Harry Greenberg
Harry "Big Greenie" Greenberg (1909 – November 22, 1939) was an associate and childhood friend of
Early years
He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1909. Greenberg and his parents were Jewish.
Alleged tie to organized crime
His first known arrest was in September 1927 for drowning Benjamin Goldstein; he was arrested with two other low-level criminals named Joseph Lefkowitz and Irving Rubinzahl. Greenberg was acquitted, and only Lefkowitz was convicted for the crime and sentenced to the electric chair, although he was later acquitted.
Murder
On November 22, 1939, Greenberg was murdered by Bugsy Siegel, Whitey Krakow, and Lucchese crime family soldier Frankie Carbo. Prosecutors claimed that Siegel had brought them to his house and drove the getaway car, and that Carbo shot Greenberg in the head five times. His wife Ida Greenberg found him murdered at his driveway. Greenberg allegedly demanded $5,000 from Buchalter to keep his silence from law enforcement, however Buchalter subsequently ordered his murder.[4] Siegel was sent to trial in 1940 but not convicted.[5] The second trial began in 1942 and Carbo was the main defendant. Krakow was murdered in 1941. Abe Reles, a notorious hitman for Murder Inc., agreed to testify but the case was dismissed when he died in 1941. Reles' actual cause of death is highly debated. Another Murder Inc. hitman who also became an informant, Albert Tannenbaum, said he brought the murder weapons to Los Angeles from New York and gave them to Carbo and Siegel.[6]
Media
Greenberg was portrayed by Academy Award nominee Elliott Gould in the 1991 film Bugsy.[7]
References
- ^ "'Bugsy' Siegel - The mob's man in Vegas". Las Vegas Sun. 15 May 2008. Retrieved 3 November 2017.
- ISBN 9781447495369.
- ISBN 9781848583849.
- ^ "Harry Greenberg". lacndb. Retrieved 3 November 2017.
- ^ "The world's most dangerous hitmen killed for cold cash". The Herald Sun. Retrieved 3 November 2017.
- ^ "Mob Slaying of 'Big Greenie' Greenberg Retold in Bugsy Siegel Trial". The Daily Mirror. 27 January 2012. Retrieved 3 November 2017.
- ^ "Elliott Gould: 'I didn't have a drug problem. I had a problem with reality'". The Independent. Archived from the original on 2022-05-09. Retrieved 3 November 2017.
Further reading
- Block, Alan A. East Side-West Side: Organizing Crime in New York, 1930-1950. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1983. ISBN 0-87855-931-0
- Cohen, Rich. Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. ISBN 0-684-83115-5
- Turkus, Burton B. and Sid Feder. Murder, Inc: The Story of "the Syndicate". New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. ISBN 0-306-81288-6
- Wallace, David. Hollywoodland. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002. ISBN 0-312-31614-3