“THE GRIM REASON WE NEVER SEE EXTRATERRESTRIALS” and More Creepy But True Stories! #WeirdDarkness

“We only kill each other.” – Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel

On October 25, 1957, mob boss Albert Anastasia was shot to death in a barber’s chair inside of the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York. Anastasia was one of the controlling members of “Murder, Inc.” which was the branch of the national crime Syndicate that carried out assassinations. Anastasia had no idea that his own number had come up.

Murder, Incorporated was the enforcement arm of the Syndicate, formed by Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Meyer Lansky. The branch carried out a record number of murders between 1935 and 1940, wiping out Syndicate rivals and police informants. The men associated Murder, Inc. included Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss, Louis Capone (no relation to Al), Charles Workman, Emmanuel Weiss and Marty “Bugsy” Goldstein. All of them were engaged in a number of different rackets in New York.

They had business and social relationships with two other members of Murder, Inc., Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, who was heavily into labor racketeering, and Albert Anastasia, who controlled the New York docks.

Both Anastasia and Buchalter were high up in the Luciano-Lansky Syndicate. Buchalter and Anastasia subcontracted killings out to Workman and Weiss, who hung out in Midnight Rose’s Candy Shop in Brooklyn, where they could be contacted any time, day or night. The store was also the headquarters of Abe Reles’ loan-sharking operation. The recruiting of Abe Reles was done by Buchalter on orders of the Commission. The Syndicate wanted killers from outside of their ranks, who could not be traced and were unknown in the underworld. The only Syndicate members in direct contact with the killers at Midnight Rose’s were Anastasia and Buchalter. In exchange for their services, the Syndicate granted Reles and the others a free hand in East New York and in Brownsville.

Up until 1940, Murder, Inc. is thought to have carried out between 400 and 500 killings, settling mob matters from New York to Los Angeles. All of the murders would have had to have been cleared through Lansky and Luciano. The decision was then passed to Anastasia or Buchalter, who contacted the assasins.

In 1940, Murder, Inc. came crashing down. Reles and a number of his colleagues were arrested on suspicion of murder and Reles decided to save himself by offering information on the others. He took a deal that offered him immunity in exchange for revealing the details of 200 murders he had taken part in. His testimony convicted Harry Strauss and Bugsy Goldstein, among others. All were sent to death in the electric chair. Reles also gave up Charles Workman and Emmanuel Weiss, who killed Dutch Schultz in 1935. Workman and Weiss were sentenced to life in prison.

From the Syndicate’s viewpoint, all of these men were expendable. However, when Reles implicated Anastasia, Buchalter and Benny Siegel in first degree murders, his days were numbered. To protect Reles, the police kept him under 24-hour guard in a hotel room on the sixth floor of the Half Moon Hotel at Coney Island. On November 12, 1941, his body was found on the ground outside the hotel. He had been flung out the window of his room. The police were unable to explain how this could have occurred but years later, Luciano and Lansky claimed that the police officers guarding Reles had been paid $100,000 by Frank Costello to demonstrate that “the canary could sing, but it couldn’t fly.”

Anastasia became a victim of the power struggles that took place in the New York mob in the 1950s.

In 1931, Lucky Luciano took over the Masseria crime family and he named Vito Genovese to serve as his underboss. He expected to take things over when Luciano went to prison for tax evasion in 1936, but Luciano passed him over and put Frank Costello in his place. Special prosecutor Thomas Dewey was convinced that Genovese was in charge anyway and the mobster fled to Italy for several years.

Costello, meanwhile, ran the Masseria crime family while Luciano was in prison and then after he was thrown out of the country in 1946. Costello became a very popular boss after Luciano, largely because of his political connections and the fact that his complex deals with Luciano and Lansky meant that members of his organization were granted a large amount of independence and the possibility of becoming very wealthy. Costello was protected not only by his close friendship with Luciano and Lansky but also by his enforcer, Albert Anastasia – a man that no one messed with.

