# Kefauver Part 7: testimony of Frank C. Bals on the custody and death of Abe Reles (14 February 1951)

Canonical: https://mobfiles.org/items/kefauver-p7-bals-testimony-1951-02-14/

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.

Frank C. Bals testified in Part 7 of the Kefauver hearings on 14 February 1951; the date comes from the volume's contents page. Questioned by committee counsel Mr. Lazarus, he said he had been a New York policeman from 1916, retired as an acting captain, served as chief investigator for the Kings County district attorney, and was seventh deputy police commissioner in 1946 (printed page 584). The hearing prints his home address; this page does not repeat it.

On printed page 587 he said: "let us start in with when Abe Reles first decided to talk, I and Captain McGowan ... went over to the Tombs, and brought him into the district attorney's office—that is, District Attorney O'Dwyer. ... Just what year it was, I think it was 1940." He said "it was really on Reles' talk that we got the other witnesses, we got Tannenbaum who corroborated his story," and that the witnesses were held "in the Bossert Hotel, first, and then the Half Moon."

He then gave his account of the death: he was called at home, found Reles "lying on a roof, I think five stories below," and said there was an indication that Reles had tied a bedsheet with a piece of telephone wire to slide to the floor below and that the knot pulled out (printed page 587). That is Bals's testimony about what he saw and inferred, not an inquest finding; no inquest or police record on the death has been opened for this archive.

## Sources

- U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/investigationofo07unit
- Full text of the volume (Internet Archive, OCR): https://archive.org/download/investigationofo07unit/investigationofo07unit_djvu.txt