fixed. And maybe was. Probably was. Well now Lucky found himself drawn into the fray. And before we learn about what Lucky does next, let's take this week's first of two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads, please sign up to be a space lizard on patreon. Get the entire catalog ad free. Episodes three days early and more. Thanks for listening to those ads. And now let's see how Lucky navigates the Castella-Marise War. Lucky made a show of taking Masuria's side in

the Big Mob War. But then, in a secret deal, he offered to murder his own boss in exchange for taking control of all of Joe the Boss's Masurias rackets and becoming Little Caesar Maranzano's second command. As part of the deal, on April 15, 1931, Luciano lured Masuria to a meeting at a restaurant called Nueva Villa Tam tomorrow on Coney Island and While the men and some others played cards with a few other unnamed underworld figures Luciano allegedly excused himself to go use the men's room And then the gunman came in they were Albert and a Stacia Vito Genovese Joe Adonis and Meyer Lansky's old friend Bugsy Siegel

Masuria was shot in his head back in in chest, serial the artichoke King Terranova, fucking weird nicknames never stop and I love it, was the getaway driver but allegedly he was too shaken up to drive over the hits and Siegel pushed him out of the driver's seat and took over. And El Salvatore Little Caesar Maranzana was the boss of all bosses, head of the five families. Luciano was soon brought in for question regarding the murder of his rival by the police. At the time, police suspected a gangster named John Silkstockins Giustra as being one of the gunmen in Masuria's murder. This was based on the report of a confidential informant and that one of the coats found at the murder scene was identified as belonging to Giustra. But the case was dropped after Juestra got murdered. July 9th, 1931. They fucking whacked Silk Stockings! Who knew Silk Stockings was touchable?

I bet the artichoke king pulled the trigger. Lucky with Siegel's help had gotten away with murdering his own boss. And he wasn't going to stop there. Before the end of the year, Luciano and other young upstarts would then knock off Marizano as well. And the era of the old world, so-called mustache Pete's was over it was time for some young guys some fresh blood to take center stage and lucky Luciano would be at the center of that center stage a natural organizer Luciano continued the committee of the five families which have been

established by Marizano and will control East Coast rackets for decades. These five families by the way, the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese families. All five of these families still active and organized crime in varying degrees in New York today, or at least on the East Coast, you know to various degrees, all founded in between the 1890s and 1920s. Rather than naming himself the boss of all bosses, as Maranzano had when he organized the five families into a group that at least tried to work together, Lociano called himself the chairman of the board. That was in line with his other plan, establishing and

hosting the first national meetings of what became known as the commission, the governing body of the American mafia, with the aim of avoiding unnecessary bloodshed and maximizing everybody's profits. These dudes are really putting the organized and organized crime now. And Luciano's still not done. He collaborated closely with the Jewish mob and had learned they could be very good allies, along with the Italian families. He now wanted to keep working with them under a formalized organization he had started a few years prior. And that organization was the National Crime Syndicate. and here we fucking go. So to reiterate, the Commission is the organizing body for just the American Italian mob, just a bunch of hot, hard

father daddies. Simply fucking dripping in marinara sauce and olive oil. Maserati bugatti meressi ton mea entano bandettis! Forget about it! And the National Crime Syndicate brought in the Jewish mob as well. More hot, hard father daddies simply wet with matzo ball soup and kosher brisket juice with tasty ass chunks of mama's challah bread mixed in with some chunky flavor making my rock hard dreidel spin baby! Oy vey!

The syndicate had been founded in May 1929 conference attended by the biggest names in the criminal underworld. Lucky Luciano, Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Frank Prime Minister Costello, Joe Adonis, Louis Lepke, Bu Calter, members of the Gambino crime family, the Atlantic crime syndicate boss, Nucky Johnson and more. And yes, that Nucky Johnson, uh, represented in HBO's Boardwalk Empire. The gangster played to perfection by Steve Buscemi, chef's kiss on that performance. Uh, Lucky was careful to stress that his being chairman of the board of the commission, him also running the national crime syndicate, this was not some kind of unification under one boss situation and that no one would have to surrender

any of their power to any other bosses. Just more of a coordination conference for bootleggers you know more than anything else. He knew who he was working with. A lot of big egos. A lot of men with big egos who would not hesitate to try and have him killed if they felt overly threatened. Lucky and Meyer did a lot of traveling for a few months now selling the idea of the syndicate. Response largely very positive. But now to make the syndicate work nationwide the organization needed enforcers. People on the ground who would not mind doing the dirty work so that the people at the top could keep their hands clean.

But to get people who were sufficiently far away from the big guys, people who were running their own rackets in smaller parts of New York and elsewhere who might occasionally do favors for the big guys, they needed to have a strong middleman. A guy who the men at the top could call and explain what job they needed doing and then he could hire someone below him to do that job. Someone the men at the top would never need to meet so they could maintain some distance from the crimes they were authorizing. And the men who are committing crimes for them, they wouldn't know who was ordering the hit. So this middleman would really need to be somebody a lot of people could trust.

Because if he got pinched, he'd be able to give the police a lot of names. And that middleman would be Albert Chobis Fish. That's how they do it in Brooklyn! Peanut butter! Let me take a cat an eye and tail to your fat bottom while you pump some of that hot apple cider on daddy's thirsty mouth! Albert Fish, the gray man, the werewolf of Wisteria, the Boogeyman, the Brooklyn Vampire, was an underworld legend. He was a shrewd businessman who could communicate well with anyone. He loved to write a long letter. And he also scared pretty much everyone he met with his propensity for genital mutilation of both himself and anybody who tried to cross him.

Piss off, Fish, and you truly would not know what would happen next. He might tie you up in a barn, might make you drink his piss, might cut half your dick off and leave you to bleed out, or might drop his own pants and insist that you spank his fat bottom with a switch and tell his bloody and stick a large sewing needle into his balls. Show me this! No, that was a throwback to the wildest story I'll probably ever tell here. Fish was in Brooklyn around this time,

but obviously he was not, if you're familiar with this story, he was not the guy who anybody would wanna work with. Louis Lepke Buchalter would be Lucky and Meyers murder organizing middleman and the first head of what would become known as Murder Incorporated. Born in 1897, Lepke was one of 13 kids, damn, spent most of his childhood in a tenement in the

Lower East Side. At the age of 12, his father died and then he was sent to live with his sister in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Dirt poor, angry with his lot in life, Lepke started doing whatever he felt he had to do to put some money in his pocket and another criminal life is born. Lepke started doing whatever he felt he had to do to put some money in his pocket. And another criminal life is born. By the 1930s he was one of the lords of the New York underworld. With his lieutenants, Jacob Gura Shapiro and Emmanuel Mendy Weiss, he'd shaken down both the garment and the trucking industries. Lepke and his gang went from business to business, union to union, demanding to be paid off.

If you didn't pay off, you might find yourself with a broken window, slashed tires, acid-burned face or a bullet through the middle of your fucking skull. And when Lepke wanted someone murdered, he often went to Albert Anastasia, a mobster who came out of the tough streets of Lower Manhattan, a man who had earned the nicknames of the Mad Hatter, One-Man Army, and Lord High Executioner. Albert will become the second and last head of Murder Incorporated. We've met him already. He was one of the gunmen who took out Joe the Boss Masuria when Lucky Luciano put a hit on him. In the 1920s and 30s, Anastasia had been

charged with three different murders. One in 1928, another in 1932, and a third in 1933. And in each case, what do you know it? Witnesses either disappeared, funny how that would happen, or would suddenly refuse to testify. This happened a lot with mob-related violence. Prosecutors, of course, wanted to change that. And in 1935, New York City District Attorney Thomas Dewey, who we mentioned earlier, decided to go after the mob. He didn't want to just try and get them on tax evasion charges. He wanted to show how the underworld was systematically influencing politics from who got to post bail to who got elected His first target was the biggest one in existence

Lucky Luciano and Dewey did put him away in 1936 on a sentence of 30 to 50 years Convicting him on charges of organizing prostitution aided by dozens of witnesses who placed lucky at the center of an enormous prostitution ring and placed Lucky at the center of an enormous prostitution ring. And then Dewey set his sights on Lepke. And Lepke decided he was going to make convicting him really hard. The way Lepke sought, he couldn't get convicted if there were simply no witnesses left alive. His business was fucking murder. If anyone could continually eliminate witnesses, it was going to be him. So he relied on his connections, specifically on a group of young Jewish men from Brownsville that he'd come to know in the early 1930s.

Young men who were eager to prove themselves as mobsters. Young men who had probably already murdered dozens of people. Young men the press would refer to as the main killers of Murder Incorporated. And now that the stage has been set, let's dig into this group further in today's timeline. Shrap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time-sucked timeline. We'll start back at the turn of the century, 1900. Within a couple years of 1900, records are unclear, Sam and Rose Rellis crossed the Williamsburg Bridge from Lower Manhattan to arrive in Brooklyn. Sam and Rose were from Austria and then settled

in the Lower East Side bringing their son Abraham into the world May 10th, 1906. Curiously, he came out of the womb wearing a well-tailored double-breasted pinstriped suit with a cigar in his mouth and he told his mom she was, quote, a nice broad. She was done breastfeeding him for the first time. He also asked for the phone number of the nurse who slapped his bottom. He was destined to be a gangster. Now, obviously that's nonsense. The streets of the Lower East Side, where Abe was born,

were crowded with fresh immigrants, over packed tenement houses, and of course, gangs. Seeking more space and a better neighborhood, they crossed over into Brooklyn. The place for immigrants to settle in Brooklyn at the time was Brownsville, also New Lots, East New York, eastern parts of Brooklyn that bordered Queens. Until relatively recently, these areas had been farmland, and not particularly nice farmland. New Lots was low land, flooded easily. At one point, it was the home of New York City's largest garbage dump, also downwind of bone-boiling plants. Sounds like a fun place to work on Jamaica Bay. And the stench was awful. But in the 1860s, some farmers started to divide their land into single lot homes with the hope of attracting New York City workers. Brownsville, named after developer Charles Brown, began with the construction of a bunch of boxy one- and two-story homes.

By 1883, there was a small neighborhood of modest homes, as well as some scattered factories. Very working class. Low-end working class. Sidewalks were broken, sewers often backed up, constantly trashed out in the streets. But it wasn't as crowded as many places in Manhattan, and it was cheap, so it kept attracting more and more people. The construction of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903 led to a flood of workers and their families looking for better housing and work that wasn't in

Manhattan sweatshops. By 1920 when Abrellas was 14, 85% of the people in the neighborhood were Jewish, many of them from Russia and they were all also vastly different. Some spoke Russian, others spoke Hebrew, still others spoke Yiddish. There were Orthodox, conservative, others spoke Hebrew, still others spoke Yiddish. There were Orthodox, Conservative, Reform Jews, even Atheist Jews. There were Conservatives and Liberals, Marxists and Democrats. It was a place teeming with diversity of thought with lots of disagreement and calls to take various kinds of political action. Also rife with violent crime. It was plagued by so-called toughs, boys and young men who went around terrorizing others, had the highest rate of assaults, robberies, and total crime in all of Brooklyn. Sammy Aronson ran an amateur boxing gym in Brownsville in the 1920s where Abe Rela sometimes went

to train and he explained how crime worked. He said kids began a sort of spring training course for thugs when they were nine or ten years old. The insidious pattern was pretty standard. It was followed by every kid in Brownsville who went wrong. First step was raiding penny candy and gum machines in the subway stations and corner stores. After a few months swiping pennies the kids would start hopping wagons to steal fruit or vegetables. They would do that for a long time, maybe three years or so, before moving up to muslin pushcart peddlers which came next. By ages 14 and 15 in the

early 1920s, Rillis was already cut in school, hanging out on the street with other teenagers like Bugsy Goldstein and Harry Pittsburgh Phil Strauss and getting into trouble. Soon Abe dropped out of school, began working as a laborer in a warehouse and then when he was 16 he and a buddy attacked the warehouse watchman where he worked, stole a whole truckload of dolls that they then sold. It was done with straight jobs. By the time he was 21 in 1927, he had started racketeering seriously. He was arrested six times before 1928.

By then he had become, according to prosecutor Burton Turcas, quote, a loathsome hoodlum with a warped intellect. His future gang members were meanwhile going down similar paths. Let's start with Harry Strauss, who participated in no fewer than 28 murders during his time with Murder Incorporated. That's fucking wild. One of the most prolific serial killers in the US kind of territory. And some historians suspect him of killing up to 500 people.

Harry Pittsburgh Phil Strauss had been born in Russia on or about July 29th, 1909. He was not born in Pittsburgh. Apparently he never even went to Pittsburgh. No one seems to know exactly how the hell he got that nickname. Somebody on Reddit guessed it was a cover to make police think that his murder victims had been killed by a guy from out of town. Right? Just a thing of like, who did it? I don't know, some guy from Pittsburgh. I think his name was Phil maybe?

I hope that's why he was called, that's pretty clever. His parents were Jacob and Jetta Ostrosky who immigrated to New York City in 1914, changed their family name to Strauss to sound more American. Strauss' family settled in the Lower East Side. Eventually there were five children, Harry, Fanny, Hyman, Alex, and Sam. Jacob Strauss was a harness maker

worked for the city's Department of Street Cleaning. The family moved constantly for years first around the Lower East Side then up to the Bronx which meant young Harry regularly changed schools. His report cards indicated conduct ranging from C's and B's and his schoolwork ranging from D's and C's. His third grade report card noted that little Harry was quote, not proficient in anything. Seems like a harsh way to view a third grader. What's he good at? Oh, fuck nothing. Literally nothing. When he was eight or nine, Harry's father died and then yetta later remarried and then he dropped out of school when he was 15. He was first arrested in 1927 when he was 18, charged with felonious

assault and unlawful possession of a revolver, and then those charges were dismissed. Guessing? The witnesses decided they didn't want to testify. That staying quiet would be, you know, better for their health. In 1928, he was arrested three different times, charged with robbery, assault, and auto theft. Charges were, can you guess? Yep, all dismissed. For the rest of his life, Strauss would be arrested for something or other almost every year. And in case after case after case, wouldn't you know it, the charges would just continually be dismissed for lack of evidence. The authorities had a hell of a time ever getting anyone to say they saw him do shit. Clearly he had quite the reputation. Strauss was known around town by a lot of people as a dude who was an impeccable dresser and he was known in the

underworld as a dude with a genuine love for violence and murder. In fact as he rose in stature and started making more money instead of hiring somebody else to start doing his dirty work, his hits for him, he just kept killing himself because he enjoyed it. He was proud of how good he was at it and he thought continuing to build a name for himself as the best killer in the city was good for his criminal career. He once said to a fellow mobster, like a ball player, that's me. I figure I get seasoned in doing these jobs here. Somebody from one of the big mob spots me, then up to the big leagues.

