THE MOST VIOLENT JEWISH GANGSTER - THE STORY OF LUIS BUCHALTER

Louis bacalter managed to go from an ordinary guy who was hired to beat someone up to becoming a man to whom entire industries were subordinated under his patronage worked a gang which received for its bloodthirstiness the name murder Incorporated and lepke himself was labeled Public Enemy Number One by the FBI so if you're interested in hearing the story of the bloodiest and most successful racketeer of the early 20th century then meet Louis lepke bacalter on the other side of the law I want to ask you to take your mind off the video for a moment and look at this cool print I made for you if you like it you can buy any product you like by clicking the link in the description and of course every item you purchase contributes to the growth and advancement of the channel thank you for your attention and now let's dive deeper into the story of our hero for today Louis bacalter was born in New York City in February 1897. he was the youngest in a family of seven children According to some accounts according to others of 11 his parents Rose and Barnett were both Jewish immigrants who both came to the states with their first spouses and both lost them there so their Union was already a blend of two families with children which was then only to be enhanced by new additions under the circumstances the bacalters had little time to raise their children all their energy was spent on providing for them and The Offspring were left to fend for themselves most of the time but even under such circumstances little Louis did not show the slightest hint of deviant Behavior surrounding adults considered him a Shy Boy which would turn out to be a decent member of American society however the guys under which he would go down in history gradually made its way into the light in 1912 he was arrested for participation in a mass brawl and his mother began to hear rumors that her beloved lepke as she called him was engaged in theft and robbery she either couldn't or didn't want to correct him at the time by then Barnett had passed away and Rose was single-handedly looking after Louis most of her time was still spent trying to earn a living rather than raising her son so turning a blind eye to the fact that he'd gotten into a fight with someone or taken something from someone else was easier than trying to constantly counsel him besides back then this kind of teenage Behavior was not out of the ordinary many people in immigrant communities grew up the same way and that didn't mean that they were bound to become gangsters for life and Rose had proof for her suppositions at the age of 15 and by this time a high school dropout Louis took a job as a legal messenger for three dollars a week giving most of his earnings to his mother however the underworlds continued to suck the Young Buck halter in and his mother had no idea how deep theft and robbery did not leave his life and added to it were trips to bars and pool halls where he got acquainted with local characters from the other side of the law and one such character named Jacob gurash Shapiro would later become his partner in everything for many years it was his acquaintance with him that marked lefke's plunge into racketeering together with Shapiro they organized a small gang and terrorized the local Street vendors they demanded protection money and if refused they smashed up their shop doing it for as many days as it took for the vendor to start paying in addition to this they also practiced burglary for which Louis was arrested three times between 1915 and 1916. he spent just over a year in prison and was released in the summer of 1917 not six months later however bacalter was again jailed on the same charge in January 1918 he received a one and a half year sentence in sing-sing prison in 1919 he was released and in 1920 he went to jail again seeing Freedom again only in March 1922 and from then until the late 1930s but calter never again looked at the Prison Walls from the inside although arrests would still be an almost regular occurrence in his life when Louis was released from prison again it turned out that the world hadn't changed all that significantly albeit slightly with the introduction of prohibition there were underground distilleries everywhere his peers were making good money bootlegging and the penalties for this activity were laughable however bacalter chose a different path whether he knew then that it would bring him a lot of money or whether he simply followed the beaten path it didn't matter much because in both cases in 1922 he began his career as a labor racketeer which would give him everything he could dream of while destroying hundreds of people's lives before we begin the story of bacalter's Rise as a labor racketeer it is worth first telling you how labor racketeering came to be in the states in the first place so that you have a better idea of lepke's role in the history of this illegal way of making money I've already touched on this topic superficially on my channel in the video about Arnold Rothstein however now we need to dive a little deeper labor racketeering started at the end of the 19th century at that time there was a mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe who in large numbers went to work in the Garment industry such a large influx of cheap labor unleashed the hands of employers who drove their workers into inhumane conditions because of this more and more labor unions began to appear fighting for decent working conditions and wages if the unions could not reach an agreement they led the workers to strike that's where the gangsters came in first hired by employers to break up the picket lines and then by the labor unions to resist the violent suppression of strikes and protect