Dutch Schultz
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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 Jewish German family in the Bronx, 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.
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[edit] Early years
Schultz's father abandoned the family when Schultz was 14. The event traumatized Schultz, and throughout his life he would deny that his father had left him, instead telling people that the elder Flegenheimer was a respectable man and an ideal father who had died tragically of disease. As a result of the abandonment, Schultz left school to work in order to support himself and his mother. He ended up apprenticing to low-level mobsters at a neighborhood night club. He robbed craps games before graduating to burglary, but was caught breaking into an apartment in the Bronx and arrested. He spent time in prison on Blackwell's Island (now known as Roosevelt Island) before the prison staff, unable to deal with him, transferred him to a work farm called Westhampton Farms, from which he escaped. Schultz was re-captured shortly thereafter and given an additional two months. Upon his return to the streets, his old associates dubbed him Dutch Schultz, the name of a deceased strongarm notorious for dirty fighting tactics. As his power grew, Schultz developed the bizarre tendency to offer houses in Westchester to police officers as bribes to either kill his enemies or let him escape prosecution. [1] [2]
[edit] Prohibition
In 1928 Joey Noe set up a hole-in-the-wall speakeasy in a Brook Avenue tenement, named it the Hub Social Club, and hired his friend Dutch Schultz to help out. While working there Schultz soon gained a reputation for brutality when someone triggered his temper. Impressed by his ruthlessness Noe made him a partner. With the profits from their speakeasy they opened more operations. They began to purchase their own trucks to avoid the delivery cost of wholesale beer. The beer for their operations was supplied by Frankie Dunn, a Union City New Jersey brewery owner. Schultz would ride shotgun to protect the trucks from being hijacked. Then they decided that they might as well furnish the beer for their rivals as well. If a speakeasy owner turned down overtures to purchase beer from the Noe / Schultz combine, they were warned to buy it, or else.
The Rock brothers, who had established a territory in the Bronx while Joey and Dutch were still standing around on street corners, did not take kindly to incursions on their turf and decided to play hardball. Eventually the elder brother, John Rock, agreed to step aside, but his younger brother Joe refused to give in. One night Joe Rock was kidnapped by members of the Noe / Schultz gang and brutalised. Rock was beaten and hung by his thumbs on a meat hook. The gang allegedly wrapped a gauze bandage over his eyes that had been smeared with the discharge from a gonorrhoea infection. His family reportedly paid $35,000 for his return. Shortly after he was released Joe Rock went blind. After this demonstration the Noe / Schultz gang met with little opposition as they expanded to control beer supply for the whole of the Bronx.
The operation which had begun so modestly in the Bronx, was now expanding over to Manhattan's upper West Side into the neighbourhoods of Washington Heights, Yorkville, and Harlem. Schultz and Noe moved their headquarters out of the Bronx and on to East 149th Street in Manhattan. However, the gang's move to Manhattan brought them into direct competition with Legs Diamond and a full scale war soon broke out.
Arnold Rothstein, Diamond's financial and political backer, was well aware that open gang warfare was bad business for all parties involved so he pushed for the two sides to meet in order to establish a truce. Schultz was sceptical saying he didn't trust Legs, but Noe over ruled him and they met with Diamond at the Chateau Madrid night club. An arrangement was reached whereby Legs conceded some territory in return for a large cash payment and Noe and Schultz walked out of the meeting well satisfied with the outcome, unaware that Diamond had set up an ambush on the street outside the club in the hopes of disposing of both of his adversaries in one night.
As the two men emerged from the building the Diamond gunmen opened fire. Although the careful Noe was wearing a bullet-proof vest, slugs ripped through his chest and lower spine. Noe and Schultz apparently got off a number of shots in return before their assailants jumped back into their vehicle and drove off with Schultz in pursuit on foot. Witnesses reported seeing a blue Cadillac bounce off a parked car, losing one of its doors before speeding away. When police found the car an hour later, they discovered the body of Diamond gunman Louis Weinberg (no relation to Shultz gang members Bo and George) dead in the back seat. Noe was taken to hospital but died a month later.
A few weeks later Arnold Rothstein was found fatally wounded near a service entrance at the Park Royal Hotel. While the most common theory for the murder was that Rothstein had welshed on a gambling debt to George Hump McManus, it was rumoured that Schultz may have been involved because of Rothstein's relationship to Diamond. Perhaps supporting this theory was the fact that the first person the Hump called after the shooting was Schultz attorney, Dixie Davis. After the phone call, Schultz associate, Bo Weinberg picked up McManus and spirited him away. McManus was later cleared of the killing.
In October 1929 at the Hotel Monticello, Legs Diamond was surprised while he and his mistress were dining in her suite in their pyjamas. Gunmen broke the door down and sprayed the room with machine gun fire. Diamond was hit 5 times. He survived but decided to leave town for a while, travelling to Europe. The Diamond gang was forced to relocate and when Legs returned he began to try and carve out a new territory for himself in Albany, the state capital of New York.
