Bugsy Siegel
Benny Siegel’s right eye was found 15 feet away from its socket. The previous night Siegel had been sitting on a sofa in his mistress’s Beverly Hills home, flipping through the Los Angeles Times, when a .30 caliber army carbine bullet carried it there. A total of nine shots were fired through a nearby window. They smashed in Siegel’s left eye, crushed the bridge of his nose, and shattered a vertebra at the back of his neck. The image of his massacred body, head tilted and streaming with blood, was splashed across the front pages of every major newspaper the day after the murder—June 21st 1947.
It was rumored that Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano had ordered the hit, supposedly because Siegel and his mistress, Virginia Hill, had been spiriting away the money they invested in his Las Vegas casino—The Flamingo—to accounts in Europe. But the more likely culprits are Siegel’s Flamingo associates—Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum—who calmly told the casino’s employees they were now in charge as police arrived at the scene of Bugsy’s murder (and so before the public had been notified). Lansky, for one, vehemently denied any part in the assassination—”If it was in my power to see Benny alive,” he told a journalist in 1975, “he would live as long as Matusula [sic].”
The Dutchman
Charlie “Bug” Workman and Mendy Weiss were driven to their meeting with Dutch Schultz on October 23, 1935 by a man named Piggy. Schultz, lounging with his crew at the back of the Palace Chop House in Newark, had no idea they were coming. For the Bug this was the most important job of his life. But he had every reason to be confident in Weiss—a true professional who had even been a guest at Bug Jr.’s bris.
At 10:15 p.m., they pulled up to the empty restaurant. Mendy drew a sawed-off shotgun from his coat. The Bug drew a .38 revolver. They sauntered in and opened fire on Schultz’ table. Abe Landau, the Dutchman’s bodyguard, dropped to the floor and reached for his gun. He was hit in the neck but still managed to fire back. Abbaddaba Berman was hit six times; Lulu Rosenkrantz, Dutch’s enforcer, seven times.
Dutch himself was in the bathroom, at a urinal. Bug kicked opened the door and shot him in the gut. He came out to find Weiss gone, Berman crawling across the floor, and Landau raising his gun. There was no trace of the getaway car. Bewildered, Bug stood transfixed until a bullet flew past his temple. He spun around and shot Landau dead. Then he ran.
As Bug fled across Jersey wasteland, Schultz came reeling out of the bathroom and collapsed over a table. Workman had to walk for hours through a railroad tunnel to get back to New York. By the time the bedraggled Bug hit the city streets in the early morning, he was ready to kill again. And Weiss hadn’t helped his own cause by spending the intervening hours boasting of how he alone had clipped the Dutchman. But before Bug could take his revenge, Lepke stepped in.
Lepke had ordered the hit on behalf of the syndicate, who feared Schultz would try to kill Thomas Dewey and so bring unbearable heat down on all of them. He convinced the killers to end their dispute. “What’s the difference who shot him?” Lepke told the men at their sit-down in Brooklyn. “He’s shot. Let’s forget about him.”
Schultz was indeed shot, but not yet dead. He hung on in his hospital bed for another twenty four hours, muttering a constant stream of delirious non-sequiturs: “Please mother! You pick me up now…. Oh Louie, didn’t I give you my doorbell?…. Oh Duckie, see we skipped again.”
Harry Millman
A loose-cannon hijacker and gunman for Detroit’s Purple Gang, Millman was one of the most feared gangsters of his day. Yet despite murdering two of his Purple colleagues and being arrested 28 times for assault, armed robbery, kidnapping, and extortion, Millman never spent a single night in jail.
By 1930, the Purples and the Italian Mafia had amicably carved up Detroit’s gangland between them. But Millman—a raging, unstable alcoholic—persisted in shaking down Mafia brothels and policy banks. He would storm in, knock customers off barstools and pistol-whip them for good measure. The Purples saved Millman from Mafia retribution, promising to “straighten” him out. But Millman would not be disciplined.