Costello’s appearance before the Kefauver Hearings in March 1951 effectively ended his usefulness to the mob. The hearings began in May 1950 and were held in 14 cities across the United States. More than 800 witnesses were subpoenaed to testify. Some of the proceedings were broadcast live and even in those early days of television, attracted 20 to 30 million fascinated viewers. The hearings were the brainchild of Estes Kefauver, a Democratic senator from Tennessee and chairman of the Special Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. The main focus of the Kefauver Committee was gambling. Witnesses came from all walks of life including politicians, policemen, state governors, gamblers and racketeers.

Of the major mob figures swept up by the hearings, Frank Costello came out looking the worst. Threatened with deportation and under constant surveillance by the police, he was forced to answer questions rather than exercising his rights under the Fifth Amendment. Even so, Costello was charged with contempt and sentenced to 18 months. Thanks to his testimony, he was also prosecuted again for tax evasion and imprisoned again in 1956. He only served 11 months on that conviction but by this time, the damage to his credibility was done.

Vito Genovese was determined to take Costello’s place as head of the family. He had been patiently biding his time, building up a healthy war chest by dealing drugs and cultivating supporters within the family, like Carlo Gambino. Genovese was convinced that in order to succeed, he had to remove Costello and his enforcer, Anastasia, and neutralize Lansky and Luciano.

Genovese went after Costello first. Soon after Costello was released from prison on tax evasion charges, on May 2, 1957, he was shot as he entered his apartment building on Central Park West. The bullet grazed his skull, not causing any serious damage. The gunman was Vincent Gigante, who was identified by the doorman and certainly known to Costello. Gigante was brought to trial, but both Costello and the doorman now claimed they had never seen him before and the case was dismissed.

Genovese did much better when it came to Anastasia. On the morning of October 25, 1957, Anastasia entered the barbershop of Manhattan’s Park Sheraton Hotel for a shave and a haircut. Anastasia’s bodyguard parked the car in an underground garage and then conveniently decided to go for a stroll. Anastasia relaxed in the barber chair, closing his eyes. Suddenly, two men with scarves covering their faces walked in. One of them told barbershop owner, Arthur Grasso, who was standing behind the counter, “Keep your mouth shut if you don’t want your head blown off.” The pair walked up to Anastasia’s chair and shoved the barber out of the way. Anastasia still did not open his eyes. The two men pulled guns from the coats and opened fire on the reclining man. Anastasia lurched from his chair after the first volley and flung himself at his killers – or rather at their reflections in the mirror. He crashed against the counter and more shots were fired into him. Finally, he fell to the floor in a lifeless heap.

Like most gangland assassinations, the Albert Anastasia murder remains officially unsolved.

STORY: VANISHING GAS MAN=====

A few weeks ago, my house started getting colder. I assumed the boiler had gone wrong. So my boyfriend and I looked up gas men and found this really cheap one. At first I thought he’d be some sort of criminal for that price, but my boyfriend persuaded me. On the day he came, my boyfriend had to be somewhere else so his mum stayed with me in case he was some kind of robber.

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When Weird Darkness returns: The United States government confiscated Nicola Tesla’s notes when he died. Could he have been working on something we’ve yet to be told about? That story is up next.

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STORY: TESLA’S SECRET SPACE PROGRAM=====

