5 Murder, Inc. Hitmen You Need to Know
In the 1930s, the American underworld built a machine designed for one purpose, silencing anyone who stood in its way. They called it Murder Inc. A crew of contract killers who enforced the syndicate’s rules with ice picks, pistols, and cold efficiency. Tonight, we’re stepping into the lives of five men whose hands helped shape that era of violence.
And whose deaths helped end it. If you enjoy our videos, don’t forget to subscribe, hit the like button, and share your thoughts about today’s topic in the comments. It really helps the channel grow. Let’s begin. Emanuel Mendy Weiss entered the world of New York crime in the years when labor rackets ran the streets like an underground economy.
Born on June 11th, 1906, he grew up into a man who learned early that power often began with intimidation and ended with silence. By 1923, he was working at the side of Louis Lepke Buchalter, the architect of one of the most profitable extortion machines in the garment industry. Weiss started as muscle, a young enforcer who stepped in when negotiations turned into threats.
Over time, he became one of Buchalter’s closest confidants, a man trusted with payrolls, finances, and decisions that shaped the empire. When Buchalter and Jacob Shapiro went on the run in 1937, Weiss stayed behind as the acting general manager, keeping the rackets functioning while the boss directed operations from the shadows.
The Federal Narcotics Bureau believed Weiss and his partner, Philip “Little Farvel” Cohen, were major figures in international drug trafficking. Indictments piled up, but they never translated into convictions. The only charges that ever stuck came from the darker side of Buchalter’s operation, contract murder.
One of the most defining moments in Weiss’s criminal life took place on October 23rd, 1935. Dutch Schultz, once a powerful mobster right, was drinking at the Palace Chop House in Newark. Schultz had made the mistake of talking too openly about killing prosecutor Thomas Dewey. The syndicate decided he had become a liability, and Murder Inc.
was tapped to remove him. Weiss walked into the restaurant with Charles “The Bug” Workman. Weiss moved to the front, told the barmen and the waiters to lie on the floor, and held the room still. Behind him, Workman pushed forward and opened fire on Schultz and his men. Bullets tore through the group. They staggered, some falling where they stood, others rushing for cover in vain.
Schultz died the next day. As soon as the shots stopped, Weiss ran to the getaway car waiting outside. He gave the order to drive. Workman was still inside the restaurant finishing the job in the restroom. When he stepped out, the car was gone. He had to walk back toward New York with no weapon, no cover, and no explanation.
The next morning, Workman brought his grievance to the Murder Inc. leadership. Abandoning a partner on a hit was the kind of offense that could end in a grave. Weiss argued that Workman had gone back not to complete the job, but to steal Schultz’s money. He claimed the hit was finished, and Workman had stayed behind for his own reasons.
The board listened. In the end, it was Buchalter who intervened and kept Weiss alive. A year later came the murder that sealed Weiss’s fate. Joseph Rosen was a small candy store owner in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Years earlier, Buchalter had forced him out of the garment trucking business. ; ; When Rosen hinted he might go to prosecutor Thomas Dewey, Buchalter saw a threat that needed to be erased.
On September 13th, 1936, the killers were assembled. Weiss, Louis Capone, Sholem Bernstein, Philip Cohen, James Ferraco, and Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss. Rosen was shot down in his store. The scene was quiet by the time police arrived. They had no lead, no evidence, and no immediate explanation. Rosen didn’t appear connected to any organized crime network.
The case turned cold and stayed that way. The break came in 1940 when Abe “Kid Twist” Reles decided he didn’t want to die for anyone else’s crimes. Reles had been part of Murder Inc. himself. When he switched sides and started talking to Brooklyn District Attorney William O’Dwyer, unsolved murders across Brooklyn and the Bronx suddenly had names attached to them. Rosen’s case was one of them.
