Welcome back to Line of Blood. I'm Jana Marcus. We are continuing to sort through the clues of the murder of my great uncle Abe "Jew Murphy" Babchick, as well as hunting for information about his brother, great Uncle Frankie, the vanishing cowboy. He mysteriously disappeared several years after Abe. These cases were both taking place in the 1940s during the golden age of the New York gangster.

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Well, we've done deep dives on the mob, the cops, crooks, and the Brooklyn DA's office, and it was clear that there was a cover up happening. Yet I suspected that there might be more to Abe's death than just silencing him for testifying against the officials on the take. Corruption is always about money and power. Uncle Abe must have known something about the higher officials that gave him power that needed to be eliminated.

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But what was it? What did Abe know? Well, at this point, our story takes a very intriguing turn.

This is episode six: We know who you are, and we saw what you did.

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Let me pose a question to you…

Do you believe that the dead can talk? That they can reach out beyond time and space to tell their stories? Well, in this day and age, we have lots of physical data to support the many theories of this possibility. Yet, whether you believe in the paranormal or not, when you have a personal experience, there is no denying it.

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So, let's continue our story. In late 2009, my father passed away from cancer. To say I was devastated was an understatement. We were very close, and I loved him dearly. Together, we had spent years researching, talking, and hypothesizing about the family history and the murder of Uncle Abe. But now, I couldn't even think about Dad without a river of despair flooding over me. With him gone, my desire to solve the family mysteries was gone as well.

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As months turned into years, I made attempts to sit at my computer to research and write, but I had nothing creative to give to it any longer. I stared at my collection of old family photos and history files, realizing that I had spent years with dead people, trying to string their lives together to make sense of my own.

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I had grown numb thinking about Uncle Abe's case, trying to piece together documents that would awaken his story and bring it to life. Grief stricken, I walked away from the faces of the past.

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But my hibernation from Uncles Abe and Frankie's story, it didn't last forever. I was about to embark on an even more mysterious journey that was truly stranger than fiction.

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The year is now 2014. It was the fifth anniversary of my father's death. When suddenly, I got a phone call out of the blue.

A scratchy voiced woman introduced herself and started talking, and I was rather disinterested, until she told me that she was the daughter of Uncle Abe's chauffeur. Well, she had my full attention. Was this a joke?

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Well, the woman's aunt had been Grandma Rae's lifelong best friend, who had told this woman to call Rae's family when she was in California. But as she explained to me, she never did it, and then she found out my father died and she didn't want to impose.

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Well, I was just absolutely astonished. I mean, Uncle Abe's chauffeur had been the secret eyewitness the police named Zoo, who was under protection. And his account had neatly fit the detective's robbery-murder theory for Abe's death.

Well, I had discovered a number of years back that Grandma Rae's best friend had actually worked for Abe as a numbers runner during the Depression. When I learned that her maiden name was actually Rabinowitz, a huge puzzle piece came together.

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You see, a man named Meyer Rabinowitz had been arrested at Abe's headquarters after the murder. He was charged with violating lottery laws, along with several other men at the headquarters. But it seems this Meyer Rabinowitz never went to jail like the other men. Now I think I knew why.

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Meyer Rabinowitz was the chauffeur who had traded his eyewitness account as Zoo to be released from the sentence. And then he immediately left New York. Meyer Rabinowitz had been the brother of Grandma Rae's best friend. And guess what? Grandma Rae was scared of him.

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Many times Grandma had pointed out that she felt Abe's driver had been the point man the night of the murder. She had told my father years ago that he had moved to LA quickly after the murder and always had money.

Now all these threads were suddenly starting to come together. Could it be that Meyer gave Abe up that fateful night, and then was paid by detectives to say what he saw, and then promptly left town?

Oh man, can you imagine to be betrayed by a family friend, and someone you trusted? Damn!

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But here's the creepiest part of all of this. I actually met Meyer Rabinowitz when I was 12 years old! Yep, flashback to the 1970s, folks. Grandma Rae was visiting California and her best friend, and her friend's brother, drove up from LA to visit us in our Northern California home.

