Louis Buchalter was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1897 and was known to the public as "Lepke", a Yiddish diminutive meaning "Little Louis". By the middle of the 1930s he stood at the head of a racketeering organization that dominated parts of the garment, fur and bakery trades in New York City, and he was counted among the founders of the national crime syndicate that took shape in those years. Authorities later linked the enforcement group he directed to close to 400 killings between 1929 and 1941. He was convicted of one.
That conviction was for the murder of Joseph Rosen in Brooklyn on September 13, 1936. A jury in the Kings County Court found Buchalter, Emanuel Weiss and Louis Capone guilty of murder in the first degree on November 30, 1941, and all three were sentenced to death. The New York Court of Appeals affirmed the judgments by a vote of four to three. The United States Supreme Court, which had at first declined to hear the cases, agreed to review them in March 1943 and affirmed on June 1, 1943. After five postponements and a last-minute reprieve, Buchalter, Weiss and Capone were executed in New York on March 4, 1944.
Buchalter was the only major organized-crime boss executed in the United States. His case turned on the evidence of former associates who had become prosecution witnesses, on a governor who had once been the prosecutor pursuing him, and on a dispute between New York and the federal government over which of them held the prisoner.
Buchalter was born in New York City in 1897, one of a large family of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. His father kept a small hardware store on the Lower East Side that barely supported the household, and died when Buchalter was about twelve. After that he lived for a time with an older sister in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and he finished grade school in 1910.
His first recorded arrest came in September 1915 on a burglary charge. A grand jury released him, and he was arrested again in 1916. In that year he was sent to a Connecticut reformatory for a year after a theft in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he gave the name Louis Kauvar. In late 1917 he and Jacob Shapiro, a larger man with whom he would work for the next two decades, were sent to a New York state prison for grand larceny. Buchalter was released in early 1919, was sent back in 1920 on a burglary conviction, and was released in March 1922. Over roughly a dozen years he was repeatedly arrested and jailed on charges of burglary, robbery and grand larceny.
Buchalter and Shapiro began working together in the 1920s on the principle that control of a union could give control of an industry. Their operation, known as "L and G", extended its influence over garment and fur workers' unions and employers in New York and New Jersey, and over the union of bakery delivery drivers. The syndicate took a share of the profits of the businesses it controlled and charged manufacturers for protection against strikes and organizing drives. By the early 1930s the two men had moved into open racketeering in the poultry, fur, artichoke and clothing trades, and Buchalter later directed operations from behind the scenes.
From about 1932 to 1934 he allied with Charles Luciano and others to build a national syndicate. Around 1933 he organized a group of enforcers to deal with the syndicate's own disputes and to carry out killings for payment. Authorities later linked that group to close to 400 killings between 1929 and 1941. None of those deaths was the subject of the charge on which Buchalter was convicted in Brooklyn.
The federal government came to Buchalter first through the fur-dressing trade. The FBI's New York field office handled the fur-dressing case as an extortion investigation that also reached Shapiro, and the same office later investigated the enforcement group for extortion and racketeering. A federal grand jury indicted the Buchalter and Shapiro group over the fur-dressing scheme in 1933, and a 1935 FBI investigation of two fur-dressing unions found that payments to racketeers were being entered in company books as "Organization Expense" and that employers who did not pay were threatened. In late 1936 Buchalter and Shapiro were convicted of violating the federal antitrust laws and each was sentenced to two years in prison and fined $10,000.
By then a second prosecution was in preparation. In 1935 the governor had appointed Thomas E. Dewey as special prosecutor for New York County, with authority to enforce the state's laws against organized crime. Dewey was elected district attorney of New York County in 1937. In August 1937 a New York City grand jury indicted Buchalter and Shapiro for conspiracy to extort money from clothing manufacturers. Rather than wait for trial, both went into hiding. Shapiro surrendered in April 1938 and was later sentenced to 15 years for extortion and conspiracy. Buchalter stayed out of sight for about two years while the FBI and the New York authorities looked for him. New York City offered a reward of $25,000 for him, "dead or alive".
On August 24, 1939, Buchalter surrendered in New York to J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, in a meeting arranged through the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell. He had been led to believe that surrender to federal authorities would keep him in federal hands and out of reach of the New York prosecutors. No such arrangement existed.
On December 20, 1939, he was convicted on the first of ten federal indictments in the U.S. District Court in New York City. In early January 1940 he pleaded guilty to the other nine. The sentence was 14 years in federal prison and ten years of probation, and he began serving it in federal prison in Kansas in April 1940. In March 1940 the General Sessions Court in New York City found him guilty on 15 counts arising from the extortion case, and he was sentenced to 30 years to life, to run after the federal term.
Joseph Rosen lived in Brooklyn. He died on Sunday, September 13, 1936. In the prosecution's case he was a man who had come into conflict with the Buchalter organization and had threatened to take his complaint to the authorities, and the prosecutors' position throughout was that this made him a danger to Buchalter, who ordered his death.