Interestingly, Strauss didn't often carry a weapon on him for his hits. He didn't want the cops to be able to arrest him and find something incriminating on his person. And I think he also saw as crazy as it sounds his kills as you know, like works of art. He liked to get creative with them. Instead of bringing a gun to take somebody out, he would stake out the area where he was planning to carry out the hit ahead of time and just look for items lying around in the area that he could use his murder weapons. One of his favorite ways to kill was by use of an ice pick apparently. Dude was

fucking brutal. He would sometimes use a gun you know when it was convenient. On April 1928 he shot a man at point-blank range for allegedly stealing a pistol from him and after that Strauss went into hiding assisted by his friend Italian-American Harry Happy-May-Own who would first come onto the cops radar when he was 16 in 1924 for assault and battery. That charge had been dismissed, but he'd spend eight months of the next year in jail for burglary. So, when these three, Harry Strauss, Happy, and Abe, linked up in the late 1920s, they

quickly began committing auto thefts, burglaries, assaults, robberies, distributing illegal drugs and doing just about anything else they thought could make them money. Soon they would be joined by Martin Goldstein, another son of Jewish immigrants. Martin, first arrested at the age of 17 in 1922, charged with petty larceny. Over the next few years he'd be charged with amongst other things, unlawful entry, felonious assault, and assault and robbery. By 1928 all of these guys are regulars at mobster adjacent Brownsville Haunts They're hanging out of places like Louie Capone's coffee shop a few blocks north of Brownsville Louie again not related Al Capone, but you know, he knew people tough guys would swagger into Capone's coffee shop to talk business and

Tough kids like Rellis Goldstein and Strauss would hover around in the background Gawk waiting for their chance to level up other times Rellis Goldstein Strauss and others would hang around labels pool background, gawk, waiting for their chance to level up. Other times, Relish, Goldstein, Strauss, and others would hang around Label's pool room on Sutter Avenue, as Sammy Aronson put it. The pool room was where you went, quote, if you wanted someone to help you break a head, beat up a guy, break a strike, buy dope, set a fire, plan a robbery, or muscle a peddler. Doesn't sound like a place where I'd enjoy playing some pool. Sounds like a good place where my smart ass would get my ass beat. Or worse. The trio were all waiting to make their big breaks, hanging around the bosses of Brownsville, the Shapiro brothers, Meyer, Irv, and Willie, who effectively ran the neighborhood. Relish Gold, Stephen Strauss,

they would run errands, collect money, threaten anybody who resisted, and wait for the Shapiros to accept them as real gangsters. But after several years working as criminal gophers, still not getting the full acceptance they craved, Rillis began getting a little antsy, a little itchy. He wanted a bigger piece of the action, maybe a brothel to manage. There were at least 15 in Brownsville alone, all owned by the Shapiros. Or maybe a small crew of criminals of his own to boss around when slot machines became all the rage pushed by Frank Costello and his people. Rela's, Goldstein, Strauss and others went from restaurant to restaurant, bar to bar in Brownsville demanding that the owners install the

slots. Anybody who refused got their head busted up. These slots were gold mines. Weekly collections brought in sacks and nickels. However, all the money went up to the Shapiros and then beyond them to mysterious gangsters in the center of the underworld and That meant there wasn't much left over for guys like Abe kid twist relice and his friends Meyer Shapiro the leader of the Shapiro brothers and thus the leader of Brownsville's underworld had no intention of sharing this wealth with the young upstarts So by 1930 relice and his friends they're getting real unhappy with this arrangement. By this time, they've been joined

by Frank the Dasher Abandondo, Vito Sacco, or Vito Chickenhead Garino, a baker who owned five little bakeries that acted like a front for his other criminal activity. Fucking Chickenhead. That's gotta be the best name of this episode so far. Not sure how he got that nickname, but Abe got his Kid Twist nickname from an earlier

gangster, Max Kid Twist Zyfuck. Zyfuck was violent, cunning local gangster, gang leader, who was also a big womanizer, and he was gunned down in 1908 at the age of just 24. Relas loved the stories he heard about him. Now new Kid Twist and his crew decided to launch a rebellion. June 4, 1930, Meyer Shapiro and some of his gang members are standing around outside the Globe Cafeteria on Sutter Avenue in Brownsville. Two cars slowly drive by and the men inside open fire.

Meyer Shapiro and his people immediately return fire and the car speeds off. Shapiro is wounded in the stomach, but will recover quickly. Word on the street was that Rela's and his crew were behind the attempted hit and they were gonna keep coming after him. Shapiro now knew that if he or his brothers left town Rela's would immediately seize all their businesses and if Shapiro stayed out in the open Rela's and his people who were lurking everywhere would try and kill him again. The Shapiro's who would stay in town now had to change their routine, sleep in different apartments every night on different blocks. Then one of the Shapiros guys, Joey Silvers, contacted Kid Twist

Rellis and whispered he could tell him where the Shapiros were. Based on Silver's tip, Rellis and the others hurried to a parking lot, found the Shapiros cars. Rellis used an ice pick to puncture the car's tires so there would be no getaway. But then before he could do anything else, the Shapiros opened fire on him. One of the Relas's friends, George DeFeo, was killed. Bugsy Goldstein took a bullet to the fucking face, but lived. Relas wounded again in the stomach. Kid, twist! Get busted up! But he'll survive. The Shapiros ran away unharmed. And while Goldstein and Relas both recovered, their informant Joey Silvers would be shot to death a couple months later by an unknown gunman for being a fucking rat.

Meanwhile, a new gang war raged on. You're gonna hear all about it right after the day's second and two mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to those sponsors and now we return to the summer of 1930 and check in on the new gang war ongoing between the Shapiros and the Rellis gangs. The Shapiros and the Rellis gangs would battle at least 18 different times between the summer of 1930 and the summer of 1931. And these fuckers fought dirty. Meyer Shapiro spotted Rellis' girlfriend walking along the sidewalk one day, and he had his driver pull over.

Shapiro then grabbed her, pulled her into his car, drove off with her, beat the shit out of her, possibly sexually assaulted her, that part is not clear, then dumped her out on the side of the street. Finally in July of 1931 the tide turned and the night of July 11th, Irv Shapiro stepped out, or stepped into rather, the darkened foyer of his apartment building on Blake Avenue. No sooner had he snapped on his light than a gunman hidden in the shadows shot him to death. Then the following month, August 31st, Rellis stood in front of a pool room on Sutter Avenue. A car roared by and the men in the car fired away at Rellis, but they missed. Kid Twist twisted his way out of some bullets.

The gunman did shoot the windows out of an adjacent store, just missed killing some terrified shoppers. Days later, another gun battle erupted on New Lots Avenue. Scores of shocked pedestrians watched as gunmen fired at one another in broad daylight and then sped away in their cars. Two months after that some armed men finally caught up with Meyer Shapiro. They pulled him into a car and sped off and then his dead body was found later in an abandoned building on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Poor Willie Shapiro, the last of the brothers, would also suffer a terrible end, but it would happen three years later. In 1934, he finally simply stopped hiding. After a couple years of sneaking around the city all the time, and Kid Twist Relas's people

easily found him. His dead body was found stuffed in a laundry bag, buried in the sand along Canarsie Flats. He'd been brutally beaten beaten, an autopsy would find sand in his lungs which indicated that at one point he'd been buried alive. They didn't just kill him, they made him suffer. But before that, back in the fall of 1931, after two of the Shapiro brothers had been killed and the other one into hiding, 25-year-old Abe Kid Twist-Relitz became the new boss of Brownsville. And he outlived his namesake. He wasted no time in taking over Shapiro's businesses, collecting extortion money from brothels, gambling

operations, and loan sharks. Relles called his new organization the Combination, and it was made up of two factions. Relles, Goldstein, and Strauss formed one. Happy Mayone, Frank the Dasher, Abandondo, and Vito Sacco Corino formed another. They even had their own wannabe gangsters underneath them now waiting to run errands. Teenage boys, bat boys hanging around their headquarters, the Midnight Rose candy store, usually called Midnight Roses, open 24 hours a day, run by a white-haired grandmother named Rosie Gold. The building in which the old headquarters of Murder Incorporated still stands today. On the corner of Saratoga and Lavonia Avenues, located on the elevated portion of the three subway train and looks

about the same as it did back then I guess. It's now a 24-hour bodega. Among the Bat Boys as they were called again hanging around midnight roses were Anthony Dukie Mafatori, Julie Catalano, Abraham Pretty Levine and Seymour Blue Jaw Magoon. And the newly formed Brownsville gang figured that one of the first ways to set themselves up for success in the underworld was to start doing favors. In 1933 Walter Sage, one of the Brownsville boys, happened to be in Albertson Square, a little town on Long Island's southern shore, when he spotted

John Bagadonowicz. Johnny Bagadonuts, actually a former minor gang figure called the Polack, who had quit the rackets and disappeared. Sage hurried back to Brownsville and the Brownsville boys helped pass the news along to friends in Newark that they had found old John the Polack. The friends in Newark as expected replied that they wanted Bagadonowicz dead and the Brownsville boys said they'd take care of it. A gunman named Joe Mercaldo and then also Vito Gorino, fucking Sacco. They took the job while Julie Catalano drove the car. Abe Kidd Twist-Relis went along, quote, for the ride as he would later testify.

With the crew assembled, they drove out to Long Island, the car from Brownsville pulled up in front of Bagadonowicz's home. Gorino and Mercaldo then walked up to the front door and knocked. The Polak's wife answered. Garino and Mercado said they were detectives looking to speak with John Bagadonowicz. Bagadonowicz's wife called for her husband and then when the Polak came to the door, Garino and Mercado quickly just shot him to death right in his fucking front door, ran back into the car and the car roared off before anyone in the neighborhood knew exactly what the hell had happened. This killing, done simply as a favor, boosted the Brownsville Boys' street cred reputations.

In February of 1934, Rellis and most likely Strauss assaulted a gas station attendant Charles Battle now, and murdered another man named Alvin Snyder. Rellis was convicted of third degree assault, sent to prison for three years. With Kid Twist locked up for a bit. I guess they couldn't get rid of the witnesses at time. The combination quickly split up into two allied gangs, one led by Strauss and Goldstein, other led by Mayon and Abedando. The two factions regularly cooperated, but keeping order in Brownsville and fending off rivals soon proved to be, as you would imagine, probably very hard. For example, a young gangster named Jimmy Blue-Eye Silvio had a brother, Bott. Bott Silvio.

And in 1935, Bott went missing. Some guys named Abe Meir and Irving Amron had snatched him, and they demanded that Blue Eyes pay a ransom of eight grand to get his brother back alive. Well, Jimmy Blue Eyes paid the ransom, and Bott was freed. But now Blue Eyes wants some revenge. He goes to Pittsburgh. Phil demands that he kill Meir and Amron. And Phil agrees. So on September 15, 1935, Dukie Mafatori, one of Rillis' bad boys, was hanging out with a friend named Walter Sage on a street corner when Bugsy Goldstein, Harry Pittsburgh,

Phil Strauss, and Shalom Bernstein hurried over. Strauss told Maffatori and Sage to go snatch a car and then go to Mir and Amron. They were to tell Mir and Amron that they needed to go to some sort of meeting with Phil and Bugsy. Maffatori and Sage found Mir and Amron then drove them to Thachford Ave. When Mir and Amron got out of the car, Strauss ran over and shouted, This is a stick up. He and Goldstein then pushed Mir and Amron up against the wall, stepped back, started shooting. But for some reason Goldstein's gun didn't go off. Mir was killed, Amron only fainted.

So Strauss and Goldstein now bundled Amron into the car with Muffatori and Sage, then Strauss, Muffatori and Sage drove off with the unconscious Amron. They took Amron, now coming around to the home of Bugsy's brother, Mutt Goldstein. Fuck yeah, let's get a mutt in this story. There they beat Amron up and loaded him back in the car. Bugsy Goldstein followed in a backup car, driving down the street. Sage now shot and killed Amron. Seems like Strauss could have just shot Amron after Goldstein's gun initially jammed, avoided all this kind of craziness driving around, additional steps, but you know, what do I know? I'm no contract killer. I'm no Danny Two Pumps Cummins And don't you fucking ask me how I got that nickname. But then what you stinking, okay? For all you know

It's from sometimes when I had a flat tire And I pumped it all the way back up with two pumps because of my big muscles, alright? And don't call me two pump comes It's two pumps plural last names come is not not comes and not Danny's two pump comes. Okay, anyway Then Maffetori stopped the car. Everyone got out jumped into the backup car. The gold team was driving leaving the corpse behind Meanwhile on the same time 1935 the Goldstein was driving, leaving the corpse behind. Meanwhile, around the same time, 1935, Ambergs emerged as an even greater threat. Hyman, Louis, and Joey Amberg were mirror images of Abe Rillas, Harry Strauss, and Buggy Goldstein. Three young men who came up as teenage street

corner hoodlums, bootleggers, thieves, and sometimes assassins. So many fucking scary men. I live around New York right now, Jesus Christ. Back in November 1926, armed with smuggled-in-guns, Hyman Amburgh staged a daring attempt to escape from New York's most notorious prison at that time, the Tombs, officially known as the Halls of Justice, located at 125 White Street in Lower Manhattan. Amburgh almost escaped, but then when he was finally cornered by guards, he killed himself. Joey and Louis would be in and out of jail, but were back the street by the mid 1930s and when they heard that Abe Kidd Twist-Relis was in jail they decided to step in on his territory. But Joey Amberg faced two major problems. In the summer of 1935 Joey had murdered a gangster named High Kasner. Amberg and some others had stuffed Kasner's corpse into a sack,

shoved it in the sewer, assuming the sewer would carry the corpse off into the ocean, but it didn't. The corpse popped back up. Word circulated that Joey Amberg was the killer. And that was a problem because High Casner was a close friend of Albert Anastasia and Louis Capone, some of the underground's elite gangsters. Amberg's second problem was that Kid Twist Relas's associates, especially Strauss and Goldstein, had no intention of being taken over by Joey and knew that Albert Anastasia, Louis Capone, and potentially other high-ranking mafiosos would not stand for it either.

Louis Capone, Albert Anastasia, they meet with Lucky Luciano at the Saratoga racetrack, and Lucky gave his permission, his blessing, to kill Amberg. So, September 30th, 1935, Joey Amberg fucking dies! He and his driver, Manny Kessler, they pull into a garage on the corner of Blake and Christopher Afts. They were apparently headed for some sort of meeting with Harry Pittsburgh Phil Strauss, one of the most dangerous men in the city. But when Kessler and Anberg stepped out of the car, two men rush up, announce their police officers, and order Anberg and Kessler to

face the garage wall. When Anberg and Kessler turned around, these two men opened fire, gun them both down. No one ever found out who these killers were. One might have been Happy Mayone, another might have been Strauss or Bugsy Goldstein. An early police report speculated that the killers were Goldstein, Strauss and maybe Louis Capone. Then just a couple weeks later, in October of 1935, Louis Pretty Amber is murdered. His body was driven to Brooklyn, left in a car, which was then doused with gasoline. According to legend, whoever did it decided to let one of the women in the neighborhood toss the match that would ignite the car. Not sure why exactly. I guess just to, I don't know, try and make her think that they were cool.

I don't know. New York City assistant district attorney, district attorney, Turcas, would later mock this event as Ladies Night and Murder Incorporated and referred to the woman who threw the match as Miss Murder Incorporated. And now once again let's back up a little before we again move forward. Just a few months earlier a variety of New York public officials had decided that enough was enough with all the violence. It was time to launch an attack on these gangs. The tipping point occurred in February of 1935 when Irving Ben Cooper, special counsel to the City of New York, reported that 77 bail bondsmen in New York City had perjured themselves 1,584 times.