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Well, Rae and her girlfriend, they kibitzed all afternoon and the brother, well, he played cards and drank soda pop with me and my sister. He WAS Meyer Rabinowitz, the chauffeur. And when they left, Grandma was crying hysterically.

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Flash forward, and the woman on the phone with me was Meyer's daughter. She didn't know anything about her father's past in Brooklyn, and she was hoping that I could shed some light on his exploits.

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But, she'd have to figure that out on her own. I think I actually had two murder mysteries to get back to, and I was amped up. I mean, talking with her really reignited my passion for hunting for the truth. I mean, how weird was it that she would call, out of nowhere, on the fifth anniversary of my dad's death?

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I mean, look. I felt it was a sign. I mean, I had been obsessed with the circumstances of Abe and Frankie's deaths for the last 26 years. That was half of my lifetime spent hunting for the poetry in their lives. I was confident of what had happened in the wake of Abe's murder, but questions did remain. I mean, what happened leading up to the murder? Was Abe's death solely about the cops on the take? What happened to the missing Uncle Frankie for whom I could find no death certificate?

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For five years I had been grieving the loss of my father, but I realized that returning to the research was a way for me to stay connected to him. I needed to get back to uncovering Abe and Frankie's story to finish it once and for all, whether I could solve the murders or not.

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So I jumped right back in. I tried all the new avenues on the internet. I filed Freedom of Information Act papers with the FBI. And, I even considered working with a crime scene psychic. Yeah, yeah, I know. But let me tell you why. I've always considered myself a skeptical believer. I believe, but it has to be proven to me. I'd seen some of those TV shows about psychics helping people talk to dead relatives and crime scene psychics helping the police, but I put it all out of my mind.

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About a month after this strange phone call from the chauffeur's daughter, I received a surprising email from a long ago acquaintance, a woman named Maria.

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Nineteen years earlier, I had been in New Orleans working on my first photo documentary book. I had the opportunity to join forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland on a late-night ghost busting case with several psychics.

Now, this was not a commercial tour. It was a private group of paranormal investigators. Well, on this hair-raising excursion, I met Maria.

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Maria was a psychic medium and healer, helping spirits tell their stories and transition to the other side. I witnessed her channeling and I had been amazed by her gifts. We had made a friendly connection, but had lost touch.

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I was surprised that she remembered me after so many years, but her note said I had been on her mind and she hoped to reconnect. Well, geez, I mean, now I knew exactly who to call for a connection with the dead.

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I quickly sent her a reply, which led to a phone conversation. We didn't really know each other personally, other than that nice connection we had made many years earlier. When I mentioned to her I could use her help on a family murder, she was immediately interested but insisted I give her no details, tell her nothing.

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We worked out a price for her services and then made plans for her to visit my home in the coming month. Before she hung up, she told me she was already getting rumblings about the case. She sensed I had a lot of misinformation and kept seeing the trunk of an old car.

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Maria arrived at my home on a blustery December day. Her engaging and dynamic personality was as I remembered from all those years ago. We immediately clicked despite the passage of time.

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Maria was the third generation of her family to display the gift of talking to the dead. She had worked on missing persons cases with the St. Louis and the Los Angeles Police Departments in the past. Currently, she had many clients.

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This first session at my home was phenomenal. Now, keep in mind, I told her nothing, and Uncle Abe's case was not something that could be found online. Unless you knew the exact date of his death, and looked it up on the New York Times online, there was no information to be found.

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Well, Maria wasn't at my house for 15 minutes when suddenly she started having a headache on the left side of her head behind her ear, exactly where Abe had been shot. She said the pain was a sign that the spirits were ready to talk.

Well, during our lengthy session, she revealed detailed and accurate descriptions of information that I had researched. She kept seeing an old police car with a large 6-9 on the side door, and that there was a body in the trunk. She channeled that people like judges and higher officials were on the take.

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She told me, “There's a lot more involved with this murder than what the public perceived, or that you have currently found. There is also much more to be learned about the police and the people of power who were respected by the public, but were actually very dirty.”

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Maria described in detail two locations that she said were very important to the crime. The first location was a red brick building that she saw was maybe three or four stories high with very narrow cut windows close together. She said there was a main door in the center, and then there was a lower-level basement with a locked black door and black windows.

