Dead man squawking: How NYC’s kosher chicken king’s luck ran out

Big Joe Cohen and his emissaries from New York’s hinky poultry racket gave Barnet (Barney) Baff plenty of hints that he ought to join their nest of corruption.

Over two months in 1913, someone planted warning bombs outside Baff’s summer bungalow on in the Rockaways, his retail shop in East Harlem and his brownstone on W. 120th St.

But Baff, the city’s kosher chicken king, didn’t give a cluck.

When cops offered to protect him, Baff shooed them off.

A married father of three, he was a headstrong immigrant from Bialystock and a prototype American success story.

But his testy relationship with his own industry — the “poultry trust” — put the portly man with a flowing Van Dyke at peril.

A century ago, the city’s $28 million-a-year kosher chicken business was based in rambling clusters of stalls in the West Washington Market, near Gansevoort St. in Greenwich Village.

Each year, 70,000 tons of live chickens were trucked in crates to the wholesale market from New Jersey rail yards. Nearly all of the birds landed in pots on the East Side, feeding the ample Jewish population there.

It was a messy business, rampant with price-fixing and graft. Palms were greased along the supply chain, from Teamster truckers to feed suppliers to the chicken-slaughterers union to a small army of kosher certifiers.

A grift known as overcropping had become endemic in the trade. Just before birds were sold, wholesalers would feed hungry chickens a final meal of bran cut heavily with sand, grit and gravel, adding as much as 25% to their weight.

The graveled gullets cost customers $7 million a year.

Barney Baff and his son Harry got into the chicken business in 1902 as kosher wholesalers, and then expanded into slaughterhouses and retail stores.

Baff didn’t like the funny business of his competitors, and he had the chutzpah to let them know. One such target said Baff was “cordially hated” in the industry.

Baff’s reputation as a noodge was one thing. But to his competitors he crossed a line when he took his complaints to the district attorney.

A series of prosecutions of kosher poultry dealers began in 1910, when 87 men were indicted for anti-trust violations (“Poultry Racketeers Rule the Roost,” said one headline). Thirteen more chicken dealers were fined and jailed the following year, with Baff as a primary informant. And in 1914, 18 members of the Live Poultry Dealers’ Protective Association were charged with corruption — again, with Baff’s help.

Big Joe Cohen, the poultry union boss, called a meeting of stakeholders to discuss their Baff problem.

“I refused their demands,” Baff told a trade paper in March 1914. “I have not lost nerve yet. I will fight to a finish.”

So Cohen decided to call in the Italians.

Six times in the summer and fall of 1914, Mafia hit men were sent to the West Washington Market on failed missions to kill Baff. The seventh trip finally paid off.

The phone in Baff’s stall jangled just before 6 p.m. on Nov. 24, 1914. It was two days before Thanksgiving and the market was swarmed with buyers, crates of turkeys stacked everywhere.

The caller said he had a tip about thefts from Baff’s retail shops. As Baff hurried to a rendezvous, two gunmen stepped from a doorway, fired simultaneous shots that pierced his back, then fled in an idling car.

The kosher chicken king fell dead outside a poultry market stall.

For weeks, the merchant’s murder shared front pages with news of the developing European war. A deputy police commissioner was forced to resign when cops couldn’t immediately pin the murder on the poultry trust.

A break came when a mob mug named Carmine DiPaolo, facing an assault rap, squealed about the Baff job. He said Joe Cohen used a $4,200 chicken union slush fund to contract the murder through Ippolito Greco, an East Harlem saloonkeeper who assembled a Mafia hit team.

Mob historians say the Baff hit was an early example of ethnic crime group cooperation in the city.

A year after the murder, police crowed that as many as 22 men could face execution. They exaggerated. Prosecutors won about a dozen convictions in three trials spanning nearly five years, including groups of Italians and Jews.

Big Joe Cohen was sentenced to die, as were mobsters Giuseppe Arichiello, one of the triggerman, and Frank Ferrera, the getaway driver.

But the trial testimony was as grubby as a chicken crate — winking witnesses with sudden cases of amnesia and others committing blatant perjuries. The testiliars included Joseph Sorro, who claimed he saw Cohen pay for the hit, recanted, then tried to recant his recantation.

Appeals and retrials kept the “everlasting” Baff murder case in the headlines for a decade. Eventually, sentences were slashed and prison gates swung open for the convicts, including the three who had been condemned.

After four execution-date reprieves, Cohen was sprung in 1921.

Ten years later, two masked gunmen interrupted a pinochle game with his wife, Mina, at their home on Westminster Road in Prospect Park South, Brooklyn.

The murder of Cohen, 49, was never solved. But detectives reckoned that Barney Baff somehow had gotten the last squawk.