Allie Tannenbaum was a strikingly handsome person of 14 pounds and was rail thin in structure. It was at Catskill hotel of his father that he started to work and went on to become the most accomplished killer of Murder Incorporated. It was with his help that Louis Buchalter, his boss was executed by the law.
His early life
It was in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, on 17th January 1906, he was born. His family moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Orchard Street, when he was 2 years old. He loved talking a lot, the reason why he earned the nickname of ‘Tick Tock’.
Sam had accumulated sufficient money for purchasing Loch-Sheldrake Country Club, Catskills, New York. During this time, he was in high school’s third year, quite an accomplishment for a boy who comes from a place that has record of others dropping after 8th grades and engaged in legal and illegal work. He was engaged by this father to do work at the hotel to do the menial work to groom him to become a successful businessman.
His beginning as a mafia
It is here that he came across Jewish gangsters who often frequented the club. Louis Lepke, Jacob Shapiro and Harry Greenberg were among them. Allie also had befriended Lepke’s bagman Shimmy Salles, Curly Holtz as well as Lepke himself. He got invited to their parties. However, for the work performed for his father at the hotel, he was not given a single dime. He had noticed the Jewish gangsters to have sufficient money with them, which lured him to the mafia world.
He started to work for Lepke upon the behest of Big Harry Schacter for $35/week, performing activities like throwing stink bombs, strikebreaking and slugging. Later, he graduated to duties such as schlammings. His pay increased with work production and got involved in about 6 murders. He became Lepke’s valuable asset. Killing Harry Greenberg in 1939 was his biggest achievement, as it was Southern California’s first ‘mob killing’.
In 1940, he got arrested along with Workman at the latter’s place. Although he refused to speak the first three days, upon being threatened of being executed, he lived up to his nick name spilled out everything, the murders and the Lepke mafia connection. He testified against Lepke on a murder charge, which led to the latter’s being sentenced to death by the electric chair.
The remaining part of his life went into hiding, since he emerged only to testify against his other mafia members and disappear back. At the age of 70, he died due to natural causes.