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 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. 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 in the Bronx, 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. As Schultz' power grew, he developed the bizarre habit of offering houses in Westchester to police officers as bribes for killing his enemies or letting Schultz escape prosecution 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 be warned to buy it "or else I'll kick you in the ass".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 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.The Noe / Shultz operation, which had begun so modestly 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.Arnold "The Brain" Rothstein", Diamond's financial and political backer, realized that open gang warfare was bad business for everyone involved, so he tried to arrange a meeting and truce. Schultz was skeptical of such a meeting, saying that he didn't trust Diamond, but Noe overruled him. So Noe and Schultz met Diamond one evening at the Chateau Madrid night club. During the meeting, Legs conceded some territory to Noe and Schultz in return for a large cash payment. When the meeting ended, Noe and Schultz walked out satisfied with the outcome. However, they were unaware that Legs had set up an ambush for them on the street outside the club, hoping to dispose of both adversaries in one night.As Noe and Schultz emerged from the building, Diamond's gunmen opened fire. Although the careful Noe was wearing a bullet-proof vest, slugs still 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 foot pursuit. 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 Diamond gunman 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.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.Unique among the major gangs in organized crime, Schultz gang members received a flat salary instead of the customary percentage of the take from any operations in which they were involved. In 1930, Vince "Mad Dog" Coll decided that this arrangement was unsatisfactory and demanded to be made a partner instead. When Schultz refused this demand, Coll quit the gang and set about establishing his own gang, with the ultimate goal of moving in on Schultz's territory.In February 1932, the Schultz gang lured Coll lured 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. Dutch Schultz's reputation for violence was well-founded; it is estimated that he killed about two people a month during his adult life.Schultz reportedly invented the infamous "cement shoes". Previously, Schultz would take his victim to a beer warehouse in Brooklyn, stuff him in a large drum, fill it with cement, and push the often pleading victim into the river. The problem with this method was the amount of time it took to completely fill the drum. In a moment of inspiration, Schultz realized that he only had to pour enough concrete in the drum to make the body heavy enough to sink; thus the birth of cement shoes. This innovation soon spread to other crime organizations in the United States and became very popular.[edit] Numbers game With the end of Prohibition, Dutch Schultz needed to find new sources of illegal 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. Each day, Berman used $10,000.00 from Schultz to place these strategic bets at race tracks and prevent the most-played number combinations from "falling". This strategy ensured a larger amount of losers in Harlem and a multi-million dollar-a-month, tax-free income for Schultz.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; Otto Berman 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 Berman’s charges and began arguing with Schultz. Both men were drinking heavily as the argument continued and Shultz 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.”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, held bingo parties and turkey dinners, 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. Returning to New York City, he was informed in no uncertain terms that he was unwelcome in the city. Schultz then moved his operation across the river to Newark, New Jersey.No others were as shocked at Schultz’s acquittal as his fellow mobsters; these men had nearly salivated at the prospects of taking over the Dutchman’s rackets. Figuring that Schultz was finished, right hand man Bo Weinberg formed an alliance with the up-and-coming Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Unfortunately for Weinberg, Schultz was not done yet. Last seen on the evening of September 9, 1935, Weinberg disappeared permanently. Legend has it that Schultz fitted Weinberg with a pair of his famous cement shoes and shoved him still alive into the Hudson River.Still suspicious at Luciano after the Weinberg betrayal, 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 assassination.