In Brooklyn, The Green-Wood Cemetery covers 478 acres filled with trees, shrubs and four lakes. Buried here are Andy Warhol Protégé Jean Michel Basquiat; Augustus Chapman Allen, who founded the City of Houston, Texas; and even Dr. John Greenwood, George Washington's Dentist. But also buried here are gangster Joey Gallo, murdered in Umbertos Clam House in Little Italy. Albert Anastasio, part of Murder Incorporated, is also buried here. He was gunned down in a barbershop.
Murder Inc., run by Abe Reles, was a group of professional killers who worked solely for the National Crime Syndicate in the 1930s. The killers received assignments and payments to murder total strangers in the New York area or anywhere in the country, murdering anyone selected by the syndicate board. It was destroyed when Reles turned informant in 1940. Other members of Murder Inc. can be found in Queens, including Frank "The Dasher" Abbandando, in Saint John's Cemetery. Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, an infamous Jewish mob boss - and a close associate of Lucky Luciano - rests in Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing. Both men were executed by the Sing Sing Prison electric chair.
At Mount Hebron Cemetery, one could also find Nathan "Kid Dropper" Caplin, another notorious Jewish gang leader. During the teens and early 1920s, Dropper's gang and the gang headed by Little Augie Orgen were fighting for supremacy of the labor rackets in New York City. On Aug. 28,1923, under heavy police guard and while sitting in a taxicab in front of a courthouse, Louis Cohen walked right up and shot Kid Dropper to death. Cohen had been hired by Little Augie Orgen (with the help of Legs Diamond, Lepke Buchalter and Gurrah Shapiro) to murder Kid Dropper.
At Montefiore Cemetery are the Amberg brothers. Herman "Hyman" Amberg, along with his brothers Louis "Pretty" and Joseph Amberg were said to be feared in the Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn during the 1920s and 1930s. Hyman Amberg was arrested for the murder of a Brooklyn jeweler in 1926 and placed in the "Tombs" jail in Manhattan to await trial. On Nov.3, 1926, Amberg and another prisoner (armed with guns) tried to escape from the jail. They got as far as the prison wall but were trapped by the guards. With all hope of escape lost they put their guns to their heads and shot themselves to death. Joseph Amberg and Morris Kessler (one of his henchmen) were lined-up against the wall of an auto repair garage in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and shot to death by three. On Oct. 23,1935 Pretty Amberg's body was found in a burning car in Brooklyn, where he was killed with an ax and a shotgun blast, then put in a car and set on fire. Reles and his men in Murder Inc. carried out both murder contracts.
