The peculiarly deflated figure you see above is George Rudnick, nicknamed Whitey, and with a handle like that you don’t even have to see him dead to know he was a crime figure. He was also a stool pigeon, so one night his colleagues brought him along on a car theft caper, and after they boosted the wheels, they attacked him, choking him while stabbing him fifty or more times with an icepick. Some accounts say he was brutally hacked with a meat cleaver. We’re inclined to think it was an icepick for the obvious reason that all his body parts seem intact, but in either case, you’d be deflated too after something like that. It happened today in 1937.
It took a few years, but two mafia footsoliders, Harry “Happy” Maione and Frank “The Dasher” Abbandando, both members of the infamous Murder, Inc., were arrested, indicted, and convicted for the killing. They appealed and were granted a new trial, but another guilty verdict sent the pair to a date with old sparky in Sing Sing Prison on February 19, 1942. If there’s a lesson here, aside from don’t hang with guys nicknamed Happy and Dasher unless they happen to work at the North Pole, it’s probably to keep in mind how very, very picky the mafia is about employee loyalty.
