Welcome to the Line of Blood deep dive on the mysterious death of Kid Twist Reles, one of the most notorious mob hitmen of all time.

I'm Jana Marcus, and I'm going to share my thoughts on the death of Reles, which remains one of the greatest unsolved mob mysteries in history. I'm going to tell you how I believe Reles death is linked to my great uncle Abe's death as well.

​

Throughout Season 1, I've talked about Abe, Kid Twist Reles. Here's a quick recap. My uncle Abe was a childhood friend of Reles and had grown up in the Reles gang. And then later, he inherited Reles policy racket when Reles moved full time into the activities of Murder Incorporated. Yup, that assassin group for the Mafia. You can hear all about this in Episode 3.

​

Now, by the late 1930s, Reles had become known as Brooklyn's number one bad man, and he had been arrested over 43 times. But you know, the charges, they never stuck. That is, until 1940, when he was finally nabbed for a murder. Now, everything was starting to unravel for the murder for hire mob, because around this time, there had been a massive two year manhunt underway for the murdering commander, whose name was Louis Lepke Buchalter.

​

 Now, Willis decided to turn state evidence in order to save himself and his family, and he was quickly whisked into protective custody for the murder. by District Attorney William O'Dwyer. He was also accompanied by three of his murdering comrades, who had also turned state evidence.

​

Now, this was a huge big deal. Kid Twist had become a sensational star witness for the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office. He had incredible recall of details from scores of unsolved killings that exposed the National Crime Syndicate for the very first time. These covered not only New York, but Chicago, Denver, St. Louis, Kansas City, and other cities that requested contract killings from mob bosses Lepke Buchalter, and Albert Anastasia.

​

During the 14 months that Reles was singing for the DA, he had given up several of his Murder Inc., pals, and this included a couple of his childhood friends. I mean, he saw four of them tried, convicted, and sentenced to the electric chair.

​

Well, during this time, he was also farmed out to the Los Angeles district attorney to give a testimony against mob boss Ben Bugsy Siegel.  And, he was soon expected to testify against the two guys who used to give him orders, Lepke Buchalter and Cosa Nostra Albert Anastasia. These became known as the Murder, Inc. Investigation and Trials.

​

So let's get to the meat of the mystery, shall we? The Murder Inc., trials were wrought with paranoia from the onset. District Attorney O'Dwyer's office, and every other law enforcement entity, were keenly aware that Kid Twist and the other three witnesses, were walking targets for mob retaliation. So this demanded serious protection.

​

In an effort to thwart possible mob hits on Reles, O'Dwyer's office rented a suite on the sixth floor of the Half Moon Hotel on the Coney Island waterfront. Reles and the other Murder, Inc. witnesses–That's Allie Tick Tock Tannenbaum, Meyer Sykoff, and Shalom Bernstein­–­­were at the Half Moon Hotel for almost a year, and they were accompanied by 18 rotating police guards.

​

I mean, they occupied the entire east wing of the sixth floor. Which was really designed to be a fortress. You see, a steel door had been erected from wall to wall, sealing off the entire section of the sixth floor. Behind the steel wall, each witness, well, they had their own room, and there was a big parlor at the end.

​

Reles, he was in room 623. There were guards outside and inside the steel door. Eighteen guards in all, they split into groups of six at different interval shifts, checking on the witnesses every fifteen minutes. Now, some reports say the guards actually sat with each witness all night as they slept. But, some of those reports differ. There were also two guards assigned to the hotel's main floor.

There was a police sergeant named Elwood Divvers, and he was in charge of the entire protection detail. But Divvers took his orders from Captain Frank Bals, and Bals took his orders from James Moran for DA William O'Dwyer.

​

Now, do you remember our list of reoccurring culprits in Uncle Abe's murder back in episode 5? Well, there were some top guys that we constantly saw over and over again. Captain Frank Bals, DA Assistant Edward Heffernan, Homicide Chief John J. McGowan, and that nefarious DA clerk in charge, James Moran.

​

Well, guess what? All those guys we talked about in Episode 5? Well, they're the same men in charge here, as well.

