He was a ruthless killer since he was 18 years old, but Abe “Kid Twist” Reles was a nobody’s man. When it came to shoving and shoving, he was nothing more than a yellow-bellied canary, betraying his best friends to save his own skin.
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 to seek a better life. But after working for years as a humble laborer in the garment trade, he ended up selling knishes on the streets of Brooklyn from a mobile stall.
Quickly realizing that his father’s life was not for him, the five-foot-two Reles dropped out of school after eighth grade. He soon worked as an assistant to the powerful brothers Shapiro, Meyer, Irving, and Willie, who ran businesses in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Reles was reduced to running errands and doing light jobs for the Shapiros, sometimes for as little as $ 5 each. One of these errands was to keep an eye on one of Shapiro’s many slot machines, and to do so, Reles was shot in the back, causing nothing more than meat would do, but a huge explosion in Reles’ ego. . It was around this time that Reles reportedly took the nickname “Kid Twist,” in honor of a former New York City Jewish mobster named Max “Kid Twist” Zwerbach, who, interestingly, was also killed in Coney. Island.
Annoyed, and not wanting to keep getting the short end of the Shapiros’ stick, Reles formed his own little gang, made up of childhood friend Bugsy Goldstein and the Italian duo of Happy Maione and Dasher Abbendado. Soon, the sadistic killer Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss joined the crew, and Reles announced, at the age of twenty, that he and his boys were going to take Brownsville and all its scams off the Shapiros. Reles named his motley crew of assassins “Brooklyn Inc.”
“Why do we have to take the leftovers?” Reles asked Goldstein. “We should cut a piece. To hell with those guys.”
When the Shapiros found out what Reles was planning, Meyer, the clan chief, was furious. “Brownsville belongs to us,” Meyer Shapiro said. “No one is moving here.”
Meyer Shapiro fired the first salvo in the war for control of Brownsville by snatching Reles’s girlfriend off the street and brutally beating and raping her. Now it was personal for Reles, and he and Goldstein stalked the streets of Brownsville, seeking to kill all three Shapiros, but primarily Meyer, out of the indignity of desecrating Reles’s girlfriend. For an entire year, Reles and Goldstein shot Meyer Shapiro nineteen times, but only wounded him once. Then one night, thinking that they had Meyer Shapiro and his two brothers ambushed in front of their apartment building on Blake Avenue, Reles was disgusted to discover that only Irving had bothered to show up. As soon as Irving Shapiro entered their fifth-floor apartment, Reles and Goldstein emptied their weapons, 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 in the ear of Meyer Sharpiro fired by Reles, dislodged Shapiro as head of the Brownsville rackets. It took Reles three years to finally eliminate Willie Shapiro, who had been threatening to kill Reles and his friends the entire time. After kidnapping Willie Shapiro from a bar, they took him to a Brooklyn basement, beat him mercilessly, and then buried him in a shallow sand dune at Canarsie Flats. Willie Shapiro’s body was soon found and the coroner who performed the autopsy located sand in his lungs, meaning he had been buried alive.
The triumph of Reles and his sons over the Shapiro brothers caught the attention of Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, and soon Brooklyn Inc. became a sub-corporation of Murder Incorporated. Lepke was said to have several dozen killers on his payroll, and in the 1930s, police estimated that Murder Incorporated was responsible for up to five hundred hits across the country.
However, nothing good lasts forever. On February 2, 1940, Reles, Goldstein, and Anthony “Dukey” Maffetore were arrested for the 1934 murder of a small neighborhood called Red Alpert. Maffetore was the first to turn state evidence against his crew, but the biggest jewel for New York District Attorney William O’Dwyer was Reles, who was the highest-ranking member of Murder Incorporated under Lepke. At Lepke’s 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. Reles’ three former friends were later convicted and fried in the Sing Sing electric chair.
However, the government did not end with the screams of Reles. They wanted him as a lead 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 guarding him, even while he slept.
However, in the early hours of the morning of November 12, 1941, Reles fell and died from the hotel’s sixth-floor window. They found him lying on his back, his suit jacket on, but his white shirt unbuttoned, revealing a fat belly. Several sheets were found tied together, and although Reles’s body was found twenty feet from the base of the hotel, the official cause of death was listed as “dying from a fall while 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 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. as one too.