Joe Bruno's Mobsters - Six Volume Set (59 page)

A few weeks later, the Parks Commission issued a press release to the New York City newspapers announcing that the president of t
he Park Commission, George C. Clausen, had used his own personal money to purchase what was left of Spate's green rocking chairs. These chairs were to be placed in public parks throughout New York City.

On each of these chairs was stenciled the lettering, “For the Exclusive Use of Women and Children.”

And right above the declaration, in large letters, was painted the word “FREE.”

G
reenberg, Harry - The Murder of

He was a mob
insider whom his pal, Louie “Lepke” Buchalter, decided knew too much to live. As a result, Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg became the victim of the first mob hit ever in the sunny state of California.

Harry Greenberg, who also went under the names of Harry Schacter and Harry
Schober, grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with Lepke and Lepke's longtime partner Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro, who were affectionately known as the “Gorilla Boys,” and then as they became more prosperous, the “Gold Dust Twins.” Greenberg was tight with the two murderers, and was their partner in various garment center schemes and swindles. Apparently a few murders were involved, and while there is no evidence that Greenberg participated in any of these murders, he definitely knew about the murders and why they had been committed. It’s possible Greenberg even knew who had committed those murders.

Greenberg palled out with Lepke and Shapiro, and he even spent the better part of his summers with the two gangsters at
the Loch Sheldrake Country Club in the Catskills in upstate New York, owned by a legitimate businessman named Sam Tannenbaum. Sam Tannenbaum had a teenage son named Allie, who worked at the hotel, either waiting tables or setting up beach chairs by the lake. Sam had hoped that Allie would be his heir apparent at the hotel when Sam decided to retire.

B
ut Allie felt he was destined for bigger and better things.

At the end of the summer in 1931, Allie Tannenbaum was strolling down Broadway in Manhattan when he bumped into Greenberg.

Greenberg asked Tannenbaum, “Do you want a job?”

“I could use one, if it pays,” Tannenbaum said.

Greenberg smiled. “This one is for Lepke. You know what kind of a job it will be.”

Unwittingly, Greenberg had just helped hire one of his future killers.

As time passed, Tannenbaum rose up the ladder in Lepke's “Murder Incorporated,” a mob subsidiary whose only purpose was to kill anyone that the top mob bosses in New York City, and later, mob bosses all over America, said needed to be killed.

I
n 1936, things started to go south for Lepke when Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who had already put Lucky Luciano, Lepke's partner in the National Crime Syndicate, in jail for a 30-year bit, set his sights on Lepke. Dewey went after Lepke's garment center rackets and Lepke's shakedown “Bakers Union.”

However, these swindles were small potatoes compared to what Dewey really had in mind for Lepke.

Convicted drug dealers always did substantial time in prison, so Dewey convinced the Federal Narcotics Bureau to build a case against Lepke in a massive drug-smuggling operation. Figuring he was facing big-time in the slammer, Lepke went on the lam. Lepke was hidden in several Brooklyn hideouts by his Murder Incorporated co-leader, Albert Anastasia, while Lepke's rackets were tended to by other Syndicate leaders.

While Lepke was in hiding, he started thinking about who knew enough about his rackets to put
him in jail for a very long time; if not right into the electric chair. Lepke got word to all his killers and anyone in the know to either “Get out of town, or die.”

Lepke's thinking was, if any of his men got arrested, they might squeal on him in order to work out a better deal for themselves. It turned out that Lepke was right to worry about this, and that's why in the spring of 1939, Lepke sent word to “Big Greenie” Greenberg to “lam it” out of
town.

Greenberg took Lepke's advice to heart. After hastily packing a suitcase, Greenberg jumped in his car and sped up to Montreal, Canada.

While in Montreal, Greenberg started thinking, “Hey, I'm up here in nowhere Canada, and I can't even earn a decent dime. These guys better start taking care of me good.”

As a result, “Big Greenie” Greenberg did something very stupid. He sent a letter to Mendy Weiss, who was Lepke's second-in-command in Murder Inc., saying, “I hope you guys aren’t forgetting about me. You better not.”

Then he asked Weiss for a reported $5,000 to help him fight the cold weather in Canada.

Greenberg waited for a response, or the money, or
for both.

When he got neither, he got to thinking again. “Hey maybe, sending that letter wasn’t such a great idea.”

By this time, Weiss, after conferring with Lepke, had already given the order to Tannenbaum to go up to Canada and erase Big Greenie from Lepke's list of “people to worry about.” But when Tannenbaum arrived in Montreal, Big Greenie had already flown the coop and was officially a “lamster,” not only from the law, but from the guys he thought were his best friends.

Greenberg figured he'd hig
htail it to Detroit, where the Purple Gang, another subsidiary of the National Crime Syndicate, might be nice enough to stake him a few bucks and maybe even give Greenberg a safe place to hide. The Purple Gang, run by Sammy Coen, whose nickname was Sammy Purple, was very nice to Greenberg; too nice Greenberg thought.

While he waited for some stake money, Big Greenie started thinking again. He came to the conclusion that the Purple Gang was stalling him so that killers from New York City could travel up there to do the big job on Big Greenie.

“They must have checked the New York office,” Greenberg figured. “The New York boys must have told them, 'Keep him in tow until we get a couple of the boys up there.' ”

Greenberg was right. Tannenbaum and two other gunsels were in route to Detroit at the precise
moment Greenberg decided to take Horace Greeley's advice and “Go west, young man.”

Greenberg went as far west as he could without swimming
, and he stopped in Hollywood, California, the new hometown of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, a top boss in Murder Incorporated and one of the few killers who thoroughly relished doing his job. Siegel had been sent out to California in 1937 by the National Crime Syndicate to take control of all the illegal activities in the state, which was considered open territory by the East Coast mob. After organizing the syndicate's gambling interests, Siegel decided there was big money to be made by unionizing the Hollywood extras.

