Abe Reles

Abraham "Kid Twist" Reles (May 10, 1906 – November 12, 1941) was a New York Jewish mobster who was a hit man for Murder, Inc., the enforcement contractor for Meyer Lansky's National Crime Syndicate.

Reles later turned government witness and sent several members of Murder, Inc. to the electric chair.

Reles's death from falling through a window while in police custody might have been a hit placed by the American Mafia, as he was set to testify against Gambino crime family underboss and future boss Albert Anastasia.

Abraham Reles, the son of Jewish immigrants from Galicia, was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, on May 10, 1906.

His father, Sam, worked in one of the garment trades until sometime during the Great Depression.

His father's last known occupation was peddling knishes on the streets of Brownsville.

His full formal Hebrew name was Elkanah ben Shimon.

Reles attended school through the eighth grade.

After leaving school, he began hanging out at pool rooms and candy stores in and around Brownsville.

During the Prohibition days of the 1920s, while still teenagers, Reles and Goldstein went to work for the Shapiro brothers, who ran the Brooklyn rackets.

Soon Reles and Goldstein were committing petty crimes for the brothers.

On one such occasion, Reles was caught and sentenced to two years in an upstate New York juvenile institution.

The Shapiro brothers failed to help Reles, prompting Reles to plan revenge.

After his release, Reles, Goldstein, and George Defeo entered the slot machine business, the province of the Shapiro brothers.

Through Defeo's connections, Reles and Goldstein were able to make a deal with the influential crime lord Meyer Lansky, who wanted access to the poorer neighborhoods of Brooklyn and thus agreed.

Both parties prospered: Lansky was able to get sizable footholds in Brownsville, East New York, and Ocean Hill, while Reles gained the backing he needed to keep both his business and himself alive.

Reles, Goldstein, and Strauss were partners in all of their criminal activities, which had primarily been the slot machine business and quickly expanded to include loan sharking, crap games, and labor slugging in connection with union activities, especially the restaurant union.

The slot machine business thrived and soon Reles and Goldstein were on the Shapiros' hit list.

One night, the two men received a phone call from a "friend" saying that the Shapiros had left their East New York headquarters.

Hopping into a car with Defeo, they headed to East New York.

However, when they reached the Shapiros' building, the three men were ambushed.

Reles and Goldstein were wounded, but all three managed to escape.

In the meantime, Meyer Shapiro abducted Reles' girlfriend and dragged her to an open field, where he beat and raped her.

To avenge the ambush and his girlfriend's rape, Reles enlisted the help of fellow Murder, Inc. killers Frank "Dasher" Abbandando and Harry "Happy" Maione.

The two killers were glad to help: they hoped to kill the Shapiro brothers and take over some of their operations.

After several futile attempts by each side to eradicate the other, the Murder, Inc. group finally caught up with Irving Shapiro.

He soon teamed up with two of his childhood friends, Martin "Buggsy" Goldstein and Harry "Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss, who eventually rose to power with him in the group conventionally known as Murder, Inc. His first arrest came in 1921 for stealing $2 worth of gum from a vending machine, and he was sent to the Children's Village at Dobbs Ferry, New York, for four months.

Reles's small physical size did not deter him from committing ruthless acts of violence.

When carrying out murders, his weapon of choice was an ice pick, which he would ram through his victim's ear right into the brain.

Reles became so adept at using the ice pick that many of his murder victims were thought to have died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Reles became known as a particularly cold-blooded and psychopathic murderer.

On one occasion, in broad daylight, he attacked a worker at a car wash for failing to clean a smudge from the fender of his car.

Another time, Reles killed a parking lot attendant for failing to fetch his car fast enough.

One night, according to journalist Rich Cohen, he and Harry Strauss with the help of Buggsy and Dukey murdered "Puggy" Feinstein in Kid Twist's house.

For this, before, they dismissed his wife and Buggsy's wife giving fifty dollars each, but his mother-in-law was still sleeping in the back of the house, he believed that there would be no problem, but before the victim arrived, he had to wake her up to ask where there was a rope and where the ice pick was.

Reles reportedly got the nickname "Kid Twist" after an earlier New York City Jewish gangster, Max "Kid Twist" Zwerbach.

Another theory behind the moniker is that it was the name of his favorite candy.

Yet another theory is that the nickname described his method for strangling people.

Reles was a bootlegger who rarely touched alcohol.

Reles lived at 649 East 91st Street in Brooklyn before moving to 9102 Avenue A, also in Brooklyn.