their leaders and workers that is to say at first the gangsters were simply hired as Fighters for a fixed fee and initially they were content with this role the first known mercenary of this kind was monk Eastman in the late 19th century he led the strongest group of gangsters on par with the Gang of Five Corners he sided with Employers in the labor Wars and broke up demonstrations from 1897 to 1904 however he did not take this way of making money seriously and didn't place any bets on it the next gangster who already saw opportunities in labor racketeering was Jack zelig in 1908 he led the former Eastman gang and took advantage of the mass strike in 1909 to infiltrate the Trade union movement that strike of twenty thousand women from the Garment industry lasted six months and zelig and his thugs were on the side of the workers eventually at the end of the strike he joined several labor unions and received a steady paycheck for himself and his fighters in 1912 zelig was murdered and his work was continued by Benny Fain who further increased the presence of gangsters in the labor movement records have been preserved showing how much feign was paid for his law enforcement Services fifty dollars a week was paid to him personally and another 10 for each of his men from which Benny pocketed another two dollars Services Beyond Simple beatings were paid for separately so a broken limb costed 200 and murder five hundred dollars per person when faced with prison time or Worse the death penalty Thane made a deal with the authorities his place was taken by Jacob organ nicknamed little Augie Oregon continued the policy of his predecessors beat faces get money and when in 1924 he was set up with a communist by Arnold Rothstein Auggie didn't ask too many questions he didn't care that the Communists wanted to take over the labor unions to influence revolutionary sentiment he didn't care that Rothstein was milking those very Communists giving the gangsters he could influence not only them but the industrialist as well allowing him to manage the strikes as he needed to Oregon was just doing what he knew how to do hitting people and getting a quick paycheck and when lepke and Shapiro tried to tell them that they themselves had the power to take over the unions the power to manage the strikes themselves and thus influence the producers getting much more from them than they do now Augie said that he was not interested this was the basis for the conflict between Oregon and Shapiro and bacalter who had gained weight in the gang by the end of the 1920s the latter understood how to act in order to ensure a secure old age and Augie was an obstacle in their way the occasion for the conflict to become active was another strike in which the gang participated with Oregon as boss they agreed to end the strike by paying him fifty thousand dollars but calter opposed it operating to the point that by continuing it would be possible to hammer out much better terms Augie of course refused because of which lepke and Shapiro broke away from the group taking their loyalists with them Oregon teamed up with the notorious prohibition area gangsters the diamond Brothers to strengthen his position however this did not help him either in October 1927 bacalter and Shapiro cracked down and killed Auggie Jack Diamond who was with him that night survived the assassination attempt but refused to confront lepke thus bacalter got rid of the last competitors in that area of Labor racketeering in the Garment industry which was dominated by Jewish gangsters because you have to realize that even though lepke was probably the biggest racketeer in that period the Italian Mobsters were not sleeping and if Louis was raiding areas where Jews were predominant the mafia was raiding areas where there were more Italian immigrants and this is basically very typical of the national crime syndicate which was formed a first and second generation immigrants now bacalter could do business the way he had long wanted to he started with the Garment industry as he knew it well the unions accustomed to gangsters sitting on their paychecks and keeping a low profile outside of strikes were unprepared for the fact that they would not just come out of the Shadows but would attack their former employers through threats and beatings bacalter together with Shapiro took control of one Union after another this scheme of the Takeover was simple as hell the union leader hired the lepke gangsters to do the job whether it was a strike or suppression of internal descent it didn't matter Louis asked in addition to money for it how many of his men would become members of the Union the work that bacalter was hired to do was done to the best of his ability the union leader satisfied but only after a while lepke's men with the same threats and beatings organized a coup within the union and took it under their control well after Louis influenced the organization of strikes on manufacturers and extorted money from them in exchange for the peaceful operation of their factories it worked the same way with the industrialists lepke was hired and did the job but inside the factory his men remained exercising control by the same means of threats and beatings which allowed Louis to extort more money than ever and if the functioning of the factory was not particularly important to him lepke maximally squeezed the credit line of the company and when the owner could no longer pay the bills he simply left him to deal with the bankruptcy alone in addition to manufacturing MacArthur also took over Transportation clothing then was not often sewn in one Factory before ending up in the store it passed through several hands it was mostly transported by private contractors who were not affiliated with the factory lepke United most