Welcome back to Line of Blood. I'm Jana Marcus. I'm recounting the sordid clues of two cold cases from the golden age of the New York gangster. These were about my great uncles Abe and Frankie, and I was determined to solve them.

This is Episode 4: The Fall Guys.

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So, let's do a quick recap. Here's what we know thus far:

We've learned that my great uncle Abe, “Jew Murphy” Babchick, controlled the largest policy gambling ring in Brooklyn and other parts of the East Coast. Abe employed 700 people and was bringing in millions of dollars a month, all back in the 1930s.

Now, Abe came into power thanks to his childhood friend, Kid Twist Reles of Murder Incorporated. You see, Abe had come up in the Reles gang and inherited Reles's policy racket when Reles was more involved in the workings of the murder-for-hire mob.

Uncle Abe had been the czar of the rackets for close to eight years when he was found shot execution style in his car. This was just hours after winning big money at a Chinatown crap game. Uncle Abe was only 36 years old.

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My pal, Mark-the-Cop, a retired NYPD detective, well he and I discovered that there was a huge controversy around Abe's death.You see, at first, the Brooklyn Police and District Attorney had theories that Abe was new to the policy racket and had been rubbed out by a rival mob.

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But the Special Prosecutor for the Attorney General, John Harlan Amen, he was investigating official corruption in Brooklyn, and he declared that Abe was silenced to keep him from testifying against the officials he was paying to keep his lucrative numbers racket thriving.

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Well, then the police and the DA completely changed their theories, since his racket wasn't new–and they knew it wasn't new. So, they decided on a new theory that Abe had been killed in a robbery gone wrong after his big gambling win.

It did appear the police were scrambling to come up with a likely motive that would counter Special Prosecutor Amen's accusations that it was a police cover up.

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We also learned that the family received a threatening phone call just days after the murder saying, “Don't investigate Abe's death or we'll kill the whole family, starting with the children.”

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Now, Abe's brother, Uncle Frankie-the-Cowboy, mysteriously vanished, trying to find out who killed Abe. Frankie had been arrested two weeks after the murder for continuing to run Abe's numbers racket and was sent to jail for three years on lottery charges. Well, the timing of his release corresponds with a suspected date of his disappearance.

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Okay, that's a lot of stuff that I know we've covered. So now let's get back to the year that all this happened. 1941.

You see, the autumn of 1941 was a very busy time for cops and crooks. Every day there were reports in the newspaper about some debacle. So, let's lay this out in terms of a timeline to get a really clear picture of what matters to our story.

September 24th, 1941, Abe is found murdered in his car.

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September 25th, the next day, several of Abe's key men, including cousin Leo and Carol's father, Mudsy, are arrested and questioned about the murder. They're charged with violating lottery laws and sent to jail.

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September 26th, two days after the murder, police have in protective custody a witness they are now calling Zoo, Z-O-O. He says he's Abe's chauffeur and bodyguard and saw Abe taken away by two mysterious men after they had been eating together at a late-night diner.

Well, now this was all very fishy, that the bodyguard would just leave Abe on the street with these two men who then drove off with him, and then just hours later, his body was found.

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On September 29th, five days after the murder, Special Prosecutor Amen had brought before his two extraordinary grand juries over 32 officers. This included captains and sergeants and inspectors, all on bribery charges. All of them were asked to explain how they had made these lavish expenditures and amassed fat bank accounts in amounts over 10 times their official police salaries. And on top of that, over 50 police officers, they just disappeared entirely, or immediately retired. Some officers even stampeded into Amen's office in an effort to trade information for protection against prosecution.

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On October 8th, two weeks after Abe's murder, that's when Uncle Frankie the Cowboy is arrested for running Abe's lottery, and he's waiting for his sentence in jail.

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On November 12th, seven weeks after Abe's murder, Kid Twist Reles–who had turned state evidence the year prior and gave up all his chums and Murder Inc.,–well he suddenly dies under very shady circumstances, having fallen from the hotel room window where he was under heavy police guard. But more on that in an upcoming episode.