No one was tried for Rosen's death for years. Buchalter was prosecuted on other matters, and the Brooklyn district attorney's office, under William O'Dwyer, built its case with the help of men from the group who had been arrested on other charges and had agreed to testify.
In April 1941 O'Dwyer announced indictments against Buchalter, Weiss and Capone for the murder of Joseph Rosen. The indictment named three other men: Harry Strauss, who had been executed before the trial, James Ferraco, who had not been apprehended, and Philip Cohen, who was granted a separate trial by consent. Buchalter was still serving his federal sentence, and in mid-May 1941 he was moved from federal prison in Kansas to Brooklyn to face the charge.
The question of custody was contested. New York wanted to carry out a death sentence on a man who was serving a federal term, and the Justice Department was prepared to release him only if the state guaranteed that he would face the death penalty, which required the President to commute the federal sentence. That dispute outlasted the trial and the appeals.
The trial in Kings County opened in the autumn of 1941 and lasted more than nine weeks. The printed record exceeded twelve thousand pages. The jury was a special jury drawn under article 18-B of the Judiciary Law, and each defendant consented to it. Buchalter had two attorneys, Weiss two and Capone three. District Attorney O'Dwyer led the prosecution, with Assistant District Attorney Burton Turkus among the prosecutors.
The prosecution's evidence came largely from former members of the group and from men who dealt with it. An intermediary used by Buchalter testified, as did several accomplices whose credibility the defense attacked heavily. One former member of the group testified that he had been within hearing when Buchalter gave the order for Rosen's death, and his testimony was central to the verdict. Abe Reles, another former member who had agreed to testify for the prosecution in the group's cases, died in protective custody on November 12, 1941, during the weeks of the trial. The Rosen case went on to verdict without him.
Weiss offered an alibi. Buchalter's defense was that Rosen had been of no importance to him and that the conversations attributed to him had never taken place. The case against Capone, the Court of Appeals later said, depended on whether the jurors believed a witness who corroborated the accomplices' accounts, a witness who was himself a criminal.
On November 30, 1941, the jury found Buchalter, Weiss and Capone guilty of murder in the first degree. Two days later the court sentenced all three to death, with the execution set for the first week of January 1942. That date was not kept. Under the New York law of 1937, death remained mandatory for premeditated murder in the first degree, although a jury could recommend life imprisonment and the court was not bound to accept the recommendation.
The three defendants appealed to the New York Court of Appeals, which decided the case as People v. Buchalter, reported at 289 N.Y. 181. The court divided four to three and wrote four opinions. Judge Conway, with Judges Finch and Lewis, wrote for the majority and affirmed the convictions. The majority said that "The guilt of the defendants Buchalter and Weiss was clearly established", and that Capone's guilt turned on a question for the jury, whether it believed the witness who corroborated the accomplices; the jury was not bound as a matter of law to disbelieve him. On corroboration, the court rejected the argument that the evidence had to exclude every reasonable hypothesis of innocence.
Chief Judge Lehman concurred in the result only. He agreed that errors had occurred which could not be disregarded, but concluded that they had not affected the verdict. His opinion also stated what the court owed the defendants: "An accused, however degraded, is entitled to a fair trial before an impartial jury".
Judge Loughran, joined by Judge Desmond, dissented and would have ordered a new trial. He wrote that the trial judge "withdrew from the jury a vital issue of fact" and called it obvious error. Judge Rippey dissented separately. He agreed with Loughran that the errors had been prejudicial but went further, concluding that "the evidence was insufficient as matter of law to sustain the conviction of any of the defendants", and he would have dismissed the indictments.
Buchalter, Weiss and Capone petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States, arguing that the trial in Kings County had denied them due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court first refused review. On March 15, 1943 it granted rehearing, vacated its earlier orders denying certiorari, granted certiorari in Nos. 606, 610 and 619, and stayed the death sentences until further order. Justices Murphy and Jackson took no part.
The cases were argued on May 7 and 10, 1943. The petitioners claimed that newspaper publicity in Kings County had made an impartial jury impossible, that a change of venue had been wrongly refused, that rulings on prospective jurors were wrong, that the trial judge was biased, that the rulings on evidence and the instructions were unfair, and that the prosecutor had suppressed evidence and made improper remarks.
Justice Roberts wrote for the Court, and on June 1, 1943 the convictions were affirmed. The Court said it could not find that "a convincing showing of actual bias on the part of the jury which tried the defendants" had been made, and that the jury-selection statute and the rulings on challenges raised no due process question. It found no suppression of evidence. The evidentiary rulings, at most, were errors of state law that the Due Process Clause did not allow it to review.
