Abe Reles

Abe Reles

Abe "Kid Twist" Reles (* 1906 in New York as Abraham Reles ; † November 12, 1941 in New York) was a Jewish-American mobster and notorious contract killer of Murder, Inc. and is now part of the Kosher Nostra .

He gained notoriety as an informant and Pentito , on whose testimony several members of his organization, Murder, Inc. , including the head of the gang Louis Buchalter , were convicted and then executed on the electric chair . Reles was nicknamed "Kid Twist" in memory of Max Zwerbach , a feared gang leader and murderer of the Eastman Gang , who lived in New York around 1900.

Life

Abraham Reles was born the son of Jewish immigrants from Austria in the Brooklyn district of Brownsville . He grew up in poverty and turned to crime from an early age.

During the alcohol prohibition period , Reles and his friend Martin Goldstein joined a gang led by the three Shapiro brothers who controlled part of Brooklyn. The first task of the two was to carry out minor crimes for the gang. On the occasion of such an act, Reles and Goldstein were arrested and sentenced to two years' imprisonment, which they served in a New York juvenile prison. Since, in the opinion of the two, the Shapiro brothers had not done enough for their arrested cronies, they began to seek revenge from now on.

After serving their prison sentence, Reles and Goldstein went into the gaming machine business with George Defeo, competing with the Shapiro brothers in Brooklyn. They were able to use Defeo's connection to Meyer Lansky , an influential mobster who promised them support. Lansky himself hoped the deal would expand his sphere of influence to the poorer areas of Brooklyn that were previously out of his reach. The agreement with Lansky gave Reles and its partners the security they needed to grow their business and to survive. In return, Lansky received the hoped-for access to the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brownsville and Ocean Hill .

Murder, Inc.

In the meantime, Reles had earned a reputation as a cold-blooded and psychopathically inclined murderer. He is said to have killed the employee of a car wash in broad daylight because he had not removed a stain on the fender of Reles' car to his satisfaction. Reles is said to have murdered another man because this Reles' car did not pull up from a parking lot fast enough.

With this reputation he and Goldstein became a member of what the press later called Murder, Inc. , a group of contract killers that the National Crime Syndicate was supposed to use to solve problems through murder. The group consisted mainly of Italians from the American La Cosa Nostra and people who are now considered to be part of the Kosher Nostra . During the ten years that Murder, Inc. existed, the contract killers are believed to have killed between 400 and 700 people. The murder troop was controlled by Louis Buchalter and Albert Anastasia , who maintained direct contact with the families of the Cosa Nostra.

Despite his small stature, the long-armed Reles was one of the most nefarious and violent killers in the group. When carrying out ordered murders, he preferred to use an ice pick , which he drove through the ears of his victims into the brain. He was so skilful in doing this that in many cases it was assumed that it would cause natural death from a cerebral haemorrhage.

The murder of the Shapiro brothers

Meanwhile, the gaming machine business was prospering and a conflict with the Shapiro brothers could no longer be avoided. One night Reles, together with Goldstein and Defeo, was lured by the Shapiro brothers to their headquarters in east New York City, where they were involved in a firefight in which Reles and Goldstein were injured. To express his contempt, Meyer Shapiro also seized Reles' girlfriend and raped her in a field.

Since the argument with the Shapiro brothers could not be won easily, help was needed. Louis Capone arranged contact with the neighboring Italian-American gang of the Ocean Hill Hooligans . In fact, he was able to win Frank Abbandando and Harry Maione over to this cause; Both promised themselves a share of the lucrative business with the gaming machines in return by eliminating the Shapiro brothers. After several attempts to murder each other, Reles and his accomplices finally managed to ambush Irving Shapiro . Reles dragged him out of the hallway of his house into the street, beat him brutally and finally shot him several times in the face.

Two months later, Reles murdered Meyer Shapiro on the street, also with a shot in the face. William Shapiro , the last of the Shapiro brothers, was finally abducted from the street to a Murder, Inc. hiding place three years later. There he was knocked unconscious and put in a sack. The sack was then buried in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn . Just as they had buried the sack, the perpetrators were surprised and hurriedly fled. The body of William Shapiro, who died in the operation, was subsequently excavated by authorities and the autopsy carried out revealed that he had been buried alive.

Justice informant

In January 1940 the petty crook Harry "Harry the Mock" Rudolph had been in prison for several years. However, he had not forgotten the murder of his 19-year-old friend Alex “Red” Alpert. Young gangster Alpert was gunned down from behind in Brownsville on November 25, 1933, because he did not want to sell his booty of uncut diamonds to Strauss and Reles for only 700 US dollars. Rudolph - who was transferred to the local prison "The Rock" on Rikers Island - now decided to work with the district attorney for the Burton B. Turkus district. This started a chain reaction, although the statements of Rudolph, who died of natural causes in prison in June 1940, were never used.

