Posted on 07/25/2010 11:48:08 AM PDT by Coleus
"That's him." Five men in a blue sedan watched a short, fat fellow in a summer-weight suit walk out of his apartment building at 250 E. 178th St. in the Bronx. The time was 7:55 a.m. on July 25, 1939. The man, bound for the E. Tremont Ave. subway station, was right on schedule. Jacob (Kuppy) Migden, a fledgling Brooklyn hoodlum who had spent a week tailing the prey, confirmed that he was the right man. The sedan's driver, Seymour (Blue Jaw) Magoon, dropped the big car in gear. He prowled past the quarry, did a U-turn, then approached from the rear. Gioacchino (Dandy Jack) Parisi stepped out on a running board, raised a .32-caliber pistol and emptied it into the man's back. It seemed another example of Murder Inc. operating at deadly efficiency.
The nickname was cooked up by the New York tabloids for a loose federation of hired killers, most of them Italians or Jews from the slums around Brownsville, Brooklyn - men like Parisi, Magoon, Abe (Kid Twist) Reles, Allie Tannenbaum, Pittsburgh Phil Strauss and Martin (Buggsy) Goldstein. Some were kept on retainer by ethnic mobs - a thousand bucks a month, with bonuses for exemplary murders. For most of these hit men, it was irrelevant whether they were working for La Cosa Nostra or Der Kosher Nostra. As long as they got paid, they killed. Murder Inc. kept morticians busy from New York to Florida and the Catskills to Kansas City during its heyday in the 1930s. The idea was that pros could take the hassle out of murder for busy mob bosses, eliminating amateur blunders - like mistaken-identity slayings.
But that is precisely what happened on this day 71 years ago on E. 178th St. Murder Inc. killed the wrong man. The victim was Irving Penn, a 42-year-old executive with G. Schirmer Inc., the Manhattan classical music publisher. He lived a quiet, crimeless life with his wife and two daughters. Penn was rushed to a hospital. With his dying breath, he whispered to a puzzled police detective, "I don't have an enemy in the world." There were groans of recognition that morning when news of the murder reached the office of gangbuster Thomas Dewey, the Manhattan district attorney. Dewey was expecting a visit that very day from Philip Orlovsky, a former garment industry union boss who had been inspired to rat on his old crime crony, mob boss Louis (Lepke) Buchalter.
Orlovsky lived in the same building as Irving Penn. The men looked vaguely alike, although Penn was 75 pounds heavier and wore glasses. Orlovsky cheated death when he left home an hour early to get a barbershop shave. Kuppy Migden had made a mistake that would go down in mob history. His goof was fatal to poor Penn - and it hastened the demise of Murder Inc. The wrong-man contract killing was front-page news, and it applied pressure on police and prosecutors to bring gangsters to heel once and for all, after years of operating under their own eye-for-an-eye justice system. The district attorneys of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx were at least as possessive about the press spotlight then as they are today. But the DAs were forced to set aside rivalries since the Penn case crossed jurisdictions. It was a murder in the Bronx planned in Brooklyn whose intended target was a marquee informant in Manhattan.
The first challenge was to find Parisi and Migden, who had scrammed after the botched job. As time passed, a series of arrests began to chip away at the bulwark of silence that had always been the crime syndicate's first line of defense. "If you hung him up by the thumbs for eight weeks," a Bronx prosecutor once said of Dandy Jack Parisi, "he might tell you his first name." But reticence lost its luster as the prosecutors promised a fast-track assembly line to the electric chair for any and all mugs convicted of murder. Brooklyn DA Bill O'Dwyer arrested Blue Jaw Magoon and Buggsy Goldstein, and they dropped a dime on Parisi and Migden as Irving Penn's killers.
Two full years after the Penn murder, Kuppy Migden was apprehended in St. Louis, where he had undergone plastic surgery to alter his appearance. By the date of Migden's trial in Feb. 1943, Murder Inc. was kaput. Goldstein and Pittsburgh Phil Strauss had already been executed, and Buchalter was in prison, awaiting his own date with Old Sparky. Kid Twist Reles, a witness against Buchalter and others, had taken a fatal header out a Brooklyn hotel window, earning him an epigraph as the canary that could not fly. On the second day of his trial, Migden took a deal offered by prosecutors. He pleaded guilty to attempted assault and was sent up the river for just five years.
He did his time and lived thereafter outside the lenses of Speed Graphic cameras. His career as a contract killing advance man never recovered. It was a decade before Dandy Jack Parisi was collared. Cops caught him napping in the Poconos, surrounded by votive candles and crucifixes. Parisi, with heavy bags under his eyes after 10 years of looking over his shoulder, was hauled back to New York for a tough trial. Witnesses were scarce, and those few available were tainted as accomplices. At the end of the proceedings, a Bronx judge directed a verdict of not guilty, and Parisi walked away a free man. He proved to be the rare member of Murder Inc. to live a long life. He died in 1982, at age 83.
what a great article. the canary that couldnt fly, kid twist , moose magoon, you gota luv it.
*ping of interest*
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