In the early morning hours of September 24th, 1941, the body of a well-dressed man was discovered on the passenger seat of a sedan in Brooklyn, just blocks from a police station. He had been shot execution style twice in the back of the head. Several hours later, the many New York dailies had bold front page stories about a gambler who had been killed, named Abe “Jew Murphy” Babchick.

His death would be the start of a controversial police investigation that was ultimately labeled one of the most baffling cases in Brooklyn history.

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I'm Jana Marcus, and I'm going to tell you an incredible story over the next few weeks that you have never heard of. It's about not one but two related cold cases from that golden age of the New York gangster that I became determined to try and solve.

It's a tale about a family's code of silence. It's about the mob, the justice system, and even a few ghosts. This is Line of Blood, a true story.

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Family mysteries travel across generations, and sometimes they become buried and disappear in the passing years. That is, until someone begins asking questions. With my family, I was that person. But in my case, the mystery was much more than an embarrassment or a scandal. It turned out to be a threat of terrible violence.

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I'm going to tell you my story about how I accidentally found the first curious clue into a mysterious saga that spanned almost 28 years of my life to try and figure out. It became a story not only of my family, But an incredible piece of lost New York history.

 

So let's start at the beginning of the journey.

​This is Episode 1, The Secret Drawer.

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The year is 1988. I'm 26 years old. I'd been living in New York City for several years after graduating college. I was a young photographer hanging out in the East Village and trying to be hip and cool at all costs. But I was also hanging out a lot with my paternal grandmother, Grandma Rae. She seemed a typical Jewish grandma, just kind of dialed up a notch or two.

She lived at a fancy address on Central Park South and always appeared very cultured and refined, despite all those Yiddish curse words. She could be lots of fun, but she also had a dark side that I didn't really become aware of until I was older. You see, I grew up in California, although all our extended relatives lived in New York.

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My parents had made that great escape to the West Coast to be artists and teachers in the free thinking milieu of the 1960s. Because of this, I wasn't close to relatives on my father's side of the family. We only really knew Grandma Rae, his mother.

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On this particular day, in 1988, Grandma Rae was getting ready for a big family dinner party in honor of my father. He was visiting New York, which he rarely ever did. Many of the Brooklyn relatives were attending this party, and although I didn't feel very connected to that side of the family, Grandma would have these parties every couple years, and they were so much fun. Everyone was together, talking at the same time, shouting in broken Yiddish and laughing. It was all a very fiddler on the roof-ish, zest for life atmosphere.

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On this day, I went to Grandma's house early to help her prepare for the family gathering.

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So before I go on, let me tell you who some of the key players are in this story. Here's the background:

There's Grandma Rae; my father, Mort; and his cousins, brother and sister, Leo and Carol.

Now, you know, it's funny the things we're told as we grow up that we just never question. For instance, my father, an only child, was sent away to private boarding school starting at the age of three. Now, that seems dramatically young to actually be true. But he always said he had an Oliver Twist childhood with a Jewish accent.

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Now, as funny as that may be, the truth is he had a lonely, sad childhood. He was always running away from these schools to come home and be with family. But Grandma would never let him stay. Even during summer break or winter holidays, she left him at the schools. I mean, what was she doing with her time? It's questionable, right?

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Well, my father Mort had only met his father once. His father had been Grandma Rae's third of five husbands. Yep, you heard that right. Grandma had been married five times. And check this out. I've never seen one of her wedding photos. Ever. Grandma Rae was a mystery. She had traversed the slums of Brownsville as a young immigrant from Russia and became a wealthy, cultured woman living on Central Park South in Manhattan. She didn't like to talk about the past, nor did anyone in the family. Except for cousin Leo.

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My father's cousin Leo was 16 years older than him and was really my father's role model growing up. They adored each other and Leo would take him on these "guy adventures" in Brooklyn, like the baseball games at Ebbets Field or eating their way through Brooklyn. Exuberant and fun loving, Leo was the storyteller of great tales in our family. But you know what? They were tales that no one ever really believed were true. Lastly, there was Cousin Carol, Leo's sister. She was also monumental in my father's young years. She had a sassy sense of humor and she reminded me of the TV comedian Roseanne Barr, both in her looks and her quick witted remarks.

