Louis (Lepke) Buchalter was born in Brooklyn NY in 1897 to Russian immigrant parents—one of 13 children. His father owned a small hardware store. One brother became a dentist, another a college professor and Rabbi, a third was a pharmacist. But, Lepke was drawn to the wild side—he spent his time on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, hanging with labor racketeers like Big Jack Zelig, Dopey Benny Fein and Kid Dropper. He was arrested many times, and served several years in prison (including Sing Sing) for a variety of felony offenses.

In 1923, he and his best pal, Jacob (Gurrah) Shapiro (who got his nickname because his favorite expression, “Get outta here,” came out as “gurrah” in his thick Russian accent) joined Jacob (Little Augie) Orgen’s gang of labor schlammers (hitters), who hired out to the highest bidders in the Garment Center wars between management and labor. In 1927, he and Gurrah whacked Little Augie and took over the gang.

Then Lepke had a powerful epiphany: Instead of hiring out thugs to the highest bidders, like a temp agency with muscle, he would become a harmonizing force in the garment industry—ending the perpetual wars between management and labor by brutalizing, pacifying and controlling both sides, in the process making himself one of the richest and most powerful gangsters of his era. Lepke moved with military precision, often under the premise that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link:

His first move was on the leather and fur dressing “protective associations”—created to protect businesses from cutthroat competition from smaller firms. He zeroed in on the rabbit furriers and their union—small but strategic because rabbit fur was cheaper and more popular than more expensive pelts during the Depression. He eliminated competition, fixed prices, as well as wages for unions he designated—and enforced his will with ruthless violence. Soon they were paying him $10 million a year in tribute.

He next turned his eye toward the garment side. The “weakest link” in their chain was the cutters’ unions—small but absolutely strategic: no cutters, no patterns; no patterns, no dresses, suits and coats. After Lepke knocked over the cutters, other unions fell in line. Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, was rumored to be paying Lepke $5,000 a week. As before, the manufacturers caved in, and he and Gurrah muscled into ownership positions in several of the largest manufacturing firms. Recognizing that trucking was crucial to the garment industry, Lepke took over several Teamsters locals. Now everything that entered the Garment District as cloth and pelts, was turned into clothing, and left as finished products, was controlled by Lepke—and there was peace in the District (cue up Elvis singing “Peace in the Valley”).

Like the big businessman he was, Lepke was a conglomorator. Pursuing some cloak-and-suiters who fled to Brooklyn to escape his clutches, Lepke saw that the baking industry was ripe for picking. He knocked over their trucking locals and muscled several of the largest baking companies. Within a month, every loaf of bread bought in New York was paying a “Lepke tax.” He also grabbed a share of control of the movie industry without stepping foot in California—he knocked over the Motion Picture Operators Union. It was another strategic move based on the weakest link in a chain: No projectionists, empty movie theaters; empty theaters, empty movie studios.
Lepke was so powerful, his reach so pervasive, that the first Federal charge filed against him, in 1936, was for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. It put him in the same league with J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller.

Lepke needed muscle and guns to enforce his rackets. He partnered with Albert Anastasia, street boss of the Mangano Family in Brooklyn, and reached into the Brownsville neighborhood to corral a gang of violent thugs who hung out at Midnight Rose’s candy store at Saratoga and Livonia Avenues. Ever the big businessman, Lepke didn’t pay them for each hit or beating—he put the gangsters on salary ($75 to $125 per week), which cemented their loyalty by leaving them free to pursue their own rackets but on constant call to Lepke. And, he turned “Murder Inc.” as they were known, into a profit center by hiring them out to do hits. The newly formed Commission was one of Murder Inc.’s biggest clients—they carried out the hit on Dutch Shultz because he was threatening to kill New York Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey.

But, Murder Inc. turned out to be the weak link in Lepke’s chain—they couldn’t commit dozens of (some newspapers claimed a thousand) murders without attracting the attention of The Law. Brooklyn DA Bill O’Dwyer (who, ironically, was later elected Mayor of New York City with strong help from Frank Costello) busted several Murder Inc. thugs for murder. Facing the electric chair, they flipped. One of them, Abraham (“Kid Twist”) Reles, had a photographic memory. O’Dwyer’s secretaries took 5,000 pages of notes from Reles that covered more than 50 murders—some of which directly implicated Lepke. He was forced to go on the lam in Brooklyn for more than a year while his rackets started falling apart.

Finally, Lepke was visited by three of his gangster “pals”—reportedly Anastasia, Meyer Lansky and Abner (“Longy”) Zwillman, boss of Newark, NJ. They convinced him to give himself up on a Federal narcotics rap for which he’d serve “only five or six years,” and would keep him out of the clutches of Dewey, who wanted him for murder, In one of the most bizarre chapters in Mob history, Lepke met Walter Winchell, America’s most famous Broadway columnist and radio commentator, in Manhattan. Winchell drove him to a car where FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was waiting for him. Lepke was sentenced to 14 years in Leavenworth. As soon as the Feds were done with him, Lepke was turned over to Dewey, who convicted him of racketeering in the bakery industry, earning him another 30 years in prison. Then, armed with Reles’s confessions, Dewey convicted Lepke in the murder of Joseph Rosen, a Brooklyn candy store owner. He was sentenced to die in the electric chair. (Reles never got to testify against Lepke—he mysteriously fell to his death while trying to “escape” from a window in a hotel room where he was being guarded by a dozen cops. It earned him the sobriquet, “The canary who could sing but couldn’t fly.”)

Lepke unsuccessfully appealed his conviction. Then he threw himself on the Governor of New York’s mercy. The Governor was Dewey who had been elected in 1942 on his prosecution of Lepke. Dewey turned him down, and Lepke was executed in March 1944—the only OC boss to die by the hand of The Law instead of his Mob peers.