He was rail-thin (140 pounds, tops) and strikingly handsome. However, Allie Tannenbaum, who started out as a worker at her father’s Catskill hotel, became one of Murder Incorporated’s most accomplished assassins. Tannenbaum was also turned into a rat, which helped put her boss, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, in the electric chair.
Tannenbaum was born on January 17, 1906 in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania. When Tannenbaum was just two years old, his father Sam moved the family to Orchard Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In New York City, Sam Tannenbaum, like he did in Pennsylvania, ran a general store. When she was a teenager, Allie Tannenbaum had a habit of always talking and talking and talking. She talked so much that people said she sounded like clockwork, hence the nickname “Tick Tock”.
After World War I, Sam Tannenbaum amassed enough cash to purchase Loch Sheldrake Country Club, in the Catskills, New York state. When her father bought the country club, Allie was already in her junior year of high school (she later attended college for a few semesters as well). This was quite an achievement, since most kids Tannenbaum’s age on the Lower East Side had already dropped out of school after eighth grade and had jobs, some legal and some not-so-legal. Making use of his son’s abilities, Sam Tannenbaum employed Allie at her hotel, either waiting tables or setting up beach chairs at the lake. Despite the initial hard work he put on his son, Sam Tannenbaum was grooming Allie as his eventual replacement. However, that was not to be.
The Loch Sheldrake Country Club was a luxurious establishment and housed many wealthy Jewish families for their summer vacations. Jewish gangsters also frequented the country club. Among them were Harry “Greenie” Greenberg, Louis Lepke and his partner Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro. Shapiro was a thick-chested gorilla who provided the muscle for Lepke’s many illegal enterprises. Whenever Shapiro got angry, and that was often, his favorite phrase was “Get out of here.” However, in his gravelly voice, the phrase sounded like “Gurra dahere.” Therefore, friends of his gave Shapiro the nickname “Gurrah.”
Allie Tannenbaum became acquainted with several of the country club’s visitors, including Shimmy Salles, who was a delivery man for Lepke’s rackets, Curly Holtz, a labor mobster, and even Lepke himself. As the son of the owner, the Jewish mobsters invited Tannenbaum to all their parties. Tannenbaum, per her agreement with her father, didn’t get a penny until after the summer, which basically ended with the holiday season. As Tannenbaum walked through her father’s resort with no money, she noticed that all the Jewish gangsters had a lot of money to dish out. This made him a possible suspect to be drawn into his organized crime world.
In the late summer of 1931, Tannenbaum was strolling down Broadway in Manhattan when he ran into Big Harry Schacter, one of Lepke’s subordinates.
Schacter asked Tannenbaum, “Do you want a job?”
“I could use one, if it pays,” Tannenbaum said.
Schacter smiled. “This one’s for Lepke. You know what kind of job it’s going to be.”
Tannenbaum shrugged and said that he would do whatever it took to earn some money.
Tannenbaum began working for Lepke, initially for $35 a week. His job included general tasks such as striking, strike breaking, and dropping stink bombs where they were needed. Later, Tannenbaum graduated to more important roles, as “schlammings”, which meant that he “chlammed” or smashed the head of union workers, who were not towing Lepke’s line.
As the output of his work increased, so did Tannenbaum’s pay. Finally, Tannenbaum, who by then had been involved in six murders and helped dispose of the body of a seventh murder victim, was earning an impressive $125 a week. Due to Tannenbaum’s summer location in the Catskills, his work primarily involved murder and extortion in upstate New York. Tannenbaum was a valuable asset to Lepke in Sullivan County, because Tannenbaum was familiar with back roads and numerous lakes, where bodies could be hidden. Over the winter, Tannenbaum and his family vacationed in Florida, where Tannenbaum worked as a strongman at several of Lepke’s gambling venues.
Tannenbaum’s greatest success for Lepke was the 1939 assassination of Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg, suspected of speaking to the government about Lepke’s activities. Lepke gave Tannenbaum the task of assassinating Greenberg, through one of Lepke’s go-betweens (in order to insulate himself from any connection to a murder, Lepke never gave orders to his assassins).
Tannenbaum stalked Greenberg, first to Montreal, then Detroit, before finally cornering Greenberg in Los Angeles. On November 23, 1939, Tannenbaum, along with Bugsy Siegel, were waiting outside Greenberg’s apartment building. When Greenberg emerged, Tannenbaum and Siegel riddled “Big Greenie” with bullets. This was considered the first “mob murder” in Southern California.