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So the scene is set for the approaching dinner party. Grandma Rae, my father Mort, and cousins Leo and Carol, plus their spouses, children, and grandchildren, and other cousins as well.

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When I was done helping Grandma set her long mahogany dinner table for the party, and she had finished interrogating me about the men I was dating and the style of clothing I was wearing, I went to go waste time in the other room.

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Now this room housed what I called the Secret Drawer. The bottom of her dresser had a big drawer that my sister and I named, not because it was secret, but because it held treasures we always found intriguing and amusing. There were piles of photographs and cards and papers haphazardly shoved together. There were even rhinestone replicas of her original diamond jewelry in these stacked, shiny little boxes. It was a peek into the past I could never get her to talk about. It was a glamorous Grandma Rae at nightclubs in 1930s New York. It was all reminiscent of old noir films.

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Well, as I sat in front of the drawer, I dove my hand inside and found old pictures of my first birthday party.It was pretty funny.

I dove my hand in again, and this time I found photos of my dad in the Air Force. Pretty funny.

I dove my hand in for a third time, felt around, but this time, way in the back, under hundreds of loose photos, I felt this old, withered envelope. I pulled it out, and inside I found a disintegrating newspaper article.

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It had the date September 29th, 1941, and the headline read, “Neighbors Ignorant of Babchick's Racket.”

Well, I read through the story, and it was about this polite man named Abe Babchick from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, who all the neighbors thought was a well to do restaurateur. The story went on that he was actually making a huge amount of money in the policy racket –Whatever that was. And, he was friends with someone named " Kid Twist" Reles of Murder Incorporated. This Abe Babchick had been found murdered in his car, execution style.

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I was immediately curious why Grandma had this article in her drawer. I mean, had she known this Abe Babchick? What was a policy racket? And what the heck was Murder Incorporated?

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I put the envelope away and went to go ask Grandma about it, but she shushed me away. She was way too busy cooking. So I figured, okay, I'll wait and I'll ask Dad and Leo at the party.

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Later that evening, when dinner had ended, relatives moved to separate areas of the apartment for conversation. I made a beeline straight for Dad and Cousin Leo. They were laughing uproariously about some childhood memory, but I interrupted.

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“Hey guys, do you know who someone named Abe Babchick was?”

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Well, suddenly Leo got very excited and started waving his arms back and forth. “Don't let your grandmother hear you say that name. We shouldn't talk about this!”

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But my father responded, “Oh, yeah, that was my uncle. That's grandma's brother.”

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I was like, whoa, that's grandma's brother?

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Dad asked me why, and I told him about the article I found. Well, he and Leo follow me into grandma's bedroom. Hot on their trail is cousin Carol. Now we're all in the bedroom and Carol's like, “What's going on?”

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I retrieved the article and handed it to them.

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“Oh my God, look at what you found,” said Leo.

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Carol responded, “Oy vey, look at what you found. Your grandmother's gonna start screaming. Put that thing away.”

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But my father was surprised. “Abe was a gangster? I thought he was a restaurateur. Are you sure this is our Uncle Abe?”

This had not been the story that my father had been told. And Leo and Carol obviously knew some ruckus was about to happen. Just then, Rae walked into the room. We all turned and looked at her at once as if we were guilty of some crime.

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“What's with all the kibbitzing in here? Come and have dessert,” Grandma demanded. But when she saw the article in my father's hand, she lunged to grab it and started screaming, “Don't say my brother's name! Don't say his name! Give that to me! Give that to me!”

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She took the article and she ran into the kitchen, barricading herself inside. We could hear pots and pans flying about. She was wailing at the top of her lungs. Grandma had gone absolutely ballistic.

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I was standing there in shock. My father was in shock. Cousins Leo and Carol, well they were just shaking their heads. Other cousins were now banging on the kitchen door to be let in and know what had happened.

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Meanwhile, Leo sat me and my father down and said, “Look, Uncle Abe was your grandmother's favorite brother. She was devastated when he was murdered. He made a lot of money, he supported the family, and yes, he used to hang out with Kid Twist Reles. He would come over for dinner at your great grandma's house on Sunday nights.”

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“Who's Kid Twist?” I asked. But they didn't bother to tell me.

