RAVAGED BY THE PERITONITIS TEARING THROUGH HIS BODY, the one thing Dutch Schultz was able to make utterly clear and explicit was that to him, like any average American boy, mother was good ("Mother is the best bet") and the devil was bad ("Don't let Satan draw you too fast").The Dutchman
had some acquaintance with Satan, evidently, before the call came from the lower depths; he had established no
connections going the other way--upstairs. Now what was he saying beyond these homilies?
When he said "George, don't make no bull moves," he had to be talking about George Weinberg, office manager for the policy racket, the administator who kept the wheels turning in the numbers banks once the Schultz takeover started in 1931. The Dutchman had a bad time with George less than two months before the assassins caught up with him in Newark. He had to tell George that his brother Bo wouldn't be around any more. He may have conveyed the bad news in a rather crude way, too, like "George, we hadda put a kimono on Bo." George had been around the mob long enough so he wouldn't need an interpreter for that kind of underworld lingo. He would have taken it to mean that his big brother, who had brought him out of a no-account life into the relative affluence of the Dutchman's inner circle, had been encased in a cement shroud and dropped into the swirling currents of the East River.
How Bo died was something else. George said he never really knew. One story was that Schultz had summoned Bo to a midtown hotel and personally performed the execution with the .45 he always had tucked into his shirt-waist for indoor business conferences. The other, told by Dixie Davis, was that Lulu Rosenkrantz and a helper named Sam Grossman picked Bo up one night when he had a load on and they had him between them in a car when Lulu's little howitzer went off. It could have been an accident, the counselor said, adding a touching epitaph from the Dutchman. "We will miss good old Bo," Davis quoted his tenderhearted employer.
Be that as it may, when the weaker George was advised of the death in the family he had to consider, naturally, whether he should remain on the payroll of that sorehead Schultz or offer his limited racket experience to some lesser cartel. Well, there was no "bull move." The Dutchman had cooled George off nicely, because George was still very much on the scene and engaged even then, as the boss lay dying, in a vain effort to hold the policy empire together with the eager help of Dixie Davis.
The next name in the Dutchman's jumbled dialog with himself is Phil. "Now listen, Phil, fun is fun." This is perhaps harder to trace than the reference to George, but there was a Phil among the Dutchman's business associates along the scarlet way--Phil (Dandy Phil) Kastel, the New Orleans slot machine partner of Frank Costello. Going back to the time when the Congress, under the inspiration of such bluenosed stalwarts as Representative Andrew J. Volstead of Minnesota and the acid-tongued Bishop James Cannon Jr., ordained that America should be dry, the speakeasies which cluttered the landscape generally kept a few one-armed bandits on hand to wean away any stray pieces of silver still jingling in the pockets of the lawbreakers on the premises.
Schultz always had slot machines in his watering places and even kept some handy in his legal, undercover night club operations after the Eighteenth Amendment was stripped from the books in December 1933. He kept them, that is, until the noisy Mayor LaGuardia arrived on the scene and advised his somnolent police force that he didn't care for slot machines because they hardly ever paid off and in some places, like candy stores, school children were putting their lunch nickels in them. The Dutchman's slots, like most everybody else's who loved peace better than war, had to come from the Kastel-Costello supply depots. The "fun is fun" reference suggested to the more studious New York detectives that Schultz at some point had tried to cut a corner or two on Dandy Phil and heard some bad language in return. And Dandy Phil was the type who didn't have to make idle threats, because the quietly efficient Don Francisco Costello had an army of beautifully disciplined Mafia soldiers at his command in those days.
Once Phil departed the deathbed incantation, mother's boy, still adhering to the familiar form, introduced "John" to the thoroughly absorbed audience in that less than plush hospital ward. "John, please ... did you buy the hotel; you promised a million ... sure." Now there was only one John in the Dutchman's social circle with whom he could kick around so much green--Johnny Torrio, formerly resident in Chicago but lately something of a combined elder statesman and financier for the New York rackets.