Reles and the other witnesses were allowed visits from their wives and girlfriends. I mean, look, they were not prisoners. They were witnesses. But they weren't really allowed out either. I mean, Reles knew that he was a walking target for the mob, with all that he was spilling, and he was rather paranoid even in the guarded suite.

​

I mean, he had no desire to go outside, except when being escorted to and from courthouse appearances. Even though Reles claimed he was afraid of no one, he admitted he was scared of Cosa Nostra Albert Anastasia, and he would soon be testifying against him.

So, let's go to the night before the murder.

​

It's the evening of November 11th, 1941. Reles's wife visits him until about 11 p. m. Supposedly, they had a big fight, and Reles didn't actually go to sleep until around 2 a.m. He was supposed to be testifying the following day against murdering commander Lepke Buchalter. At 6:45 a.m., the following morning, the assistant manager of the hotel heard a thud in the direction of the extension roof, but he paid no attention to it.

​

Detective Boyle of the protection unit said that he had checked on Reles at 6:45 a. m. and he was asleep in his room and his pants were over the chair. But sometime between 7 a.m. and 7:15, that's 15 to 30 minutes later, another detective, Detective Robbins, said he checked on Reles and he was no longer in his room.

​

Robbins ran to the open window in Reles room and saw that six floors below, there was a sprawled body. There was a wire tied around the radiator by the window that held a blanket and bedsheets that had been tied together as a makeshift rope. Detective Robbins said that he went downstairs immediately and identified the body as Kid Twist.

​

But you know what? For half an hour, the death was reported as an unidentified man by the police. And it wasn't until 8 a.m., 45 minutes later, that someone in a neighboring building saw the body on the extension roof and then called the hotel manager, who in turn remembered the thump he had heard and called the protection guards on the sixth floor. All very murky in terms of who saw what and when. And who reported the body as being Reles.

​

You see, from the moment Reles body was found on the extension roof at the Half Moon Hotel, the investigation was plagued by incompetence. Captain Bals was feeling overwhelmed and got in a total dither. So he called his buddies, Homicide Chief McGowan and DA Edward Heffernan, to help him with the crime scene. He relied on McGowan to take control. However, McGowan, well, he followed no protocols, and he collected no evidence. None of them had the crime scene preserved or recorded according to standards. They never interviewed any of the hotel employees. Despite the lack of collecting any information, McGowan immediately came up with the story that Reles had tried to escape and fell to his death.

​

That is until the hotel manager pointed out that a strange phone call the day before from someone unknown had inquired if the room below Reles was occupied. The manager went to the room and discovered that the window was open. The screen dislodged and scuff marks on the windowsill. So, with this new information, McGowan then changed the story completely and decided that Reles was playing a prank on the guards. His plan was to go through the fifth floor window and then sneak back up to the sixth floor to surprise the guards. McGowan was just making this stuff up!

​

All in all, there were four theories on how Reles, the most priceless figure in the law's first exposure of the National Crime Syndicate, managed to get himself killed with detectives all around him.

​

The first theory was that it was an accident while trying to escape. Well, Reles's body was actually found more than 20 to 27 feet away from the wall of the building and his body was fully clothed. There were two rolled bedsheets near the body. The entire scene gave the impression that Reles had tried to slide down the knotted bedsheets to escape, but the trajectory of the body did not make sense and the bedsheets found near him were only long enough to make it to the fifth floor –not the 40 foot drop from his hotel window to the extension roof.

 

Now this idea that he was trying to escape did become the official opinion, but there was no reason for Reles to want to escape. I mean, he knew the mob would get him in a heartbeat. There was a rumor that even Bugsy Siegel said he would give $50,000 to Reles to disappear and not testify against him. But that didn't add up. I mean, why would Siegel pay him in advance? They wouldn't have trusted Reles at this point, right? And why would Reles trust them? Ah, the whole theory just didn't make sense.