They had regularly listed fake names on records of who posted whose bail, who were they protecting, who were lining their pockets. Pressured by angry civic groups, Manhattan District Attorney William Copeland Dodge agreed to impanel a grand jury to investigate Cooper's charges. But then the grand jury investigation went nowhere. Leader of the grand jury demanded that Dodge appoint an investigator of their choice and that Governor Herbert Lehman appoint appointed special prosecutor in all this reek of interference and corruption. It became clear to DA Dodge that someone

was going to have to take on all this corruption and he selected 33 year old special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, a man who will earn yet another nickname in this nickname happy story. He would be the gangbuster. Born in 1902, raised in Oueso, Michigan, Thomas Dewey's ancestors included passionate Republican reformers who believed the Democratic Party was the party of aristocrats, slavery, and secession. His family line was so well known and so politically active that on Thomas' birth, the local paper reported that, quote, a 10-pound Republican voter was born last evening to Mr. and Mrs. George M. Dewey.

George says the young man arrived in time for registration in the April elections. Thomas Edward Dewey, whose initials were selected by his father to be T.E.D., Ted Roosevelt's nickname, graduated from the University of Michigan in 1923 and Columbia University's Law School in 1925. With 10 years of practicing law in New York under his belt by 1935, Dewey knew well how corrupt the city's government was. He understood that immigrants and first generation Americans saw the corrupt political machine of Tammany Hall as their only friend. But Dewey believed that Tammany Hall was simply just taking advantage of poor and struggling

people. He wanted to empower immigrants to vote Republican, then the party of the anti-monopoly, trust-busting Theodore Roosevelt. One of Dewey's first criminal cases involved prosecuting vice-cop Jimmy Quinlivan, whose career was uncovered during the Seabury hearings. Somehow between 1927 and 1929, Officer Quinlivan, despite his modest police officer salary, had accumulated some $80,000. And Dewey claimed was grafts taken from speakeasies and brothels. And 80 grand back then, equivalent to about one and a half million today. In 1931, Dewey indicted the infamous gangster Jack Legs Diamond, AKA Gentleman Jack, for

tax evasion, getting him sentenced to four years in prison. Side note on Legs. This dude was fucking insane. This is one of the toughest people I've ever heard of. Very hard man to kill. Let's take a quick little side road because this is so entertaining and absurd. On October 24th, 1924, Legs was shot with a shotgun while robbing a rival's liquor supply. Had a doctor take out a bunch of pellets, stitch him up, he was fine. Back on the street the same night.

October 16th, 1927. Took two pistol shots to the fucking chest. Both bullets came close to his heart. He did this while he was caught up in an assassination attempt on an associate. He went to the hospital, refused to testify as to who shot him, recovered just fine, quickly released. Three years later, October 12, 1930, Dude should have left town every October, very unlucky month for him. Two armed men forced away into Hotel Monticello on Manhattan's west side. They shoot

him at close range five times during an attempted hit and then they ran five shots, hit him hit him each and every time. After they left he got up, poured himself two shots of whiskey, threw him back, then walked out into the hallway where he then collapsed from blood loss. But recovered just fine in the hospital. He has taken seven bullets now and who knows how many shot compelets. Now on April 21st 1931 after grabbing a meal at the Eratoga Inn, a roadhouse near Cairo, New York, he gets shot three more times at close range by an unnamed gunman trying to kill him. Ten total bullet wounds now. Didn't even lose consciousness. He was driven to the hospital in Albany where he reportedly told his surgeon, quote,

They have not yet made the bullet that will kill me. Jesus Christ. He again recovers and maybe he was glad he was, I don't know, at least not shot in October that time. Finally, December 18th, 1931, while he was passed out drunk in his bed after partying all night in a rooming house on Dove Street in Albany, two gunmen enter his room, one holds him down while the other puts a gun to the back of his head and pulls the trigger not once, not twice, but three times. Now he's dead after being shot a total of 13 times. Dude should have left New York after his first several hit

attempts. What a fucking crazy way to live. And he was only 34 when he died. And there's all kinds of guys like legs diamonds running around. Back to the guy who would have put him in prison had he lived, Ted Thomas Edward Dewey, the gang buster. 1932, he helped prosecute Waxie Gordon, one of the East Coast's most prosperous bootleggers.

Dewey alleged that Gordon failed to pay federal income taxes on yearly income of at least 500 grand. In his final remarks at the trial, Dewey said, "...As you retire to your room, gentlemen, I ask you to bear in mind that the people of this country look to you, twelve men, as to the course of justice in this country. Are we to have justice in the courts? Is justice to be effective in this country in the courts or is it not? The jury convicted Gordon, fined him 20 grand, sentenced him to 10 years in prison. And so in 1935, Governor Herbert Lehman asked De me. I think I said Lehman earlier, Governor Herbert Lehman, asked Dewey if he'd lead a special investigation into Manhattan corruption and Dewey agreed, beginning

his work in July of that year. That summer his police squad began making raids. He began getting indictments, snagging 22 loan sharks who would be charged with a total of 252 different crimes and that was just the beginning. He didn't simply want to go after street level criminals. He wanted the mafiosos. And that caused a lot of anxiety for the people we mentioned at the top of this episode. Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Meyer Langsky, Bugsy Siegel, Lepke Buchalter, Albert Anastasia, Dutch Schultz and others. Soon they met to decide what the hell to do. Schultz, outraged by Dewey's assault, insisted that the obvious response was to fucking kill him. Albert Anastasia added that he personally scouted Dewey's office, building, watched Dewey enter a corner store to make some telephone calls he would love to make

to hit himself. Killing Dewey would be easy, Anastasia argued. Dewey's guards usually waited outside while Dewey went into the store. All somebody had to do was take care of the guards, go into the store, and blast the bastard. The others, however, not so sure. Lepke allegedly said, we will all burn if Dewey's knocked out. Luciano agreed with Lepke. The heat was bad enough as it was. Killing Dewey would only bring bigger problems. Anastasia finally agreed with Luciano and Lepke.

Schultz did not, furious, he insisted that Dewey's got to go and announced that if no one else had the stones to go after him, he'd do it himself. After this formal meeting ended, lucky Luciano and the others decided that Schultz had to go. He's a fucking hothead. If Dutch went wild, took a shot at Dewey, everyone was in serious trouble. And there was another consideration in this prospective murder. Since the end of prohibition, everyone had been looking for a new racket to replace bootlegging. Dutch Schultz had expanded rapidly into gambling, threatening games run by Meyer Langsky and Bugsy Siegel. If he were to die, well, then his income would be up for the taking.

And so, October 25, 1935, around 6 p.m., Dutch Schultz walked into the Palace Chop House in Newark. He was staying out of New York City in Jersey,z walked into the Palace Chop House in Newark. He was staying out of New York City in Jersey where he was in deep legal trouble in New York hanging out with friends like Bernard Lulu Rosencrantz and Abe Landau. What's up with Landau? Why didn't he have a nickname? What a fucking loser! Abe! Fucking loser! Landau. Now he's got a nickname. By 1015 or so. There were only four customers left in Palace Chop House. Schulz, Rosencrantz, Landau, and Schulz's bookkeeper, Otto

Berman. And the door flew open. The first men rushing in, or man rushing in, barked, don't move, lay down. Several men rushed to table where Rosencrantz, Landau, and Berman were sitting and immediately opened fire. But Schulz wasn't at the table. And when the shooting was done, the hitmen realized that. So they started looking around and then when they burst into the men's room they find Schultz shoot him repeatedly. He dramatically staggers out and collapses in the gunman run. Rosencrantz and Landau, mortally wounded, managed to stagger to their feet, pursue the assassins, but Rosencrantz collapsed after only a few paces, not LULU! Landau made it outside, but then fell dead on the sidewalk,

the fucking loser's gone. Mortally wounded, Dutch Schultz would somehow survive for another day, semi-conscious, delirious, and mumbling a bizarre litany, peppered with obscure names and places and favorite foods, all transcribed by a series of police stenographers. At one point, Schultz, a non-religious Jew, asked to see a priest

He died at 33 having never regained full consciousness And with his death the problem was solved for lucky Luciano his fellow gangsters, but unfortunately for lucky He was still the number one target on Dewey's radar Thankfully though Dewey still had no idea how to make a charge against lucky stick He'd been arrested repeatedly, but he managed to avoid prison because invariably evidence or, you know, witnesses would disappear. But Eunice Carter, one of Dewey's lawyers, a graduate of Smith College and Fordham Law School, and one of New York's first female black lawyers had an idea of how to change that. Hey, Elucifina! She's excited for a powerful female character to finally emerge

in this fucking meatball fest. A balone pastrami peperoni Antonio Banderas. She'd been involved in a number of cases involving prostitution. She argued that a serious racketeer like Luciano was almost certainly involved with prostitution, that prostitution was a nasty business, and that a jury might well convict Luciano on some sort of prostitution-related charge. So midnight, January 31 31st 1936, Dewey's police squad swept through New York and raided a score of brothels. The next night the Dewey raiders attacked some 80 more.

My god! And the raids would continue for the next several weeks. Every kind of person got caught up in these raids. Prostitutes, bookers, madams, gamblers, horrified citizens, caught in embarrassing situations, and of course, gangsters. Dewey and his lawyers interviewed each and every one. Luciano fled New York, headed for Hot Springs, Arkansas, to that gangster-friendly resort town run by former bootlegger and Harlem Cotton Club owner Owen Ony Madden.

Met him in the Irish mob suck, I believe. On April 1, 1936, Dewey obtained a warrant for Luciano's arrest. Small army of Arkansas lawyers challenged the warrant, but finally Luciano was arrested, shipped back to New York. Dewey's original indictment charged Luciano and 15 co-conspirators with multiple crimes. The number of defendants and the specific charges would vary as the investigation wore on. The trial of Lucky Luciano and others began on May 11, 1936, and like others before and after, a tabloid sensation. Dewey's basic claim was that Luciano and others began on May 11th 1936 and like others before and after a tabloid sensation. Dewey's basic claim was that Luciano with the help of his nine co-defendants had taken over the sex industry, regularly used threats

and violence against the sex workers and of course paid not a penny in taxes on his enormous profits something in the neighborhood of 12 million each year equivalent to a whopping 27275 million a year now. The final version of the indictment charged Lucky and 10 co-conspirators with over 60 separate counts and all of them would be tried at once. But it would be the sex workers who would really capture the media's attention. Betty Anderson was described as blonde and buxom. Catherine O'Connor referred to as a vivacious 24 year old redhead. Shirley Mason, 23 years old,

not given such a flattering description. She was described as quote, a scrawny prostitute. Ouch. Eleanor Jackson, 28, was given a lot more praise, described as slim, pretty, henna-haired, and dressed in a becoming modest brown suit. Margaret Martino, also given a flattering description, a statuesque composed reddish blonde, while Molly Leonard, 37, not so much. She was

written up as quote a rotund solidly built woman, Jesus Christ, who wore a jaunty little hat cocked at a precarious angle over her right eye. Gertrude Bertha Prudence described the most brutally. A reporter wrote that she was quote, a lonely prostitute, homely, dim-witted, cantankerous, and with a voice that many would gladly trade for nails on a chalkboard. Her only repeat customer was allegedly her tomcat, Dirty Whiskers. Very harsh. And that reporter was me, by the way.

Mildred thankfully never was badmouth like that since she was never alive. Back to reality, for the first time, many of these women had an opportunity to tell their stories on a national stage. Mildred Harris, a madam, quote, handsomely dressed in a black and white print gown, black coat draped with silver fox, smart black hat, trimmed with the white bow, wearing white gloves, explained that she had been a sex worker saying, I had always been somewhat adventuresome all my life before becoming a madam. And she explained, and then she said, you know, before becoming a madam, these women explained how they ran their bordellos and who they had to pay off, how they would be threatened with beatings, destruction of property, even murder, if they didn't come up with the money. These descriptions

titillated the press and the reading public and it helped Dewey methodically recreate for the jury New York's huge sex industry. He demonstrated that the industry was dominated by hoodlums who became rich from the sex workers sordid work. Step by step he linked each defendant to the sex business, most often when they had paid off a cop or a judge to release an arrested sex worker. And the person behind all of this, Dewey argued, was none other than Lucky Luciano. The defense heatedly pointed out that virtually all of the prosecution witnesses were criminals themselves. Many Dewey argued was none other than Lucky Luciano. The defense heatedly pointed out that virtually all of the prosecution witnesses

were criminals themselves. Many had been in jail. Many of these sex workers were drug addicts. Lucky's lawyers maintained that all the witnesses against him had been coached on what to do by none other than Dewey himself. It was clear where this was all going. The media declared that Luciano was droopy-eyed,

sullen and swarthy, that he'd run out of luck. Dewey rested confidently May 29th, 1936 after calling 68 witnesses. Now it was the defense's turn, they would call Lucky to testify on his own behalf and it wouldn't go well because that meant Dewey got to cross-examine him. This grueling process took four hours as Dewey forced Luciano to admit that he had been arrested repeatedly, that he had been a bootlegger, that several of his arrests were for possession and distribution of narcotics, that he had regularly cheated on his taxes and lied under oath. Dewey pointed out that once Luciano had been arrested for having a car full of pistols

and shotguns and 250 rounds of ammo. And what was all that for? For hunting peasants, Luciano replied. He had meant to say pheasants. And everybody in the courtroom laughed. The jury would deliberate. That is pretty funny. It's hunting peasants. Oh, I mean, I mean, wait a minute, wait a minute. What are those little birds called? The jury would deliberate for six and a half hours before returning at 525 a.m. on Sunday morning, June 7th, they found nine defendants guilty on 62 different counts. And Judge McCook calmly sentenced not-so-lucky-anymore Luciano to an incredible

30 to 50 years in prison. It was a landmark ruling, the first truly major conviction against a major organized crime figure for anything other than tax evasion. Mayor LaGuardia also thrilled. He told the press that Luciano, quote, could never have run his rackets without the knowledge, if not the connivance, of some of the very people entrusted with law enforcement. I recommend that at least six public officials commit hairy carry. Pretty funny. Straight up telling the press that he wanted crooked politicians to do the honorable thing and take themselves out. Dewey not done now he wanted to go out for someone else.

Louis Lepke Buchalter, the death dealer for the syndicate, the manslaughter maestro for Murder Incorporated. Born in 1897, Lepke grew up on the Lower East Side as one of 13 kids before moving to live with his sister in Williamsburg at the age of 13. He'd come to dominate the drug trafficking trades in Manhattan and also controlled the major trucking lines like linked New York to the rest of the country. His people infiltrated both businesses and unions and he was Dewey's next target. And to take him down Dewey of course would need witnesses. And Lepke's calculation in order to avoid being taken down was simple as I went over

earlier. He would just kill the witnesses before Dewey got to them. He could eliminate the witnesses himself of course. He could also have his lieutenant, Mandy Weiss, seat of that. Lepke and Weiss though, they knew it would be dangerous for them to act directly. They'd ideally need somebody else, someone not directly linked to them to do their work for them, someone like the boys over at Murder Incorporated. And conveniently, guess who just got out of prison?

Abe Relles. Kid Twist. His first goal was to reconstitute the combination in all its holdings, but Lepke and Albert Anastasia had a different job for them, liquidate any witnesses who could come after Lepke. Without much trying, Abe had just become the man in charge of handling most of, quote, the contracts for the syndicate. And the first person Lepke wanted killed was Joe Rosen. Joe was a trucker who drove for Geralt Trucking out of Passaic, New Jersey, just a little north of Newark, and later the New York and New Jersey Trucking Company,

hauling freight back and forth from Eastern Pennsylvania, New York City. By 1932, Lepke Buchalter and his lieutenants, Mendy Weiss and Gurish Shapiro, had begun to shake down the truckers. They demanded a cut from all the trucking contracts and if not paid off they slashed truck tires, set fire to truckloads, and threw fucking acid in drivers faces. But Joe refused to be intimidated.

