It is an old family story: Great Grandfather Barnett Baff, was murdered. He had been in the kosher poultry business and refused to go along with a price fixing scheme. His business rivals had sent a bomb to his home, but it did not go off. He had been offered police protection, but had refused it. His business rivals hired gangsters to kill him. One evening, on his way home from work, he had been ambushed and murdered. True or false? True, Barnett had been murdered, but the entire story is far more complex and protracted than anyone knew. It is a story of truth stranger than fiction that has never before been fully told. It is a story of gangsters and businessmen, though it may be hard to tell the difference, immigrants, citizens, government, New York City, wholesale and retail, brownstones, gravestones and most definitely murder. The people lived, the places existed and the surprising events really happened. Here is history, biography and true crime, in New York City, as the nineteenth century waned and the twentieth century began.