Unique among the major gangs in organised crime, members of the Schultz gang were paid a flat salary, rather than a percentage of the take from any operations in which they were involved, which was customary. In 1930 Vince Coll decided that was an unsatisfactory arrangement and demanded to be made a partner instead. When Schultz refused, Coll quit and set about establishing his own gang to move in on Schultz territory.
In February 1932 Vince Coll was lured into a trap and machine-gunned to death in a drug store phone booth by members of the Schultz gang who may have included Fats McCarthy and the Weinberg brothers.
[edit] Numbers game
With the end of Prohibition, Dutch Schultz sought illegal income elsewhere. His answer came in two forms: Otto 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. Otto Berman, nicknamed "Abbadabba," was a middle-aged accounting whiz who aligned himself with Schultz. In a matter of seconds, Berman was able to mentally calculate the minimum amount of money Schultz would need to bet at the track at the last minute in order to alter the odds, thereby ensuring that he always controlled which numbers won.
Along with the policy rackets, Schultz began extorting New York restaurant owners and workers. Through strong-arm tactics such as ballot-box-stuffing, beatings, and stink bomb attacks, Schultz coalesced all local unions under his Metropolitan Restaurant & Cafeteria Owners Association. A large, hulking gangster named Julius Modgilewsky, aka Julie Martin, was his point man in this operation. Martin successfully extracted thousands of dollars of tributes and "dues" from the terrified café owners.
During Schultz’s tax trial, he began to suspect that Martin was skimming from the shakedown operation, as Otto Berman had discovered a $70,000 disparity in the books. Escorted by Bo Weinberg and Dixie Davis, Julie Martin was lured by Schultz to a meet at the Harmony Hotel in Cohoes, New York on the evening of March 2, 1935. In quite a belligerent mood, Martin denied Berman’s charges and began arguing with his employer. Both he and Schultz were drinking heavily as the debate wore on, and things really took an ugly turn after Schultz sucker-punched Martin, who finally insisted that he had stolen “only” $20,000 dollars, money that he was “entitled to.” 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 in his final agonies on the floor, Schultz readily apologized to his attorney for killing a man right in front of him. Davis later admitted his shock when he read a newspaper story about Julie Martin being found shot to death on a snow bank but also with a dozen stab wounds to his chest. To which Dutch Schultz dead-panned, “I cut his heart out.”
At the time of his murder of Julie Martin, Schultz was busy fighting a government tax evasion case. The trial took place in rural New York state, which U.S. Attorney Thomas Dewey setting his sights on the gangster. Looking to influence potential jurors, Schultz presented himself as a country squire, donating cash to local businesses, holding bingo parties and turkey dinners, etc. By the late summer of 1935, Schultz was surprisingly acquitted. Returning to New York City, he was informed in no uncertain terms that he was unwelcome in the city, so he set up shop across the river in Newark, New Jersey.
No others were as shocked at Schultz’s acquittal as his fellow mobsters, who had nearly salivated at the prospects of taking over the Dutchman’s rackets upon his trip to Alcatraz. Bo Weinberg, figuring his boss was a goner, formed an alliance with Lucky Luciano, trying to get in good with the new administration. When Schultz came back to town, his learned that his right-hand man had been disloyal. Last seen on the evening of September 9, 1935, Bo Weinberg disappeared permanently. Gangland legend has it that the Dutchman fitted Weinberg’s feet in a tub of cement and dropped him while he was still alive into the Hudson River.
Harboring lingering suspicions at Luciano over the Weinberg incident, Schultz went before the Commission with a plan to kill his nemesis, Thomas Dewey. While some gangsters, such as Albert Anastasia, saw merit to Schultz's proposal, the others shot it down, as they figured, probably correctly, that the whole world would come down upon their heads if they hit Dewey. Schultz was furious, claiming the Commission tried to steal his rackets and was trying to "feed him to the law." After he left, Murder, Inc. head, Louis Lepke, was designated to handle the Dutch Schultz situation.
[edit] Death
Schultz was ambushed at 10:15 on the night of October 23, 1935, in the Palace Chophouse in Newark, New Jersey. Since fleeing New York, Schultz had converted the back room of the Palace into his headquarters, at which he held regular meetings with his associates.
Schultz had excused himself to go the bathroom when Charles Workman (also known as "Charlie the Bug") and Emanuel Weiss (also known as "Mendy"), two hit men working for Louis Buchalter's Murder, Inc., entered the back room. Accounts of what happened next vary from person to person; 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 has Workman and Weiss opening fire on the three men they found there: Otto Berman, Schultz's chief henchman Abe Landau, and Schultz's bodyguard Lulu Rosenkrantz. In the bathroom, Schultz apparently heard the shots but had difficulty ending his urination to come to his men's aid.
