Welcome back to Line of Blood. I'm Jana Marcus. I'm recounting the sordid clues of two cold cases from the golden age of the New York gangster, that I was determined to solve.

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This is Episode 3: The Little Professor, Kid Twist, and the War for Brownsville.

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Last time we learned that the family received a threatening phone call just days after Uncle Abe's murder. The voice on the other end of the line had said, “If anyone tries to find out what happened to Abe, we'll kill the whole family, starting with the children.”

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I found this threat to be absolutely bone chilling. I mean, no wonder the family was so scared and had remained silent for decades, never mentioning Abe's name or speaking of the past. Maybe that was the reason my father had been sent away to those schools at such a young age. And even 25 years later, Cousin Leo always sent his daughters away to camp in the summertime. As he said, “No Babchick relative should just be hanging out in Brooklyn if they don't have to be.”

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The threat also proved this was a situation of incredible magnitude. I had to know what it was all about. I became more and more driven to really understand who Abe had been and how he had become part of a dark underworld that led to his ultimate demise.

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Today's episode can really be seen as a story about tipping points. Decisions, if you will. A situation that pushes someone to make a choice that changes the course of their lives and their family's lives forever.

I've often wondered what was the tipping point for my great grandfather when he decided to have his family leave their village in the Ukraine to come to America in 1914.

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Those kinds of decisions led to so many difficulties. I mean, they had no money, no education. They didn't speak the language. And we all know those familiar immigrant tales of working in a sweatshop for 14-hours a day, trying to make a living so that their children could have a better future.

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But what if they didn't choose to do that? What if they made different choices that led them down a different path? For instance, the gangsters or the racketeers.

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Well, think about this: How does one go from being a nine-year-old boy on a boat to America, and then twelve years later become the king of the Brooklyn Rackets? I mean, how does that happen? What is the tipping point?

Well, I wanted to understand the New York in which Uncle Abe grew up in, and how he was connected to Kid Twist Reles of Murder Incorporated. Remember, Cousin Leo had shared they were childhood friends, and Kid Twist frequently came to dinner at Great Grandma's house in Brooklyn on Sunday nights.

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I thought that learning the origin story of Murder Incorporated could help me understand the circumstances of Abe's life. You know, often Jewish gangsters are referred to as a lost breed of people, a product of their situation where ordinary men were really pushed to do extraordinary things.

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I like to think that Kid Twist would not have turned out to be the ruthless killer of a murder-for-hire gang had it not been for the circumstances he stumbled upon. And, I ponder what might have been Uncle Abe's defining moments. Did he just fall into the wrong crowd having befriended Reles at a young age? Or did he consciously decide there was no other way to better his life and the life of our family?

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As I put together all the pieces of family stories combined with census and immigration records and written histories of Jewish gangs, a picture started to form of who they were that long ago time in New York City.

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I'm going to tell you how it all started. Are you ready? Here's the origin story.

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Frankie, Abe, and Grandma Rae came to America in 1914. The family settled in the East New York section of Brooklyn. Abe was nine-years-old at the time, and he saw his father stagger home after a 14-hour workday in a factory.

Yet, Abie must have also seen the well dressed, pinky ringed men of the neighborhood collecting money on the street corners. They were the mobsters. They were the Jews who would not be victimized any longer. We like to call them “Tough Jews.” They would make it out of the ghetto at any cost, and they were willing to fight back and grab their piece of the American dream.

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Abie also heard his father grumble about how he refused to work for anyone any longer and saved all his money and started to buy up these small lots around Brownsville where he finally built the family home on Avenue B.

I can imagine that the lessons for young Abie must have just been fraught with gaining independence, work for yourself, get what you can, support the family.

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So around the corner from the Avenue B home lived another Abe, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles. Now these two Abes grew up together and they were close pals. And according to cousin Leo, Great Grandma thought Reles was, “such a nice boy. What a mensch!”

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So upon graduation of the 8th grade, Uncle Abe was given the title the Little Professor. He was very intelligent and had gone farther in school than any of his Babchick siblings thus far. Grandma Rae, she only had a fourth-grade education.

Soon after leaving school, Abe took a job for a short time selling pretzels at Ebbets Field during the ball games. Reles, on the other hand, well, he was arrested for stealing $2 worth of gum from a vending machine. In the days of penny candy, that's an awful lot of gum. Can you imagine him running away with 200 gum balls? Oy! Well, Reles was caught and sent to a children's reform school.

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As the two Abe's grew into adulthood, they both found themselves unemployed after businesses they worked for folded. Now they had a lot of leisure time on their hands, and Uncle Abe and Reles, well, they ended up haunting pool halls and candy stores.

