the Man Who Built Murder Inc.: Albert Anastasia and Ruthless Architecture of American Organized Crime

At nineteen, Albert Anastasia was sentenced to die in the electric chair. Four witnesses disappeared, the case collapsed, and the young Calabrian immigrant walked free. What followed was a rise through the Brooklyn waterfront, organized labor, and the violent underworld of New York that would eventually make him one of the most feared figures in American organized crime.Known to the press as the "Lord High Executioner," Anastasia was more than a notorious killer. He was an organizer. Alongside Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, he helped transform contract murder into a disciplined, compartmentalized enterprise known to history as Murder, Inc. Its killers could be sent across state lines, disconnected from both their victims and the families that ordered the hits. The result was an organization designed to make violence difficult to trace - and accountability even harder to reach.But power built on silence has a weakness: someone eventually talks.From the Castellammarese War and the creation of the Commission to the rise of Murder, Inc., the disappearance of Peter Panto, Abe Reles's explosive testimony, Anastasia's takeover of the Mangano family, his ambitions in Havana, and the growing conflict that surrounded him, this book follows the machinery behind one of organized crime's most ruthless careers.Then, on October 25, 1957, the architect of an institution built around deniable violence sat down in a Manhattan barbershop. Within seconds, the machine he had helped perfect turned against him.This is the story of Albert Anastasia - and the ruthless architecture of American organized crime.