Notorious New Jersey 100 True Tales of Murders and Mobsters, Scandals and Scoundrels
by Jon Blackwell
Rutgers Press
There’s a reason Tony Soprano lived in New Jersey. In “Notorious New Jersey,” author Jon Blackwell shows the state’s reputation for hard cases is well deserved. For more than a century, the Garden State has been a Criminal State, home to infamous murders and headline-making kooks. In this excerpt, The New York Post copyeditor highlights four of the 100 lawless tales he chronicles:
HELL FOR LEATHER
Inside some of New Jersey’s finest houses are leather book covers, lampshades, change purses and wallets. Many are inscribed with the date in 1833 when a murderer named Antoine LeBlanc was hanged – and all the items are made from skin carved off his body.
LeBlanc, a 31-year-old farmhand from France, emigrated to find work at a farm in Morristown, NJ. Two weeks into his job, LeBlanc beat to death his elderly employers, Samuel and Sarah Sayre, using a spade and his heavy boots. Then he stabbed their servant to death with a pitchfork. LeBlanc’s plan was to steal a horse, flee to New York and set sail for Europe before anyone had discovered the bodies. But a sheriff’s posse caught him sipping refreshments at a nearby tavern.
A jury needed all of 20 minutes to convict him. On Sept. 6, LeBlanc was hanged on the Morristown village green before 12,000 people, more than five times the town’s population.
Hanging apparently wasn’t good enough for him. LeBlanc’s body was cut down from the noose and taken to a local surgeon’s office. In a bizarre experiment, current was run through the corpse to make the dead eyes roll in their sockets.
LeBlanc’s skin was then stripped away and sent to a tannery, which spared no effort in a grisly form of recycling. Wallets, book jackets and simple strips of skin were all hawked on the streets.
One of the human-skin wallets – a frail, green-brown piece of leather – is still reportedly owned by an area chief of police.
LAST LAUGH
Willie Moretti was a gambling man who liked sure things.
In the mid-1930s, he discovered a scrawny young singer from Hoboken, NJ, named Frank Sinatra and placed a bet on the kid’s future. In order to free Ol’ Blue Eyes from an onerous employment contract, it was said, a Moretti henchman put a contract release in front of his boss, bandleader Tommy Dorsey.
The goon stuck a gun barrel into his mouth and assured him either his brains or his signature would be on the paper. Dorsey signed, and the anecdote made its way into “The Godfather.”
Moretti liked to entertain as much as he liked entertainers. Although he ruled a North Jersey criminal empire based on union rackets and extortion, Moretti loved to yuk it up with politicians as he claimed all his income came from gambling. Willie said he consistently beat the odds because he had a system. “Bet ’em to place and show,” he once explained. “You’ve got three ways of winning. Come down to the track some time and I’ll show you.”
On Oct. 4, 1951, Moretti planned to go to the races in Jamaica, Queens, after a morning at Joe’s Elbow Room restaurant in Cliffside Park, NJ, for what he believed would be a sit-down with mob chief Albert Anastasia.
A hit squad was there instead, assigned to whack him because of his persistent gabbiness. At 11:25 a.m., two men pulled .38-caliber revolvers and aimed squarely for his bald skull. The police investigating the murder later got a chuckle out of the sure-thing bet he had circled in his tip sheet. It was a horse named Auditing, who finished fourth and out of the money that afternoon.
MASTER RACE
“Heil! Heil! Heil!”
The parade ground was filled with zealots in brown shirts and armbands. From the podium, in front of a swastika banner, came exhortations to fight for the German fatherland and crush its enemies. “Our day is coming,” said one speaker. “We know who you all are – all Jews – and we’ll get rid of you.”
Nuremberg? No, New Jersey.
In the years leading up to World War II, America had its own version of the Nazi Party. Members of the German-American Bund heiled Hitler and hoped for fascism to reign supreme in the United States. Every summer from 1937 to 1941, the Bund retreated to Camp Nordland, a wooded pleasure ground in Andover, NJ (population 479).
The Bund’s leader was Fritz Kuhn, a strutting windbag in spit-shined jackboots with his chin always jutting out. From headquarters in Yorkville, Manhattan, he collected membership dues from perhaps 18,000 Bundists across the nation. Most were fellow German immigrants who cheered Hitler’s rise to power and blamed the Jews for all their Depression misfortunes.
At the July 18, 1937, opening of Camp Nordland, the public was invited to a ceremony in which the word “Nazi” was carefully never mentioned. A state senator even gave this greeting: “Sussex County welcomes you as it has many other good German people.”
COLD BLOODED
Two years had passed since Louis Masgay vanished in Little Ferry, NJ. When his body turned up in 1983, shot and wrapped in garbage bags, it was fresh, as if he’d just died.
The coroner puzzled over this oddity until carving open the victim’s heart to discover ice crystals inside. Whoever killed Masgay had kept the body frozen for those two years, in an attempt to disguise the time of death. That was how New Jersey’s most wanted, most elusive killer became “The Iceman.”
Richard Kuklinski claimed to have murdered 100 people in the course of his career, but he was no serial killer who did it for kicks. Every death was “just business,” the 6-foot-4, 275-pounder said.
Through his job at a film laboratory, he got into the business of selling porn. This work introduced him to the Gambino crime family in the late 1970s and, he claimed, the business of contract killing.
In 1993, after Kuklinski had been put away for life for the Masgay murder and four others, he happily sat for an interview televised on HBO. Now he claimed to be not merely a five-time convicted killer, but a master hit man responsible for 100 murders.
Right up to his death in 2006, he was telling tales – and they grew increasingly taller. Supposedly, he was the assassin of both Jimmy Hoffa and Gambino crime boss Paul Castellano.
One man marked for death pleaded to Kuklinski for mercy. “He was please-God-ing all over the place,” the killer remembered. “So I told him he could have half an hour to pray to God, and if God could come down and change the circumstances, he’d [live]. But God never showed up.”