"What's the difference who shot him? He's shot. Let's forget about him."
--LEPKE BUCHALTER, talking about
Dutch Schultz.
CHAPTER XXII THE TWIN SONGBIRDS 0F MURDER INC.
FOR A GUY WHO NEVER REACHED BEYOND FIVE-FEET-TWO IN his cashmere socks, Abe Reles walked very tall in his set. Pound for pound, he had to be listed as an even more formidable instrument of destruction than a cold-blooded killer like Charlie Workman. He enjoyed every minute of it; just to kill some time, he went along "for the ride" the night three of his Brooklyn colleagues went out to Long Island to knock off some bum named John (John the Polack) Bagdonowitz for walking out on Murder Inc. It was never clear whether he counted that one as one of the eleven execution missions on his personal list of credits, since it wasn't like him to make idle boasts.
You could throw out Reles' unfortunate height defect. He was wide, squat, dark and menacing. He had piercing black eyes, long arms all out of proportion to his body, and remarkably strong hands. Always firm and trim in his good days, he looked as if he could strangle another man or beat him to death with his grubby fists--and he could. Burt Turkus says he was the closest thing he had ever seen to a monster--"a small monster."
Reles did six months for juvenile delinquency in 1920, when he was 13, and in the next two decades acquired a dossier that filled three police yellow sheets. He had 42 arrests, covering everything in the book up to drugs and homicide (just five cases), and if he didn't hold the record for the most arrests he surely could claim it for beating the most cases. Oh, he did the inevitable short stretches in the Elmira Reformatory and the City Prison. Once he even stood a 30-day contempt rap for losing his head and assaulting a court officer, but that was about it; none of his seven convictions involved anything serious.
When you asked the kinky-haired Reles how he made his living between arrests he would mention things like bookmaking, running crap games or helping out a labor union here or there. He never liked to talk about the stable of whores he had once, or about busting heads in the Shylock trade, but when they broke him in the Murder Inc. investigation he added roles in a large assortment of killings, either as a star or a bit player, to his spotty employment record. He never even blushed describing his execution chores, although he did get angry once when someone suggested that after one such mission he surveyed the results to his complete satisfaction and then turned to a colleague and said, "Hey, who was this guy anyway?" No, said Kid Twist, he never killed anyone whose name--the last name, anyway--he didn't know.
Abe Reles fell into the O'Dwyer dragnet on February 2, 1940. Used to walking through the law's swinging doors, he came in voluntarily, oozing confidence, when he heard that Harry (The Mock) Rudolph, a minor sinner doing a misdemeanor bit in the Workhouse on Rikers Island, had implicated him in a seven-year-old slaying. For no apparent reason, Rudolph suddenly had remembered that Reles and two playmates, Buggsy Goldstein and Anthony (Dukey) Maffetore, had murdered a 19-year-old hoodlum companion of his, Albert (Red) Alpert, in an East New York yard in some argument over a batch of stolen jewels. The reason he remembered it so well, Rudolph said, was that the Murder Inc. trio put a slug into his own belly at the same time and it hurt like anything. Well, Goldstein (34 arrests) and Maffetore (15 arrests) also were picked up and stashed away in separate jails. The cops had Maffetore talking after a while, and behind him Turkus had another wayward Brooklyn boy named Louis (Pretty) Levine who also felt like talking around the same time and happened to know a thing or two about Alpert's demise.
Tossed into the creepy, bug-infested Raymond Street Jail, Reles spent 47 days telling Turkus to stop bothering him with the Alpert murder--"you got no corroboration." But it all changed on March 22. The gangster's 25-year-old wife, Rose, mother of his five-year-old son, dropped in at the District Attorney's office and announced that "my husband wants an interview with the law." Taken to Turkus, who was chief of the Homicide Division, she said she had to see Mr. O'Dwyer or no one. Turkus accordingly ushered her into the big man's presence, and Rose Reles laid it on the line. "I want to save my husband from the electric chair," she said, "because there's another baby coming." O'Dwyer said he had to have it in writing and the woman said that was no problem, Abe was ready. Turkus thereupon dashed over to the home of a nearby judge to get the necessary court order permitting him to remove the penitent from his unseemly Raymond Street quarters to Brooklyn's comparatively luxurious Hotel Bossert (clean sheets, room service and all that).