In the tortuously tangled web of conspiracy theory, there is endlessly spun the element of fear and mistrust. Who in that shadowy realm is really in charge, and how afraid should we be of losing our freedoms – such as they are – to the ambitions of a “deep state” that operates without public scrutiny and seeks to control every aspect of our public and private lives?
And does this shadow government possess advanced forms of technology that they keep secret as they quietly go about the business of subduing the entire planet to their willful control? Have they conquered outer space and colonized the moon and even Mars under our trusting noses?
This is one of the questions tackled in “Nikola Tesla Journey To Mars Update: Exposing the Existence of the Secret Space Program,” in which certain possibilities are dealt with openly and without fear of the debunkers.
We are concerned here with the idea of a Secret Space Program and the innovators who may have made it possible. It is theorized that Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest scientists of the modern era, developed an antigravity form of propulsion that was used to go to Mars.
The book includes a Q and A I conducted with Tesla expert Tim R. Swartz, who told me of a strange statement made to him by J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer and UFO chaser who was once the lead investigator for the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. Some years after the closing of Project Blue Book, Swartz was working as a journalist for a television station in Dayton, Ohio, home to Wright Patterson Air Force Base (which is said to house the dead alien bodies recovered from the Roswell Incident, among other UFO legends) when Hynek made an appearance there.
Hynek was at the base to deliver a talk on the new exhibit of Project Blue Book artifacts and Swartz was covering the story for his television station. As Swartz was packing up his camera equipment and preparing to leave, the two men discussed television technology, which led to a further discussion on the role of Tesla in developing what would later become television.
“Hynek brought up the subject of the Tesla/Mars project,” Swartz said. “And I was like, ‘What?’ And he told me that there were files possessed by the Air Force that talked about Tesla’s attempt to send a spacecraft to Mars. Now that was all he knew about it. But he had heard, from what he said were reliable sources, that Tesla had been involved in a project that involved a group of wealthy men from the East Coast that were building an aircraft in the middle and late 1800s. And that these were the aircraft being reported during the ‘flying machine flap’ that started in California in 1896.
“Hynek told me that this was one of the reasons,” Swartz continued, “that the United States government confiscated Tesla’s notes when he died. That, and Tesla had been saying that he had invented a Death Ray and had tried to sell it to the highest bidder.”
When Tesla passed away, many of his confiscated notes and papers ended up at Wright-Patterson, where further research was being done with the material.
The wealthy group of men referred to above weren’t just pulling the new technology out of thin air – or were they? Swartz said one story has it that the men were receiving communications from a spirit medium, probably around the mid-19th century. This really opens up the possibility of a supernatural, nonhuman source for the information, an entity with a vested interest in getting mankind to Mars quickly and with no public fanfare.
“They started to get messages from spirits,” Swartz explained, “and eventually communication professing to be an intelligence from the Planet Mars. These channeled messages started feeding technological information that led to the development of early flying machines.”
Further along, in 1899, Tesla built an experimental lab in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he was hoping to learn to harness lightning as a source of electricity. Tesla began to hear strange, rhythmic radio signals on his low-frequency radio receiver. He later wrote that he was the first person to hear the sound of one planet greeting another.
“When the newspapers picked up the story,” Swartz said, “the so-called ‘Martian Messages’ created a firestorm of debate. No one had ever heard regular signals from space, and Tesla concluded that they must be from living creatures on a nearby planet, such as Mars.”
Tesla was then approached by the secret East Coast-based group, who called themselves the Aero Club and claimed they had been receiving the same mysterious radio signals as Tesla.
“Tesla’s mission was to help the Aero Club develop an aerial machine,” Swartz said, “that could fly them into space and onto Mars. Most likely, Tesla considered this group to be peopled by suicidal madmen. But obviously, after seeing the results of their earlier successful airships, Tesla could have been caught up in the enthusiasm of making such a grand project a reality.”
All this information is taken from the rare manuscript, reprinted in its entirety in “Nikola Tesla Journey To Mars Update,” and makes for fascinating reading. There is much more to the Tesla/Mars story for readers to discover on their own.
In a manner similar to the group that drafted Tesla, the Germanic mediums of the Vril Society, which consisted of beautiful blonde women that were the physical embodiment of the Aryan ideal, received advanced technological information from an extraterrestrial civilization existing light years away in the Constellation of Taurus. The transmissions held the key to constructing circular flying craft capable of traveling around the world at great speed as well as exiting the Earth’s uppermost atmospheric levels.
Many believe that some of the information gathered by the mysterious females in the early 20th century was eventually exploited by Hitler for the sake of warfare and maintaining his dictatorial authority. And, as with the Tesla story, the Nazis may have used the channeled information to actually travel to the moon and Mars on spacecraft totally unheard of by the general public in their time or our own.
So far we have presented here the bare bones of two separate Secret Space Programs, that of Nikola Tesla and the Nazis, programs shrouded in history and hidden from the world at large but nevertheless compellingly believable. But what’s happening in these terms today? Why believe in a Secret Space Program?
