Beer, bloodshed, and buried treasure. That is the legacy left behind by one of New York’s most notorious malefactors, mobster and bootlegger Dutch Schultz.
Like many other criminals, Schultz saw Prohibition as the golden ticket to a life full of riches. And he was right, although many people had to die for him to achieve his goal. He fought not one, but two bloody gang wars to firmly establish himself as New York’s premier distributor of illegal hooch, the cause of (and solution to) all of life’s problems.
The Early Years
Dutch Schultz was born Arthur Simon Flegenheimer on August 6, 1902, in the Bronx, to a couple of German Jewish immigrants named Herman and Emma Flegenheimer. He adopted the name “Dutch Schultz,” also known as the “Dutchman,” relatively early in his criminal career, so we will stick with that from the beginning to avoid confusion. Presumably, Schultz concluded (quite reasonably, we think) that nobody would be intimidated by someone called Arthur Flegenheimer. We mean, the “Flegenheimer Gang” doesn’t really strike fear into the hearts of men, does it?
Emma Flegenheimer tried to instill a devout and modest upbringing into her son, but it was no use. Growing up on the mean streets of the Bronx, young Dutch frequently got into scraps with other kids and, eventually, joined a gang for added protection. And it probably won’t be much of a surprise to you to find out that he didn’t really care that much for school, although here’s a fun fact for you trivia hounds. The principal of Schultz’s school was Dr. John F. Condon, who would later attain infamy during the Lindbergh baby case, as he was the one who delivered the $50,000 ransom to the kidnappers, only to be double-crossed by them.
At some point during Dutch’s childhood, his father abandoned the family. We’re really not sure when exactly; some sources say Dutch was 14 years old at the time, and others claim that Herman Flegenheimer was already gone by the 1910 census, which would make Dutch eight years or younger. And some say Herman never left at all, but that he died. Anyway, the salient point here is that the family was left without its breadwinner, so Dutch eventually dropped out of school to make some money.
An honest pay for an honest day’s work was never in the cards for Schultz, but he thought he’d give it the old college try. He worked a few odd jobs before deciding that they all left him too poor and too unhappy to keep it going. Instead, he started hanging out at a local nightclub owned by a two-bit gangster called Marcel Poffo, hoping that he would find some better work there. Poffo had a long rap sheet full of stick-ups, burglaries, bank robberies, and probably some jaywalking, too, so it was only normal that Schultz would try to emulate his mentor. He began holding up crap games and committing burglaries, but he was still just a greenhorn at this crime game, so when he was 17, Schultz was caught trying to break into an apartment. He was arrested, sentenced to 17 months in prison, and sent to Roosevelt Island (still called Blackwell’s Island back then).
Dutch was released on parole in December 1920, but he had no intention of changing his criminal ways and going straight, especially now that a golden goose had been presented to him. The United States Congress had recently passed the Volstead Act, and America had entered Prohibition.
The Beer Wars Begin
Once he was out of prison, Schultz’s only concern was to make money. He went back to one of his old jobs with a trucking company and was pleasantly surprised to discover that, while he was behind bars, they had decided to turn to the dark side and become a smuggling operation, bringing in booze from Canada. He rode with them for a while, earning a few bucks but, more importantly, making connections with New York’s criminal underworld. Schultz met and even worked with some important gangsters during this time, such as Arnold Rothstein and Lucky Luciano, and an Irish mobster called Jack “Legs” Diamond, but more on him later.
Anyway, by the mid-1920s, Schultz’s basic bootlegging business led to another gig, working in a speakeasy in the Bronx for an old childhood friend and up-and-coming gangster named Joey Noe. The two of them saw just how much money there was to be made from selling booze, so they got their own little operation off the ground, with Noe eventually taking on Schultz as a full-time partner. By this point, Dutch Schultz was settling nicely into a deserved reputation as a violent and bloodthirsty psychopath that you did not want to mess with. That kind of guy proved useful to have when you were trying to strongarm your way into the bootlegging market. Schultz used his menacing ways to intimidate rival saloon owners into buying beer from them, on occasion even kidnapping and torturing those who refused to see eye to eye with them.
