Albert Anastasia’s Last Shave: The Barber Chair Hit That Changed the Mafia Forever – HT

 

 

 

October 25th, 1957, 10:15 in the morning. The barber shop inside the Park Sheritan Hotel, 7th Avenue and 55th Street, Manhattan. Albert Anastasia sat in chair number four, a hot towel draped across his face, his eyes closed. He was getting a shave. He’d left his bodyguard parked in the garage.

 His pistol was in his overcoat, hanging on a hook across the room. Two men walked in through the 55th Street entrance. Scarves pulled up over their mouths. Fedoris pulled low. They didn’t say a word. They walked straight to chair number four. They opened fire. The first shot shattered the mirror behind him.

 Anastasia lunged forward, saw only reflections, and charged at the glass, thinking his killers were in front of him. That’s how they found him, face down on the tile floor, lather still on his cheek. Five bullets in his back and head. The shave half finished. The hit took under 15 seconds. This wasn’t just another mob murder.

 Albert Anastasia was the Lord High Executioner, the boss of what the newspapers called murder incorporated. The man who, by federal estimates, had ordered or personally committed somewhere between 200 and 1,000 killings across three decades. He ran the waterfront. He ran one of the five New York families. He scared Lucky Luchiano.

He scared Frank Costello. He scared everyone. And he was killed in broad daylight in a public hotel surrounded by witnesses. And not one person in that barber shop could ever identify the shooters. This is the story of how the most feared killer in American organized crime got set up by his own people. How a Midtown barber chair became the staging ground for a mafia coup.

 How a man named Veto Genevese used Anastasia’s own ambition as the knife that killed him. And how that one morning, that one shave rewired the entire structure of organized crime in America. But here’s what the history books barely mention. The hit on Anastasia wasn’t just about power.

 It was about a conversation Anastasia had with a Cuban dictator. a billion dollars in casino money and a betrayal so perfectly engineered that 68 years later. The FBI still can’t officially name the shooters. To understand how Albert Anastasia ended up face down on a barberh shop floor, you have to go back to a small town in Calabria, Italy.

 He was born Ombberto Anastasio in 1902 in the coastal village of Tropea, son of a railroad worker, one of 12 children. His family had nothing. At 15, he worked as a deckhand on a freighter bound for New York. At 17, he jumped ship in Brooklyn and never went back. He changed the name from Anastasio to Anastasia, he said, so his mother would never read about him in the newspapers. It didn’t work.

 She read about him plenty. By 1921, Ombberto was working the Brooklyn docks. The waterfront in those years was the bloodiest real estate in America. Long shoreman fought each other for shape up jobs at dawn. Italian gangs fought Irish gangs for control of the peers. Alberto was 19 years old, built like a middleweight boxer with dead black eyes and no fear of anything.

 In March of that year, he got into a dispute with another long shoreman named Joe Torino. They argued over a work assignment and Anastasia strangled him with his bare hands on Pier 18. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death. He sat in Singh’s death row for 18 months waiting for the electric chair. Then something strange happened.

 The conviction was overturned on appeal. A new trial was ordered. Four key witnesses suddenly couldn’t remember what they’d seen. One disappeared entirely. Another was found dead in a gutter in Red Hook. The charges were dropped. Anastasia walked out of prison in 1922. A free man and a legend on the docks.

 That was the moment the mafia noticed him. Joseeppe Maseria, the boss of bosses at the time, brought him in. So did a young hustler from the Lower East Side named Charles Luchiano. Luchiano would later call Anastasia the most dangerous man he ever worked with. And Luchiano worked with a lot of dangerous men. Through the 1920s and early 30s, Anastasia rose fast.

 He sided with Luciano in the Castellamarice war. He was one of the four gunmen who walked into Nova Villa tomorrow restaurant on Coney Island on April 15th, 1931 and put bullets into Jeppe Maseria while Luciano conveniently excused himself to the bathroom. 6 months later on September 10th, 1931, Anastasia helped coordinate the citywide massacre that killed Salvatoreé Marenzano and more than 40 old guard bosses across America.

