Arthur Flegenheimer never had it easy. He was born at the turn of
the 20th century to newly immigrated German-Jewish parents
who had just gotten married in Manhattan. By the age of ten, his
father had abandoned the family, an event that left an emotional scar
that bothered him until the end of his short and brutal life. As he
rose in the ranks of the criminal underworld, he had earned the
nickname Dutch Schultz, the name he will always be remembered by.
During his teenage years, Dutch Schultz learned to fight in the
streets of New York City. He caught on to the arts of robbing and
stealing. He got arrested during a burglary attempt and sent to
prison. He was a troublesome prisoner who had a tough time taking
orders. After he escaped, he got recaptured and given an extended
sentence in a workhouse upstate.
By the time he got out, Prohibition was in full swing. Dutch
Schultz worked as a bouncer in a speakeasy, helped to smuggle liquor
from Canada across the Canadian border, and rode with guns in his
hands on the passenger side of trucks transporting illegal swill from
clandestine distilleries to secretive bars; transport trucks often
got hijacked by rival gangs who wanted to steal liquor and Dutch was
prepared to shoot to protect the cargo.
This is how he got his mob name. Schultz Trucking employed him
to work as security and, being of German descent, the lower class
gangsters dubbed him “Dutch”, a corruption of the word “Deutsch”
which apparently was too difficult for the uneducated thugs to
pronounce. He kept the name and took up a side-gig as a bouncer in a
drinking den owned by Joey Noe. When a small-time dealer refused to
buy their homebrewed beer, Dutch Schultz and Joey Noe kidnapped him,
hung him in a basement by his thumbs on a meat hook, and rubbed a rag
saturated in syphilitic pus in eyes. They let the guy go but he soon
went blind and his gang never refused to buy their beer again.
When the Mafia wars broke out in the 1930s, Joey Noe got shot.
Dutch Schultz became the sole leader of the gang but his top soldier,
Vincent Coll, demanded that he take Joey Noe’s place as a boss,
equal in stature. Dutch didn’t like that idea so Vincent Coll split
and formed his own squad; the plan was to assassinate Dutch Schultz
and take over the old gang. But Schultz was wise to his scheme and
sent a team of machine-gunners to riddle his body with bullets while
making a call in a phone booth inside a drug store.
Prohibition ended. Dutch Schultz took to numbers running and
extortion to make up for the loss in profits from bootlegging. Many
Manhattan restaurant owners ended up with broken bones after refusing
to pay protection money. A stink bomb set off during a dinner rush or
a little waiter’s union strike helped him collect donations with
businessmen who were a little stingy when it comes to making
charitable donations to the mob. When Dutch Schultz realized that one
of his henchmen named Julie Martin was skimming a little cream from
the top of his milk, he took the crook to a private party in a hotel
with two of his best buddies. In a drunken rage, Dutch Schultz shot
Martin in the head, used a knife to carve the heart out of the
corpse, and dumped the body in a snowbank. He later apologized to his
two friends because they had to see him lose his temper.
The pigs were onto Dutch Schultz; unable to effectively link him
to any crimes, the federal attorney Thomas Dewey took him to court on
charges of tax evasion. The courts decided that Schultz could never
get a fair trial if held in New York City so they rescheduled it in
the town of Malone, New York. When Dutch Schultz arrived he began
making friends, spending lots of money, and donating considerable
sums to charity. He became the best of the good guys around town and
the local jury, enamored with the nice man who was so much fun to be
around, found him innocent. New York’s Mayor La Guardia did not
like the verdict and permanently banned Schultz from Manhattan. He
took up residence in The Bronx.
Dutch Schultz and Thomas Dewey were not done with each other
yet.
During his sojourn in Malone, Dutch’s gang was being run by Bo
Weinberg. But his legal defense fund was costing the crew a lot of
money. Weinberg secretly met with Lucky Luciano and together they
divided up all the operations between them and took control over the
cash flow. When Dutch Schultz learned about this, he met with Luciano
but they decided to keep the peace and Dutch’s went down a notch in
status. Bo Weinberg disappeared.
