The Strange Death of Dutch Schultz

     Arthur Flegenheimer never had it easy. He was born at the turn of the 20^th 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

The Syndicate and Murder Inc.: Organized Crime and the Long Arm Of the Unlawful

     Organized crime has always been a part of American society. Over time, criminal gangs and mafias became more secretive, more regimented, and more powerful. By the 1920s, gangs began teaming up with one another and this process coalesced in the 1930s with the foundation of the National Crime Syndicate and their henchmen Murder Inc.

     As immigrant groups came to America in search of a better life, the nativist-minded citizens were openly hostile to them and often refused to give them work. A small number of those immigrant groups turned to crime as a fast and easy way to make money and progress on the social ladder. The Irish, the Chinese, and the Russians all had their own little mafias. Over time, the crooks, thugs, and extortionists realized they had plenty to gain from protecting each other in urban tribal bands. Criminal gangs grew to protect themselves from the police and each other. One of the ethnic groups knowing for breeding criminal gangs was the Jewish people but in terms of notoriety and fame, the Italians, particularly southern Italians and Sicilians, far outshone all the others. Those Sicilians were called the Mafia and the term has since been used to describe any group of disreputable people ever since.

     The Mafia worked primarily out of New York City and the surrounding areas, though their shadowy presence was known to be all over America. By the 1920s, several families of the Mafia were doing business and becoming a more potent social force. That is when the Jewish gangsters Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel formed their own mob and took on the “Moustache Petes”, the old guard of organized crime bosses so-called because of the long, drooping moustaches many of them wore. The Castellamarese War had begun. The bosses were all gunned down and their gangs taken over by the Young Turks as they were called. Lansky and Siegel next pitched the idea for a gangster oriented corporation to mob bosses all across the country and the National Crime Syndicate was born. Often referred to as The Syndicate, other prominent bosses like Lucky Luciano and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter joined. Unlike the Mafia who only worked with Sicilians, The Syndicate was more a politically correct, multi-ethnic operation and a transnational cartel. The crime families would no longer fight each other but instead combined their lurid talents and skills to fight the police, the law, and the government.

     The Syndicate acted as the governing council of the organized crime underworld. They needed a team of soldiers to carry out their orders while they called the shots and sat back to collect their money. Lucky Luciano put together Murder Inc. for that purpose.

     Based out of a dismal little candy shop in Brooklyn, owned by Rosie “Midnight Rose” Gold, Murder Inc. were an elite, street-level squad of hitmen who carried out orders passed down to them from their superiors. Abe “Kid Twist” Reles gave commands. The suave and fashionable Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss had as much of a passion for expensive clothes as he did for homicide; he became the most prolific killer with a possible 500 corpses to his credit. Murder Inc. got involved in all manners of crime, being proficient at gambling, drug trafficking, bootlegging, prostitution, extortion, and labor union racketeering. Most significantly though, their specialty was murder. The professional thugs were paid a monthly salary and then given a fee for each contract to kill. The victims were mostly men who had stepped on the Syndicate’s toes or posed an existential threat to their organization.

     The most famous of Murder Inc.’s hits was the killing of Syndicate executive Dutch Schultz. The U.S. attorney Thomas Dewey began paying close attention to the Syndicate and had begun preparations for taking them down. Dutch Schultz proposed to the Syndicate that they assassinate the lawyer to end the investigations. But they unanimously decided not to carry out the plan out of fear that the hit would only bring closer legal scrutiny to their conspiracies. Schultz, however, decided to act on his own. He hired some street-level criminals for the surveillance of Dewey’s habits. The bosses learned of the plot to kill Dewey so they cornered Dutch Schultz in the bathroom of the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey. When the police arrived, Schultz and three of his men were lying on the floor in expanding pools of blood.

