The testimony of Abe “Kid Twist” Reles’ propelled seven Mafia assassins or lieutenants into the electric chair—a feat never before or since equaled. Among these was Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, whose execution, in 1944, makes him to date the only mob boss to suffer the fullest penalty of the law.
Reles’ career as a witness earned him the hatred of mobsters throughout the nation. The Mafia put out a $100,000 contract on him and hoped that one of its hitmen proved lucky or skillful enough to collect on it. But no hitman ever tried, for Reles was too carefully guarded, and the mobsters knew it.
When he wasn’t testifying in court, Reles was quartered in a secured room on the sixth floor of the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island. There he dined on thick steaks and cold beers and listened to ballgames on the radio. Eighteen officers of the NYPD, working in three, eight-hour, six-man shifts, protected him at all times.
Despite these precautions, the witnessing career of Abe “Kid Twist” Reles ended abruptly on November 12, 1941. Sometime around dawn, Reles “fell” to his death from one of the windows of his sixth-floor room.
Abe Reles in death
The sudden death of the prosecution’s star witness scandalized the NYPD. Local newspapers questioned the integrity of the officers on the Reles security detail. Both the police and the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office launched investigations to learn whether Reles had died as the result of an accident—or murder.
But the NYPD quickly moved to protect itself from blame. Its final report shifted blame for Reles’ death from his bodyguards to the victim himself. According to this version: Reles, a “notorious” practical joker, had tied two bedsheets together and slipped out of his window to play a trick on his guards.
He intended to enter a vacant room, just below his own, and then walk back upstairs to surprise his protectors. Unfortunately, his makeshift rope snapped, and he plunged to his death forty-two feet below.
Two bedsheets, knotted together, were in fact discovered near Reles’ corpse. That seemed to support the police theory of the rope-ladder escape attempt. But the police could not explain why Reles had landed twenty feet from the wall.
More than twenty years later, Joseph Valachi, an aging Mafia hitman, became the Justice Department’s own version of Abe Reles. Before dying—of a heart attack—Valachi offered his own view on what had happened to Reles: “I never met anybody yet who thought Reles went out that window on purpose.”
The next important organized crime witnesses to die while under “protective custody” by local police was Peter La Tempa, a cigar store salesman with rackets connections.
His testimony could have supported that of another witness, Ernest “The Hawk” Rupollo. Rupollo’s testimony linked Vito Genovese, one of the nation’s most-feared Mafia bosses, with the murder of a Genovese henchman, Ferdinand Boccia, in 1934.
But La Tempa never got the chance to testify. On January 15, 1945, he swallowed what he thought were pain-killers for his gallstones. A New York toxicologist later reported there was enough poison in La Tempa’s bloodstream “to kill eight horses.” At the time of his death, he was being held under police guard in a Brooklyn jail cell.
The circumstances behind La Tempa’s murder were never satisfactorily explained. The police claimed they couldn’t determine how poison pills had been substituted for the victim’s regular medication. Nor was anyone ever indicted—exactly the scenario that had followed the equally mysterious death of Abe Reles.
With La Tempa dead, the testimony of Ernest Rupollo could not be corroborated. The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office dropped the murder charge it had leveled against him to compel his testimony. Prosecutors declared him a free man, but the Mafia declared him a hunted one.
For eighteen years, Rupollo somehow eluded his pursuers. Finally, on August 17, 1964, his bullet-riddled body, weighted with chains and concrete blocks, washed ashore in New York. Four Mafia figures were later fried for the murder, but were acquitted.
Yet another witness to come forward—and die for it—was Arnold Schuster, a shoe salesman. One night in early 1952, he spotted Willie “The Actor” Sutton, a notorious bank robber, on the New York subway. Schuster tipped off police, who arrested Sutton.
For several days, the mild-mannered Schuster became a minor celebrity. Then he became a dead one: on March 8, 1952, two gunmen shot him down on the street.
The murder baffled police; Sutton was known as a loner without ties to killers or organized crime.
More than ten years later, the truth finally emerged. According to Joseph Valachi, the man responsible for Arnold Schuster’s murder was Albert Anastasia, the former boss of Murder, Inc.
Only the untimely death of Abe Reles had prevented Anastasia’s own in the electric chair. In 1952, he was still one of the most-feared Mafia chieftains in the nation.
Albert Anastasia
Anastasia had seen Schuster being interviewed on television and had flown into a rage. “I hate squealers!” he had screamed to three of his executioners who were in the room at the time. “Hit that guy!”
As Valachi saw it, the killing of Arnold Schuster was simply Anastasia’s way of doing a favor for a fellow criminal, even though he had never met Sutton.
Copyright@1984 Taking Cover: Inside the Witness Security Program, by Steffen White and Richard St. Germain