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She said she saw someone being beaten there and that important information about the case was buried in this basement. She also saw that there was an empty lot next door.

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The second location she saw was of the police car with the 69 on the side. She saw it sitting under a bridge on a dirt road that dropped off into some kind of water. She said that she could see there was a fence there now. But she felt something horrible had happened in this location, and she started to feel nauseous and had an acidic taste in her mouth.

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Maria went on to channel both Grandma Rae and my father, saying things that only they would have said to me, and she physically described them. It was amazing!

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She described my father and saw him sitting in a chair in my home office, trying to figure out how to talk through her. She said that he was a writer and he was going to help me write this story.

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She asked permission if we could go into my office because my father wanted to show her something. Well, I had a large crime scene photo of Abe that I had put away to the side of my desk before Maria arrived. Well, now she was looking all around my desk saying, “There's something here in this area that your dad wants me to see,” and she went straight to the pile of papers where I had tucked away the photo of Abe's crime scene.

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“What's here? What do you want me to find?” She kept asking the spirit of my father.

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I retrieved the crime scene photo from its hiding place. Maria had closed her eyes, saying, “There's something in the police trunk. I'm telling you, there's something in there.”

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She opened her eyes, and I handed her the crime scene photo. She stared intensely at the image. But then she shook her head excitedly, saying, “This is not right. I'm telling you, something isn't right here. This whole photo is wrong. There's a fucking cop car involved in this.”

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She became overwhelmed with excitement and was talking really fast until she started to get a pain again in the front of her head that she said belonged to my relative.

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And then she said, “It's an uncle. It feels like his death was a hit from a group of people. It's not what happened in this crime scene photo. I'm being told a cop or several cops killed your uncle. They were summoned to do the hit.”

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Okay, so Maria knows nothing about this situation, okay? I only told her I had a relative who was murdered. She didn't know that it was an uncle. She didn't know any of the scenario that there was cops involved or officials or anything. I mean, this was astounding.

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I acknowledged that the details she had given were true and that the newspapers had said that Abe was robbed or taken out by a rival gang. But Maria was adamant saying, “The only gang that took him out were the ones in office. I'm telling you, it was the cops.”

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“I think you're right,” I said, “But I don't have the proof.”

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Maria stated with confidence, “You will be given names. I keep being told there's something in the trunk of the cop car that we have to see. So the crime scene photos you have, Jana, they don't make sense. Your uncle was killed somewhere else and they moved the body. We will just have to continue to see what's in that trunk.”

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Well, this was eerie and unbelievable. Maria was so accurate, it took my breath away.

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Although Maria said the spirits had started to back away, I made one more request of her.

 “I'd like to know about someone named Frankie.”

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She closed her eyes and was silent. And then she said to me, “He's an unsolved case as well, yes? I'm seeing a triangle. It seems he disappeared in the same fashion as your uncle. Oh wait, he worked for your uncle. I'm feeling pressure and pain throughout my body…and I keep hearing him say, ‘They forgot about me, they forgot about me.’ Okay, Jana, this is a family affair. Is he Abe's brother? I don't know the story, but it's not just about Abe and Frankie. It's about the higher ups. They started to take everyone out so they could stop something.”

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Maria concentrated with her eyes closed, as if listening intently to a conversation. And then she said, “Frankie is telling me a cop has money in this car. The pockets are turned inside out. Somebody's in the trunk. Frankie's confused. He doesn't know what's happening to him. It feels like they got Frankie after Abe…he died after Abe…and it feels like Frankie faded to black very fast. It could mean he was covered by something, like water.”

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Maria asked Frankie to back up and calm down a little bit. She said, “Frankie is not as cut and dry as the others. He feels different. Abe is very shrewd, but Frankie is a softer soul. He's very sweet, and he's scared. He doesn't understand what's happened to him. I feel that Frankie was either jumped or knocked unconscious.”

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Then Maria told me that his spirit was backing off for my own protection. She said she could feel his nervous anxiety coming through and he was saying, “I just can't talk about this right now.”

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I anxiously asked Maria, “Where did he die? Where was he?”