 It was called the night of the Sicilian vespers, though historians now dispute how many actually died that day. What is not disputed is this. When the smoke cleared, Lucky Luciano was the new king and Albert Anastasia was his favorite executioner. Luchiano and Meer Lansky then did something no one had done before. They organized.

 They created the commission. Five New York families, Chicago and the other major cities, all with seats at a ruling table. And they created a separate enforcement arm, a group of killers for hire who would carry out sanctioned hits across the country. No freelancing, no emotion, just business. They called it the combination.

 The newspapers called it Murder Incorporated. The man they put in charge of it was Albert Anastasia. He was 29 years old. For the next decade, Anastasia ran the most efficient killing machine in American history. Based out of Midnight Ros’s candy store at the corner of Saratoga and Leavonia in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Murder Incorporated operated with a simple structure. Here’s how it worked.

 A boss somewhere in the country had a problem. a witness, a rival, a business partner who talked too much. He’d make a phone call to the commission. The commission would vote. If approved, the contract went to Lewis Balter or directly to Anastasia. Anastasia would pick a team, usually two to four shooters, men like Abe Relis, Harry Strauss, Frank Abando.

They’d travel to the target city. They’d do the job. They’d come home. The local police had no leads because the killers had no local connections, no motive, no prince, no witnesses who’d talk. The crew got paid between $1,000 and $5,000 per hit, depending on the difficulty. Anastasia got a percentage of every contract, plus his cut from the commission.

 By 1940, Federal Investigators estimated Murder Incorporated had killed between 400 and 1,000 people nationwide. Not a single member had ever been convicted. Then came Abby Relises. Relless, known as Kid Twist, was one of Anastasia’s top shooters. In February of 1940, Brooklyn District Attorney William Odwire arrested him on a murder charge.

 Facing the electric chair, Rles did the unthinkable. He flipped. He sat in an interrogation room for 12 straight days and laid out everything. names, dates, methods, locations. He confessed to participating in 11 murders himself and provided evidence on dozens more. His testimony sent Lewis Bukalter to the electric chair in 1944.

It was supposed to send Albert Anastasia there next. On the morning of November 12th, 1941, Relis was being held under 24-hour police protection at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island. Six detectives were assigned to guard his room. At 7:00 a.m., his body was found on the hotel extension roof, five stories below his window.

 Bed sheets were tied together to look like an escape rope. The official finding was accidental death during an escape attempt. Nobody believed it. The newspapers started calling Rles the Canary, who could sing but couldn’t fly. Later, investigations suggested that Frank Costello had paid $100,000 in bribes to the detectives on duty.

 With Relis dead, the case against Anastasia collapsed. He was untouchable again. But the damage was done. Anastasia had come too close to the chair. He started changing. He became paranoid, volatile. He killed without commission approval. In 1952, a young Brooklyn salesman named Arnold Schuster appeared on television.

Shuster had spotted fugitive bank robber Willie Sutton on a subway and tipped off police. He was a civilian, a hero, a nobody. Anastasia saw the interview, turned to his crew, and said, “I can’t stand squealers. Hit that guy.” 3 weeks later on March 8th, 1952, Shuster was shot dead on a Brooklyn street corner.

The killer, Frederick Tonuto, was himself murdered shortly after to eliminate the trail. That hit broke every rule. Shuster wasn’t a mobster. He wasn’t a threat. He was a random citizen. The commission was furious. Veto Genevvesi, Anastasia’s longtime rival, started whispering, “This man is out of control.

 He’s going to bring the feds down on all of us. Here’s where it gets interesting. By 1951, Anastasia had become the official boss of what is now called the Gambino family after engineering the murder of the previous boss, Vincent Mangano. Mangano simply vanished on April 19th, 1951. His body was never found. Anastasia took over. His under boss was a quiet, calculating man named Carlo Gambino.

 Gambino was the opposite of Anastasia. Small, soft-spoken, humblel looking, always differential. Anastasia thought he was harmless. That was the mistake that got him killed. Through the mid-50s, Anastasia’s ambition grew beyond anything the commission could tolerate. He wanted casinos. Specifically, he wanted a piece of the Havana operation that Meer Lansky had built in Cuba.

