Abe Reles: The Hitman Who Killed 100+ People — Then “Fell” From a Window – HT
November 12th, 1941. 6:45 in the morning. The Half Moon Hotel, Coney Island, Brooklyn. Room 623, 6th floor. Abelis, 34 years old, 5’2 in tall, built like a fire hydrant, was found broken on the kitchen extension roof below his window, bed sheets knotted together. a wire from a radio, a body twisted at an angle no living man makes.
Five New York City detectives had been assigned to guard him around the clock. Five. All of them somehow failed to see him climb out a window. The sheets were tied to a radiator. The radiator didn’t move. The window was open. And Abrales, the most valuable witness in American criminal history, was dead on the concrete below. This wasn’t just another dead gangster.
This was Kid Twist. The man who had personally strangled, stabbed, shot, and ICE, picked his way through more than a dozen murders with his own hands and had ordered or arranged dozens more. He was the top enforcer for Murder Incorporated, the contract killing arm of the National Crime Syndicate. And for 18 months he had been sitting in a hotel room singing to prosecutors names, dates, bodies, bosses.
He had already put seven of his own crew in the electric chair. And the morning he died, he was scheduled to testify against Albert Anastasia, the Lord High executioner himself. This is the story of how one window, one fall, and one impossible death saved the American mafia from the greatest criminal prosecution it had ever faced.
How the boss of bosses walked free. How Murder Incorporated was buried with its loudest voice. And how a nickname invented by a cop on a Brooklyn sidewalk became a phrase that haunts organized crime to this day. The canary, who could sing but couldn’t fly. But here’s what the history books don’t tell you. Abra didn’t just know a few secrets.
He knew where 85 bodies were buried. Literally, he had memorized them. And the moment he hit that concrete, two decades of mob rule got a second life. You have to understand who Abraham Rles was before you can understand why his death mattered so much. He was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn in 1906 to Jewish immigrants from Austria.
Short, stocky, a bad student. By 13, he’d been kicked out of school. By 15, he was running with the Shapiro brothers, the local Tuss who ran Brownsville’s rackets. By 18, he was arrested for stealing $2 worth of gum from a vending machine. He did time as a juvenile. He came out harder, meaner, smarter. Reis got his nickname the way a lot of those guys did.
Nobody really knows for sure. One story says a newspaperman gave it to him after Max Zwerbach, an earlier Brooklyn killer, also called Kid Twist. Another says it was because of the way Relles killed. He liked the ice pick. He’d drive it through the ear into the brain and then twist. A twist at the end, a signature.
Either way, the name stuck. Kid twist. And in Brownsville by the time he was 25, it was a name you didn’t say too loud. By 1931, Relles and his partners Martin Bukalter and Harry Strauss had taken over Brownsville completely. They killed the Shapiro brothers one by one. Meer Shapiro got a bullet through the eye in July. Irving Shapiro got killed in front of his mother that September.
Willie Shapiro, the last one, got buried alive in a sand dune on Canars Beach in July of 1934, dug up 9 months later. The coroner ruled he’d still been breathing when they covered him. That was Kid Twist’s style. He was never fast. He was thorough. Here’s the thing about Reles. He wasn’t just muscle. He was a strategist.
He had a mind for logistics. And when Louis Bukalter, better known as Lepki, and Albert Anastasia were looking for reliable Brooklyn talent in the mid 1930s, Relis was the name at the top of their list. Lepka ran labor rackets for the Jewish side of the syndicate. Anastasia handled the Italian side. Together, they needed men who could take a contract, travel to another city, kill a stranger, and come home like nothing happened. They needed professionals.
So in 1931, Meerlansky, Charles Luciano, Bugsy Seagull, and the rest of the new generation had their big meeting. They organized what reporters would later call the National Crime Syndicate. No more street wars, no more ego killings. Every hit had to be approved by the bosses. Every hit had to serve the business.
And if a hit got approved, the job would go to a specialized crew, one that had no personal connection to the target. No motive, no trail. That crew became known by the name of newspapermanman Harry Feny gave it in 1940 Murder Incorporated. Murder Incorporated operated out of a candy store at the corner of Saratoga and Leavonia Avenues in Brownsville.