of these firms into one Association naturally under his control after that he could dictate his terms to dissenting factories by simply cutting off their logistical Links of course after such an association Transportation Prices rose sharply and all the unforeseen profits were taken by bacalter and his Partners the only area in the Garment industry where Louis could not penetrate was in the fur industry there he was strongly rebuffed so the gangster left them alone and turned his attention to controlling what had already been acquired as well as scouting other potential areas one of which eventually became the bakery industry lepke went in using an already proven method he organized a single Association of carriers from disparate firms and then extorted money from industrialists through Labor strikes in addition to these fears bacalter also penetrated into the unions of film operators shoemakers handbag manufacturers cab drivers poultry farmers and after the death of Dutch Schultz he took over part of the Union of restaurant workers he didn't do all these takeovers alone of course by the beginning of the 1930s included in berkalter and Shapiro's group was about 250 people and the following years their numbers only grew some of these Fighters would eventually become known as murder Incorporated such a loud name for bokhalter's Brooklyn gang was invented of course by journalists and then on the basis of this name there were so many rumors that the order of assassins from the game of the same name would nervously Smoke on the side for example there were rumors that for new killers in the gang invariably their first order received was to dispatch an older killer who had already managed to perform several hits and thus the top got rid of a lot of knowledge people the new Hitman was subsequently eliminated in the same fashion and in other rumors these new killers were all descendants of local scum barely approaching 18 years old those who did the best job were not killed but transferred to the category of so-called professionals who sat on a permanent salary and carried out especially important orders and who paid them for this right the criminal Syndicate headed by Luciano the number of gangs varied from 500 to 1500 people the number of murders and all totaled less than a thousand victims it's just a great story for a cool action or detective movie where the investigator catches the most dangerous gang in the world however the reality has always turned out to be much more prosaic they did not sit on any salary from the crime syndicate as there was no crime syndicate those who have been watching me for a long time already know why for those who have been watching me for a long time already know why for those who haven't check out my video about the birth of the American Mafia actually everything else has been greatly exaggerated it was an ordinary gang which like others engaged in racketeering extortion usury prostitution and other illegal activities and as a secondary job they did orders for bacalter could they have committed murders for the mob they could have Louis knew Luciano and he was on good terms with Anastasia so getting them together wasn't a problem the other thing is that they didn't kill on the level of modern drug cartels and they were never a private Army it was a gang of ordinary Thugs who eliminated dozens maybe hundreds but by no means thousands of people but I digress murder Incorporated is a topic for a separate video and for the context of lepke's story you should realize that he was connected to them they were doing his bidding and in the future they would be one of the reasons for his problems with the law now I propose we move on and talk about another legal trade that the Jewish gangster had a hand in namely drug trafficking this story goes back to the 1920s when a Jacob katzenberg worked for Arnold Rothstein managing the delivery of heroin from China to the states in 1928 Rothstein died and Jacob began running the operation on his own by 1935 however either the channels through which he smuggled the product were cut off or some other problems prevented him from working in general katzenberg came to lepke and asked for help in organizing for this smooth receipt of goods on American soil but culture agreed but set on his own conditions he put up no money but only solved problems he got 50 percent of the wholesale heroin Imports the drugs were only sold to dealers Louis trusted that is those who worked for him in one way or another and from them he gets 50 percent of the retail sales katzenberg of course puffed up at such demands but to refuse one of the most influential gangsters of that time especially when he himself came to him was not only stupid but also dangerous and pocalter did solve the problems with customs and without investing a dime entered the heroin smuggling business however drugs of course were for him a kind of investment on par with the same legal Investments he made for reports to the tax authorities labor racketeering remained his source of livelihood no wonder just think about it he managed to take over an industry that in the 1930s produced about 500 million pieces of women's clothing and 250 million pieces of men's clothing a year don't forget that he had a presence in other areas as well and then estimate how much money he could have made through extortion unfortunately of course no one gave us exact figures and the FBI's calculations don't make it very clear either they said after lepke's conviction that he made between 2 and 50 million dollars a year but even if you take the minimum figure from that statement and convert it to the modern equivalent you get more than 35 million dollars or almost 3 million monthly on this money lepke could not deny himself anything travel