Jacob Shapiro
Encyclopedia
Louis Buchalter
Louis "Lepke" Buchalter was a Jewish American mobster and head of the Mafia hit squad Murder, Inc. during the 1930s. After Dutch Schultz' request of the Mafia Commission for permission to kill his enemy, U.S. Attorney Thomas Dewey, the Commission decided to kill Schultz in order to prevent the hit...
, controlled industrial labor racketeering in New York for two decades and established the Murder, Inc.
Murder, Inc.
Murder, Inc. was the name given by the press to organized crime groups in the 1920s through the 1940s that resulted in hundreds of murders on behalf of the American Mafia and Jewish Mafia groups who together formed the early organized crime groups in New York and...
organization.
Early years
Born in OdessaOdessa
Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...
(Russian Empire
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
) in 1899. While confined in Protectory in Brooklyn he became friends with Joe Valachi
Joe Valachi
Joseph "Joe Cargo" Valachi , Italian American, also known as "Charles Chanbano" and "Anthony Sorge" was the first Mafia member to publicly acknowledge the existence of the Mafia. He is also the person who made Cosa Nostra a household name.-Career:Joseph Valachi was born in East Harlem, New York...
and Jimmy "The Shiv" DeStefano (who got his nickname while confined in the protectory). Jack "Legs" Diamond was also there but kept his distance from the feared threesome. During this period, Shapiro encountered his future partner, Louis Buchalter; both boys were attempting to rob the same pushcart
Pushcart
Pushcart may refer to:* Pushcart Press* Pushcart Prize* The Pushcart War, a 1964 children's book by Jean Merrill* a synonym for baggage cart...
. Instead of fighting over the spoils, Shapiro and Buchalter agreed on a partnership. Buchalter served as the brains and Shapiro provided the muscle in an alliance that lasted for decades. Shapiro and Buchalter soon become acquainted with future mobsters Meyer Lansky
Meyer Lansky
Meyer Lansky , known as the "Mob's Accountant", was a Polish-born American organized crime figure who, along with his associate Charles "Lucky" Luciano, was instrumental in the development of the "National Crime Syndicate" in the United States...
and Charles "Lucky" Luciano
Lucky Luciano
Charlie "Lucky" Luciano was an Italian mobster born in Sicily. Luciano is considered the father of modern organized crime in the United States for splitting New York City into five different Mafia crime families and the establishment of the first commission...
, both of whom were protégés of mobster Arnold "The Brain" Rothstein
Arnold Rothstein
Arnold Rothstein , nicknamed "The Brain", was a New York businessman and gambler who became a famous kingpin of the Jewish mafia. Rothstein was also widely reputed to have been behind baseball's Black Sox Scandal, in which the 1919 World Series was fixed...
.
Labor slugger
Encouraged by Rothstein, Shapiro and Buchalter entered the lucrative arena of New York labor racketeering working for Jacob "Little Augie" OrgenJacob Orgen
Jacob "Little Augie" Orgen was a New York gangster involved in bootlegging and labor racketeering during Prohibition.-Biography:...
. Orgen had previously wrested control of this racket from Nathan "Kid Dropper" Kaplan
Nathan Kaplan
"Kid Dropper" Nathan Caplin or Kaplan , also known as Jack the Dropper, was an American gangster controlling labor racketeering and extortion in New York City during the post-World War I period into the early years of Prohibition in the early 1920s.-Biography:One of seven children, Kaplan was born...
in the decade-long labor slugger war
Labor Slugger War
The Labor Sluggers War was a 15-year period of gang wars among New York labor sluggers for control of labor racketeering from 1911 to 1927. This began in 1911 with the first war between "Dopey" Benny Fein and Joe "The Greaser" Rosenzweig against a coalition of smaller gangs and continuing on and...
s. The gangsters had infiltrated labor unions in the busy Garment District
Garment District, Manhattan
The Garment District, also known as the Garment Center, the Fashion District, or the Fashion Center, is a neighborhood located in the Manhattan borough of New York City. The dense concentration of fashion-related uses give the neighborhood, which is generally considered to span between Fifth Avenue...
of Manhattan, assaulting and murdering the union leadership to gain control. The gangsters then instituted a system of kickbacks and skimming from union dues while at the same time extorting the garment manufacturers with the threat of strikes.
After working for Orgen for a while, Shapiro and Buchalter started planning to take over his operations. Realizing that Shapiro and Buchalter posed a threat, Orgen allied himself with brothers Eddie and Jack "Legs" Diamond. Shapiro and Buchalter soon made their move. On October 15, 1927, Orgen and Jack Diamond were standing on the corner of Delancey and Norfolk Street in the Lower East Side. Two gunmen (thought to be Shapiro and Buchalter) drove up to the corner. One gunman got out of the car and started shooting while the driver began shooting from the inside the car. Orgen was killed instantly and Jack Diamond was severely wounded. With Orgen's death, Shapiro and Buchalter took over his labor racketing operation. The two partners soon began massive extortions of both labor unions and businesses as they created a massive criminal monopoly in the Garment District.