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So a big uproar had taken place when mentioning this uncle's name. But Carol and Leo, they knew enough to try and tame the volatile reaction from Grandma. I was stunned. This big story had just sort of dropped into my lap. I was curious and I really wanted to know more. I mean, this couldn't be the whole story, right?

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While Dad was still in New York, we went to go visit Cousin Carol at her home in the Bronx and hopefully get some more juicy tidbits about this story. Well, the day we were there, she didn't say much about Abe, but she did mention Uncle Frankie the Cowboy. She and Dad were reminiscing about how they loved their Uncle Frankie, and he would take them for pony rides at Coney Island.

Frankie had been Abe and Grandma Rae's older brother.

 

Now you see, my generation, and my father's as well, had been told that Frankie was a cowboy who broke horses in the West. The story that we were told was that in the mid 1940s he called the family that he would be over for dinner. But he never showed up, and no one ever heard from him again. He was just gone.

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While Carol and Dad are laughing and sharing these great memories, I see this framed photograph on display in Carol's living room. It's this happy looking man in a pinstripe suit and a fedora cocked over one eye.

 

I asked Carol, “Hey, who's this guy in the photograph? Carol replied, "Awww, that was your Uncle Frankie!"

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Uh, but, that didn't look like any cowboy. There were no bandanas around his neck. He looked like a character straight out of a Damon Runyon story.

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Well, this was all getting a little kooky. I mean, we've got one brother, Abe, who's murdered, and seems to be buddies with a guy named Kid Twist from Murder Incorporated. And now, we've got another brother, Frankie the Cowboy, who mysteriously vanished. And he actually looks like a gangster, not a cowboy.

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Well, none of this was making any sense, and obviously no one was going to tell me what was going on. So I decided to go to the library and do some research.

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Now keep in mind, this was long before the personal computer was around. In the old days, the way you did research was at a library looking through microfilm, or at the state archives in card catalogs. This was browsing through dates for hours. Nothing was findable with just a click, like it is today.

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Well, my first day at the New York Public Library, I learned there were 10 daily newspapers in New York back in the 1940s. That's a lot of newspapers to read, but I was told many of them were not on microfilm or available for viewing. But of the four or five papers I was able to read, I found tons of articles about this Uncle Abe's murder. It had been headline news for several weeks in the papers.

I started throwing coins into the viewing contraption, and xeroxed everything I could find. I was so excited, I thought I had hit the jackpot. Mystery solved!

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But later, when I read through those articles, there was a lot I didn't understand. What was a policy racket? I didn't know what "grafting" meant, and I still didn't know who the heck Murder Incorporated was. There were tons of conflicting stories in the papers about Abe's last name and what had actually happened the night of his death.

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But I was excited. I thought I was done. I thought this was all there really was to know about Abe's murder. So I called my father, who was now back in California, and told him of my discovery. He was invested in the story. I mean, he had known Abe as a child, and he was now writing a book of poetry about the family.

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So, great! I'd let him figure out the things that I didn't understand. I mean, I had my own life to figure out at the age of 26.

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Time went by, and I moved back to California by the mid 1990s. My father and I would often talk about Abe – who he was, what happened to him. His story was always in the back of our minds.

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Around this time, Grandma Rae decided to move to California for her very, very golden years. She was 90 at this point, and I realized I needed to get more stories from her before it was too late.

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I carefully danced around the mention of her brother Abe, and she shared small amounts of information here and there. But she was a mystery, and I remained very curious about the family and this code of silence that would not be broken. Except for cousin Leo, he was the only one in the family talking, telling those tall tales. But like I said before, most in the family thought he was just making this stuff up.

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One Christmas, we did what most Jewish families do on that day. We ate Chinese food and we went to the movies. Dad took us all to see Warren Beatty in the film “Bugsy.” You know, that biopic about the famous Jewish gangster, Bugsy Siegel?

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Well, when the movie was over, we were all in the car. We were critiquing it, talking about what we liked, what we didn't like, and Grandma wasn't saying anything. So I tapped her on the shoulder and I said, "Hey Grandma, did you enjoy the movie?"

She just turned and she looked at us and said, “Nah, Bugsy wasn't anything like that.”

