Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, the notorious Brooklyn mobster who helped run the enforcement arm of organized crime fashionably dubbed Murder, Inc., sat in the Manhattan jail called the Tombs and wrote a short, but ever so significant letter to his wife. 

“Dear Rose,” the letter began. “Go and see O’Dwyer and tell him I want to talk to him.”

It was March 21, 1940, and the letter referred to Brooklyn District Attorney William O’Dwyer, who was spearheading a very public investigation into the activities of organized crime in his borough. O’Dwyer, and his assistant, Burton B. Turkus, had already succeeded in getting two of Reles’ lightweight colleagues, Anthony “Dukey” Maffetore and Abraham “Pretty” Levine, to tell their stories, and details of dozens of murders dating back five and six years or more were beginning to emerge. It was just the tip of the iceberg.

Reles was in jail under indictment in the 1933 murder of Alex “Red” Alpert, and something– to this day authorities can only speculate what that was– had made him decide to start cooperating. When he was through, Brooklyn and Sullivan County officials had learned more than they had ever wanted to know about the activities of Murder, Inc. in their jurisdictions.

It turned out that Reles possessed an eidetic memory when it came to the murders his group had committed. While the uneven narratives of Dukey and Pretty had brought some of the killings to light, it took Reles’ gift of memory to fill in many of the blanks. 

Just the day before Reles wrote the fateful letter to his wife, Sullivan County District Attorney William Deckelman had been able to obtain indictments against five men in the 1937 murder of the mob’s Catskills’ slot machine overseer, Walter Sage, and the 1936 slaying of taxi cab driver Irving Ashkenas. There was more to come.

As soon as Maffetore and Levine were finished telling Deckelman and his staff about their roles in the murders of Sage and Ashkenas, they were taken for a tour of the county in order to show police where bodies might still be hidden. 

“They pointed out spots in Hurleyville, Swan Lake, Loch Sheldrake, and other places where they said slayings had been committed by the gang,” the New York Times reported on March 20, 1940. “As soon as the thawing of the ice on Lake (sic) Sheldrake permits, it will be dragged for the body of a man known only as Jack, as the result of a statement by Levine yesterday that he had been shot and his weighted body thrown into the water in the summer of 1938.”

Reles would later reveal that Jack was really Sol Goldstein, a gangster trying to reform, who had been killed by the mob while he was honeymooning in Glen Wild in the summer of 1936 (not 1938 as the Times had erroneously reported), when it was feared that he might testify about organized crime’s influence over the Fulton Fish Market, where he had once worked.

“At the end of July (1936), Louis Capone summoned Pretty to the Corner,” wrote Turkus and Sid Feder in their 1951 book, Murder, Inc. “‘Go up to Loch Sheldrake in the mountains where Pep is staying, to do some work,’ he directed. ‘Pep will tell you.’” 

Pep was Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss, who was the most prolific of all the Murder, Inc. killers. It just so happened that Pittsburgh Phil had a personal score to settle with Goldstein, so this contract was a double barreled mission. 

“Pretty and Dukey drove to the Catskills and found not only Pittsburgh Phil, but Mikey Syckoff and Jack Cutler, another of the boys. Pittsburgh Phil briefed his squad. It was necessary to get Sol away from the side of his bride.”

Strauss gave strict instructions to “the boys” to subdue Goldstein, but not to kill him. He wanted that pleasure for himself. Goldstein was eventually trussed up in one of Pittsburgh Phil’s patented knots and taken to Loch Sheldrake, where, as Turkus and Feder wrote, “Allie (Tannenbaum) and Jack Drucker were waiting in a rowboat. They paddled out to the center of the lake and Phil personally threw the blanketed bundle overboard.”

Despite an extensive search of the lake by state police during the spring of 1940, Sol Goldstein’s body was never recovered.

Reles’ revelations provided authorities with the sordid details of hundreds of murders, and his eventual testimony at trial led to the convictions of countless mobsters, including Pittsburgh Phil” and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, both of whom were executed at Sing Sing. Lepke, who was public enemy number one at the time of his conviction, remains the only top level member of organized crime ever put to death by the government.

Reles, who had envisioned taking money he had stashed and running away to South America once he had fulfilled his obligations to the Brooklyn D.A., was under police guard at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island on November 12, 1941 when he mysteriously fell– or was thrown– to his death from a sixth floor window. He will forever be remembered in the history books of organized crime as “the canary who could sing, but couldn’t fly.”

John Conway is the Sullivan County Historian and a founder and president of The Delaware Company. Email him at jconway52@hotmail.com.