Prohibition Gangsters: The Rise and Fall of a Bad Generation

Chapter 11. Lepke on the Hot Seat

197 $ Louis Lepke Buchalter was the “intelligent Hebrew” who became the master of the labor racket in New York, primarily in the city’s garment industry (see chapter 3). By the 1930s he had branched out beyond the needle trades to bakeries and flour truckers. He was a leading crime figure; among the attendees at the bar mitzvah of his son were Lucky Luciano, Longie Zwillman, Meyer Lansky, and Bugsy Siegel.1 He was making millions of dollars a year by ripping off unions and manufacturing establishments. With the death or imprisonment of most of his fellow crime lords, he was one of the last of the headline-grabbing New York bosses who had risen to power during Prohibition. He also has the distinction of being the only one of them to be executed in the electric chair for his crimes. Lepke’s path to the death chamber could be said to have begun with the pelt of the humble rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus. Fur was a popular fashion item in the 1930s, and, in the face of the Depression, rabbit fur predominated because it was cheaper than mink, fox, and sable. Lepke and his partner Gurrah Shapiro saw this as a business opportunity and took control of the Protective Fur Dressers’ Corporation. They looted the dues of the organization and levied a ten-cent surcharge on every one hundred rabbit skins, not a bad deal considering that the furriers processed some twenty to thirty million skins a year.2 Managers and owners in the fur industry who did not accept this arrangement either were beaten up or c h a p t e r 1 1 Lepke on the Hot Seat 198 The Fall their property was destroyed. For example, one furrier had acid thrown in his face, and another was blown up by a car bomb.3 Federal law enforcement officers realized that they could charge Lepke for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which made price fixing and restraint of trade illegal. As a side benefit, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York saw this as a way to grab the crime buster spotlight away from his rival, Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey. On November 13, 1936, Lepke and Shapiro were each sentenced in federal court to two-year prison terms and fined $10,000. A “slap on the wrist,” said the presiding judge.4 It was indeed a minor punishment, and it became even more ineffectual. Dewey, preparing his own case against the racketeers, went to see U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Martin T. Manton to request that bail be set at a level high enough so that Lepke and Shapiro would not be able to skip town while they appealed their antitrust conviction . Manton nodded sympathetically, but the next day he assigned bail at a measly $10,000 for each man, which they quickly paid and walked out of jail. In fact, Manton subsequently went even further by overturning Lepke’s antitrust conviction! The furious Dewey launched an investigation that discovered Manton had been actively accepting bribes in exchange for favorable court decisions. When word of the investigation broke in the newspapers, Manton resigned in shame.5 Crossing Tom Dewey from Owosso, Michigan, was clearly a losing proposition. After being released on bail, Lepke’s next hurdle was a retrial on the antitrust indictment. The new trial was scheduled for July 6, 1937, and Lepke must have been fretting for some time before the trial. Not only were the Feds after him, but Dewey was also building a case against him. Furthermore, Lepke must have known that he was being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics for smuggling drugs. Faced with all this, Lepke decided to go on the lam. When he did not show up for the trial he was officially regarded as a fugitive from the law, and in December 1937 he was indicted in absentia by a federal grand jury for narcotics smuggling, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.6 Lepke on the Hot Seat 199 On the Lam Lepke’s disappearance turned into a long and notorious vanishing act. Dewey saw to it that a million “Wanted Dead or Alive” police circulars were sent out all over the nation. A five-thousand-dollar reward was offered by the state of New York, which eventually grew to fifty thousand dollars...