Midnight Roses, Rose Gold ran the counter. Egg creams for a nickel. And in the back, Kidwist, Pittsburgh, Phil Strauss, Happy Mayoni, Frank Abandundo, Bugsy Goldstein, and the rest of the crew took calls from bosses all over America. Cleveland had a problem. Philadelphia wanted somebody gone. Los Angeles needed a body dumped in the desert. The candy store rang.
The boys got on a train. 3 days later, a man nobody in that city had ever seen was dead in an alley. and the boys were back in Brooklyn eating cherry sodas. The money was good, but not spectacular. Relles himself made about $12,000 a year in salary from the syndicate, plus bonuses for each completed job. In 1938, that was roughly the income of a well-paid accountant, but it added up.
Relis owned a house. He had a wife, Rose Kersh, whom he’d married in 1929. They had one son. He drove a Buick. He wore tailored suits. He tipped waiters like a man who wanted to be remembered. And every morning he’d walk from his apartment on Leavonia Avenue down to Midnight Roses for coffee, two sugars, and the morning paper.
You’d see him laughing with the other men, joking about the Dodgers, complaining about his mother-in-law. He’d take calls from his wife, promising to be home for dinner. Then somebody would walk in, hand him a slip of paper with a name and a city on it, and Relles would stand up, finish his coffee, and walk out.
3 days later, somewhere in America, a man would die. By 1940, law enforcement had been chasing shadows for 9 years. They knew people were being killed. They didn’t know who. They didn’t know why. They didn’t know how. What they had were bodies, dozens of them, all over the country, all connected by the same methods.
Strangulation with a clothesline, an ice pick through the ear, a bullet behind the left ear, the same professional cleanup, the same lack of evidence. The FBI suspected there was an organized murder ring, but J. Edgar Hoover still publicly denied that organized crime even existed. The man who figured it out was a Brooklyn assistant district attorney named William Odwire.
Odoire was an Irish immigrant, 49 years old, a former cop who’d worked his way through law school at night. He had one theory. If he could arrest one of these killers and flip him, he could unravel the whole operation. In January of 1940, he got his break. A small-time hood named Harry Rudolph told detectives that he knew who had killed a minor thug named Alex Alpert.
In 1933, the killers, Rudolph said, were Abe Relis, Martin Goldstein, and Anthony Mafur. On February 2nd, 1940, Relis was arrested. He sat in the Brooklyn jail for weeks. Then the walls started closing in. Harry Rudolph died mysteriously in his cell. Other suspects started talking. Pretty Amberg had been murdered. Red Alpert, Whitey Rudnik.
Detectives were piling up evidence from every direction. Here’s what turned Relles. His wife Rose came to visit him in jail in late March. She told him she was pregnant again. She told him she was scared. And she told him that the other wives, the ones married to his crew, were saying their husbands might have to get rid of Relless before he talked.
Because everybody in Murder Incorporated knew the same thing. The first one to a prosecutor’s door walked free. The rest went to the chair. Rose begged him, “Make a deal. Be the first one through the door. Save yourself. Save the baby.” On March 22nd, 1940, Abrales sent word to Odoire. He wanted to talk.
He wanted full immunity. And in exchange, he would give them everything. What Relis delivered over the next 12 days was the single most devastating confession in American organized crime history. He sat in a room with stenographers for 12 straight days. He named 200 gangsters. He described 85 murders he knew about personally, dates, locations, methods, getaway cars, license plates, accompllices.
He gave the real names of men known only by street aliases. He named the bosses who ordered the hits. He named the go-betweens who carried the messages. He named the ones who buried the bodies. The stenographers transcripts filled 75 notebooks. 25 volumes of indexed testimony. And here’s the insider knowledge that makes this story matter.
Murder Incorporated wasn’t just a crew. It was a system. [clears throat] Reles explained how it worked. When a boss anywhere in America wanted somebody dead, he’d send a message through Lewis Capone, an intermediary who worked out of a Brooklyn restaurant called the Oriental Palace at 66 Pittkin Avenue. Capone would bring the contract to Albert Anastasia. Anastasia would approve it.