For that we turned to Richard Dolan, one of the most respected figures in the UFO community. In a field crowded by overzealous believers and fringe “contactees,” Dolan has firmly established a reputation as a researcher and author who relies primarily on public and proven sources, or at least sources whose background can be verified in real-world terms. He has written two very influential books on the government cover-up of the UFO phenomenon, “UFOs and the National Security State,” Volumes One and Two, that provide thorough research into the history of the clandestine, black budget response of the US military and intelligence community to the alien presence.
We asked Dolan, why should we believe in a Secret Space Program?
One crucial factor, according to Dolan, is the many nomalous events witnessed by both American and Soviet astronauts beginning in the mid-1960s. We also have the evidence of what are known as DSP satellites, or Defense Support Program satellites.
“These are a series of geosynchronous satellites in Earth orbit,” Dolan explained, “that have a long record of tracking ‘fast-walkers’ in space. That is, objects that are like a space UFO.”
Dolan said that from 1973 to 1991, nearly 300 “unknowns” were recorded by the DSP satellites, a number of which were really bizarre. For example, around 1984, one of the special satellites recorded an object that approached it very closely and then ominously moved away into deep space. The information comes to us almost by accident. A friend of Dolan’s who worked for many years at an aerospace company received mistakenly, but not illegally, a printout of some DSP “fast-walker” events.
Dolan said his point is a simple one.
“You’ve got those events and quite a few others that are intriguing,” Dolan said, “and which tell me there is something going on in Earth’s orbit that’s not being officially explained. It would seem to me very logical that just as there would be a covert monitoring of the UFO phenomenon within Earth’s atmosphere and on the ground and so forth, if there are anomalous activities going on in space, then clearly you would want an agency to monitor that as well, to deal with it. And that would necessitate the creation of a very clandestine component to the U.S. space program.”
But what about some of the wilder claims, like our having traveled to the moon and Mars in secret? Dolan says he has spoken to people he considers credible who affirm that there is a secret program connected with the moon. Concerning Mars, he says he’s never gotten anything that would allow him to say confidently one way or the other, but, he added, he would not be shocked to learn that we had traveled to Mars by the means of recovered alien technology.
“Every conclusion in science,” he said, “is provisional and contingent on more information coming your way.”
Dolan also has opinions on the Nazis ability to travel to the stars.
“The Nazis were quite sophisticated,” he said, “in their science of what we would call ‘flying saucer technology.’ We now know this.”
But Dolan also cautions that those who believe that UFOs are all a product of Nazi technology need to do a little more research into the phenomenon itself. UFOs were sighted long before the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, and the fact remains that UFOs may be piloted by nonhuman entities of no particular political stripe.
“It’s either a very, very clandestine human intelligence that exists as a longstanding secret society – of course we need to find their manufacturing plant and where the hell they’re located – or we’re dealing with nonhumans here that are interacting with Planet Earth. I actually think the latter theory is more likely, but there certainly is a clandestine human power structure. I don’t dispute that.”
How could such powerful technology exist right under our oblivious noses? Who could keep things like traveling to Mars a secret? Dolan answers by way of something he calls a “Breakaway Civilization.”
“I think that this is something that is real,” he said. “Now, my theory of it is that it originated in post-World War II society, but there’s nothing preventing such a thing from having happened earlier. The basic idea of the ‘Breakaway Civilization’ is simply that you have a secret group, a classified group of people, with access to radically advanced technology, radically advanced science, and they just don’t share it with the rest of the world. One scientific breakthrough leads to another, and that leads to another and so on. So the next thing you know, you’ve got a separate group of humanity that is far beyond the rest of the world.”
Dolan compared the situation to our own “official” world history of 200 years ago, for example, when the level of technology achieved by Europe was contrasted with, say, Central Africa.
“You’re talking about two vastly different ways understanding the world,” Dolan said. “So, really, what is the difficulty in understanding that a classified, secret, scientific community would make radical breakthroughs that they wouldn’t share? I don’t think it’s outrageous, and I do think this has happened since World War II. Now, one of the breakthroughs they’ve made is what we would call ‘antigravity technology.’ Could this have happened in the 19th century? I don’t think it’s impossible, in theory.”
Dolan confessed that he sometimes speculated privately that such a secret breakaway group has existed since ancient times. Some of history’s most puzzling mysteries, like the Great Pyramid of Giza or Macchu Picchu, don’t make a lot of sense in architectural terms in the context of human society in their given eras.
“I wonder if this was a human construct at the time,” Dolan queried, “and what human civilization are we talking about here? So I leave open the possibility that some great secret would be understood by a very small, elect group of people. They would want to hide this from the rest of the world for obvious reasons – power, and just not wanting to share.”
Was Nikola Tesla one of the hidden few who kept his scientific advances a closely guarded secret? Did he lead his clandestine group of wealthy patrons on a trip to Mars with antigravity technology that he barely understood himself? Did some off-world civilization telepathically implant space-faring technology into Tesla or the Vril group? Was our current space age jumpstarted by messages given to mediums during extraterrestrial séances?
In the absence of publicly available, irrefutable, absolute proof, one can only speculate, as Richard Dolan makes clear. It all seems a little “beyond” us mere mortals, something our minds could not conjure independently. But if the knowledge of this secret group eventually takes us to the stars, we will surely find whatever guiding force – or breakaway civilization – has summoned us to join them.