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But, let's back-track to late October… because the story that I'm about to tell you is gonna blow your mind!

It's a month since Uncle Abe's murder, and police, well, they have no clues. Even though they say there are 50 officers who are supposedly working on the case, under the direction of Brooklyn Homicide Captain John J. McGowan. These guys had nothing.

Now remember, the current theory by the police and DA's office is that Abe's murder is a robbery gone wrong. Because of that $60,000 he won at a crap game. And the theory is backed by this mysterious eyewitness named Zoo, who described two men coming out of the shadows and pushing Abe into a car and driving away. Well, these unknown men, they are now the prime suspects, and it fits the police and DA's theory that it's a robbery gone wrong.

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But one of the most intriguing stories in the fall of 1941 was about a man named Sam Kovner.

Suddenly, on October 29th, just a month after Abe's murder, the police were now hot on the trail of three thugs who were known for sticking up card games and robbing gamblers.

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Detective Robert Bowe of the Brooklyn Homicide Squad spied one of these three thugs in Times Square and cornered him in a doorway. Well, the thug, named Sam Kovner, immediately put his hands in the air and just gave up.

Accompanied by two other detectives, they handcuff Sam and take him back to the Times Square hotel, where the thugs had been hiding out in a room on the ninth floor. The detectives sit with Sam Kovner and they wait. They wait for the other two thugs to come back, which includes the gang leader who's known as “The Killer” Beitler.

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Several hours transpire when finally at 2. 30 a. m. there's a secret knock at the hotel room door. "Get it," demanded Detective Bowe of Sam Kovner.

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Well, Sam, shaking his head back and forth, refuses, saying, “Not me! When the door opens, the killer's just gonna start shootin’.”

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Well, Detective Bow throws Sam to the floor and makes for the door. It was the Killer Beitler and he starts shooting. Well, Beitler wasn't alone, the third thug was behind him and they both turn and run down the hallway.

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The chase is on. One detective runs after the third thug to the left, while Detective Bowe volleys shots with the Killer Beitler down the corridor to the right.

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Beitler made for the elevator and ended up on the 22nd floor, fleeing into a dark ballroom. The detectives reported that when Beitler entered the ballroom, he saw a man through the far window. He thought it was a cop and fired twice. The man in the window, well, he was actually a tourist who had gone to the window to see what all the commotion was about. He died instantly from the Killer Beitler's shots. By the time Detective Bowe got to the ballroom, he said Beitler had turned the gun on himself and lay dead on the floor.

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I thought to myself, really? Beitler shoots an innocent guy and then commits suicide? Well, let's continue the story…

Sam Kovner and the other thug are taken into custody and questioned for 24 hours by DA O’Dwyer and Homicide Chief McGowan about what they know about Uncle Abe's murder.

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Well, the third thug, he got sent back to Sing Sing for parole violation when he said he knew nothing about Abe's murder. So, now he's just out of the picture. The Killer Beitler, well, he's dead. So, all we're left with is one thug, and that's Sam Kovner.

The police and DA, well, they've got no good reason to hold Sam for the Times Square shootout, but they arrest him anyway for a robbery he committed several months earlier. Kovner pleaded not guilty, and now he waits in jail for his court date.

Homicide Chief McGowan publicly states to the press that the Killer Beitler had extorted $500 from Uncle Abe a few weeks before his murder. McGowan suggests that the thugs either saw Uncle Abe's murder, knew about it, or assisted the Killer Beitler in committing the crime.

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So, you see, the police are totally putting the blame on these guys for Abe's murder. It perfectly fits the story they're trying to maintain as true. That it's a robbery gone wrong.

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But wait, this story gets better. Here's where things start to get really crazy. Stay with me.

Five months later, in February of 1942, Sam Kovner is now in court for that

robbery charge. His trial started and ended in only one day.

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Now you see, Sam was a tall guy with an unruly bush of hair who worked as a shoe salesman in Brooklyn. The 28-year-old had several previous robbery arrests on his record, and he was known to bet on the horses and other gambling games.

