DUTCH SCHULTZ

'Dutch Schultz' (August 6, 1902 – October 24, 1935) was a New York City-area gangster of the 1920s and '30s. Born 'Arthur Flegenheimer' into a German Jewish family in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, he made his fortune in organized crime-related activities such as bootlegging illegal alcohol and the numbers racket in Harlem. He is most famous today for the rambling, stream-of-consciousness monologue he gave police in a hospital as he lay dying of a gunshot wound.

Contents

Early years

Prohibition

Legs Diamond

Vince Coll

The Numbers Game

The Restaurant Racket

Tax Troubles

The Death of Dutch Schultz

Last words and posthumous events

In popular culture

External links

Early years

When Dutch Schultz was 14, his father abandoned the family. The event traumatized Schultz; throughout his life he would deny that his father had left the family. Instead, Schultz defended elder Flegenheimer as a respectable man and ideal father who died tragically of disease.
As a result of his father's departure, Schultz left school to find work and support himself and his mother. He ended up apprenticing to a low-level mobsters at a neighborhood night club. Schultz robbed craps games before graduating to burglary. Schultz was eventually caught breaking into an apartment, was arrested, and sent to prison on Blackwell's Island (now known as Roosevelt Island) However, the prison staff soon found the young inmate to be unmanageable and arranged his transfer to the Westhampton Farms work farm. Schultz escaped from the farm but was soon re-captured and given an additional two months on his sentence.
After Schultz' release from the work farm, his old associates dubbed him "Dutch" Schultz in honor of a deceased strongarm thug who was notorious for dirty fighting. The enactment of Prohibition would make Schultz a very wealthy man.

Prohibition

In 1928 Joey Noe set up the Hub Social Club, a hole-in-the-wall speakeasy in a Brook Avenue tenement and hired his friend Dutch Schultz to work in it. While working at the Club, Schultz gained a reputation for brutality when he lost his temper. Impressed by Schultz's ruthlessness, Noe soon made him a partner. With the profits from their speakeasy, Noe and Schultz opened more operations. To avoid the high delivery cost of wholesale beer, the two men bought their own trucks. Frankie Dunn, a Union City, New Jersey brewery owner, supplied Noe and Schultz with beer. Schultz would ride shotgun on deliveries to protect the beer trucks from hijackers. Noe and Shultz then decided that they would also furnish the beer for their rival speakeasies. If a speakeasy owner refused to buy beer from the Noe / Schultz combine, he would pay a very steep price.
The Rock brothers, who had established a territory in the Bronx while Joey and Dutch were still hanging on street corners, did not appreciate incursions on their turf and decided to play hardball with Noe and Schultz. However, the Rock brothers underestimated these newcomers. Eventually, elder brother John Rock, wised up and agreed to step aside. However, younger brother Joe refused to give in. One night the Noe / Schultz gang kidnapped and brutalized Joe. The gang beat Joe and hung him by his thumbs on a meat hook. They then allegedly wrapped a gauze bandage smeared with discharge from a gonorrhea infection over Joe's eyes. Joe's family reportedly paid $35,000 and Joe was released. Shortly after his return, Joe went blind. After this shocking demonstration of ruthlessness, the Noe / Schultz gang met little opposition as they expanded to control the beer supply for the entire Bronx.

