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Infamous mob murder site now a Starbucks

By David Freedlander, amNewYork Staff Writer
More stories | dfreedlander@am-ny.com

October 25, 2007

The barista stood stock still, her cold eyes glistening off the cool metal of the espresso machine. She grabbed the handle, and bang! bang! a few quick hits to the side, and before anyone knew what was happened, a Macchiato, double-shot, lay steaming on the counter.

Fifty years ago Thursday, in the same spot that very espresso machine sat coldly whipping nonfat mocha lattes, perhaps the most notorious mob hit in history happened.

Albert Anastasia, the powerful leader of Murder Inc., a man believed to be have personally killed 36 people, stopped in what was then a barber shop in the Park Sheraton Hotel's lobby on West 57th Street. As he dozed in the chair, two gunmen walked in and fired a barrage of lead into the crime boss.

Meyer Berger, who covered the murder for the New York Times, wrote at the time, "Anastasia fell to the floor ... One pudgy hand was outstretched. The fluorescent lights kicked fire from the diamonds in his fat finger ring. He lay still."

The murderers were never caught.

It is difficult today to stand on tiled floor of the Starbucks and imagine the pool of blood where the man nicknamed "The Executioner" once lay.

Those ghosts are all gone amid customers sipping Tazo teas and leaning over laptops, oblivious to the murder that captivated most of the country five decades ago. Back where the barber stood before the gunmen barged past him, a sign advertises the Starbucks song of the day: Dave Matthews' "Grace is Gone."

"You think people care?" says one barista, out on a smoke break and checking her Sidekick, and who, as per company policy, would not give her name. "That was 50 years ago. Trust me. They just want their coffee and they want to get on their way."

Anastasia ran Murder, Inc. a group of trained contract killers who did the mob's grisly bidding, and he seemed to delight in offing disloyal rivals. He was ultimately undone by fellow bosses leery of his intentions to accrue more power for himself and by internal feuding within his own family. His murder captivated the nation and later inspired the famous massage murder scene in "The Godfather."

"It was unheard of to so brazenly kill a boss," said Selwyn Raab, author of the mob book "Five Families." "Anastasia was probably the most powerful mobster in America. He thought he was so safe that he would even go to a barber shop without his bodyguard."

The general manager of the hotel, Florencio Ferraro, laughs when asked if any guests should feel nervous about gettinga hair cut there.

"Absolutely not," he said. "We don't even have a barbershop in this hotel at this time."

Life on the street that Anastasia walked in his last moments continues apace. August Fischer, up for the day from New Jersey with his wife, remembered coming to the city back in those days.

It was a different time, he said, but he had no memory of the gruesome murder in the latter-day Starbucks.

"What happened, he didn't like his coffee?"

Albert Anastasia

-Born Umberto Anastasio in Italy on Sept. 26, 1902

-Moved to the United States around 1919 and worked on Brooklyn waterfront

-One of four to kill mob head Joe "The Boss" Masseria in 1931. For his role got put in charge of Murder Inc., an arm of Lucky Luciano¹s National Crime Sydicate

-Became boss of the Mangano family in the 50s, which later became the Gambino crime family

-Murdered on Oct. 25, 1957 at a barbershop at the Park Sheraton Hotel by two gunmen