| abstract | - Tropiano was a New Haven native who'd moved to Brooklyn as a boy and was rumored to have been a hit man for the notorious "Murder, Inc." hit squad of the late 1930s. In the late 1940s, Tropiano was arrested for two murders in New York City, but the charges were mysteriously dropped. Years later, an FBI informant said that Tropiano and his crew of freelance gangsters had been caught robbing Mob gambling operations. He was given a choice: Kill your crew or be killed. Over the next 18 months, a dozen members of his crew turned up dead on the streets of Brooklyn. The killings made banner headlines and confounded local cops. An investigating judge said the murder spree "makes Murder, Inc. look like a penny-ante racket." Tropiano got off, the informant said, by paying a homicide detective $20,000 to kill a witness. The Mob needed one more thing. Willie Moretti, boss of the Genovese crime family's New Jersey faction, was suffering from syphilis and saying dangerous things during his testimony before the Kefauver Commission. He needed to go. On Oct. 4, 1951, four men met Moretti for lunch and shot him dead. Tropiano was widely believed within the mafia to have been one of the trigger men, informants told the FBI. His reward, word within the mob went: New Haven.
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