Murder, Inc.
Shapiro and Buchalter soon formed the infamous Murder, Inc.Murder, Inc.
Murder, Inc. was the name given by the press to organized crime groups in the 1920s through the 1940s that resulted in hundreds of murders on behalf of the American Mafia and Jewish Mafia groups who together formed the early organized crime groups in New York and...
, an organization that performed contract murders for organized crime. Their client was the "National Crime Syndicate
National Crime Syndicate
The National Crime Syndicate was the name given by the press to a loosely-organized multi-ethnic organized crime syndicate. Its origins are uncertain....
", a confederation of crime families created by Luciano and Lansky in 1929. The Syndicate was created to avoid the bloody gang wars of the 1920s by creating an organization with the power to mediate organized crime disputes and punish offenders. Murder, Inc. served as the enforcement arm for the Syndicate. With Buchalter leading Murder, Inc., Shapiro and Albert "Mad Hatter" Anastasia
Albert Anastasia
Albert Anastasia was boss of what is now called the Gambino crime family, one of New York City's Five Families, from 1951-1957. He also ran a gang of contract killers called Murder Inc. which enforced the decisions of the Commission, the ruling council of the American Mafia...
were his most trusted associates. One of its most dedicated members, Shapiro personally oversaw many contract murders and recruited promising gunmen for future membership.
Government Pressure
Dutch Schultz
Dutch Schultz was a New York City-area Jewish American gangster of the 1920s and 1930s who made his fortune in organized crime-related activities such as bootlegging alcohol and the numbers racket...
asked the National Crime Syndicate to approve Dewey's murder. Shapiro and Anastasia agreed with Schultz, but Buchalter and the rest of the Syndicate turned down his request. Killing a prosecutor went against mob tradition, the majority argued, and would only increase federal investigation into organized crime and possibly expose the Syndicate itself. In fact, the Syndicate was so fearful of Schultz's proposal that they later ordered Buchalter to murder Schultz. On October 23, 1935, Schultz and several associates were gunned down by Murder, Inc. gunmen in a restaurant in Newark, New Jersey.
Shortly after Schultz's death, Shapiro and Buchalter became the focus of Dewey's investigations. In October, 1936, Shapiro and Buchalter were convicted under the terms of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and were both sentenced to two years in Sing Sing Prison. After his conviction, Shapiro went into hiding for a year. However, he finally turned himself in to Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
(FBI) agents on April 14, 1938 and was sent to prison. On May 5, 1944, Shapiro was convicted of conspiracy and extortion and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
Months before his 1944 conviction, Shapiro allegedly smuggled a note to Buchalter, who was then on trial in New York for murder. The note simply read, "I told you so." On March 4, 1944, Buchalter was electrocuted in Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York
Ossining (village), New York
Ossining is a village in Westchester County, New York, United States. The population was 25,060 at the 2010 census. As a village, it is located in the Town of Ossining.-Geography:Ossining borders the eastern shores of the widest part of the Hudson River....
. Until his death in prison from a heart attack in 1947, Shapiro remained convinced that had Dewey been killed, he and others would have remained free.
Further reading
- Block, Alan A. East Side-West Side: Organizing Crime in New York, 1930-1950. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers 1983. ISBN 0-87855-931-0
- Ellis, Edward Robb. The Epic Of New York City: A Narrative History. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005. ISBN 0-7867-1436-0
- Fried, Albert. The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. ISBN 0-231-09683-6
- Katcher, Leo. The Big Bankroll: The Life and Times of Arnold Rothstein. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994. ISBN 0-306-80565-0
- Jacobs, James B., Christopher Panarella and Jay Worthington. Busting the Mob: The United States Vs. Cosa Nostra. New York: NYU Press, 1994. ISBN 0-8147-4230-0
- O'Kane, James M. The Crooked Ladder: Gangsters, Ethnicity and the American Dream. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1994. ISBN 0-7658-0994-X
- Peterson, Robert W. Crime & the American Response. New York: Facts on File, 1973. ISBN 0-87196-227-6
- Pietrusza, David. Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003. ISBN 0-7867-1250-3
- Reppetto, Thomas A. American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004. ISBN 0-8050-7798-7
- Sorin, Gerald. The Nurturing Neighborhood: The Brownsville Boys' Club and Jewish Community in Urban America, 1940-1990. New York: NYU Press, 1992. ISBN 0-8147-7939-5
- Cohen, Rich. Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. ISBN 0-375-70547-3
- Almog, OzOz AlmogOz Almog, an Israeli–Austrian artist was born on April 15, 1956, in Kfar Saba, Israel. He comes from a family of Russian/Ukrainian pioneers and Romanian/Russian immigrants...
, Kosher Nostra Jüdische Gangster in Amerika, 1890-1980 ; Jüdischen Museum der Stadt Wien ; 2003, Text Oz Almog, Erich Metz, ISBN 3901398333