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Fascinating and Lesser Known People Who Changed American History

Khalid Elhassan May 5, 2020 33 min

Normandy landings - Operation Overlord — Men of the 320th in Normandy. YouTube

28. When Murder Went Corporate

Murder Incorporated’s chiefs, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, left, and Albert “The Lord High Executioner” Anastasia. National Crime Syndicate

Not all who impacted American history impacted it for the better. Two who definitely had a negative historic impact were Lepke Buchalter, founder of what came to be known as “Murder Incorporated”, and Albert Anastasia, a key leader of that sinister organization.

From the early 1930s to the early 1940s, the Italian-American mafia had an oversight board known as The Commission. To enforce its will, The Commission kept a coalition of Italian and Jewish gangsters as retained contract killers. Dubbed “Murder Incorporated” or “Murder Inc.”, the hitmen were the mob leadership’s on-call execution squad. During its existence, Murder Inc. enforced The Commission’s will and regulated the underworld by taking out the troublesome, making the hitmen, literally, the mob’s troubleshooters.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.