Murder Inc. started out as a gang of mostly Jewish thugs who ran rackets in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in the Thirties. Brownsville was one of the highest-crime areas of NYC. They also fought--and won--wars with other Brooklyn gangs.

Lepke Bucholter was probably the most powerful and richest individual gangster of the Thirties. He started as a labor racketeer, then branched out into running unions and several big garmet firms. Then he knocked over trucking in and out of the District; nailed bakery unions, and had a foothold in the movie industry by dominating the projectionists' union. He was so big that the first federal charge against him was violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which put him in the same legal league as US Steel and Standard Oil.

Lepke needed muscle to enforce his will. His partner, Jacob (Gurrah) Shapiro grew up in Brownsville, so Lepke reached out to the Brownsville mob as enforcers. A sharp businessman, Lepke didn't pay Murder Inc. by the hit--that would have encouraged them to hold out for the highest bidder. Instead, he put them on retainer--salaries--which enabled them to pursue their own rackets while being on 24-hour call to Lepke. Lepke also shopped out their services to others, for profit. When Charlie Luciano and the Commission agreed that Dutch Shultz had to go, the job was farmed out to Murder Inc. Charlie "the Bug" Workman was the leader of that hit squad. Albert Anastasia, then a capo in the Mangano Family in the Ocean Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, also had a piece of Murder Inc. and supplied shooters.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Murder Inc. had enough people, and did enough violence, to produce weak links. Brooklyn DA Bill O'Dwyer and his deputy, Burton Turkus, nailed two of them--Abraham "Kid Twist" Reles and Allie "Tick Tock" Tanenbaum--who implicated Lepke in several murders. Lepke took it on the lam and was convicted and executed. The garment rackets went to the Gambinos and the Luccheses.

The name, "Murder Inc." was provided by a tabloid newspaperman of the era. While they did plenty of violence, I seriously doubt that they pulled off 1,000 hits, or that Pittsburg Phil did 500 or even 100.