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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

24. End of the Lord High Executioner

When Murder Incorporated hitman Abe Reles turned snitch, Albert Anastasia, AKA “The Lord High Executioner”, was seemingly toast. Reles was scheduled to offer evidence against Anastasia but fell to his death from a 6^th floor window a few hours before doing so. Police claimed that Reles had been trying to lower himself out the window via an improvised rope made of tied bedsheets. However, he had shown no inclination to escape, and ever since snitching on the mob, had been deathly afraid to be out of police sight. With Reles dead, Anastasia escaped prosecution.

He enlisted in the US Army during WWII, rose to technical sergeant, and was honorably discharged in 1944. After the war, Anastasia founded what is today the Gambino crime family, but his greed and brutality alienated his subordinates. On October 25^th, 1957, belated karma finally caught up with The Lord High Executioner, when he was shot to death in a barber’s chair while waiting for a shave.

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.