Orgen was buried in a cherry-red coffin lined with white satin. On the lid gleamed a silver plate which read: “Jacob Orgen, Age 25 Years.” His real age was thirty-three. But eight years had passed since he assumed active leadership of his gang. That same day his father, a religious Jew, had declared him dead.12
Lepke then took over New York’s labor rackets.
Since Lepke was a leading exponent of contract killing, an explanation of this underworld enterprise is in order. “Contract” is a common English word which, in the underworld, means one thing — murder by hire. Once a contract is ordered, the procedure follows certain rules. To protect the person ordering the hit, he is isolated from the trigger man, never saying a word to him about the job. The contract is passed to a second party who selects the killer. Often the order will be passed on to yet another party. Since all the negotiations are handled on a one-to-one basis, it doesn’t matter if someone along the line of command eventually talks. In order to make a conviction, the authorities need the corroboration of someone who knows the entire setup.
The actual killers are given the identity of the victim, background on his habits and a place where he can most likely be found. Sometimes they are given a spotter who points out the victim. Once the deed is done, the gunmen vanish, notifying no one but the person who gave them the specific orders. The information is then relayed up the line to the one who originally ordered the murder.
Frequently the hitmen are from out of town, making it harder for the local authorities to trace them. The police are left with a killing, few clues and no likely suspects, because often the killers do not even know their victim.
Authorities frequently learn the details of contract murders through informers, but this rarely leads to a conviction. For example, there were approximately 1,000 gangland executions in Chicago from 1919 to 1967, but in only thirteen cases was there a conviction.13
Despite the portrayals in over-romanticized Hollywood gangster films, hitmen rarely make a deal with their intended victim. This would destroy their professional standing and reputation.
Gangland lore is filled with examples of men who were specialists in this line of work. Israel “Ice Pick Willie” Alderman got his moniker because he was supposed to have perfected this method of execution.
Ice Pick was a Minnesota mobster who was a close friend of Meyer Lansky in his bootlegging days and was later one of the first investors, along with Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and Moe Sedway, in Las Vegas gambling.
Willie ran a second story speakeasy in Minneapolis. He boasted of having committed eleven murders with his trusty ice pick there.
The ice pick method was favored by many hitmen because it made the victim’s death appear to be the result of natural causes. Generally, the victim was cornered in some out-of-the-way place, and while two or three hitmen held him, the executioner jammed the ice pick through the eardrum into the brain. The pick produced only a tiny hole in the ear and a minute amount of bleeding which could be carefully wiped away. After examining the corpse, doctors generally concluded that the cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage. Only a meticulous and expert medical examination could reveal the truth.
According to one source, Willie would engage his intended victim in a conversation and ply him with drinks. When the man was properly inebriated, Willie would shove the ice pick in his ear, then take his victim into a back room and dump his body down the laundry chute. The body would be disposed of later that evening.14
Another consummate professional hitman was Samuel “Red” Levine who achieved notoriety for a reason other than his work. Red was an Orthodox Jew, a strange man, devoted to his religion and his family but at the same time a killer. Born in Toledo, Ohio, Levine was hand-picked by Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano to kill Luciano’s nemesis, Salvatore Maranzano, in 1931. After this killing, Luciano and his generation of gangsters took over and dominated the New York underworld.
Luciano called Red “the best driver and hitman I had.” Luciano recalled that at home Levine always wore a skullcap, and if he was going to do a job during the Sabbath, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, he always wore a skullcap under his hat.
Whenever possible, Red tried not to kill anyone on the Sabbath. If he had no choice and had to make a hit on that particular day, he would put a talith (prayer shawl) over his shoulders and pray before doing anything.15
Perhaps the most famous professional killer in American gangster history was Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss. Phil killed more than 100 (some said over 400) men from the late 1920s to 1940, making him the most prolific killer New York, and perhaps syndicated crime, had ever produced.16
The Brooklyn-born Phil was so good that when an out-of-town mob needed someone eliminated, they almost always asked for him. Phil packed his briefcase with a shirt, a change of socks and underwear, a gun, a knife, a length of rope to tie or strangle his victims and an ice pick. He then hopped a train or plane to his destination, pulled the job and caught the next connection back to New York. Often Phil didn’t even know the name of the person he had killed, and he usually didn’t care enough to find out.