Since the law's new-found friend happened to be blessed with total recall, even unto the goriest anatomical detail in instances where the conventional heaters had been supplemented with such things as meat cleavers, ice picks, tire irons and nooses, this was the break that would turn the key on a sizeable portion of the murders ascribed to the Brownsville--East New York--Ocean Hill mobs. How many murders? Turkus always said it was around 200, coast to coast; the more conservative O'Dwyer never pegged it at any more than 83 or so, but he may have been confining himself to the more local contracts. Abe Reles talked about 85 that he knew about.
Naturally, the name of Charlie Workman turned up very quickly as the Reles memoir began to unfold. The O'Dwyer songbird remembered the Bug borrowing a car for a journey to Sullivan County the night a certain party who had lost his credentials with Murder Inc. was due to go on the spot. He remembered Lepke saying to him only the year before, "Charlie has a tough assignment--I hate like hell to have to do it, but we've got to take Feinstein." That was Samuel (Tootsie) Feinstein, the Bug's very own sidekick, fallen from grace either for flubbing an easy assignment (it was just to kill some guy) or because he fell in love with his own wife and started talking about the straight and narrow. He said that not long after Lepke made that plaintive remark to him the Bug drove off with Tootsie one night and then for a long time the Bug would take $50 to Mrs. Tootsie Feinstein every week and tell her that Tootsie would be home soon, but Tootsie never came home again. He remembered that Workman picked up a package of hardware from the Murder Inc. arsenal the night in January 1939 when a punk named Albert (The Plug) Shuman, suspected of whispering things to Tom Dewey, caught a fatal bullet in the head--from one of the guns in that package. He remembered Red Levine beefing to him once that "any time I've got a contract Charlie is around to do the killing"--meaning that the greedy Workman was grabbing off all the choice jobs. He remembered that the Bug had the assignment to steer Danny Fields--mind you, Danny Fields--to a Brooklyn garage to meet his maker, but he wasn't saying that the Bug fulfilled that mission, because Danny got his in Manhattan. (There is also a record, furnished by Allie Tannenbaum, of the Bug expressing "disappointment and sorrow" over the demise of Mr. Fields.) He remembered the Bug telling him he set up a party named Morris (Mersh) Schlermer to finger a certain Max Rubin in a bungled shooting party in The Bronx.
And oh, yes, he remembered a 1939 New Year's party at his own house in Brooklyn, just a bunch of the boys getting together with their wives and in-laws, when Charlie Workman started talking about Mendy Weiss. Charlie was very bitter about Mendy Weiss, who wasn't among those present at the festive table. He said Mendy Weiss was no damn good and after a while he took his host aside and said, as Reles told it:
"If I didn't go into the shithouse and kill the Dutchman, he wouldn't have been killed."
This undignified treat, pointing a way to a solution of the Dutch Schultz assassination after it had been gathering dust in Newark for three and a half years, was slipped to Bill O'Dwyer and Detective Captain Frank C. Bals on Good Friday. Reles went on to say that the Bug told him that Mendy Weiss and Piggy, the forever mysterious wheelman borrowed from Willie (Willie Moore) Moretti's gang in Jersey, ran off after the shootings. "Charlie," Reles recalled, "said he had to go out by hisself and find his way back by following the railroad tracks."
The Reles recitation was so impressive that the word went out to go find Charlie Workman, and two days later, on March 24, two detectives from the Manhattan Grand Jury squad, John J. O'Brien and Abraham Belsky, had the good fortune to run into the Bug coming out of an apartment in Brighton Beach with Allie Tannenbaum, of all people. The cops took both gentlemen in on a charge of vagrancy, always handy in those situations. It must have seemed trivial to Charlie Workman, but he would always regret that he went along so cheerfully. The rap quickly went from vagrancy to the equally handy "material witness"--Abe Reles was in excellent voice at the time, so pick any old murder--and the bail turned out to be $75,000 per man, too much to raise in that delicate time for Murder Inc.
Workman couldn't know it, of course, but almost a quarter of a century was going to pass before he would walk the streets again--and the guy handcuffed to him on that pinch in Brooklyn would have more to do with that item than even Abe Reles. Tannenbaum was going to furnish the key testimony once he decided, with the help of the persuasive O'Dwyer, that sometimes it's better for a man to polish up his singing voice than to face a rap that might land him in that horrible little green room at Sing Sing. But that's ahead of the story.