Weiss fled. Under the name James W. Bell, he surfaced in Kansas City posing as a mining executive. Federal Narcotics agents tracked him down in April 1941 and handed him back to New York. By late 1941, he was sitting beside Buchalter and Capone in a Brooklyn courtroom listening as former partners Allie “Tick-Tock” Tannenbaum, Max Rubin, and others described the meetings, the orders, and the killings.
The jury heard the evidence and didn’t hesitate. All three men were convicted of first-degree murder. All three were sentenced to death. On the night of March 4th, 1944, inside Sing Sing prison, the executions were carried out. Weiss was the last of the three to be brought into the room. Before the current hit him, he delivered his final words.
He said he had been framed, claimed Governor Thomas Dewey knew it, and thanked Judge Lehman. He said the judge understood him because they shared the same faith. Then he asked that love be sent to his family. Minutes later, the current surged through the chair, and Emanuel Mendy Weiss was gone. He was buried in Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, Queens, alongside the history he helped write and the men who witnessed its darkest chapters.
Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss stepped into the world as Harry Ostrovsky. Born on July 28th, 1909, somewhere inside the old Russian Empire, his family, Jacob and Yetta and their children, made the hard crossing to New York in 1914, carrying the same hopes as thousands of others who funneled into the Lower East Side.
They changed their name to Strauss and tried to build a life in the cramped apartments and narrow streets of Manhattan. His father found work with the Department of Street Cleaning, one of those steady municipal jobs that kept immigrant families afloat. Then, around 1917 or 1918, Jacob was killed in an industrial accident, and the family stability snapped.
Yetta remarried, the children grew older, and Harry stepped away from school when he was 15, drifting into the corners of the city where trouble waited. By the time he was in his 20s, Strauss was the kind of street criminal the police recognized on sight. He racked up arrests for larceny, assaults, and drug dealing, but nothing seemed to stick.
He developed a reputation for being restless, violent, and unpredictable. His associates called him Pep, a nickname that didn’t fit his face but matched the way he moved. He knew the alleys of Brooklyn and the Bronx the way other men knew their neighborhoods’ churches. ; ; The more time he spent outside the law, the deeper he sank into the company of men who used violence as currency.
One early incident showed the way he handled anger. In 1934, Strauss and Abe Reles were charged with first-degree murder and second-degree assault for attacking two black garage workers. The trouble started when Charles Battles scolded Reles for causing a disturbance. Strauss and Reles jumped him.
Later that morning, they returned to the garage and stabbed a man named Alvin Snyder. Police believed Snyder died because he was mistaken for Battles. The murder charge against Strauss was dropped for lack of evidence. Reles took a three-year sentence for stabbing Battles. The episode left a mark in police files, but Strauss walked away again.
Word of his capacity for violence traveled fast. By the mid-1930s, Strauss had been noticed by Louis Lepke Buchalter’s operation. Murder Inc. was taking shape, a collection of killers used by the National Crime Syndicate to make problems disappear. Strauss fit their needs perfectly. He was resourceful and frighteningly inventive.
He never carried a weapon because he didn’t want to give police an excuse to pin a charge on him. Instead, he studied the place where a hit would happen and found whatever tool the environment offered. An ice pick, a length of rope, a brick, a body of water, a shovel. He used whatever it took.
Rumors grew around his name. Some said he killed more than 100 people. Others whispered numbers in the hundreds. ; ; There was no official count, only stories told by men who feared ending up as one more unmarked grave. His downfall began the way many stories from that era did, with someone deciding they didn’t want to die for the syndicate.
Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, once Strauss’s partner in violence, turned informant in 1940. When he started talking, entire case files came alive. One of the murders he described was the killing of Irving “Puggy” Feinstein. Strauss had reportedly helped bind Feinstein, drag him to a location out of sight, and end his life with a method that matched the dark signature he carried.
Strauss was arrested, and from the moment he entered the courtroom, he tried to play his last card, insanity. He ranted, babbled, and acted deranged. He pulled the same routine on death row hoping for a medical reprieve. The state didn’t buy it. On September 19th, 1940, he and fellow hitman Martin “Bugsy” Goldstein were convicted of first-degree murder.
