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Al, who was born in Tropea, Italy (real name: Umberto Anastasio), started his career almost as soon as he jumped ship in New York in 1917 to become a dock-walloper on the Brooklyn piers. In 1921 and 1922 he spent 18 months in the death house at Sing Sing for the murder of another longshoreman named George Turrello. The experience taught him the efficacy of wholesale death; when his lawyer got him a new trial, his pals killed off so many witnesses that Al was released. After that he prospered; the waterfront offered, as it still does, wonderful opportunities in pilferage, shakedowns, strikebreaking and extortion. He met a lot of other rising young men: Al Capone, Louis ("Lepke") Buchalter, Lucky Luciano. He was often arrested (murder, 1928; murder, 1932; murder, 1933), but never convicted. A stool pigeon named John Bazzano, who took an interest in him in 1932, was found cut into stew meat in a burlap bag.
Out the Window. When the mobs syndicated, after Prohibition, Al became "The Law"—his Brooklyn mob handled executions for the chieftains of the underworld. Some victims went into the Hudson in concrete kimonos. Some were buried in quicklime in a Lyndhurst, NJ. chicken yard that the boys used as a private cemetery. In all, Al was credited with 63 corpses during this phase of his career. He never paid a day in jail for them. Abe ("Kid Twist") Reles sang about Murder Inc., in 1940, but Reles, though locked in a Coney Island hotel room and guarded by cops, somehow managed to fall out the window and kill himself before Brooklyn Prosecutor Bill O'Dwyer saw fit to bring Al to trial Al disappeared and joined the Army (he trained soldiers as longshoremen during the war), and for "clerical reasons," the "wanted" card with Al's name was removed from the files of the New York Police Department.
After the war Al built a tile-roofed, Spanish-style mansion at the edge of the Hudson River palisades in New Jersey, built a loft. metal fence topped by barbed wire, installed lights and Doberman pinscher watchdogs, and settled down to the good life. He went to race tracks and took the sun in Florida and Hot Springs, Ark. This existence was interrupted in 1954 when the Government charged him with evading a paltry $12,000 in federal income taxes. Before the matter was settled two Government witnesses, an elderly couple, disappeared from their bloodstained Miami house. Al got off with a year in Milan, Mich.
In the Box. Still, Al grew to resent reference to the vulgar necessities of his sort of life. So did his brother, Tough Tony, who ran the Brooklyn piers for him. "Murderer?" Tony once rasped to a reporter. "He kill anybody in your family yet?" Al was proud of his children and became a heavy spender in New York toy stores. He was mourned last week, however, in a very narrow circle. Only Tough Tony gave any public display of grief. When a New York Daily News reporter called him and announced that Al had been shot to death, Tony said: "What the hell kind of a joke do you call that?" "It's no joke," said his informant. "Oh, my God," moaned Tony. "Oh, my God. No ... no ... no." He hurried to the hotel and threw himself, weeping hysterically, upon his brother's corpse.