On April 8, O'Dwyer and Burt Turkus called Bill Wachenfeld over from Newark and told the prosecutor that it was a man called Charles Workman who fled the Palace Chop House on that night of painful memory and traded shots on the sidewalk with one of the Dutchman's wounded soldiers. O'Dwyer said he had that information from an informant and he thought that perhaps Mr. Wachenfeld might want to bring over the woman who had seen the fleeing gunman. The D.A. cautioned his New Jersey colleague that if his eyewitness was indeed able to identify Charles Workman she would thereafter need a round-the-clock bodyguard or somebody might kill her. Wachenfeld suggested that perhaps it would be safer if he just took home a picture of the suspect and let the woman, Marion Seaberg, try to pick it out from among a small selection of other Rogues' Gallery luminaries. This was done, on the instant, and Wachenfeld reported back, in some sorrow, that Miss Seaberg had failed to pass the test. She said she had never seen Mr. Workman before. O'Dwyer was in no way dismayed. He suggested that Wachenfeld start extradition proceedings and get the Bug salted away in one of his prisons while the case was being tied together by other means. Apprised of the fact that corroboration for Reles' story was now available from the suddenly talkative Allie Tannenbaum, Wachenfeld did that. On his home turf, of course, he found Workman no more communicative than he had been in New York. Turkus had told the prosecutor that nobody was ever going to get so much as the time of day from that guy, and Turkus was so right. Here is a report Detective Captain Joseph Cocozza made on June 12, 1941, after Wachenfeld hustled him over to Essex County Jail to have a chat with the prisoner:
"I asked Workman if he could tell me who was with him on the night of October 23, 1935, when he and two or three others killed Dutch Schultz.
"Workman shrugged his shoulders and said 'Listen, Mr. Cocozza, I don't want to cut you short but I won't answer any questions. I have been framed.'
"Then I asked Workman if he had committed any other crimes in Essex County or in New Jersey alone or with anyone else.
"Workman replied, 'I was never in Newark or in Jersey and I never committed any crimes here.'
"I asked Workman if he knew anyone in Newark or in Essex County or in New Jersey and he replied 'No.'
"I then asked Workman if Tannenbaum and Reles told the truth and he replied, 'Why don't you ask them?'
"I asked Workman if Ruth Sands told the truth and if Danny Fields was his friend and Workman replied, 'Ask the girl about it.'
"Then I told Workman that I would probably be up to see him again before he moved or that perhaps I would see him later on and he replied, 'Don't waste your time, Mr. Cocozza, you and everybody else here in Jersey are swell guys but I don't want to see you any more. There is nothing more that I can tell you.'"
As it happened, the Jersey police didn't need any help from the Bug, because by then all the blanks had been filled in by Mr. Tannenbaum. The lovable Allie, who had progressed from a $50-a-week slugger, strikebreaker and stinkbomb thrower to $75 to $100 and finally to a $125-a-week graduate killer in the Lepke murder school, had been talking a blue streak ever since mid-April.
The manner in which this classic case of underworld lockjaw was cured, by the way, came straight out of a Grade B movie. To start with, Tannenbaum's lawyers got him out of Bill O'Dwyer's clutches on a writ of habeas corpus only to find a delegation of lawmen from Sullivan County waiting to claim the guy on an old Murder Inc. contract up that way. Then one day O'Dwyer made the 100-mile journey to the land of lakes, hills and sour cream, dropped in on the prisoner and suggested a brief change of scenery, like an automobile ride. The District Attorney, never faulted for any lack of humor, didn't tell the big fellow where they were going, but he was taking him to see one of the fellows Abe Reles had mentioned, Hyman Yuran, a wealthy young dress manufacturer and a buddy of the Murder Inc. hired guns. Tannenbaum began to catch on all by himself after a while because he knew that country like a book.