In 1934, Lepke got him fired, somehow getting his bosses to accuse him of petty larceny. He denied the charges but was out of a job anyway. And when he found another job, that company was under Lepke's control, so Joe would have to pay up or get out. He chose the third option. He chose to find Lepke's grandparents. He held them down and he's shitting their faces. Wait, no.

Wait, no. I forgot. I already said that was nonsense. What really happened was Rosen quit, threatened to quote, go to Dewey, and then to make a living. In the meanwhile, he opened a little convenience convenience store 725 Sutter Avenue in Brooklyn in the spring of 1936 ominous looking men started to drop by the store asking to speak to Joe according to Joe's wife Esther Gura Shapiro and Lepke Buchalter came by they

wanted some cigars she remembered so she gave them some Robert Burns cigars later Max Rubin another Lepke lieutenant, came by with a couple of other guys. Esther Rosen told police that they said to Joe, be a good fellow. We know we've done you dirty, but be a good fellow. First of all, you have to get out of the place. Then she goes, my husband says I can't get out. You have to have money to get out. And then they said, you don't have to worry about that. We'll take care of it. They told him if you know what's good for you. You got to get out of here Over the following weeks more people started dropping by the store pleading with Joe to get out of town saying the higher-ups had authorized his murder But Rosen would not back down and said he again threatened to go to Dewey and rat them all out

Lepke sent the message that under no circumstances was he to talk to Dewey He tried to bribe tried tried to frighten him, nothing worked. Unsurprisingly, now that Dewey was coming after Lepke directly, Lepke decided that Joe had to die fast before he testified to anything. Lepke ordered one of his gunmen, Paul Berger, to drive to Brownsville and identify Rosen for Mendy Weiss. Berger drove slowly past Rosen's store, pointed out Rosen to Weiss. Weiss then reconnoitered the area around Rosen's store. He strolled into the store, looked around, strolled out again, talked to Louis Capone. Capone talked to Pittsburgh Phil Strauss. Capone then ordered a gangster named Shalom Bernstein to clip a car, aka steal it to be a

getaway. Bernstein did. A two-door coupe. Bernstein also had an acquaintance named Muggsy. He had him pull the radio out of the car so that if the car were later found, the police would think it was just an old car stolen for its radio. Bernstein showed the stolen car to Capone and Capone was furious. How could the whole crew climb in and out of a two-door? But it would have to do. They didn't have time to wait. Capone drove with Bernstein along Sutter Avenue and pointed out Rosen's store. That's where somebody's going to get killed, Capone said to Bernstein.

Early on Sunday morning, September 13th, 1936, Bernstein drove up to Rosen's store on Sutter Ave. In the two-door coupe with him were Mendy Weiss, Harry Strauss, Pittsburgh Phil, and another one of Louis Capone's associates, Jimmy Ferracco. Joe Rosen stepped out of his store. He and his family lived in the back. He picked up a bundle of newspapers, walked back in.

This poor bastard just wanted to be left alone. Just wanted to not be shook down or intimidated. He's a good guy, trying to work an honest job and keep the money he rightfully made. Well, slowly, Weiss, Strauss, and Farocco clambered out of the car while Farocco stood watch. Weiss and Strauss stepped into the store pulled out Their pistols shot rose into death not far from where he and his wife and kids slept each night

The gunman then ran back outside the three of them Farakko Weiss Strauss shoved themselves through Bernstein's two doors Bernstein then drove to a pre-arranged rendezvous point where he and the others abandoned the two-door murder coupe Split up drove off with Capone and a gangster named little Farvel Cohen Mean fucking little Farvel of course meanwhile a fish officer Guglielmo Capodoro cruising alongside her av on a tediously routine patrol checking out the traffic lights Suddenly he spotted someone in front of Rosen's store waving hysterically officer Capodoro pulled over ran into the store Sprawled on the floor amid a bloodied clutter of Sunday papers lay Joe Rosen riddled with bullets. It was immediately clear to everyone that the criminal underworld was involved.

Not only the criminal underworld, but Lepke specifically. The police asked Harold Rosen, Joe's sons, is it your impression and your conclusion that the motive for the killing of your father was to prevent him from telling Dewey about the practices of Lepke or any other men. Harold Rosen did not hesitate to answer. Very matter-of-factly, he said, that is it. Right, that poor kid. How badly did he want all these gangsters to fucking die now? Wouldn't it be a great gangster movie? Mob kills some innocent dude, then the guy's kid basically becomes a fucking punisher. Just exterminates 90% of the underworld, killing gang strapped for another. I mean I'm actually after I say that I mean I guess that pretty much is the premise of The Punisher minus the

kid right when mobsters kill Frank Castle's wife and two kids for being witnesses to another murder, Castle becomes a one-man army and starts fucking him up. If I didn't have anything else to do this next week I would just dedicate my time to rewatching The Punisher series on Netflix and re-reading Garth Ennis' take on the Punisher series back in the early 2000s. Back to this story now. November of 1936 federal officials convicted Lepke Bucalter and Gura Shapiro of violating antitrust laws in the rabbit fur garment industry of New York. So random. Out on bail both Bucalter and Shapiro went underground.

They were sentenced to two years in prison, their lawyers appealed, but in June of 1937 they lost. Still Buchalter and Shapiro stayed hidden, though Shapiro would eventually give up. Not Lepke though. Rellis, aka Kid Twist and his gang arranged for a series of hideouts for Lepke in New York. They brought him food, newspapers, and cigarettes. Now back to Lepke, Buccalter, using Kid Twist to take out potential witnesses against him.

On May 25, 1937, around 7.40 a.m., police officers Francis Schneider and Jim Riley, patrolling in Brooklyn in their police cruiser, got a call to investigate an abandoned car. It was a black Buick sedan on Jefferson Ave between Evergreen and Central. They were hurried to the site, peered into the car, jammed into the back seat, it was a fresh corpse. Whoever it was had been hit in the forehead with some sort of weapon,

strangled with the rope and stabbed repeatedly. On the body, the officers discovered a poorly typed note addressed to George Rudnick. Friend George had said, "'Will you please meet me in New York someday? And his friend spelled F-R-E-I-N-D. Same place and time in reference to what you told me last week. Also, I will have that certain powder that I promised you the last time I seen you. P.S. I hope you find this in your

letterbox still sealed. I remain your friend, you know, from Dewey's office. The battered corpse was then taken to the morgue where Rudnick's mother Dora sadly identified him the corner reported that Rudnick was about six feet in height skinny no more than 140 pounds and the poor bastards and the poor bastard had been stabbed with an ice pick some 63 times my god so who was George Rudnick? George Whitey Rudnick was a drug addict and for some reason he'd been identified as a potential Dewey witness. The note seemed to be a clear indication of that. What happened to George would only come to light in 1940 at the Murder

Incorporated trials. There a story unfolded that began about May 20th, five days before the discovery of the body, when Anthony Duky Maffatori was hanging out with Harry Pittsburgh Phil Strauss. Harry told Ducchi and Ducchi's partner Abraham Pretty Levine, we've met all these guys before, to steal the car, bring it to Strauss' home. The next night Ducchi and Pretty took the car to a garage on Atlantic Ave near Eastern Parkway. Meantime, Pittsburgh Phil, a kid twist relis, invented what they considered a pretty clever ruse. First, they tracked down an old typewriter. They had no ribbon spool. Relis had to hold a piece of ribbon in the typewriter while Phil typed. And Phil typed friend George. Relis told him, I think he told spelled a friend wrong. And they tore the note out of the typewriter

and tried again. Once again, Phil typed F-R-E-I-N-D. Rellis again was like, what are you doing? It's not how you spell friend. Well then they got into what Rellis would later describe as quite a rhubarb about the proper way to spell friend and Phil's misspelling would prevail. This will do a lot of good for Lep when they find a dead man with the note, Phil pointed out, meaning Lepke Buchalter. His idea was that when the note appeared in the paper, it would frighten anyone who would consider going to Dewey with information about them.

But the note, by the way, never appeared in the news. Anyway, confident with their plan, the men waited for Rudnick, who they knew hung around the neighborhood and did odd jobs for drug money. Around 4.30 a.m., the morning of May 24th 1937 Rellis spotted Rudnick wandering down the street. Rellis alerted Frank the Dasher Abandondo. Abandondo hurried over to Rudnick. Then Abandondo got into his car. Rudnick got in with him. The two then drove off to the garage on Atlantic Ave. Once they were there Abandondo suddenly grabbed Rudnick. Harry Strauss jumped out of the shadows, looped a rope around Rudnick's neck, began strangling

him while stabbing him furiously with an ice pick. That's so fucking savage. When Rudnick finally collapsed, Abandondo and Strauss tried to shove his corpse into the sedan. Dookie and Pretty had stolen. Happy Mayonne helped, but even with three men pushing and squeezing, it became clear that Rudnick was awfully tall, too tall to fit in the sedan's back seat. At some point, Kid Twist Relus appeared, watched as the others shoved the corpse into the car. When Rudnick's

corpse let out a loud sigh, Phil startled and started to stab him again. Happy Mayown then grabbed a meat cleaver, literally shouted, let me hit this bastard for luck. And he fucking whacked Rudnick's corpse hard on the head. And after that, the corpse was still. I think it was like nerves twitching. These dudes are animals. One of their bad boys, Julie Catalano, he's come up a lot. I guess Julie wasn't quite cool enough

to get a nickname either, like a lot of these guys. Probably got a lot of shit back then for being a dude named Julie. Well, Julie then drove the stolen car with Rudnick's corpse in it over to Jefferson Ave, abandoned it, another car picked Catalano up and they drove off. Always doing this like multi-car switcheroo situation. A curious neighbor spotted the

car a few minutes later. They called the police and that was how Rudnick's body was found. And now let's jump to the summer of 1937. While Murder Incorporated went after the targets they were assigned, they knew they would have to be just as merciless within their own ranks if they wanted to maintain order. Remember Walter Sage? The man who had spotted John the Polak Bagadonowicz back in 1933? He was also the guy who killed Irving Amron in 1935. Well now he was one of the gang's top earners. He ran slot machines and the cat skills and they were a gold mine. But by the summer of 1937 Kid Twist and the others had started suspecting that Walter was skimming some money off the top.

Kid Twist and Strauss were furious. Sage would have to go. They decided that Sage's friend and business partner, Big Gangie Cohen, would have to kill Sage. Big Gangie. I love it. This dude was a big hulk of a man, I guess. Actually in the coming years, he would appear in a few Hollywood movies and some bit parts as mobsters, as a mobster. in the coming years he would appear in a few Hollywood movies and some bit parts as mobsters, as a mobster. He would also during the Murder Incorporated trials break down and start sobbing for so long and so loud that the judge declared a recess and the press gave him a new nickname of Big Weepy. God, how much did he get his balls busted over that? Strauss went up to the mountains to supervise his hit in 1937. Up in the Catskill, Strauss tracked down Pretty Levine, who happened to be just vacationing there, and he ordered Levine to get in his car. Levine got in the car and in the middle of the night in front of the Evans Hotel he waited.

Strauss walked over, got in, another car went past, Levine pulled out and followed. Walter Sage, Big Gangy Cohen, and an associate named Jack Drucker were in the first car. Sage sat in the front passenger seat. Drucker suddenly leaned forward from behind him, jerked his arm across Sage's neck, put him in a headlock, something the gangsters liked to call mugging. Then he started stabbing the fuck out of him in the neck

and upper torso with that ice pick. Drucker stabbed Sage 32 times. So gory. The car then pulled onto the shoulder before Drucker and Cohen pulled out Sage's body, tumbled it into the trunk of Levine's car. Levine and Strauss then drove to a nearby lake. Sage's corpse was latched to a pinball machine and the combo of machine and body was then

dumped into the lake. The killers assumed that a body as punctured as Sage's would sink, especially when tied up to a pinball machine. But they fucked up. They didn't tie him up very well. Ten days after the murder, Sage's corpse somehow wiggled loose from a pinball machine. But they fucked up. They didn't tie him up very well. Ten days after the murder, Sage's corpse somehow wiggled loose from the pinball machine, bobbed to the surface, and was discovered. Ah, okay.

Now let's meet a few more characters we have not spent time with yet. So many gangsters! So many nicknames! Murder Incorporated just cast such a massive shadow. Albert Plugg Schumann was a small-time gangster who worked for Lepke Buccalter, but when Dewey's crusade began, Lepke started to suspect that Schumann might run to Dewey and get him put in a cell. So Lepke asked Albert Anastasia to talk to Plugg very firmly and tell him that if he were to

squeal he would be most displeased. No, of course he tells him that he needs to fucking get rid of Schumann. It's time to plug plug. Anastasia told Rellis to take care of it. Killing Schumann will be complicated. Schumann knew and mistrusted virtually everyone in Brownsville. He did have an old friend from the Bronx he trusted, though, a man named Irving Nadel's Knitsburg. No clue what the hell Nadel's means for his nickname here. A kid twist, Rellis contacted Nadel's Nitzberg, told him that Nitzberg's good friend Plug had to go. Nadel's understood. I'm sure he understood that if he didn't help kill his friend, well, he'd be killed. So January 9, 1939, Nitzberg and another gangster named Albert Ticktock Tannenbaum. Oh, fuck yeah, that's a great nickname. Offered to take Schumann

out to play some cards. Ticktock Tannenbaum will Oh fuck yeah, that's a great nickname. Offered to take Schumann out to play some cards. Tik Tok Tannenbaum will later gain some infamy when he carries out or helps carry out the first mob hit in California in 1939 on Harry Big Greeny Greenberg. But that's not the murder we're focusing on right now. Focusing on Albert, Plug, Schumann. Tik Tok Tannenbaum, drove him to the supposed car game.

Tik Tok, behind the wheel. All right, things are going well. Schumann sits next to him to the supposed car game. TikTok behind the wheel. Alright, things are going well. Schumann sits next to him in the front seat. Nitzburg, Nattles is in the back behind Schumann. Kid twists falling in the second car. The signal to start shooting would be when tannenbaum asked Nitzburg for a cigarette. And when TikTok turned and did so, Nattles shot Schumann twice in the head. And they had Nattles pull the trigger on his boy plug.

And wanted to give him plenty of incentive to keep quiet about it, I guess. Nadels shot Schumann twice in the head. Man, they had Nadels pull the trigger on his boy, Plug. Man, wanted to give him plenty of incentive to keep quiet about it, I guess. Right now, if he talks, he's risking putting himself in the electric chair. Well, after Plug is dead, Tannenbaum and this big old fucking tick-tocking Nadels leapt out of the car, jumped in to relish his vehicle. Another witness is gone. In February of 1939 now, the gang gets another job, this time from their old friend friend Louis Capone. Louis had been trying to shake down the local Hod Carriers and Builders Union, trying to increase the percentage of union dues he was stealing. But he ran into some hard-line trade unionists who were not afraid of him and refused to pay him off.

