Joe Bruno's Mobsters - Six Volume Set

by Bruno, Joe

  “Now what happens?” Happy said.

  “Well, the Shapiros have to be hit,” Reles said. “We can’t just muscle them out; they got to go. And remember, the first one is Meyer. I got something to square him for.”

  The Shapiros knew they were hunted men, but they were lucky Reles and his crew couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a scatter-gun at five paces.

  For the next year, Reles and his boys stalked the streets of Brownsvile looking for the Shapiros; especially Meyer Shapiro. They spotted Meyer 18 times and 18 times their bullets missed the mark. On the 19th try, Reles finally wounded Shapiro and two innocent bystanders, but the wound was superficial and Meyer Shapiro escaped, still very much alive.

  In early July of 1931, Irving Shapiro convinced Meyer that maybe they should relax and take a ride for the day to Monticello in the Catskill Mountains to visit old pal Jack Siegal, who was on trial for running illegal slot machines.

  “You look a little jumpy, Meyer,” Irv said. “We can run up and see if we can do anything for Jack. The ride will do you good.”

  Since he was tired of being a clay pigeon for Reles’s inept shooting gallery, Meyer agreed to take the day off and breathe in some of that clean, fresh, upstate country air.

  By this time, Abe Reles had his long tentacles throughout Brownsvile and his ears firmly to the ground. Minutes after Irv and Meyer Shapiro left town, Reles knew about their little country excursion. Reles quickly assembled his crew and presented his plan.

  “There’s a card game at the Democratic Club on Sheffield Avenue tonight,” Reles said. “Those rats are sure to be back for it. They figure to leave Monticello around four-five o’clock. That would get them down here about eight. They’ll eat and be at the club say, 10-11 o’clock. We’ll be there when they come out.”

  Reles was almost exact in his calculations.

  Around 1 a.m., with Reles and his crew loaded for bear, Irv and Meyer Shapiro exited the Democratic Club and headed for their cars. The only problem was - about a dozen other card players exited at the same time, forming a shield around the Shapiro brothers. Before Reles and his crew could get off a clean shot, the Shapiro brother were safely in their car and gone.

  Reles was steaming mad, but he would not be deterred.

  “Quick, over to their house!” Reles told his crew. “They’ll head there!”

  Reles and his men sped over to 691 Blake Avenue; the apartment building where the Shapiros lived. The Shapiros’ car was nowhere in sight.

  “Good, we beat them here,” Reles said. “Now we go in the hall and wait. Remember, Meyer goes first.”

  They snuck into the hallway of the apartment building, removed the overhead light bulb, and waited in the dark. Luckily, no other residents entered the apartment building, and luckily for Meyer Shapiro, he had decided he needed a nice rubdown at a nearby bathhouse.

  “I don’t think I’ll go home,” Meyer had told Irv in the car. “I’m still jumpy. Drop me off at the Cleveland Baths. I’ll stay there overnight. Maybe it will loosen me up.”

  Irv Shapiro did as his brother requested, and after he parked his car near the entrance to his apartment building, Irv entered the darkened vestibule.

  Reles hesitated, realizing it was Irv and not Meyer Shapiro, whom he wanted badly. However, before he could say anything, the rest of his crew commenced firing.

  When the smoke cleared, Irving Shapiro, hit 18 times, was splattered dead on the tiled floor.

  Scratch Shapiro brother No. 1.

  Nine days later, on July 19, 1931, Meyer Shapiro was strolling down Church Avenue and East 58th Street in the East New York section of Brooklyn, when a dark sedan pulled up next to him, and three gunmen started firing.

  Shapiro jumped into his car and tried to escape, with the sedan speeding after him.

  Policeman Harold Schreck was driving nearby when he heard the gunfire. He rushed to where the shots had come from, and he spotted the dark sedan careening straight toward him.

  Not seeing Shapiro speeding away for his life, Policeman Schreck ordered the driver of the sedan to pull over, but the sedan whizzed past him.

  Policeman Schreck made a U-turn and gave chase; his right hand driving and his left hand firing a gun at the speeding sedan.

  Soon, Schreck was joined by another police car manned by policemen Joe Fleming, with his partner Harry Phelps riding shotgun. The two police cars chased the sedan onto the streetcar tracks.