BREAK=====

The early 1900s were marred by scores of labor strikes across the country. There was no question that workers of the day often labored under deplorable conditions. They worked long hours in often unsafe factories and, in many cases, labor unions were the only relief they had from the greed of big companies who would work their employees until they literally broke under the pressure. But in some cases, labor strikes had fatal consequences – as they did that day in Brooklyn when a strikebreaker lost control of a Brighton Beach train during the evening rush hour. The horrible wreck ended with 93 people dead and many more injured.

Previously known as the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railroad, the Brighton Beach line dated back to the 1870s. It was one of several steam railroads that linked Brooklyn to the seaside resorts. By the early 1900s, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit system controlled the line, along with streetcar and elevated lines throughout the area.

During 1918, the last year of World War I, tensions escalated between Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT) and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. At least 20 men had been fired because of their membership in the union. The union responded by filing a grievance with the National War Labor Board, a federal review panel that had been created to strengthen the war effort on the home front by improving labor-management relations. In late October, the board recommended that the BRT re-hire the workers with back pay, but the board had no power of enforcement and the BRT ignored the recommendation. In fact, they even refused to meet with the union’s delegation. Finally, a strike was called started at 5:00 a.m. on Friday, November 1, 1918.

The strike crippled the rail line. Supervisors and clerks with little or no hands-on training were thrown into empty locomotives to work as motormen. Among the strike-breakers was Edward Luciano, 23, who worked under the name of Billy Lewis to avoid the anti-Italian prejudice that was prevalent at the time. He had been a dispatcher for the BRT for two years. Earlier in 1918, he had received two hours of classroom instruction to become a motorman. Just before he was assigned to a locomotive, he had spent two days riding as an observer to gain practical experience in train operations. Needless to say, this scant training fell far short of the BRT’s usual 60 hours of on-the-job training, in addition to a 90-question exam, 60 hours of apprenticeship on board trains, a physical exam and further testing and certification. After all of that, neophytes would be permitted to take empty trains on practice runs in and around the yards and terminals before finally being allowed to operate a train that was carrying passengers.

At 5:00 a.m. on November 1, Luciano began a long, eleven-and-one-half hour shift. When it ended at 4:30 p.m., he was offered a $20 bonus and the promise of a post-strike raise to pilot a rush-hour train from Kings Highway to Manhattan and then back to Brooklyn over the Brighton Beach line to Coney Island. Luciano had never ridden on the Brighton line, let alone driven a train there, but he gladly accepted. “A man has to earn a living,” he later told the New York Times.