Workman opened fire with his .38. Before either of the Schultz gunners had been able to get off a single shot, "Charlie the Bug" had emptied his pistol, and all 6 bullets hit their marks. Just as accurate, Weiss sprayed the men with buckshot: a total of seven slugs ripped through Rosenkrantz from his chest down (ricocheting shotgun pellets even ripped apart one of his shoes); a total of six went through Berman, into his torso, wrist, elbow, his shoulder, and into his neck (which exited through the side of his face); and three struck Landau, in the wrist, right arm, and left shoulder (which exited the right side of his neck, severing an artery).
Mere seconds later, Workman charged into the bathroom and found Schultz still at the urinal. Schultz reached for an 8.8 cm (3.5 inch) "Chicago Spike"-style switchblade knife, the only weapon he had on him at the time; he'd been intending it to be an uneventful evening and had been planning on returning soon to the hotel room he was sharing with his wife. Before Schultz could retrieve his knife, Workman fired off two shots from his .45. The first bullet missed, while the second bullet struck Schultz slightly below the heart, ricocheting off bone and damaging Schultz's spleen, stomach, colon, liver, and gall bladder before tearing out of his back.
Workman returned to the back room, whereupon he discovered that Weiss had run out of the restaurant, followed miraculously by Rosenkrantz and Landau, both of whom had gotten their guns out and were pumping lead at their assailant. Landau was clutching his neck to stop the spray of blood from his severed artery. Landau fired all the bullets from his .45, none of which did any serious damage to his prey. Weiss jumped into the hitmen's waiting getaway car and ordered their driver, Seymour "Piggy" Schechter, to speed away, leaving Workman behind at the murder scene, who dodged the bullets and charged out the front door of the chop house. Landau followed him outside but then collapsed on a trash can, while Workman disappeared into the night. Back inside, his .45 empty, Rosenkrantz finally quit and fell face down on the floor.
Having been abandoned by the rest of his murder squad, Workman was forced to find his way back to New York by foot in the middle of the night.
Shortly after Workman had fled, Dutch Schultz staggered out of the bathroom, clutching his side. He did not want to be found dead on the floor of a men's room. He picked up his hat, staggered back to his seat, sat down, and slumped over the table. He called for someone to get an ambulance. Rosenkrantz dutifully pulled himself to his feet, and rather than go immediately to the phone booth near the bar, he demanded that the bartender (who hid behind the register the entire duration of the shootout) change his quarter for five nickels; Rosenkrantz did not want the phone company getting twenty more cents than they were owed. Rosenkrantz deposited a nickel and called for an ambulance before collapsing against the wall of the phone booth.
When ambulances arrived, the first man they found was Landau, still sitting on the trash can, his arms dangling at his sides and blood faintly coming out of his neck. His last bits of strength were used to give the police a fake name and address before he was loaded into the ambulance.
The next man discovered was Rosenkrantz, inside the phone booth; he was strapped to a gurney and taken away. Otto Berman, barely clinging to life, was the first to die, at 2:20 that morning. Police interrogated Schultz and gave him brandy while they waited for another ambulance to arrive. When he was finally loaded into the ambulance, Schultz gave the paramedics twenty dollars and asked them to take good care of him.
At the hospital, Landau and Rosenkrantz awaited surgery and refused to speak even a word to the police until Schultz arrived and gave them permission; even then, they provided only minimal information. Landau died eight hours after he was wounded; meanwhile, Rosenkrantz was taken into surgery, where doctors found themselves unsure of where to start, considering the extent of his wounds.
Before he was operated on, Schultz received last rites from a Roman Catholic priest per Schultz's wife's request, having converted shortly before the end of his life. Doctors performed surgery, but they were unaware of the extent of damage done to his abdominal organs; he would succumb to peritonitis 22 hours after being wounded. In what can only be considered a medical marvel, Lulu Rosenkrantz lasted seven hours longer, dying at the 29-hour mark at the age of 33.
Workman complained he had been abandoned by Weiss and Piggy at the murder scene, an offense punishable by death. Weiss defended himself by arguing that Workman had returned to the men's room not for the purpose of making sure the job had been completed (as Workman claimed), but simply for the purpose of stealing Schultz's money and other belongings. Therefore, argued Weiss, the job was already done and Workman had chosen to remain at the scene strictly for selfish personal reasons, thereby jeopardizing their escape and increasing their risk of capture. Charles Workman would eventually be convicted of Schultz's murder, serving a total of twenty-three years in prison. Mendy Weiss would be executed in New York for another murder in 1944.
[edit] 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 in addition to the woman who was the mother of his children, Schultz had also married two other women; all three came forward to try and claim his earthly possessions.
By receiving last rites (despite his Jewish Roots), Schultz was guaranteed interment in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne in Westchester County, New York.
[edit] 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 1959-63 ABC crime drama The Untouchables. John Dennis portrayed the Dutchman on ten episodes of the 1959-61 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.
[edit] External links
- Schultz's last words (archived at the Wayback Machine)
- Kill the Dutchman!: The Story of Dutch Schultz by Paul Sann
| Preceded by Casper Holstein and Stephanie St. Clair |
Policy racket in New York City circa 1932-1935 |
Succeeded by Michael "Trigger Mike" Coppola |