Legs Diamond

The Noe / Shultz operation, which had begun to flourish in the Bronx, now expanded over to Manhattan's Upper West Side into the neighborhoods of Washington Heights, Yorkville, and Harlem. Schultz and Noe moved their headquarters from the Bronx to East 149th Street in Manhattan. However, the gang's move to Manhattan now brought them into direct competition with Jack "Legs" Diamond. A full-scale war soon broke out between the two gangs.
One early morning in 1928, Noe was gunned down outside of the Chateau Madrid in 54th Street. He managed to get off a couple of shots although he was mortally wounded. Witnesses later reported seeing a blue Cadillac bounce off a parked car and lose one of its doors before speeding away. When police recovered the car an hour later, they discovered the body of [Louis Weinberg]] (no relation to Shultz gang members Abraham "Bo" Weinberg and George Weinberg) in the back seat. Joey Noe managed to survive the ambush, but died a month later. Schultz was crushed by the loss of his friend and mentor and the underworld legend is that he held Diamond responsible.
A few weeks after the Chateau Madrid ambush, Arnold Rothstein was found fatally wounded near a service entrance to the Park Royal Hotel. While the most common theory for Rothstein's murder was that George "Hump" McManus killed him over a bad gambling debt, many believed Schultz ordered the Rothstein hit in retribution for the Chateau Madrid meeting. One piece of circumstantial evidence supporting this theory was that the first person McManus called after the Rothstein shooting was Schultz's attorney, Dixie Davis. After the phone call to Davis, Bo Weinberg picked up McManus and spirited him away from the murder scene. McManus was later cleared of the killing.
In October 1929, Diamond and his mistress were dining in their pajamas in her suite at the Hotel Monticello. Gunmen broke down the door and sprayed the room with machine gun fire, hitting Legs five times. After recovering from his wounds, Diamond left New York for a stay in Europe. During his absence, the Diamond gang was forced to relocate out of the city. When Diamond returned home, he began carving out a new territory for himself in Albany.

Vince Coll

The Schultz gang had an impressive number of trigger men, Vincent Coll being one of them. Along with his older brother Pete, they made a formidable duo. Coll decided that he wanted a bigger piece of the action and wanted in as Schultz's partner. With this request being refused; in 1930, Vince "Mad Dog" Coll Coll quit the gang and set about establishing his own gang, with the ultimate goal of moving in on Schultz's territory. It led to a bloody conflict between the two gangs with hidden casualties on both sides. Coll became one of the most despised hoodlums in the city, with both the law and his fellow gangsters asking for his head.
In February 1932, the Schultz gang lured Coll into a trap. While Coll was talking in a drug store phone booth, gunmen burst into the store and machine-gunned him to death. The killers may have included Fats McCarthy and the Weinberg brothers.

The Numbers Game

With the end of Prohibition, Dutch Schultz needed to find new sources of income. His answer came with Otto "Abbadabba" Berman and the Harlem numbers racket. The numbers racket, the forerunner of "Pick 3" lotteries, required players to choose three numbers, which were then derived from the last number before the decimal in the odds at the racetrack. Berman was a middle-aged accounting and math whiz who let Schultz fix this racket. In a matter of seconds, Berman could mentally calculate the minimum amount of money Schultz needed to bet at the track at the last minute in order to alter the odds. This strategy ensured that Schultz always controlled which numbers won. This strategy ensured a larger amount of losers in Harlem and a multi-million dollar-a-month, tax-free income for Schultz. Berman was reportedly paid $10,000 a week for his valued insight.

The Restaurant Racket

Along with the policy rackets, Schultz began extorting New York restaurant owners and workers. Using strong-arm tactics such as ballot-box-stuffing, beatings, and stink bomb attacks, Schultz merged all the local unions under his Metropolitan Restaurant & Cafeteria Owners Association. A hulking gangster named Julius Modgilewsky, aka Julie Martin, served as Schultz' point man in this operation. Martin successfully extracted thousands of dollars of tributes and "dues" from the terrified restaurant owners.

During Schultz’s tax trial, Schultz began to suspect that Martin was skimming from the shakedown operation; Schultz had recently discovered a $70,000 disparity in the books. On the evening of March 2, 1935, Schultz lured Martin, escorted by Bo Weinberg and Dixie Davis, to a meeting at the Harmony Hotel in Cohoes, New York. At the meeting, Martin belligerantly denied Schultz's charges and began arguing with him. Both men were drinking heavily as the argument continued and Schultz sucker-punched Martin. Finally, Martin admitted that he had stolen “only” $20,000 dollars, which he believed he was “entitled to" anyway. Dixie Davis related what happened next:
“Dutch Schultz was ugly; he had been drinking and suddenly he had his gun out. The Dutchman wore his pistol under his vest, tucked inside his pants, right against his belly. One jerk at his vest and he had it in his hand. All in the same quick motion he swung it up, stuck it in Jules Martin’s mouth and pulled the trigger. It was as simple and undramatic as that – just one quick motion of the hand. The Dutchman did that murder just as casually as if he were picking his teeth.”
As Martin contorted on the floor, Schultz apologized to Davis for killing someone in front of him. When Davis later read a newspaper story about Martin's murder, he was shocked to find out that the body was found on a snow bank with a dozen stab wounds to the chest. When Davis asked Schultz about this, the boss dead-panned, “I cut his heart out.”

