# Louis "Lepke" Buchalter

Canonical: https://mobfiles.org/people/louis-buchalter/

Defendant with Jacob Shapiro in the federal fur dressers antitrust cases. His 1936 Sherman Act conviction was reversed on appeal in 1937; he failed to appear in 1937, surrendered to J. Edgar Hoover on August 24, 1939, pleaded guilty to a federal indictment and was sentenced to fourteen years, and was handed to New York for a state trial. The FBI states he was executed at Sing Sing on March 4, 1944.

The FBI's history page calls him "Louis "Lepke" Buchalter," and the Bureau's 1939 narrative uses "Lepke" as his name. The Second Circuit's opinions name him only as Buchalter. The Bureau's files list further aliases in OCR that has not been checked against the page images, so they are not given here.

The federal record covers the antitrust cases, the fugitive hunt, the surrender and the federal plea. The appeals court reversed his one federal conviction that went to an appellate opinion, for want of proof. The FBI's history page describes the violence of the fur rackets and attributes its direction to Buchalter and Shapiro; that is the Bureau's narrative, quoted on [its page](/items/fbi-history-fur-dressers-case/), and is not a court finding. The FBI says the sentence after his surrender was on "antitrust and narcotics charges," but no record of the narcotics case has been filed. The murder conviction and the execution were state matters and rest here on the FBI's statement.

The FBI's 1935 memorandum on Charles Luciano lists Buchalter among the associates of Benjamin Siegel found in a 1933 investigation, and its 1939 narrative describes his dealings in 1933. Those are the Bureau's statements. No record filed on this page states a family, a rank, or a role in any organization.

## Sources

- Federal Bureau of Investigation, History: Fur Dressers Case: https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/fur-dressers-case
- World-Telegram & Sun staff photograph by Al Aumuller, 1939, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-114629). The item record reads "No known restrictions on publication for NYWT&S staff photographs.": https://www.loc.gov/item/95511436/