Then Anastasia would assign it to Murder Incorporated’s operations boss, Lewis Bukalter, known as Lepki. Lepkkey would assign the hit to a specific crew member based on availability and skill. The crew member would travel. The crew member would kill. The crew member would return. No connection to the victim.
No motive visible to police. Perfect contract killing. Rles gave Odwire the whole org chart from the bosses in Manhattan down to the cleaners in Brooklyn. And he told them where the bodies were. Literally. He walked detectives to empty lots, marshes, garbage dumps, construction sites. Each time they dug.
Each time they found bones. The indictment started falling like dominoes. Harry Strauss and Martin Goldstein were convicted of murder and sentenced to death on September 19th, 1940. They were executed at Sing Singh on June 12th, 1941. Happy May and Frank Abando were convicted of killing George Rdnik in 1937. They went to the chair on February 19th, 1942.
Lewis Capone was convicted. Emanuel Weiss was convicted. The crew that had killed for a living was being wiped out by the testimony of its own best man. Seven of Relles’s crew would die in the electric chair based on his words. But Rles wasn’t done. He was just getting warmed up. He had bigger fish to give.
The biggest fish in the ocean. In late 1940, Rles started talking about Lewis Lepka Bukalter, one of the richest labor raketeers in America. Lepki had gone on the run in 1937 when he heard prosecutors were building a case. He’d hidden in the New York underworld for 2 years while the FBI chased him across the country.
On August 24th, 1939, Lepki had surrendered dramatically to the journalist Walter Winshell, who handed him over to Hoover. But Lepki had thought he was only facing federal narcotics charges, federal time, maybe 15 years. He figured he’d do it standing on his head. Relless changed that. Relles placed Lepki at the center of at least five murders.
Most importantly, the 1936 killing of Joseph Rosen, a candy store owner in Brooklyn, who had been murdered for the simple reason that Lepki thought he might go to the authorities about a trucking racket. Rosen had been shot 17 times in his own store in front of his wife. On November 30th, 1941, Lepki was indicted for the Rosen murder along with Mendy Weiss and Louie Capone. The case was ironclad.
Relis had been there for the planning. He knew the shooters. He knew the car. He knew every word Lepki had said. The trial was scheduled to begin once the prosecutors had their star witness ready to take the stand. And then there was Anastasia, Albert Anastasia, the Lord High Executioner, the boss of what would later become the Gambino family.
A man who the federal government suspected of involvement in more than 60 murders, but had never been able to touch. Relless could touch him. Relles had direct testimony that Anastasia had ordered the 1939 killing of Morris Diamond, a labor organizer who had been in the way of a Brooklyn racket.
Relles could place Anastasia at meetings. Relles could quote Anastasia giving the order. On November 12th, 1941, Anastasia’s indictment was being prepared. Rles was scheduled to go before the grand jury within the week. You have to understand what this meant. If Rles testified against Anastasia, Anastasia was dead. Electric chair dead.
And if Anastasia fell, half the leadership of the American mafia fell with him. Frank Costello, Veto Genevese, Joe Adonis, Meer Lansky, every one of them had business with Anastasia. Every one of them was vulnerable to what Rles knew. This wasn’t just one mobster on the stand. This was the greatest existential threat organized crime in America had ever faced.
So they put him in a hotel, the Half Moon Hotel on the Coney Island Boardwalk, 29 West, 29th Street, Coney Island, room 623, 6th floor. Five police detectives on 24-hour rotating guard. Three other informants in adjacent rooms. Frank Bz, the Brooklyn commissioner’s assistant, personally in charge. Nobody got near Aelis. Nobody was supposed to.
For 18 months, Relis lived in that hotel. His wife visited, his kid visited, he played cards with the detectives, he ate steak from the hotel kitchen, he watched baseball on the radio. He laughed, he schemed. He gave more testimony. He was a gold mine. As long as he was breathing, the mafia was cornered. The money the syndicate had put on Railles’s head was staggering.