  The sedan skidded all over the road, almost tipping over several times, but it always regained its balance. At one point, Policeman Schreck spotted a pistol being flung from the car into an empty lot on Sutter Avenue.

  The chase ended at Livonia and Howard Avenues, where the three gangsters sprung from the car and tried to flee on foot. The cops jumped out of their two cars and caught all three men before they could get very far.

  The three men turned out to be Abe Reles, Harry Strauss, and Dasher Abbandando, who had obviously lost his skills at “dashing.” The cops also found a sawed-off shotgun near the sedan (which had been stolen six days earlier at the corner of Pitkin and Stone). It was obvious; the hot shotgun had recently been discharged.

  The three thugs were arrested, but they refused to talk.

  The police had information that Reles and his boys were “out to get” Meyer Shapiro, but Shapiro, only slightly wounded, went into hiding. With no dead body and no one to issue a complaint, Brooklyn District Attorney Geoghan was forced to let Reles and his men go.

  That made it 20 times that Meyer Shapiro had survived a Reles-led pistol attack.

  As a consolation prize, a few days later, Reles and Happy Maione cornered Joey Silvers on a Brownsvile Street corner, and up close, they blew his head almost completely off his shoulders.

  However, Meyer Shapiro was still on the loose, with Reles and his boys in fiery pursuit.

  Meyer Shapiro decided Brooklyn was too hot for him, so he holed up in Manhattan where he thought he was safe; and he was – for a while.

  While in Manhattan, Shapiro, his gang shrinking quickly, figured maybe he could establish himself in Manhattan; a little loansharking, a few slot machines, and maybe even a speakeasy to call his own. While attempting to set up shop in Manhattan, Shapiro exposed himself to the underworld element; not a smart thing to do for a man with a bullseye on his back.

  On Sept. 17, Shapiro stopped in a Manhattan speakeasy for a drink. It’s not clear who spotted him first, but soon Kid Twist, Happy, and Buggsy abducted Shapiro and took him to a Lower East Side cellar located at 7 Manhattan Avenue.

  The next morning a newsboy found Shapiro’s body in that cellar. He had been shot once behind the left ear at extremely close range, which was verified by deep powder burns where the bullet had entered Shapiro’s skull. As was his plan, Reles fired the fatal shot himself, and even Reles couldn’t miss with his gun pressed up against Shapiro’s noggin.

  Scratch Shapiro brother No. 2.

  Now all that was left of the Shapiro gang was Willie Shapiro, who had been making noise that he was out to get Reles and his crew, despite the fact that Willie had disappeared from the streets of Brownsville.

  Willie Shapiro was considered the weakest of the Shapiro brothers and not a top priority on the Boys from Brownsville’s list of things to do. Reles and Happy Maione were too busy strengthening their organizations to put much effort in locating Willie, who by this time had embarked on a career as a prizefighter. Unfortunately for Willie Shapiro, he spent most of his ring time on his back staring at the overhead lights.

  By 1934, Willie Shapiro knew he was dead in the water if he insisted on going after the men who had killed his two brothers.

  He told his sister Rose, “What’s the use? I can’t make it alone. I’m out of the rackets. I’m going to forget about those bums.”

  It turned out that Willie had waited too long to announce his retirement from a life of crime.

  Although Reles and his boys were not actively seeking Willie, he was still unfinished business,
and Reles hated unfinished business.

  On July 18, 1934, the day after Willie Shapiro had spoken to his sister Rose, Vito Gurino met Reles and Strauss on a Brownsville street corner.

  He told them, “I just spotted Willie going into a place near Herkimer. You know, we’ve got nothing to do now (meaning killings). Why don’t we take him tonight and be done with it?”

  Reles and Strauss agreed with Gurino’s assessment, and a few hours later they abducted Willie Shapiro from a Brownsville bar and brought him to the basement of a bar-and-grill on Rockaway Avenue, which Gurino owned with Happy Maione and Happy’s brother-in-law, Joe Daddonna.

  In the basement, working over Willie pretty good were the hulking Gurino, Happy, Strauss, and the Dasher. The beating was most brutal, and when Willie was finally rendered unconscious, Happy put a stop to the festivities; at least for a while.

