Frank "The Dasher" Abbandando by Ace Preston 1942

Frank Abbandando known as "The Dasher", was part of Murder, Inc. not to be confused with Otto "Abbadabba" Berman Biederman. 

One of twelve children of Lorenzo Abbondondola and Rosaria Famighetti. 

As a teenager, Abbandando extorted money from shop owners by threatening to torch their shops. Abbandando joined a street gang in the Ocean Hill Brooklyn, becoming a lieutenant for Harry "Happy" Maione, organizing gambling, loan sharking, and extortion rackets for the gang as well as committing murders. 

In 1928, Abbandando was convicted of beating a New York City police officer and was sent to reform school in Elmira, New York, where he demonstrated skill with a baseball bat and received the nickname "The Dasher". 

He was a connoisseur of fine clothes and fancy cars, reportedly also a sexual predator, driving around Brownsville and Ocean Hill, looking for young women to rape. At his later murder trial, the prosecutor said that Abbandando had all but admitted one rape, replying, "Well, that one doesn't count really—I married the girl later." Most of his victims would be stabbed in the chest with ice picks like chopped liver. 

In the early 1930s, the Cosa Nostra crime families in New York, known as the Five Families, began using street gangs to commit their murders. Having recently settled the vicious Castellammarese War and reorganized into a new structure, the families desperately wanted to keep themselves out of public attention. By using Jewish contract killers, the families were better protected from public and law enforcement scrutiny. The gang leader that the mafiosi used the most was Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, the young Jewish leader of the "Gorilla Boys" gang. 

As the Cosa Nostra business increased, Buchalter's small informal network of killers turned into a group of 250 criminals who were involved in narcotics smuggling, labor racketeering, and other rackets. Buchalter called his group "The Combination", but the press labeled it "Murder, Inc." 

Unlike the Five Families, which required Sicilian or Southern Italian ancestry for membership, Murder Inc. included Jews, Italians, and members of other ethnic groups. The Dasher was reputed to have killed thirty people, mostly in Brooklyn, usually receiving about $500 for a murder. 

In September 1931, Abbandando helped Buchalter and gang member Abe Reles eliminate The Shapiro Gang, rivals from the Lower East Side of Manhattan who were trying to take over some of the men's rackets. In 1937, Abbandando assisted in the murder of George Rudnick, a loan shark in Brooklyn. Reles had ordered Rudnick's murder because he had received information that Rudnick was a police informant. Using an ice pick and a meat cleaver, Abbandando and several other gang members strangled Rudnick, stabbed him 63 times, and crushed his head inside a garage can. 

In February 1939, Abbandando and others killed mobster Felice Esposito in a contract killing. The Cosa Nostra wanted Esposito dead because he testified for the prosecution in a mob murder trial 17 years earlier. 

In May 1940, based on information from Reles, Abbandando was indicted for the 1937 Rudnik murder. At one point during the trial, while Abbandando was on the witness stand, he whispered a threat into the judge's ear. 

Throughout the trial, Abbandando was confident that his allies would succeed in fixing the verdict. To his surprise, Abbandando was convicted of murder. The verdict was overturned on appeal and Abbandando went on trial a second time in 1941. 

On April 3, 1941, Abbandando was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to death. 

 On February 19, 1942, Frank Abbandando was executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. After Abbandando's conviction, six other members of Murder, Inc., including Buchalter and Maione, were also convicted of murder and executed based on Reles' testimony. 

On 11/12/41, while under police protection, and no longer needed, Reles fell out a hotel window in Coney Island after a $100,000 reward was offered for his death. With Buchalter's death, and the end of the National Crime Syndicate, the italians, under Albert Anastasia, now a made man, of the newly formed Cosa Nostra took over "Murder, Inc." 

As a reaction to government informants in Murder, Inc., the New York crime families started using their own members and associates, who were more easily controlled, to commit murders. Murder, Inc. soon faded away. 

On his tombstone, the family name is inscribed as "Abbundando".