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These were really the local stomping grounds and social clubs for young Brooklyn boys. Back then, the Brownsville neighborhood was cramped and congested. The young kids, they were really trying to Americanize themselves, and home life, well, it just felt unbearable with parents who were stuck in the old ways.

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So, this led to more and more kids really hanging out on the streets. Now, many of the Jewish kids formed gangs, and they tended to lean toward thievery rather than violent acts. But many of these gang kids did grow up to become masters of their craft.

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So, in this backroom culture of pool halls and candy stores, social success was everything. It equaled power. Because the right relationships on the streets added to one's clout, and it was all about doing favors for those who were more powerful. Well, in the late 1920s, that meant the Shapiro brothers– Irving, Meyer, and Willie Shapiro. They were a group of American hoods who controlled the Brooklyn rackets. If you wanted any part of the street action, it started by doing favors for them.

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Reles started committing petty crimes for the Shapiros. It was little stuff, like minor theft and breaking and entering. But, Reles was arrested on one of his missions and sent to the Elmira Reformatory upstate. He was pissed that the Shapiros didn't step in to help. You see, usually if you worked for a kingpin, they would bail you out. But the Shapiros, they left him in the Reformatory.

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So during Reles's two year sentence, he started plotting how he would work for himself. The plan was simple at first. He planned to do some number running on the side. When Reles was released, he and his chums, which included Uncle Abe, jumped right into making money for themselves, keeping their side business out of sight of the Shapiros.

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It was at this time, when Uncle Abe was about 23-years-old, that the first newspaper reports actually appear about him. He started as a policy collector for Reles and then he worked his way up being promoted to the thumbs-up man because of his wide acquaintance within the neighborhood. You see, whenever Reles talked to a possible prospect, Abe would give the thumbs-up gesture if the stranger's rating was okay. Abe was like the Dun and Bradstreet of Brooklyn.

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As they became more successful, Reles and his gang, they got cocky. They added to their list of enterprises the beer racket, loan sharking, and muscling in on the Shapiro's slot machine business.

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Well, Reles and his pals would install slot machines and pinball machines in the back rooms of local candy stores. And then they'd receive a cut of the earnings. Now, you know, back then, it was believed that pinball machines actually bred crime and juvenile delinquency. It's hard to believe, but that's what they thought back then.

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By the late 1920s, the prosperity of Reles's group and their encroachment on the Shapiros' territory, well, it angered the brothers Irving and Meyer to absolutely no end. They realized they needed to stamp out Reles and his gang.

So Meyer decided to send an undeniable message. He kidnapped and viciously assaulted Reles's girlfriend before letting her go.

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Revenge was imminent and necessary for what the Shapiros had done, and Reles no longer wanted to hide his rackets in the shadows. He felt it was time to take over. This moment was Reles's tipping point.

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But in order to wipe out the Shapiros' monopoly on Brownsville, he needed to build his alliances. That's when Reles and his gang started frequenting a patisserie café owned by mafioso Louis Capone and Albert “the High Lord Executioner” Anastasia. It was a popular hangout for young hoods, where Capone would give them free food and entice them into doing criminal deeds for him and Mafia boss Anastasia. They were basically grooming them.

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So it was at this cafe that Reles met an Italian gang led by Harry “Happy” Maione and Frank “The Dasher” Abbandando.

They combined their gangs. And the alliance was approved by Albert Anastasia. And this strengthened their position against the Shapiros. But the association also connected them to the Jewish mobsters Ben “Bugsy” Siegel and Meyer Lansky.

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Now Siegel and Lansky, they were the most feared and affluent underworld organization working on the east side of Manhattan at that time.

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So, under this watchful eye of the Mafia, Reles's new combination, combined with Harry “Happy” Maione's gang, was in business. Reles had the troops he needed. The war with the Shapiros was on.

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It's 1930, and Reles, he makes the first attempt at revenge on Meyer Shapiro for the rape of his girlfriend. Reles's newly formed gang was now known as the Brownsville Boys. They shot Meyer Shapiro while he was standing in front of a restaurant one night. But, Meyer survived. And then his brother, Irving, retaliated with a plan to completely exterminate Reles and his men the following week.

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Well, Reles was shot in the back, and his comrade, Happy Maione, had the tip of his nose blown off, and others were injured as well. The papers, they called these the Slot Machine Wars. But you know what? Everything quieted down as Reles and Maione recovered from their wounds. But a year later, in July of 1931, the war was back on.

