Read Online 100 Most Infamous Criminals by Jo Durden Smith - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jo Durden Smith
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violence – and he died by it. The boss of Murder Incorporated, New York’s so-called ‘Lord High Executioner,’ was ultimately executed by those he’d once served. He had, to use a later expression, by then passed his sell-by date. The days of the gun-toting street-fighter were over.
Alberto Anastasia seems to have arrived in New York from Sicily as an illegal immigrant during the First World War. But he was soon cutting his criminal teeth – like so many other future Mafia leaders – in the gang of Jacob ‘Little Augie’ Orgen, a New York labour-union racketeer. Orgen’s assassination in 1927 split the gang into factions, and Anastasia soon threw in his lot with the three men who were to reshape and reorganize the Mafia on a national basis: Meyer Lansky, Vito Genovese and ‘Lucky’ Luciano. He became one of their strong-arms and hit-men, alongside ‘Bugsy’ Siegel; when the New York Commission – or National Criminal Syndicate – was finally set up, he became the founding father of its enforcement arm, taking responsibility for long-distance contract killings.
In 1940, though, Abe Reles, one of Anastasia’s killers-for-hire, turned stoolie and started giving detailed evidence about dozens of murders in which Anastasia was implicated. He went underground and only re-emerged in November 1941 when Reles had an unfortunate ‘accident,’ falling six floors to his death from the hotel in which the Brooklyn District Attorney had hidden him, under supposed police protection.
No one was ever charged in Reles’s death. But the case against Anastasia, with him out of the way, collapsed; and he was free to play his part, after the war and the exile of ‘Lucky’ Luciano to Italy, in the vicious mob battles for control of Luciano’s gambling, prostitution and drugs operations in the US. He emerged as head of the Mangano family. But his style of doing business – and his increasing ambition – didn’t sit well with the bosses of the other clans. So on October 25th 1957, when Anastasia went down to the basement barber’s shop in Manhattan’s Park-Sheraton Hotel for his regular haircut, two men followed him and shot him to death with automatic pistols as he sat in the barber’s chair. Then they threw down their weapons, went back up to street-level and disappeared.
Ten years later, a Mafia soldier called Joe Valachi claimed that the killing had been ordered by Anastasia’s old associate, Vito Genovese, on the grounds that Anastasia had been invading his turf. The members of the Commission had agreed. In the old days, of course, at this point they would have got in touch with Murder Incorporated – and Alberto Anastasia himself.
Joe Ball
J oe Ball was a large man, over six feet tall, with a big appetite and lots of muscle. He was also an expert with guns; he kept alligators – and he scared people. He scared the ranchowner next to his hooch house in Elmendorf, Texas so badly that he moved his family to California even before he sold up. His third wife took off in the same direction and for the same reason, and when a neighbour came calling one day to complain about a foul smell from a rain barrel near the alligator pool, he learned never to complain again. Even the cops weren’t immune. When one of them asked in passing why so many of the waitresses at Ball’s saloon, The Sociable Club, seemed just to stay for a while and then vanish, he got a gun in his face and a death-threat for his pains – and not even he took it any further.
Ball was born a rich kid in 1894 – his family had cattle and were big in business. But, after spending time at the University of Texas, he just didn’t seem interested in anything his parents had to offer. Instead he went to the bad and made a small fortune of his own as a bootlegger, doing most of his business from bed. His clients said that he didn’t even bother to look up much as he busied himself with whichever young girl was currently occupying it. Just so long
Alberto Anastasia seems to have arrived in New York from Sicily as an illegal immigrant during the First World War. But he was soon cutting his criminal teeth – like so many other future Mafia leaders – in the gang of Jacob ‘Little Augie’ Orgen, a New York labour-union racketeer. Orgen’s assassination in 1927 split the gang into factions, and Anastasia soon threw in his lot with the three men who were to reshape and reorganize the Mafia on a national basis: Meyer Lansky, Vito Genovese and ‘Lucky’ Luciano. He became one of their strong-arms and hit-men, alongside ‘Bugsy’ Siegel; when the New York Commission – or National Criminal Syndicate – was finally set up, he became the founding father of its enforcement arm, taking responsibility for long-distance contract killings.
In 1940, though, Abe Reles, one of Anastasia’s killers-for-hire, turned stoolie and started giving detailed evidence about dozens of murders in which Anastasia was implicated. He went underground and only re-emerged in November 1941 when Reles had an unfortunate ‘accident,’ falling six floors to his death from the hotel in which the Brooklyn District Attorney had hidden him, under supposed police protection.
No one was ever charged in Reles’s death. But the case against Anastasia, with him out of the way, collapsed; and he was free to play his part, after the war and the exile of ‘Lucky’ Luciano to Italy, in the vicious mob battles for control of Luciano’s gambling, prostitution and drugs operations in the US. He emerged as head of the Mangano family. But his style of doing business – and his increasing ambition – didn’t sit well with the bosses of the other clans. So on October 25th 1957, when Anastasia went down to the basement barber’s shop in Manhattan’s Park-Sheraton Hotel for his regular haircut, two men followed him and shot him to death with automatic pistols as he sat in the barber’s chair. Then they threw down their weapons, went back up to street-level and disappeared.
Ten years later, a Mafia soldier called Joe Valachi claimed that the killing had been ordered by Anastasia’s old associate, Vito Genovese, on the grounds that Anastasia had been invading his turf. The members of the Commission had agreed. In the old days, of course, at this point they would have got in touch with Murder Incorporated – and Alberto Anastasia himself.
Joe Ball
J oe Ball was a large man, over six feet tall, with a big appetite and lots of muscle. He was also an expert with guns; he kept alligators – and he scared people. He scared the ranchowner next to his hooch house in Elmendorf, Texas so badly that he moved his family to California even before he sold up. His third wife took off in the same direction and for the same reason, and when a neighbour came calling one day to complain about a foul smell from a rain barrel near the alligator pool, he learned never to complain again. Even the cops weren’t immune. When one of them asked in passing why so many of the waitresses at Ball’s saloon, The Sociable Club, seemed just to stay for a while and then vanish, he got a gun in his face and a death-threat for his pains – and not even he took it any further.
Ball was born a rich kid in 1894 – his family had cattle and were big in business. But, after spending time at the University of Texas, he just didn’t seem interested in anything his parents had to offer. Instead he went to the bad and made a small fortune of his own as a bootlegger, doing most of his business from bed. His clients said that he didn’t even bother to look up much as he busied himself with whichever young girl was currently occupying it. Just so long
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