Today marks the eighty-sixth anniversary of the double murder of Max Greenberg and Max Hassell, both top executives in Waxey Gordon's brewery empire. Both Max' were in a six room suite in side the Elizabeth-Carteret Hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Greenberg had a lengthy police record going back over a decade in his home town of St. Louis, Missouri where he was a member of the infamous Egan's Rats until the gang's namesake felt that Greenberg had double crossed him on a liquor deal. Greenberg survived an attempted murder and Egan was bumped off later. Whether or not Greenberg was behind the murder is not known but Greenberg left town. By the mid 1920s he had hooked up with Waxey Gordon and became a wealthy bootlegger, buying into a number of hotels in both New York and New Jersey.
Hassell was an immigrant from Russia who opened a string of breweries in Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
At the time of their murder, there was a meeting going on between Greenberg and Hassell with a handful of men. It may have been a hit from the onset or perhaps the meeting didn't go the way the gunmen wanted so the shooting irons came out. Either way, it was lucky for Gordon that he wasn't in the meeting or he would have went as well. These murders were the opening salvo in the war to exterminate Waxey and his minions.
Max Greenberg Max Hassell
