Murder Inc: The Real Story Behind the Mafia’s Killing Machine
There is something suspiciously modern about the legend of Murder, Inc. Orders came from management, specialists handled the unpleasant work and senior executives supposedly remained safely insulated from the consequences. Organised crime, according to the story, had discovered outsourcing.
During the 1930s and early 1940s, a circle of Brooklyn killers associated with mob boss Louis “Lepke” Buchalter became notorious for carrying out murders on behalf of underworld figures. Newspapers gave them the irresistible name Murder, Incorporated, and the phrase stuck so firmly that separating the organisation from the legend is still surprisingly difficult.
Hellwood’s Murder Inc T-Shirt taps into that grim piece of American gangland mythology. But was Murder, Inc. really the Mafia’s coast-to-coast assassination department?
The Killers Were Certainly Real
Whatever doubts surround the corporate-looking mythology, Louis Buchalter was no newspaper invention. Together with Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro, he built a formidable racketeering operation around New York’s garment industries. The FBI began investigating the pair in 1932 and later described intimidation involving bombs, iron bars, shootings and hired strong-arm squads.
Violence was part of the business model. Buchalter could increasingly leave that violence to other men, many drawn from the Jewish and Italian gangs of Brooklyn neighbourhoods such as Brownsville and Ocean Hill.
By 1940, Brooklyn prosecutors were building cases against men including Harry Strauss, Martin Goldstein, Harry Maione and Frank Abbandando. The Mob Museum notes that prosecutors eventually estimated the network had been responsible for more than 100 homicides nationwide.
Then Abe Reles Started Talking
The machinery began coming apart when gang members decided that cooperation looked healthier than New York’s electric chair. Most important was Abraham “Kid Twist” Reles, a Brownsville killer who became a prosecution witness in 1940.
Reles helped investigators connect previously isolated murders and supplied evidence against former associates. His testimony contributed to a string of convictions, and other informants followed.
Reles never reached one of the biggest trials. On 12 November 1941, while supposedly under police protection at Coney Island’s Half Moon Hotel, he fell from a sixth-floor window. Whether he slipped while attempting an escape, jumped or was pushed has been debated ever since. His conveniently timed death did nothing to make the Murder, Inc. story less cinematic.
When “The Combination” Became Murder, Inc.
There is an important wrinkle. The killers apparently did not sit around referring to themselves as Murder, Incorporated. The Mob Museum notes that the underworld group was known as “The Combination”, while “Murder Inc.” became a press catchphrase as the prosecutions exploded across New York newspapers in 1940.
And that matters, because the newspaper version gradually became wonderfully neat: a national board of criminal directors, a central assassination bureau and a pool of professional killers ready to travel anywhere in America when headquarters issued a contract.
Later historians have been less certain. Scholarship on organised crime has questioned whether the so-called National Crime Syndicate ever existed in the rigid, corporate form popularised by prosecutors, journalists and later gangster histories. There was unquestionably cooperation between major criminals, and unquestionably a Brooklyn network prepared to kill. What becomes harder to prove is the elegant organisational chart.
The Myth May Be Bigger Than the Organisation
That does not make Murder, Inc. fictional. It makes the real story more interesting.
Buchalter was convicted over the 1936 murder of candy-store owner Joseph Rosen and went to the electric chair at Sing Sing on 4 March 1944 alongside Emanuel Weiss and Louis Capone. He remains an extraordinary case: a major American organised-crime boss executed by the state rather than quietly disappearing into retirement, prison or another gangster’s gun sights.
But “Murder, Inc.” survives because the name transformed a messy web of killers, racketeers, informants and alliances into something the public could instantly understand. It made organised crime sound like General Motors with ice picks.
For more American underworld history, browse Hellwood’s Mobsters & Gangsters collection, True Crime T-Shirts and broader Historical T-Shirts.
The killers were real. The bodies were real. The prosecutions were real. The corporate murder empire described in countless books and films? That part still deserves an asterisk.
MURDER INC. T-SHIRT
Brooklyn killers, newspaper mythology and one of the most chilling brand names organised crime never actually chose for itself.