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 This time, the Brownsville Boys targeted Irving Shapiro. It was quiet on Blake Avenue at 3 a. m. when the Brownsville boys parked in the shadows, waiting for Irving to come home. When he arrived and reached for his house keys, the silence was broken by ten rounds of bullets. Irving died instantly. Well, Meyer Shapiro, he swore he would avenge his brother's murder.

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Sawed off shotguns, spattering bullets, screeching tires became the norm all that summer between the two rival mobs. Two months later, Meyer was killed. Reles, Happy Maione, and two of the other Brownsville boys were arrested for the murder, but were released due to lack of evidence. Eventually, the third brother, Willie, was killed as well.

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With Kid Twist's revenge complete, he and his gang were now free to completely run the rackets in East New York. They made their home base a candy store. Upstairs, on the second floor, they plotted and planned their various endeavors. The candy store proprietor was an elderly woman named Rose. She ran the bail bond racket for Reles and also managed his loan shark intake. Often known to keep a light burning till the wee hours so the Brownsville boys could find their way home, the infamous candy store was nicknamed Midnight Rose’s.

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Now keep in mind the Brownsville boys were just running rackets until they had exterminated their rivals. The revenge for his girlfriend's rape and the desire to run Brownsville had been Reles's tipping point. That was when he went from racketeer to murderer.

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At this point, Uncle Abe is now in his mid-twenties. He was arrested several times for lottery running, consorting with other criminals, and possession of a gun. But the charges never stuck. How much of Reles mayhem was he involved in? Well, we just don't know for sure. But we do know he grew up in the Reles gang, and this was the world he lived in.

So you may be wondering, how does this all fit in with the Italian mob? Well, here's my two-minute version of modern Italian mob history. Ready? Here we go.

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At the same time that Reles's gang was coming up, the bloody battle between the two Italian American mafiosi was coming to an end. These were known as the Castellammarese Wars. Now, this is really interesting. The underlying tone of the war was a generational divide between the Old World Sicilians and a younger, more forward thinking group called the Young Turks. Now, the Young Turks, who were run by Lucky Luciano, embraced the idea of multi ethnicity as the future of organized crime and how it should move forward. The group included other such well known mobsters as Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, and Frank Costello.

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Now, Lucky Luciano decided to merge with Jewish gangsters Ben “Bugsy” Siegel and Meyer Lansky. Now, Siegel and Lansky's gang were known for bootlegging and handling various murder contracts during Prohibition.

Luciano wanted them to take out the last faction of the old Sicilians.

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Well, this was good news for Jewish gangsters. They were invested in Luciano and the Young Turks. Why? Because it was in everyone's interest to get rid of those who refused to work with non-Italians. So Siegel and Lansky, having gained Luciano's confidence and being great believers in this new multi ethnic thinking, they conceived a meticulous plan to assassinate the last of the old Sicilians. The genius of this was that neither of them would be suspected because they were Jewish. The old Sicilians would never see it coming.

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With the successful elimination of the Old World Sicilians, the way was now paved for Lucky Luciano's rise to the top of the U. S. Mafia. He structured modern organized crime into something known as the National Syndicate.

Together, Luciano with Meyer Lansky created what's known as the Commission, which is a board of directors to oversee all mafia activities in the U. S. and to mediate disputes between New York's five families, as well as Al Capone's Chicago outfit.

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During the Commission's first gathering in 1931, Jewish and Italian mobsters actually came together for the first time, and a new chapter in American crime had begun.

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So now, let's bring this all back to our story. Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano created the idea of a network of assassins that would do the commission's bidding to keep everything in order and to keep the bosses out of the fray. This network was run by Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and Albert Anastasia.

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The way it worked is they would relay a murder request from the syndicate to Anastasia, who in turn would assign the job to the Brownsville Boys. Why? Because Reles in particular was greatly admired by Anastasia on how he had taken out the Shapiros. Now Reles and the Brownsville Boys were committing hundreds of mob murders across the country.

They had no official name, but ten years later when the press caught wind of them, the press labeled them Murder, Incorporated.

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So here's where all of this comes back together. By 1933, Kid Twist Reles had moved further and further away from the rackets and became much more absorbed in the workings of Murder, Incorporated.

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Uncle Abe, well, he basically inherited Reles's policy racket, as well as buying out the bank of another well-known racketeer at the time. These two mergers, they made him the top policy king in the borough. I love that it's noted that, quote, “except for a few cracked skulls, Uncle Abe's ascension to power was marked by an absence of violence.”

