About Me
Louis "Lepke" Buchalter (6 February 1897 - 4 March 1944) was a Jewish American mobster who was the notorious head of Murder, Inc., the enforcement arm of the National Crime Syndicate. He is the only major mob boss to ever have been executed by state or federal authorities for his crimes.
Born Louis Bookhouse on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Buchalter, as a young man, became a member of the Amboy Dukes, a street gang in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville named after Amboy Street (a local road). He became involved in push cart shoplifting and by 1919 had served two prison terms. Together with friend Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro, he ultimately gained control of the garment industry unions on the Lower East Side. He used the unions to threaten strikes and demand weekly payments from factory owners while simultaneously dipping into union bank accounts. His control of the unions later evolved into a general protection racket, extending into such areas as bakery trucking. The unions were an extremely profitable venture for him, and he kept an iron grip on them even after becoming a big-time player in the mob.
Buchalter's general protection racket was an idea used by gangsters all over New York City; what made Buchalter stand out from the rest of the pack, however, was his intolerance of those who didn't pay him. With other hoods, a person who defaulted on payments would get his legs broken. In Buchalter's case, if someone didn't cough up the cash, he or she was simply killed: no second chances whatsoever. Not only would his henchmen kill shopkeepers, they would loot the business before the killing and then burn it afterwards. Buchalter learned the general order of things early on: looting, rape, pillage, arson. His eventual Achilles heel proved to be an informant who said Buchalter was behind two out of every three cases of arson in Manhattan.
Buchalter's success with the protection rackets propelled him to the top of the crime world; the piles of money he raked in were being coveted by old-school Mafia chieftain Salvatore Maranzano by 1929. So, for help, Buchalter went to an old friend: Lucky Luciano. Luciano first arranged the rubout of Maranzano's hated rival, Joe Masseria, using Bugsy Siegel, Joe Adonis, Vito Genovese, and Albert Anastasia as the executioners; he then engineered the elimination of Maranzano, establishing himself as the top mob boss in New York City.
In the early 1930s, Luciano, Buchalter (who had taken on the nickname Lepke, meaning "Little Louis" in Yiddish), and Johnny Torrio (the former Chicago boss and mentor of Al Capone) formed the National Crime Syndicate, an umbrella organization of all major organized crime groups coast-to-coast. As a founding member, and also as a reward for his support of the murders of Masseria and Maranzano, Buchalter obtained a seat on the Syndicate's "board of directors." To take care of "problems," Luciano's associates Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky formed Murder, Inc. Originally a band of Brooklyn killers of mostly Jewish origin, they were highly effective and eventually used to fulfill most Syndicate contracts. Control of the group soon passed to Buchalter and Albert Anastasia, as Siegel and Lansky had larger concerns to deal with.
Buchalter was probably the bloodiest Jewish gangster of all time. He constantly wore wool suits, but they couldn't warm up his eyes, which were, with some hyperbole, said to be like blocks of ice. He was adept at commanding others to murder for him, ordering assassinations on the phone from his grandmother's house without so much as batting an eye. As many as a hundred corpses have been attributed to Buchalter himself; those under his control may have slain a thousand more nationwide. Some of the more famous hitmen at Buchalter's disposal included Abe Reles, Seymour Magoon, Frank Abbandando, Harry Maione, Albert Tannenbaum, and the infamous Harry Strauss. The rubout of Dutch Schultz on 23 October 1935 was a major killing for the group, as was the murder of Louis Amberg the same day. Buchalter naturally attracted a lot of attention from the FBI during the early 1930s, but thanks to bribed federal judges and other friends in high places, Buchalter got off scot-free every time.
