The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: The Mafia Story in His Own Words (39 page)

The murder that had the potential of sending Bugsy Siegel along the same route was that of a Lepke enforcer named Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg. During Lepke’s time of trouble in the late thirties, Greenberg had fled to Canada for safety, had soon run
short of funds, and had written back asking for five thousand dollars and implying that if his friends didn’t send it quickly, he might decide to return for a long talk with Tom Dewey. That threat earned him an underworld death sentence and Tannenbaum was given the contract. Greenberg, however, succeeded in eluding him until late in 1939, when he surfaced in Los Angeles.

The West Coast was the province of Siegel, who decided to take a personal hand. He imported another killer, Frankie Carbo (later to come to prominence as a prizefight manager), once Greenberg had been tracked to his hideout. Then, shortly after dark on November 22, 1939, Tannenbaum, Siegel and Carbo drove to 1804 Vista Del Mar in Los Angeles and waited in their parked car for Greenberg to return from his only daily outdoor excursion — a short drive to pick up the newspapers. When Greenberg’s car pulled up in front of the house, Carbo and Siegel stepped out to meet him. With guns supplied by Longie Zwillman and brought to California by Tannenbaum, they completed the long-delayed contract and then sped away with Tannenbaum at the wheel.

Less than a year later, during his own recital for Brooklyn authorities, in exchange for immunity and eventual freedom, Tannenbaum told Turkis the story of that murder. Though convincing, his evidence could not convict anyone without the corroboration of a nonparticipant. Reles, who had not been part of the plot, provided that corroboration; he had been advised, he said, of all the details since the inception.

Armed with the statements and other evidence, Turkis flew off to California for discussions with Los Angeles authorities, then took Reles and Tannenbaum out to testify before the grand jury. Siegel, Carbo and Champ Segal, who had been present in a backup car, were indicted for murder, and Lepke and Mendy Weiss were indicted for having ordered the killing.

Before the warrants could be served, Benny Siegel and Carbo were alerted and both vanished — Siegel into the attic of his two-hundred-thousand-dollar mansion on North Linden Drive in Beverly Hills, from which he eventually emerged to surrender. In his cell, Siegel, visited often by his Hollywood friends who professed utter disbelief that he could have been involved, was supremely confident. With the approval of the outfit in the East, he had donated
thirty thousand dollars to the campaign of John Dockweiler as Los Angeles County district attorney, and when Dockweiler was elected, Siegel had boasted to Costello and others, “He’s my man.” That claim was given some substance when Dockweiler asked the court to dismiss the indictments in early December 1940, on grounds that his staff had discovered that a witness — not Reles or Tannenbaum — had lied to the grand jury. The indictment was dismissed and Siegel walked out of jail.

But Los Angeles authorities decided to seek a second indictment. O’Dwyer was asked to send Tannenbaum and Reles back to California for another grand jury appearance. He refused at first and then reluctantly permitted only Tannenbaum to make the trip. Another indictment was forthcoming, this time naming only Siegel and Carbo for the murder of Greenberg. Once again, Siegel disappeared, part of the time relaxing in his mansion, part journeying to New York for meetings with his friends.

With Siegel loose, the object of a massive manhunt, and with the Lepke trial in progress, Charlie Lucky Luciano, viewing all this as a major derailment of his plans for release from prison, summoned Costello to Dannemora in the fall of 1941. By then, some of the restrictions on Luciano had been relaxed; Dr. Walter Martin had replaced William Snyder as warden of the prison and had expressed the view that Luciano’s sentence was both harsh and unusual, and so he was willing to grant some small privileges, including privacy with his visitors.

When Costello arrived, Luciano wasted no time. “Frank, I’m gettin’ sick and tired of all the shit that’s happenin’ between Benny and Albert. No matter what kinda heat they got on ’em they’re still outside, walkin’ around. I’m locked up and I want out. We gave O’Dwyer a pisspot full of money, now what the hell are we gettin’ back for it?”

“Charlie,” Costello said, “we can’t put a blanket on what’s goin’ on. O’Dwyer is worse than Dewey when it comes to ambition. I’ve told him he’s a fuckin’ idiot to dream about goin’ to Washington. I’ve tried to convince him to be patient and we’ll get him the mayor’s job, get La Guardia the fuck outa there. But the son of a bitch has stars in his eyes. It’s almost like you can’t talk to him no more.”

“But what the hell is he doin’ for us?”

“I hate to tell you,” Costello said, “but the answer is, nothin’.”

Luciano was disgusted. He demanded, “Then what the hell are you doin’ about Reles? Now he’s tied Albert in for the killin’ of Moish Diamond a couple of years ago. That dumb bastard, Albert — I warned him not to go around hittin’ guys unless it’s somebody in the outfit. You hit guys on the outside, it’s like askin’ for trouble. He was crazy to knock off Diamond. He didn’t have to do it. I sent him the word that if he did it he was off his head.”

(Teamster official Morris Diamond had been murdered in May of 1939 after he had resisted increasing encroachment by racketeers and threatened to go to Dewey. With Anastasia looking on and giving the orders, Diamond was cornered on a Brooklyn street and shot six times in the head. Allie Tannenbaum, one of the killers, had told the story to Turkis and O’Dwyer, and Reles had corroborated it.)

“Frank,” Luciano said, “Reles has gotta go. That’s the only way we can save Benny and Albert. Without him, all the O’Dwyers and Turkises and Deweys in the world can’t convict them two guys, and we owe ’em enough so we gotta save ’em. You gotta make a move and get the little bastard.”

“That’s one of the things I wanted to see you about,” Costello said. “We got a deal just about set up and I came up here to get your okay. They got Reles stashed away like he was gold in Fort Knox. He’s surrounded by cops day and night, even when he’s sleepin’.”

“We been payin’ off them Brooklyn cops for years. What’s so hard about this job?”

“There’s just no way we can get to Reles. The cops’ll have to do it for us.”

“So what. Let ’em do it. Christ, let ’em do somethin’ to earn their dough.”

“Okay. But remember, it’s gonna cost like hell.”

“I don’t give a fuck what it costs — pay it.”

Costello nodded. “That’s what I thought you’d say. But I came up here to get the word straight from you.”

“All right, you got it. And when you’re a hundred and ten per cent sure, tell Benny to give himself up — beforehand.”

In October, Siegel walked out of hiding and surrendered once again to Los Angeles authorities. When Luciano heard the news, he knew that Costello had worked out all the arrangements. “There was a big-shot cop on the New York Police Department, name of Captain Frank Bals. He was in charge of all the investigations for O’Dwyer, and them two was together like two fingers. And so Bals did us the big favor of arranging for Reles to get lost, like out of the window of his hotel room. I’ll never forget the date, because it was one of the turnin’ points of my life — November 12, 1941.”

That morning, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles was, as usual, in his room, 623, at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island. As usual, his door was open. His protectors that morning were three plainclothes detectives, James Boyle, Victor Robbins and John E. Moran and two patrolmen, Francesco Tempone and Harvey F. X. McLaughlin, all under command of Frank Bals and his chief aide, Sergeant Elwood Divvers. (A sixth guard was normally assigned to the shift, but who he was and whether he was there that morning have been a continuing source of controversy and mystery; some police officials have insisted there were only five men there, others that there were six, but they have never identified the sixth.)

Sometime before seven in the morning, the assistant manager of the hotel heard a thud on an extension roof beneath Reles’s room, but he ignored it. About the same time, Detective Robbins said he checked Reles’s room and the Kid was in bed as usual. At ten after seven Robbins checked again; Reles was gone. Robbins said he rushed to an open window and looked down, and forty-two feet below lay the remains of Abe Reles, fully dressed, with two knotted bedsheets nearby. The body was sprawled more than twenty feet out from the wall.

O’Dwyer placed the investigation of the sudden death of his star witness in the hands of Captain Bals. Within hours, Bals had reached his conclusion: there was nothing unusual in the fact that Reles had been alone in his room, checked regularly by guards, for this was the normal practice. (Later, Tannenbaum would assert that he and Reles were never left alone, that a guard was always present in their rooms, even when they were asleep.) Bals said that Reles’s death was an unfortunate accident, but only an accident. The captain theorized that it could have happened in
one of two ways: Reles had attempted to escape by means of the knotted bedsheets and had fallen to his death when the sheets gave way; or Reles — a notorious practical joker, according to Bals — had been attempting to play one of his pranks by sliding down to the fifth floor and then walking up the stairs to surprise his protectors, and had fallen to his death in the process. (Other police officials, not including Bals, later offered a third theory: Reles had suddenly become conscience-stricken over his past and fearful of his future and so had committed suicide.)