Torrio was the little underworld professor from Brooklyn who took Alphonse Capone out of New York's Five Points Gang in 1920 and made him his understudy in the Windy City racket playland. Outside his Gold Coast apartment on a brisk January day in 1925, Torrio fell before an assortment of garlic-tipped bullets presumably directed at him by loyal heirs of the North Side's recently assassinated Dion O'Banion. Too tough to die, Torrio was sufficiently recovered within ten days to cast a hard eye on a collection of suspects and tell the police, casually, "I wouldn't lay the finger on." Then, since the Chicago streets had turned so unsafe, he elected to pay the State of Illinois nine months he owed on an old pinch in a brewery raid. And then, apparently dejected over the failure of his efforts to bring all the bad men of Carl Sandburg's "stormy, husky, brawling City of the Big Shoulders" together under one bulletproof shelter, turned the scepter over to the promising Capone and departed for the native Neapolitan
acres in Italy.
Now Torrio was back, an adornment of the Manhattan scene, and the police believed that the Dutchman, squeezed for cash when the policy net started to shrink, might have been compelled to go to the man who had stepped into the murdered Arnold Rothstein's shoes as a bankroller for suddenly depressed mob operations. Of course, Torrio would disdain any suggestion that he had ever done any business, financial or otherwise, with the likes of any such punk as Arthur Flegenheimer. Just the same, the Dutchman in his semi-conscious raving was evidently referring to a million-dollar hotel deal--and John Torrio might well have been the man he had to see if he was thinking about following the lead of so many post-Prohibition racket guys and adding some legitimate investments to his tattered portfolio. The theory about a hotel deal drew further support from a letter found among Schultz's effects. Signed by an Al Jennings and sent from Bridgeport, Conn., where Schultz had spent much time between his two upstate trials and
his unfortunate sojourn in New Jersey, this letter regretfully advised the Dutchman that negotiations for the purchase of a hotel, not named, had fallen through.
Schultz definitely was involved with the old Chicago terror in at least one other large financial operation. In January 1933, the New York Department of Insurance petitioned the state's Supreme Court for an order to dissolve a new giant in the bonding field, the Greater City Surety and Indemnity Company. Why? It turned out that Messrs. Torrio (1,667 shares) and Schultz (833 shares) were two-thirds owners of the company and in a dandy position to corner the market on bail bonds, since they happened to be so well acquainted among the people in town who needed bail the most. Besides, the Insurance Department had detected some hanky-panky in the handling of the company's funds.
Three years later, once Tom Dewey aired all that dirty linen during Jimmy Hines' trial for protecting the policy racket, Dixie Davis shed an appropriately garish light on the Torrio-Schultz adventure in bail bonds. Davis said it was the Dutchman who first spotted the marvelous possibilities in the bonding business but that the absolutely immoral Torrio presently summoned him to a moonlight gathering in a coal-yard shack off the East River and advised him that he (Torrio) simply had to have a piece. Davis said that Schultz, suitably aware of his insistent visitor's awesome credentials, coughed up $70,000 worth of stock in the bonding company rather than chance any unseemly argument. In this connection, the counselor deposed that even when his own artillerymen were on hand the Dutchman invariably showed Mr. Torrio an inordinate amount of respect. This was as it should be, inasmuch as the whole underworld community, except perhaps for those hotheads who took the shots at him in Chicago, tended to bestow a very
special deference on Johnny Torrio; when his time came in 1957, he died in bed. Heart, you know. He was 75 years old and very likely pretty bitter about things by then. With his busted protégé Capone babbling away after his income tax adversities put him in Alcatraz, Torrio in 1939 had suffered the indignity of a 2-1/2-year prison sentence and a cash outlay of $177,352 to settle an old tax bill.
