1941 - Crime

Crime

New York's homicide rate will fall to 3.5 per 100,000 in the next 5 years, down from 4.5 per 100,000 in the last 5 and its lowest level of this century.

A New York plainclothesman tells small-time, Flatbush-born gambler-bookmaker Harry Gross, 25, that paying "ice" (protection money) could keep him safe from arrest. Gross sets up his own "horse room," a venue where players can place bets and get race results by radio and telephone. Gross begins paying as much as $1,000 per month for police protection.

Gangster Abe "Kid Twist" Reles "falls" to his death November 12 from a fifth-story window of Coney Island's Half Moon Hotel while in the custody of a six-man police bodyguard. Reles last year informed to Brooklyn district attorney William O'Dwyer, his testimony attributed 130 hired killings between 1930 and 1940 to a national crime syndicate called Murder Inc., whose members have been accused of 63 murders for racketeers since 1934, and the testimony will lead to the execution of mob figures who include Louis "Lepke" Buchalter; police say Reles was trying to escape but there are suspicions that he was pushed to keep him from implicating the police. O'Dwyer says the death of Reles ruins the state's "perfect" case against mobster Umberto "Albert" Anastasia, now 39, but a King's County grand jury will severely censure O'Dwyer in 1945 for not having prosecuted Anastasia anyway (see Kefauver Committee hearings, 1950).