Sing Sing’s death chamber waited. On June 12th, 1941, Strauss was brought into the room where Old Sparky sat bolted to the floor. Witnesses said he was still trying to sell the idea that he wasn’t responsible, that his mind had fractured. Moments later, the current hit and Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss, a man who once walked into crime scenes unarmed and walked out leaving nothing alive behind him, was gone.
His life left a trail of arrests, bodies, and rumors. His death ended one more branch of Murder Inc., a crew built on killing, fear, and the belief that no one inside the organization would ever turn. Reles proved otherwise, and Strauss paid the price in the chair at Sing Sing. Martin “Bugsy” Goldstein came into the world on February the 12th, 1905, under the name Meyer Goldstein.
He grew up in East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood where kids learned early how power worked on the street. It was a place where small crews formed around hard-headed teenagers, and Goldstein found his footing quickly. By the time he reached adulthood, he had teamed up with another young man from Brooklyn, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles.
Together, they built something that would later become one of the most feared murder-for-hire operations in American criminal history. Goldstein wasn’t a man of theatrics. He blended into the crowd, a quiet figure who understood the mechanics of violence and the discipline behind it. When Reles and Goldstein began gathering young toughs from the surrounding neighborhoods, their group evolved into a lethal outfit that the underworld relied on whenever a problem needed to disappear.
Long before the headlines coined the name, the core of Murder Inc. was already taking shape under their watch. When Louis Lepke Buchalter rose to power within the National Crime Syndicate and Albert Anastasia began shaping the enforcement wing with his own brand of ruthlessness, Goldstein became one of the men trusted to carry out their orders.
He took part in killings that tightened the syndicate’s grip over unions, loan operations, and gambling routes. The violence was calculated, and the men delivering it understood the consequences of failure. As the investigations of District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey intensified, the world around Murder Inc. started closing in. ; ; Informants appeared, deals were whispered, arrests followed.
The organization that once moved like a silent machine began to fall apart under the weight of testimony and indictments. By 1941, Goldstein’s role in the murders that kept the syndicate secure had put him directly in the state’s crosshairs. His fate, like so many of his associates, was sealed in a courtroom long before he ever entered the death house at Sing Sing.
Around midnight on June 12th, 1941, Martin “Bugsy” Goldstein and Harry Strauss walked the final stretch inside the prison. Both men were executed in the electric chair, the machine that brought an end to the Brooklyn crew that once enforced the syndicate’s will with deadly precision. The quiet kid from East New York who helped build the foundation of Murder Inc.
met his end in the same institution that eventually claimed nearly every man tied to the organization’s darkest work. Frank Abbandando came into the world on July 11th, 1910, the son of Lorenzo Abbandandolo and Rosaria Famiglietti, who had crossed the ocean from Avellino, Italy, and tried to build a life in New York City. 12 children passed through that home, though only half survived.
The family settled in Brooklyn, and Frank grew up in streets where a boy learned quickly that strength could be a language of its own. As a teenager, he found his way into crime the way some kids find their way into sports. He shook down shopkeepers, threatening to burn their businesses if they didn’t pay. He learned that fear could earn faster than any honest work.
By his 20s, he was running with a gang in Ocean Hill, answering to Harry “Happy” Maione, an ambitious street boss from Brownsville. Abbandando handled gambling, loan sharking, extortion, and the kind of violence that kept those rackets safe. In 1928, he was convicted of beating a New York police officer ; ; and sent to the Elmira Reformatory.
Inside, he showed a surprising talent for baseball. The guards started calling him the Dasher, and the name followed him back to the streets. He liked expensive clothes and good cars, but behind that polished exterior lurked something darker. Prosecutors later described him as a predator who cruised the neighborhood looking for women he could overpower.
