He Helped the Police Catch a Fugitive — The Mob Shot Out Both His Eyes – HT

 

 

 

March 8th, 1952. 9:15 at night. 45th Street, Burrow Park, Brooklyn. A quiet residential block, gas lamps, row houses. The kind of street where people knew each other’s names. Arnold Schuster was walking home, 24 years old, a clothing salesman, lived with his parents. He had just finished an appearance on a television program, a small celebrity in his neighborhood for something he had done 3 weeks earlier.

Something he thought was the right thing to do. He never made it to his front door. A gunman stepped out of the shadows. Four shots, once in the groin, once through the head, once in each eye. The last two shots were deliberate, a message, a signature. Arnold Schuster died on the sidewalk a few feet from the house where he grew up in the city he had lived in his entire life.

 He had no connection to organized crime. He had never crossed a mob boss. He had never stolen from anyone, betrayed anyone, or broken a single law. He had done the opposite. He had done what every civic textbook said a good citizen should do. He saw something. He said something. and Albert Anastasia, one of the most feared men in the history of American organized crime, had him killed for it.

 This is the story of how a 24year-old Brooklyn kid riding the subway home crossed paths with America’s most wanted fugitive, became famous for 20 days, and was then executed by a mafia boss who did not know him, had no business dispute with him, and had nothing to gain from his death.

 a man who ordered a murder simply because he saw a face on television that he did not like. Here is what that tells you about what the mafia actually was. Not the movies, not the glamour, the real thing. You have to understand what New York City looked like in early 1952. Before any of this makes sense, the American mafia was at the absolute peak of its power.

 The five families controlled the waterfront, the garment district, the construction industry, and enormous chunks of the city’s political machine. They had judges, they had police captains, they had union presidents. Most Americans did not fully believe organized crime existed as a coherent national structure. Jay Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, had spent years publicly dismissing the idea.

 The mob existed in the space that denial created. And sitting at the center of that world in a 25 room mansion in Fort Lee, New Jersey, was Ombberto Anastasia. Born in the village of Tropea, Calabria, Italy on September 26th, 192. He came to New York as a teenager, jumped ship off a merchant vessel, and never looked back.

 By the time he was 19 years old, he had already been convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Four witnesses against him. All four disappeared before the retrial. He walked free. That was how Albert Anastasia operated from the very beginning. By 1952, Anastasia was 50 years old, broadshouldered with heavy hands and a face that people described as permanently set in a kind of contained fury.

 He had earned two nicknames over the course of his career. The first was the Lord High Executioner. The second was the Mad Hatter. Both fit. He had co-founded Murder Incorporated, the enforcement arm of the National Crime Syndicate, a largely Jewish and Italian crew of professional killers operating out of the backroom of a candy store in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

 During its decade of operation, Murder Incorporated is estimated to have carried out somewhere between 400 and 1,000 murders. Many were never solved. Anastasia was never prosecuted for a single one. He had worked his way up through the Mangano family. He had allegedly ordered the murder of his own boss, Vincent Mangano, and Mangano’s brother, Philillip, in 1951 when the bodies were discovered on a beach. No arrest, no conviction.

Anastasia simply stepped into the role of boss. He now ran what would eventually become known as the Gambino Crime Family, controlled the New York Waterfront through the Long Shoreman’s Union, and sat as one of the most powerful and most feared men in American organized crime. He was also deeply pathologically irrational.

 His lieutenants knew it. His allies knew it. Even the men who feared him understood that Anastasia operated on impulse, on rage, and on a code of personal honor that bore no relationship to business logic. That quality had made him an extraordinary killer. It would eventually make him a liability, but that reckoning was still 5 years away.

In February of 1952, Albert Anastasia was untouchable. Now, let’s talk about Willie Sutton. William Francis Sutton Jr. was born on June 30th, 191 in the Irish Town section of Brooklyn, the fourth of five children. He left school after the 8th grade. His longest legal job lasted 18 months. By his mid20s, he had begun robbing banks, and he was exceptionally good at it.

 Over the course of his career, Sutton stole an estimated $2 million from more than a 100 banks. But what made him famous was not the money. It was the method. Willie Sutton was a master of disguise. He came disguised as a mailman, a messenger, a police officer, a maintenance worker, a window cleaner.