Some accounts say $50,000. Some say $100,000. What’s documented is that Anastasia personally put up a large bounty and that by October of 1941, the word was out across the American underworld. Anybody who could get to Kid Twist could retire. On the night of November 11th, 1941, Relis went to bed in room 623 around 1:30 in the morning.
Detective Victor Robbins was assigned to watch him. Another detective, James Bole, was in the next room. Detectives Harvey Mclofflin and Francis Tempone, were at the end of the hall. A fifth detective, John Moran, was in the corridor. Five men, five sets of eyes, one window. At 7:15 the next morning, a hotel employee named Morris Landau was crossing the kitchen extension roof below the sixth floor.
He saw a body on the concrete. He looked up. He saw an open window. He saw bed sheets hanging from a radiator. He ran for help. Frank Balls got the call at home. He arrived at the Half Moon Hotel at 7:45. Railless was already dead. The body was lying 42 ft below the window on a two-story kitchen extension that stuck out from the building.
Two white bed sheets and a piece of radio wire had been tied together and knotted around the radiator in his room. The homemade rope was about 13 ft long. The window was open. The screen had been removed. Here is where the accounts vary. The official ruling after investigation was that Abby Rles had attempted to escape. The theory went that he had tried to lower himself from his window down to room 511, one floor below, and then break in and hide or flee through the hotel. The homemade rope was too short.
The knot slipped. Relles fell. Accidental death during an escape attempt. But here’s the problem with that story. Relles was not a man trying to escape anything. He had full immunity. He was the most protected witness in America. He was scheduled to testify in 2 days, after which he would have gone into what was effectively the original witness protection setup.
He had nothing to run to, nowhere to go, no reason to leave the hotel, and he certainly had no reason to crawl out of a sixth floor window at dawn in November with a rope made of sheets. And then there was the position of the body. Relles was lying 20 ft out from the side of the building, not directly below the window, 20 ft out.
If a man fell straight down from a window while climbing, he would land near the wall. He wouldn’t land 20 ft away unless he had been thrown, unless he had been given a running start. Unless the fall wasn’t a fall at all. The homemade rope itself was strange. Rles was a professional killer. He had tied men up for a living.
He knew how to knot a rope, and yet the knot holding the bed sheets together had been tied in a way that any experienced hand would have known would slip under weight. It was almost as if someone had wanted it to look like an escape, but hadn’t cared enough to make it convincing. Most suspicious of all, five detectives on guard. All five said they heard nothing.
All five said they saw nothing. All five said Rles had been fine when they last checked him sometime between 4 and 500 a.m. And all five, according to their own statements, were more or less asleep or in other rooms at the Madab Rles allegedly got out of bed, tied bed sheets together, hooked them to a radiator, opened a window, and climbed out into the November air.
Nobody heard the window. Nobody heard the radiator scrape. Nobody heard the body hit. Years later, in 1951, a report by Brooklyn District Attorney Miles Macdonald would conclude that Rles had in fact been murdered. The theory was simple. The detectives on guard had been bribed. Someone had paid them to look the other way.
Relis had been picked up out of bed, carried to the window, and thrown. The bed sheets were staged. The rope was staged. The whole scene was a production put together in a matter of minutes while the detectives kept their backs turned. The Kavver committee investigating organized crime nationally in 1951 would hear testimony about the rel’s death.
Senator Estes Kavver himself would ask Frank Balls how a heavily guarded witness could simply fly out a window unnoticed. Ball’s explanations were unsatisfying. None of the five detectives were ever charged with anything. But Frank Balls was forced into retirement and privately prosecutors and journalists agreed on what everybody in Brooklyn already knew.
Kidwist hadn’t jumped. Kidwist had been helped. Who paid? The money almost certainly came from Albert Anastasia. Anastasia had the most to lose and the most cash on hand. Some accounts put the bribe at $50,000 split among the guards. Others say 100,000. What’s documented is that several of the detectives on duty that night, men on a city salary of about $3,000 a year, made financial moves in the months afterward that nobody could explain.