Killing never seemed to bother Phil, but he did worry a great deal about his own health. Once, in the middle of beating a hood by the name of Puggy Feinstein, the victim, fighting for his life, bit Phil on the finger.
“The bastard bit me in the hand,” yelled Phil, as he and his associates garroted Feinstein.
After the job was done, Strauss and some of the boys took Puggy’s body to an empty lot, poured gasoline over it and set it ablaze. All the while Phil whined about the bite. “The son of a bitch give me some bite,” he said.
The group adjourned to a local restaurant for a fish dinner. Phil, however, could not enjoy his meal. “Maybe I’ll get lockjaw from being bit,” he fretted. Despite assurances he would not, Phil could barely finish his meal.17
The autopsy report on George Rudnick shows the kind of work Phil was capable of. Rudnick was a small-time hood who Lepke Buchalter suspected of being an informer. Taking no chances, Buchalter wanted him eliminated and gave the contract to Pittsburgh Phil.
On May 11, 1937, Phil and some of his colleagues snatched Rudnick as he loitered on Livonia Avenue near Midnight Rose’s store. A few hours later Rudnick’s body was found in a stolen car at the other end of Brooklyn.
According to the medical examiner, “There were sixty-three stab wounds on the body. On the neck, I counted thirteen stab wounds between the jaw and collarbone. On the right chest, there were fifty separate circular wounds…. His face was intensely cyanic, or blue. The tongue protruded…. When the heart was laid open, the entire wall was found to be penetrated by stab wounds.”18
Tall and handsome, with an athletic build, Phil was an elegant dresser with a special fondness for expensive suits. Lewis Valentine, New York City’s police commissioner during the 1930s, once spotted Phil in a police lineup. “Look at him,” exclaimed Valentine. “He’s the best dressed man in the room and he’s never worked a day in his life.”
Phil had one redeeming quality: he was in love. The object of his affection was a beautiful Brooklyn girl named Evelyn Mittleman.
Longy Zwillman
Evelyn was dubbed “The Kiss of Death Girl,” a sobriquet newspapers apply to women whose lovers appear to die at a much faster rate than is normal. Phil eliminated anyone he thought could be a rival for her affections.
It appears, however, that Evelyn had earned this nickname before Phil met her. Evelyn was a luscious blond who seemed to attract violent men. In 1933, at the age of eighteen, she was at a dance with her then current boyfriend, Hy Miller, when another man was taken by her looks. He tried to cut in and Miller objected. A fight ensued and Miller was killed. A couple of years later Evelyn was dating one Robert Feurer, when she caught the eye of a Brownsville gangster named Jack Goldstein. When Feurer objected to Jack’s advances, Goldstein killed him. Goldstein became her new boyfriend.
One day in 1938, they happened to pass a Brown
sville pool hall where Pittsburgh Phil saw them. Phil liked what he saw, and said so. Goldstein took offence at the remark and told Phil to buzz off. Phil went inside the poolhall, got a cue stick, and beat the daylights out of Goldstein. He then supplanted Goldstein as Evelyn’s new paramour.
Goldstein was later killed by Phil, but not because of Evelyn. A contract was put out on Jack because of his racket activities, and a number of hitmen, led by Phil, were assigned the job. The men hammered Goldstein into unconsciousness, but did not kill him. Instead, they brought him directly to Phil, who insisted on drowning Goldstein personally.
Pittsburgh Phil was Evelyn’s final victim. She was the last person to visit him in his death cell before he was executed for murder in 1941. Evelyn left off consorting with mob figures, married and faded from view.19
Phil had been put on death row by his erstwhile pal and fellow killer-for-hire, Abe Reles. Reles had been arrested in February 1940, along with several other Brooklyn hoodlums, for allegedly murdering a petty burglar and small-time crook named Alexander “Red” Alpert.