At his murder trial, when confronted with an assault he had allegedly admitted, he brushed it off by saying that one ; ; didn’t count because he eventually married the woman. The remark gave prosecutors a disturbing glimpse of how he measured right and wrong. ; ; In the early 1930s, the major New York crime families were reorganizing after the Castellammarese War.
They needed killers who weren’t tied directly to their own membership. Louis Lepke Buchalter offered the perfect solution, a mixed roster of young Jewish, Italian, and Irish killers who could step in, handle a job, ; ; and vanish back into the alleys of Brooklyn. The press would later call this deadly consortium Murder Inc.
, but inside the underworld, it was just the combination. Abbandando had been orbiting Buchalter’s circle since the late 20s. By the time Murder Inc. hit its stride, he had already developed a reputation for stabbing his victims through the heart with an ice pick. He was believed to have carried out at least 30 killings, most for about $500 each.
In September 1931, he helped Buchalter and Abe Reles eliminate the Shapiro brothers, an entrenched Lower East Side outfit that had challenged their hold over the garment industry. Abbandando’s role grew as the killings multiplied. In 1937, Reles heard that George Rudnick, a Brooklyn loan shark, was feeding information to the police.
Rudnick was lured into a garage. What followed was the kind of brutality that marked the darkest corners of Murder Inc. Rudnick was strangled, stabbed 63 times with an ice pick, and beaten with a meat cleaver until his skull gave way. Abbandando was one of the men in that garage. No arrests were made. Two years later, he and others killed Felicia Esposito, a man who had testified in a murder case 17 years earlier.
Nothing in the underworld was forgotten, but 1940 brought a fracture no one in Murder Inc. anticipated. Abe Reles, the same man who had sat beside Abbandando during hits, chose to save his own skin and turned state’s evidence. His testimony peeled back the layers of unsolved killings across New York. Among the cases he laid bare was the Rudnick murder.
Abbandando, Harry “Happy” Maione, and Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss were arrested and brought to trial in May 1940. Abbandando was so convinced the prosecution could be bought that he leaned toward the judge on the stand and muttered a threat into his ear. Whatever influence he believed he had didn’t carry.
All three men were convicted, though the verdict was overturned on appeal. The state tried again. In April 1941, Abbandando and Maione stood trial a second time. Strauss had already been condemned in a separate case. This time, the prosecution came prepared. Reles, Tannenbaum, Rubin, men who had once worked at Abbandando’s side, laid out the planning, the orders, and the killing itself.
The jury took little time. The verdict was guilty, the sentence was death. Abbandando spent 9 months on death row in Sing Sing. He mocked the guards, made crude jokes, and carried himself with a kind of grim amusement, as though none of it could touch him. On February 19th, 1942, he was taken to Old Sparky, the prison’s electric chair, and strapped in.
Witnesses said he showed no fear, only that same dark humor he’d worn for years. Moments later, the current surged and ended his life. A mass was held for him at Our Lady of Loreto Church. During the service, his brother Rocco attacked a newspaper photographer outside, as if the violence in the family couldn’t help but surface.
Abbandando was buried in the family plot in Saint John’s Cemetery in Queens. The collapse of Murder Inc. continued long after the funeral. Reles, the government’s star witness, plunged from a Coney Island hotel window later that year. The official explanation was an escape attempt gone wrong, but the rumor on the street was simple. Someone paid enough to make sure he never testified again.
With Buchalter eventually executed and Albert Anastasia taking what was left of the organization, the mob shifted its tactics. They relied on their own associates for killings, men easier to control and harder to flip. Murder Inc. dissolved into memory. In Frank Abbandando’s family, the echoes of that life didn’t fade.
He had married Jenny De Luca in 1927 at his parents’ urging. They had two sons, Lawrence and Frank Jr., and both stepped into the world their father left behind. Lawrence became a mob associate and later died of cancer in Florida in 1995. Frank Jr. became a Gambino family associate. His life ended violently on December the 22nd, 1995, when he was run down and shot on Biscayne Boulevard in North Miami Beach by Rocco Napolitano.