​

Theory number two, that it was an accident while playing a prank on the guards. Well, Reles did have a wicked sense of humor. And he was famous for playing practical jokes on the guards and his buddies all the time. If Reles was playing a prank, that he would lower himself to the room below and then surprise the guards sneaking back up the stairs, the theory didn't make sense because Reles was an experienced knot tier in many of his assassinations. He would never have lowered himself with such a flimsy tie of bedsheets.

And, how would Reles have known if the room below his, number 523, was actually empty or not?

 

Lastly, I think to myself, why would he lower himself at 6:45 in the morning when he could be seen? Why not do it under the shadow of night?

​

The third thought was that it might have been suicide, which is rarely ever mentioned. Here's why: Reles was not physically well, and he actually thought that maybe he was dying, which he wasn't. But the guard at 6:45 a.m. said that Reles was asleep and his pants over a chair.

​

So my thought is, why would Reles get completely dressed to throw himself out the window? Why make a rope of sheets as a prop? Suicide, it was just not a reasonable theory to anyone at the time, or even now.

​

So that leaves us just with murder, and the questions of who, why, and how.

​

In episode 10, we left off that I was at the New York Municipal Archives on one of my last visits there, when the archivist said to me, we have other stuff, we have objects. Well, there were no objects listed in the Murder, Inc., collection inventory. But the archivist shared with me that they actually had Kid Twist Reles suitcase, which contained the evidence collected at the crime scene. Boy, was I excited to see that!

​

Two days later, waiting for me on a table in the reading room, was Reles suitcase, wrapped tightly in white archival paper. I had brought along my friend, Kevin Baker, who had written a fictional version of the Reles murder in his book, “The Big Crowd,” and Kevin was a New York historian.

​

We stared in awe for several moments at that large white package as if it were a sacred object, a monumental piece of history.

It was the Holy Grail of mob lore. Together, we carefully unwrapped the thick paper until the suitcase was revealed. String was wrapped around the disintegrating leather, holding it together and its corners were crumbling in our cotton gloved hands. There were stickers on the outside of the suitcase for the Cunard White Star to Europe reading “tourist class.”

​

Inside, the case was lined in forest green plaid fabric. A divider separated the deeply stained wool blanket imprinted with the words American Hotel Corporation, and on the other side were the bedsheets, which were a deep rust color from the FBI testing kit. There was also a thick white cotton-weave blanket with pink trim that had been ripped and tied apart as a makeshift rope.

​

We lifted them out one by one and examined them, and, you know, it was amazing to touch a piece of history like this. I mean, this is what makes detective work so much fun, actually touching objects and documents and realizing that they represent real people and real moments. Holding these objects, I couldn't help but wonder if Reles had really tied these together himself or if they had just been part of a staged crime scene.

​

Kevin and I rehashed our theories about Reles death. Assistant District Attorney Burton Turkus, who had been the prosecutor on the Murder, Inc. trials, pointed out in his retelling of the case in his famous book, “Murder, Inc., The Story of the Syndicate,” that most of the common theories just didn't pan out.

​

 It was clear that Reles had been murdered and Kevin and I agreed that the murder had to have been committed by someone who had enough clout to walk past the downstairs and the upstairs police details. Someone who had enough clout to threaten them if they happened to wake up or catch a glimpse of him and someone who had enough muscle to throw Reles out the window.

​

There are many discrepancies about the early morning hours at the hotel. The official report said that five detectives were on guard, and all of them had fallen asleep. Captain Bals, on the stand during the Kefauver Committee hearings in 1951, along with others, said that there were six guards that night.

​

Well, this strange inconsistency was never pursued. Was the sixth man purposely left out of the investigation?

​

The perpetrators came down to either the detectives guarding Reles room, or his murdering pals, who were sequestered away in the same suite. For Who at this point, well, they couldn't stand Kid Twist, and it's possible they may have tossed him.

​

But think about it. Why? I mean, they had nothing to gain. If all the guards had fallen asleep that night as they claimed on the stand during the investigation, well, as Burton Turkus points out, if one of them woke up and slipped into Relis's room, well, the others could just claim that they never saw anything.

