http://www.ganglandnews.com/column112.htm

in the article above which is very old i read at the bottom that murder inc was just a myth. is this true? ive been reading up on everything mafia related for almost 2 years now i think and never knew this .

GF69, the usual problem with trying to find the "truth" in organized crime stories is that the criminals don't leave their collected papers, letters and journals to universities so that scholars like you and I can peruse them. In fact, many were illiterate, and their associates regarded talking for the record as fatally stupid.
But, in the case of Murder, Inc., two highly placed squealers--Abraham (Kid Twist) Reles and Allie (Tick Tock) Tanenbaum, gave an immense record to Brooklyn DA Bill O'Dwyer and his assistant, Burton Turkus. Reles, in particular, had a photographic memory. His squealing left stenographers with 5,000 pages of notes, in which he resolved more than 50 murder cases that were still open. Several implicated Louis (Lepke) Bucholter, the biggest gangster of the era, who was eventually sent to the chair on Reles's evidence.
As I've pieced it together from multiple sources:
Lepke Bucholter controlled New York's Garment District, the biggest manufacturing business in the city at the time. He absolutely controlled all the unions-- and he controlled three of the biggest manufacturers, and the trucking in and out of the District, and the Baker's Union, and the Movie Projectionists' Union, and on and on. He was so big and so wealthy ($300M/year) that the first Federal case filed against him was an antitrust suit under the Sherman Act--putting him in the same league as Standard Oil and US Steel. He was so powerful that he became a factor in the 1940 Presidential election (see below).
Lepke needed a lot of muscle to enforce his will. So he and his partner, Jacob (Gurrah) Shapiro, who grew up in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, reached into Brownsville (then a high-crime neighborhood) to form a gang killers and thugs that was later called "Murder, Inc." by Assistant DA Turkus. Murder, Inc., started out as a salaried organization, doing Lepke's bidding. But their salaries ate into Lepke's earnings. Ever the big businessman, Lepke got the idea to turn them into a profit center by hiring them out. That's how Albert Anastasia (then a capo in the Mafia family of Vincent Mangano and the boss of the adjoining Ocean Hill neighborhood) got involved. The myth is that Lepke checked with Anastasia before using his Brownsville thugs to commit murders. The reality is that Anastasia was his biggest customer, and an occasional supplier of shooters (like Louis Capone and Happy Maione).
The Ganglandnews.com article is wrong in characterizing Murder Inc. as a myth, and Reles and his pals as guys who merely organized the rackets in Brownsville. If they were simply local thugs, how explain the fact that Reles's and Tanenbaum's revelations sent Lepke--the biggest gangster in NY history to that time to the chair? How explain that Reles was important enough to be killed in a high-profile "accident"--he fell out of a window of a hotel in which he was being guarded by a dozen cops, almost half of whom were in the room with him at the time of his alleged "accident" (leading to the famous description, "that canary could sing but he couldn't fly")?
Murder Inc. was alleged to have committed almost a thousand murders for Lepke and his customers. Even taking into account that Reles may have exaggerated to save his skin, and that Turkus may have exaggerated to sell his book, there are still enough murders to qualify "Murder Inc."

Two other points:
1. Lepke went into hiding when Twist and Tick Tock started singing. His Garment Center rackets suffered during his absence. Three gangster colleagues--Meyer Lansky, Abner (Longie) Zwillman and Anastasia--convinced him to give himself up on a Federal dope rap. He did, surrendering to columnist Walter Winchell, who drove him to a car containing FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. But then, special prosecutor Tom Dewey (later a GOP Presidential candidate) charged that President Roosevelt was allowing Lepke to plead to the dope rap to keep Lepke from testifying that he regularly received bribes from Sidney Hillman, a Garment Union official who was FDR's closest labor adviser. So, the Feds gave him over to Dewey, who sent him to the chair. That's when Anastasia took over the Garment and trucking rackets that then became the main earnings of the Anastasia (later Gambino) Family.
2. I grew up in Brownsville more than a decade after the heyday of Murder, Inc. As a kid,I worked in Midnight Rose's candy store on the corner of Saratoga and Livonia Avenues, a block from my home, which was Murder Inc.'s headquarters years earlier. Neither I nor the candy store's owner knew about this.

Turnbull, once again you have come through so graciously with your wisdom on organized crime, thank you!

Turnbull, your amazing, no-one I know has a knowledge like yours for these matters.

FH