Evelyn Mittelman was the York version of gangland’s so called “Kiss of death girl”……. Chicago had its own a Kiss of death girl and there were several others in mob lore.

Mittelman was from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. At the age of 16, she was already a local legend as a gangster’s girl.

Evelyn fled Brooklyn for Los Angeles and started dating a

guy named Hymie Miller. One night they went to a dance and

Evelyn started flirting with another man and Hy chastised her on the dance floor. The man she had been flirting with started defending Evelyn, words were exchanged, and the man pulled out a gun and killed Hy.

She returned to Brooklyn a few years later on the arm of

Robert Feurer. At yet another dance, Sol Goldstein, who owned the biggest fish wholesaler business in the city, spotted Evelyn and started to move on her which made Robert Feurer furious. He shouted at Evelyn on the dance floor, Goldstein came to her rescue, and Feurer ended up dead on the dance floor.

A while later at another dance, Goldstein and Evelyn were on the floor when Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss,

the top killer for Murder Incorporated, spotted Evelyn. He walked over to Goldstein and said that he considered Evelyn to be his new girlfriend.

Goldstein didn’t like it and challenged the mentally unbalanced Strauss to take the fight to a nearby poolroom. Strauss accepted the challenge, went to the pool room and nearly beat Goldstein to death with a pool stick.

A few years later Goldstein disappeared while on his honeymoon in the Catskills, drowned by Murder Inc.

The murder was ordered by Joe “Socks” Lanza, mob boss on the Manhattan docks and part owned in the

Fulton Fish Market.

Lanza had been indicted by a Federal Grand Jury for the “monopolistic control of fish sent to New York City from Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Canada”

It troubled Lanza that Goldstein knew enough information about Lanza’s waterfront rackets to put Lanza away for life.

Lanza contacted Louis Capone, another Murder Incorporated killer, and told him he wanted Goldstein dead.

At approximately 9 p.m. on August 3, 1936, Goldstein received a phone call in the honeymoon cottage he was sharing with wife, Helen. After the call Goldstein told his wife that he had to see someone in the lobby and would be right back.

From later testimony it was learned that Goldstein got in a car filled with Murder Inc killers and was immediately knocked out with a hammer. His dead body was dumped at a lakeside cottage where Pittsburgh Phil” killed him, he was tied with a rope, wrapped in a blanket, driven to the

lake’s shore, tossed in a rowboat, taken out to the

deepest part of the lake and dropped into the water.

In 1940, Strauss was arrested on information given to the feds by Murder Inc. member Abe “Kid Twist” Reles. District Attorney Burton Turkus had enough evidence to implicate Strauss in at least six murders, but the most solid case Turkus had on Strauss was the murder of a guy named George Ruddick, a police informant.

While Strauss was in jail, he received repeated visits by a woman described by Turkus as “a striking brunette,” who signed herself in as Strauss’ sister “Eve.”

On her next visit, the police picked her up and found out that “Eve” was Evelyn Mittelman. When she was pulled in for questioning she was wearing three diamond rings and a diamond bracelet.

“Pep (Strauss) gave them to me,” Evelyn told Turkus “And I have several more trinkets like this in a bank vault.”

Turkus checked the bank vault she named and found tens of thousands of dollars in jewelry in the safety deposit box. Almost all of it was loot from a $100,000 jewelry robbery in at a Florida resort

Turkus held Evelyn as a material witness, with bail set at $50,000.

No one came forward to put the bail money up and she remained in jail for six weeks. Evelyn realized that the only way she could save herself was to convince Strauss to become an informant. Evelyn asked Turkus for permission to speak to Strauss to try to convince him to cooperate., Strauss agreed on the condition that, as h said, “I got to walk out clean.”

Turkus had Strauss connected to between 50 to 100 murders and rejected the terms.

During Strauss’ trial, he acted like a lunatic. He refused to shave and came into court with a long, scraggly beard and at one point chewed on his lawyer’s briefcase straps. None of that worked. He was executed on June 12, 1941. His last visitor was Evelyn Mittelman.