Well, this gets back to Barrett's point about how we define "power":
Lepke started out as a labor muscleman for a gang operated by Dopey Benny Fein, and later Jacob (Little Augie) Orgen, which hired out to the highest bidders in the constant labor/management wars in NYC's Garment Center. . Lepke and hs pal,Gurrah, took over after murdering Little Augie. But instead of continuing as thugs-for-hire, they set out to control both management and labor in the Garment District.
His first move was against the furriers’ unions. By the end of his first year, both unions and management were paying him $5 million annually for peace. He then attacked the garment unions. His target was the cutters’ union, small but highly strategic: no cutters, no patterns; no patterns, no dresses and suits. All the other unions shortly fell under his thumb. Then he muscled his way into controlling positions in three of the Garment District’s biggest manufacturing companies. Now Lepke had a commanding position in both labor and management. He recognized that trucking was crucial to the industry, so he knocked over the trucking companies and their unions.
By the mid-Thirties, Lepke controlled everything that was made in, and that went in and out of, the Garment District. Sidney Hillman, head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and President Roosevelt’s top labor adviser, allegedly paid Lepke $5,000 a week for peace. He knocked over the handbag industry, the bakers’ union and the movie projectionists' union.
That's where he accumulated annual income estimated by some historians at $300 million. Another measure of his power was how completely he controlled the big-bucks garment industry. He was also smart enough to buy peace with the Mafia by sharing his wealth with Albert Anastasia (who was a partner in Murder Inc.) and Charlie Luciano, who doled out some of his Garment Center income to other mobsters.
But, where Lepke was weak was in overextending himself and being too close to the violence he ordered--a mistake most Mafia Dons avoided by distancing themselves from day to day operations. It was inevitable that someone in Murder Inc. would rat him out. He took it on the lam for almost a year. Finally, three of his "friends--Meyer Lansky, Albert A. and Abner (Longy) Zwillman, convinced him to surrender on Federal drugs and racketeering charges, which they assured him would result in no more than a five- or six-year sentence and protect him from New York’s special prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey, who wanted to send him to the electric chair for his murders. Lepke met with famed radio and newspaper columnist Walter Winchell, who drove him to a car containing FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, to whom he surrendered. He was convicted on the Federal raps in 1941, and sentenced to 14 years in Leavenworth.
But, Lepke was so big that he had become a factor in Presidential politics. Dewey (who was to be the GOP Presidential candidate in 1944 and 1948) charged that FDR was being “soft” on Lepke to keep him quiet about his relationship with Sidney Hillman. The Justice Department obligingly turned Lepke over to Dewey, who prosecuted and convicted him for murder. Lepke was executed in 1944, the first and only mob boss to die in the chair. The Mangano/Anastasia/Gambino family, and the Luccheses,took over his labor and trucking rackets.