In the aftermath of the disaster, William Brody, a BRT trainmaster, stated that Thomas Blewitt, the BRT superintendent responsible for certifying motormen, had represented Luciano as being “properly qualified.” Ironically, according to the standards set by the company in the midst of the strike, he probably was. Men with similar “qualifications” had been running trains on the line all day. Supervisors decided to take a chance with Luciano. At the yard, he was given a train with five cars attached. Each car had a steel underframe and a wooden body and roof. Four of the cars were at least 30 years old.

At 6:08 p.m., Luciano’s train arrived at the Park Row terminal, the vaulted train shed that stood at the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge. Six minutes later, Luciano began his return trip to Brighton Beach. Charles Darling, a lawyer riding in the first car, later said that the train moved with sudden starts and stops and sped around a curve at Sands Street, the first station in Brooklyn. The train then rumbled onto the Fulton Street elevated line. Walter H. Simonson, a civil engineer who was on board, recalled that the car was jammed to near standing room only.

At 6:29 p.m., Luciano departed Grand Avenue for the junction at Franklin Avenue. The switch there was incorrectly set, keeping the train on the Fulton Avenue line toward East New York, rather than turning it southward toward Brighton Beach. After some delay, Luciano managed to back the train up and route it onto the Brighton Beach line at 6:38 p.m. Two minutes later, the train left Park Place Station.

As its name indicates, Crown Heights is located atop a crest of land. Between Park Place, at the top of the Heights, and Prospect Park, the station at the foot of the hill, the track dropped 70 feet over a distance of less than a mile. After the drop came an S-shaped curve that was known as “Deadman’s Curve” even before the accident. It was a hazardous place where experienced motormen had to stay alert. By this time, Luciano was probably exhausted. He had been fortunate enough to have recently recovered from the deadly strain of influenza that targeted mainly young adults in the wake of World War I, claiming an estimated three percent of the world’s population. In addition to having been ill, he was finishing up a double shift at an extremely demanding job for which he had been inadequately trained. His conductor signaled a stop at the next station — Consumer’s Park (now Botanic Garden) — but Luciano rushed through without stopping. Passenger Walter Simonson felt the train accelerate, as if to make up for lost time. The next stop was Prospect Park, on the other side of Flatbush Avenue.

Luciano found it simple to accelerate the train but not so easy to stop it. Braking a subway train safely and smoothly – and aligning it with the station platform so passengers can safely board and depart – was a difficult task that could only be achieved with experience. The brakes operated with compressed air. By maximizing air pressure in the train’s main brake line, a motorman had to release the brakes. In other words, he permitted the air to push the brake shoes from the wheels so the train could move. When he wanted to slow the train, he applied the brakes by reducing air pressure, permitting the brake shoes to make contact with the wheels. Air brakes took time to apply and to take effect, which meant that trains often traveled hundreds of feet before stopping. A motorman who knew from training and experience how his train would respond to a particular uphill or downhill grade could gauge when to begin braking. Luciano had no such experience. He had never run a train on the Brighton Beach line — or any other line — before that morning.

At the bottom of the hill, the tracks curved sharply, entering a short tunnel beneath the intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Malbone Street. The posted speed limit for the curve was six miles per hour. Luciano later stated that he had been traveling at 30 miles per hour. After the crash, the New York Times quoted a naval officer who estimated the train’s speed at 70 miles per hour when it left the track. Many of the surviving passengers later admitted to feeling frightened as Luciano picked up the pace to try and make up for lost time.

As Luciano approached the curve, he claimed that the air brakes failed, after which he applied the emergency brakes and threw the train into reverse. Investigators from the New York Public Service Commission and the BRT found after examining the wreckage that the brakes had not failed, the emergency brakes had never been applied and the motors were never reversed. No one could explain what Luciano had been doing in those final seconds but it was obvious that he was totally unprepared for the challenges that faced him that day.

It was 6:42 p.m. when the train reached Malbone Street and roared into the curve, the first car derailed, ripping up the third rail in a burst of blue sparks. The car left the rails a few feet in front of the opening to the tunnel and rammed one end of a concrete partition that separated the north and southbound tracks. It was thrown at right angles across the roadbed, its front and rear corners crashing into the tunnel wall. The windows of the car shattered, spraying glass at the screaming passengers. Packed together in the flimsy wooden box, the passengers were crushed and cut to pieces.

