Infamous Mob killers Louis Lepke Buchalter, Albert Anastasia and Abe Kid Twist Reles became known collectively as Murder Incorporated. Middle-management troubleshooters rather than freelance killers for hire, they settled the US Crime Syndicates personnel problems via the bullet, the blade, the garrotte or the ice-pick. As the end of Prohibition turned the Mafia into a national corporation fighting to protect its regional interests, the 1935 shooting of maverick gangster 'Dutch' Schultz in a restaurant restroom was, according to prosecuting assistant district attorney Burton Turkus, the first of up to a thousand murders committed by the organisation throughout that decade. Some of its victims simply disappeared off the face of the earth. Things started to fall apart in 1940, when Kid Twist was investigated for a 1933 gangland killing and realised the jig was up. He started to squeal on his partners, and he didn't stop for two years. Revealing how he killed seven out of 11 witnesses in a court case, he sent his friend Lepke to the electric chair, but saved his own hide - at least until persons unknown ejected the Kid from the sixth-floor window of a hotel. Murder Incorporated became the template for decades of gangster-movie antiheroes. In the fictionalised 1950 film, The Enforcer (Murder Incorporated in the UK), Mob-busting District Attorney Humphrey Bogart was the hero, based on Turkus, the dark plot line and noir-ish photography telling the story of his campaign to put murderous Syndicate kingpin Albert Mendoza in the chair. Mendoza was based on Anastasia who, in reality, would evade the law. But in 1957, rival gangster 'Crazy Joe' Gallo sent two gunmen to kill his rival Albert in the barbershop of a Sheraton hotel. In a nicely cinematic touch, he fell into a mirror which fragmented many times over as more bullets hit him. By the time of Lepke, audience sympathy belonged to Tony Curtis as the title character, the ruthless over-boss of Murder, Inc., depicted as a dapper, sword-fencing, charismatic individualist. Colourful and entertaining but lacking the grit of earlier Mafia informant drama The Valachi Papers, Lepke is unrelenting in its depiction of that 1970s Hollywood archetype the admirable murderer.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
