Abbandando's parents, Lorenzo Abbondandolo and Rosaria Famighetti, emigrated from Avellino, Italy, to New York City.

By his twenties, he had joined a street gang in the Ocean Hill section of Brooklyn where he quickly became a lieutenant of Harry "Happy" Maione.

Abbandando organized gambling, loan sharking, and extortion rackets for the gang, as well as committing murders.

[2][3] While Abbandando was said to be a connoisseur of fine clothes and fancy cars, he was also a habitual sexual predator who would drive around his neighborhoods of Brownsville and Ocean Hill looking for young women to rape.

This was because they had reformed their operating structures following the vicious, high-profile Castellammarese War which had made front-page news for its brutality.

These killers were led by Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, the young leader of the Jewish gang known as the "Gorilla Boys".

Buchalter called his group "The Combination" but the New York Press labeled it "Murder, Inc." Unlike the Five Families, which required members to be of Sicilian or Southern Italian ancestry, Murder Inc. was a diverse ethnic gang that included Jews, Italians, and Irish killers.

In September 1931, Abbandando helped Buchalter and gang member Abe Reles eliminate the Shapiro Brothers, a rival outfit from the Lower East Side of Manhattan who controlled the garment industry in Brooklyn.

Using an ice pick and a meat cleaver, Abbandando and several other gang members strangled Rudnick, stabbed him 63 times, and crushed his head inside a garage.

By the 1940s, Murder, Inc. was severely weakened after the arrests and convictions of its leaders, like Buchalter and Jacob Shapiro, and top hitmen such as Charles "The Bug" Workman and Emanuel "Mendy" Weiss.

Abbandando was so confident that his allies would succeed in fixing the verdict, he even whispered a threat into the judge's ear while he was on the witness stand.

In April 1941 Abbandando, along with Maione (Strauss had been convicted in September 1940 of killing Jewish mobster Irving Feinstein in 1939), went on trial a second time.