JUSTICE STORY: How a mobster’s moll became target of cops and killers amid nasty NYC gang war

It was an idyllic domestic scene straight out of a Hollywood talkie: A pretty young wife kisses her dapper, handsome husband goodbye at the door of their suburban bungalow on a pleasant summer day, a smile spreading across her face as he rushes down the driveway to join his carpool colleagues waiting in an idling sedan.

She hears his buddies ribbing her hubby for making them late for work, then sees him wink at her through the backseat window. She watches as the Packard pulls away and rumbles down the quiet street.

But as she turns to go inside, her smile fades as a sudden feeling of dread overcomes her.

Somehow, she senses that was to be their final kiss, and her last loving look at the only man who was ever really good to her.

When he didn’t come home that night, Anna Urbas knew he was gone forever — and so were the high times that came with being a gangster’s moll.

On the morning of Aug. 10, 1929, cops in Newark, N.J., found the charred body of a man in the backseat of a Packard set ablaze at a city dump. The bullet hole in the skull was a dead giveaway it was a mob hit.

It would take several months for police to officially ID the crisped cadaver as Eugene Moran, a bootlegger, button man and former $1,000-a-week bodyguard for infamous gambler Arnold Rothstein, the late crime kingpin widely believed to have fixed the 1919 World Series.

But cops, criminals, tabloid readers and anyone else who’d been following the exploits of New York’s larger-than-life underworld figures during the last gasps of the Roaring Twenties easily surmised the dead man was the missing Moran.

He was obviously the latest victim in an escalating feud between Rothstein’s loyal minions and Jack “Legs” Diamond, the rakish racketeer whose talent for dodging death — he’d survived several shootings — was only exceeded by his knack for making headlines.

The falling out between Diamond and his former mentor Rothstein had captivated the public for months. The day after someone fatally shot Rothstein in November 1928, two goons sprayed machine gun fire at Diamond’s kid brother, Eddie, who lived and told Legs he recognized one of the Tommy gun-brandishing hit men: Eugene Moran.

Urbas didn’t care a whit about the bad blood that had boiled over between the rival gangs. She only knew that with her lover gone, she was an easy target. Word was getting out fast that the terrified 24-year-old had already told too many people the names of the four dirty double-crossers who had taken Moran for a ride.

Days after Moran was killed, Urbas took a permanent powder, leaving behind the comfy cottage in rural Brielle, N.J., she happily shared with her beau with no trace of where she’d gone.

In the months that neither friend nor foe saw hide nor hair of Urbas, the body count in the gangland tiff that claimed her boyfriend started to rise.

In September 1929, one of Moran’s purported killers was found shot to death in a car on 107th St. and Fifth Ave. Two days later, another of his betrayers was shot multiple times on a Manhattan street but lived.

Two months later, a third man turned up dead under the elevated tracks at Broadway and W. 125th St. with an ear lopped off and knife slashes all over his badly burned body. The torture apparently ended when his killers pumped a bullet into him.

Several weeks later, Jersey cops used dental records to officially identify the barbecued body as Eugene Moran — setting off what the Daily News called “the greatest woman hunt in the history of New York.”

Wherever she was hiding, Urbas learned it wasn’t only New York detectives who were now looking for Moran’s mistress in the hopes of getting her to spill on what she knew about his murder and the subsequent death toll that had left a bloody trail of bullet-riddled bodies on city streets.

Diamond and his torpedoes were hoping to find her first and clam her up for good.

Her newfound notoriety as a gangster’s girlfriend on the lam belied her small-town West Virginia roots as the daughter of a coal miner and housewife who’d emigrated from Slovakia.

Anna was the bright light of the family, a good-natured child who loved to sing and dance and harbored big dreams of becoming a Broadway star.

By 16, she had grown into a lovely, if headstrong young woman and told her parents she was headed to Manhattan to live with an older sister while she pursued fame and fortune.

She instead ended up acquiring a healthy appetite for rich men, cheap hooch and the illicit good times of the Prohibition era. In 1925, Urbas became smitten with an older man who was fresh off a two-year stint at Sing Sing for taking part in a jewel heist — Moran, who would soon cast his lot with Rothstein.

The New York detectives tracking Urbas’ whereabouts were getting close. Urbas, they discovered, had been living with an Astoria taxi driver for much of the time she was lying low. But he swore he hadn’t seen her since late March, when she left his apartment and never came back.

On May 29, 1930, nearly 10 months after she went into hiding, police finally found Urbas.

But the bad guys had found her first.

Urbas was dragged out of the Harlem River at E. 159th St., her bloated body ravaged from two months in the dark, dirty water.

Around her neck was a thick wire tied to an iron weight. The same type of wire was used to bind her wrists and ankles. The men who wanted to keep her quiet had tracked her to a Bronx apartment before throwing her into the river, alive and screaming.

The Broadway dreamer had finally found the fame she was seeking, though it came as a high-profile victim of an infamous mob war.

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