He’s been a ruthless killer since he was 18 years old, but Abe “Kid Twist” Reles wasn’t a man. When it came to shoving and shoving, he was nothing more than a yellow-bellied canary, which he ratted out to his best friends to save his own skin.
Abraham Reles was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, on May 10, 1906. His father was an Austrian Jew who had immigrated to the United States in search of a better life. But after working for years as a humble pieceworker in the garment trade, he ended up selling knishes on the streets of Brooklyn from a mobile stand.
Quickly realizing that his father’s life was not for him, the five-foot-two-inch Reles dropped out of school after eighth grade. He soon worked as a gofer for the powerful Shapiro brothers, Meyer, Irving and Willie, who ran the mobs in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Reles was reduced to running errands and doing light jobs for the Shapiros, sometimes for as little as five dollars each. One of these errands consisted of guarding one of Shapiro’s many slot machines, and for this, Reles received a bullet in the back, which caused nothing more than impudence, but did cause a great outburst in Reles’s ego. It was around this time that Reles reportedly took on the nickname “Kid Twist,” after a former New York City Jewish mobster named Max “Kid Twist” Zwerbach, who, oddly enough, was also killed at Coney. Island.
Upset, and not wanting to continue taking the short end of the Shapiros’ stick, Reles formed his own little gang, consisting of his childhood friend Bugsy Goldstein and the Italian duo of Happy Maione and Dasher Abbendado. Soon, sadistic assassin Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss joined the crew, and Reles announced, at the ripe age of twenty, that he and his boys were going to take Brownsville and all of its business from the Shapiros. Reles named his motley crew of assassins “Brooklyn Inc.”
“Why do we have to take leftovers?” Reles asked Goldstein. “We should cut a piece off. To hell with those guys.”
When the Shapiros found out what Reles was planning, Meyer, the clan chief, was furious. “Brownsville belongs to us,” Meyer Shapiro said. “No one moves here.”
Meyer Shapiro fired the first salvo in the war for control of Brownsville by grabbing Rele’s girlfriend on the street, brutally beating her, and raping her. Now it was personal for Reles, and he and Goldstein stalked the streets of Brownsville, looking to kill all three Shapiros, but mainly Meyer, due to the indignity of desecrating Reles’s girlfriend. Over the course of an entire year, Reles and Goldstein shot Meyer Shapiro nineteen times, but wounded him only once. Then one night, thinking that Meyer Shapiro and his two brothers had been ambushed outside his apartment building on Blake Avenue, Reles was upset to discover that only Irving had bothered to show up. As soon as Irving Shapiro entered his fifth-floor apartment, Reles and Goldstein discharged their weapons at him, first hitting Irving twice in the face and then sixteen more times in the back.
A few days later, Reles and his boys cornered Meyer Shapiro on the streets of Brooklyn. A single bullet to Meyer Sharpiro’s ear from Reles unseated Shapiro as Brownsville mob boss. It took Reles three years to finally eliminate Willie Shapiro, who had been threatening to kill Reles and his friends all along. After Willie Shapiro was kidnapped from a bar, he was taken to a Brooklyn basement, mercilessly beaten, then buried in a shallow sand dune on Canarsie Flats. Willie Shapiro’s body was soon found, and the medical examiner who performed the autopsy located sand in his lungs, meaning he had been buried alive.
Reles and his boys’ triumph over the Shapiro brothers caught the eye of Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, and soon Brooklyn Inc. became a subcorporation of Murder Incorporated. Lepke was said to have several dozen assassins on his payroll, and in the 1930s, police estimated that Murder Incorporated was responsible for as many as five hundred murders nationwide.
However, nothing good lasts forever. On February 2, 1940, Reles, Goldstein, and Anthony “Dukey” Maffetore were arrested for the 1934 murder of the hoodlum named Red Alpert. Maffetore was the first to turn the state evidence against his team, but the biggest rat gem for New York District Attorney William O’Dwyer was Reles, who was the highest-ranking member of Murder. Incorporated under Lepke. In the Lepke trial, which also included Mendy Weiss and Louis Capone as defendants, Reles, who had a photographic memory, gave intimate details of more than 200 murders in which the defendants were involved. Subsequently, Reles’s three former friends were convicted and fried in Sing Sing’s electric chair.
However, the government was not done with Reles’ shrieks. They wanted him as a lead witness in the upcoming trials of Murder Incorporated bigwigs Albert Anastasia and Bugsy Siegel. While Reles awaited several more trips to court, O’Dwyer hid Reles at the Half Moon Hotel, located on the sandy beaches of Coney Island. Reles was under constant police surveillance, with no less than six police officers at a time watching him, even while he slept.
However, in the early hours of November 12, 1941, Reles fell to his death from the hotel’s sixth-floor window. They found him lying lopsided on his back, his suit jacket on, but his white shirt unbuttoned, exposing a fat belly. Several sheets were found tied together, and although Reles’s body was found twenty feet from the base of the hotel, the official cause of death was “death by fall, while he was attempting to escape.” After Reles’ death, O’Dwyer announced that his future cases “went out the window” with Reles.
Years later, Italian crime boss Lucky Luciano said Frank Costello paid $50,000 to distribute to the New York City police department, to see if the man who could “sing like a canary” could fly like one, too.