Police said Napolitano killed him to avenge his brother, a low-level drug dealer who may have been executed on Frank Jr.’s orders. Napolitano was sentenced to life. The younger Abbandando was brought back to Brooklyn and buried in Ocean Hill. Frank the Dasher Abbandando lived fast, died strapped to a wooden chair, and left behind a lineage shaped by the same world that once made him valuable.
A world where violence rarely stopped at one generation. It began on the Lower East Side, the kind of neighborhood where every building felt crowded with accents, arguments, and the quiet hope that the next generation might have an easier life. Louis Buchalter came into that world on February 6th, 1897. His parents were Ashkenazi Jews who had made their way out of the old Russian Empire and into Manhattan, hoping the city would give their children a chance.
His mother called him Lepkeleh, Little Louis, a name that followed him long after he stopped being little. His father, Barnett Buchalter, had arrived in New York in 1890 with three daughters from a previous marriage. By the time Louis was born, Barnett was running a hardware store on the Lower East Side, trying to keep a large, blended family on its feet.
Louis’s mother, Rose, had her own history behind her. She came from Vilnius, had children from her first marriage, and tried to keep the new household together. The children from both sides filled the apartment. Among them was Rabbi Charles Carvar, Louis’s half-brother. His brothers Emmanuel and Isidore grew into a dentist and a pharmacist.
Louis’s path didn’t bend that way. In 1909, when Louis was 12, his father died. The family shook under the loss. Louis finished elementary school, took a job selling theatrical goods, and tried to stay steady, but the structure around him was falling apart. His mother moved to Arizona for her health and left him in the care of his sister, Sarah.
She couldn’t cut into his growing restlessness. By 1915, he was already on police blotters. On September 2nd, he was arrested for burglary and assault, though the case didn’t stick. Not long after, he drifted to Bridgeport, Connecticut, to his uncle. In February 1916, he was arrested again for burglary and sent to the Cheshire Reformatory for juvenile offenders.
He did more than a year there before returning to New York after an argument over wages. The trouble didn’t stop. On September the 28th, 1917, he was sentenced to 18 months in Sing Sing for grand larceny. He did additional time for attempted burglary in 1920. By March 1922, he walked out a free man with more prison record than prospects.
What happened next changed the direction of organized crime in New York. Once he stepped back onto city streets, he reconnected with his childhood friend, Jacob Gurrah Shapiro. They began tightening their grip on the garment industry one union at a time. At first, it was muscle in the shadows.
Then, it became a system. They leaned on union leaders, threatened strikes, siphoned money, and used fear as a tool of negotiation. It grew into a protection racket that pulled in bakery, trucking, and other industries. When Tommy Lucchese joined their circle, the garment district became another territory under their control.
The neighborhoods changed around them. Buchalter and Shapiro moved into fashionable buildings on Eastern Parkway, surrounded by families who went to synagogue each week. Later, Buchalter settled into a penthouse near Central Park West with his family. The contrast between the quiet hallways of those buildings and the violence he commanded out on the streets was sharp.
In 1927, both men were picked up for the murder of Jacob Little Augie Orgen and the attempted killing of bootlegger Jack Legs Diamond. The charges fell apart, and Buchalter slipped back into the kind of anonymity he preferred. He rarely spoke more than he had to. He paid his men well, took them to hockey games and boxing matches, and gave them a sense of loyalty that kept them close.
On August 20th, 1931, he married Betty Wasserman, a British-born widow of Russian descent, at City Hall. He adopted her child. A few years later, he helped engineer something darker. Through the early 1930s, he built a quiet, efficient system for contract killings. It didn’t have a name at first.
The press later called it Murder Inc. Cosa Nostra bosses wanted distance between themselves and the men who carried out their orders. Buchalter and his partner, Albert Anastasia, created the buffer. Requests came in through Anastasia. Buchalter handed the work to young Jewish and Italian street soldiers from Brooklyn. They weren’t tied to any major crime families, which made them perfect shields if the law caught up.
