Most of the killers were Italian and Jewish gangsters from the gangs of the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brownsville, East New York, and Ocean Hill. In addition to carrying out crime in New York City and acting as enforcers for New York Jewish mobster Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, they accepted murder contracts from mob bosses all around the United States. In the book "The Valachi Papers" (1969) by Peter Maas, Mafia turncoat Joe Valachi is described as insisting that Murder, Inc. did not commit crimes for the Italian-American Mafia; but this is contradicted by other sources, and by the fact that Albert Anastasia was head of an Italian-American Mafia crime family.