Well, this case against Sam stated that he had robbed a bookie a year earlier at a candy store in Brooklyn. Sam claimed he was just trying to get what was owed to him from the bookie. But the bookie insisted that Sam was accompanied by the Killer Beitler, and that it was actually The Killer who had pulled out a gun and threatened him.

But in the end, both Sam and the Killer left because the bookie had no money on him. Just a check for $15 that they threw back at him.

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Well, Kovner was being blamed for a robbery when in fact nothing in the end had been stolen. Sam swore that the Killer Beitler was not there, but the court would not let Kovner speak or defend himself. The judge would not grant Kovner's lawyers an extension for witnesses or answer the jury's questions about the charges.

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The DA's team even had Homicide Chief McGowan testify against Kovner for his involvement in the Times Square shootout and that should have been thrown out of court. But, Sam just kept insisting that he had been framed and that the Killer Beitler was not there. And the judge, well, he was in a hurry. He wanted this case closed by the end of the day.

The verdict was guilty of first-degree robbery, and Sam was facing a 15 to 30 year sentence, even though Kovner hadn't stole anything, at least in this case.

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Well, before the judge sent Kovner back to his cell to await sentencing, he shook a stern finger at him, saying, “You know the killers of Abe Babchick, and take it from me, you will talk to District Attorney O'Dwyer if you know what's good for you.”

Well, the judge's threat asserted that Kovner would be sent to Sing Sing for the full sentence if he didn't spill what he knew about Uncle Abe's murder. This seemed oddly out of context to me, so I ordered the court transcript to review Kovner's case. Well, guess what? At no time during the trial had Uncle Abe's name ever come up, even when Kovner was asked about bookmakers he knew or was associated with.

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 It was bizarre that the judge even mentioned Uncle Abe at the end of the trial. And check this out, the judge's threat never appears in the final court transcript. Yet the following day, the papers were filled with bold headlines such as, "Orders Thug to Name Gambler's Killers."

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 None of this trial made any sense to me. Beitler had the gun and made the threats, not Sam. But instead, we're left with a case where nothing had been stolen was turning into a 15 to 30 year sentence for Kovner. Unless he said he knew something about Uncle Abe's murder.

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Well, did Kovner know anything about Uncle Abe's death? I was super frustrated to learn that the newspaper coverage of Kovner's trial abruptly stopped. There was no further information, even in the court transcripts, about whether he had revealed details of Uncle Abe's murder to the judge before his sentencing.

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 So, I started calculating this all out in my brain. Okay, so let's assume Kovner did the minimum 15 years. That would have made him 43 years old if he was released in 1957. That would make him about 93 today–well, that was back when I was doing this research. Could he still be alive?

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Well, I decided to Google him.

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The result was a 2005 article from New York Magazine about a multi billionaire commodities king named Bruce Kovner. They were calling him the most powerful New Yorker you'd never heard of.

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As I read through the article of the hedge fund multi billionaire, it mentioned his family roots, and that he had an uncle known as Big Sam, who pulled a long stretch in Sing Sing Prison. The article also quoted Sam's nephew, Abraham Kovner.

Well, gosh, I mean, these Kovners were bound to know what happened to Sam. And I had to know the end of this story. But you know what? I had no idea how to contact a multi billionaire recluse in New York City.

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So instead, I did a search for the cousin who was quoted in the article. Quickly, I found the nephew's address and phone number in Manhattan.

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But as I contemplated calling him, I was suddenly reminded of that threatening message to our family: "Don't try to find out what happened to Abe, or we'll kill the whole family." I thought, God, should I be worried? I mean, I don't really know these people. But then I sort of rationalized that petty thugs, like Sam Kovner and the Killer Beitler, they probably wouldn't have bothered to make a phone call like that. I don't think they would have wasted the nickel. So I decided to dial up the nephew and I left a message asking him to contact me.

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 Three days later, he called me back.

"This is Kovner. What's your game? Why are you digging up all this stuff about Sam?"

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Well, I was so jarred by his tough guy tone, I fumbled the phone twice like a football.