Frank Balls himself became a commissioner of public welfare, the fix had been in, and the moment Relises hit the concrete, everything changed. The immediate consequence was catastrophic for the prosecution. Albert Anastasia’s indictment, the one that had been ready to go, was quietly shelved. Without Relis, there was no case.
The Morris Diamond murder evidence was all secondhand. Nobody else was willing to testify. Anastasia walked. He would continue running Murder Incorporated successor operations for another 16 years. He would eventually become the boss of the Mangano crime family after orchestrating the disappearance of Vincent Mangano in April of 1951.
He would rule that family until October 25th, 1957, when he was shot to death in the barber chair of the Park Sheritan Hotel, 2007th Avenue, Manhattan. Only another mob hit could do what the state couldn’t. Louis Lepka Bushalter was less fortunate. The prosecutors still had enough evidence from other witnesses to proceed against him for the Rosen murder.
On March 5th, 1944, Lepki was executed in the electric chair at Sing Singh. He is the only major American mob boss in history ever executed by the United States government. He died because the Rosen case had enough corroborating witnesses to survive without rel. Anastasia didn’t. Prosecutor Burton Turkis, who had helped build the Murder Incorporated cases, would later write that Rles’s death was the single most damaging event in the history of organized crime prosecution.
Everything Res could have given them beyond the seven convictions already in hand was lost. the bigger bosses, the national network, the politicians on the payroll, the entire superructure of the syndicate. All of it walked free because one witness couldn’t survive. One night, William Odwire, the man whose investigation had caught Relles in the first place, would go on to become mayor of New York City in 1946.
His career would be haunted by questions about how Rles had died on his watch. He would resign in 1950 amid corruption investigations and flee to Mexico as United States ambassador. He died in 1964 without ever publicly addressing what had happened in room 623. The nickname stuck. In the Brooklyn DA’s office, in the press, in the mouths of every mobster who ever lived through that era, Abra became known by the phrase that defined him forever.
The canary who could sing but couldn’t fly. It was Gallow’s humor. But it was also a warning, a message from the mob to every informant who might come after. Nobody is safe. Not even in a police guarded hotel room with five detectives outside your door. Not even with immunity. Not even with the whole machinery of the state protecting you.
If you talk, we can reach you. We can reach anywhere. That message shaped organized crime for the next 40 years. The Federal Witness Protection Program, which wouldn’t be formally established until 1971 under the Organized Crime Control Act, was created in direct response to lessons learned from cases like Rayless. Prosecutors understood you couldn’t just hide a witness in a hotel.
You had to disappear him. New name, new city, new face, new life. because the mob would find him otherwise. Joseph Velace in 1963 became the first major mafia member to publicly testify about the inner workings of Lacosa Nostra. Velace survived because he was locked in a federal prison, not a Brooklyn hotel room.
Henry Hill in the late 1970s survived because he was relocated under the new wits program and given a completely new identity. Sammy Graano in 1991 survived Paul Castellano’s successor, John Gotti, because the federal government had learned finally that a living witness could destroy a crime family. But in 1941, they hadn’t learned yet.
They thought five cops and a locked door would be enough. It wasn’t. The other thing Rlesa’s death revealed was something darker. It revealed that the mob had police on its payroll at a level nobody had fully understood before. The five detectives in that hotel were not low-level patrolmen. They were plain clothes men assigned to a major witness protection detail. They had been handpicked.
They had been vetted. And every one of them, it turned out, was either complicit, bought, or willing to look away for the right price. That meant the corruption ran deep, deeper than Odwire could admit publicly without ending his career. In the years that followed, the Brooklyn DA’s office and the NYPD would undergo reforms.
Internal affairs divisions would be strengthened. Witness handling protocols would be rewritten. But the damage was done. Anastasia had his 16-year run. The five families of New York consolidated. The heroin trade exploded. The labor rackets continued. The bodies kept piling up. For the men at the top, nothing really changed. You want to know what Abra actually accomplished in his life and death? He killed dozens of men personally.