At the time he was picked up, Reles sported a rap sheet that contained 42 arrests, accumulated over a sixteen-year period, for robbery, assault, burglary, possession of narcotics and homicide. He never served time for any major charge.
Abe was squat and ugly, with thick, powerful fingers which he used to twist the necks of his victims. This skill earned him his underworld nickname, “Kid Twist.”20
Kid Twist started in racketeering in 1927 as a hooligan. He began murdering in 1930 when he put together his own gang to take over in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. He never s topped racketeering and he never stopped killing. According to his own account, he committed eleven murders, not counting the times he participated but didn’t pull the trigger, or the times where he held one end of the strangling rope but, as he claimed, “had not yanked it.”
Nothing fazed Abe. In 1934, he was sentenced to three years for assault, breaking a bottle of oil over the head of a garage attendant who hadn’t gotten to his car fast enough. Before pronouncing sentence, the judge admonished Reles severely.
“Reles is one of the most vicious characters we have had in years,” he said. “I am convinced he will eventually either be sentenced to prison for life, or be put out of the way by some good detective with a couple of bullets.”
Reles listened with a sneer on his face. When the judge finished, Abe leaned over and whispered in his lawyer’s ear. Reles’ attorney repeated his client’s message to the court.
“I will take on any cop in the city with pistols, fists or anything else,” Reles said. “A cop counts to fifteen when he puts his finger on the trigger before he shoots.”
Abe never counted.
When the police arrested him in 1940, Reles proved to be a tough cookie. The police had little hope of making him crack. Luckily for the authorities, one of the men picked up with Reles began to talk and Reles feared he would be implicated. In addition, Reles’s wife Rose was pregnant. She implored her husband to cooperate with the authorities to save his life so the baby would have a father. He agreed.
Reles’s wife went to assistant district attorney Burton Turkus. Weeping, she cried “I want to save my husband from the electric chair. My baby is coming in June.” Recovering her composure, she added, “My husband wants to talk to you.”21
Reles made a deal. If he was not prosecuted for any of the murders he had participated in, he would talk. The District Attorney swallowed hard and agreed, and Reles began to sing. He told the police about fifty homicides he and his friends had committed in New York, New Jersey, Detroit, Louisville, Los Angeles and Kansas City. At the end of twelve days of testimony, the prosecutors had twenty-five notebooks filled with stenographers’ shorthand record. Later investigation proved Reles’ information to be entirely accurate, down to the last detail.
Abe became one of the most famous stool pigeons in criminal history, furnishing prosecutors with the particulars of 85 New York murders and hundreds more nationwide. Not only did he put his friends Pittsburgh Phil, Happy Maione, Dasher Abbandando and Buggsy Goldstein in the electric chair, but he provided prosecutor Burton Turkus with insight into the workings of the Brooklyn-based gang of murderers for hire.
An incredulous Turkus finally asked Reles how he brought himself to take human life so casually. “Did your conscience ever bother you?” asked Turkus. “Didn’t you feel anything?”
“How did you feel when you tried your first law case?” countered Reles.
“I was rather nervous,” Turkus admitted.
‘And how about your second case,” asked Reles.
“It wasn’t so bad, but I was still a little nervous,” said Turkus.
‘And after that,” asked Reles.
“Oh, after that, I was alright. I was used to it,” answered Turkus.
“You answered your own question,” said Reles. “It’s the same with murder. I got used to it.”22
Just how matter-of-fact Reles could be about killing is illustrated by a story that Itzik Goldstein, a Newark bar owner and driver for Doc Stacher, swears is true. Reles and his pal Buggsy Goldstein were sitting in Midnight Rose’s candy store when a fellow named Johnny approached them and asked, “Do you know if Angelo hangs around here?”
“Yeah, he hangs around,” said Reles, “but I don’t know where he is. Would you like to leave a message?”
“Yeah. Tell him Johnny was here.”
Unbeknownst to Johnny, Reles had a contract to kill him.