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At first, the cousin was skeptical about my motives. But when I mentioned that I was doing genealogical research about my great uncle, Abe Babchick, he opened up.

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"Ah, well, my Uncle Sam, he was a petty foot soldier, nothing more. Honestly, he wasn't very bright. He couldn't have orchestrated anything on his own. I'll tell you this much, he was scared to death. He never told anything about anything. He kept his mouth shut, and he did his time."

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“What was he so scared of?”

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"That he'd be killed, whether in jail or not, by the higher ups, the police, and the DA's office."

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"Wow, okay, so you're telling me he was silent and did his full jail term at Sing Sing Prison?"

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"Yep, he was the only Kovner to ever go to music school." The old man laughed at his joke about Sing Sing Prison. It was the same line he'd used in the magazine article.

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So, it seemed that Sam Kovner kept his mouth shut and went to prison for at least 15 more years and knew nothing about Uncle Abe's murder.

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Well, this was all shocking to me. I mean, it seemed that Homicide Chief McGowan and the DEA's office could now easily wrap up their murder theory about Uncle Abe's death by blaming it on the dead Killer Beitler and threatening Kovner to back up the story. I mean, hell, why not blame everything on a dead guy? I mean, the dead can't talk back, right?

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Well, a year later, in March of 1943, Sam Kovner is now back in court with a new lawyer. They're seeking an appeal for that robbery conviction. Well, the many flaws of the first trial were pointed out, and it was revealed that two detectives had visited the owner of the candy store where the robbery happened, and they coerced him to say that the Killer Beitler had robbed the bookie at gunpoint.

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So there it is, the corruption is revealed. But, even though the new defense made a really strong case that Kovner's trial had been unfair, the appeal was denied.

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But hold on, folks. This story, it gets even juicier.

My working theory, that Kovner and Bietler were looking more and more like the perfect fall guys for the authorities, was looking very possible. But it became even more plausible when I discovered an incredible connection to the famous Malinsky murder trial of 1946.

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So let me tell you this story and then we're going to bring it all back around.

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 The Malinsky story starts on an evening in February of 1941. A Coney Island police inspector named Leon Fox was escorting a movie theater manager with the evening's money deposit to a bank a few blocks away.

Suddenly, a man came out of the shadows and shot the officer in the chest, stole the bag of money, and then ran to a waiting getaway car. Officer Fox Lying on the ground, mortally injured, managed to shoot at the car. The gunman returned fire, hitting the officer for a second time and then zoomed away.

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 Officer Fox died the next morning. The theater manager said the gunman had been alone. Two days later, after a 200 officer processional to Fox's funeral, a new version of what happened surfaced by an unknown witness. They claimed there were actually two or three men participating in the robbery, and one man waiting in a getaway car.

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 Well, in the following months, a legion of potential suspects were brought in and marched before the court. Every month, there was a new group of thugs who had their names and addresses printed in the papers as potentially responsible for the robbery murder of Officer Fox. Ultimately, no one was charged and the crime was never solved.

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 A year and a half later In October of 1942, Brooklyn DAs Thomas Hughes and Edward Heffernan, both of whom had been prosecutors at Sam Kovner's trial, suddenly announced that they have solved the Officer Fox case. They proclaimed in a press conference, are you ready? Can you guess? They proclaim that the killer Beitler was the murderer of officer Fox Even though Beitler had now been dead for over a year.

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The DA stated that they had been secretly Investigating the Fox case and that Sam Kovner who's now been in jail for eight months, that Sam Kovner had supplied the information that the killer Beitler was the shooter in cahoots with another guy named Morris Malinsky and two others. Okay, let me just say this all again because it's so astounding, okay?

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 A year and a half after Officer Fox's murder and no one has been charged with the crime, all of a sudden the two DAs who put Sam Kovner away? Thomas Hughes and Edward Heffernan, they now claim they have solved the Fox case. And they say the Killer Beitler was the murderer, and that Sam Kovner supplied the information.

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Is this crazy? Alright, well now, Morris Malinsky and his two pals, whoever they are, are now in jail awaiting a murder trial based on Sam Kovner's testimony.