In characteristic fashion, Capone wanted these Union opponents dead. He demanded that the two Union members, Cesar Lattaro and Antonio Scalano, kill Capone's opponents. But Lattaro and Scalano refused, so Capone decided to have them killed instead, and he asked Happy Mayon to do it. Happy was happy for the assignment, and Happy knew who he wanted as his backup. Around 1 30 a.m. on the dark morning of February 6, 1939, Julie Catalano is fast asleep with his wife in their apartment on East New York Ave. He's scratching and tapping on his window wakes him up. Frank Abandondo,

happy Mayon, wave Catalano to his front door where they tell him to get up get dressed, go snatch a car. They had a piece of work to do. Catalano complained, Jesus, another one? Mayone angrily replied, What the hell? Must I always explain to you when I need you? Perhaps fearful of Mayone, Catalano hurriedly put his clothes on, ran out, found a car, and drove to meet Vito Guerrero, Mayone, and Abbandondo. When he drove up to the meeting spot, he spotted Guerrero and the Dasher.

But at the Dasher's side was some woman. Guerreroino, Abbandondo and this woman get into Catalano's car. To his shock, Catalano discovered the woman was happy Mayonne dressed in a skirt and hat with a feather on it. He said to Mayonne, you look like a real broad you got the face of one not bad. He's probably lucky that happy didn't go full fucking Joe Pesci from Goodfellas on him. Whack him for that comment or something. You think I'm pretty Julie? Is that it? Is that it? You want to fuck my Julie? Is that what you're saying? I have a beautiful face? You want to fuck my face Julie? Is that it? Julie Catalano drove Garino, Abbandondo and Mayone to the basement apartment that the two union

members, Latorre and Scalano shared. Garino got out of the car to stay and watch Abbandondo put his arm around Happy, he was still in costume, knocked on the door. Latorre Oskiliano opened the door, looked at the man and the woman. In response, Abandondo and Mayon immediately opened fire, blasting six or seven shots. Then Abandondo and Garino jumped back into the car, but Happy has not jumped back into the car because he's been attacked by the man's dog. So he shoots the dog, runs back to the car, jumps in clutching his smoking gun and feathered hat. And Bojangles is fucking out. He was really enjoying this episode until that moment. He just left the room. August 5th, 1939. Something surprising happens in the underworld. That day an informant called radio personality, very popular radio personality,

Walter Winchell, to tell him that Lepke, the original head of the syndicates hits of Murder Incorporated, will be surrendering to him and J. Edgar Hoover personally. Sounded too crazy to be true. Lepke been on the lam for years at this point. But indeed, later that month, Winchell got a call to meet on 24th Street, close to Madison Square. He drove there and Lepke climbed into his car. They then drove to 28th Street where they met up with J. Edgar Hoover and some FBI agents who took Lepke into custody. Why would he do this? Word on the street was because he was sick of his fucking grandma getting her face shit on. So stupid. Word on the street was because he was afraid of getting whacked for being too much trouble to hide.

Right? He figured he had better odds in negotiating a lenient sense than he did of living for the rest of his life and hiding, being watched over by people who would eventually come to think he wasn't worth the trouble anymore, and would fill him full of holes made by either bullets or an ice pick. While there were rumors he had fled to Poland or Palestine, he'd actually had associates keeping him hidden in New York City the entire time. Back to the Brownsville boys now. We've covered a lot of stuff that they did for Lepke and Anastasia, but the gang did not only commit crimes for profit or revenge.

Sometimes they simply acted out of nothing more than a desire for violence because they were fucking pieces of shit. August 23rd, 1939, three members of the Brownsville gang, Happy Mayone, Vito Gorino, Frank Abbandondo, as well as a couple of associates, decided to hang out at the Parkway Casino in Ozone Park in Queens. When the club closed, a 17-year-old dancer climbed into their car and these guys drove off as the girl thought to party until dawn. Instead, they drove to a nearby parking lot where the men beat and raped her.

Just a fucking pack of animals. They then took her home, told her to keep her mouth shut or they would bury her alive and then they gave her mom 500 bucks to keep her mouth shut. Well, this girl, her mom, would not keep their mouth shut. They went straight to the police. However, since there were nowhere the witnesses and the police were probably in these motherfuckers' pockets, no arrest is made. The next day, according to later police reports, there was a heated argument amongst the gangsters about what had happened the night before. Happy Mayone called Abedondo an animal but Mayone added it didn't matter because the girl was a bum. Right? These motherfuckers were dirty animals and who knows how many other stories like this happened just

never made it into the into a book or article about them. I imagine these guys were attacking the sex workers who worked in one of their many brothels just on a regular basis, just viciously. Sometime in the next few weeks or months in the fall of 1939, Harry Pittsburgh Phil Strauss told Abe kid Twist Rullis that Albert the Mad Hatter, Anastasia, current leader of Murder Incorporated, had another job for him and his crew. He wanted them to kill a man named Irving Puggy Feinstein. Puggy Feinstein had always wanted to be a boxer, but he was not good at it.

He'd had several bouts, and about the only thing he'd accomplished was getting his nose flattened, earning him the nickname of Puggy. Jesus, not the best nickname. After giving up on his dreams, Puggy became a minor underworld character in Brooklyn. He gambled, lost, borrowed from loan sharks,

he worked for a while for Vince McDonough, another figure in the criminal underworld doing odd tough guy jobs. But then in 1939, Puggy decided to go straight. And Vince Mangano, aware of everything that had happened during the Lucky Luciano trial, was worried that Puggy might testify against him now someday. So Mangano asked Anastasia for help, and Anastasia told Pittsburgh Phil to take Puggy for a little ride.

On the night before Labor Day, Sunday, June, September 3rd, Puggy Feinstein and friends are cruising around Brooklyn in Feinstein's new car when Feinstein said he wanted to drive over towards Brownsville. He wanted to pay off a loan shark named Tiny Benson. He then parked, said he'd be right back after talking to Tiny. As he was looking, Puggy runs into Strauss, Rellis, and Buggy Goldstein and asked him if they've seen Tiny. They replied they hadn't. Who was asking? When Puggy runs into Strauss, Rellis, and Buggy Goldstein and asked them if they've seen Tiny. They replied they hadn't. Who was asking? When Puggy told them his name, they were astonished. He was the fucking guy they've been looking to kill and he'd walked right into him. They were just one problem. They hadn't put a

formal murder plan together yet. They had nowhere to take him, no method to kill him easily available, so they improvised. They quickly hatched a plan where Goldstein and Dookie would drive Puggy around Brooklyn on a phony hunt looking for Tiny. Rellis and Strauss would rush over to Rellis' house. Goldstein and Dookie Maffatorri would then drive Puggy over to Rellis' place. With the plan set, Strauss and Rellis go home. When they get there, Rellis' wife Rose and Goldstein's wife Beatrice were getting ready to go to the movies. Rellis and Straussried them along but Relas's mother-in-law won't leave. She stays behind goes to bed. Relas starts looking for an ice pick. Now in length and rumps they're gonna fucking kill this guy anyway with this guy's mother-in-law hanging near. He couldn't

find what he's looking for. He tiptoed into his mother-in-law's bedroom was like hey why do we have an ice pick and some rope? She told him that the rope was down in the basement, ice picks in the pantry. She had to have known what was going on, right? I guess his mother-in-law is willing to accomplish. Meanwhile Harry Strauss helps himself with some milk, right? Okay, everyone gets thirsty. A couple minutes later Goldstein, Maffetori, Puggy, they pull up. As soon as Puggy steps through the front door, Harry Strauss, aka Pittsburgh Phil, leaps

out from behind him, tries to tie a rope around his neck, but Puggy manages to shriek, kicks him and another guy, sends him tumbling onto the couch as Goldstein starts punching Puggy. Kid Twist turns up the radio, doesn't want the neighbors to hear. Meanwhile Puggy starts shouting, don't hit me, don't hit me, I got the money! Nobody's listening though, they're all resting on the floor. At some point Puggy bites Harry Strauss. Kid Twist finally starts jumping on Puggy's stomach, then Strauss gets the rope around his neck, proceeds to tie him quote into a little ball as Kid Twist will later testify. Then Harry Strauss goes to work with that ice pick.

God, my God, fucking Kid Twist mother-in-law. Hearing this guy just be savagely murdered, what a weird life. Now they all worried, what are they going to do with Puggy's bloody corpse? They thought Puggy might have gotten some physical evidence when he bit Strauss. Strauss insisted they had to burn him. So Maffetori and Goldstein run off, get a can of gasoline. They then return, all of them then smash Feinstein's corpse into the car. Strauss tells Maffetori and Goldstein to take the corpse to the dumps off Flatlands Avenue,

a city dump where refuse was constantly smoldering, and burn it. They figured no one would ever find Pugies burn remains there and they're probably right. But Mount Fatore and Goldstein are dumb as fuck. They're vicious but not smart and they can't figure out how to make it to the city dump. So they just pick a random lot in southeast Brooklyn with lots of people living around it. They drag Puggies corpse out of the car, dump it into this lot. Goldstein douses the corpse with gasoline, tosses a match on it with a whoosh. The corpse bursts into flames. Goldstein jumps back with a scream. The flames had singed his eyebrows and burnt part

of his dumb fucking face. But at least Puggies body is burning, right? They'd done their job or thought they had. That night, Mrs. Louise Louise Mauer who lived next door to the lot looks out her window sees quote in unmercifully big blaze she ran outside with a pail of water two neighbor boys ran over to into their shock they see a charred human form in the middle of the blaze. Boys run off find a police officer who discovers that while the top of Buggies body was badly burned the bottom not at all. His white and brown sandalback shoes or saddleback shoes are still good as new, and a ring and scrap of paper still on his purse identify him as Puggy Feinstein. They didn't even bother to fucking empty his pockets. This killing, perhaps more than any

other murder incorporated hit job, is shocking and devastating to the community. Most in the community did not see Puggy as a street tough, but instead as a misguided young guy who had wanted to be a boxer, fell into crime when his dreams didn't work out, the community knew he was trying to go straight, and if he had, that it might have sent a message of hope that even if you were involved in some shady shit, you could still turn your life around. Attorney Sidney V. Levy wrote a brief letter to journalist Eddie Zeltner about all this, who wrote a column about Brooklyn life for the New York Daily Mirror. He said, Dear Ed, I desire to write a few words concerning Puggy Feinstein. Puggy and I played punch ball

together in the neighborhood. He was a small fellow and wanted to be a big shot, so we took different paths. But both paths are so closely entwined that we should understand those who take a path we just miss. He too had a fine background. Last year, Puggy enthusiastically told me how he was going straight. The cause of his return to his proper environment was that he was in love with a respectable flatbush girl. But after he had bought the furniture and planned the wedding, a neighborhood boy went up to the girls' folks and told him of Puggy's past. This broke up the match and broke his heart. He reverted to type. And now I read that Puggy was a torch murder victim. He was a swell punchball player. As for the gangsters who had fucked up the

exposure of his body, they decided to go out for a late night lobster dinner to celebrate a job well done after that. Alright, now let's meet somebody else. January of 1940, Harry Rudolph, doing little time on Rikers Island. Not a particularly bad guy, the police knew him as Rudy and laughed that he, quote, was off his rocker. They called him a full mooner, a lunatic. But maybe Harry wasn't so crazy after all, because he was coming up with a plan. Years before, his old friend Red Alpert had been murdered simply because he had insulted Harry Strauss. Harry Rudolph had even been an eyewitness to the murder. Out on the street,

Rudolph had never made an issue of it, but now in prison, Rudolph saw a way to both curry favor with the law and also get revenge on Alpert's killer. On a piece of stationery from the City Workhouse on Rikers Island, Rudolph scribbled a note to the Brooklyn District Attorney that read, Dear Sir, I'm doing a bit here. I would like to talk to the District Attorney. I know something about a murder in East New York. When they got got the note Brooklyn's district attorney William O'Dwyer and his assistant for homicide Burton Turkess Wonder what Rudolph had to say. Bill O'Dwyer was a 50 year old Ireland native who had studied for the priesthood

But at 20 decided to move to New York and start a new life instead He began as a day laborer But worked his way into the police department and from there attended Fordham University's law school. As a Tammany Hall Democrat, he was rewarded for his loyal service to the political machine with an elected judge position. But he didn't love that job. So in 1939 he ran for King's County District Attorney Andy One. His platform was simple. O'Dwyer vowed to purge the District Attorney's Office of political hacks and to crack down on gangs. This was a position a lot of Brooklynites could get behind. Over the course of the 1930s, thanks in no small part to Murder Incorporated, gangs had

become a murderous plague. One civilian wrote to the DA in February of 1940 about the Brownsville boys in particular, saying, These bums, none of them work. They own beautiful homes and cars. They do all the plotting and the boys are got to steal then They go and gamble down if the boys lose anything They lend them money and they charge high interest if they can't pay they have places them to steal so they can pay the loan

Policemen come and go but they don't care the cops work with the crooks Harry Mayone Frankie Abandondo and Angelo Catalano are responsible for robbing of the machines of the vocational school and all the robberies around the neighborhood. Frank Abbandondo lives very comfortable and very nicely on no work. Vito Guerrero never works. Likewise with Maillonne and Catalano and Rellis. They plan everything. Please, honorable mayor and magistrate, get rid of these leaders to bring peace to the stores and boys of East New York."

Another anonymous letter denounced Frank Abbandondo called on the district attorney to take action against the Brownsville gang and ended ominously with, I desire to see justice meted out. All this spelled something out to Bill O'Dwyer. If he got the gangs, there was a chance he could be elected New York's mayor. That his star could rise even higher than Tom Dewey's. But for that he would need help. And so he recruited 38-year-old Burton Turcas in 1940. He was a native Brooklynite, the son of working Jewish immigrants. And he'd worked nights as a western union operator while

he attended NYU by day. After earning his law degree, Turcas became a criminal defense attorney and quickly made a name for himself. A 1933 profile of him noted that he was one of the town's better attorneys and a pretty good boxer too. Like Tom Dewey, Turcas cut a good figure. Always perfectly groomed with a neatly trimmed mustache, O'Dwyer appointed him assistant DA and only days after taking office, the two men received that strange letter from Harry Rudolph from prison. They knew immediately they had to go interview him. Harry quickly informed them that those rats, the Brownsville gang, had killed his friend Red Alpert.

And based on that info, Turcas and O'Dwyer would make their move. January 19, 1940. The New York police officers arrested Abe Kidd Twist-Relis on a vagrancy charge, the all-purpose charge police would use to harass hoodlums. Relis had been arrested for vagrancy many, many times before. This time he quickly appeared before the magistrate, paid his thousand dollar fine. But then six days later, January 25th, 1940, right after Harry Rudolph had spoken with Turcas and after Turcas had sent the police after Rellis, Rellis turned himself in and

Rellis was sent to the tombs. Happy Mayome, also picked up on a vagrancy charge, was already there. Rellis said he wanted to speak to a detective he knew, John J. McDonough, saying, all right, I'll talk. Get John McDonough at Miller Avenue Station. He's one of the few cops I've ever known to be honest. Meanwhile, on February 2nd, 1940, Turkis ordered the arrest of 25-year-old Dukie Mafatori. He was quickly snapped up, placed in jail where a detective named John Asnato visited him. Having worked for the police since the 1920s, Asnato had a sprawling network of informers, including Harry Rudolph, and he thought he knew what needed to be done next. He told Mafatore that he knew Dukie didn't have anything to do with it. He was just taking the

fall for bigger people, the ones who got the gravy while the little guys took all the heat. with it. He was just taking the fall for bigger people, the ones who got the gravy while the little guys took all the heat. Osnato left, returned a few days later with Mafatori's favorite cigarettes, Paul Maul's. A few days later, Osnato arranged for Mafatori's wife to visit him. All the while, Osnato reminded Mafatori that he and he alone would be charged with Red Alpert's murder and if when he were found guilty, he'd go to the electric chair and get cooked by old Sparky and Singsing. That was a cruel, unfair fate for a mere bat-boy, as Notto said.