Tax Troubles

At the time of the Martin killing, Schultz was busy fighting a Federal tax evasion case. In addition, U.S. Attorney Thomas Dewey had set his sights on convicting Schultz.
Schultz's lawyers convinced the judge that their client couldn't get a fair trial in New York City, so the judge moved it to a small town in rural Upstate.
Looking to influence potential jurors, Schultz presented himself to the town as a country squire and good citizen. He donated cash to local businesses, gave toys to sick children and performed other such good deeds. The strategy worked. In the late summer of 1935, to everyone's surprise, Schultz was acquitted of tax evasion.
Following his acquittal in the second trail the outraged Mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia, had issued an order that Schultz be arrested on sight should he return to New York.
As a result Schultz was forced to relocate his base of operations across the Hudson River to Newark, New Jersey.
Upon his return to the New York area Schultz quickly became aware that things were not as they should be.
As the legal and related costs of fighting his tax indictment continued to mount, Schultz had found it necessary to cut the commissions of his runners and controllers in order to bolster the "Arthur Flegenheimer Defense Fund". How much of a cut? A round 50 percent, down to 10 percent for the runners and 5 percent for the controllers. However the Schultz's poverty plea fell on universally deaf ears, even after his associates began making threats about breaking some heads if any serious resistance developed. The runners and controllers hired a hall and held a mass protest meeting and declared a strike of sorts. All of a sudden fewer and fewer bets were being delivered to the banks, reducing the vast policy inflow to a mere trickle as the Schultz's street soldiers lost their zeal. Schultz was forced to back down and restore the status quo, but the damage had been done…
Bo Weinberg, concerned that the drain of money from Schultz rackets into his legal defense fund was going to ruin the business for everyone else, sought advice from New Jersey mobster Longy Zwillman, who in turn put him in contact with Charlie Luciano. Weinberg was hoping to make a deal whereby he would retain overall control and a percentage, but Luciano instead planned to
divide the Schultz empire among his associates. All this was to come into effect in the event of the Dutchman being convicted.
Believing that Schultz would be convicted in the second trial Luciano and his allies had implemented their plan to move in on his empire. Given the circumstances of his take-over of the Policy racket, the bad feeling created by his attempted pay cuts and the complicity of Weinberg, his number one enforcer, the take-over would have met with little resistance.
Schultz quickly sought a meeting with Charlie Luciano, his erstwhile colleague on the Commission, in order to 'clarify' the situation. Luciano placated Schultz with the explanation that they were just 'looking after the shop' while he was away, only to ensure that everything ran smoothly, and promised that control of his rackets would be returned. In a weakened position and still under constant harassment from the authorities, Schultz is forced to accept Luciano's version of
events. However Luciano was well aware of the Schultz prior history and would have had no illusions about what the long term scenario would be - that as soon as he felt able, Sshultz would launch an all out war to recover what he had lost and get revenge.

