The Murder of Albert Anastasia is presented as the shock that helped precipitate the November 1957 Apalachin meeting. Anastasia was shot in a barber’s chair at New York City’s Park-Sheraton Hotel, a killing that raised the prospect of conflict among powerful gang figures. The book does not identify the killers or describe the shooting beyond its stark setting; its emphasis is on the gathering that followed and the unintended publicity surrounding it.

Background and Killing

In October 1957, Albert Anastasia, described as a New York waterfront boss and godfather, was murdered while seated in a barber’s chair. A hot towel was over his face. The detail places the killing amid an ordinary grooming ritual, abruptly turned into a publicized act of violence. The account supplies no further circumstances about who carried it out, what weapons were used, or how the attack unfolded.

The Apalachin Meeting

The following month, Russell Bufalino helped organize a meeting of godfathers from around the country in Apalachin, New York. The gathering had been called to settle potential problems that might erupt in the aftermath of Anastasia’s murder. In Frank Sheeran’s recollection, people downtown increasingly described Bufalino as the boss who had called the meeting to avert a gang war. That reputation marked a change in Sheeran’s own estimation of Bufalino: the mechanic who had once helped start Sheeran’s horse at a truck stop in Endicott now appeared to him as a figure of national importance.

Raid and Public Consequences

The meeting intended to contain trouble instead drew the police. Suspicious of the activity in the area, local officers raided the house where the gathering was being held. Fifty-eight powerful mobsters were seized and taken away; roughly fifty others escaped through the woods. The episode gave the killing a consequence far beyond the immediate danger of a gang conflict: the attempt to settle tensions helped expose the scale and reach of organized crime to the public.

The book places the raid within a broader turn in public awareness during 1957. Its account says that before the Apalachin publicity, Americans could still dispute whether a nationwide organized network of gangsters existed, and that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had denied such an organization existed. The raid and its aftermath helped force the subject into national view. Thus Anastasia’s murder matters in the narrative not only as a violent death, but as the crisis that preceded a gathering whose exposure damaged the secrecy its organizers had sought to preserve.

Narrative Role

The killing is recounted retrospectively rather than staged as a scene from the attack. Its narrative weight comes from the chain of consequences: Anastasia’s death raised the possibility of a gang war; the Apalachin meeting was convened to head off that danger; and the police raid turned a private effort at crisis management into a public spectacle. Sheeran’s account also uses the episode to show how his view of Bufalino grew as Bufalino’s reported influence became more visible. The source leaves the murder itself unresolved, while making its political and organizational aftermath central to the story.