In 1940, Tannenbaum was vacationing in Florida, when he received word that Lepke had been arrested and that Murder Incorporated killer Abe “Kid Twist” Reles was now singing like a canary about the work of Murder Incorporated. Tannenbaum immediately caught a train to New York City and went to the home of Charlie “The Bug” Workman, another of Lepke’s top killers. The reason for Tannenbaum’s visit was that he sought funding from Workman to go on the lam in Detroit. Luckily, while Tannenbaum and Workman were sitting in Workman’s living room, Detective Abraham Belsky knocked on the door to arrest Workman. Belsky was pleasantly surprised when he found Tannenbaum there, too.
At first Tannenbaum refused to yell. When Tannenbaum was questioned by police over a three-day period, he repeatedly said: “I refuse to answer for my constitutional rights.”
However, District Attorney Deckelman suddenly hit Tannenbaum with an indictment, accusing Tannenbaum and “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss of the 1936 murder of Irv Ashkenaz, a cab owner, who was informing the police about the cab business. of Lepke in Manhattan. Ashkenaz’s body was found near the entrance of a Catskills hotel, riddled with sixteen bullets.
“We have enough information on you to put you in person,” District Attorney Deckelman told Tannenbaum.
Suddenly, Tannenbaum, living up to his “Tick Tock” nickname, started talking non-stop. Tannenbaum told Deckelman about all the murders he was involved in and how they were connected to Lepke.
On the witness stand, during Lepke’s trial, Tannenbaum put the final nail in Lepke’s coffin, when he gave an essay about the day he heard Lepke order the murder of a candy store owner named Joe Rosen. Lepke was always cool and collected, and careful about what he said in front of anyone. In fact, Lepke never gave Tannenbaum a direct order to kill. This information was always passed on to Tannenbaum through an intermediary, close to Lepke.
However, in 1936, Tannenbaum was ordered, through Mendy Weiss, to kill Irv Ashkenaz. However, Weiss told Tannenbaum to report directly to Lepke, when the deed was done. After disposing of Ashkenaz, Tannenbaum went to Lepke’s office downtown to tell Lepke that Ashkenaz was really dead. When he entered Lepke’s office, Tannenbaum was met by a furious Lepke, yelling at Max Rubin, one of Lepke’s closest confidantes.
Tannenbaum testified on the witness stand to District Attorney Burton Turkus: “Lepke was yelling that he gave Joe Rosen money to get him to leave, and then he sneaked into a candy store, after telling him to stay away. Lepke he was yelling, ‘There’s a son of a bitch that will never come down to Dewey about me. Max (Rubin) was trying to calm him down. Easy Luis. I’ll take care of Joe Rosen; he’s fine.'”
“What did Lepke say to that?” Turkus asked Tannenbaum.
Tannenbaum responded, “He says, ‘You told me that before.'” He says, “This is the end. I’m sick of that son of a bitch.” He says, ‘and I’ll take care of him.’
Tannenbaum testified that two days after his meeting with Lepke and Rubin, in Lepke’s office, he read in the newspapers that Joe Rosen had been shot 16 times as he was opening his candy store in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Tannenbaum’s testimony, regarding the Rosen murder, corroborated Abe Reles’ testimony and was a death blow for Lepke. It took only four hours for the jury to convict Lepke of first-degree murder, which landed Lepke in the electric chair four years later. For his testimony against Lepke, Tannenbaum received a short jail sentence, a mild slap on the wrist for a man who had committed at least six murders.
Little is known about what Tannenbaum did for the rest of his life. He seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth, except for the times when he reappeared, to testify against his murderous old friends. In Rich Cohen’s book “Tough Jews,” Cohen says that in the 1950s, Tannenbaum worked in Atlanta for a time as a lampshade salesman.
In 1950, Tannenbaum emerged from the woodwork and tried himself in the murder trial of Jack Parisi, another Murder Incorporated hitman, who had been on the run for ten years. Despite Tannenbaum’s testimony, a judge found Parisi not guilty.
In 1976, unlike most of his contemporaries, Tannenbaum died of natural causes on an unnamed island off the coast of Florida. He was 70 years old.