He was skinny as a rail (140 pounds, tops) and surprisingly handsome. However, Allie Tannenbaum, who started out as a worker at her father’s Catskill Hotel, became one of Murder Incorporated’s most accomplished assassins. Tannenbaum was also turned into a rat, which helped put her boss, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, in the electric chair.
Tannenbaum was born on January 17, 1906, in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania. When Tannenbaum was just two years old, his father Sam moved the family to Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In New York City, Sam Tannenbaum, like he did in Pennsylvania, ran a general store. As a teenager, Allie Tannenbaum had a habit of always talking, talking, talking. She talked so much that people said she sounded like a clock, hence the nickname “Tick Tock”.
After World War I, Sam Tannenbaum amassed enough cash to purchase the Loch Sheldrake Country Club, in the Catskills, upstate New York. When her father bought the country club, Allie was already in her junior year of high school (she later attended college for a few semesters as well). This was quite an achievement, since most kids Tannenbaum’s age on the Lower East Side had already dropped out of school after the eighth grade and had jobs, some legal and some not so legal. Making use of his son’s abilities, Sam Tannenbaum employed Allie at her hotel, either waiting tables or setting up beach chairs on the lake. Despite the initial hard work he put on his son, Sam Tannenbaum was grooming Allie as his eventual replacement. However, that was not to be.
The Loch Sheldrake Country Club was a luxurious establishment and hosted many wealthy Jewish families for their summer holidays. Jewish gangsters also frequented the country club. Among them were Harry “Greenie” Greenberg, Louis Lepke and his associate Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro. Shapiro was a thick-chested gorilla who provided the muscle for Lepke’s many illegal enterprises. Whenever Shapiro got angry, and that was often, his favorite line was “Get out of here.” However, with his deep voice, the phrase sounded like “Gurra dahere”. Therefore, his friends gave Shapiro the nickname “Gurrah”.
Allie Tannenbaum became acquainted with several of the country club’s visitors, including Shimmy Salles, who was a delivery man for Lepke’s rackets, Curly Holtz, a labor mobster, and even Lepke himself. As the owner’s son, Tannenbaum was invited to all their parties by Jewish mobsters. Tannenbaum, according to her agreement with her father, did not receive a dime until after the summer, which basically ended the vacation season. As Tannenbaum walked through her father’s resort penniless, she noticed that all the Jewish gangsters had a lot of money to go around. This made him a possible suspect to be lured into his organized crime world.
In the late summer of 1931, Tannenbaum was walking down Broadway in Manhattan when he ran into Big Harry Schacter, one of Lepke’s subordinates.
Schacter asked Tannenbaum, “Do you want a job?”
“I could use one, if it pays,” Tannenbaum said.
Schactor smiled. “This one is for Lepke. You know what kind of job it will be.”
Tannenbaum shrugged and said he would do whatever it takes to make some money.
Tannenbaum began working for Lepke, initially for $35 a week. His job included general tasks like hitting, breaking strikes, and dropping stink bombs where they were needed. Tannenbaum later graduated to bigger roles, such as “schlammings,” which meant he “chlammed” or broke the heads of unionized workers, who weren’t towing Lepke’s line.
As the output of his work increased, so did Tannenbaum’s pay. Finally, Tannenbaum, who by then had been involved in six murders and helped dispose of the body of a seventh murder victim, was earning an impressive $125 a week. Due to Tannenbaum’s summer location in the Catskills, his work primarily included assassinations and extortion in upstate New York. Tannenbaum was a valuable asset to Lepke in Sullivan County, because Tannenbaum was familiar with back roads and numerous lakes, where bodies could be hidden. Over the winter, Tannenbaum and his family vacationed in Florida, where Tannenbaum worked as a strongman at several of Lepke’s gambling venues.
Tannenbaum’s greatest success for Lepke was the 1939 murder of Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg, suspected of speaking to the government about Lepke’s activities. Lepke gave Tannenbaum the task of assassinating Greenberg, through one of Lepke’s intermediaries (in order to insulate himself from any connection to a murder, Lepke never gave the assassins orders from him).
Tannenbaum stalked Greenberg, first to Montreal, then to Detroit, before finally cornering Greenberg in Los Angeles. On November 23, 1939, Tannenbaum, along with Bugsy Siegel, waited outside Greenberg’s apartment building. When Greenberg emerged, Tannenbaum and Siegel riddled “Big Greenie” with bullets. This was considered the first “mob murder” in Southern California.