Dookie was a minor player, a car thief, a small-time loan shark. He certainly hadn't murdered Albert, right? Finally, Maffetori agreed to talk. He said he knew who did it. Bugsy Goldstein and Abe Kid Twist-Relis. O'Dwyer immediately ordered their arrests, along with Abraham Pretty-Levin, who immediately agreed to talk. Levin eagerly told Turcas about Alpert's argument with Harry Pittsburgh Phil Strauss over some

stolen jewelry. He explained how Strauss had then told Walter Sage, Alpert's friend, to kill Alpert. Once they started talking, Maffetori and Pretty-Levin could not stop. Levin told Turcas about Walter Sage's 1937 murder too. But it was Rellis they really wanted to hear from. And on March 21st, Rose Rellis, his wife, gave the attorneys a message. Her husband wanted to meet with them. And the meeting would take place the next day.

By Turcas' reckoning, Rellis, from June 11th, 1930, when he was first charged with murder until February 1940, when he turned himself in, had been arrested on average once every 78 days. He'd been imprisoned six times for short periods. Although he was frequently arrested, he was rarely convicted. He'd committed at least 11 murders and Turkis was sure he was involved in at least 14 others. And Rellis would now provide him with the details for all of them, provided he was a prosecution witness, not a defendant. His ultimate goal was survival, and if he had to be a rat, he'd be a rat. Turcas agreed to work with him. Word quickly leaked that Abe Rellis had turned state's evidence, and a wave of panic swept through the underworld in New York when O'Dwyer announced that not only

had Reyes told on his fellow Brownsville boys, he'd also told on Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia, and Lepke Bucalter. Meanwhile, the police rounded up everyone that might have ever been involved with Murder Incorporated. This of course stoked fears, well-rounded fears, that the witnesses might be murdered. Turcas thus set up a sort of fortress to house potential witnesses, an entire floor of a large Brooklyn hotel where nobody could get off the elevator unless they'd been checked in and where an entire squad of detectives was constantly standing guard. Smart. It's not looking good for Murder Incorporated. Now, O'Dwyer and Turcas had to construct their case, which they did from March to May 1940. Initially,

Turcas decided to try Abandondo, Harry Happy-May-Own, and Harry Strauss for the murder of George Whitey Rudnick. But then Strauss hinted that maybe he too would make a deal. So, Turkish changed plans. Turkish finally decided to proceed against Mayone and Abandondo. And so, on May 13, 1940, the first of the murder incorporated trials began with Harry Happy-Mayone and Frank the Dasher Abandondo charged with the 1937 murder of George Rudnick. At first, the gangsters didn't seem too worried. Both had been in court before, both had done time in prison, both had evaded multiple serious charges.

But, Turcas now had a star lineup of witnesses, something few of the gangsters' previous cases had. In this instance, it was Dukie Mafatori, Pretty Levine, Julie Catalano, the attendant at the garage where Rudnick was killed, and a score of friends and associates, but the star of the show, Abe Kid Twist-Relis. In a thick and husky voice, Kid Twist told the court all about the murder, how they'd lured Rudnick to the garage, took him by surprise. When he talked about the argument he'd had with Strauss over the spelling of the word friend, the court burst into astonished laughter. When at long last, Relas finished and had stepped down from the witness stand, Happy Mayon glared at him with murder in his

eyes. Suddenly Mayon lunged at Relas and screamed, you stupid son of a bitch, I'm gonna kill you. I'm gonna tear your throat out. That outburst obviously did not win Happy any points with the jury. He looked exactly like who he was being accused of being, right? A hot-headed, cold-blooded killer. Once things were under control again, the defense did what it could, arguing that Mayonne was at his grandmother's funeral on the night of the murder. Frank the Dasher Abandono could only say he wasn't there and didn't know anything. On May 23rd, 1940, after only two hours of deliberation, the jury found Harry and Frank guilty of first-degree murder. Happy not so happy anymore and the Dasher not gonna be wearing any well-tailored suits again

anytime soon. The verdict carried an automatic death sentence and now Turkish and O'Dwyer move on to the next murder incorporated case. This time Bugsy Goldstein, Pittsburgh Phil Strauss will be tried for the murder of Irving Puggy Feinstein. Bugsy and Pittsburgh Phil's trial was scheduled to begin on September 4th, 1940. Started with the bang, literally. Somebody lit a firecracker in the courthouse. Also something was wrong with Harry. He'd always been a snazzy dresser.

But in the weeks before the trial, he refused to shave, bathe, get a haircut. He was also drooling uncontrollably and staring vacantly at the judge. Pretty sure you can guess where this is going. Strauss' lawyers argued that their client had gone crazy and was not able to participate coherently in his own defense. Turkis and the prosecution team argued that Pittsburgh Phil was faking it. The trial was paused while the team of psychiatrists then examined Strauss. Psychiatrists asked Strauss in his cell whether he knew Abe Rellis. Sure, Strauss said, Rellis quote, comes under my bed every night, but my brother comes and chases him away.

Rellis flies in here through the window. He tries to kill me. Psychiatrists are not impressed. Their conclusion? He's full of shit. Martin Bugsy Goldstein meanwhile seemed to enjoy the attention. He smirked for photographs, shouted jokes at the reporters. By the time the trial started for real it was a media circus made more complete by the addition of another witness, Vito Chickenhead Garino. Yes! Got Chickenhead back! He had weirdly disappeared for a while, but showed up screaming hysterically in a Manhattan church. Okay, eager to testify. But just to keep him close, Turcas indicted him for three different murders.

But as we said, Kid Twist is the star witness. He told the court all he knew about Puggy's murder, aka everything. He admitted that he was a murderer too, but said the order for this hit had come from Albert Anastasia, the Mad Hatter. Then Turcas called Seymour McGoon, the Bat Boy, to the stand. McGoon testified he'd gone to Kid Twist's home that night, agreed to drive Goldstein back to the gas station, returned the gas can they'd used to burn Puggy's body. Through Magoon's testimony, Strauss sat staring and mumbling. Meanwhile Bugsy got more and more agitated. Magoon had been his understudy, his protege, and now Magoon was sending Bugsy to the chair. As Magoon ended his testimony, Bugsy leapt to his feet and shrieked in the courtroom,

He's banding me! His lawyer pulled him back to his seat and then Bugsy burst into tears. September, uh, all in all, excuse me, the trial would last two weeks. Then on September 19, 1940, both would be found guilty of the murder of Irving Puggy Feinstein. When the foreman finished announcing the guilty verdict, Goldstein raised his hand and asked the judge, can I say something? Judge Fitzgerald answered no. And then he said, can I say words, just a little word? And the judge again was like no. But Bugsy spoke anyway and said, I want to thank the jury for what they've done.

Okay. Both mobsters sentenced to death a few days later. Then asked if he had anything to say. Bugsy And I want to thank the jury for what they've done. Uh, okay. Both mobsters sentenced to death a few days later. Then asked if he had anything to say. Bugsy replied, I want to thank the court for the charge he made sending us to our death. And I only hope the same applies to you and your family. I'm willing to die like a man. Okay, I'm pretty sure there's like a threat in there. O'Dwyer and Turcas, they're kicking ass.

But there would be a shocking defeat on the horizon for the attorneys. Happy Mayones and the Dasher Abandondos lawyers had appealed their clients' convictions. The lawyers had accused Turcas and O'Dwyer of coaching witnesses, intimidating others. They complained about the immunity given to Rellis and the other prosecution witnesses. They argued that the trial judges' final instructions to the jury were incorrect and with that last technicality the appeals court agreed. So in December of 1940, the appeals court ordered a new trial for Mayonne and Abedondo. As a weird aside, Judge Franklin Taylor ruled that women would not be eligible to serve as jurors because the case was too gruesome.

Besides, the court had no place to house and protect women jurors to keep them from getting fucking whacked. Other than that, it'd be pretty much the same as the first trial. Same witnesses were called, same stories were told. Just as before, prosecution's case held strong. And on April 14th, 1941, Mayonne and Abedando once again sentenced to death. And this time it would hold. May of 1941 now, a lot of shit going on, O'Dwyer and Turcas prepared for their fourth murder incorporated trial. They charged Irving Nadel's Nitzberg for the 1939 murder of Albert Plugg Schuman and ADA Julius Donky Tits Heflin would prosecute. He was not known as Donky Tits. I do

wish that even the attorneys had wild nicknames in this story though. Rillas was once again the star witness. Kid twist, right? He's really having to work to avoid the chair. He explained he'd been present when Lepke ordered Schumann's murder. King's County jury took just 18 minutes to convict fucking Nadal's, old Nitzberg, of Plugg Schumann's murder. He was sentenced to death and while he was sentenced to death, Nitzberg quote, smiled sardonically. However, the only eyewitness to the killing was Tik Tok Tannenbaum and he was accomplished to the crime. Although Tannenbaum insisted that Nitzburg was the killer, Nitzburg claimed that

Tannenbaum was the killer. Reles had followed with the second car but Reles could not see the actual killing. So Nitzburg lawyers appealed. The appeals court struck down the conviction and ordered a new trial. Freed after the second trial, Nitzburg would eventually go to jail but on a lesser charge. And then he'd get out of jail, fall off the radar. I found obituaries for several Irving Nitzburgs who lived in New York City in 1930s and 1940s. Young men, they all seemed to live long lives. So I don't know, maybe he was one of the few guys involved in all this to actually get away with it. The next murder incorporated trial did not belong to O'Dwyer and Turcas.

It belonged to their colleagues in New Jersey, but the key player in the case, again, the star witness, Abe Kid Twist Relis. He's a fucking busy boy. In this case, Relis had solved the murder of Dutch Schultz. He recounted how all the other big shots, afraid that Schultz might kill Tom Dewey, decided to take out one of their own instead. Releases revealed that it was Charlie the Bug Workman who had ultimately done the deed. We got the bug now in on this. That trial would begin in June of 1941 in Newark. After a two-week trial, Workman would be sentenced not to death, but to life in prison. Different state, different criteria for the electric chair. Speaking of the

chair, on June 12, 1941, the state of New York electrocuted both Harry Strauss and Martin Goldstein, whose appeals had been denied. They both got to sit in Old Sparky at Sing Sing. The night before their executions, Goldstein's father, brother, and sister-in-law paid him a last visit, but strangely, he refused to see them. At 11.03 p.m., June 12th Goldstein stepped into the execution chamber. He sat quietly in the electric chair while the executioner strapped him in no last words and he died a few minutes later. Bugsy's widow Beatrice would file a double indemnity claim with Bugsy's insurance company claiming a

double payout because Bugsy had died unexpectedly and suddenly from unnatural causes. She was half right, was sudden, hardly unexpected. The insurance company would reject Beatrice's claim. Harry Strauss, meanwhile, stayed disheveled and acting crazy almost until the very end. Just before his execution now, he dropped the act. He shaved, got a haircut, cleaned himself up. His companion, Evelyn Middleman, paid him a last visit. Pittsburgh Phil, only minutes after Bugsy's death, followed his old gangster associate

into the electric chair. And just like Bugsy, he offered no final words. Neither man showed any emotion or made any remarks before being put to death. They were cold and dead-eyed when they killed, and they died the same way. That summer, O'Dwyer and Turcas were preparing for their biggest trial yet now. In the fall, they would try Louis Capone, Mendy Weiss, and Lepke Buchalter for the murder of Joe

Rosen. Lepke was their biggest target. The head of Murder, Inc. was the most powerful underworld leader ever to be charged with homicide. This was the biggest mafia trial since Al Capone had been convicted of tax evasion and since Lucky Luciano had been convicted of organizing prostitution. And after Lepke, they wanted to go after the next head of Murder Incorporated, Albert the Mad Hatter, Anastasia. They had information from Kid Twist that Albert had agreed to kill a Teamster official named Morris Diamond because Lepke feared that Diamond would testify about Lepke's muscling into the trucking industry.

One night Rilla said he went to Anastasia's home where he was busy talking about the diamond matter and how the guy he'd gotten to do it was too slow in getting diamond's address. Once they got it, Anastasia said he'd do it himself. And indeed, diamond was murdered in 1939 and it seemed easily provable that Anastasia was responsible. And with that it seemed like the New York underworld might be mortally wounded once and for all. May 9, 1941 in Brooklyn, Burton Turcas charged Lepke Buchalter with first-degree murder. He'd have to do it alone, since O'Dwyer was now busy running for mayor. Lepke, who'd been convicted on federal narcotics charges after being taken into FBI custody, after he'd personally surrendered to J. Edgar Hoover, thought he was going to be safe. He'd been sentenced to prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and he assumed he would spend the next dozen or so years there. Now he was going to be fighting to

not end up sitting in the electric chair. Jury selection began in August of 1941. Jurors were fully aware of what had happened to other witnesses against Lepke. It took some time to find enough people who were willing to serve, but in October of 41 they finally got the trial underway. Turcas's star witness was Shalom Bernstein, who had worked for Lepke for many years. He described how Lepke systematically intimidated people until he either got his money or they were dead. How his interlocking system of fake businesses worked. How Lepke boasted of having connections to people high up in the city government. Meanwhile, by early November of 1941, Turcas's other case against Capone, Weiss, and Buchalter was also going well.

Turcas had yet to call in his star witness, Abe Relles. Kid Twist hadn't been part of the Rosen job, but as usual, he knew all about it. But on November 12th, when Burton Turcas was getting ready for court, something crazy happened. Abe Kid Twist Relles, who was in protective custody on the sixth floor of the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island. The man whose testimony was sending gangster after gangster to the chair had somehow accidentally fallen out of his window, onto the roof of the hotel's kitchen where he died on impact.