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She responded, “My throat feels waterlogged. He died in water. It's fade to black and then I can't breathe. The hit to his head was very traumatic and he fell into water. But, he's being very careful. It seems he knew about or overheard threats being made to the family and he had this overwhelming sense of determination to get to the bottom of this case without anyone else involved.”

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 Okay, uh, I can't even speak because that's exactly what we found out in a couple episodes ago, right? Frankie was going back into the rackets to try to find out who killed Abe. He was trying to alleviate all those threats to the family by seeking out the killers on his own. And here was Maria telling me this. This was mind blowing.

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Well, Frankie faded away and our session came to an end. I was absolutely speechless and Maria was exhausted. Holy Toledo, she was on the money about so many things that I knew to be true. Detailed things that no one could have known.

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It was remarkable to watch her process and witness how she took on the physical symptoms of the spirits that came through. Maria was also accurate about the Abe situation. She immediately honed in on the fact that Abe was my uncle, that the cops killed him, she felt where he was killed in the back of the head, that his pockets had been turned inside out, and she knew that Frankie had been Abe's brother, that he worked for him and was killed after him.

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And, she was adamant that the cops had done it and she was picking up that there was more to the whole story than what the newspapers revealed.

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There was just no way she could know these things. And the messages from Grandma and Dad, well, they were things that only they would have said to me, in great detail.

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The Uncle Frankie connection was particularly fascinating to me. I mean, I knew little about him. It kind of hurt my heart that Frankie thought we had forgotten about him, as if Abe's case was more important.

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Well, I had never forgotten about Frankie. There just had never been any clues to figure out what happened to him. No body was ever found. There was no death certificate for him. With Maria having been so accurate about other details about Abe's case, I was hopeful she might be able to actually reveal what happened to Frankie as we moved forward.

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But mostly, there were no words to describe the elation I felt that my dad might actually be with me, guiding me to finish the research and finally piece together the truth behind the family secrets.

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I was 100% ready to work with Maria to see where these messages would lead us. This was a whole new vein of investigation.

We were both excited about the case and planned our next session via video call, as Maria lived on the East Coast. But ultimately, she wanted to go on location to Brooklyn.

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After that first meeting with Maria, I used Google Street View to look at the Brooklyn locations that were mentioned in my early research. I don't know why I never thought to do this before.

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There were three key locations. The first one was Dubrow's Cafeteria Restaurant on Eastern Parkway, where Abe was last seen alive.

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The second location was Empire Boulevard, where Abe's body was found in his car.

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 And the third location was Lincoln Place, where his racket headquarters were. To my utter shock and amazement, the Lincoln Place location of Abe's headquarters fit Maria's description exactly. It WAS a four story brick building with narrow rectangular windows, and there was a black door in the middle with an empty lot next to it!

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I mean, seriously, this was friggin’ eerie, man. The Google view showed that Lincoln Place had a black door gate leading to a lower level and black basement windows. I mean, people, I can't make this stuff up. This is for real. Maria's vision had been spot-on.

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You know, I had a sense this was going to be a very wild ride.

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Maria and I went on to have many sessions via video over the next couple of months. The information she received was amazing, especially since I had still never told her what Abe's situation was. She had no context for what she was seeing, but she just kept on delivering.

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There were so many clues coming in at this point that I recruited my friend Eric to help me do research. I wanted to verify with hard evidence that what she was seeing was real.

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The most important clues she shared with us were, further details about the Lincoln Place headquarters. She actually channeled that the fourth floor was a business facade and that the nerve center of Abe's racket was in the basement.

Well, this had been in the newspaper. She gave further details about Frankie's beating in the basement at the Lincoln Place headquarters.

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Well, the police car with the 69 on the door, I knew it had to be the 69th precinct. And the precinct territory was the area that we were looking at.

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The spirits had also shown her a path, connecting different locations as if a route were revealing itself in regard to what took place the night that Abe was killed.

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Most importantly, Abe showed her a list of names in a ledger book. The ledger had 20 names in old cursive handwriting. It was hard for her to read, but she was able to spell out the first name, and it started with H E F F E. And then she saw the word ‘Dwyer.’

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Well, we sure know what that is, don't we? H E F F E? That's the beginning of Edward Heffernan's last name. Yes, Edward Heffernan, that inept D A.