"John," in any case, momentarily departed from the Dutchman's swan song as suddenly as he had arrived. "Phil" came back in an utterly meaningless reference, followed by some much less glittering names. "Reserve decision; police, police; Henny and Frankie." And after that a passing reference to "dog biscuit"--underworld argot for money--and then, "Henny, Henny; Frankie! You didn't meet him; you didn't even meet me." The Henny who came to mind was the Dutchman's brother-in-law, Henry Ursprung, but he was a minor hand in the operation, just family, really. Schultz more likely was referring to Henry (Sailor Stevens) Margolis and Frankie Ahearn, two allies from his early beginnings on the Bronx beer run. Margolis and Ahearn, in fact, had been indicted with him on the original 1933 tax rap, presumably in the hopes that they would do some singing and help the government make the case stick, but there wasn't the barest chance of that happening. This pair just dropped from sight with the Dutchman, not even bothering
to show when he surrendered to stand trial, and they were still among the missing when Schultz caught that bullet. They went legitimate in a Bronx restaurant operation after the smoke cleared. They're still in it.
When Sergeant Conlon put in that very tired who-shot-you question, Schultz came back with "The boss himself." Why? "I don't know sir; honestly I don't." Who could the boss have been? In the underworld of the early Thirties the gentleman who bore that common appellation happened to be Lucky Luciano. He earned the high title when he made his way to the top of the Eastern branch of the Unione Siciliana, precursor of the Mafia and what Joe Valachi would tell us later was really the Cosa Nostra ("Our Thing"). But if the dying man was trying to say that Luciano had shot him, it was a bum steer because the sharpshooter in the Palace--and Schultz could indeed have known him by sight, as noted earlier--met the description neither of "the boss himself' nor of the immediately following reference to "the big fellow." The actual killer was just that, a killer, one of the best in the Murder Inc. stable, as the record would bear out six years later.
Going on without prompting now, Schultz mentioned "the ring" and something about "if we wanted to break [it]." Here, he could have been talking about the rival Italian mobs, bearing sealed-in-blood Mafia credentials, which had started to cast soulful looks at his numbers barony once his troubles with the government began to distract him. We have noted that toward the end Bo Weinberg had sat down with the enemy, in this case Lucky Luciano, to talk about a takeover. Joe Valachi, a Cosa Nostra soldier in good standing then, confirmed this.
From "the ring," Schultz's ravings turned, curiously, to the vibrant politics of the Thirties, something about "communistic...strike...baloneys." What this established, other than the true-blue Americanism of the mobster, never was clear. It could have been a reference, however, cloudy, to some of the troubles Schultz encountered from honest elements in the unions when his hired strong-arm men began to set up sweetheart contracts for the restaurants on his protection rolls.
If the Dutchman's mention of the Communists did happen to be purely political, it may be said that he at least balanced it with a passing rap at the Nazis. This came in a sentence which said, "Please crack down on the Chinaman's friends and Hitler's commander." Schultz, of course, had no enemies in the German madman's inner circle. The "Chinaman," on the other hand, had to be Chink Sherman, who had led the enemy force in that Club Abbey battle. Schultz had other troubles with that bum, some quite recently, but at the moment of his oration Sherman happened to be dead, sealed away in a homemade limestone grave on a farm near Monticello in the Catskills, and nobody on the side of the law knew it. Did the Dutchman know?
Now "John" came back into the deathbed scene.
Sergeant Conlon wanted to know "what did the big fellow shoot you for?" and got this answer: "Him? John? Over a million, five million dollars." So the price was going up, but bear in mind that Uncle John Torrio could deal in that kind of scratch too; he was a high roller. Schultz did not bite, however, when Conlon once again asked about the hand that held the gun--"John shot you; we will take care of John." This was most unlikely, actually, because Mr. Torrio had never been known, not even in the bygone Chicago days, as a man who would deign to carry out his own murder missions; there were always hired hands for that.
What else was Schultz saying? Apart from the pure poetry of those two splendid and ever-mystifying lines--"a boy has never wept/nor dashed a thousand kim"--his ravings did furnish a kind of underworld glossary for the uninitiated. "Dog biscuits," as noted, was the coin of his realm and the "sidewalk" was a reference to his freedom to carry on his trade; he had once said to Dixie Davis, while he was on the lam, "If I don't make the sidewalk soon, this racket will go to pieces." He was referring to the numbers game there. "Get the doll a roofing" probably meant that he wanted someone to take care of Frances--or was it some other love of his life? When he said "onions" he meant girls, too. The phrase, "I am a pretty good pretzeler," seemed rather obscure but it turned out that "pretzel" was the Dutchman's word for a German. Comedian Joe E. Lewis, who played in Schultz-owned joints in his time, recalled that the gangster often said, "I ain't a bad pretzel."