The Death of Dutch Schultz

Still suspicious at Luciano after the Weinberg betrayal, Gangland legend has it that Schultz soon went before the Commission and presented a plan to kill his nemesis, U.S. Attorney Tom Dewey. While some Commission members, including Albert Anastasia, liked Schultz's proposal, the majority shot it down; they figured, probably correctly, that the whole world would come down on them if they hit Dewey. Schultz was furious at this outcome; he accused the Commission of trying to steal his rackets and "feed him to the law." After Schultz left, the Commission decided to finally eliminate him. Murder, Inc. head Louis Lepke, was tasked with the "hit".
At 10:15 pm on October 23, 1935, Dutch Schultz was ambushed in the Palace Chophouse in Newark, New Jersey. Schultz had previously converted the back room of the Palace into his new headquarters (after fleeing New York) and held regular meetings there with his associates.
On that fateful night, Schultz left the backroom and went to the bathroom. Minutes later Charles "The Bug" Workman and Emanuel "Mendy" Weiss, two hit men working for Louis "Lepke" Buchalter's Murder, Inc., entered the back room. Accounts vary of what happened next; what is known for certain is that Emmanuel Weiss carried a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun loaded with buckshot, and Charles Workman was armed with a .38 special revolver and a .45 automatic.
The most widely accepted story is that Workman and Weiss opened fire on the three men in the backroom: Otto Berman, Schultz's chief henchman, Abe Landau, and Schultz's bodyguard, Bernard "Lulu" Rosencrantz.
In the back room, Workman opened fire with his .38. Before either of the Schultz gunners could fire a single shot, Workman had emptied his pistol, and all six bullets had hit their marks. Just as accurately, Weiss sprayed the three men with buckshot: seven slugs ripped through Rosencrantz from his chest down (ricocheting shotgun pellets even ripped apart one of his shoes); six slugs went through Berman, into his torso, wrist, elbow, shoulder, and neck (this last slug exiting through the side of his face); and three slugs struck Landau in the wrist, right arm, and left shoulder (the last slug exiting the right side of his neck and severing an artery).
Seconds later, Workman charged into the bathroom and found Schultz still at the urinal. Schultz was unarmed, except for a (3.5 inch) "Chicago Spike"-style switchblade knife, the only weapon he had on him. Schultz didn't have a gun because he'd been expecting an uneventful evening and had been planning to return to the hotel room he shared with his wife. Before Schultz could use his knife, Workman fired two shots from his .45. The first bullet missed Schultz entirely. However, the second bullet struck Schultz slightly below the heart, ricocheted off bone and damaged Schultz's spleen, stomach, colon, liver, and gall bladder, then tore out of his back.
Workman returned to the back room and discovered that Weiss had left the restaurant. Miraculously, both Rosenkrantz and Landau were still alive; both men were following Weiss and pumping lead at him. Landau was clutching his neck to stop the spray of blood from his severed artery while still shooting. Landau fired all the bullets from his .45 without hitting Weiss. Weiss jumped into their getaway car and ordered the driver, Seymour "Piggy" Schechter, to take off, leaving his associate Workman behind. While dodging bullets, Workman charged out the front door of the Palace, noticed that his ride was gone, and ran off into the night. Abandoned by Weiss and Schechter, Workman had to find his way back to New York on foot in the middle of the night. Landau tried to follow Workman, but collapsed from weakness on a trash can. Back in the Palace, Rosencrantz, his .45 empty, finally fell face down on the floor.
Shortly after Workman fled, Schultz staggered out of the bathroom, clutching his side. According to legend, Schultz did not want to be found dead on the floor of a men's room. He therefore picked up his hat, staggered back to his seat in the backroom, sat down, and slumped over the table. Schultz called for someone to get an ambulance; Rosencrantz pulled himself to his feet and walked to the bar. He then demanded that the bartender (who had been hiding throughout this mayhem behind the register) give him change for a quarter; after all, a local call only cost a nickel in 1935! Rosencrantz went to the phone both by the bar, deposited a nickel, and called for an ambulance. He then collapsed against the wall of the phone booth.
When the ambulances arrived, the attendants found Landau first. He was still sitting on the trash can with his arms dangling at his sides and blood oozing faintly from his neck. Before being loaded into the ambulance, Landau used his last burst of strength to give the police a fake name and address. The attendants then discovered Rosencrantz lying inside the phone booth; he was strapped to a gurney and taken away. While waiting for Schultz's ambulance to arrive, the police interrogated him and gave him a shot of brandy. After being loaded into the ambulance, Schultz gave the attendant $720 and asked them to take good care of him.
Otto Berman was the first to die at 2:20 that morning.
At the hospital, Landau and Rosencrantz waited for surgery and refused to say anything to the police until Schultz arrived and gave them permission; even then, they provided the cops only minimal information. Abe Landau died eight hours after the shooting. Meanwhile, Rosencrantz was taken into surgery, where his injuries were so great that doctors found themselves unsure of where to start. In what can be considered a medical marvel, Lulu Rosencrantz lasted 29 hours after the shooting. He was age 33.
Before Schultz went to surgery, the gangster received the Last Rites from a Roman Catholic priest at his request. He wanted to die a Catholic, which was the faith of his wife. Doctors performed surgery, but they were unaware of the extent of damage done to his abdominal organs; Dutch Schultz would die of peritonitis 22 hours after being shot.
After the shooting, hitman Workman complained to the Commission that his associates Schechter and Weiss had abandoned him at the murder scene. This was a serious gangland offense punishable by death. Weiss defended himself by arguing that Workman had returned to the men's room not to verfiy that Schultz was dead (as Workman claimed), but to steal Schultz's money and other valuables. Weiss also argued that the job had been completed and Workman's greed had jeopardized their escape and increased their risk of capture. The Commission decided to execute Schechter, the hapless driver, and spare Weiss and Workman. However, Charles Workman was eventually convicted of Schultz's murder and served 23 years in prison. Emmanuel Weiss was executed in New York for another murder in 1944.