The winding backroad course of O'Dwyer's limo took the grim party to a swimming pool drain behind the Loch Sheldrake Inn and there were some workmen there with spades and pick axes and a character named Sol (Sholem) Bernstein, also out of the old crowd, was telling them where to dig. It didn't take long. Hyman Yuran, also known as Yoell Miller, was waiting in a shallow grave of limestone and Sholem Bernstein said that Allie Tannenbaum was one of the gentlemen who had put him there. O'Dwyer, an ex-judge with a built-in concern for the rights of the accused, wanted Tannenbaum on hand to face the backslid Bernstein and affirm or deny. Well, the gruesome tableau failed to produce the desired result. Yuran, named with Lepke and Gurrah in the garment racket indictment and suspected of switching over to the enemy Dewey when he was building his extortion case against the pair, had been in his improvised resting place since the summer of 1938, more than a year. Naturally, he was hardly in the pink of condition, so O'Dwyer's guest just took a quick look and turned pale. All he said was, "I demand my constitutional rights."
Tannenbaum was going to need more than that, because behind Sholem Bernstein the man from County Mayo had Abe Reles, author of the Yuran squeal in the first place. So the prosecutor was in no way dismayed as he headed back alone to his busy office on the Gowanus. Even if Tannenbaum sounded as if he thought he could beat that case, O'Dwyer had an even better one up in that same verdant Murder Inc. dumping ground. This case, the one Tannenbaum was being held on in the first place, involved the 1936 demise of Irving Ashkenas, like the equally unfortunate Yuran a Lepke defector. Ashkenas, who operated a jitney service for Catskill- bound vacationers, had been found sprawled alongside one of his own hacks near the Paramount Manor Hotel in Loch Sheldrake, not very far from the quicklime pit where the mysteriously slain Chink Sherman had reposed a few months earlier. Ashkenas was very dead because someone had fired five bullets into his head.
Between the Yuran and Ashkenas missions, Tannenbaum had a right to guess that he was in bad trouble for the first time in his life. So, blessed with a trifling formal record for his 30 summers up to that time and evidently not wishing to dirty his police yellow sheet with any homicide convictions, he had a change of heart.
A courier brought the word to Bill O'Dwyer that Kid Twist's playmate would like to come home to Brooklyn and tell him some things. One may assume that it came as something of a wrench to the guy to leave the good green Catskill country, because there were warm memories there, perhaps even enough to counteract the scenes of horror that came later. Consider his history: Allie Tannenbaum was born in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, but the family moved to an Orchard Street tenement on the Lower East Side when he was three, and then to Brooklyn. Allie made it to the fifth grade at Bushwick High School and quit at 17 to go to work as a stock boy in the Garment Center. He moved on to an Upper Broadway haberdashery after a while and then became a salesman for a paper and twine jobber. In the interim, his father acquired the Loch Sheldrake Country Club and Allie began to put in weekends and summer vacations there, helping out. That had to be the good time, maybe the best time--but one summer Allie attracted the attention of a burly resort guest named Gurrah Shapiro (Gurrah for the way he said "Get out of here," which came out "gurrah dahere"). The coarse, bullnecked Shapiro, impressed with Tannenbaum's brawn and muscle, arranged his introduction to that fun-loving crowd in Brooklyn. That was around 1931, when Allie was 25, and from then on the road dripped with blood.
Somewhat more literate than his Murder Inc. co-workers because of his better schooling and his formative years in the square world, Allie Tannenbaum actually proved more helpful to Bill O'Dwyer than Abe Reles. In the matter of the Dutch Schultz assassination, it turned out that he had more information to start with because Charlie Workman, by contrast to his passing remarks to Reles, really had spilled his guts with him. What is quoted here, without editing for the refinements, is a confidential report which emerged from one of the numerous sessions with high New York and New Jersey police brass once Tannenbaum began to hit the high notes as O'Dwyer's featured canary:
| Albert (Allie) Tannenbaum states that the first he knew of the Dutchman's death was the day after the fatal shooting, when he read the newspaper accounts of the killing. Allie knew of no motive for the shooting aside from the fact that Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey was after the Dutchman which caused great concern in the ranks of the Lepke mob. Allie also states that bad blood existed between the Lepke and Schultz factions, as a result of the rubbing out of Bo Weinberg,
which in addition to the pressure of Mr. Dewey, might have served as a motive for the end of the Dutchman.
