Albert Tannenbaum

"Allie" Albert "Tick-Tock" Tannenbaum (born January 17, 1906 in Nanticoke , Pennsylvania , † November 1976 in Florida ) was an American gangster who is now part of the Kosher Nostra . As a hit man for Murder, Inc. , he mostly did jobs for the National Crime Syndicate during the 1930s.

biography

Tannenbaum was born in Luzerne County , Pennsylvania, but lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan , New York City, from the age of 4 . At 17 he dropped out of school to work as an errand boy . After brief activity as a businessman, he joined his father's Loch Sheldrake Country Club . He got his nickname Tick-Tock because he could talk like clockwork without a break.

At the age of 25, he met Jacob Shapiro , a member of Murder, Inc., in his father's nightclub , who introduced him to the criminal world. He started out as a debt collector and professional scabs who made $ 50 a week but quickly climbed the hierarchy. His income gradually rose to $ 125, particularly when he became a hit man for Murder, Inc.

His most notorious murder was that of Harry Greenberg on November 22, 1939 in Los Angeles . He had received the order from Louis Buchalter , who was currently in the lack of prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey , which is why Buchalter wanted to silence potential witnesses . Tannenbaum chased Greenberg from Montreal via Detroit to Los Angeles, where he finally murdered him. He was not only supervised, but also actively supported by Bugsy Siegel , so to speak as the representative of the west coast of organized crime.

In 1940, Tannenbaum fell into the clutches of the judiciary, became an informant and spy and testified against Buchalter and Charles Workman in the trial aimed at solving the murder of Dutch Schultz . The trigger was probably the arrest of his 'colleague' Abe Reles in the same year and his testimony against Buchalter in the murder of Joseph Rosen . Buchalter was executed in 1944 on the basis of information from Reles, who himself was able to avoid the death penalty due to his willingness to cooperate . Tannenbaum was the main witness in the case of the murder of Joseph Rosen . Buchalter underestimated the possible burden of Tannenbaum, as he was not directly involved in the murder of Rosen and had never received direct murder orders from Buchalter. However, Tannenbaum had carried out the murder of Irv Ashkenaz , who had reported to the police about Buchalter's influence on taxi companies, on the very day that Buchalter was very upset about Rosen. Tannenbaum, who wanted to report to Buchalter, found an angry boss who testified to Max Rubin that Rosen would never be able to testify to the prosecutor Dewey. In this way, the testimony of Tannenbaum confirmed that Buchalter was commissioned to murder Rosen, since Rosen was murdered two days later.

In contrast to Reles, Albert Tannenbaum was actually an atypical “Kosher Nostra”, who apparently turned the 'adventure' into a hit man. In 1950, Tannenbaum testified in the trial of Jack Parisi . He was abroad, was only allowed to step on American soil once a year, and died off the coast of Florida in 1976.

literature

• Cohen, Rich: Murder Inc .: Not exactly kosher stores in Brooklyn . Fischer Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-10-010215-0 .
• Burton B. Turkus and Sid Feder: Murder Inc. . Farrar Straus and Young, 1952, 1992, ISBN 978-0-306-80475-5 .
• Burton B. Turkus and Sid Feder: Murder Inc. . Da Capo Press, 2003, ISBN 0-306-81288-6 .

Web links

• Kill The Dutchman! by Paul Sann ( Memento from June 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
• "The Jewish Mafia in New York in the 1930s. Moses of the Underworld?" by Tekla Szymanski
• Albert Tannenbaum on Find a Grave