Seymour Magoon
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Seymour "Blue Jaw" Magoon (? - ?) was a Jewish hitman in New York's Murder Inc gang, one of many members who were implicated by the testimony of former member and government informant Abe "Kid Twist" Reles.
A longtime member of Murder Inc., Magoon was heavily involved in the Painters unions with Martin Goldstein during the 1920s and 30s. In 1940, when Abe Reles and Louis Levine began to give evidence to New York District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey, Magoon suprisingly decided to follow suit and helped testify against the other members of Murder Inc. along with Albert Tannenbaum and Sholem Bernstein.
Before the trial, he was one of the most feared members and even famously challenged Harry Strauss and lived to tell the tale; one of very few men to have managed that feat.
However, much of his life remains unknown and, in 2003, his skeleton was discovered in the desert outside Las Vegas. It has been speculated that the incident inspired "Whatever Happened to Seymour Magoon?", an episode of "Las Vegas" that was broadcast in 2005.
[edit] Further reading
- Block, Alan A. East Side-West Side: Organizing Crime in New York, 1930-1950. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1983. ISBN 0-87855-931-0
- Cohen, Rich. Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. ISBN 0-684-83115-5