     While Murder Inc. were responsible for a long list of crimes, some were more eccentric than others. One night in 1939, Puggy Feinstein was taken for a ride by Kid Twist Reles, Buggsy Goldetsin, and Pittsburgh Phil. Feinstein had been running a gambling operation and the Syndicate boss Vincent “The Executioner” Mangano had put the squeeze on him, demanding a 21 percent cut of the profits or else. Puggy Feinstein refused so Albert Anastasia contacted Kid Twist Reles and commanded him to rub Feinstein out. On the evening of the hit, the four men arrived at Kid Twist’s mother-in-law’s house. As she prepared for bed, he asked her for a clothesline and an ice pick. He told her to sleep well as she entered her bedroom and closed the door. Kid Twist went into the living room, turned up the radio to hide any incriminating noises and had Goldestein and Pittsburgh Phil bring the victim in. They proceeded to strangle him with the clothesline while Pittsburgh Phil poked holes all over his body with the ice pick. They cleaned up the mess, ate a snack, then put the dead body in the trunk of the car. They took Feinstein’s corpse to an empty lot and cremated it. During the struggle, Feinstein had bitten Goldstein’s arm. The teeth marks were used as corroborating evidence during the trial.

     Earlier in 1937, a more typical hit job happened when the gangster Walter Sage was taken care of forever. Murder Inc. members Jacob Drucker and Irving Cohen picked up Sage and told him they were taking him out for some fun in the resorts of the Catskills. Sage was not aware that they were being tailed by another car with Abraham Levine and Pittsburgh Phil. They pulled off onto a forest road and forced Sage into the front seat of the car that pulled up behind. Sage, knowing he was in trouble, tried to grab the steering wheel so Drucker took out his ice pick and tried to stab him but the ice pick went into Cohen’s arm instead. The car crashed into a tree, so the four men forced Sage to march down the road to Swan Lake. They used ice picks to poke him so full of holes that he resembled a wedge of Swiss cheese in tomato sauce. Then they tied his body to the frame of a slot machine which they threw into the water. Whether the slot machine was meant to be symbolic or functional was irrelevant; the body floated to the surface soon after. Meanwhile Cohen, thinking Drucker’s jab in the arm with the ice pick was deliberate feared he was about to be the next to die due to a recent dispute with a Syndicate boss, ran off and disappeared. Gangsters later spotted him on the movie screen; Irving Cohen had escaped to Hollywood and got a job doing bit parts in the movies and otherwise living a tame life. They thought it was funny seeing him wearing a police uniform, cast in the role of a cop with one line in a crime film.

     But fortune is a whore that loves you one minute and leaves you tne next. After some petty disputes with a Syndicate boss, Kid Twist Reles realized he had seen a few too many crimes for his own good. There might have been those who thought of him as a liability to the cartel, rather than an asset. Kid Twist began to fear for his life. He decided to turn state’s evidence and handed himself over to the police. In the ensuing trials, he would act as a corroborating witness to murder. The trials lasted for a couple years and Kid Twist, along with a few others, took the stand to testify in a last ditch attempt to survive into middle age. A few colorful moments took place. At one point Harry “Happy” Maione lost his Italian temper and threw a glass of water at Kid Twist’s head; while raving with fury, the police dragged Maione out of the courtroom and he had to spend the rest of the trial restrained in a cell. Pittsburgh Phil pleaded insanity and tried to act crazy to stay out of trouble. When called to the witness stand he spoke gibberish and tried to eat a briefcase handle when he returned to his seat. The jury did not buy his plea, especially because his insanity had a strange way of disappearing any time he was not in court. At the end of it all, members from all ranks of the Syndicate and Murder Inc. hierarchy were convicted of racketeering related crimes. The majority of them were sent to live in Sing Sing prison until their date of execution when they were fried like eggs sunny-side-up in the electric chair.

     Kid Twist Reles got to live for a short time longer. In 1941, police were holding him on the top floor of the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island as part of their witness protection program. As the sun rose one morning, his dead body was discovered on the roof of a smaller building beside the hotel. Instigators claimed that he had gotten drunk and fallen out the window but some suspicions remained. The body’s position and angle of descent suggested he had been pushed and after searching his room, no alcohol was found but their crude analysis determined there was a faint trace of some kind of medicine in his stomach at the time of death. Did he really fall? Did he commit suicide? Or possibly he stumbled while trying to escape? Maybe a crooked policeman took a bribe to push him out the window.

     Murder Inc. and The Syndicate dissolved and in 1957, Albert Anastasia called a meeting in the Appalachian Mountains of New York to delegate the remains of The Syndicate’s business holdings to all the mob bosses who, thereafter, would operate on their own.

Reference

Turkus, Burtun B. and Feder, Sid. Murder Inc.: The Story Of the Syndicate. Da Capo Press, New York: 2003.

Bookshelf

Murder Inc.: The Story Of the Syndicate

by Burtun B. Turkus and Sid Feder