​

Furthermore, one of the guards could have awakened and let someone into the suite. But again, who would have had the clout to get past the downstairs guards, enough muscle to throw Ellis out the window and then threaten the detectives if they happened to wake up or catch a glimpse of him?

​

Homicide chief John J. McGowan appeared to be the most likely suspect. I mean, look, he had the title, the brawn and the power to threaten the detectives, and McGowan had never preserved the crime scene. He never collected evidence or conducted interviews with the guards at the hotel. I mean, considering what a reputation McGowan once had as an investigator, why else would he have done such a negligent job if it weren't to cover for himself or someone else?

​

As blameworthy as McGowan appears, and who my friend Kevin Baker felt was the culprit, well, I took this theory one step further. DA Clerk, James J. Moran, had the ultimate authority to have orchestrated the crime, or maybe even commit it himself. He was O'Dwyer's right hand man, and in charge of Reles at the Half Moon Hotel, having assigned Captain Bals and his detail to protect him.

​

 I mean, Moran had even greater power than McGowan. He might have even sauntered into the suite at any time. And, Moran was a big man, and he could have thrown Reles out the window. Sergeant Elwood Divvers, who ran the Reles detail under Captain Bals, had testified during the 1945 Grand Jury inquisition that the general feeling in the DA's office was that “Mr. Moran was practically the spokesperson for everything and the police officers, while they took their orders from the chief clerk.”

​

It had been Moran who told Captain Bals to call McGowan the morning Reles body was found and to help him and DA Edward Heffernan with the crime scene. Moran even admitted during the second Reles investigation in 1951 that he had removed items from Reles room early that morning.

​

And as I've stated before, Moran was the link between the DA's office and the underworld bosses. Did they kill Reles for the mob? Well, maybe.

​

I speculate that it was Moran, as a mob liaison, who orchestrated the hit, possibly with Homicide Chief McGowan. This was for two reasons. The first was the mob–to stop Reles testimony against Lepke Buchalter and Albert Anastasia. And also, to get the last of the lower level Jewish gangsters out of the picture. When Reles was turning state evidence, and many of the Murder, Inc. members were headed to the elector chair, they all had become a doomed commodity to be connected to the Mafia, and they had to be eliminated. Kevin Baker felt that that was the motive, and I agreed.

​

But, I also believe there was a second reason. A much more powerful reason. This was my theory, that it was to stop any mention or connection of the DA's office to the unbounded greed and corruption that they were responsible for in Brooklyn. You see, something really interesting happened only 10 days before Reles’ death.

​

Lepke Buchalter, the Murder Inc., commander, his trial was in full swing. One of his oldest associates, Max Rubin, had an outburst on the stand about Lepke's power and how it tied back to the Brooklyn authorities.

​

Max Rubin's blurt on the stand was of such point that Justice Matthew Troy made the following statement in a special session. He said, “I charge that District Attorney O'Dwyer has failed to prosecute politicians and political fixers. Reles can name names of those politicians and fixers and give the necessary evidence to put them in jail.”

​

 Well, Judge Matthew Troy's attack on the DA's office was bitter and scolding, and this was before any of the investigations that were conducted in 1945 or 1951 into O'Dwyer and his office.

​

Now, all of this craziness was happening during Special Prosecutor John Harlan Amen's investigation into Brooklyn corruption.

Reles had become Amen's second potential witness to die violently before testifying about Brooklyn police being paid off. Uncle Abe, of course, being the first.

​

Now, DA O'Dwyer hinted that he would loan Reles out for testimony in Amen's corruption case, but O'Dwyer really had no intention of actually doing it. Amen had only been able to speak to Reles once, ten months earlier, in January of 1941, when Reles was under O'Dwyer's custody. Amen was not alone with Reles during this questioning and felt that Reles was uncomfortable divulging any details about the bribes being given to officials. Reles's death may have actually been an even greater blow to John Harlan Amen's investigation than to O'Dwyer's prosecution of the murder mob.

​

I believe the DA clerk James Moran and Homicide Chief John J. McGowan did the deed to protect themselves and the DA's office from prosecution of Amen's corruption inquiry. And they probably also did it for the mob. I mean, McGowan and Moran, well, they had the ability and the history of making people and documents disappear.