By this time The Syndicate and Murder Inc. were well-established
as the rulers of the organized crime underworld. The Five Families
were working together and La Cosa Nostra was on its way up. Thomas
Dewey, their mortal enemy and greatest existential threat, began
laying plans for increased surveillance in an operation to prosecute
and take down the mob. Dutch Schultz approached The Syndicate and
proposed a scheme to rub Dewey out. At first a couple other members
liked the idea but Lucky Luciano brought a counter-argument to the
floor. The murder of the federal attorney would most likely result in
increased scrutiny of their operations so the council voted not to
engage in the plot.
Dutch Schultz went away frustrated. In secret he laid plans to
carry the job out himself. He sent men to shadow Dewey as he left his
apartment building every morning. The punctual prosecutor went to
work at the same time every day. The hired hit men were preparing to
move in for the kill. Then Lucky Luciano learned Dutch Schultz had
taken the gangster law into his own hands. Luciano had had enough.
Dutch Schulz was the loosest cannon in a cartel of loose canons and
something had to be done.
In October of 1935, Dutch Schultz was having a meeting with
three colleagues in the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey. A
car pulled up in front. The getaway driver waited while two wise guys
from Murder Inc., Charles Workman and Mendy Weiss, entered through
the front door. The bartender, familiar with their faces, ducked down
behind the bar. Workman walked towards the dining room at the back
and Weiss went to the restroom to take a leak. A man stood at the
sink, washing his hands. Weiss shot him in the side, took a piss,
then walked out. The two entered the dining area which was empty
except for three men who were known associates of Dutch Schultz. Otto
Berman took bullets first. A slug went through Abe Landau’s neck.
Lulu Rosenkranz was shot repeatedly at point blank range. Berman,
Landau and Rosenkranz spent their last living hours shooting at the
two assassins as they ran away.
While Mendy Weiss ran out the door, Workman, in a state of
confusion, wondered where Dutch Schultz was. He looked in the
bathroom and saw the body lying all bloody on the floor. Schultz was the man Mendy Weiss had shot when the pair first entered the establishment. Workman stopped
to relieve Dutch Schultz of his wallet. Meanwhile, Mendy Weiss
decided that Workman was taking too long and told the getaway driver
to go, leaving his partner behind. Workman re-entered the bar and
Landau shot him. Dutch Schultz, who actually was not dead, crawled
out of the bathroom and demanded someone call an ambulance.
Rosenkranz crawled to the bartender, still cowering behind the bar,
asked for a shot of whiskey and gave him five nickels and asked for a
quarter which he then gave to Schultz who called for help.
The ambulance came and took Dutch Schultz away. Drifting in and
out of lucidity, Schultz took $3000 out of his pocket and gave it to
the medics because he knew he wouldn’t need it anymore. They had no
pain killers so they fetched a bottle of brandy from the bar and told
him to drink every time it started to hurt.
As Schultz lay dying in bed, his wife and the police listened to
him ramble incoherently, trying to get information about who the
hitmen were. He whispered about lambs and little girls, flowers and
fields and forests while a scribe tried to write down everything he
said. The fragmented sentenced sounded like disharmonious verses of
French Symbolist poetry. Some believed the surrealistic words were
directions to where his money was hidden. Others though he was
speaking in code. Conspiracy theorists still think he was relaying a
message meant to be heard only by some secret society.
A Catholic priest came to the ward to deliver the extreme
unction. Dutch Schultz had earlier received baptismal rites because
he wanted to get on Lucky Luciano’s good side. Despite being buried
in a Catholic cemetery, his dead body was draped with a talit.
Besides his wife, two other women came to claim an inheritance.
Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer, amongst all his other
crimes, was a bigamist as well. None of his three wives received any
money though. He had sealed his fortunes in a safe and buried them in
a secret location. Treasure hunters to this day are still searching
the Catskill Mountains for his loot which has never been found.
Dutch Schultz was the man The Syndicate murdered to save the
life of Thomas Dewey, the prosecutor who biggest ambition was to
watch them all fry in the electric chair.
Reference
Turkus,
Burtun B. and Feder, Sid. Murder
Inc.: The Story Of the Syndicate. Da
Capo Press, New York: 2003
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