The affirmance ended the question of the conviction. The question that remained was custody. Buchalter was still serving his federal sentence, and the federal government would not release him to New York until the President had commuted it. Governor Dewey implied that the federal authorities had improper reasons for holding him, and Attorney General Francis Biddle replied that the state had never made the formal request the law requires. Dewey complained that President Roosevelt had not granted "the customary conditional pardon", and set a fourth execution date. The federal authorities eventually relented. Five postponements in all moved the date to March 2, 1944.
On that day Dewey granted Buchalter, Weiss and Capone a reprieve of 48 hours, so that their attorney, J. Bertram Wegman, could ask the Supreme Court to review the argument that Buchalter had been wrongly released from federal custody. During the reprieve Buchalter asked to see the Manhattan district attorney, Frank Hogan; Dewey made no agreement. Rabbi Jacob Katz asked the governor to delay the execution so that it would not fall on the Jewish Sabbath, Saturday, March 4, and Dewey declined. On that Saturday the Supreme Court rejected the application.
Buchalter could have sought to save his life by giving evidence against other leaders of the syndicate, and he refused. In the three years between the verdict and the execution his case had been before the state's highest court once and the Supreme Court of the United States twice, and the governor had delayed the date five times; by March 1944 every legal avenue and every request for clemency had been used. On the night of March 4, 1944, Louis Capone, Emanuel Weiss and Louis Buchalter were executed in New York.
In New York in 1941 a defendant convicted of premeditated murder in the first degree faced a mandatory death sentence. Chapter 67 of the Laws of 1937 allowed a jury to recommend life imprisonment in murder cases, but the recommendation did not bind the judge. Capital judgments were reviewed by the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, and the governor held the power of clemency and of reprieve, which is the power Dewey used for the final postponement. Over the roughly seventy-five years that ended with the last execution in New York in 1963, the state executed more people than any other state.
Kings County is the New York State court district that covers the borough of Brooklyn, and the County Court there heard serious criminal trials, including the Rosen case. The United States Supreme Court reviewed state criminal trials only for violations of the federal Constitution. Buchalter v. New York is cited for the standard that the Due Process Clause requires state action to be "consistent with the fundamental principles of liberty and justice", and that unfairness has to be shown "not as a matter of speculation, but as a demonstrable reality". The Court left questions of state evidence law to the state courts.
Thomas E. Dewey, who figures at three points in the case, first gained attention in the early 1930s as a special prosecutor for the Justice Department. He was appointed special prosecutor for New York County in 1935 and became district attorney in 1937. He won election as governor in 1942 and held the office until 1955. The first of those roles put him on Buchalter's trail, and the last gave him the power to set or postpone the execution dates.
The killings attributed to the group Buchalter directed were never tried against him, and no court found that he ordered them. The Rosen case is the one in which a jury returned a verdict against him on a charge of murder.
Within the Rosen case the defense attacked the credibility of the accomplice witnesses, and two of the Court of Appeals judges concluded that the trial had been marked by prejudicial error. One of them, Judge Rippey, held that the evidence was legally insufficient for any of the three defendants. The majority held otherwise, as did the Supreme Court, which found no demonstrable bias in the jury.
1897: Louis Buchalter born in New York City.
1915 and 1916: first arrests; a year in a Connecticut reformatory for a theft in Bridgeport.
1917 to 1922: two terms in a New York state prison.
1935: Thomas E. Dewey becomes special prosecutor for New York County.
September 13, 1936: Joseph Rosen dies in Brooklyn.
Late 1936: Buchalter and Jacob Shapiro convicted of violating the federal antitrust laws; two years and $10,000 each.
1937: Dewey elected district attorney of New York County.
August 1937: Buchalter indicted in New York for conspiracy to extort; goes into hiding.
August 24, 1939: surrenders to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in New York.
December 20, 1939: convicted in the U.S. District Court on the first of ten federal indictments.
January 1940: pleads guilty to the other nine; sentenced to 14 years.
March 1940: found guilty on 15 counts in the New York General Sessions Court; 30 years to life, to follow the federal term.
April 1941: Brooklyn indictment of Buchalter, Weiss and Capone for the murder of Joseph Rosen.
Mid-May 1941: moved from federal prison in Kansas to Brooklyn.
Autumn 1941: trial in the Kings County Court.
November 12, 1941: prosecution witness Abe Reles dies in protective custody.
November 30, 1941: guilty verdicts on murder in the first degree; two days later, sentences of death.
1942: New York Court of Appeals affirms, four to three (289 N.Y. 181); Dewey elected governor.
March 15, 1943: U.S. Supreme Court grants rehearing and certiorari; death sentences stayed.
May 7 and 10, 1943: argument in Buchalter v. New York.
June 1, 1943: Supreme Court affirms the convictions (319 U.S. 427).
March 2, 1944: Governor Dewey grants a reprieve of 48 hours.
March 4, 1944: the Supreme Court rejects the final application; Buchalter, Weiss and Capone executed in New York.