to Europe vacations at the best resorts in America nice houses cars suits he had a life he never dreamed of as a kid stealing purses however having climbed so high but calter couldn't help it attract the attention of the authorities prosecutor Thomas Dewey had just about put underground Lottery Kingpin Dutch Schultz in jail he put Charles Luciano away for running a prostitution ring and decided his scalp collection was missing a prominent labor racketeer so lepke appeared on his radar and he would soon forget what a quiet and contented life was all about but coulter's downfall began in 1936 when a labor racketeering case in the fur industry finally came to court I've said before that this was the only area in the Garment industry that lepke was unable to take over there he got not only a forceful rebuff but also a man who risked testifying against him he didn't get punished in the end managing to acquit himself in the appeals court but what he did get was Dewey's undivided attention the prosecutor had been developing a case against lepke but after the trial he finally realized that he could be another big fish for him Dewey decided to focus on the ax but calter had committed in the baking industry it started with the investigation into the murder of William Snyder which took place in 1934. Snyder was then head of the flower carriers Association but Coulter did not like him in this position so on his orders Snyder was murdered by the golden brothers who then de facto headed it however as often happens in such cases the witnesses who could be found refused to testify and the case fell apart did that stop Dewey on the contrary he got a clear signal of where to dig by beginning a thorough examination of the Affairs of the flower Transporters Association lefke immediately realized that the heat was on and went on the run so that his place in the dock was empty instead Max Silverman William Goldust and Benjamin Spivak were convicted of Labor racketeering all three naturally had worked for bacalter lepke himself had a separate case in the same area in which Max Rubin bacalter's longtime right-hand man who knew a lot was already testifying plus one of katzenberg's men also sang giving the Bureau of Narcotics the whole scheme of his operation putting bacalter in charge of it and to make sure Louis didn't get away with it Dewey nailed the Goldis Brothers on the Snyder assassination attempt and they broke agreeing to testify about lepke's dealings in the baking industry with that set of charges but Calder could have well spent the rest of his life in prison which he most likely did not want to do he decided to solve this problem in the most typical way very similar to the famous expression no body no case only in the case of lepke it sounds more like no witness no prosecution the first thing to do with this strategy was to hide so that the authorities would not find him before they ran out of living Witnesses which wasn't really the easiest task Dewey put up a 25 000 bounty on his head and Hoover promised the same amount on behalf of the FBI and created in New York was a special task force consisting of 50 people which dealt exclusively with the capture of bookhalter and even in such conditions lepke managed for several years to successfully hide and run his Empire while eliminating all those who could denounce him in court and on one hand it did work Dewey was very nervous about the fact that one by one people who could tell him anything about bacalter's Affairs were disappearing he even called a private meeting about it where he discussed with the FBI and the DEA how to influence the situation but on the other hand and because of this Behavior by the boss many subordinates began to fear for their lives after all the slightest suspicion was enough for lepke to sentence a person to death especially since there was already a precedent when Louis was wrong Max Rubin whom I've already mentioned was sent away from New York by bacalter however a couple weeks later he disobeyed his boss and traveled back to see his family at the same moment he received a summons to report to Dewey for questioning Reuben had no intention of complying he wasn't going to snitch like that but Calder did not believe this and sent men to kill him Max miraculously survived the assassination attempt and radically changed his mind about cooperating with the authorities becoming a key witness in the racketeering case in the bakery industry another downside to this strategy was that it hurt the rest of the top of the underworld New York's crime bosses one way or another had connections in the power structures such cooperation was mutually beneficial and allowed both sides to enrich themselves however when you have a hunt for a Public Enemy Number One with whom you were basking in the Florida Sun yesterday the authorities are somehow less willing to make contact fearing among other things that the hunt would affect them as well so the other bosses mostly from the Italian mafia began to think about how to clean up this whole mess as quick as possible and they decided that the best way was to hand lepke over to the authorities this option was also advantageous for them because it would be possible to divide his spheres of influence among themselves after bacalter's condemnation that is as they say to have your cake and eat it too and in order that led key would not resist such a decision they persuaded him through Albert Anastasia who helped Louis to hide the surrender would take place according to a pre-agreed scenario but Coulter would have to surrender in person into the hands of FBI director Hoover and would receive a sentence of only drug trafficking and no more than 12 years lepke who was facing many times that amount agreed and the mob actually arranged for