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I was like, what? What is this? The press had been announcing monthly throughout 1941 a slew of different suspects that were picked up for the Officer Fox murder. It wasn't being investigated in secret. So how did Sam Kovner get involved in all of this?

Morris Malinsky and the other two men had their initial trial for the murder of Officer Fox in 1943, and they were sentenced to the electric chair. But in the 11th hour, the Supreme Court stepped in and overthrew the case, demanding a retrial in 1946. Okay, hold on to your hats, because it's at this second trial that a detective for the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office gave a shocking testimony that during that first trial he had taken long term convicts from their Sing Sing prison cells for weekends of partying in Manhattan in exchange for false and coerced testimony on the stand. These convicts were all star witnesses against Malinsky that led to the guilty verdict.

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So, guess who one of the convicts was that the detectives took out of prison for fun times? You guessed it! Sam Kovner! Un-be-lievable! The detective stated that he took Sam Kovner out of prison to visit his girlfriend and to be wined and dined in Manhattan, all paid for by the DA's office. At no time was Kovner handcuffed on these trips, whether in the streets, hotels, or restaurants. And, Sam also received monthly stipends from a DA fund while he was in prison.

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Over the 13 day retrial for Morris Malinsky, it was revealed that Kovner and the other two convicts from Sing Sing were coached and coerced by both the DA and their detectives on what to say when they appeared on the stand.

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One of the other convicts that was giving false testimony was actually Morris Malinsky's brother-in-law who had a grudge against him. At the second trial, the brother in law recanted his original testimony saying, Morris Malinsky couldn't shoot anything but dice. He was innocent. He never did the crime.

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Okay, we just have to take a dramatic pause here, people. This is crazy stuff.

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Morris Malinsky was finally freed in June of 1946.

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The DAs, that's William O'Dwyer's staff, of Thomas Hughes, Edward Heffernan, and James Moran, as well as the detectives that were exposed for corruption during the Malinsky trial, well they were never investigated or saw any repercussions for almost sending three innocent men to the electric chair.

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Now think about it: Why did the authorities need to bribe the convicts to begin with? Why did they need to make up a story? Did the DA or the police have something to do with Officer Fox's murder?

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So let's hypothesize this for a minute. Was Fox a clean cop and the dirty cops wanted him silenced? Fox's murder did happen during the John Harlan Amen investigation in 1941.But by the end of the appeal trial in ‘46, Amen's investigation was long over. Maybe that's why they weren't investigated.

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So let's bring this all back to Uncle Abe. The common factors in both Uncle Abe's murder and the Malinsky trial were Sam Kovner and the Killer Beitler. They were the fall guys for the DA's office and their detectives, who worked on both cases. Beitler was an easy and dead fall guy for their ability to close cases that either weren't being solved or to cover up something much more sinister.

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Going back to the Times Square shootout when the detectives captured Sam Kovner, well I question if the Killer Beitler really fired the shot that hit the bystander in the window or if he really committed suicide that day.

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I believe that it may have actually been Detective Bowe who killed the onlooker while aiming at Beitler. Well, only the detective knows for sure, but I have a feeling both Beitler and the onlooker were met by the officer's bullets.

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The bigger question is why all the cover ups? Why did the police and DA need a fall guy for so many cases? I mean, was there that much skullduggery really going on with the higher officials?

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Following the threads of Sam Kovner's story and cases such as the Malinsky murder trial, well, they strengthened my belief that this was the perimeter of the Uncle Abe cover up by these same diabolical officials.

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Thank you for listening. Join me, Jana Marcus, next time as we continue the baffling cold cases in Line of Blood. You can join me in this investigation, episode by episode, by checking out the historical files on our website at lineofblood-podcast.com. If you've enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave us a review, tell your friends.

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And if you want even more of a deep dive, check out the book version of Line of Blood, which is available at all online booksellers. We'd like to give a special thanks to Suki Wessling, Eric Sassaman, Valerie Marcus Ramshur, and Amy Scott.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.