Pithy comments were not enough to put off a tough like Schultz. In 1935 he put a couple of his boys, Benny Holinsky and Frank Dolak, in a new loan office in Borough Hall, just a block away from the Amberg operation. Within 24 hours the two Schultz men were bullet-riddled corpses.
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The Schultz-Amberg war broke out in earnest, and the next victim was Joey Amberg, killed in an ambush. Later, in October 1935, both Pretty Amberg and Schultz died. Schultz's execution had been ordered by the Luciano-Lansky crime syndicate. It may well be that the boys also had Amberg put out of the way. However, there is a quainter story told by some observers. According to this version, each man was responsible for having the other knocked off. Amberg supposedly paid some hit men $25,000 down to murder Schultz with another $25,000 payable on completion of the contract.
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In the meantime Amberg was murdered, supposedly on Schultz's orders. His body was pulled from a blazing automobile on a Brooklyn street, charred beyond all recognition. There was wire wrapped around his neck, arms and legs and it took several days for an identification to be made. In the meantime some gunmen blasted Dutch Schultz in a Newark chop house. Poor Schultz may have died never knowing Pretty Amberg had gone to his reward.
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Actually, it was never determined whether Amberg's death was a Schultz job or a Luciano-Lansky caper. There was even a third theory that Amberg had been murdered by an angry gang of armed robbers with whom he had joined in a major job and then taken most of the loot for himself.
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In Brooklyn, most everyone thought it was about time somebody did something about Pretty Amberg.
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Anastasia, Albert (19031957): Executioner and crime family boss
Albert Anastasia, chief executioner of Murder, Inc., found his unbridled brutality could land him leadership of one of the most important Mafia families in the country. But, preoccupied with killing, he was not really a competent godfather, a fact decisively indicated by the efficient and prosperous operation of the family under Anastasia's underboss and successor, Carlo Gambino.
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One of nine brothers, Italian-born Anastasia jumped ship in the United States sometime between 1917 and 1920. He became active in Brooklyn's dock operations and rose to a position of authority in the longshoreman's union. It was here that Anastasia first demonstrated his penchant for murder at the slightest provocation, killing a fellow longshoreman in the early '20s. Nor was his executioner's behavior pattern altered by a consequent 18-month stay in the death house in Sing Sing. He went free when, at a new trial, the four most important witnesses turned up missing, a situation that proved permanent.
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Dead witnesses forever littered Anastasia's trail. In the mid-1950s Anastasia was prosecuted for income tax evasion. The first trial ended in a hung jury. A second trial was scheduled for 1955. Charles Ferri, a Fort Lee, New Jersey, plumbing contractor who had collected $8,700 for work he had performed on Anastasia's home, was expected to be a key witness. In April, about a month before the retrial, Ferri and his wife disappeared from their blood-splattered home in a Miami, Florida, suburb. Some time earlier Vincent Macri, an Anastasia associate, had been found shot to death, his body stuffed in the trunk of a car in the Bronx. A few days after that, Vincent's brother Benedicto was declared missing, his body supposedly dumped in the Passaic River. The erasure of the two Ferris and the two Macris was seen as part of a plot to eliminate all possible witnesses against Anastasia. At Anastasia's trial the crime boss suddenly entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to one year in federal prison. It was unlikely the government would have accepted what amounted to a plea bargain had it still had a full arsenal of witnesses against him.
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Considering Anastasia's lifelong devotion to homicide as the solution to any problem it was not surprising that he and Louis "Lepke" Buchalter were installed as the operating heads of the national crime syndicate's enforcement arm, Murder, Inc. Some estimates have it that Murder, Inc., may have taken in a decade of operation a toll of between 400 and 500 victims. Unlike Lepke and many other members of Murder, Inc., Anastasia was never prosecuted for any of the crimes. There was a "perfect case" against him, but the main prosecution witness not surprisingly disappeared.
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Anastasia was always a devoted follower of others, primarily Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello. His devotion to Luciano knew no bounds. When in 1930 Luciano finalized plans to take over crime in America by destroying the two old-line Mafia factions headed by Joe the Boss Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano, he outlined his plot to Anastasia. He knew the Mad Hatter, as Anastasia had become known, would enthusiastically kill for him. Anastasia responded by seizing Luciano in a bear hug and kissing him on both cheeks. "Charlie," he said, "I been waiting for this day for at least eight years. You're gonna be on top if I have to kill everybody for you. With you there, that's the only way we can have any peace and make the real money." Anastasia was personally part of the four-man death squad that mowed down Masseria in a Coney Island restaurant in 1931.
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During World War II Anastasia appears to have been the originator of a plan to free Luciano from prison by
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