Murder Inc.: How the Mob Built America's First Contract Killing Network
Between 1929 and 1941, an organization operating out of the Brownsville and East New York neighborhoods of Brooklyn carried out hundreds of contract killings across the United States with a professionalism and organizational discipline that law enforcement spent more than a decade trying to understand. Newspapers would eventually call it "Murder Inc." — a name its members never used but that captured something accurate about what it was: murder as an industry, organized with the same logic applied to any other criminal enterprise, staffed by specialists whose only function was the provision of lethal services on contract.
The Organizational Logic
When Lucky Luciano restructured American organized crime in 1931 following the Castellammarese War, he built the Commission — the governing body of the national syndicate — on a principle of organizational separation between authority and execution. The bosses who ordered violence would never be the ones carrying it out. The killers would have no direct relationship with the men who contracted for their services. The layers of insulation would make prosecution architecturally difficult.
Murder Inc. was the enforcement expression of this principle. Louis "Lepke" Buchalter ran the operation from Brooklyn with Albert Anastasia as his partner in day-to-day management. The killers they employed — drawn primarily from the Jewish and Italian communities of Brownsville — were not soldiers of any particular family. They were independent contractors whose services were available to any member of the national syndicate upon appropriate authorization from the Commission.
The system worked with striking efficiency for over a decade. A boss in Chicago could order a killing in Miami without any direct contact with the men who would carry it out. The contract moved through intermediaries. The killers conducted their own surveillance. The execution was clean. The money moved through channels no different from any other criminal payment. Law enforcement had no tool capable of penetrating these separations through conventional investigative means.
The Men Who Did the Work
Harry "Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss was Murder Inc.'s most prolific practitioner. His personal kill count has been estimated at between 30 and more than 100 murders, and his approach to his work was notable for its methodical detachment. He is documented as having used ice picks, rope, fire, and firearms in various combinations depending on the requirements of specific contracts. He preferred methods that minimized noise and maximized the difficulty of identifying victims after the fact.
Abe "Kid Twist" Reles was the organization's other senior operational figure, a man whose physical courage was matched only by his capacity for violence. Reles was responsible for numerous murders and served as a connection between the Brooklyn operational base and the senior leadership of the national syndicate. His later decision to cooperate with prosecutors would destroy the organization he had spent his career building.
Martin "Buggsy" Goldstein, Vito "Chicken Head" Gurino, and Frank "Dasher" Abbandando rounded out the core operational team. These were not glamorous figures in the manner of the film gangster — they were working professionals whose trade happened to be killing, and they conducted themselves with the matter-of-fact competence of skilled tradespeople.
The End: Reles Cooperates
In 1940, Brooklyn District Attorney William O'Dwyer arrested Abe Reles on a murder charge. Reles, calculating that the available evidence was sufficient to send him to the electric chair, made the decision that destroyed Murder Inc.: he cooperated fully with prosecutors, providing testimony that covered dozens of murders across a decade of criminal operations.
The trials that followed were devastating. Pittsburgh Phil Strauss and Martin Goldstein were convicted and executed. Lepke Buchalter himself was ultimately convicted and executed at Sing Sing in March 1944, making him the only major organized crime boss in American history to be put to death by the state.
Albert Anastasia was scheduled to be prosecuted based on Reles's testimony. In November 1941, Abe Reles fell from a window of his Coney Island hotel room while under police guard and died. Anastasia was never prosecuted. He went on to lead what became the Gambino crime family until his own assassination in 1957, shot in a barber's chair at the Park Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan.
What Murder Inc. Meant for Organized Crime
The destruction of Murder Inc. forced the national syndicate to reorganize its enforcement operations in ways that dispersed the function across individual families rather than centralizing it in a Brooklyn-based specialist operation. The organizational lessons remained: the separation of authority from execution, the use of intermediaries to insulate senior figures, and the professional approach to criminal violence as a business function rather than a personal matter.
The FBI's eventual development of the RICO statute in 1970, specifically designed to prosecute criminal organizations rather than individual crimes, was in part a response to the organizational sophistication that Murder Inc. had demonstrated. The statute made it possible to prosecute mob bosses for crimes ordered but not personally committed, closing the gap that Murder Inc.'s separation of authority had exploited.
FAQs About Murder Inc.
How many people did Murder Inc. kill? Estimates range from 400 to 1,000 murders during Murder Inc.'s operational period, though the precise number cannot be determined.
Who ran Murder Inc.? Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and Albert Anastasia ran the operation. Lepke was executed in 1944; Anastasia survived because key witness Abe Reles died before he could testify.
What happened to Murder Inc.? The organization was effectively destroyed after Abe Reles turned government witness in 1940, leading to multiple convictions and executions of senior members including Lepke Buchalter.