Murder Inc.

Between the late 1930s and the early 1940s, a group of killers from the tenements of Brownsville, Brooklyn operated the most prolific assassination enterprise in American history. They were not freelancers. They were employees - the enforcement arm of the national crime syndicate, dispatched across the country to kill on contract, managed with the specific bureaucratic discipline of a business that had found, in murder, its core competency. The estimated body count: four hundred to five hundred people.

Their names were Abe Reles, Pittsburgh Phil Strauss, Happy Maione, Buggsy Goldstein. Their organizational architects were Louis Lepke Buchalter - the only national crime syndicate figure ever sent to the electric chair - and Albert Anastasia, the Lord High Executioner, who survived because his star witness went out a sixth-floor hotel window on a November night in 1941 while five detectives slept.

The canary who could sing but couldn't fly. The most consequential defenestration in American organized crime history. What Abe Reles knew about Anastasia - and what died with him at the Half Moon Hotel - is one of the great unanswered questions of the mob era.

Murder Inc. is the definitive narrative account of America's deadliest killing organization - its origins in the Brooklyn tenement world, its bureaucratic genius, its partial unraveling, and the questions it left permanently open.