1. Louis Buchalter, known as Louis Lepke or Lepke Buchalter, was a Jewish-American organized crime figure and head of the Mafia hit squad Murder, Inc.
36 Facts About Lepke Buchalter
1. 2.
Charles Birger and Lepke Buchalter are the only National Crime Syndicate bosses to be executed after being convicted of murder.
3.
Lepke Buchalter was executed using the infamous "Old Sparky" electric chair after being sent "up the river" to Sing Sing Correctional Facility.
4.
Lepke Buchalter was born on February 6,1897 into a large Ashkenazi Jewish family in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan.
5.
Lepke Buchalter's parents emigrated separately from the Russian Empire and married in 1893 in New York, where they had three sons together.
6.
Lepke Buchalter's mother called Louis, their second son, "Lepkeleh", which later became "Lepke".
7.
Lepke Buchalter was a machinist who operated a hardware store on the Lower East Side.
8.
Lepke Buchalter's mother, Rose Kauvar Buchalter, was from Vilnius and had three sons and two daughters by her first husband.
9.
Lepke Buchalter's half-brother was Rabbi Charles Kauvar, while his brother Emanuel became a dentist and brother Isadore a pharmacist.
10.
In 1910, Lepke Buchalter finished elementary school and started a job selling theatrical goods.
11.
On September 2,1915, Lepke Buchalter was arrested in New York for the first time for burglary and assault, but the case was discharged.
12.
In late 1915 or early 1916, Lepke Buchalter went to live with his uncle in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
13.
On February 29,1916, Lepke Buchalter was arrested in Bridgeport on burglary charges and was sent to the Cheshire Reformatory for juvenile offenders in Cheshire, Connecticut, until July 12,1917.
14.
On September 28,1917, Lepke Buchalter was sentenced in New York to 18 months in state prison at Sing Sing in Ossining, New York, on a grand larceny conviction.
15.
On January 22,1920, Lepke Buchalter returned to Sing Sing on a 30-month sentence for attempted burglary.
16.
Lepke Buchalter then used the unions to threaten strikes and demand weekly payments from factory owners while dipping into union bank accounts.
17.
Lepke Buchalter later formed an alliance with Tommy Lucchese, a leader of the Lucchese crime family, and together they controlled the garment district.
18.
Lepke Buchalter was described as a quiet man who for years managed to avoid the public spotlight.
19.
In conversations with his criminal associates, Lepke Buchalter preferred listening over talking.
20.
Lepke Buchalter generously compensated his gang members and took them to hockey games, boxing matches, and even winter cruises.
21.
In turn, Lepke Buchalter would assign the job to Jewish and Italian street gang members from Brooklyn.
22.
Lepke Buchalter used the same killers for his own murder contracts.
23.
In 1935, Lepke Buchalter arranged his most significant murder: the powerful New York gangster Dutch Schultz.
24.
On September 13,1936, Murder, Inc killers, acting on Lepke Buchalter's orders, gunned down Joseph Rosen, a Brooklyn candy store owner.
25.
On December 1,1937, the fugitive Lepke Buchalter was indicted in federal court on conspiracy to smuggle heroin into the United States.
26.
Lepke Buchalter bribed US customs agents not to inspect the trunks.
27.
On July 29,1939, Thomas Dewey requested that the City of New York offer a $25,000 reward for Lepke Buchalter's capture, citing a string of unsolved gangland murders.
28.
However, Lepke Buchalter was sent to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas to serve his federal sentence of 14 years for narcotics trafficking.
29.
On May 9,1941, Lepke Buchalter was arraigned in New York state court on the 1936 Rosen murder along with three other murders.
30.
On December 2,1941, Lepke Buchalter was sentenced to death along with his lieutenants Emanuel "Mendy" Weiss and Louis Capone.
31.
Lepke Buchalter made several pleas for mercy, but they were rejected.
32.
On March 4,1944, Louis Lepke Buchalter was executed in the electric chair in Sing Sing.
33.
Louis Lepke Buchalter was buried at the Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, Queens.
34.
Lepke Buchalter was mentioned in "The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti", episode eight of the first season of the popular HBO television series The Sopranos.
35.
Lowell's poem claims that prior to execution, Lepke Buchalter had been lobotomized.
36.
Lepke Buchalter's labor racketeering and extortion is prominently featured in Button Man, a 2018 novel by Andrew Gross partially based on Gross's maternal grandfather's career in the New York City garment industry.