​

You know, James Moran is remembered as, “A cynical grafter of unbounded greed. He was tough, insensitive, and a quote, thoroughly corrupt politician who relentlessly hounded subordinates suspected of holding out on him.”

​

Moran, McGowan, and DA Edward Heffernan, they had long documented histories of corruption, and these men were either directly involved or inexplicably linked to every single corruption investigation I had researched from 1932 to 1946, and they were directly in charge of Reles's protection detail and Uncle Abe's murder investigation. And, this is what ties it all back to Uncle Abe's murder as well.

​

Reles and Uncle Abe, they knew about mob activity, but they also knew about the corrupt police, judges, district attorneys, the police commissioner, and politicians. I mean, Reles and Uncle Abe, they knew it all.

​

And here's an interesting side story. On the night of September 24, 1941, following Uncle Abe's murder, McGowan had raided Abe's policy headquarters on Lincoln Place, along with two other detectives who later would be on the Reles detail.

Now, McGowan had created the story that Abe's murder was a robbery gone wrong, just as he had concocted the Reles theory that he had tried to escape or play a prank.

​

And you know, we can go back to all those things we learned in episode four: McGowan and Moran, made sure that Sam Kovner, our fall guy, was arrested, and McGowan even testified against him at his robbery trial, and probably made sure that the Killer Beitler was permanently quieted in that Times Square shootout to become their easy fall guy in several cases.

Moran and McGowan, they were protecting the DA's office, the police commissioner's office, politicians, and the Mafia from the two Abe's.

​

With Reles death just seven weeks after Uncle Abe's, I'm convinced the cases are connected and that both the Abe's were killed for the same reason. They knew too much about everyone to remain alive.

​

 As I've stated in an earlier episode, Uncle Abe's death may have been a warning to Reles to keep his mouth shut from testifying or saying anything against the DA's office for Amen.

​

The authorities were also sending a message to John Harlan Amen, blocking his investigation by taking out his two most important witnesses. Amen was too close to the truth, and the authorities were letting him know that they were willing to kill the two Abe's and anyone else who could trace the DA's association with corruption that happened in the 1930s and their connection to the mob.

​

You know, there is lots of interesting things that happened when the case on Reles death was reopened in 1951 and at the Kefauver Committee hearings. If you're interested in those details, there's lots of great books you can read that will tell you how Frank Costello walked out of the hearings when he was specifically asked if he knew James Moran. And, of course how O'Dwyer became so rattled on the stand when asked about the death of Reles, that he literally broke down and they had to have a recess for the day.

There is lots of interesting details about this case, but for me, I was pretty sure I knew what the truth was. And how it all came back to the death of Uncle Abe.

​

As an epilogue to my theory, let me leave you with this.

​

Feeling confident about my theory about James Moran, I rang Maria-the-Psychic and asked her simply what she saw when I said the name James Moran.

​

She was shown a large window with a radiator below it and a rope tied around it. From the back, she saw two men. One of them she said was Moran and then a shorter man with a cleft-like chin, standing in front of the window. She could hear Moran clearly yell, “jump.”

To my astonishment, and unbeknownst to Maria, she basically saw Reles's death. Her description of which she was given no context was enough for me to believe that my theory was on the right track.

​

Thanks for joining me for this deep dive episode today. I'm Jana Marcus, and join me for our remaining bonus episodes this season as I delve even deeper into Line of Blood with interviews with Maria-the-Psychic and Mark-the-Cop.

​

You know, you can check out all those historical files on our website and even videos of our investigations in Brooklyn at www.lineofblood-podcast.com.

​

Hey, if you've enjoyed this season, please subscribe, leave a review, and let your friends know about it. That's how you can help support us the most. Spread the word, and if you want even more of a deep dive on all of this, check out the book version of Line of Blood, which is available at all online booksellers.

Special thanks go out to Suki Wessling, Eric Sassaman, Valerie Marcus Ramshur, and Amy Scott. And fabulous, fantastic music by Blue Dots Sessions.