People v. Buchalter, 289 N.Y. 181 (1942)

The New York Court of Appeals affirmed the murder convictions of Louis Buchalter, Emanuel Weiss and Louis Capone. In passing, the opinion refers to "one Abe Reles (now dead)."

Date: 1942-10-30
Kind: court-opinion
Source: CourtListener (Free Law Project), text of the opinion
Retrieved: 2026-10-12
Docket: 289 N.Y. 181, 45 N.E.2d 225 (N.Y. 1942)
Rights: Opinion of a state court. Judicial opinions are not subject to copyright under the government edicts doctrine (Banks v. Manchester, 128 U.S. 244 (1888); Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, 590 U.S. 255 (2020)). This page uses the opinion text only, not any publisher headnote. The text was read on CourtListener.

New York Court of Appeals, decided October 30, 1942. The lead opinion is by Judge Conway, with a concurrence by Lehman and dissents by Loughran and Rippey, as CourtListener lists them. The court affirmed the convictions of Louis Buchalter, Emanuel Weiss and Louis Capone for murder: “Judgments of conviction affirmed.”

Reles appears only in passing, in the court’s account of the accomplice witnesses: the opinion refers to “the defendant Louis Capone and one Abe Reles (now dead).” The opinion does not describe testimony by Reles in this case.

This archive cites the opinion only to show that by October 1942 the court described Reles as dead. It does not give the date or circumstances of his death; the only account of the death filed here is Frank Bals’s 1951 testimony to the Kefauver Committee.

itemPeople v. Goldstein, 285 N.Y. 376 (1941)The New York Court of Appeals affirmed the murder convictions of Martin Goldstein and Harry Strauss. It called the testimony of Abraham Reles, "concededly an accomplice," an important factor in the People's case and reviewed the charge on corroboration of accomplice testimony.itemKefauver Part 7: testimony of Frank C. Bals on the custody and death of Abe Reles (14 February 1951)A retired New York police official who supervised the Murder, Inc. witnesses testified that Abe Reles began to talk in about 1940, that his information led to other witnesses, and gave his account of Reles's fall from a window of the Half Moon Hotel. Pp. 584-590; the Reles passage is on p. 587.

itemLouis "Lepke" Buchalter handcuffed to a guard, 1939 (Library of Congress)World-Telegram & Sun staff photograph by Al Aumuller of Louis "Lepke" Buchalter handcuffed to a guard and getting into a van, dated 1939. A copy is stored here.