It seems that any good mobster movie has to have several scenes were various people are murdered for making the mistake of crossing the mob. While those types of gangland murders are probably not as common in organized crime as those movies might suggest, they have and do continue to occur. They probably reached their zenith in this country, however, in the 1930s and 1940s when the Murder Incorporated organization was doing work for the National Crime Syndicate.
Murder Incorporated is a term that Hary Feeney, a reporter for the New York World-Telegram coined in the 1930s. The members of the group worked from Brooklyn themselves referred to it as the "Combination." The Combination was a group of Jewish and Italian enforces, many of them former strikebreakers, who accepted murder contracts on behalf of the National Crime Syndicate and bosses around the country. It was typically used to get rid of informants, witnesses, or mobsters who had tried to steal money from the mob. The enforcers were paid a salary along with a $1,000 to $5,000 bonus for every job they completed. In addition, the Combination offered legal help if members happened to be indicted. That rarely happened, however, because the killers were particularly good at hiding all the evidence of their crimes. To this day, most of the murders performed by Murder Incorporated assassins remain unsolved.
The assassins were often used in particular to kill witnesses and suspected informants for prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey who was leading the legal battle against the mob in the 1930s. The Combination was so ruthless that it even murdered one of its own members when Dutch Schultz declared his intention of killing Dewey against the wishes of the organization. The organization feared that killing Dewey would bring even harsher reprisals against them, so they killed Dewey and several of his associates before he could carry out the plan. Another time, four of the assassins hacked a loan shark to pieces because they suspected him of being an informant.
The members of Murder Incorporated were not just paranoid for suspecting every one of being an informant because there were many informants against them, including some of those members themselves. Former members including Albert Tannenbaum, Harry Rudolph, Abe Reles, Seymour Magoon and Sholem Bernstein all turned state's evidence in exchange for shorter sentences. This testimony sent several Murder Incorporated killers to the electric chair including Harry Strauss, Martin Goldstein, Harry Maione, Frank, Abbandando, Louis Buchalter, Emanuel Weiss, Louis Capone. With the death of so many leader figures of the organization, it fell apart in the late 1940s