While the mention of a "cowboy in one of the ... seven days a week fights" also seemed wholly obscure, Craig Thompson and Allen Raymond, in their excellent book, Gang Rule in New York, recalled in 1940 that Schultz may have been calling up a scornful remembrance of another old foeman, the late Legs Diamond. Thompson and Raymond said that when the celebrated Clay Pigeon of the Underworld finally departed in 1931 and the cops asked Schultz why anyone would want to shoot that guy for keeps the Dutchman treated the question with contempt, dismissing Diamond as a "cowboy."
When the line "Talk to the Sword" came up in the dying man's farewell there was no doubt that he was talking about himself. He was "The Sword"; he had used the expression quite commonly in the conduct of his affairs. "Come on...open the soap duckets" was another allusion to money in the lexicon of the dying man, and when he spoke of "The Chimney Sweeps" right after that he was using one of his pet phrases for the Negroes he had to keep in his employ after his takeover of the numbers game. There was a more explicit racial reference, noted earlier, in the expense sheets found on that table in the Palace. It said, "niggers, $9,000"--a suggestion, no doubt, that the Dutchman never quite relished paying policy's hired hands their share, however piddling it might be against the towering sums they were feeding into his accounts.
When you put it all together, you have something of an autobiography dictated by a man who tended to touch all the high spots but was rather casual about last names, dates and places. The head of Newark Junior College's English department, Professor Leo Lemchen, used the Schultz ravings in class in 1940 as a piece of American folk literature, borrowed from the James Joyce stream-of-consciousness technique in fiction. "Schultz," said Lemchen, "told his life story in these mutterings, and left behind him a clear picture of the character and outlook of a type which played an important part in the American theme. It is a complete self-portrait." But the Professor wasn't too high on the author. Taken in its entirety, he put the deathbed jumble down as the work of a "fear-ridden weakling" who had a "bullying, cruel and crafty nature. While the babblings seem not to make sense, one gets a glimpse of a man's mind laid bare. The gangster alternated threats to associates ... with piteous appeals to 'mamma' to help
him."
When Schultz said "my...gilt-edge stuff, and those dirty rats have tuned in," it sounded to Lemchen like a piece of bitterness from a domineering feudal lord whose serfs were demanding a bigger slice of the action.
The last soliloquy--or the police role in it, in any case--also brought some tart comment from Dr. Bruce Robinson, psychiatrist for the Newark Board of Education. The doctor thought the police had blown it. He said that when Schultz pleaded continually for his mother ("Please, Mother! You pick me up now. Please, you know me.") the room should have been cleared of the law and a woman produced, any woman the dying man might have accepted as his mother in a moment when he was apparently retreating to his own childhood. Then, according to Dr. Robinson, Schultz might really have spilled some secrets, whereas he was never going to tell the cops anything. "He was always on the defensive against the police," the doctor said, "and I don't think he sank so far into unconsciousness at any time as to give them a chance to break down that defense."
The doctor may have had a point.
The fact is that when the Dutchman uttered his closing line on that black evening--"I want to pay, let them leave me alone"--he was leaving the police quite empty-handed. With the end at hand for their briefly talkative captive, they didn't have much to go on. The real saga of Arthur Flegenheimer would take almost three decades to unfold. First, some intriguing items of that last night's business had to come out. Then the untold story of the Dutchman in the policy racket would be brought out by Tom Dewey in the process of sending Jimmy Hines off to Sing Sing. Then, in 1941, some of the missing details of the Massacre on Park Street, including the names of the torpedomen, would come out. And finally, 21 years after that, Joe Valachi would fill in the last missing strokes and make the canvas, dipped in crimson, complete.
