?This guy is burning me?the girls in the spaghetti house!? Who?d have thunk that mobsters could be so poetic?
?Then the lobsters came. We ate.??Abe Reles
That?s ?Kid Twist? telling the jury about the shore dinner he, Harry ?Pittsburgh Phil? Strauss, who also went by ?Pep,? and Martin ?Buggsy? Goldstein enjoyed after killing Irving ?Puggy? Feinstein.
You can?t come across Puggy without hearing about his days as club fighter. Maybe, but I can?t find any record of it. There were hard Jews who boxed?Abe Attell, Benny Leonard, Barney Ross, Al Bummy Davis, among others?but doesn?t look like Puggy was one of them.
And if he was, fat lot of good it did him against Murder, Inc. hitmen Kid Twist, Pep, and Buggsy.
What happened was that Puggy ran afoul of Albert Anastasia by going into the Brooklyn loansharking business. ?It was penny-ante stuff, and he foolishly believed Anastasia wouldn?t notice,? writes Edmund Elmaleh in The Canary Sang but Couldn?t Fly. ?He was wrong.?
Reles and his boys couldn?t find Feinstein, and couldn?t believe their luck when he walked into Midnight Rose?s, the Brownsville sweet shop where the murderous crew hung out. He wanted to pay off a debt, but couldn?t find the guy. ?Glad to help,? said Kid Twist, or words to that effect.
What happens is that Puggy winds up at the Reles home, where the torpedo wakes up his mother-in-law and asks where he can get his thick-fingered hands on a rope and an icepick. She obliges, but wants to know what?s going on. Strauss, rumored to have once dated Jean Harlow and killer of about 100 men, tells her to take a powder. He gets his finger bit struggling with Puggy??Maybe I?ll get lockjaw!? ?but they get the job done. Opting for the ever-reliable ?rope job,? Feinstein slowly strangles to death.
The killers take Puggy?s body to a vacant lot near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and set it on fire. That was on September 4, 1939. Thanks to Reles? testimony, Strauss and Goldstein went to the electric chair on June 12, 1941, despite Pep growing a wild beard and chewing on briefcases, and Buggsy also acting all crazy, coming up with things like, ?This guy is burning me?the girls in the spaghetti house!? Who?d have thunk that mobsters could be so poetic? Think of Dutch Schultz?s deathbed ramblings. Born Arthur Flegenheimer, another of these hard Jews, he had this to say while seeing the darkness, ?A boy has never wept?nor dashed a thousand kin.?
As for Reles, he went out a window of Coney Island?s Half Moon Hotel on November 12, 1941. What compelled him? Who propelled him? Nobody knows, not for sure. But there were a whole lot of guys who didn?t like him much.