Crazy. A hotel staff noticed two sheets tied together flapping out of a sixth floor window. Within minutes, police were on the scene, but there was nothing to be done for Abe. So what happened? Had he tried to escape? Had he committed suicide? Those who knew him said that there was no way he'd kill himself and the rope of sheets only hung to the fifth floor. Or was his plan to crawl through that window and escape to the lobby where there were half a dozen police officers hanging

out? Or had somebody tried to kill him and tried to make it look like an accident? Well that seemed to be the most commonly held belief. There were only three other informants being held on that same floor, but possibly one of them maybe tried to curry favor with Anastasia or Lepke. District Attorney O'Dwyer immediately ordered both an internal police investigation and impaneled a grand jury to investigate Relas's murder, but no one would discover anything. Shortly after Relas's death, O'Dwyer quietly informed his office in the New York Police Department that he was ending the investigation of Albert Anastasia now. He no longer had enough evidence to send the co-founder and eventual

leader of Murder Incorporated to the chair. Rellis, meanwhile, was buried by relatives in a private ceremony. He left behind his wife, Rose, and their two young children, a buddy in Maryland. While one major gangster would now escape justice, several others were still on trial and Turcas would get another win. November 30th, 1941, on Burton Turcas' birthday no less, the jury found Lepke, Capone, and Weiss guilty of the murder of Joe Rosen. All three were sentenced to death in Sing Sing's electric chair. And on February 20th, 1942, just after midnight, Harry,-Mayone and Frank the Dasher Abandondo were executed. Just two months later, in April of 1942, Harry Mayone's two brothers, Carlo and Louis, were

arrested for and later convicted of intimidating witnesses during the Mayone and Abandondo trials. Meanwhile, Lepke tied up his own execution process and appeals, but his death was coming for him too. On March 4th, 1944, Lepke, Mendy Weiss, and Louis Capone all executed, and murder incorporated is done. And for a time it seemed like the era of the gangster was over. World War II was drawing the media away from crime at home. Bill O'Dwyer joined the army as a major, though when he came home in 1945 to organize his second mayoral campaign,

he met with someone interesting, Frank Costello, boss of the Luciano crime family. O'Dwyer's rivals got wind of that meeting and never let O'Dwyer live it down. O'Dwyer tried to explain he was just investigating for the army, allegations of contract fraud at Wright Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. Though O'Dwyer would ultimately be elected the 100th mayor of New York City, he would end up resigning in part because of these allegations. And thus the Murder Incorporated investigations and trials ended on a minor bleak and uncertain note. What had really happened to Abe Kid Twist-Relis? Why did O'Dwyer really drop the Anastasia investigation? Why did O'Dwyer go to see Frank Costello? What was the relationship between the city's law enforcement and the city's

underworld now? As the years wore on city's law enforcement and the city's underworld now? As the years wore on, it seemed that even the original crusader Tom Dewey wasn't immune from this moral ambiguity. He would run for governor and win three times. He was in office from 1943 to 1954. But in 1946, 10 years after Lucky Luciano was convicted of organizing prostitution, Governor Dewey stunned New Yorkers by ordering that the former mobster be released from prison. Luciano hadn't been pardoned, his conviction would stay on his record, but Dewey commuted

his sentence. Dewey agreed to let Luciano go and Luciano agreed to depart immediately for Italy. The whole bizarre case was shrouded in mystery. Luciano headed back to Italy, but quickly would resurface in Havana. Harassed there by U.S. authorities, Luciano would then return to Italy and live a mysterious life. Some said he was simply a retired businessman, others said he played a major role in drug smuggling from the Middle East through Sicily and Marseille to the U.S., but nobody ever knew for sure and nobody ever figured out why Dewey released him in the first place. But nobody ever knew for sure and nobody ever figured out why Dewey released him in the first place.

Turkis, meanwhile, left criminal law entirely, became a respected labor arbitrator, though he would write his own book about the case Murder Incorporated, the story of the Syndicate, published in 1951. That same year, a grand jury investigation concluded that in Relas's death that it was an accident. The grand jury further condemned many aspects of the investigation. Among the points of criticism, no specific guard was ever in charge, some evidence was simply disposed of or not examined, the extremely long amount of time it took to identify and then examine Rellis' body, and the unaccountable hours between the last moment Rellis was seen alive and

the moment when he was found dead. Seems like he was probably killed. Despite the bad taste left in their collective mouths, the grand jurors determined that from all the evidence they had at their disposal to study that Rellis had tried to lower himself to the partially open window of room 523 which showed evidence of scrapings they believed caused by Rellis, caused by him trying to grab the windowsill but he was too heavy for the wire, bedspread, rope, he had fashioned for this purpose, and he fell. But is that what really happened? I doubt it. One final timeline note. Albert Anastasia, the mad hatter, the one-man army, the Lord High executioner, co-founder, later boss of Murder Incorporated, was never sent to the chair. He would still meet a violent end.

It would just take nearly two more decades. On the morning of October 25, 1957, the 55-year-old gangster entered the barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel at 56th Street and 7th Avenue in midtown Manhattan. As Albert relaxed in the barber's chair, two men with scarves covering their faces rushed in, shoved the barber out of the way, and started firing at Anastasia. After the first volley of bullets, that still tough-as-nails motherfucker leapt up from his chair, lunged at his killers, or at least he thought he did. In the shock and chaos of what had just happened, he lunged towards the reflection of his tackers in the barbershop's impeccably clean mirror. And then his killers opened fire again, easily shooting him in the back while he

fought the mirror until he was covered in holes and very, very dead. No one was ever charged in his killing, but word on the street was that his hit was authorized by the heads of three of New York's five families. A fitting end to the man who had worked with so many crime bosses to arrange so many different brutal executions. to arrange so many different brutal executions. Good job, soldier. You made it back. Barely. Murder, Inc. So much gangstering. So many murders, so many nicknames. Beginning as a loose association of Brownsville Bat Boys, who became their own gang, Murder Incorporated, as it was named in the press,

expanded throughout the 1930s to include both direct and loosely associated underlings and assassins. While some sources say they committed hundreds, maybe even thousands of murders in the late 20s and 1930s, still pretty unclear what that number is or even who qualified as a member of Murder Incorporated. There were just so many gangsters operating around that time in New York and elsewhere. Everyone from big shots like Albert the Mad Hatter, Anastasia, Louis Lepke, Bu Calter, Charles Lucky Luciano, before he got put away of course, to guys so small-time, never really made more than a few sentences in the history books here.

Got a cool nickname. Bodies were popping up everywhere around New York City for years, from lakes and sewers The guy, so small-time, never really made more than a few sentences in the history books here. Got a cool nickname. Bodies were popping up everywhere around New York City for years, from lakes and sewers to abandoned burn cars to just on the streets or in their homes, suddenly and inexplicably murdered by often unseen assailants. Sometimes these assailants were seen, but good luck finding a witness who would tell you who they were. Which was exactly what Thomas Dewey and later Bill O'Dwyer and Burton Turkess wanted to

do. They figured and figured right, with the tide of public opinion turning, people were fed up with watching their neighbors, sons and husbands turn up dead through nothing more than refusing to give the mob an unfair cut of their heart and money. Dewey called on scores of sex workers, madams and clients, eventually managing to link a prostitution ring all the way back up to the man at the top, Lucky Luciano. It was the first time that a mobster had been put away for anything other than tax evasion, like a big time mobster.

But Dewey didn't want to stop there. When Bill O'Dwyer and Burton Turkess laid down the law across the bridge in Brooklyn, got wind of a letter from an informant named Harry Rudolph that there was a group of men responsible for a gangland murder. They were very interested and they took the torch from Dewey in a way. The DA's office convinced two low-level hoods to talk, Anthony Mafatori and Abraham Pretty-Levin, followed by the gang's leader Abe Kid Twist-Relis, the big git. By the summer of 1940, O'Dwyer's office had enkusty those they felt were the primary culprits. Martin Bugsy Goldstein,

Harry Pittsburgh Phil Strauss, Harry Happy-Mayone, and Frank the Dasher Abedondo. They decided to try Goldstein and Strauss for the 1939 murder of Irving Puggy Feinstein, while Mayone and Abedondo would go to trial for the 1937 murder of George Whitey Rudnick. Louis Lepke Buchalter grew up in hiding out, turning himself in to federal authorities on narcotics charges in 1939, but New York pushed harder to get him back to trying for murder. Lepke was handed over to local prosecutors to face capital murder charges in the 1936 shooting death of candy store proprietor Joseph Rosen.

Emanuel Mendy-Weiss and Louis Capone joined Lepke on the charge, and the trials for all these men would collectively become a sensation. Lurid tales of ice pick and meat cleaver killings shocked an audience that had been reading about gangland killings for years but had never heard directly from the perspective of those who had actually committed the killings. Rel has proved to be a star witness with an A-plus memory providing details about the case like going out for a lobster dinner after a grizzly murder or committing a hit and drag. But just when it seemed like the DA's office might be able to go after Anastasia, the case collapsed.

In a bizarre turn of events, the prosecution star witness Rellis either fell, jumped, or was thrown, probably that, from the six-story window of a hotel November 12, 1941. Still, many of the perpetrators were finally brought to justice. The first two men led to the electric chair were Goldstein and Strauss, put to death in June of 1941. Mayonne and Abbandondo saw a glimmer of hope when their convictions were overturned in 1940, only to have those hopes dashed when their sentences were upheld in April of 1941. They were also put to death in February of 1942. And then Buchalter, Weiss, and Capone all marched into Sing Sing's death chamber March 4, 1944.

Seven murderous gangsters fried and an eighth had flown to his death out of a window. And it seemed like the streets were a little safer. Corruption lessened a little bit. But did it? Both Bill O'Dwyer and Tom Dewey would go on to have major political careers, careers tainted by their ongoing associations with the mob. Or at least it appeared they might still be compromised or might be compromised, sorry. And that makes me wonder how much corruption is still out there today. Has the link between the underworld and the government ever truly been severed? Does it continue?

Are there any major politicians currently in the mob's pockets? Or maybe do today's gangsters look a little more white collar? Instead of zoot suits and pensions for face-to-face violence? Do they now wear designer jeans, work at a high-rise corner offices, working upper level executive jobs

for companies like International Pharmaceutical Conglomerates? Do their hits no longer happen with a barrage of bullets or an ice pick, but instead they come in the form of making life-saving medicine and treatments unaffordable for many. Guessing there's a lot more money in that racket than there is in brothels and bootlegging today. Let's head to our takeaways. Time Shack Top 5 Takeaways

Number one, Murder Incorporated was born out of the mob and the mob was born in Sicily. Its roots go back centuries. The Romans conquered Sicily and then subsequent invasions over the next few centuries by vandals from North Africa, Ostrogoths, Arabs, and Normans made Sicilians truly hate outside rule. There was rarely a long settled period of law and governance, which meant that local landlords began to expand their powers. To counter that local peasants began to form self-help organizations that fought back against and terrorized these landlords and eventually the landlords joined the peasants leadership and they mutually terrorized all those below them.

Organized crime syndicates were born. By the time Italy reunited in the mid 19th century Sicily had been stuck in this way of doing business for centuries. And then tens of thousands of Sicilians fled to the United States, and some of them brought the island style of organized crime with them. Number two, Abe Kid Twist-Relis, born in 1906,

would become the leader of the Brownsville gang, and then later one of the main hitmen for Murder Incorporated, and the contract enforcer for the National Crime Syndicate. A classic Prohibition-era gangster, Abe grew up on the streets of Brownsville assisting older, more established gangsters with whatever they needed until he managed to stage a coup and claim Brownsville as his own territory.

And then he became one of the biggest rats the mafia had ever seen. It was his testimony that would prove some of the most damning. He even described how mobsters took out their fellow gangster Dutch Schultz. And then sometime early in the chilly morning of November 12, 1941, Rellis jumped, slipped, maybe thrown out of the window of Room 623 of the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island, bringing Burton Turkess' dreams of prosecuting Albert Mad Hatter Anastasia to an end. 3. The saga that led to the formation of Murder Incorporated began with Lucky Luciano's ascent to the throne of the criminal underworld after bumping off the old guard. Luciano helped put together the National Crime

Syndicate and Murder Incorporated will be its enforcement arm. Kind of. It was never as organized as the press made it out to be. The syndicate actually had a loose complex network of gangsters, all with their own backups to call on when they needed a job done. And the Murder Incorporated boys were at the beck and call of mostly trucking gangster Louis Lepke Buchalter and Albert Anastasia. The guys they hired for hits were just some of the many, many gangsters,

whacking problems during this era. Number four, by far the most murderous member of the group was allegedly Harry Pittsburgh Phil Strauss. He said to have killed dozens of men and he liked to get creative with his kills. Shooting some, stabbing others with ice picks, drowning some, strangling others, beating some with blunt objects, even burying men alive. He seemed to get genuine pleasure out of killing. Wasn't just a job for him. It was a lifestyle. And number five, new info. Because it's such a catchy name, Murder Incorporated has been used to refer to a number of things that are not the Brownsville gang, like organized crime in cities abroad and even a book about the CIA's role in the JFK assassination and also a song. In 1982,

Bruce Springsteen, the boss, recorded a brooding song he called Murder Incorporated. And in the second verse, Springsteen sings, Now you check over your shoulder everywhere that you go. Walking down the street, there's eyes in every shadow. You better take a look around you. Come on now. That equipment you got so outdated, you can't compete with Murder Incorporated. Everywhere you look now, Murder Incorporated. Time Suck Top 5 Takeaways.

Murder Incorporated has been sucked. Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for the help in making Time Suck this week. Thanks to Queen of Bad Magic Lindsay Cummins. Thanks to Logan Keith helping to publish this episode designing merch for the store at badmagicproductions.com, editing out the many instances this week of me being like, Jesus Christ, so many names! Thank you to Sophie Evans for the initial research. Also, thanks to the all-seeing eyes, moderating the culture, the curious, private Facebook page, the Mod Squad, making sure Discord keeps running smooth, and everybody over on the Time Suck subreddit and Bad Magic subreddit. And now,

this week's Time Sucker updates. Today's first update came in with a subject line I truly never thought I would see. Time Suck inspired my ministry and our new church. I actually thought it was a joke. It's not. It was sent to Bojangles at time suck podcast.com by a sweet caring sack pastor Danny Labarger. Danny I hope I've said your name right. Doing his best to provide shelter for those caught out in the storm and also those who just want some scripture in their lives without the intolerance that sometimes comes with it. Danny wrote in with the subject line of, hey Dan, I've been sitting on

this email for over a year but honestly I just wanted to say thanks. Not just for the laughs and deep dives on Time Suck but for the way you handle difference. Week after week you read updates from folks across the ideological, religious and political spectrum and what gets me isn't just that you include them, it's that you respond with kindness, curiosity, empathy, and humility, even when you clearly don't agree. And that kind of thing really matters. That's what our world needs more of. As a pastor, that same spirit has been the guiding light for the kind of church we're trying to build. Our community, the Well, a new

United Methodist Church planted, I'm sorry, the Well, a new United Methodist Church plant I founded outside of St. Louis in 2021, is made up of people across the faith and no faith spectrum. Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, and atheists fill our space weekly. But it's not just religious diversity. Queer folks, cis folks, trans folks, people of color, and white folks all share collaboratively in the life and leadership of this thing we're building at the well. We sum all of that up in our mantra. Your seat at the table can't cost someone else theirs. I know it might sound weird, but time suck and your posture as a person has played a huge part in shaping my ethos as both a meat sack and a pastor.

Seeing someone hold space for nuance, questions, and complexity without turning into a jerk about it has been a quiet inspiration in my work. I know organized religion is not necessarily your thing and as we hear almost on a weekly on the pod it often and deservedly gets a bad name, but I just wanted to share my gratitude for all you do and open your eyes to the ripples you're making even in places you might have never expected. PS my brother and I got to meet you and Lindsay when you performed your most recent special in St. Louis. He swears that you gave off the vibe that you two really wanted to be our friends. I told him that was probably the giant edible he took before the show talking but hey

maybe he's right. Alright the way it was awesome to meet you both. Thanks for the laughs, wisdom and insight you share with the world. Thanks for what you do with three out of five stars. Wouldn't change a thing. Keep on sucking peace. Danny Liebarger. PPS. If you end up reading this email on air, please don't feel any obligation to share my personal or church accounts as we are not a Oh this word always I have to pause Prost, oh my gosh, proselytizing. Proselytizing crew. It's that prasa. I always want to throw a T in there I think anyway proselytizing, proselytizing crew. It's that prosa. I always want to throw a T in there, I think. Anyway, proselytizing crew.