The two following cars had swung wider. One of them struck the edge of the tunnel’s mouth and ripped along its inner wall, where steel girders that supported the tunnel roof and Flatbush Avenue above protruded from the concrete surface. The girders tore into the car’s roof and left side and it splintered and shattered into bits and pieces of wood, steel and flesh. Great gashes were cut into the side of the car, which was still traveling at high speed, mowing down the passengers who were standing, and decapitating some of them.

The left sides of both the second and third cars were stripped away. Scores of men, women and children were flung against the girders and the concrete wall, where they were either killed instantly or crushed under the wheels after falling onto the tracks. Some of those remaining inside the car were killed inside when they fell onto the twisted iron of the seats, broken timbers, and iron beams that projected through the shattered bottom of the car. People standing on the platforms were nearly all killed instantly. One dead man was found impaled on a broken metal rod that had run underneath the car and had snapped, shooting upward in the crash.

With an agonizing shriek of metal, the train finally came to a stop. Only 10 seconds had passed – it was still 6:42 p.m.

The last two cars had not derailed and most of the passengers riding in them escaped without serious injury. However, nearly all of them had been cut by flying glass or were bruised from being thrown from their seats. They were packed so tightly in the two rear cars that the force of the wreck was not really felt. Many women on board became hysterical when they learned what had happened in the front cars. The passengers were in complete darkness since the derailing cars had torn out the power lines in the tunnel. They could see nothing, but could hear the screams of the dying and injured in the blackness ahead. Would-be rescuers who tried to reach the forward cars found their way cut off by masses of broken wood and twisted steel. There was no way to get to the survivors who were pinned to their seats or crushed in the ruined cars.

Firemen who took part in the rescue work said that the second and third cars had fallen over on their sides and the passengers lay heaped together, some dead and some dying, some slightly injured and some unhurt, but all tightly gripped by the wreckage. Bodies were smothered to death found with only slight marks of injuries.

The last cars had survived the disaster and the locomotive was also largely intact. Attorney Charles Darling watched as Edward Luciano emerged unscathed from the cab. The lawyer asked him what had happened. “I don’t know,” Luciano reportedly replied. “I lost control of the damn thing, that’s all.” Then he stepped from the car and walked up the track to Prospect Park station. A newsboy waiting for a train who had heard the crash saw a man – presumably Luciano — walk out of the tunnel and wander away. Luciano arrived home later that evening, having taken a trolley.

Because of the position of the wreck and the nature of the accident, there was a delay in spreading the alarm. Police and firefighters were not notified for nearly 20 minutes. The first rescuers to arrive on the scene found the tunnel jammed with debris “so tightly…that no crevice or opening was left,” reported the New York Times. With lanterns in hand, they began removing wreckage one piece at a time. Police officers and firefighters set about removing the wounded from the tangle of steel, glass and shattered wood, “which stuck out like bayonets in all directions, some of them having already pierced those in the cars,” the Times reported. Those who could walk staggered from the tunnel. Others had to be carried out. Cradles of burlap were made for the recovered bodies, which were hoisted by the rescuers to the street and laid out in rows before being taken to the morgue.

As word about the accident spread throughout Brooklyn, there was little detail about when or where it had happened. Those waiting for loved ones traveling home during rush hour began to panic. When it was finally realized where the tragedy had taken place, a crowd began to gather. Most were there to try and learn the fate of friends and loved ones, but ghoulish curiosity-seekers also swelled the ranks of onlookers. As the bodies of the dead were lifted out of the tunnel, reserves from six police precincts were sent to keep order. Ambulances arrived from every hospital in Brooklyn and scores of doctors and nurses were sent to the scene.

As darkness fell on the city, conditions in the tunnel grew even blacker. Automobiles were commandeered and their headlights were pointed at the wreckage. The Brooklyn Gas Company and the Brooklyn Edison Company sent gangs of men with searchlights to illuminate the site. Down in the tunnel, surgeons were working by lantern light, side by side with priests administering last rites.

