Louis Lepke — gangster (murder inc) with roots in the Russian Empire
Louis Lepke Buchalter was one of the most powerful American gangsters of the 1930s — the head of Murder Inc., the enforcement arm of the American organized crime syndicate, responsible for an estimated 100 murders. Born to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents in Brooklyn, he became the only major American mob boss to be executed by the state.
Tracing the roots — Russia (Jewish)
Born Louis Buchalter in Manhattan in 1897 to parents who had emigrated from the Russian Empire, Lepke grew up in the Jewish immigrant poverty of the Lower East Side. His rise and fall — from immigrant tenement to the Sing Sing electric chair — is one of the defining stories of what the Russian-Jewish immigrant experience could produce at its darkest extreme.
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Russia (Jewish). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.