  “This bum’s done for,” Happy said.

  That was the cue for Strauss to perform his neat rope trick.

  “Pittsburgh Phil” trussed up Willie Shapiro like a Thanksgiving turkey; then the killers watched Willie’s dance of death. When Willie stopped struggling and fell limp, the killers stuffed Willie into a laundry bag to make it easier to transport his body. They flung the laundry bag into the trunk of their car and drove to the sand dunes in a secluded area of Canarsie Flats. There they dumped the laundry bag containing Willie onto a sand dune and commenced digging.

  Shortly after, a Canarsie resident, who was having trouble sleeping, decided to go for a stroll near the sand dunes. Suddenly, he was startled when he thought he detected movement on top of one of the dunes. He crept closer, and he spotted four men digging in the sand.

  Suddenly, one of the men lifted his head and spotted the witness. It was Happy, and he yelled, “Somebody made us.”

  The four killers sprinted to their car, jumped in, and sped back to Brownsville

  The witness ran over to where the men had been digging, and he noticed the laundry bag in the half-dug hole. He bent down, pulled open the top of the bag, and there was Willie, all trussed up and not looking too chipper.

  The witness ran to the local police station, and when the police arrived soon after, Willie Shapiro was definitely dead. His body was brought to the Medical Examiner, who discovered sand in Willie’s lungs; meaning Willie had been buried alive.

  Scratch Shapiro brother No. 3.

  *****

  With Louis Capone serving as the intermediary to keep peace between Kid Twist and Happy, the Boys from Brownsville thrived. When Albert Anastasia needed someone murdered, he relayed this information to Capone, who gave the contract to Reles and Maione, who then used their stable of killers, including themselves, to do the dirty deeds.

  However, the Boys from Brownsville’s main source of income was shylocking (loaning money out at usurious rates), bookmaking (taking illegal bets on sporting events), and floating craps (dice) games. The “floating” craps games took place on street corners and in vacant lots. The more expensive games were run in car garages, or in any building that was vacant for the night.

  The shylocking and bookmaking businesses were run from the backroom of a Brownsville candy store called “Midnight Rose’s.” The store was owned by a cranky old lady named Rose, who was the mother of one of the minor members of the crew known only as “The Dapper.” Rose was hassled several times by the law over the types of people who frequented her establishment.

  “Why do you let hoodlums hang out in your store?” detectives once asked her.

  “Why don’t the police keep them out?” she said. “Can I help it who comes into my store?”

  Another time she was asked by the police if she knew anyone named “Pittsburgh Phil.”

  “Pittsburgh, Chicago, San Francisco… what do I know about them?” she said. “I was never out of Brooklyn in my life. All I know is I got ‘syracuse’ veins. I’m a sick woman.”

  It was stated in a 1942 corruption report to New York Governor Herbert Lehman - written by Special Assistant Attorney John Harlan - that in 1938 alone, more than $400,000 in loans were handled by Midnight Rose herself.

  There was also a Boys from Brownsville “stolen-car department,” run by the younger members of the crew, who were basically gofers for Reles, Happy Maione, Pittsburgh Phil, and the rest of the higher-ups. Teenagers like Dukey Maffetore and Pretty Levine stole cars on a regular basis, as did “Blue Jaw” Magoon and stolen-car-specialist Sholem Bernstein. Some cars were broken down and sold for their parts, but most were used as transportation in murder contracts.

  It was around the time of the Willie Shapiro murder that the Boys from Brownsville moved up in stature in the National Crime Commission. Through intermediary Louis Capone, the Boys from Brownsville were given numerous murder contracts by the Commission, which culminated in the Boys from Brownsville being given more territories in Brooklyn in which to run their rackets.

  There is no doubt that the Boys from Brownsville’s elimination of the Shapiro brothers spurred their transition from strictly small-timers into the major leagues of organized crime.

  This brings us to…

  Murder Inc.

  After the Castellammarese War ended in 1931, with both opposing bosses, Joe “The Boss” Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano, ending up quite dead due to the treachery of Lucky Luciano, amongst others, Luciano along with Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky formed a nine-member National Crime Commission which cut across ethnic lines.