Tens of thousands of people flocked to the police stations and to the morgue where the bodies were taken. The large numbers of those searching for missing relatives made identifying the dead a slow process. Telephone service in Brooklyn became overburdened as frantic calls were made to try and track down loved ones who usually traveled on the BRT line and had not yet arrived home. The wreckage stopped all Brighton Beach traffic, holding up thousands of passengers on the trains that followed. Many of those delayed had to walk long distances to overcrowded streetcars. Commuters arrived home more than two hours late, usually to empty homes. In many cases, their families had become alarmed and had gone to the site of the wreck in search of news, delaying their reunions until late in the evening.

In the early morning hours of November 2, Edward Luciano was arrested at his home on 33rd Street in Brooklyn. He was taken to the Snyder Street police station, where he was questioned by the district attorney, the police commissioner and the mayor. The young man quickly broke down when faced with such intimidating interrogators and blurted out a nervous story that turned out to be largely untrue. New York City Mayor John Hylan, himself a former railroad man, indicated to reporters that he believed Luciano had been criminally negligent. He told the press, “This man confessed that he had never run a train on the Brighton Beach line before. He also admitted that when running around that curve, he was making a speed of thirty miles an hour.”

Ironically, the mayor had been fired from his position as a locomotive engineer for taking a curve too fast and nearly hitting a supervisor who was crossing the tracks. He protested his dismissal, but to no avail. The experience left him with a bitter hatred of private rail systems and their owners.

When it was pointed out that a sign on the curve warned motormen to go no faster than six miles per hour, Luciano shrugged and had no reply. When he was asked why he had taken a job for which he was unfitted, he answered, “A man has to earn a living.” He told the men that he had no intention of running away from the crash. He said he remembered nothing until he found himself at home after the accident.

He did not know how he got out of the wreck, or how he got home. He said that he had a vague recollection of having boarded a trolley car, but could not remember what car it was. Detectives stated that Luciano was “as pale as death” when they reached his home and he appeared to be on the verge of collapse. His replies to questions about the details of the accident turned out to be lies: The brakes had not failed, the emergency brakes had never been applied and the motors were never reversed.

His wife pled his case to the newspapers. “Three weeks ago, my husband had an attack of influenza. The next Friday, our baby died… now this terrible accident,” she wept. But the general public had little sympathy for Luciano, or for his bosses who operated the rail line.

Luciano and five officials from the BRT were indicted for manslaughter after the accident. Before the trial began, the BRT’s lawyers obtained a change of venue from Brooklyn to Nassau County. Mysteriously, although the prosecution knew that Luciano had perjured himself by lying when he said that he had applied the brakes, that part of his statement was never used as evidence. All cases ended in hung juries, acquittals and dismissals. No one, including Luciano or the men who put him into his deadly position at the train controls, was ever held responsible for the deadly disaster.

The controversy over the disaster raged for months, culminating in a charge by Public Service Commissioner Travis Whitney that Mayor Hylan was responsible for the deaths in the tunnel. He said that it was the mayor’s fault that the decrepit wooden cars – which were pulverized in the wreck while the steel cars came through unscathed – were still being used. Hylan, Whitney insisted, had done nothing for 10 months with an agreement awaiting his signature that would compel the line to use only steel cars. His charges were dismissed as nothing more than political posturing and eventually, the finger-pointing faded from the headlines.

In December, just a month after the accident, the Brooklyn Rapid Transit line went into receivership. This delayed payment of any claims against the line for over three years. Eventually, the company paid out damages totaling $1.6 million. The largest payout was $40,000, which went to the widow of George W. Holmes, the only railroad worker to die in the disaster. In 1923, the BRT was reorganized as the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation. It, too, went into receivership and was dissolved on November 1, 1941, the twenty-third anniversary of the accident.

After Luciano was acquitted in 1919, he moved and went into the real estate business. He faded from history and what happened to him after that is unknown.