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Well, count a beat, and then we all started asking her a million questions at once. What do you mean? Did you know Bugsy? What's this about?  She just turned her head, looked out the window – had nothing else to say.

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And you see, it was moments like that, little crumbs that Grandma and relatives would drop that would make me continually eager to understand not only who she was, but what was going on with this family. I realize now that whatever the truth might be about Uncle Abe, Uncle Frankie, and Grandma, one thing was certain, if I wanted to find out, I would have to continue to seek it out myself.

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Years went by, and although I considered myself an eager researcher, there just simply was no information to find. I had tidbits of family hints, photographs and those xeroxed newspaper articles. I even read history books about gangsters and the Jewish mob. And interestingly, Abe was not mentioned in any of the books I was reading. I found this odd, since his death had been headline news. But like I said, there was just nothing to find.

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In some ways, you can view my story as a technology story. It wasn't until the early to mid 2000s that the Internet was blossoming, and then along came Ancestry.com. They changed everything. Once they were on the scene, there were census records and immigration records and so many things to look up and review, with just the click of a button. This was when I became more and more pushed to find answers. That's really when I became an obsessed sleuth.

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In the 1980s, when I was spending a lot of time night clubbing in the East Village, I had become good friends with a bartender named Mark. Now, since leaving New York City, whenever I returned for annual visits, I would get together with old friends, and Mark had remained one of my closest pals. By the 2000s, Mark had made the jump from mixology to criminology.

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Yeah, he had actually become a detective with the NYPD. Because of this, I nicknamed him Mark-the-Cop. Over the years, I had told Mark about Uncle Abe's murder. He loved New York history and a good mob story. So out of friendship, he offered to help me do some research. I was thrilled to have his help and his interest. I felt like Nancy Drew with a Hardy Boy!

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Well, Mark explained some of those terms from the newspapers that I hadn't understood. For instance, when police take money dishonestly, it's known as grafting. A policy racket? Well, that was actually an illegal lottery or numbers game that was played in poor neighborhoods across the United States before the lottery became legal in 1964. The way it worked was that a player would place their bets with a bookie at a semi private location that acted as a betting parlor. A runner would then carry the money and the betting slips between the parlor and the headquarters, which was also known as a policy bank. The name Policy actually came from its similarity to insurance, both seen as a gamble on the future.

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And Murder Incorporated? Well, they wound up being an assassin group for the Mob. Okay, that took me back for a hot minute. Was Abe a part of that? Well, we'll get to that in a future episode.

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Well, I asked Mark if we could find some police files on Abe's case, and maybe even crime scene photos. So Mark did some digging and found that police records before the 1970s were not computerized and kept in his warehouse in Queens. Although these records should be public information, you could only access them with a police escort. Mark was kind enough to take a day off from work to see what he could find.

 

When he went there, he discovered the place was a disaster, files strewn everywhere. He told me, “I couldn't find anything. It'll take weeks to look through that place because nothing is in date order. And, if there is something fishy about Abe's case, Jana, the records were probably conveniently lost. Every cop has had access to that place for decades. If something was there, it's probably gone.”

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Well, Mark and I had run into a brick wall. There were no police records to be found. I could find no documentation about Abe, except for his death certificate. I only had newspaper stories to piece it all together. So I went back to all those xeroxed newspaper articles I had found decades ago. When I reread them, they were still as confusing to me as they had been back then.

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The newspapers had so many different accounts of what actually happened around Uncle Abe's murder. It didn't make sense. Something was really wrong here. I felt it was time to take action and do some serious, serious research.

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I mean, it was 2007. It had been almost 20 years since my initial research and there had to be a plethora of new information available.

With my renewed vigor in the case and my enlisted Hardy Boy, Mark-the-Cop, I couldn't wait to go back to New York City.

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With my bags packed, I was ready to hunt for the truth. And guess what I found out? Well, I'll tell you that next time as we continue to unravel the story of Line of Blood.

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You can join me in the investigation, episode by episode, by checking out the historical files on our website, www.lineofblood-podcast.com. If you've enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, tell your friends.

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If you want even more of a deep dive, check out the book version of Line of Blood, which is available at all online booksellers. Want to give a special thanks to Eric Sassaman, Valerie Marcus Ramshur, Amy Scott, Suki Wessling, and Andrew Ceglio. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.