With that kind of persuasion, it was only a couple of years until the dynamic duo became the most prominent hooch suppliers in all of the Bronx so naturally, they looked to expand their operation into Manhattan. But this caused a problem…There was a lot of money on the line, and other people were not going to give up their slice of the pie willingly just because the Noe-Schultz Gang was in town.
As you might imagine, Manhattan was already well-supplied with intoxicating spirits, so the Dutchman’s arrival brought him into conflict with the aforementioned Legs Diamond and the Irish Mob. It did not take long at all for this one to get bloody. Diamond wanted to cut off the head of the serpent right off the bat so the first domino to fall was none other than Joey Noe himself.
On the night of October 15, 1928, Noe and Dutch stopped by the Swanee Club, next to Harlem’s iconic Apollo Theater. The hangout was supposed to be safe ground, even between feuding gangsters who wanted each other dead, sort of like the Continental. The rule was that, whenever two rival mobsters ran into each other, the one who arrived last sat down for just one drink and then got the hell out of Dodge. The club was also a popular hotspot with off-duty cops, which helped it maintain its neutral status.
Violence inside the Swanee Club might have been off-limits, but once you were out the door, you were on your own. That night, Schultz and Noe stayed and partied until the wee hours of the morning. Around 7 a.m., Joey Noe finally left the club and was making his way toward his parked car when a blue Cadillac pulled up and two men opened fire. Noe was hit multiple times, but he was wearing a bulletproof vest, so he did not collapse immediately. Instead, he pulled out his piece and returned fire at the getaway vehicle. The Cadillac zig-zagged violently and side-swiped a parked car before disappearing into the night, leaving behind a door as a souvenir. It was clear that Noe had hit his target, but his wounds finally got the best of him, and he crumpled to the ground, barely hanging on to life.
Later that same night, police found the blue Caddy abandoned on the Lower East Side. Inside, in the backseat, was the dead body of triggerman Louis Weinberg, who clearly got the worst of it from his shootout with Joey Noe. But Schultz’s partner wasn’t exactly in mint condition, either. Taken to the Roosevelt Hospital, doctors managed to stabilize him for the time being, but a recovery wasn’t in the cards for him. Noe lingered for another month or so before finally dying in November 1928.
Schultz was devastated by the loss of one of the only people in his line of work whom he could actually call a friend and mean it, but he was consoled by the fact that he was now the sole boss of their bootlegging empire. Still, his issues with Legs Diamond were far from settled. It has sometimes been claimed, although certainly never substantiated, that Schultz had Diamond’s associate and mentor, Arnold Rothstein, killed as retaliation for Noe’s death. Ostensibly, Rothstein was shot over an unpaid gambling debt, although some believe that it was the Dutchman who ordered the hit.
Either way, it was clear that the gang war would continue until either Schultz or Diamond was dead. Dutch’s problem, however, was that his rival was somewhat of a bullet sponge who simply refused to die. Legs Diamond had been shot 14 times on four separate occasions, and he survived every time, earning him the additional nickname of “the clay pigeon.” Presumably, at least one, if not two of those assassination attempts happened on Dutch’s orders, but Diamond wasn’t the kind to get shot and tell, so we can’t really say for sure. Schultz was certainly not the only one who wanted him dead.
Eventually, Diamond’s luck ran out. In December 1931, he was in Albany, New York, celebrating with friends his acquittal in a kidnapping trial. Afterward, he abandoned the party to meet up with his mistress, and after that “encounter” was finished, he drunkenly stumbled into his hotel room and passed out. Two or more assassins paid him a visit and, this time, they took no chances. Diamond was shot three times in the head from close range, and that was finally enough to put him down for the count. Again, Schultz was always the main suspect behind the hit, but nothing concrete ever tied him to the murder.