 Lansky had spent years cultivating Cuban dictator Fulgensio Batista. He’d invested millions in the hotel Nasanal, the Riviera, the Capri. Anastasia flew to Havana in the spring of 1957. He met with Batista directly. He tried to cut his own deal. He wanted in. This was a declaration of war. Cuba was Lansky’s territory. Lansky was Genevacy’s closest ally.

 And Genevves was already building a case to take Anastasia down. There was more. Anastasia had also started selling made memberships. Actual mafia buttons for cash. $50,000 per initiation by some accounts. That was sacrilege. Being made was supposed to be earned through bloodshed and loyalty, not purchased. Every boss in America heard about it.

Every boss in America was offended. Vto Genevvesi saw his opening. Genevvesi was 60 years old in 1957. He’d come back from exile in Italy in 1945. He’d spent 12 years rebuilding his power base. He was under boss of the Luciano family, now technically controlled from exile by Lucky Luciano through acting boss Frank Costello.

 Genevves wanted the whole thing. Costello’s crown, Anastasia’s territory, everything. He began making quiet offers to Carlo Gambino, to Joe Proface, to Tommy Lucasy. If Anastasia goes, you take his operation. If Costello goes, I take mine. We redraw the map. Carlo Gambino listened. And agreed. On May 2nd, 1957, the plot’s first phase executed.

 Frank Costello was walking into his apartment building at 1 Central Park West. A massive gunman stepped out of the shadows and yelled, “Hey, Frank, this is for you.” He fired one shot. Costello turned his head at the exact moment of the pull. The bullet grazed his scalp instead of entering his skull. He lived.

 The shooter, identified later as Vincent Chen Jaganti, fled. Costello, shaken, retired from day-to-day operations. That left Anastasia without his main commission ally. Anastasia was now alone. He just didn’t know it yet. For the next 5 months, Anastasia kept operating as if nothing had changed. He still held court at his estate at 75 Bluff Road in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

 He still commuted into Manhattan. He still kept the same routine. Every Friday, he went to the same barber shop at the Park Sheran Hotel. Arthur Grasso’s Grasso Barber Shop for a shave and trim. His bodyguard, a man named Anthony Copala, would drop him off and wait in the hotel parking garage. Nobody thought twice about it.

 The park sheritan was a public hotel. There were witnesses everywhere. It was safe. Then came October 25th. That morning, Anastasia left his Fort Lee mansion around 9:30. Copala drove him across the George Washington Bridge down the Westside Highway and over to 7th Avenue. They pulled into the Park Sheritan garage at 10:05.

 Anastasia got out. Copala suspiciously decided to go for a walk instead of waiting inside the shop. Nobody has ever fully explained why. At 10:10, Anastasia entered the barber shop. He greeted Arthur Graasso, the owner, sat in chair 4, took off his suit jacket, let barber Joseph Bokino begin the shave.

 A hot towel went over his face. At 10:15, two men entered through the 55th Street door. They wore scarves, dark suits, fedoras. They drew pistols, 45 caliber and 38 caliber, according to ballistics. They fired 10 rounds. The first shots hit Anastasia in the left hand and wrist as he raised his arms instinctively. He tried to stand.

He charged forward toward the mirrors. He collapsed. The killers walked out calmly. They dropped their guns in the hallway. They disappeared into the Manhattan lunchtime crowd. The entire shop stood frozen. Not one of the five other barbers, the four customers, or the two Shoe Shine boys moved for a full minute.

 When police arrived, they found Anastasia face down in a pool of blood, lather on half his face. His wristwatch had stopped at 10:20. The five bullet holes formed a tight cluster. Professional shooting. By nightfall, the NYPD had a 100 detectives working the case. Within days, they had a theory. They would never have a conviction. The shooters have been rumored for decades to have been Joseph Profacy Gunman, specifically the brothers Larry and Joseph Gallow, the same Joey Gallow, who would later be murdered himself at Ombberto’s clam house. Gallow allegedly

boasted in later years, “From now on, you can call the five of us the barbershop quintet. He never said it on the record. He never admitted it in court. Nobody ever will.” Some accounts name Steven Armone and Arnold Wittenberg. The accounts vary. What is documented is this. The hit was sanctioned by Carlo Gambino, approved by Veto Genevi and contracted to outside shooters so that no finger could be pointed at the Gambino family directly.