And Dwyer? Well, that was obviously William O'Dwyer.

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Maria's visions were always consistent, just the details became more pronounced over time. She was starting to get a very clear triangle of events that happened the night of Abe's death. She saw him at a restaurant, then in front of an old broken gate, and then his death under a bridge with the police car that had that large 69 on the side.

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Although Abe's body had been found on the passenger seat of his sedan on Albany Avenue, Maria was sure his body had been moved.

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There were two men who continually appeared in her visions. She nicknamed them by an identifying clothing marker that she saw them wearing.

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 The first man she called White Fedora Man. She saw him as a high-ranking officer who was following Abe that night. And she also saw him at the location of his death under that bridge.

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Now what Maria didn't know was that I actually had a crime scene photo that she had never seen, of Abe's body being pulled out of the car where he was found on Albany Avenue. There was a detective in charge pointing at Abe's body in the photo, and he was wearing a white fedora.

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The second man she kept seeing, she called the White Carnation Man. She had been shown Abe having a secret meeting with a man who wore a white carnation in his lapel. They met secretly in the shadows of an old, decrepit gate.

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Abe gave this man a sheet of paper which contained the 20 names she had seen in the ledger book from Abe's headquarters.

Well, this was incredible. The White Carnation man was John Harlan Amen, the special prosecutor! I had tons of photos of him wearing a white carnation.

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I asked if she was able to get a name for him. She replied that it sounded like a prayer, “Something, something, amen.” Well, holy snooping people, Maria was right again. This was incredible.

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You know, I started thinking about that 20 names, and I realized that many of the headlines that I had collected from newspapers–that were not available online, so Maria couldn't have seen them–some of the headlines declared, “Amen names 20 cops,” or “Amen's Investigating 20 cops.” Well, where did that exact number 20 come from?

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Did Amen actually have a list of names from Abe before he died? Now don't forget, Amen wanted to question Abe. He even had four detectives who had been looking for him but failed to bring him in before he was murdered. So it seems in the newspaper reports that Abe and Amen never actually met. But Maria's visions were seeing something totally different.

It seems as though Abe might have actually met with Amen the night he died and gave him that list of 20 police and higher officials that he was paying. Could it be that that's where Amen actually got those 20 names that he was now indicting? This was boggling!

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Maria was adamant about going to New York City. I mean, she said we had to find this missing, important piece of paper that was buried someplace at Lincoln Place. So, we were planning a trip to New York City in March of 2015.

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As I was preparing for this on the ground investigation, I was putting together my Scooby Doo team, which included Maria-the-Psychic, Mark-the-Cop, and my cousin Michael.

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Cousin Michael was Cousin Carol's son. Abe and Frankie had been his uncles too, and I was thrilled to have a family member come along.

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Well, the week before we left for New York, Maria and I met on video for a planning meeting. But it immediately turned into an impromptu session.

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The spirit of Uncle Abe came through with another fella named Abe Frosch. Now Abe Frosch was someone who was actually questioned by John Harlan Amen, the special prosecutor, and I knew all about Abe Frosch. So I was shocked when Maria actually channeled him coming through with Uncle Abe.

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They had a lot to say about John Harlan Amen and some of the cops, but what was most interesting was that Maria had channeled a message that was “Atlantic, Pennsylvania, nobody.”

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She just kept saying it over and over again. “Atlantic, Pennsylvania, nobody.” Well, I didn't know what this meant. A state and an ocean? And, was it no body or nobody?

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Well, Maria didn't know what it meant either, but we soon would find out just how important these clues would be.

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Thanks so much for listening, I'm Jana Marcus. Join me next time as my newly formed team of investigators goes to Brooklyn for a mind blowing on the ground investigation.

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Now, you can keep up with our investigation episode-by-episode by checking out all the amazing historical files on our website at lineofblood-podcast.com.

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If you've enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review. We would love that. And if you want even more of a deep dive and all the details about my sessions with Maria, check out the book version of Line of Blood, which is available at all online booksellers.

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We gotta give a special thank you to Suki Wessling, Eric Sassaman, Valerie Marcus Ramshur, and Amy Scott. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.