These killers worked across the country. They cleared problems, removed rivals, and took care of anything the bosses needed buried. In 1935, Buchalter oversaw the murder of Dutch Schultz. Schultz had pushed for the assassination of District Attorney Thomas Dewey. Lucky Luciano shut down the idea, fearing the citywide pressure it would bring.
Schultz stormed out and threatened to do it anyway. The commission decided he had become a liability. On October 23rd, 1935, gunmen stepped into a Newark tavern and opened fire. Schultz died the next day. Six years later, Charles the Bug Workman, one of Buchalter’s men, was charged with the hit.
By the mid-1930s, law enforcement believed Buchalter and Shapiro controlled 250 men and were pulling in more than a million dollars a year. They had influence in trucking, baking, and the garment trades. Buchalter owned the Riobamba, a polished Manhattan nightclub where the lights were bright and the guests carried themselves like the world would never crumble. That illusion didn’t last.
On September the 13th, 1936, Joseph Rosen, a Brooklyn candy store owner and former trucker, was shot down on a street corner. Rosen had once worked in a union Buchalter controlled. Buchalter became convinced Rosen was talking to Dewey’s investigators. It was enough to seal his fate. Two months later, on November the 8th, 1936, Buchalter and Shapiro were convicted on federal antitrust charges involving the rabbit fur industry.
They disappeared while out on bail. Five days after their conviction, both men were sentenced in absentia to two years in federal prison. Their appeal was denied in 1937, and the hunt began. Rewards went up. Rumors spread across continents. Some said Buchalter was hiding in Poland. Others placed him in Palestine. In December 1937, he was indicted for a heroin smuggling ring that used ocean liner passengers as unwitting couriers and paid off customs agents to look the other way.
Shapiro surrendered in April 1938. Buchalter stayed underground. The search dragged on for two years until August 24th, 1939. Outside a Manhattan hotel, in front of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Louis Buchalter surrendered. Reporter and broadcaster Walter Winchell was said to have helped arrange the meeting.
The truth was simpler. Buchalter had never left New York. After a narcotics conviction, he was handed over to New York State for a labor extortion trial. On April 5th, 1940, he was sentenced to 30 years to life. He still owed the government 14 years on the narcotics case, so he was shipped to Leavenworth. While he sat behind federal walls, Los Angeles charged him with ordering the murder of Harry Greenberg, an associate of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel.
He never stood trial for it. The case that ended his life came from closer to home. On May 9th, 1941, he was arraigned for the murder of Joseph Rosen. Abe Reles, once a murderer for hire under his command, turned informant in 1940 and told prosecutors about orders he claimed to have heard directly from Buchalter.
Albert Tick Tock Tannenbaum added his own testimony. After 4 hours of deliberation at 2:00 in the morning on November 30th, 1941, the jury returned a verdict of first-degree murder. On December 2nd, Buchalter, along with his lieutenants Emmanuel Mendy Weiss and Louis Capone, received a death sentence. His appeals stretched on.
In October 1942, the New York Court of Appeals upheld the conviction. Three judges dissented over the strength of the evidence and the jury instructions. The case was carried to the US Supreme Court, and in 1943, the justices upheld the conviction. There were no more legal doors to open. New York demanded custody.
On January the 21st, 1944, federal agents handed Buchalter over to state authorities. He was transported to Sing Sing, where he pleaded for clemency. Every request was denied. On March 4th, 1944, Louis Buchalter was led to the electric chair. He offered no final words. Minutes before or after, accounts differ, Weiss and Capone met the same end.
When it was over, Buchalter was taken to Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens and laid into the ground. His life moved from a crowded tenement to the center of the underworld and then into the death chamber at Sing Sing. It remains one of the rare times a figure of his stature in the National Crime Syndicate faced a courtroom, a conviction, and the final switch of Old Sparky.
; Mhm.