Albert Anastasio (b. Feb 26, 1903, d. Oct 25, 1957)
Albert Anastasio was born Feb 26, 1903 in Italy, and died Oct 25, 1957 in Park sheraton Hotel, NY. He married Elsa.
Notes for Albert Anastasio: Buried- lot 38325 Grave 182 section 39/40 Anastasia, Albert,
original name UMBERTO ANASTASIO (b. Sept. 26, 1902 or February 26, Tropea, Italy--d. Oct. 25, 1957, New York, N.Y., U.S.), major American gangster.
Anastasia immigrated to New York City from Italy in 1919 and, in the 1920s, rose through Giuseppe Masseria's gang. He was one of Masseria's executioners in 1931, at Lucky Luciano's command. In the late 1930s he became active head of "Murder, Inc.," a notorious murder-for-hire organization, and in the late 1940s became boss of one of the Five Families of organized crime in New York City. He was murdered by two gunmen (hired by rival Vito Genovese) as he sat in a barber chair in the Park Sheraton Hotel.
To cite this page: "Anastasia, Albert" Britannica Online.
Anastasia, Albert Anastasia
Anastasia, Albert ( Umberto Anastasio, AKA: Lord High Executioner ; The Mad Hatter ; Big Al ), 1903-57, One of the most ruthless killers of American organized crime , Anastasia was the mob 's top exterminator. He personally murdered at least fifty or more persons but was responsible, as head of Murder, Inc., the syndicate 's execution squad located in Brooklyn, N.Y., for the killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands of victims for four decades. He was of middle height and carried extra weight that was mostly muscle GAN since he worked out regularly. His hands were enormous and anyone hit with his fists invariably reported broken bones. His face was fleshy. A large nose boomed over thin lips and Anastasia's eyes, usually narrowed to a suspicious squint, seemed to dart about wildly when he became excited--and this was usually before he ordered someone murdered. Shortly before WWI, in 1917, Anastasia and his nine brothers immigrated from Italy to the United States the 14-year-old Albert slipping onto a Brooklyn dock in the dead of night, without shoes, and hiding with a relative until he could find work. A strapping boy, Anastasia was given a job on the docks and was a longshoreman by age sixteen, working alongside his brother Anthony. Anastasia was also active in a brutal Brooklyn gang which preyed on women, robbing and raping them. Early on he decided to change his name from Anastasio to Anastasia to avoid bringing shame upon his family and being identified with them when he was mentioned in newspapers as a gangster , or so the story goes. But his brother Tony kept the original family name and went on to become one of the leading racketeers controlling the Brooklyn docks twenty years later, working under the direction of his bully-boy brother Albert. Anastasia quickly came under the wing of Brooklyn gang boss , Joe Adonis, and it was through Adonis and his fabulous bootleg wealth that Anastasia was able to set up his own fledgling gang of bootleggers and killers at the dawn of Prohibition . By this time, Anastasia had been credited with killing at least five men in gangland wars over bootleg territory in Brooklyn. He made a mistake, however, when he boldly murdered a fellow longshoreman, one Joe Torino in 1920, in a dispute over the right to unload ships with precious cargoes. There were several witnesses to this killing where the powerful Anastasia stabbed and strangled his victim. He was convicted and sentenced to death. Anastasia lingered on death row in Sing Sing for eighteen months but he won a new trial when the witnesses reversed their statements and, when the witnesses suddenly vanished, the thug -killer was released. Of course, Anastasia's gang members saw to it that the witnesses disappeared. Anastasia was a key member of the national crime cartel from its inception. He was present at the historic 1929 Atlantic City convention of mobsters from all over the United States. Anastasia was also involved in the deadly Castellammarese War in New York between the gangland factions of Joe "The Boss " Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. Though he fought with the Masseria side, Anastasia was one of the four gangsters who killed Joe the Boss in Coney Island in 1931, and it was he that administered the coup de grace to Masseria while his fellow murderers, Bugsy Siegel, Vito Genovese, and Joe Adonis stood by admiringly, the killing performed at Luciano's orders. This display of cold-blooded willingness to murder established, for Anastasia, a fearsome reputation among his own peers, one which implanted respect and apprehension among them. In 1940, when Brooklyn District Attorney Burton B. Turkus suddenly found several members of Murder, Inc., willing to turn state's evidence, Anastasia, too, went into hiding. Reles and others implicated him in several murders and named him as their boss in their murder-for-profit organization. Albert Tannenbaum stated to Turkus that Anastasia ran afoul of a crusading longshoreman named Peter Panto, who had begun a campaign to clean up the Brooklyn waterfront in 1939, and an enraged Anastasia personally garroted and buried the labor leader in quicklime. Tannebaum instructed Turkus where to find the body which was dug up in Lyndhurst, N.J. Tannenbaum's statements were supported by Kid Twist. Reles, however, never lived long enough to testify in court against Anastasia. He was pushed to his death in 1942 from a six-story hotel room window of the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island. At this time, Albert Anastasia went into even deeper hiding, finding a place where no police official would ever think to look for him, the U.S. Army. As a Mafia don, however, Anastasia displayed an erratic, explosive nature and found it impossible to check his mercurial, murderous temperament. When watching a TV news show one day in 1952, Anastasia saw Arnold Schuster, an amateur sleuth who had identified the much-wanted bank robber Willie "The Actor" Sutton on a New York