Today’s Ruthless Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Shortly after ten o’clock on the morning of Friday, October 25, 1957, Albert Anastasia – the Lord High Executioner of Murder Incorporated – sauntered into the barber shop of New York’s Park-Sheraton Hotel. He strolled over to chair No. 4, sat down and relaxed while barber Joseph Bocchino fitted a white smock around his neck. That done, Bocchino asked Al, ‘What’ll it be, sir? A shave or a haircut?” Anastasia stared contentedly at his reflection in the mirror, “Gimme the works,” he said. Bocchino nodded and began to lather the Mafioso’s face. He had just covered Anastasia’s features with thick, foamy shaving-cream when two men – one dark and skinny, the other fat and fair – strode in and marched up to chair No. 4.
Before anyone could ask them what they wanted, or what their business was, they each drew a gun – a .32 and a .38 – and fired at the Lord High Executioner from pointblank range. The first bullets ploughed into the back of Anastasia’s head with such force that he was blasted forward from the chair, his feet breaking the footrest. Travelling as if shot from a gun himself, he crashed into the counter with its arrays of pomades, lotions, oils, powders, and dressings.
He was still upright when the next fusillade struck him. This time he spun round, gasped, and fell face down on the floor. Watched by the horrified Bocchino, the killers – the lower parts of their faces covered with scarves – continued to drill bullets into their victim until their guns were empty. Then, as abruptly and swiftly as they arrived, they quit the shop and disappeared into the pedestrians on 7th Avenue. The Lord High Executioner was dead – slaughtered as brutally, bloodily, and effectively as any of the scores of men whose murder he had ordered over the past 20 years.
Anastasia, Brooklyn racketeer and gangster, was born in 1904 in a small fishing village in south-east Italy. He entered America illegally during World War One, served his apprenticeship in crime, and by the late 1920s was the head of an enforcement mob covering Brownsville and Brooklyn. He graduated to the Mafia, became chief organizing executive of the notorious Crime Syndicate – which operated along the lines of big business – and brought in huge profits from waterfront extortion and the smuggling of narcotics. He posed as a dress manufacturer, but as a henchman said of him: “The only clothes Al knows anything about are made of concrete and worn when being dumped in the East River.”
His appointment as Lord High Executioner to Murder Inc. was a natural move in the game of death and violence played throughout Brooklyn, New York, and the surrounding area. Anyone who displeased the Syndicate – anyone who had “cheated” or tried to defy it – was marked for execution. A meeting was held where the offender’s crime was discussed, a “defense counsel” was permitted to speak for him, and the sentence (invariably fatal) was carried out by one of Anastasia’s thugs. The favorite method of capital punishment was by icepick, but Big Al sometimes varied this and instructed his boys to bury the condemned man alive, to strangle him, shoot him, drown him, burn him, or throw him off a tall building. Some of the victims were buried in quicklime, and those who were thought to have “sung” on the Syndicate were found on pieces of waste ground with dead canaries stuffed in their mouths.
By 1957, Anastasia’s power was dwindling. Considered a growing embarrassment to the syndicate a charge was read out against him, a lawyer spoke in his defense, but the verdict was “guilty”. Two of his own gunmen were ordered to deliver sentence, and that black Friday in October 1957 the Lord High Executioner met the kind of end he had so frequently decreed for others.
Culled from: Crimes and Punishment: The Illustrated Crime Encyclopedia, Volume 4
Poll Results!
Back on November 25th, I featured a photo of a car crash and a poignant note found in the car that were culled from the booklet accompanying the Negativland album Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak and I asked whether you thought that “Daddy” had died. Let me refresh your memory.
Here’s the car:
And here’s the note:
The Poll Results are in and you have decided….
Daddy Survived!
(By a 54.5% to 45.5% margin)
Thank you for participating – that was fun! We’ll have to do more polls in the future.
Mug Shots Du Jour!
Here’s another excerpt from Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook featuring some of Los Angeles area homicide detective Jack Huddleston’s favorite mug shots. This is Part Two of a Six Part series. The captions are all Jack’s. I feel kinda bad for the guy who was arrested for Attack “Sex”. I believe the quotations marks indicate the guy isn’t quite capable of real sex. Same with the “robbery” attempt and the “razor” which was probably a piece of plastic.
And is it just me or does it just seem like criminals were more interesting looking before? You can peruse mug shots from the Chicago Tribune for comparison (one of my favorite bored-and-blue-with-nothing-to-do past times).
Part five is lurking in a dark alleyway to jump out at you tomorrow!