He helped execute hundreds of contracts. He sent seven of his friends to the electric chair. He sent one boss to the electric chair. He humiliated J. Edgar Hoover by proving organized crime existed. And then by dying he saved the very system he had spent 18 months trying to destroy. That’s the brutal arithmetic of the murder incorporated era. One witness, one window, one fall.
20 years of mafia dominance preserved. The Half Moon Hotel itself was demolished in 1996. Room 623 no longer exists. The kitchen extension where Rles landed is gone. There is no plaque, no marker. No memorial, just a patch of ground in Coney Island where for one morning in November of 1941, the entire future of American organized crime hung in the balance.
Rose, Abee’s widow, disappeared from public view shortly after her husband’s death. She kept the immunity money. She raised her children. She never spoke to reporters. She died decades later quietly in Brooklyn. Her son, by most accounts, lived a normal life, carrying the weight of a father he barely remembered, but whose name opened certain doors and closed others.
Burton Turkus, the prosecutor who had worked with Relis, went on to write a book about the case in 1951. It was titled Murder Incorporated. It became a bestseller. It was adapted into a film in 1960. The mafia tried to suppress it. They couldn’t. The story was already out. The bodies had already been counted.
The truth was already on the record. Thanks to 75 notebooks of testimony Relises had left behind. Albert Anastasia, for his part, spent the next 16 years looking over his shoulder. He got more paranoid every year. By the time he was shot in that barber chair in 1957, his own keer regimes had been plotting against him for months. Carlo Gambino took over.
Gambino would use the lessons of the Murder Incorporated era, keep your crew small, keep your secrets tight, kill only when necessary to build what became the most powerful crime family in American history. Gambino learned from Anastasia’s survival. He also learned from Reles’s death. Never let a single witness know too much.
Compartmentalize everything. Keep the boss’s three layers removed from any killing. Make sure that if one man talks, all he can give up is other buttonmen, not the structure. That architecture built on the Ashes of Murder Incorporated would protect the mafia for another 30 years. It would take the racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations act of 1970 and prosecutors like Rudolph Giuliani in the 1980s to finally start dismantling what Relis’s death had preserved.
Think about that. The American mafia’s golden age, the era of the five families ruling New York, the era of Appalachin and the Genevesei coronation, and the Gambino dynasty and the Lucasi consolidation. All of it was built on a foundation laid the morning April hit the concrete in Coney Island.
If he had lived two more days, if he had made it to that witness stand, Anastasia would have burned. And with Anastasia burned, Luciano in exile in Italy would have been vulnerable. And with Luciano vulnerable, the whole post Castellamarie structure could have collapsed. The mafia we know, the one from the Godfather and Goodfellows and the Sopranos, might never have existed in the form we remember.
Instead, one short man, one fireplug of a killer, fell 42 feet out of a window on a November morning. And everything the law had built over 18 months. Every confession, every name, every map to everybody became useless against the bosses who mattered most. Abra was buried at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens. His funeral was small.
His old crew, the ones still alive, stayed away. Rose was there. A few relatives. The rabbi spoke briefly. There was no sermon about the man’s accomplishments. There couldn’t be. His accomplishments were a column of corpses, 85 names long. He was 34 years old when he died. He had killed since he was a teenager.
He had sung for 18 months. And then he had flown or been flown out a window at the edge of the American dream. The canary who could sing but couldn’t fly. It’s the perfect epitap because it contains the whole truth. He could have brought down the entire American mafia. He had the voice. He had the knowledge. He had the protection.
What he didn’t have was wings. And the mob made sure he never got the chance to use them. That’s the real lesson of Abe Reelis. Not that informants are always killed, not that the mob always wins, but that power in a criminal organization ultimately rests not on how many soldiers you have or how much money you earn or how many territories you control.
It rests on one thing, silence. the ability to buy it, the ability to enforce it, the ability to guarantee it even against the full weight of a state prosecutor. With 18 months of protected custody and five armed cops at the door for 18 months, Abrales was the loudest voice in American crime. For one November morning, he was silenced forever.
And in that silence, everything the American mafia would become was decided. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment. What mafia figure should we cover next?