  There was no single boss of this commission, but instead the leadership was divided equally amongst Luciano, Lansky, Lansky’s sidekick Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Frank Costello, Joe Bonanno, Vincent Mangano, Joe “Adonis” Doto, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, and his right-hand man Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro. (Loose cannon Dutch Schultz - real name Arthur Flegenheimer - was not a member of the Commission for exactly that reason: he was a loose cannon and could not be trusted with making commonsense decisions.)

  Of course, all corporations need a separation of powers within that corporation, whereas certain members are given duties that do not tread upon the powers of other members (make no mistake, the National Crime Commission ran like a well-oiled machine and indeed operated like an unregistered corporation).

  This is where Murder Inc. came into play.

  It was decided, that for the good of the National Crime Commission, sometimes unpleasant things needed to be done to keep the Commission nice and profitable. This included killing people who endangered the continued cash flow into the Commission’s coffers. The Commission decided that they needed to establish a separate branch of their organization, which was responsible for one thing and one thing only: the murder of people the bosses said needed to be killed.

  Louie “Lepke” Buchalter was put in charge of what the press called Murder Inc., and to assist Lepke in his duties, the Commission appointed Albert Anastasia, nicknamed “The Lord High Executioner,” to be Lepke’s second-in-command.

  Lepke never gave a direct order to any of his killers to do a job. Instead, Lepke used trusted men like Mendy Weiss and Louis Capone to issue the final order and decree to the hit men chosen. By keeping a level or two of insulation between himself and the actual killers Lepke figured nothing could ever be directly pinned on him.

  Lepke was right, until he made one fatal mistake. But we’ll get to that later.

  The first order of business for Lepke and Anastasia was to assemble a crack hit-team to do the dirty work. Through Louis Capone, who was close to Anastasia, Lepke had been nurturing a group of homicidal maniacs, some of whom would rather kill than eat. These killers were the aforementioned “The Boys from Brownsville.”

  The Boys from Brownsville were hardly the only killers employed by Murder Inc., but they were the foundation which led to as many as 100 freelance assassins being put on a steady weekly salary (of $125 and up), to be ready to kill whenever they were given the order. These men were sometimes paid extra for a job especially well-done, and they were allowed to operate in designated territ
ories in the gambling and loansharking businesses, or in any illegal operation; like hijackings and even kidnappings.

  However, one thing is for sure: even if a member of Murder Inc. didn’t kill anyone for a month, or two, or three, his killing salary came in steadily every week.

  Now, let me introduce Murder Incorporated’s cast of characters.

  The first and foremost member of Murder Inc. turned out to be the biggest headache for Lepke: Abe “Kid Twist” Reles.

  As we discussed earlier, by eliminating the three Shapiro brothers - Meyer, Irving, and Willie - Reles, along with his childhood pal Martin “Buggsy” Goldstein, took over all the illegal rackets in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. To do so, Reles enlisted the help of Harry “Happy” Maione and Frank “Dasher” Abbandando of the neighboring “Ocean Hill Hooligans.” Soon, such cutthroat killers like Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss, Vito Gurino, and “Blue Jaw” Magoon were taken into the fold, and the Boys from Brownsville were a formidable group of killers indeed. The key for their transition from Brownsville to the big-time was Louis Capone, ostensibly a Brooklyn restaurateur, who was very close to Albert Anastasia.

  When Anastasia, along with Lepke, was entrusted by the Commission to form Murder Inc., Anastasia approached Capone and said, “What about Reles and his boys from Brownsville? Are these guys capable of doing what needs to be done? No questions asked.”

  Capone assured Anastasia that Reles and his boys were stone-cold killers and efficient ones at that. The only problem Capone had was that Reles and Maione, considered to be the No. 1 and No. 2 leaders of the group, hated each other’s guts, and they didn’t trust each other.

  Despite their differences, Reles and Maione worked like a well-oiled killing machine. Under the direction of Anastasia and Capone, the Murder Inc. killers operated in a manner that was almost foolproof.

  The key to their method was the concepts of corroboration and separation of powers. The bosses brought in several men to do different aspects of each job, with one man knowing nothing about the other men and their involvement. Still, each man was so intimately involved in the operation, he would be considered an accomplice, and his possible corroborating testimony was useless in a court of law, in case he ever decided to turn rat.