His continued muscling of Mafia numbers rackets won him the enmity of boss Joe “Scarface” Bommarito. And Millman did not help his cause by sidling up to Bommarito in his barber shop chair, lifting up the hot towel draped over his head, and spitting in his face. A few weeks later, Millman’s valet turned the ignition key in his car as Millman prepared to leave his favorite bar for the night. The car exploded, blowing out the bar’s windows and sending the hood onto the roof of a five-story apartment block. The Purples had withdrawn their protection.
Millman was under a death sentence. He still walked the streets but was unwelcome at every Detroit hotel, their proprietors unwilling to have to mop up his blood. He now spent most of his nights alone at Boesky’s restaurant, indulging in all-night drinking and heroin binges. Meanwhile the Mafia and the Purples decided to have the job done right. They contracted Murder Inc. killers “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss and “Happy” Maione to make their way out from Brooklyn and do the hit.
At 1 A.M. on November 25th, 1937, Millman took up his usual place at Boesky’s bar. At the same instant, two men in overcoats and fedoras rushed at him, drew their pistols and fired at point blank range. Terrified customers dove under the tables and trays of dishes crashed to the ground. The killers pumped ten bullets into Millman who was thrown back against the bar and died before his body even slipped all the way to the restaurant floor.
Evsei Agron
Evsei Agron’s body was found in a pool of blood on the marble floor of his Little Odessa apartment house on May 4, 1985. The two bullets that killed him were fired into his right temple at point-blank range at 8:35 that morning. They came from the gun of an unidentified assailant wearing a tracksuit and sunglasses who ambushed Agron outside the elevator. The cattle-prod-toting mobster was en route to a sit-down at the Russian and Turkish Baths on the Lower East Side—a favorite hangout of Lansky and Siegel during prohibition where the gangsters exchanged their Tommy-guns for bath towels. As he left his apartment, he had told his wife—a beautiful blonde cabaret singer—that he would meet her for dinner at a Brighton Beach restaurant. For his trip, he had slipped on his baggy blue pinstriped suit and his brown fedora. Before getting dressed he had stood in his gilded bathroom slapping on cologne while his massive bodyguard waited for him downstairs in a black Lincoln Town Car—both unaware that Agron’s chief advisor, Marat Balagula, had been building up a clandestine organization of his own, waiting for his chance to usurp the crown of the “King of Brighton Beach.”
Yisrael “Alic” Mizrahi
The bomb sheared off the roof and the steering wheel but left the underbody intact Yisrael Mizrahi was killed instantly. The packet of explosives weighed over two pounds, but was placed underneath the driver’s seat of the Mercedes Jeep with such accuracy that it only slightly injured Mizrahi’s wife, who was in the passenger seat. The explosives were triggered by remote control. “Only a highly skilled professional is capable of such a hit,” a police spokesman said.
That day—August 6th, 2003—the 58 year-old Mizrahi had been driving down Herzl Street on his way to work like any other Tel Aviv businessman. But “Alice,” as Mizrahi was known on the street, had spent most of his career in the looking-glass world of Israeli organized crime. In the
1980’s, Mizrahi was the main associate of Yehuda “Johnny” Attias, who headed a gang of Israeli expatriates in New York, specializing in heroin and cocaine smuggling, gasoline racketeering, and extortion. He was suspected of kidnapping and killing drug dealer Albert Beber Shushan in 1988. And Mizrahi and Attias were the main suspects in the 1989 death of Michael Markowitz, whose body was found in his car riddled with bullets.
Attias was eventually murdered, leaving Alice to feud with his partners. Mizrahi fled to Israel after his white Lincoln was blown up outside an Israeli-owned nightclub. There he was promptly convicted of heroin smuggling and served five years of a 12 year sentence. After his release in 2001, Mizrahi became involved in Israel’s illegal gambling industry. But the police suspect the murder was pulled off by his former New York associates, eager for a second bite of the apple.