Last words and posthumous events

Schultz's last words, influenced by a high fever and large quantities of morphine, were a strange stream of consciousness babble. They were taken down by a police stenographer. This includes the famous:
:A boy has never wept...nor dashed a thousand kim.
But the entire text (linked below) is much more rambling, including such gems as
:You can play jacks, and girls do that with a soft ball and do tricks with it.
:Oh, Oh, dog Biscuit, and when he is happy he doesn't get snappy.
One of his last utterances was a seemingly random reference to "French Canadian bean soup".
The surreal nature of Schultz's comments inspired a number of writers to devote works related to them. Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs published a screenplay in novel form entitled ''The Last Words of Dutch Schultz'' in the early 1970s, while Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson connected Schultz's words to a global Illuminati-related conspiracy, making them a major part of 1975's ''The Illuminatus! Trilogy''. (In Wilson and Shea's story, Schultz's ramblings are a coded message.)
After Schultz's death, it was discovered that he and his wife had never gone through an official marriage ceremony and the possible existence of another wife emerged with the discovery of letters and pictures of another woman and children among his effects at the hotel he was staying at in Newark. This would never be resolved as his common law wife refused to talk about it and the mystery woman never came forward. Two other women also called at the morgue to receive his effects but their identities were never known. Though estimated to be worth $ 7 million when he died, no trace of his income was ever found.
By receiving Last Rites (despite his Jewish roots), Schultz was guaranteed interment in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne in Westchester County, New York.

In popular culture

Schultz's life has been the basis of numerous novels and feature films, most of which have taken substantial dramatic license with the facts such as the ''The Last Words of Dutch Schultz'', a novel-cum-screenplay by William S. Burroughs. The most famous of these works is novelist E.L. Doctorow's ''Billy Bathgate'', a PEN/Faulkner Award winning novel which dramatizes the last three months of Schultz's life, as seen through the eyes of a young boy who briefly becomes his protégé. In the 1991 film adaptation of the book, Schultz is played by Dustin Hoffman.

★ In 1984, Francis Ford Coppola's ''The Cotton Club'' featured Shultz, played by James Remar. The film is a fictional retelling of the Harlem rackets and the relationship between Dutch and Owney Madden, owner of the Cotton Club, played by Bob Hoskins. One of the final scenes in the film shows the shootout at the Chophouse.

★ The 1997 film ''Hoodlum'' centers upon Harlem numbers kingpin Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson during Schultz's time there, and the bloody turf war fought between the two men before Schultz's death. Johnson is played by Laurence Fishburne, Schultz by Tim Roth.

★ On television, Schultz was portrayed by Lawrence Dobkin on three episodes of the 1959-1963 ABC crime drama ''The Untouchables''. John Dennis portrayed the him on ten episodes of the 1959-1961 NBC crime drama ''The Lawless Years''. Both shows gave highly fictitious accounts of Schultz's career.

★ In music, Coil's "Circles of Mania" from the 1986 album ''Horse Rotorvator'' references Schultz's death directly; the incident is also hinted at in the song's delivery - an increasingly hysterical, stream-of consciousness rant.

★ In music, during live shows, Scott Schultz from Happy Hour (Grand Rapids, MI), often summons the power of Dutch Schultz, a possible ancestor.

External links

★ The Last Words of Dutch Schultz

★ ''Kill the Dutchman!: The Story of Dutch Schultz'' by Paul Sann

★ ''FBI files on Arthur Flegenheimer'' (FBI's Freedom of Information Archive)

★ Gangster City Profiles: Dutch Schultz