Aside from learning of the shooting in the newspapers, Allie also heard of it on the same day when he went to the meeting place of Lepke's mob. At this time Lepke wanted to know from Allie where he had been the night before, as he was wanted by Lepke to "go to work on Marty Krompier." Allie told Lepke that he was at the movies the night of the Dutch Schultz killing. Allie did not know that Lepke was looking for him that night. This conversation with Lepke took place in the back office of 500 Seventh Avenue, in Manhattan, a cloak and suit place conducted under the name of Fierman & Kolmer. During the conversation with Lepke at this time, Allie inquired if there would be further trouble with the Dutchman's men as a result of the shooting of Schultz. Lepke said no, that it would all be taken care of.
The next time Allie got information regarding the shooting was a few days after the actual occurrence when he had a conversation with Charlie Workman, at a certain place in New York City.
Workman told Allie about the shooting of Dutch Schultz, stating that he went to Jersey with Mendy Weiss and one known as Piggy. These three were instructed to go to Newark for the purpose of killing Dutch Schultz. They first stopped at a "flat" where they were to await a telephone call or message as to when the Dutchman would be in the tavern. As soon as he got the message, Charlie took two pistols and put them in his coat and they went to the tavern where Dutch Schultz was. The three of them were walking together--Charlie, Mendy and Piggy--and about a block away from the tavern, Piggy said "I better not go near the place." Piggy told Charlie and Mendy he wasn't sure he knew the Dutchman, and said, "Maybe the Dutchman's men will recognize me." Then, from what Charlie told Allie, he started getting cold feet, and at this point both Charlie and Mendy edged up closer to Piggy and said to him, "What do you mean? What did you tell us before that you knew him? Come on, you, walk along with us," and when everybody got a few feet from the tavern they saw one of Schultz's bodyguards in front of the place and stuck him up and walked into the tavern where they saw some men at the table but didn't see the Dutchman there. Mendy ran towards the back, Piggy stood at the entrance, and Charlie went walking towards the back and he couldn't find the Dutchman. Then Charlie went and opened up a little door and saw a man taking a piss and didn't recognize him as the Dutchman but figured it was one of his men. Charlie told Allie that he took one shot at him with his .45 revolver. Workman figured it was one of Schultz's men and shot him once so that he wouldn't bother him.
At this point, Workman walked out and saw Piggy wrestling with one or two of the Dutchman's bodyguards and he butted in and started to help Piggy. After that was straightened out he still didn't know who shot the Dutchman. Again he walked towards the back and finally there was a lot of shooting there and he started to run out. He came out and he didn't see the car there, neither did he see Mendy or Piggy around. He was left stranded and he started to run. As he started to run one of the bodyguards started shooting; and he turned around and emptied both pistols and shot one of the bodyguards in the street.
This was all told to Allie by Charlie Workman. They had a shooting match in the street. Charlie then started to run and when he got a few blocks away took off his coat, his jacket, and threw it away. He walked a few miles to some little town where he saw a railroad station. Here he sat down and waited for a train, and when a train finally came along he boarded the same and came back to New York. During the course of his story to Allie, Workman mentioned about running through a little park where he lost himself, and this was the point where he threw his coat away. He dropped nothing but his jacket. Allie is not sure if he threw the coat away in the park or not.
Workman didn't tell Allie how they got to Newark, whether by car or train, and when Allie asked Charlie why he didn't go back to the flat he was told that he didn't know where the flat was located, except that it was not far from the tavern. Allie says when Workman left the tavern he saw that the getaway car was gone. There was a shotgun in the getaway car to be used just in case they were pursued. Mendy told Allie about the shotgun.
At a later date, Allie relates, there was some friction in the ranks due to the fact that Mendy and Piggy left Charlie behind at the tavern. Charlie said that Mendy shouldn't have left him stranded, and that as long as he didn't see him right away he should have waited for him. That was the opinion held by Charlie, that Mendy should have waited. Thus, about a few months after the shooting, Lepke was present at a meeting and smoothed things over. This meeting took place in Workman's house, somewhere on Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn. At this meeting were present Charlie, Mendy Weiss, Allie Tannenbaum, Lepke, Toots Feinstein, and others whose names Allie doesn't recall. The purpose of the meeting was to iron out all this friction and bad blood that existed. The meeting was held in the living room. Mrs. Workman was not present. Lepke asked Mendy for his version as to why he didn't wait for Charlie in front of the tavern. Mendy said "Well, I ran out and didn't see Charlie there, that only two minutes before I saw Charlie run towards the back. I thought he got out through the kitchen. I thought he got out through the back way, and there was no sense in me waiting for him. If I knew he didn't get out I wouldn't have rode away from there."