subway and informed police which had led to Sutton's arrest. While Schuster was being interviewed, Anastasia leaped from his chair and shouted to his goons, "I can't stand squealers! Hit that guy!" Schuster was murdered, according to the orders of the Mad Hatter, on Mar. 8, 1952. When news of this mob murder reached the ears of Vito Genovese, the calculating Mafia don began to spread the word that Anastasia was unstable, a thug murderer who did not deserve the high rank he had achieved in the syndicate . Genovese also wooed the loyalties of Carlo Gambino, who served as Anastasia's underboss and Gambino, in turn, persuaded his good friend Joseph Profaci, a Mafia family boss , to oppose Anastasia at every turn, siding with Genovese. Standing between these factions, however, was Frank Costello, the so-called Prime Minister of Organized Crime . Costello was the financial guardian of Luciano's old rackets and an avowed enemy of the scheming Don Vito. Genovese spread the word that Anastasia had attempted to bully his way into controlling some of the lucrative gambling casinos in Cuba which were controlled by Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello who were in league with the then military dictator of the island, Fulgencio Batista. The Mad Hatter had been rebuffed and was now plotting against his former ally, Costello, claimed Genovese. Then on the night of May 14, 1957, Costello was entering his swank Manhattan apartment building when a lumbering, fat young hoodlum , later identified as Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, stood outside the building and shouted at the gang chief from some thirty yards distant, "This is for you, Frank!" With that he fired a single shot and then fled. The bullet grazed Costello's head but he survived. Gigante was identified by the doorman of the apartment building but was later tried and acquitted when Costello refused to identify him as his would-be killer. The word through Mafia enclaves had it that this had been the work of Anastasia; that he had hired Gigante, a Greenwich Village thug , paying him $500 to murder Costello, but that Gigante had botched the job. Costello himself believed this tale and agreed with Genovese and other Mafia dons that the Mad Hatter had to be eliminated. It was Genovese, of course, who had hired Gigante, instructing him to purposely miss Costello so that the gang chief could legitimately seek and get his vengeance against Anastasia. That vengeance was reaped shortly after 10:15 a.m. on Oct. 25, 1957, when Anastasia walked into the barbershop of New York's Park Sheraton Hotel. He waved at the shop owner Arthur Grasso as he sat down in the deep leather of chair four. Joe Bocchino, who had been cropping Anastasia's short, curly hair for years, covered him with the candy striped barber's cloth and began to clip at the gang boss 's hair while a manicurist sat next to the chair and worked on the Mad Hatter's fingernails. Jimmy, the shoeshine boy, began to slap brown polish on the gangster 's wing-tipped shoes. Two short, squat men wearing fedoras and sunglasses then entered the shop and pulled .38-caliber revolvers, waving the shop people away from chair four. As they scattered in fright, both men began to blast at the seated figure. Anastasia had been dozing in the chair, his eyes closed. They popped open just before the first shot was fired. The gang boss raised his left hand as if to shield his head from the bullet which tore through the palm. Two more bullets smashed his left wrist and entered his hip. Anastasia let out a roar and struggled to get out of the chair, reaching, some reports later said, for a gun that he no longer wore. Bullets crashed into the barber's shelf in front of the chair, shattering bottles of hair tonic. Another bullet struck Anastasia in the back as he stood upright for a moment, the barber's cloth still clinging to him. He sank to the floor, and one of the gunmen calmly walked up to the prone figure and fired a bullet into the back of his head, a coup de grace identical to the shot Anastasia had fired into the head of Joe "The Boss " Masseria in 1931. Their gruesome task completed, the two gunmen raced for the door and vanished. They were never apprehended, but gangland consensus had it that the murder had been carried out by Larry and Joe Gallo who had received a "contract" from Don Vito Genovese. There was no typical mobster funeral for Albert Anastasia, with massive floral wreaths and a long motorcade of limousines packed with black-suited gangsters. The ceremony was simple and was attended by his family members, including his union-mobster brother Tony. Anastasia's wife Elsa, who married the arch killer in 1937 at age nineteen after moving from Canada to New York, refused to believe any of the terrible stories about her wealthy husband. She insisted that he was a good family man who worked hard to support his family and maintain their lavish home in Fort Lee, N.J. Mrs. Anastasia claimed that her dutiful husband never drank, only smoked cigarettes and that he was usually home by 9 p.m. He often took the children to see movies, she said, and liked to take the family to visit the homes of friends. "I never heard him say a bad word in front of me or the children," Elsa Anastasia told one writer. "He never spoke roughly. He used to go to church with me every Sunday. He gave generously to the church... Now he's not even buried in consecrated ground." The Anastasia family sold its U.S. holdings and changed their name, moving to Canada. The same day Anastasia collapsed into the cuttings of his own hair, Vito Genovese took over the old Luciano Mafia family, through underboss Carlo Gambino, telling Frank Costello that he was permanently retired.
More About Albert Anastasio: Burial: Unknown, Green-Wood Cemetary in Brooklyn. Emigration: from Italy. Military service: 1947, Army.
More About Albert Anastasio and Elsa: Private-Begin: Private
Albert Anastasio (b. Feb 26, 1903, d. Oct 25, 1957)
Notes for Albert Anastasio: