Murder, Incorporated (nonfiction)

A November 1937 FBI wanted poster for Buchalter and Shapiro.

Murder, Incorporated (or Murder, Inc.) was the name the press gave to organized crime groups in the 1930s through the 1940s that acted as the armed forces of the American Mafia in New York and elsewhere.

The groups were composed of largely Italian-American and Jewish gangsters from the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brownsville, East New York, and Ocean Hill.

Originally headed by Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, and later by Albert "The Mad Hatter" Anastasia, Murder, Inc. was believed to be responsible for between 400 and 1,000 contract killings, until the group was exposed in the early 1940s by former group member Abe "Kid Twist" Reles.

In the trials that followed, many members were convicted and executed.

Reles died after falling out of -- or being thrown from -- a window while under police protection, before he could testify against his former associates.

Thomas E. Dewey first came to prominence as a prosecutor of Murder, Inc. and other organized crime cases.

In the News

• 

  A groups of Murder, Inc. trainees strangling a traveller on a highway in India in the early 19th century. See Criminal.

Fiction cross-reference

• Dalton Trumbo
• Killer Poke - software defect and contract killer for hire.
• Murder, Incorporated 1.1

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Abe Reles (nonfiction)
• Crime (nonfiction)
• Criminal (nonfiction)
• Evil bit (nonfiction)

External links:

• Murder, Inc. @ Wikipedia