 He would arrive before a bank opened, talk his way inside, secure the staff quietly, crack the vault, and leave. He carried either a pistol or a Thompson submachine gun, but by his own admission, both were often unloaded. He said, and I am paraphrasing because the quote is disputed, that you cannot rob a bank on charm and personality.

 He was wrong. That is almost exactly what he did. People presented his robberies described him as polite, controlled. There are accounts of him telling tellers to stay calm, that no one would be hurt, and keeping his word. He never fired a weapon at a civilian. He became a folk hero of sorts, particularly during the depression, when robbing a bank felt less like a crime and more like a natural response to an economy that had already robbed everyone else.

He was caught repeatedly. He escaped from custody. Three times he scaled the walls of Sing Singh Prison in 1932 using a ladder fashioned from materials he had smuggled inside. He broke through a tunnel at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia in 1945, though he was recaptured the same day. And on February 10th, 1947, he and four other prisoners dressed as guards carried ladders to the prison wall at Holsburg County Jail in Philadelphia and got clean away.

 He owed the legal system one life sentence and 105 additional years at the time of that final escape. He went underground. He got plastic surgery. He changed his nose using hollowedout corks. He moved between furnished rooms in Brooklyn, staying quiet, staying low. By 1950, he was on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list.

 5 years passed, no one found him. Then came February 18th, 1952. Arnold Leonard Schuster was born on February 21st, 1928 in Burrow Park, Brooklyn, the same burrow where Willie Sutton had grown up. the same subway lines, the same streets. Shuster worked as a clothing salesman. He lived with his parents at 45th Street.

 By every account, he was a pleasant young man, good personality, observant. He had always been interested in true crime, in reading about wanted criminals the way other young men read about baseball players. He knew the faces on the wanted posters. He paid attention. On the evening of February 18th, 1952, Schustster was riding the RAR home after work.

 He looked across the car and saw a man sitting directly opposite him. Something registered the face. He looked again. He was certain. The man was Willie Sutton. Schustster did not panic. He did not make a scene. He followed Sutton off the train at Pacific Street Station in Park Slope. Sutton walked to a car parked nearby and began working on a dead battery.

 Schustster crossed the street, kept his distance, and waited. A police cruiser happened to drive past. Shuster flagged it down. He told the officers he believed the man working on the car down the block was Willie Sutton, America’s most wanted bank robber. The officers looked. One of them walked over. They arrested Sutton without incident. Schustster went home.

He heard the news on the radio later that evening. The arrest was confirmed. He had done it. And then the phone started ringing. Here is where things turned. Within days, Schustster was a minor celebrity. New York City Police Commissioner George Monahan invited him to the precinct for a formal meeting. Photographers were there.

 The newspapers ran his picture with the commissioner. He appeared on the live television program I’ve Got a Secret. He gave multiple television interviews describing how he had spotted Sutton, how he had followed him, how he had flagged down the police. He was animated, proud, young. He talked about how he had always read about Sutton and recognized him from the wanted posters.

He was on television for 22 days straight, appearing in multiple interviews across multiple stations. His face was everywhere. The police praised him as a model citizen. The newspapers wrote human interest pieces about a regular Brooklyn kid who had done what every good American was supposed to do. One evening during that period, Albert Anastasia was sitting in front of his television.

 He watched Arnold Schuster being interviewed and he erupted. The exact words confirmed 11 years later by mob informant Joseph Valache during televised Senate hearings were these. I can’t stand squealers. Hit that guy. That was it. No business dispute, no territory, no money, no personal connection. Sutton had no mob ties whatsoever.

 Anastasia had no relationship to Sutton. Schustster had no relationship to either of them. Anastasia simply watched a young man on television talking about how he had turned in a fugitive and something in him broke. This is the part that matters most and it is the part that gets lost when people tell this story quickly. Arnold Schuster was not an informant against organized crime.

 He was not a government witness. He was not a rat in any sense that the mafia code of silence was designed to address. He was a private citizen who spotted a bank robber on the subway and called the police. The mob had nothing to do with Willie Sutton. The mob had nothing to lose from his capture. This was purely personal to Anastasia.

 He saw the concept of informing and it blinded him to everything else. The order went out. One of Anastasia’s men received it. His name was Frederick Tonuto. Frederick Tonuto, nicknamed the angel, was born January 20th, 1915 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He had been a low-level New York criminal and suspected hitman for years.

