Murder, Inc. is a 1960 American gangster film starring Stuart Whitman, May Britt, Henry Morgan, Peter Falk, and Simon Oakland. Filmed in Cinemascope and directed by Burt Balaban and Stuart Rosenberg, the film was based on the true story of Murder, Inc., a Brooklyn gang that operated in the 1930s.
Falk was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his first major feature role as Abe Reles, a vicious thug who led the Murder, Inc. gang and was believed to have committed 30 murders, for which he was never prosecuted. In his 2006 autobiography Just One More Thing, Falk said that Murder, Inc. launched his career.
This was the first film directed by Rosenberg, who later won acclaim for Cool Hand Luke (1967), and it launched Stuart Whitman's career as a leading man.
A highly fictionalized film on the same basic events titled The Enforcer (1951), starring Humphrey Bogart, was released in the United Kingdom with the title Murder, Inc.
Plot summary
Abe Reles and his accomplice Bug Workman, two cold-blooded killers from Brooklyn's Brownsville district, go to the Garment District to meet with Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, leader of the organized crime mob Murder, Inc., who offers them jobs as hit men. After hiring them to kill Catskills resort owner Walter Sage for withholding slot machine profits from the syndicate, Lepke designates Emanuel "Mendy" Weiss, his assistant, as Reles' contact. Reles coerces struggling singer Joey Collins, an old friend of Sage indebted to Reles, with veiled threats, and Joey agrees to accompany him to the Catskills, where he draws an unsuspecting Sage out into the street and into Reles' murderous hands.
Upon their return to the city, Reles visits Joey at the apartment he shares with his dancer wife Eadie and coldly announces that he will kill them if they tell anyone about what happened. Aghast, she denounces him and throws him out. Later, at a soda shop, Lieutenant William Flaherty Tobin, a local police detective determined to end the syndicate's reign of terror, arrests him and takes him to the station house for questioning. When they arrive, however, Lepke's attorney Lazlo orders for Reles' release. Resentful towards Eadie, Reles returns while Joey is away and brutally rapes her. When Joey returns, the beaten and disheveled Eadie begs him to escape with her, but he declines out of fear, and she hysterically insists that he leave.
Under Lepke's direction, Reles continues his murderous campaign. One day, at the nightclub in which Eadie performs, he asks her to reconcile with Joey, before taking her to a luxurious apartment filled with stolen goods and offering it to the couple for free. A grand jury impaneled by special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey soon convenes, forcing Lepke to hide at the couple's dwelling; he soon takes control, mistreating and constantly berating Eadie. He instructs Mendy to personally kill Joe Rosen, a shop owner he had beaten for failing to pay extortion money, to prevent him from testifying. As the NYPD scours the city for Lepke, crime lord Albert Anastasia informs him that per the syndicate's orders, he must turn himself in on a reduced charge of interstate commerce crime. Lepke reluctantly consents, but rather than the two-year prison term promised by Albert, is sentenced to thirty years in Leavenworth.
District Attorney Burton Turkus takes over the crusade, enlisting Tobin's help in identifying the players. Initially cynical about his ability to withstand political pressure, Tobin eventually agrees. Lepke, concerned about being linked to Rosen's death, orders Mendy to kill the entire Brownsville gang along with Joey and Eadie. Shell-shocked from being dominated by him, she describes living with the killers to Turkus, identifying Mendy as Lepke's right-hand man and the Brownsville gang as his personal squad, and revealing that Reles will arrive that afternoon on the Baltimore train; he puts her in protective custody and goes to the train station to arrest Reles. Later, as Mendy waits menacingly outside the soda shop to kill Joey, Turkus arrives and hauls Joey into the police station, shows him photographs of Bug's murder and warns that he will be next. Upon learning of Reles' arrest, Joey visits him in jail, notifies him of Bug's death and then threatens to testify against him. Fearing incrimination by Joey, Reles relents and, over the next six days, vividly details the organization's activities, including the fact that Joey overheard Lepke order Rosen's murder.