Mob FilesPublic-domain archive of American organized crime
Typed FBI report page numbered 48 describing Buchalter's surrender at 10:17 and Shapiro's June 17, 1938 sentence, from the FBI Vault, Buchalter Part 03, page 16
Open the full imageGIF, 1000 × 1312 px, 0.1 MB

FBI Vault: Louis (Lepke) Buchalter, Part 03

Third part of the FBI's Buchalter file: the Bureau's narrative "The Furdress Case" ending with his surrender on August 24, 1939, Los Angeles report pages from 1939, a 1956 memorandum, a 1966 Portland memorandum, and pasted newspaper clippings. Page 16 is stored here.

Date
1939/1966
Kind
case-file
Source
FBI Records: The Vault
Retrieved
2026-10-12
Rights
A record of the Federal Bureau of Investigation released under FOIA. A work of the United States government, public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105. The stored page is the Vault's scan of page 16. The newspaper clippings pasted into the file are third-party items and are not reproduced.

The Vault titles this part “Louis (Lepke) Buchalter Part 03.” It has 53 scanned pages. Cover sheets carry Bureau serials 60-1501-4266, -4310 and -4327 and Sub A Sections 3 and 4, and the Los Angeles field file 60-122. The OCR text was read in full and the page images of pages 6, 11, 13 and 16 were viewed.

Pages 6 to 17 are the Bureau’s narrative “The Furdress Case,” filed here as its own page. Page 16, stored here, is its report page numbered 48: “At 10:17 the search ended when “Lepke”, wearing dark glasses, disguised with a mustache, kept his word.” The same page says Shapiro “on June 17, 1938, was sentenced to serve three additional years and pay a $15,000 fine” in the Southern District of New York in the Fur Dressers Factor Corporation case.

As read from the OCR, the rest of the part holds Los Angeles report pages from 1939, a personal-history summary with an alias list (page 17), a memorandum of November 28, 1956 quoting the Bureau’s published history, a July 1966 Portland office memorandum with a background summary prepared for an Internal Revenue Service trial, an April 1939 draft identification order, and newspaper clippings about the search and the reward (pages 23 to 29 and 40 to 53). The clippings are third-party publications; the only mention of Abe Reles in this part is inside one of them.

item"The Furdress Case": the FBI's narrative of the Shapiro and Buchalter surrenders (1939)An undated Bureau narrative, file 60-1501-4266, in Part 03 of the Buchalter file: Shapiro's surrender on April 14, 1938, the 1939 negotiations through Walter Winchell, and Buchalter's surrender to the Director at 10:17 on August 24, 1939. The first page is stored here.itemFBI Vault: Louis (Lepke) Buchalter, Part 02Second part of the FBI's Buchalter file, 1937 to 1939: a New York report on his background and finances, 1939 report pages, the Bureau memorandum of July 5, 1939 on the fugitive hunt, and a Los Angeles report on a search made in August 1939.itemFBI Vault: Louis (Lepke) Buchalter, Part 04 (Final)Final part of the FBI's Buchalter file, Sub A Section 13: mostly newspaper clippings from August 1939 that the Bureau collected on the New York racketeering grand jury, the combined reward and the search, with later clippings on Shapiro.itemFur Dressers Case (FBI history page)The FBI's own account of its 1932 to 1939 antitrust investigation of the Protective Fur Dressers Corporation and the Fur Dressers Factor Corporation, in which Louis Buchalter and Jacob Shapiro were named defendants, through Buchalter's surrender on August 24, 1939.