 In 1940, he pleaded guilty to secondderee murder and received a 10 to 20year sentence. He served 7 years. And then on February 10th, 1947, Frederick Tonuto was one of the men who escaped from Holmesburg County Jail, dressed as a prison guard. He escaped alongside Willie Sutton. That is the thread. Tonuto had been part of Sutton’s crew at various points.

 When Sutton was captured and Anastasia issued the order, Tenuto was already operating in Anastasia’s orbit, having surfaced in Brooklyn underworld circles after the escape. He was placed on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list on May 24th, 1950. On March 8th, 1952, 18 days after Sutton’s arrest, Frederick Tonuto waited on 45th Street in Burough Park, Brooklyn.

 He waited for Arnold Schuster. When Schustster walked home that night, Tonuto stepped forward, four bullets, groin, eyes, head. He then fled in a waiting car. Witnesses identified Tonuto near the scene. Within 48 hours, he became the primary suspect immediately. He was never caught. The NYPD launched what would become the most investigated cold case in the department’s history.

 1,700 case files, 4,000 people interviewed. One of the murder weapons was traced to a batch of revolvers that had been stolen from a shipment headed for Japan. A fence named in the records as Squinty and Chappie was identified as having possibly provided the weapon. A woman who had seen Schustster on a bus the night he died received an anonymous threatening letter shortly after speaking to police.

That letter was never traced to its sender. The investigation went nowhere and for a reason. Frederick Tonuto had been identified. He was a suspect. Anastasia knew Tonuto had been identified and Anastasia solved that problem the way he always solved problems. He ordered Tonuto killed. Tonuto’s body was never found.

 According to informant accounts gathered years later, he was given what was called a double decker funeral. His body placed in the false bottom of a coffin beneath another corpse being legitimately buried. The FBI eventually removed Tonuto from the 10 most wanted list after 14 years, the longest consecutive listing in the program’s history at the time.

 When it became clear he was almost certainly dead, the case went cold. The Shuster family sued New York City for failing to protect him after he had come forward as a civic informant. The lawsuit reached the New York Court of Appeals in 1958, 6 years after the murder. The court ruled that when a citizen places themselves in danger by cooperating with police, the government owes that citizen a special duty of care.

 That ruling became legal precedent. It contributed to the eventual framework that led to formalized witness protection programs in the United States. Arnold Schusters’s death, in other words, changed American law, just not in time to save him. The murder shocked New York. It shocked the general public in a way that mafia killings normally did not, because the victim was not a criminal.

 He was the opposite. People who had been following the story of the young man who caught Willie Sutton were now reading about his murder. Politicians demanded action. Commissioner Monahan, who had stood next to Schustster for photographs only weeks earlier, called it an outrage. But who ordered it? That question remained officially unanswered for 11 years.

 In 1962, a man named Joseph Velace was serving a 15-year sentence for drug trafficking at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. Vito Genevves, the boss of the Genevves crime family, was also incarcerated there. Velace believed Genevves had identified him as an informant and had marked him for death. In a state of paranoid desperation, Velacei beat a fellow prisoner to death with a metal pipe in the prison yard, believing him to be the man sent to kill him. He killed the wrong man.

 Now facing a murder charge on top of his drug sentence and genuinely terrified of being killed in prison, Velace made a decision. He would talk. He talked to federal agents. He talked for months. And in October of 1963, Joseph Velace sat down before Senator John Mlelen’s permanent subcommittee on investigations of the United States Senate under the lights of television cameras and became the first made member of the American Mafia to publicly acknowledge its existence in front of the entire country.

 He described the structure, the five families, the commission, the initiation rituals, the code of silence. He named names. He described murders. He pulled back the curtain on an organization that had operated for decades behind the fiction that it did not exist. And among the things he told the Senate committee was this.

 Albert Anastasia had ordered the murder of Arnold Schuster after watching him on television. The sole reason was that Anastasia could not tolerate a squealer. Any squealer, even one who had nothing to do with organized crime whatsoever. The country was riveted. The hearings were televised nationally. Ordinary Americans who had grown up reading about the mob in newspapers now watched a real member describe from the inside exactly how it worked.

 Anastasia was not alive to deny it. He had been murdered 5 years earlier.