At this point Charlie Workman spoke up and said "Well, as long as you were doing so much bullshitting that you shot the Dutchman six times when he was only shot once you shouldn't know I was back there. You claimed you were shooting in the back, and you claimed you saw him running towards the back. If you didn't see me how do you come to say I got out the back way?"
Mendy says, "Well, that's what I thought," and they were talking back and forth, and Lepke said, "All right, forget it, forget all about it, it was a mistake and tell everybody not to talk about it."
That was all that Allie heard about the matter.
Allie also relates conversation held between Charlie Workman and Charles (Lucky) Luciano in Miami, sometime after the Schultz shooting. Workman told Allie he was going over to see Charlie Lucky to borrow $1,000 from him. When Workman came back, he told Allie he saw Luciano and borrowed the money from him. He also started talking about the Dutchman's killing, Workman told Allie, and stated to Luciano how he was left behind, stranded, with no car, and that he didn't like the idea at all. He stated that Luciano said, "All right, forget it. I'll straighten it out."
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While the essentials were fairly uniform, some of the details in Tannenbaum's recital did vary in the telling. Once he said he heard Workman's account of the shooting not "a few days after the actual occurrence" but the very next night. He said he was summoned then to Ruth Sands' apartment (which she would deny) and saw the Bug alone there and "very angry." He said he asked Workman, "Where were you the last couple of days?" and the Bug replied, "Gee, what an experience I had." He said Workman followed that mild understatement with a full account of the bloodbath, touched off with a punch line that seemed mingled with more pride than horror. "It looked like a Wild West show," the Bug was quoted as saying.
On the motive for the death sentence, Tannenbaum departed from the Dewey assassination plot in another singing session. "The Combination," he said, "received information that the Dutchman was about to be indicted by the District Attorney of New York County and feared that, in that event, the Dutchman would not stand up but would tell what he knew about the different mobs." Here, of course, Tannenbaum had to be referring to Dewey, then Special Prosecutor, rather than Bill Dodge, the District Attorney who had been helped into office by the Schultz mob. Dodge did have a Grand Jury looking into policy in 1935 but the Syndicate, always attuned to this sort of secret proceeding, must have known that this investigation was pure flimflam; the newspapers all duly recorded it when that Grand Jury, led by Lee Thompson Smith, a real estate man, bolted and led Governor Lehman to supersede Dodge with the mustached racket buster that June.
The reference to the Schultz bodyguard encountered outside the Palace Chop House and "stuck up" remained a mystifying item. What happened to him? Did the kindly execution duo simply slap the outside triggerman on the wrist and send him off with a mild reprimand? It would hardly seem so. More likely, the Bug added the outside man to his narrative for purposes of adornment. The reference to the timid Piggy wrestling in the tavern "with one or two of the Dutchman's bodyguards" is also open to question. Schultz's trio of gunbearers all had been trapped at the table in the back room; there was never any evidence of any others in the tavern and, again, Workman and Weiss would have had to slip some lead to any such strangers instead of letting them stay alive to identify them either to the remnants of the Schultz mob or to the authorities.
The matter of Workman's failing to recognize the man trapped in that embarrassing position in the Palace men's room also raises a question. Tannenbaum's interrogators were delinquent for letting that statement go unquestioned, because elsewhere he had said that the Bug at one time or another had worked for the Dutchman. Thus one would have thought that some recognition had to occur, even though the gunner had nothing better than a side view because the victim was facing the urinal.
On the item of the kangaroo court presided over by Lepke, Tannenbaum also was able to recall, in still another session, a fuller text of the pint-sized mob boss's opinion. It went this way: "What's the difference who shot him? He's shot. Let's forget about him. It doesn't make any difference. Why don't you fellows forget the whole thing?"
Well, now, who could quarrel with that when it came from the underworld's "Judge Louis," who had the kindest, softest brown eyes and the manner of a Solomon with a machine gun under his robe? Obviously, nobody did, because the quiet that immediately settled over the assassination of Dutch Schultz and his cohorts kept the whole thing in cold storage until first Ruth Sands talked, after Danny Fields went on the spot, and then, two years after that, Abe Reles opened up.
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