him to surrender to Hoover personally and on August 24 1939 Anastasia took Louis to a meeting with the director of the FBI after getting into the car driving a few hundred meters and having a few words with Hoover lepke realized that he was deceived there was no deal and whether the gangsters received the promise of fifty thousand dollars for the surrender of bacalter is not known the first case he was tried for was drug trafficking it turned out so because Louis surrendered to the federal authorities and the case of smuggling was also Federal incidentally in the future the fact that he was first try for heroin would very much jeopardize Dewey's enforcement of a conviction in a case he prosecuted katzenberg who had suggested lepke get into drug smuggling was happy to testify in the case as a witness to get his own sentence commuted plus it turned out that undercover agent Al Karens was also among the smugglers in general Louis was there and it was impossible to turn away in January 1941 he received 14 years in prison then a couple of days later he already had another court date in which the prosecutor was Thomas Dewey lepke was on trial in New York for a labor racketeering in the baking and clothing Industries here as in the drug case his former Associates testified against him but did it not only for fear of spending a long time behind bars but also for fear of being killed for lepke their mere existence would seem burdensome because even after his arrest the deaths of undesirable people still continued as a result in March 1940 in a racketeering case he received another 30 years in prison as it turned out however the worst was just ahead Abe relis a Hitman from the infamous murder Incorporated had talked to the authorities lepke knew that he could have said so much that the only feasible sentence for him would be the electric chair however for such a prediction to become true the authorities needed to find evidence beyond relis's words because in New York City you couldn't judge a man solely on the word of his accomplice and the only case in which this was accomplished was the 1936 murder of trucker Joseph Rosen lepke had squeezed him out of the trucking business and the man had blurted out somewhere that he would go to the authorities and tell them everything once it got to bacalter Rosen was dead law enforcement managed to find enough witnesses to reconstruct the whole chain of events from how lepke gave the order from when the order was carried out so even relis mysteriously falling out of a window didn't interfere with the trial there were enough people there to win the case without him but calter ever realizing where things were going refused used to make a deal with the authorities he was twice offered while the investigation was going on leniency in exchange for his testimony in the so-called Corporation of murder's case which originated with relis's testimony about contract killings carried out by their gang lepke rejected the offers both times Well since he did not agree to give something to the authorities he was tried to the fullest extent of the law and on November 30th 1941 Louis bacalter was sentenced to death the first and only time in the states an organized crime boss at that level received such a sentence but if you think the intricacies of the bacalter story ended there you're wrong there was one catch the drug case as I said earlier was a federal case and the other cases were handled at the state level so by law before the death penalty could be carried out lepke had to serve 14 years for dealing heroin the only loophole to get around this was a presidential pardon in the federal case to go straight to the state sentence however even here thing things were not so simple the president at the time was Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt Thomas Dewey who had the greatest political Ambitions was a Republican and that's where big politics came in serving time in a federal case lepke to put it crudely was under the jurisdiction of the president if Roosevelt pardoned him Louis would immediately come under the jurisdiction of Dewey who ruled the ball in New York first as prosecutor and then as Governor why is this important to ask the fact is that several people strongly close to Roosevelt had business dealings with bacalter at one time as an example Sydney Hillman as the head of the United garment Workers Union worked very close with lepke often using his Thugs and Roosevelt was afraid that if he put bacalter in Dewey's hands he might try to offer him a deal he would turn over all the dirty Democratic functionaries and in return receive leniency if lepke were to agree to such a deal it would have been the end of the careers of many subordinates as well as Rose Roosevelt himself and a dramatic increase in Dewey's political weight this is why picoulter's execution was continually postponed for more than two years the authorities found a compromise in this matter only in early 1944 and Louis was transferred to the state of New York but even there the law did not stop mocking lepke on March 2nd an execution was scheduled he was prepared for it and ate his last meal yet it turned out that because of legal delays it had to be postponed for 48 hours so on March 4th 1944 he ate his last supper again this time really his last a couple hours later he was put in an electric chair he was electrocuted and the doctor said I pronounced this man officially dead this was the story of Louis let keep a calter and as a conclusion to it I'd like to offer the folk wisdom that states you reap what you sow

Channel: On the other side of the law

Views: 9,495

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Id: Zy4Xo_u3ISw

Length: 27min 24sec (1644 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2023