It was perfect organizational murder. Two weeks later on November 14th, 1957, Veto Genevvesi called the most famous meeting in mafia history. He summoned 60 of America’s top bosses to a farmhouse outside the small town of Appalachin, New York, owned by Buffalo Capo Joseph Barbara. The agenda was simple.

 Genevves wanted to be formally named boss of bosses. He wanted to ratify the new order. Gambino as Anastasia’s successor, Genevvescy at the top, Lansky in Cuba, everyone in their place. It became a disaster. New York State trooper Edgar Cwell noticed dozens of expensive cars arriving at the remote farmhouse. He set up a roadblock.

 When the bosses saw the police, they panicked. 60 men in silk suits ran through the woods. Some were caught in cornfields, some hid in barns. 58 were detained and identified. For the first time in American history, the federal government had documented proof that the mafia existed as a coordinated national organization. J.

 Edgar Hoover, who for years had denied the existence of organized crime, could deny it no longer. Appalachin triggered the birth of modern federal mafia investigations. It gave the FBI its organized crime division. It led eventually to the RICO statutes of 1970. The irony cuts deep. Veto Genevvesi had killed Anastasia to take control.

 Within 18 months, Genevves himself was set up by Lansky Luciano and Costello in a narcotic sting. He was convicted on April 17th, 1959 and sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. He died behind bars in 1969. Never having enjoyed the throne he killed for. Carlo Gambino, however, played the long game perfectly, he took over the Anastasia family.

 He renamed it the Gambino family. He ran it for 19 years with quiet, ruthless efficiency. He made peace with every other boss. He built the most powerful crime family in American history. He died peacefully of natural causes at his Long Island home on October 15th, 1976. His empire passed to his brother-in-law, Paul Castellano, who himself would be murdered outside Spark Steakhouse, 210 East 46th Street, on December 16th, 1985, by a rising captain named John Gotti. The cycle repeated.

 Anthony Copala, Anastasia’s bodyguard, who conveniently took a walk that morning, was questioned for weeks. He never cracked. He never admitted being paid off. He never named anyone. He disappeared from the public record by 1960. Arthur Graasso, the barber shop owner, testified he saw nothing. Joseph Bokino, the man holding the razor, testified he saw nothing.

 None of the shooters were ever indicted. The case remains officially open. Here’s what the Anastasia hit really changed. Before October 25th, 1957, the mafia was a brotherhood of controlled violence. Hits required commission approval. Civilians were off limits. Bosses negotiated before they killed. After that morning, the rules were different.

 Bosses could be eliminated by their own underbosses through commission vote. Ambition had limits. Paranoia became currency. Every boss who followed Anastasia understood the lesson. The chair you sit in, the routine you keep, the people you trust, these are the things that kill you. Albert Anastasia spent 40 years building a reputation as the most feared killer in America.

 He survived two death row sentences. He survived a brillless. He survived federal prosecutors and rival families and his own worst instincts. He commanded an army of murderers. He made millions from the waterfront. He sat on the commission. He had everything a man in that life could want. And he died in a borrowed chair with soap on his face for the price of a $5 shave.

 He never saw his killer’s faces. He never got to fire back. He never even got off the floor. That’s the real story of the mafia. Not the power, not the glory, not the myth. The truth is simpler and colder. In that life, the people closest to you are the ones holding the knife. Your underboss votes. Your barber shop becomes your execution chamber.

 Your bodyguard takes a walk. And the world goes on without you by lunchtime. If this story pulled you in, hit that subscribe button. We drop a new Mafia Talks documentary every single week. Drop a comment below. Who do you think actually pulled the triggers in Graasso’s barber shop that morning? The Gallo brothers, the Professi crew, somebody else? Let us know what you think.

 And remember, in this world, the shave always ends the same