Many in the family were told that Abe was in the restaurant business, and from what we know, he did own a couple of delicatessens. Uncle Abe, he is remembered as being quiet and serious, yet also generous to a fault. Everyone who knew him absolutely loved him. During the height of the Depression, almost a million people were unemployed in the metropolitan area, but Abe, he took care of those he could.

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He hired all his childhood friends from the neighborhood. He set up his brother-in-law Mudsy with a deli, and he put his younger brother through law school. Notably, Abe refused to marry, as he felt no woman should have to live the life that he had chosen for himself. Abe loved the prize fights and he loved to gamble, and he was known to gamble as much as $100,000 in a night. My goodness, that is over $2 million in today's money that Abe was gambling on a dice game. I mean, the amounts of money are staggeringly astounding.

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So, here's an interesting little tidbit: Jewish gangsters never really saw their profession as something to be passed down to the next generation. They just wanted in, make the money, and get out. Now, this was unlike the Italians, who saw their underworld business as really a legacy to stay within the family. This immigrant generation of Jewish gangsters, they really wanted a life free of crime for their children, nieces, and nephews.

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Abe had managed to stay out of jail for his illegal policy racket and gambling ring. But, that all came to an end in 1938. He was convicted on two counts of conspiracy to conduct a lottery. He was fined $500 and then sent off to the workhouse for nine months.

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Meanwhile, Reles became known as Brooklyn’s “#1 Bad Man.” By the late 1930s he had been arrested 43 times! He was often mentioned in the newspapers and cops were well aware of Reles - they were often stopping him for simply driving around or leaving his usual hang-outs like Midnight Rose’s. Reles and the boys were picked up for anything from vagrancy to suspicion of murder.  But most of the time the charges never stuck. Reles had served several small jail terms and had been charged with homicide 5 times, but was never ever convicted.

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Reles, he had a real sarcastic sense of humor and he’s quoted as saying, Ha! I guess I’ll have to walk around with bail bondsman all time, uh?”  He said this to cops once during an arrest.

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Well, by the spring of 1939, Abe was released from the workhouse and back to business as usual. But this wound up being just a few short months before everything started to unravel for the Brownsville Boys, a. k. a. Murder Incorporated.

Here's what happened. There had been a massive two-year manhunt for the murdering CEO, Lepke Buchalter, and he finally surrendered to authorities. This meant that the Brownsville boys had lost their biggest ally. It would be very important to keep Cosa Nostra, Albert Anastasia, very happy.

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So when Reles was ordered to get rid of a petty crook, well, he did just that. But Reles was soon arrested for the murder. And this time, there was no easy way for him to wiggle out of the allegations.

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Kid Twist Reles has been portrayed in the history books as a ruthless, cold blooded killer and a psychopath. Now juxtapose that with his family members who remember him as a generous, well-mannered mensch. He was probably a little of both.

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Mostly, he deeply loved his children, so much so that the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office and its detectives were willing to bank on it when Reles's wife, now pregnant with their second child, begged him to talk to D. A. William O'Dwyer to avoid the electric chair.

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Well, Reles decided to turn state's evidence in order to save himself and his family. He was quickly whisked into protective custody and gave up all of his chums from Murder Incorporated.

Now as for Uncle Abe, he was now the Czar of the Brooklyn Rackets and he remained untouched, at least for the time being.

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So, today we really have talked about choices. Choices that Reles made that led to him becoming a vicious murderer who ultimately gave up all of his friends to go to the electric chair.

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Uncle Abe? Well, he was the one that was left untouched. He was now out there, all alone.

Did Uncle Abe have a tipping point like Reles? It's hard to know. Reles's tipping point was personal.

 

My father and I often contemplated what Abe would have been like if he had lived. He was smart, generous, loved, and very, very wealthy. Who would he have been if he had chosen a different path in his life?

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Sometimes I wonder why anyone chooses that path, but you know, back then, survival of the family was everything for immigrant families. And I wonder, could it be that after so much oppression in the old country, that they now were actually on the other side of the guns, and they could live their life free and make whatever choices they wanted to. Maybe that was part of the appeal.

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So, you may be wondering, what ever happened to Reles? Well, six weeks after Uncle Abe's murder, Kid Twist fell from the window of a hotel to his death. Now this was while he was under heavy police guard about to give a testimony against Cosa Nostra Albert Anastasia. And, it is a mystery that has never been solved whether he jumped trying to escape or if he was pushed.

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Well, I'm gonna talk about Kid Twist and the mystery of his death in another episode.

But for now, let me leave you with this: I think there is a deep connection between the deaths of the two Abes.