“This was on Friday afternoon,” says Itzik, “and Reles used to go to his mother’s house every Friday evening to have a traditional Sabbath meal of gefilte fish, chicken soup with noodles and boiled chicken.
“So he says to this fellow Johnny, ‘Why don’t you come up to the house and have something to eat. In the meantime, maybe we will run into your friend.”
Having nothing better to do, Johnny accepted.
Reles and Goldstein escorted Johnny to Reles’s mother’s home where she made dinner for the three of them. Reles then sent his mother to the movies.
When she was gone, Reles and Goldstein bludgeoned and strangled Johnny. “They carried his body into the bathroom,” says Itzik, “and dumped it in the bathtub. They chopped the body into pieces and put it into bags.” Then they dragged the bags down to Goldstein’s car. Goldstein took the bags to an unknown destination and incinerated them.
Meanwhile, Reles quickly but carefully cleaned up the bathroom and waited for his mother to return. When she came home, he joined her in a cup of tea and a piece of honey cake.23
Reles’s testimony helped build a successful case against Lepke Buchalter, as well as two of Lepke’s aides, Louis Capone and Mendy Weiss, who were convicted of killing truck company owner Joseph Rosen.
By this time, Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Albert Anastasia, Bugsy Siegel and other top mob figures began to worry. Reles knew too much and no one knew where this would end. “If he keeps on goin’,” Costello told Luciano, “they’re gonna get everybody for murder.”24
Reles had to be stopped. The problem was how. To secure their star witness, the police had put Reles under protective custody on the sixth floor of the Half Moon Hotel in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn. He was guarded around the clock by two policemen and three plainclothes detectives.
Sometime before seven o’clock in the morning of November 12, 1941, the hotel’s assistant manager heard a “thud” on the extension roof beneath Reles’s room, but he ignored it. When the room was checked, Reles was missing. His fully dressed body was found on the ground more than twenty feet from the wall of the building. Two knotted bedsheets were laying nearby.
Theories on how it happened abounded. The police said Reles must have tried to escape by twisting bedsheets together and using them for a rope. However, the knotted bedsheets gave way and he fell 42 feet to his death. Another theory was that Reles became conscience-stricken over his past and fearful of his future, and committed suicide.<
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Neither of these, or other theories, explain how the 160-pound Reles landed twenty feet from the wall. He only could have done so if he had wings.
Lots of people wanted Reles dead. His closest pals relished seeing him in a coffin. Buggsy Goldstein’s only objection to dying in the electric chair was that he couldn’t hold Reles’s hand when it happened.
Pittsburgh Phil told an attorney he wanted to get into the same room with Reles just so he could sink his teeth in his jugular vein. “I didn’t worry about the chair,” he said, “if I could just tear his throat out first.”
In 1961, Lucky Luciano told his biographer that it cost upwards of $50,000 to get rid of Reles. “The whole bunch of cops was on the take,” he said. “Reles was sleepin’ and one of the cops give him a tap with a billy and knocked him out. Then they picked him up and heaved him out the window. For Chrissake, he landed so far from the wall he couldn’t’ve done that even if he had jumped.”25
No one was ever prosecuted for Reles’s death, and the entire underworld heaved a collective sigh of relief.
There have been few hoodlums in American history more infamous than Bugsy Siegel. By the age of twenty-one, his police charge sheet included assault, white-slavery, dope dealing, bootlegging, hijacking, rape, extortion, robbery, bookmaking, the numbers racket and murder. He was ruthless and wild, with a reckless disregard for danger. His fits of temper became an underworld legend.
In 1981, NBC-TV produced a miniseries titled The Gangster Chronicles, supposedly based on the lives of Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano. Meyer Lansky, retired in Florida, enjoyed watching the program with his friends. The men and their wives kept up a running commentary on the actions portrayed on the screen.
One of Lansky’s pals, Benny Sigelbaum, took exception to the depiction of Bugsy as a violent and unthinking hoodlum.
“The television company should be sued,” he said.
“What are you going to sue them for,” Lansky asked, laughing. “In real life, he was even worse.”26
But He Was Good to His Mother - The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters Page 13