Shapiro Brothers

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The Shapiro Brothers were a group of New York independent labor racketeers based in Williamsburg who controlled bootlegging, extortion, illegal gambling and prostitution in New York's East Side during the 1920s and 30s. Well established in the local garment industry, long dominated by Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro and Louis "Lepke" Buchalter since the 1927 death of Jacob "Little Augie" Orgen, the two began to move against them in the summer of 1931. As the two sides battled for complete control over the garment industry in Brooklyn, Irving and Meyer Shapiro were killed by Joseph and Louis Amberg; as Irving was gunned down near his apartment on July 11 and Meyer who was found shot to death in the basement of a tenement building on Manhattan's Lower East Side on September 17, 1931. The following year, on orders from Buchalter, William Shapiro was finally killed by Murder Inc. members Martin "Bugsy" Goldstein and Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, supposedly being buried alive in a sandpit in the marshland of Canarsie by Reles and the Amberg brothers on the night of July 20, 1934.

Reles would implicate Buchalter in the murders during talks with District Attorney William O'Dwyer after agreeing to become a government informant in 1941. His later testimony would result in the conviction of Buchalter and the rest of Murder Inc., who were all eventually sentenced to death.