Gangsters in America – Abe "boy twist" Reles – The canary that sang but didn’t fly
He was a ruthless killer since he was 18 years old, but Abe “Kid Twist” Reles was not a man. When it came to pushing and shoving, he was nothing more than a yellow-bellied canary, which he ratted out to his best friends to save his own hide.
Abraham Reles was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, on May 10, 1906. His father was an Austrian Jew who had immigrated to the United States in search of a better life. But after working for years as a humble pieceworker in the garment trade, he ended up selling knishes on the streets of Brooklyn from a mobile stand.
Quickly realizing that his father’s life was not for him, five-foot-two-inch Reles dropped out of school after the eighth grade. He soon worked as a gofer for the powerful Shapiro brothers, Meyer, Irving and Willie, who ran the mob in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Reles was reduced to running errands and doing light work for the Shapiros, sometimes for as little as five dollars each. One of these errands involved guarding one of Shapiro’s many slot machines, and to do so, Reles was shot in the back, which caused nothing more than a cheek, but it did a big blow to Reles’s ego. It was at this time that Reles reportedly took on the nickname “Kid Twist,” after a former New York City Jewish mobster named Max “Kid Twist” Zwerbach, who, interestingly enough, was also killed in Coney. Island.
Upset, and not wanting to keep getting the short end of the stick from the Shapiros, Reles formed his own little gang, made up of his childhood friend Bugsy Goldstein and the Italian duo of Happy Maione and Dasher Abbendado. Soon, sadistic killer Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss joined the crew, and Reles announced, at the ripe old age of twenty, that he and his boys were going to take Brownsville and all of his business from the Shapiros. Reles named his ragtag group of assassins “Brooklyn Inc.”
“Why do we have to take leftovers?” Reles asked Goldstein. “We should cut a piece off. To hell with those guys.”
When the Shapiros found out what Reles was planning, Meyer, the head of the clan, was furious. “Brownsville belongs to us,” Meyer Shapiro said. “No one moves here.”
Meyer Shapiro fired the first salvo in the war for control of Brownsville by snatching Rele’s girlfriend from him on the street, brutally beating and raping her. It was personal to Reles now, and he and Goldstein stalked the streets of Brownsville, seeking to kill all three Shapiros, but primarily Meyer, due to the indignity of desecrating Reles’ girlfriend. For an entire year, Reles and Goldstein shot Meyer Shapiro 19 times, but wounded him only once. Then one night, thinking that Meyer Shapiro and his two brothers had been ambushed outside his apartment building on Blake Avenue, Reles was upset to discover that only Irving had bothered to show up. As soon as Irving Shapiro entered his fifth-floor apartment, Reles and Goldstein unloaded their weapons on him, first hitting Irving twice in the face and then sixteen more times in the back.
A few days later, Reles and his boys cornered Meyer Shapiro on the streets of Brooklyn. A single bullet to Meyer Sharpiro’s ear, fired by Reles, unseated Shapiro as boss of the Brownsville mob. It took three years for Reles to finally eliminate Willie Shapiro, who had been threatening to kill Reles and his friends all along. After kidnapping Willie Shapiro from a bar, he was taken to a Brooklyn basement, beaten mercilessly, and then buried in a shallow sand dune in Canarsie Flats. Willie Shapiro’s body was soon found, and the medical examiner who performed the autopsy found sand in his lungs, meaning he had been buried alive.
Reles and his boys’ triumph over the Shapiro brothers caught the attention of Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, and soon Brooklyn Inc. became a subcorporation of Murder Incorporated. Lepke was said to have several dozen murderers on his payroll, and in the 1930s, police estimated that Murder Incorporated was responsible for as many as five hundred murders nationwide.
However, nothing good lasts forever. On February 2, 1940, Reles, Goldstein, and Anthony “Dukey” Maffetore were arrested for the 1934 murder of the asshole named Red Alpert. Maffetore was the first to turn state evidence against his team, but New York District Attorney William O’Dwyer’s biggest rat rat was Reles, who was the highest-ranking member of Murder. Incorporated under Lepke. At the Lepke trial, which also included Mendy Weiss and Louis Capone as defendants, Reles, who had a photographic memory, gave intimate details of more than 200 murders in which the defendants were involved. The three former friends of Reles were subsequently convicted and fried in the electric chair at Sing Sing.
The government wasn’t done with Reles’s yelling, though. They wanted him as a key witness in the upcoming trials of Murder Incorporated bigwigs Albert Anastasia and Bugsy Siegel. While Reles awaited several more trips to court, O’Dwyer hid Reles at the Half Moon Hotel, located on the sandy beaches of Coney Island. Reles was under constant police surveillance, with no fewer than six police officers at a time keeping an eye on him, even while he slept.
However, in the early hours of November 12, 1941, Reles fell to his death from the hotel’s sixth-floor window. They found him lying crooked on his back, his suit jacket on, but his white shirt unbuttoned, exposing a fat belly. Several sheets were found tied together, and although Reles’ body was found twenty feet from the base of the hotel, the official cause of death was “death from a fall, while he was trying to escape.” After Reles’ death, O’Dwyer announced that his future cases “went out the window” with Reles.
Years later, Italian crime boss Lucky Luciano said that Frank Costello paid $50,000 to distribute to the New York City police department, to see if the man who could “sing like a canary” could fly like one too.