With Legs Diamond and his gang out of the way, Schultz had a clear path to proclaim himself the Undisputed Beer Baron of New York…except not quite. Because as soon as one threat is eliminated, another one emerges.
The Beer Baron vs. the Mad Dog
The gang war between Schultz and Diamond left quite a few bodies in its wake, but as it turned out, it was just the appetizer to the main course that was about to be unleashed on the streets of New York. This time, it was one of Schultz’s own men who decided to try and shoot his way to the top…an Irish hitman by the name of Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll.
Coll was the type of guy who made Schultz look like a level-headed, tranquil individual. Coll had an itchy trigger finger and would shoot at the slightest provocation, and he really didn’t care who was in his crosshairs. In fact, his most notorious moment came when he mercilessly gunned down a five-year-old child during a failed kidnapping. The boy wasn’t the target, he was just an innocent bystander who had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time when Coll opened fire with his machine gun. The killer was arrested but got off scot-free due to a lack of evidence and a problematic witness. However, he became known in the press as “Mad Dog” and “the baby killer.”
Initially, Schultz made good use of Coll’s brutal talents. The latter became one of the Dutchman’s main enforcers and often paid visits to bar owners who refused to sell Dutch’s booze. In 1927, he was even put on trial for the murder of a speakeasy owner, but was acquitted thanks to some jury interference from Schultz. But Coll got too big for his britches pretty fast. Feeling invincible, he started doing off-the-book jobs without Dutch’s permission, such as robberies and kidnappings. When Schultz confronted him, not only did Coll not apologize, but he doubled down and demanded to be made partner. After all, Joey Noe wasn’t around anymore, so who better than him?
Unsurprisingly, Schultz turned down Coll’s offer, as tempting as it was. But now he had a problem since it was clear that Coll wasn’t the kind of guy who would take the rejection lying down. His moniker was very fitting since Dutch felt like he had a mad dog on the loose that he had to put down. But Coll had been busy forming his own little gang and was ready to go to war against the Dutch criminal empire.
It’s hard to say how many people died during this conflict that lasted less than two years between 1930 and 1932. At the time, New York City was somewhat of a warzone as it was also dealing with the Castellammarese War between the Mafia factions, but if you want to find out more about that one, you can check out our videos on Italian mobsters because we covered that ground several times already. Some have reported that Coll and his crew killed around 20 of Schultz’s men, although the Dutchman himself was careful to never get caught in the crossfire. He even cut down on his drinking during this period just to have his wits about him more.
The way Coll was going through the opposition like a hot knife through butter, he might have emerged triumphant and become the new Beer Baron if not for his own hubris and sense of invincibility. Taking on Dutch Schultz was bad enough, but what if he decided to also make enemies of the Mafia and the Irish Mob?
Well, that’s exactly what Coll did. As we said, he had no qualms about taking any job as long as the pay was good and he didn’t care who his target was. Unsurprisingly, this approach to life won’t earn you a lot of friends. He made enemies of the Irish Gopher Gang when he kidnapped for ransom a close associate of the gang’s leader, Owney Madden. He also pissed off the Mafia when he accepted a hit on Lucky Luciano on behalf of his boss/enemy, Salvatore Maranzano. But Luciano found out about it and organized a faster, more successful hit on Maranzano, so by the time Coll was ready to strike, his employer was already dead, Luciano was the new head of the Mafia, and very aware that Coll was going to try to kill him. It’s said that there was a point when Schultz, Madden, and Luciano all had put a price on Vincent Coll’s head, and everyone in New York with a gun was after him. Coll was basically John Wick, except without the dead dog, all the badass gun fu moves, and the “Keanu” coolness factor.
Okay, so maybe he wasn’t anything like John Wick, but with that kind of heat on him, his demise would be inevitable as much as it would be bloody. On February 1, 1932, four gunmen working for Schultz or Madden burst in on a card game in progress in the North Bronx that Coll was supposed to attend. They opened fire indiscriminately on all six people in that room, killing three and wounding the rest, but still not getting Coll, who had not arrived yet.
