[1] Buchalter was born on February 6, 1897 into a large Ashkenazi Jewish family in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan.

His father, Barnett (Berl) Buchalter, had been a widower from Pruzhany (now Belarus) who immigrated to the United States in 1890 with three daughters.

[3][4] His mother, Rose (Reisel) Kauvar Buchalter (née Devaltov or De Waltoff), was from Vilnius and had three sons and two daughters by her first husband.

Reportedly, on the Lower East Side, he attended the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, where he was an "honor roll" student.

[10] Upon Buchalter's 1922 release from prison, he started working with his childhood friend, mobster Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro.

[citation needed] Buchalter's control of the unions evolved into a protection racket, extending into areas such as bakery trucking.

In later years, Buchalter and his family lived in a penthouse in the exclusive Central Park West section of Manhattan.

Buchalter generously compensated his gang members and took them to hockey games, boxing matches, and even winter cruises.

[13] On August 20, 1931, Buchalter married Betty Wasserman, a British-born widow of Russian descent, at New York City Hall.

[15] In the early 1930s, Buchalter created an effective process for performing contract killings for Cosa Nostra mobsters; it had no name, but the press 10 years later called it Murder, Inc.

Schultz had proposed to the National Crime Syndicate, a confederation of mobsters, that New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey be murdered.

Co-founder of the Syndicate and leading mafioso Charles "Lucky" Luciano argued that a Dewey assassination would precipitate a massive law enforcement crackdown.

[21] On September 13, 1936, Murder, Inc. killers, acting on Buchalter's orders,[1] gunned down Joseph Rosen, a Brooklyn candy store owner.

On November 8, 1936, Buchalter and Shapiro were convicted of violating federal anti-trust laws in the rabbit fur industry in New York.

The scheme involved heroin hidden in the trunks of young women and couples traveling by ocean liner from China to France, then to New York City.

Over the next two years, an extensive manhunt was conducted in both the United States and Europe, with reports of Buchalter hiding in Poland and Palestine.

On July 29, 1939, Thomas Dewey requested that the City of New York offer a $25,000 reward for Buchalter's capture, citing a string of unsolved gangland murders.

[8] On August 20, 1940, Buchalter was indicted on murder charges in Los Angeles for the killing of Harry Greenberg, a mob associate of casino owner Meyer Lansky and mobster Bugsy Siegel.

Returned from Leavenworth to Brooklyn to stand trial for the Rosen slaying, Buchalter's position was worsened by the testimony of Albert "Tick-Tock" Tannenbaum.

(People v. Buchalter, 289 N.Y. 181) Two dissenting judges thought the evidence was so weak that errors in the jury instructions as to how to evaluate certain testimony were harmful enough to require a new trial.

The third dissenter agreed, but added that, in his opinion, there was insufficient evidence to sustain a guilty verdict, so the indictment should be dismissed altogether (failure of proof means no retrial).

Buchalter was also mentioned in "The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti", episode eight of the first season of the popular HBO television series The Sopranos.