You could have the biggest movie stars, the best scripts, and the finest producers an
d directors, but without extras most movies could never get made. Siegel unionized the extras, and he collected tidy sums from each and every one of these extras for the privilege of appearing, if only a few seconds, in a Hollywood production. Showing he was just one of the guys, Siegel even became a movie extra himself.

However, that was chump change compared to what Siegel really had in mind
for his Hollywood pals.

Tall and Hollywood-handsome, Siegel inveigled himself into the upper reaches of the Hollywood elite. He dated starlets two at a time, and
he even had a hot and heavy affair with an Italian Countess. The top actors and actresses of that time were Siegel's best friends, but they learned fast being chums with a man known as Bugsy (no one ever called him “Bugsy” to his face) was an easy way to put a dent in your bank account.

Using the same technique he had learned from Lepke with the labor unions, Siegel approached the biggest stars with his smooth line of patter. He would romance the female stars,
and then scare the hell out of them with his reputation and a few pointed words.

But with male stars, Siegel got straight to the point

With a notebook and pen in Siegel's hands, the conversation would go something like this: “Hey look buddy, I'm putting you down for $10,000 for the extras.”

“What kind of deal is this?” the actor
would say. “What have I got to do with the extras?”

Siege
l would then shake his head like a father disgusted at an ignorant child, and say, “I don't think you understand. Take your new picture, for example. Everything's ready to go. But what happens if the extras go out on strike? That means the stagehands go out on strike too, because they're all union. So there goes your picture.”

Without blinking an eye, every Hollywood star Siegel approached, without exception, paid up, and
they paid up good. In 1940, when the Feds got a warrant for Siegel's thirty-five room Holmby Hill's mansion, they found in an upstairs safe a detailed accounting of the “loans” Siegel had received from all the top Hollywood stars. In one year alone, Bugsy Siegel had shaken-down actors and actresses to the tune of $400,000. And no one dared complain to the cops. These frightened Hollywood suckers even palled out with Siegel while he was sticking his hands deep into their pockets.

So when the word came from back east that Greenberg was in Hollywood, of course Siegel was given the contract. Now, usually a man of Siegel's stature
would just give out the orders and maybe help with the planning. But Siegel insisted, against the advice of Lepke, on getting in on the actual Greenberg murder himself.

Bugsy just loved a good killing.

“We all begged Bugsy to keep out of the shooting,” Lepke's pal Doc Stracher said years later. “He was too big a man by this time to become personally involved. But Bugsy wouldn’t listen. He said Greenberg was a menace to all of us, and if the cops grabbed him he could tell the whole story of our outfit back to the 1920s.”

At Newark Airport, just before he boarded a flight to Hollywood,
Allie Tannenbaum was given a small doctor's instrument bag by the boss of New Jersey mob himself: Abner “Longie” Zwillman. Inside this bag were several “clean” guns, which were to be used in the Greenberg Hollywood hit.

In the meantime, Siegel was assembling his “hit team,” which included Whitey Krakow, Siegel's b
other-in-law from New York City. Siegel also enlisted Frankie Carbo, a Lower East Side thug and Murder Inc. operative who had already been arrested 17 times and charged with five murders, but none of the charges had resulted in Carbo doing any significant prison time. Carbo was also a big-time fight promoter and manager, and many of his top-notch fighters were suspected of not giving their best efforts when their boss and his pals had bet big money on the other guy.

Now came the issue of obtaining a getaway car.

Sholem Bernstein, an independent operator from New York City, just happened to be vacationing in Hollywood when he decided to visit his old pal, Benny Siegel. Soon, Bernstein would be sorry he ever made that visit.

Before even the small talk began, Siegel got right to the point.

“Clip a car,” Siegel barked at Bernstein. “Leave it in the parking lot down the street.”

Bernstein, a veteran
of these sorts of things, looked perplexed. Usually, when he clipped a car, he hid it in a private garage where the police wouldn't be able to see it.

“A parking lot?” Bernstein said.

“That's right,” Siegel snapped. “Just do as I say?”

So, Bernstein clipped a car
, and he parked it in the open parking lot, just as Siegel had demanded.

Almost immediately, the owner of the stolen car filed a police report. Because they were on the lookout for the stolen car, the cops spotted the car right out in the open
, and they returned it to its rightful owner.

Despite this misfortune, Siegel told Bernstein to steal another car. Bernstein said he would, and he
then told Siegel how he usually operated.

“Then you get license plates off another car that you case to see the owner only uses it once in a while, like a Sunday driver,” Bernstein said. “By the time the guy finds out, you got the job done, and the cops are looking for him – why are his plates on a
hot car? Then you...”

Siegel cut Bernstein off in mid-sentence. The veins bulging in his neck, Siegel said, “Who the hell are you, coming in and telling me how to do a job? Out here it goes my way. And don't you forget it.”

Even though Bernstein was in Hollywood on vacation, the mob rules were when a mob boss tells you to do something, you do it or you're dead. But Bernstein figured, when he was back in New York City and asked to do a job, the mob bosses, because Bernstein was such a capable freelancer, let him handle things his own way. Now, since Siegel was dictating terms, Bernstein felt he was under no obligation to continue with the job.

So
, Bernstein jumped in his car and headed back to New York City, which displeased Siegel to no end and caused him to find someone else to pilfer a car for the Greenberg caper. Fuming, Siegel now wanted Bernstein dead.

But more on that later.

By this time, the surveillance on Greenberg's residence at 1804 N. Vista De Mar Drive revealed that Greenberg was little more than a recluse. He never left home, except for his nightly 15-minute drive, each way, to get a newspaper in nearby Bel Air.