“The truth of the whole thing was,” Luciano said twenty years later, “that the whole bunch of cops was on the take and Bals handled the whole thing. We paid him fifty grand and set aside some more money for the other guys in case they hadda take a rap. The way I heard it was that Bals stood there in the room and supervised the whole thing. Reles was sleepin’ and one of the cops give him a tap with a billy and knocked him out. Then they picked him up and heaved him out the window. For chrissake, he landed so far from the wall he couldn’t’ve done that even if he jumped.”

For some of those assigned to guard Reles from the underworld’s vengeance, there was comparatively minor punishment — the five policemen were put back in uniform and assigned to walk the beat. No blame fell on either Bals or Divvers — or on O’Dwyer. And, in fact, when O’Dwyer was elected mayor of New York in 1945, he appointed Frank Bals a deputy police commissioner. “Bals became our bagman for the whole department. He got ten grand in small bills in the same goddamn fuckin’ paper bag that was always goin’ someplace down around City Hall every week, just like clockwork. And let’s get this straight — the dough went to Bals and the split was his responsibility.”

So Abe Reles was dead and the “perfect murder case” against Albert Anastasia for the killing of Morris Diamond, about which O’Dwyer had boasted repeatedly, had gone out the window too. What emerged in the aftermath, though, was equally shocking to many. During the nineteen months between the time Reles and Tannenbaum had first talked about the murder and Reles’s death, a period when Anastasia had gone underground and O’Dwyer was supposedly scouring the country in search of him, the Brooklyn
district attorney did not bother to obtain an indictment of Anastasia for the Diamond murder. Not only that, but he never directed anyone on his staff to obtain such an indictment and, in fact, actually forbade anyone to do so — even though, Turkis would later say, “He was fully aware that Anastasia had to approve every murder done within organized crime in Brooklyn.” O’Dwyer’s explanation? Anastasia was a fugitive and it would have been a waste of time to indict him before he was found.

A few months after Reles’s sudden fall, O’Dwyer took a leave of absence from his job as district attorney to enter the Army, from which he would emerge at the end of World War II a brigadier general, something of a hero, and a major political power among New York Democrats. But before he left office, he placed the disposition of the Anastasia case in the hands of Captain Bals, who filed a confidential memorandum on its status: “In the case of Anastasio [Anastasia’s real family name], legal corroboration is missing. . . . On November 12, 1941, Abe Reles who was under police guard in the Half Moon Hotel, Brooklyn, attempted to escape and fell five [sic] stories, being instantly killed. This not only seriously hampered the investigation, but deprived the state of his testimony and information. At the present time the only testimony adducible against Anastasio is that of accomplices.”

(A Brooklyn grand jury in 1945 had what may have been the last legal observation on the affair; it charged that there had been “negligence, incompetence and flagrant irresponsibility” in O’Dwyer’s handling of the Anastasia case, for the district attorney was “in possession of competent legal evidence that Anastasia was guilty of first degree murder and other vicious crimes. The proof admittedly was sufficient to warrant Anastasia’s indictment and conviction, but Anastasia was neither prosecuted, indicted nor convicted. . . . The consistent and complete failure to prosecute the overlord of organized crime . . . is so revolting that we cannot permit these disclosures to be filed away in the same manner the evidence against Anastasia was heretofore ‘put in the files.’ ” That grand jury report and knowledge that the underworld was making huge contributions to O’Dwyer’s political fortunes did not stop Tammany Hall from backing him in his
successful mayoralty campaign in 1945 and in his successful reelection effort four years later.)

With the collapse of O’Dwyer’s “perfect murder case” against him, Albert Anastasia once again was omnipresent in Brooklyn, strutting with new confidence in his invincibility along the waterfront. He did not, however, remain there long. Within weeks, Pearl Harbor was bombed and the United States was at war. Anastasia’s criminal record might ordinarily have made him a very unlikely candidate for service in the American war effort, but times were perilous and able-bodied men were needed. So Anastasia, proclaiming his devotion to his country and his willingness to serve (and, too, envisioning life as a soldier as protection against any unpleasantness that might arise from civilian authorities), offered no objection when he was drafted, particularly when he was awarded a technical sergeant’s stripes and put to work at a camp in Pennsylvania for two years instructing G.I.’s in the art of being longshoremen. In return for this valuable service, Anastasia was not only granted an honorable discharge in 1944, but was awarded United States citizenship as well.