The grisly enforcement arm of the organized crime syndicate fashionably dubbed by the media of the day as Murder, Inc., was responsible for no less than eight murders in Sullivan County during the 1930s. That number may be higher – some of the bodies, even of known victims, have never been found – but it pales in comparison to what it might have been if not for the events that transpired in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office in March of 1940.

 That’s when three key members of the hit squad, beginning with lightweight youngsters Anthony “Dukey” Maffetore and Abe “Pretty” Levine, and culminating with high-level enforcer Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, decided to cooperate with authorities, and before they were finished, they had effectively unraveled the most notorious gang of contract killers in American history.

 “Dukey Maffetore was a sleek young man who read comic books while the rest plotted murder. They would give him his orders; he would fold up his literature with a sigh and carry out some job that could lead him to the electric chair,” wrote Burton B. Turkus and Sid Feder in their 1951 book, “Murder, Inc.”

“Having completed his chore, Dukey would place his shoulder against a building again with a satisfied smile, and get back to ‘Li’l Abner’ or ‘Superman.’ When Dukey was arrested in the Red Alpert murder, he was twenty-five, and he hadn’t done an honest day’s work in over seven years. Yet, he had never been convicted of a crime. All the Brownsville boys seemed lucky that way in those days.”

 Maffetore started squealing on his long-time employers only after he had been arrested and presented with evidence that his friends had planned to have him killed to keep just such an eventuality from occurring. It was his apprehension on the murder charge, in fact, that undoubtedly saved his life.

 Like his buddy, Abraham Levine was a low-level hood who worked some big jobs for the enforcers. And like Dukey, he knew way too much to ever get too comfortable, especially when he showed indications that he intended to go straight once he was married. Levine, too was marked for execution by his pals, and only his arrest saved him.

 “Pretty had big blue eyes and curly hair, and dimples that caused much palpitation and fluttering of the eyelids among the Brownsville girls,” Turkus and Feder wrote. “He married a belle who was one of the beauties of Brooklyn. Some of his friends were unkind enough to suggest that she was wasted on a punk, even one as pretty as Pretty was.

 “Where Dukey had the I.Q. of a boy probably half his age, Pretty’s mind was clear. At one time it was said around the Brownsville ‘office’ that if Pretty kept his mind on his work, Kid Twist was even thinking of advancing him from punk to hoodlum.”

 Of course, none of that mattered once Dukey and Pretty began providing details of hit after hit in which they had played supporting roles. Some of these rub-outs took place in Sullivan County, most notably the July, 1937 ice-pick murder of Walter Sage, whose body was dumped into Swan Lake, only to float to the surface just a few days later, at the height of the summer tourist season. At one point, state police officers and sheriff’s deputies from Sullivan County had taken the two young mobsters on an automobile tour of the county, as the pair pointed out the disposal sites for a number of bodies.

 “District Attorney William Deckelman of Sullivan County said that although Levine and Maffetore had offered some information concerning a number of murders committed in that county in the last few years, they did not give enough to clear them up,” the New York Times reported in its March 21, 1940 edition.

Indeed, it wasn’t until Reles joined the chorus a week or so later that the gruesome details of the Sullivan County slayings-– and plenty of them, for Reles had virtually an eidetic memory when it came to murder-– would come to light. 

But it wasn’t as if the information supplied by the two young punks went for naught, either. Proceeding solely on their ramblings, and the little physical evidence that had been collected over the years, officials in Sullivan County were able to obtain indictments against five men in two murders.

 “Based on the sickening revelations of Levine and Maffetore, murder indictments were handed up last week in Sullivan County against five men, including Big Gangi Cohen, who was promptly arrested in California,” it was reported in Time Magazine on April 1, 1940.

Cohen, who was Walter Sage’s best friend and sometime roommate, and who, by all accounts had been a key figure in his demise, had left Sullivan County the night of the Sage murder and had fled to Hollywood, where he was earning a comfortable living as a film extra under the name Jack Gordon. Upon extradition, he became the first to stand trial in the Sage slaying in one of the most famous trials ever in Sullivan County Court.

John Conway is the Sullivan County Historian. Email him at jconway52@hotmail.com.  For more stories about Murder, Inc., see his new book, “The Borscht Belt in Retrospect,” due out in May.