But if you personally want to check out my work or The Well's work, you can find us on TikTok and Instagram at at Danny underscore, libarger, L-Y-B-A-R-G-E-R for my personal account and at thewell.636 for our church account. The comment sections can get pretty vile with hateful folks, but I try my best to dunk on them when I can, obviously in Jesus' name. Danny. Well Danny, I am surprised, but also honored. I'm following your church now on Instagram. TikTok, I'm trying to live up my social media. TikTok's a little bit much for me right now, but that's good that you're on it, getting your word out. Yeah, good for you, man. I know I'm not the target demo for organized

religion, as you referenced, but I also know that it does lift up so many when they're feeling dangerously down. And as I've said so many times before, I sure as hell don't know what awaits us all on the other side. Maybe dirt and worms, maybe something so much more. I think something does. And while I may not understand how so many believe in things science can't prove with all their hearts in some ways, I also believe in ghosts, you know. I've changed. So, okay. Me criticizing others for their faith-based beliefs, I am aware on some level is definitely a case of pot calling the kettle black. And your brother's right. We probably would be friends if we were out in St. Louis. Good energy, you guys. My favorite thing about checking out your posts on your church's Instagram is all the smiles. Seriously, just big, very

happy, fulfilled smiles coming from a lot of different kind of faces. You know, it just truly seems like you're out there selling hope, love, and acceptance, right? And the world can always use that. Always use more of that. So thanks for doing what you do sincerely and just don't fucking ruin it by fucking anybody in your congregation. Hard red line Danny. Don't you dare go crazy cult leader on us. I mean I will find it kind of entertaining but also I'll be very sad. Seriously I am glad to have had some very small role in your journey and again I'm just surprised but happy to have this life moment. Next up, Officer Colby Ray, law enforcement, long time sack, wants to talk drugs. Because he is a filthy drug user who takes drugs from everyone he arrests, literally everyone,

and stuffs all of them in his butt and then he kills people. Wait, what? What was I talking about? No, he's a good guy. He's been a long time listener. He's written a lot of great updates and he's a good dude with some questions and he sent in an email with the subject line of, let's talk drugs, you delightful wizard demon. Fair. Good afternoon, Dan and the Bad Magic Crew. Listen, uh, listening to the acid king suck. suck, I ran into some information I found a bit contradicting. You've mentioned multiple times about the suck and especially in this episode your stance on the legalization of drugs and

yet here towards the end you mentioned how cocaine and heroin directly caused Jerry Garcia's death. Yes, yet in the same episode you heavily criticized drug enforcement agents and police officers stated that drugs don't have a victim. Yet one of the most talented musicians in the counterculture revolution lost his life due to the effects of drugs. I personally have seen drugs ruin many lives through my service as a police officer. I distinctly remember asking an individual who we knew had overdosed multiple times if he ever planned to quit. He said absolutely not despite his assurance that

drugs would cause his own death and would lead him to remaining homeless for the rest of his life. I am personally for the legalization of marijuana, possibly LSD, due to the empirical tests that have been done that show its extremely minor harm potential. In a nutshell, I think you should at least explain further your view on drugs that can be directly harmful to people and how you would like to see those regulated and enforcement take action. Just a thought I wanted to mention as I'm driving back from Indiana to Texas for my new full-time job in law enforcement sales. Longtime listener, space lizard, hopeful occupant of Nimrod's glorious sack for eternity Colby

Ray. P.S. I refuse to apologize for the length this email because much like Ed Kemper's penis, it was relatively short. Rest assured, I never planned to stick my email in my mother's severed neck. Wow. Thank you, Colby. Good to hear from you again.

Yeah, thank you again for what you do. What the hell is law enforcement sales? Are you selling cops? Are you trafficking law enforcement officers? How is that legal? I'm guessing you're selling equipment. Let me attempt to clarify. First, if I've said the drugs don't have a victim, I apologize. I do believe, you know, drugs do have victims. I believe

that certain drugs, like psychedelics, lead to more good than bad. I would imagine in the acid king suck I was referring to psychedelics. Maybe I didn't make that clear. You know, just like anything course they can be abused but LSD for example I believe has opened a lot more minds hearts than it has hurt people you know it's helped people with a suicidal ideation with depression anxiety. Now for the meat of my answer I can see how I hold a seemingly contradictory view on drugs I do believe that many drugs such as opioids absolutely destroy people's lives and I simultaneously believe they should also be legal. Why? For a multitude of reasons and the first is to reduce

overdose deaths as counterintuitive as that may seem. Imagine walking into a bar ordering a pint of beer and having no fucking clue what the potency of that beer is what the alcohol content is it could be the same as you know just a your basic pilsner out there today or it could be the equivalent of an entire bottle of whiskey that'd be crazy right you know people will be dying of alcohol poisoning left and right if no one had a clue how strong their drink was from night to night. And it's the same for street drugs.

Most overdoses occur because the person taking whatever drug that they are using, they have no clue how strong it is compared to their tolerance because it is not pure. It's not regulated. It's been cut with God knows what. But if you could go into a store and buy something that has been regulated and inspected like we can do with weed now. Like when I go to... It's so great to go to the weed shop on the state line. You know, between Idaho and Washington. And I get the fucking same shit week after week. And you know, when I take it, I know that 10 milligrams is 10 milligrams. And it's not going to be 300 and have me on a fucking other planet for you know 24 hours

It's gonna help me chill out be fine But yeah, yeah, you know I think death would go way down if you're like alright. This is that much coke This is that much heroin. This is that much. You know fucking whatever second Legalization would lead to you know a lot of de stigmatization people would be able to openly talk about drugs more without fear of being you know I don't know arrested or suspected of this or that. You know they could educate themselves talk about the good parts the bad parts you know when there's an overdose an 911 gets called they're gonna be more likely to tell officers like yourself and or EMTs you know what they took how much they might even be

able to like hey I took some of the stuff that's in my pocket right now. They're not gonna do that now in all likelihood. People are gonna be more honest with their doctors about drug use and that's gonna be helpful. Third, will people still die from drugs? Yes, and actually if legalization occurred, initially probably a lot more people. But I do think it would course correct in time.

And also, you know, people die every day from essentially eating stuff like, you know, shitty food. You know, for too many years to get diabetes, obesity, or related medical problems, should we outlaw junk food? No, it's not good for you. You should just be educated about it. You know, the packages should be labeled. It's terrible for you. But if it's also, if it's how you want to live your life and get that quick sugar rush, all right, well then that's a choice you should be able to make for yourself and same with drugs You know if you want to risk dying from a heart attack from doing too much blow if it means that much to you

Well, okay, then that's your choice and as far as how law enforcement should react my stance is, you know long been I hope I've been consistent here Punish people for crimes. They commit while on drugs just like you would if they were sober But not for the usage itself. Like if somebody neglects their kids or they assault somebody or they steal something while on drugs, then punish them for that crime. Theft, neglect, assault, but don't add on under the influence. Like what does it fucking matter if the result is gonna be the same whether they were sober or not? You know, and then in this situation if they're just high as fuck at a music festival having a great time bothering no one, what crime is there there?

Like I just don't think that should be a crime. Why should it be a crime to be high if you are hurting no one? So I hope that clears things up a bit Colby and yeah especially with the the recent shootings on my mind just please stay safe out there brother. Uh last up for today, amped up meets Zach Dustin. I'll leave his last name out of this because he didn't sign off with it. Sent a message with the subject line. I love this subject line. You asked for it. And then Dustin wrote, this is in response to Dan saying he wants to hear from other people's opinions on essentially the state of politics today.

While I will try to keep everything reasonable, you did ask for the thoughts floating around my brain. So that's on you. Before I actually start, I want to acknowledge Dan's intelligence and asking for the opinions in the first place. You're letting people vent. Something a lot of people need these days. So good on you for taking on not only my medically diagnosed mental illness, but many others as well. It's odd and it's odd and brave public service that is uniquely Dan into something I feel he needs a pat on the back from time to time Oh, well, thank you now under the real topic. I have been an independent thinker for a long time I've had an opposition to just mindlessly agreeing with other people for no real reason since forever

There has never been a single Adam inside of me that has ever wanted to side with people to make me feel better It's not always helped me in life, but I haven't lost sleep at night over any of my opinions in a very, very long time. When it comes to the general atmosphere today, I'll say that there is logical reasons on both sides. I tend to struggle seeing everything through a lens of empathy and sympathy. I personally feel logic and reason should always have its say. So when it comes to deporting illegal immigrants, this is where I stand.

I feel it's not a terrible thing as long as they are illegal. Mass deportations that are reckless enough to have actual citizens end up being deported is blatantly not the answer, though. I see the issue with illegal immigration as much more complex than most. One thing that hasn't been talked about much is the Democratic Party does have a documented intent to try and allow an open border Whether legal or not simply to mass import people who they feel will forever vote their way. It's not a strategy of empathy It's a strategy for power which is right in line with essentially every other political strategy for either side in the past 50 plus years

So one party is completely against policing immigration for nothing other than their own personal gain. That's disgusting It's tantamount to rigging voting machines. It's a strategy of undermining legal immigrants and everyone else in an attempt to create a single forever party. Now with that said, these mass deportations are flat out messy. The problem is not the immigrants, it's that they are illegal. So I could see a confinement until they either complete the citizenship process or deportations afterwards.

Most of these people want to be citizens and that's fine. They have just been allowed to move on with their lives without putting in the work. That's not fair to legal immigrants. Everyone should be willing to follow the rules to ensure they are in compliance with the law of the land. That goes for every country across the globe. Just tossing people into planes and flying them away is treating the people like the problem when the process and system is the problem. In my eyes people who have lived here for 10 plus years and had an otherwise quiet and peaceful life, being productive in society, should all get expedited paperwork. Naturally, the system is not made for that type of volume, but that's no excuse.

That's an easy problem to address rationally. Everyone else should have a different process. Partisan identity-based politics is the only other thing I'll address. To me, anyone who is true to themselves will never fully agree with an entire group of people. The amount of people on both sides who just agree wholeheartedly to all of the popular stances of their favored political party is disturbing. The left is starting to go much further off the rails than the right. For some reason, it is heresy for either side to admit that they might be taking things too far, but the amount of violent rhetoric I hear is almost ubiquitous with people who are far left.

It is becoming startling to see the party of tolerance and understanding become the party of burn it all down. That is not to say that the far right is some sort of shining example of being level headed. The right is making 4chan edgelords a real-life persona and that is flat-out terrible. They all seem to want to troll the entire rest of the world just for an LOL. The craziest thing is both ends up... Excuse me, the craze... because this is a good sense. They're all good senses, but the craziest thing is both... Oh my gosh. I don't know what's wrong with me. The craziest thing is both end up looking very similar at the fringes.

Yeah, far left, far right. None of them seem to be willing to even consider that this is a country of compromise. The craziest thing is both end up looking very similar at the fringes. None of them seem to be willing to even consider that this is a country of compromise. That's what it was designed for. It's not a one-party system. Dialogue and discourse are encoded within the system. It is never supposed to be one type of person making all the rules. Any left-leaning person who has an issue with sensible right-leaning politics is flat out

unreasonable and shouldn't be taken seriously. Anyone on the right should be held to the same standard. Both parties should be only slightly left of right of center because the middle is where the country should operate. I feel it is obvious that the farther we stray from the center the less stable society is. The blatant messaging coming from the media is also problematic because the vast majority is signaling that one side is right and purposefully trying to push the entire country into a single-party mindset. That should be seen as unacceptable by any rational person, even if that message

is something you agree with. Money is indeed too concentrated at the top and the rich have taken the long game and actually rigged the entire economic system of the US. That should be up to the politicians to change but when the entire country is split down the middle and trying to rip the throats out of the other side, the politicians will always go to the default, which is which side will benefit me the most. So they go with the money. I'm always left with the same answer to all of our political woes. It's that the vast majority of us should be ashamed of ourselves. The majority of this country should start yelling in the mirror because that is the beginning and end of all the issues. Protests should be towards being rude and closed-minded towards people different than you, not towards policies. If all individuals took more responsibility over the state of the entire country, the entire country would change.

Damn, wow Dustin. Way too much there for me to address all the points, but I just loved hearing your vent. I really did. My favorite part is the end. You know, we should all spend a lot of to address all the points. But I just loved hearing you vent. I really did. My favorite part is the end. You know, we should all spend a lot of time looking in the mirror. Yeah, I've been trying to do that more lately. So much easier to point the finger of blame anywhere but yourself. And yes, we need to talk to each other and listen to each other,

not just yell at each other. And also, yeah, you can be pro-immigrant without thinking that anyone can just wander on in, do whatever they want, never become a citizen, because who cares? You know, that extreme view is childish madness. But also, we don't need to be so cruel. We don't need to treat illegal immigrants who are not committing crimes like they're dangerous criminals who deserve to have masked men stuff them into a van, you know, to try and hit a quota for a bonus. That's also madness. The extremes. Left or right. I don't think they're what most people ever want to see. And I won't comment more than that, you know, I just appreciate you sharing your views in a respectful way, not being afraid to call out all sorts of shit, Dustin. Did I agree with everything you just wrote? No. Just

like you don't agree with everything I say. You know, I'm sure you don't. Do I respect your view? Yes. Yes, I do. I don't need't agree with everything I say. You know, I'm sure you don't. Do I respect your view? Yes. Yes, I do. I don't need to agree with everything somebody else says to believe, you know, or believes to still have respect for them. You guys collectively, meat sacks, time sacks, got into the fucking best. A lot of different people with a lot of different views and a lot of different people despite their different views who seem to be at their core good decent empathetic caring folks

So hail all of you Next time suckers I needed that we all did Thanks for listening to another bad magic productions podcast be sure to rate and review this show if you haven't already Please and thank you. Please don't try to organize a group of hitmen to carry out murders for various loosely affiliated gangsters this week. Eventually your new business is going to get you sent to prison or the morgue. There's no third option other than shooting on grandparents' faces. But that's also not a good option. Just don't do it. Just do. Keep on sucking.

Now how about a quick rundown of 90%, I'm hoping at least, of the nickname gangsters I mentioned today. Abe Kid Twist-Relis Harry Pittsburgh Phil Strauss Harry Happy Mayone Martin Bugsy Goldstein Frank the Dasher Abandondo Louis Capone so it'll be Louis, Louis Capone Charles Lucky Luciano Louis Lepke Buchalter Benjamin Bugsy Siegel Irving Taboo Sandler, Joseph Dock Stature, Giuseppe Joe the Boss, Masuria, Arnold the Brain Rosting, Irving Waxy Gordon, Salvatore Little Caesar, Marizano, Joe the Boss, Masuria, Ciro the Artichoke King, Terra

Nova, John Silk Stockings, Giustra, Harry Happy Mayone, Vito Sacco-Garino I think I said Harry Happymayone twice. Abraham, PrettyLevine, Seymour, Bluejaw, Magoon, Jimmy Blue-Eyes, Silvio, Jack, Legs, Diamond, aka, Gentleman Jack, Bernard, Lulu, Rosencrantz, George, Whitey, Ruddock, Big Gang, Cohen, aka, Big Weepy, Irving, Nattles, Nitzberg, Albert the Mad Hatter, Anastasia, Irving, Puggy, Feinstein, and last but not least Vito, a chicken head, Garino!