Murder, Inc, has become one of the best known big business enterprises in the country since the District Attorney of Brooklyn startled the nation by the exposure of a crime syndicate which operates major rackets from coast to coast and commits homicide on contract, writes Joseph Freeman in the "American Mercury" Two Brooklyn leaders of the syndicate have been sentenced to death; a secoríi murder trial involving other leaders is under way at this writing; a third group has been indicted on capital charges in Los Angeles. Further indictments are inevitable—at least 57 killings have already been traced to the slaughter combine.
The phase of the sinister story that has not been sufficiently explored, however, and it really the most significant, is how the killers got that way, how they got caught up and prospered in the lethal business. This phase may best be delineated in a close-up of two types in the homicidal hierarchy—a "vice president" or big shot of Murder, Inc. at one end, and a lowly trooper or punk at the other. Confessions provide a fairly detailed picture of how the crime cartel, covering forty-eight states, recruits and trains its personnel. The direct quotations from Abe (Kid Twist) Reles, star witness for the prosecution, and Abe (Pretty) Levine have never before been published.
Admissions by these and other members of the trust emphasize that the underworld is a grotesque caricature of the upper world. The racket monopoly is a deliberate imitation of modern trusts, "like the Lehman banks, one confession put it, "or the aeroplane ind has its division of profits and its division of labour. Some racketeers specialize in gambling, others in prostitution, others in slot machines, still others in killing. Even murder is done by division of labour. Some punks specialize in stealing, driving or disposing of murder cars; others act as finger men; there are those who wield the deadly ice pick or fire the sawed-off shotgun, and those who get rid of the corpse.
The detailed admissions of Abe Reles to District Attorney O'Dwyer form a running film of modern organized crime. At 33, Reles is slight, kinky-haired, brown-eyed, with a flat nose, low wrinkled forehead and heavy lips. In his native haunts in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn he is known as a cruel, sadistic slugger. His voice is harsh, ironical. The words come rapidly. The, language is clipped, full of that underworld argot in which money is "sugar," confessing is "singing" and a dead body is a "package." Behind this lingo there is"often sardonic humour, and always a shrewd, predatory mind with a strange rationale. Reles considers himself and his associates cool, calculating businessmen operating a vast economic enterprise. There is a fantastic touch of the pride of self-made men in his manner.
"You start stealing," he explained to Prosecuter O'Dwyer, "and you see how it reaches around, and you try to advance yourself. You see the next man in the rackets go higher and "higher, and you want to go higher, too. Everv-Bogy wants to get ahead in the world. Well we also want to advance ourselves higher and higher." If you want to get ahead you've got to fight your way up. "There's nobody to help you go ahead," Reles explains. "Nobody approaches you and says, "Core along with me.' No, you've got to be smart enough to dope the situation out for yourself. You have got io advance yourself, and how you make your bed, that's how you lay in it.
By the time Reles was released from a reform school at 16, he and his pals Bugsy Goldstein and Harry Strauss had graduated from stealing fruit on pushcarts, snatching bundles from trucks and extorting $5 notes from small shopkeepers.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.