February 6: Murder Inc.

Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, head of the organized crime death squad Murder, Inc. during the 1930s and the only major mob boss to be executed for a specific murder, was born on this date in 1897. By 1922, he had served two prison terms in Sing Sing. In the 1920s, he and his childhood friend Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro took control of Jewish garment workers unions on the Lower East Side and developed a profitable “protection” racket among business owners, whom he could threaten with both strikes and violence. Buchalter and Albert Anastasia took over Murder, Inc. when its founders, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Lucky Luciano, developed national rackets in California and a gambling empire in Las Vegas; among Lepke’s targets was the mobster Dutch Schultz, who was thereby prevented from trying to kill Attorney General Thomas Dewey. Murder Inc. operated out of a candy store called Midnight Rose’s in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and is thought to have been responsible for between 400 and 800 murders. Lepke was executed by electrocution in 1944.

“I am anxious to have it clearly understood that I did not offer to talk and give information in exchange for any promise of commutation of my death sentence. I did not ask for that!” —Louis Buchalter’s last statement