In 1940, Tannenbaum was vacationing in Florida, when he received word that Lepke had been arrested and that Murder Incorporated killer Abe “Kid Twist” Reles was now singing like a canary about Murder Incorporated’s work. Tannenbaum immediately took a train to New York City and went to the home of Charlie “The Bug” Workman, another of Lepke’s top killers. The reason for Tannenbaum’s visit was that he sought funding from Workman to go on the run in Detroit. Luckily, while Tannenbaum and Workman were sitting in Workman’s living room, Detective Abraham Belsky knocked on the door to arrest Workman. Belsky was pleasantly surprised when he found Tannenbaum there as well.
At first, Tannenbaum refused to yell. When Tannenbaum was questioned by police over a three-day period, he repeatedly said, “I refuse to answer for my constitutional rights.”
However, District Attorney Deckelman suddenly hit Tannenbaum with an indictment, accusing Tannenbaum and “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss of the 1936 murder of Irv Ashkenaz, a taxi owner, who whistleblowered the police about the taxi business. Lepke’s in Manhattan. Ashkenaz’s body was found near the entrance to a Catskills hotel, riddled with sixteen bullets.
“We have enough information on you to put you in person,” District Attorney Deckelman told Tannenbaum.
Suddenly, Tannenbaum, living up to his nickname “Tick Tock”, started talking nonstop. Tannenbaum told Deckelman about all the murders he was involved in and how they were connected to Lepke.
On the witness stand, during Lepke’s trial, Tannenbaum put the final nail in Lepke’s coffin, when he did an audition about the day he heard Lepke order the murder of a candy store owner named Joe Rosen. Lepke was always cool and collected, and careful what he said in front of anyone. In fact, Lepke never gave Tannenbaum a direct order to kill. This information was always passed on to Tannenbaum through an intermediary, close to Lepke.
However, in 1936, Tannenbaum was ordered, through Mendy Weiss, to kill Irv Ashkenaz. However, Weiss told Tannenbaum to report directly to Lepke, when the deed was done. After getting rid of Ashkenaz, Tannenbaum went to Lepke’s office downtown to tell Lepke that Ashkenaz was really dead. When he entered Lepke’s office, Tannenbaum was met by a furious Lepke, yelling at Max Rubin, one of Lepke’s closest confidants.
Tannenbaum put District Attorney Burton Turkus on the witness stand: “Lepke was yelling that he gave Joe Rosen money to get him to go away, and then sneaked into a candy store, after telling him to stay away. Lepke was yelling, ‘There’s a son of a bitch who will never come down to talk to Dewey about me. Max (Rubin) was trying to calm him down. Easy, Luis. I’ll take care of Joe Rosen; he’s fine.'”
“What did Lepke say to that?” Turkus asked Tannenbaum.
Tannenbaum responded, “He says, ‘You told me that before.'” He says, “This is the end. I’m sick of that son of a bitch.” He says, ‘and I’ll take care of him.’
Tannenbaum testified that two days after his meeting with Lepke and Rubin, in Lepke’s office, he read in the newspapers that Joe Rosen had been shot 16 times as he was opening his candy store in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Tannenbaum’s testimony, regarding the Rosen murder, corroborated Abe Reles’s testimony and was a deathblow for Lepke. It took only four hours for the jury to convict Lepke of first degree murder, which landed Lepke in the electric chair four years later. For his testimony against Lepke, Tannenbaum received a short jail sentence, a mild slap on the wrist for a man who had committed at least six murders.
Little is known about what Tannenbaum did for the rest of his life. He seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth, except for the occasions when he reappeared, to testify against old murderous friends of his. In Rich Cohen’s book Tough Jews, Cohen says that in the 1950s, Tannenbaum worked in Atlanta for a time as a lampshade salesman.
In 1950, Tannenbaum left the carpentry and tried himself in the murder trial of Jack Parisi, another hitman for Murder Incorporated, who had been on the run for ten years. Despite Tannenbaum’s testimony, a judge found Parisi not guilty.
In 1976, unlike most of his contemporaries, Tannenbaum died of natural causes on an unnamed island off the coast of Florida. He was 70 years old.