Jack Parisi is a toadlike
little man with amazingly large bags under his eyes and an unswerving
penchant for flashy clothes. During the big years of New York's Murder,
Inc., he made his living by shooting people. But though he finished off
a lot of them, most of the details of his life remain obscure. Jack is
not a talkative man. “If you hung him up by the thumbs for eight
weeks,” said a Bronx prosecutor, “he might tell you his first name.” This reticence has not prevented the law from checking up on some of his
business enterprises. Take Jack's last job: one of his associates told
the cops all about it to avoid being electrocuted at Sing Sing. It took
place in 1939, after Gangbuster Tom Dewey slapped a subpoena on a
onetime garment-union leader named Philip Orlofsky. Orlofsky knew a lot
about the union rackets, and Mob Chieftain Louis Buchalter
was disturbed. He ordered Orlofsky's death. Parisi was chosen to do the
honors. The Fingers. Everything was handled with great care. Gangsters Albert
Anastasia, Abe Reles, Harry Strauss and Emanuel Weiss spent weeks in planning. One
Jacob Migdon spent a long time “fingering” the job, and reported that
Orlofsky, a short, fat man, left his Bronx apartment at exactly 7:55
every morning. Thus, when the big day came, Parisi was standing near by
at exactly the right time. But everything went wrong. Parisi had no way of knowing that his victim
had left 20 minutes early to get a barbershop shave. He just fired five
shots into the first short, fat man who came out the door—it happened
to be a music-publishing executive named Irving Penn. Penn screamed and
collapsed, dying. Parisi jumped into a stolen getaway car, driven by
one Seymour Magoon—and found that a gravel truck was
blocking the street. As police sirens moaned close by, Parisi cried: “Mamma mia, mamma mia,
let me out of here.” He jerked open the door and ran. Parisi dropped
out of sight for ten long years. Last autumn the Pennsylvania State
Police found him at last; he was napping on a bed surrounded by
crucifixes and holy candles in his hideout house in the anthracite coal
fields. The Forgetful. He was taken back to Brooklyn, put on trial for the
murder of an A.F.L. official named Morris Diamond. Ex-gangster Allie
Tannenbaum told the jury all about the crime. But
another hood named Angelo Catalano—who had earlier admitted driving
Parisi's getaway car—last week took the stand and said blandly, “That
ain't the guy.” A corroborating witness who had seen the murder just
couldn't identify the killer either. Since a man may not be convicted
of murder in New York solely on the testimony of accomplices, the judge
helplessly dismissed the charge against Parisi and gave him an
indignant dressing-down. “The court is convinced,” said the judge,
“that this defendant . . . shot and killed Morris Diamond.” Parisi
listened with a bored air, and belched loudly at the climax of the
judge's denunciation.