Turkus arrested Abe Reles, Martin Goldstein and Dukey Maffetore based on the testimony of Rudolph and on the instructions of William O'Dwyers , the Kings County Attorney . Maffetore decided next because he was not involved in Alpert's murder. Reles also realized that on the one hand he could be sentenced to death, on the other hand his boss Louis Buchalter would not take the risk of leaving witnesses alive. So he decided to cooperate and revealed Louis Buchalter's involvement in the murder of the confectioner Joseph Rosen . Reles and his accomplices, Albert Tannenbaum , Seymour Magoon , Sholem Bernstein and Abraham "Pretty" Levine , who were also arrested and became informants, also accused Bugsy Siegel , Frankie Carbo , Vito Gurino , James Ferraco , Harry "Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss , and Philip Cohen of the murder , Mendy Weiss , Charles Workman , Irving Nitzberg , Jacob Midgen , Gioacchino Parisi , Jacob Drucker , Louis Capone , Harry "Happy" Maione , Frank "Dasher" Abbandando and even 'childhood friend Martin Goldstein.

“Pep has an ice ax. Happer has a meat cleaver. The way they chop, you know, a butcher's cleaver. Abby grabs (the unconscious) Rudnick by the feet and pulls him over to the car. Pep and Happy grab his head. You put him in the car. One says, 'It doesn't fit'. Just as they press the body into it, it gives a slight moan or something. Pep immediately starts stabbing Whitey with the ice pick. Maione says, 'Let me give the bastard a hit!' And he hits him on the head with the meat cleaver. "

- From the confession of Abe Reles, with which he incriminated Frank Abbandando (Abby), Harry Maione (Happy or Hap) and Harry Strauss (Pep) as the murderers of George Rudnick (Whitey).

Based on the testimony of Reles and other informants, Buchalter and some members of the Murder, Inc. were sentenced to death and executed on the electric chair in Sing Sing . Buchalter is the only high level organized crime person to have been executed in the United States .

After the trials of the above people, O'Dwyer, who was running for the office of mayor of New York , was planning another trial against Albert Anastasia, who had controlled the murderers of Murder, Inc. together with Buchalter. Meyer Lansky is said to have put a $ 100,000 bounty on Reles to prevent his testimony in court. All of the incriminating material that O'Dwyer gathered against Anastasia was based on what Reles said.

Accidental death or murder

At the time of his death, Reles was one of the prosecution’s key witnesses in a number of murder cases. In an upcoming trial he was to testify against Louis Buchalter, in another against Benjamin Siegel and Frankie Carbo and in a third against Albert Anastasia.

On the eve of the trial against Anastasia, which was scheduled for November 12, 1941, Reles, who was closely guarded by six police officers, was accommodated in a room on the sixth floor of the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island . In the early hours of the day of the trial, Reles mysteriously fell to his death from the window of his hotel room. It is still unclear today whether he was pushed out the window or died trying to escape. The camber angle, however, indicates that Reles was pushed out of the window. Beside the corpse there were sheets tied together, which gave the appearance of an escape, but Reles had no reason to flee. Furthermore, the fact that the bib was still open at Reles speaks against an attempt to escape. The authorities officially assumed an accidental death.

It is believed today that Anastasia and Frank Costello bribed some police officers to make sure Reles would never testify against Anastasia. In fact, Anastasia could no longer be proven after Reles' death.

Because of his informant service, the resulting disregard as a songbird in the criminal milieu and the mysterious circumstances of his death, Reles received media attention. Reles was dubbed by a newspaper as "the canary that could sing but not fly".

Abe Reles is buried in Old Mount Carmel Cemetery in Glendale , Queens .

Movie and movie quotes

In the 1960 film Unterwelt ("Murder, Inc."), Abe Reles is played by Peter Falk , who earned his performance an Oscar nomination . In the same year Peter Falk appeared in the same role in an episode called Kid Twist in the US television series The Witness . In 1975 he was also seen as a character in The New York Gangbang.

literature

• Edmund Elmaleh: The Canary Sang But Couldn't Fly: The Fatal Fall of Abe Reles, the Mobster Who Shattered Murder, Inc.'s Code of Silence. . Union Square Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-40-276113-3 .
• Rich Cohen: Murder Inc .: Not exactly kosher stores in Brooklyn. . Fischer Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-10-010215-0 .
• Burton B. Turkus, Sid Feder: Murder Inc. . Farrar Straus and Young., 1992, ISBN 0-306-80475-1 .
• Burton B. Turkus, Sid Feder: Murder Inc. . Da Capo Press, 2003, ISBN 0-306-81288-6 .

Web links

• Abe Reles on findagrave.com
• Abe Reles FBI file ( January 5, 2009 memento in the Internet Archive )
• Kill The Dutchman! by Paul Sann ( Memento from June 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Abe Reles on britannica.com.