The shootout was big news in the press of the day. It wasn’t quite on the level of the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” but it was up there. There was a lot of pressure to end the war, so talk of a truce emerged in the days that followed. Coll sort of trusted Owney Madden more than the others, which was a mistake since Madden totally set him up for Schultz’s men to gun him down in broad daylight. On February 8, 1932, Coll entered a pharmacy to use the telephone. He was immediately followed inside by a hitman who pulled a Tommy gun out of his trench coat and proceeded to turn the Mad Dog into Swiss cheese.
With his final challenger dealt with, Dutch Schultz could proclaim himself the Undisputed Beer Baron of New York City…just in time for the end of Prohibition.
Legal Woes
Okay, so Prohibition was out, and with legal alcohol once again filling the glasses of happy barflies throughout the country, the need for speakeasies and bootleg hooch dwindled. This meant that men like Dutch Schultz needed to find new avenues of revenue to replace the golden goose.
For Dutch, this meant using his considerable resources and influence to expand into various rackets such as extortion, running numbers, and controlling the unions. But whenever someone gains territory in a situation like this, there’s usually someone else who loses it, and they are bound to be unhappy. Once again, Dutch made some enemies, especially among the Black gangs of Harlem, but none of them posed a serious threat to him like Coll and Diamond had. In fact, by this point, Schultz’s gang had gotten so powerful that it was the only outfit left in New York that could rival the Italian Mafia in the scope of its operations. People often talked about the “Big Six,” referring to the five mob families plus the Schultz Gang.
Although rival outfits did not pose much of a threat to Dutch, he still had to contend with internal problems. One of his top lieutenants, a guy named Jules Martin who acted as the front for many of Schultz’s businesses, was caught skimming off the top. Everyone knew what the end result would be, but, as it happened, Schultz’s lawyer, Dixie Davis, was there to witness the scene and describe it later in a tell-all book. He wrote:
“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 Martins’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.”
But neither rival gangs nor disloyal employees were Schultz’s biggest headache. Instead, that took the form of New York prosecutor Thomas Dewey. He rose through the ranks of the legal system by declaring war on organized crime and actually meaning it. The biggest whale he would land was sending Lucky Luciano to prison for 30-to-50 years, but before that, he had set his sights on Dutch Schultz.
Dewey’s crusade against the Dutchman began in the early 30s, while Prohibition was still in effect. At first, it looked like Dutch would beat the rap, but in 1933, Dewey managed to send another notorious bootlegger, Waxey Gordon, to prison for ten years. Schultz was getting nervous, but against the odds, he was acquitted in his first two trials, both for various counts related to tax evasion.
Dewey, however, refused to surrender. Once he was made special prosecutor in 1935, he intended to indict Schultz again and bring him before a special grand jury. For Dutch, the solution to his problems became obvious – kill Dewey.
Mayhem at the Chop House
By that point, the Commission had been formed, a special Mafia committee consisting of the most powerful criminal outfits in the country, which tried to govern in a somewhat egalitarian manner so that the gangs wouldn’t spend all their time fighting with each other instead of making money.
Although the Commission was a Mafia organization, several prominent Jewish mobsters were closely associated with it. Schultz was one of them, so when he decided to off Dewey, he went to the Commission first to request permission. He received a resounding “NO,” as the others argued that assassinating such a high-profile target like Thomas Dewey would bring a massive law enforcement crackdown on all of them. As you might imagine, Dutch Schultz wasn’t the kind of guy who took rejection well, so he basically said “Screw you guys! I’m gonna kill him, anyway.”
This presented the Commission with its first serious issue. Schultz wasn’t just some schmuck of the street, but he openly ignored their decision and presented a danger to all their operations. There was only one answer – they had to kill Dutch before he killed Dewey.
Once the decision was made, it didn’t take long for it to happen. On October 23, 1935, the Dutchman was in Newark, New Jersey, having a private dinner with three associates at the Palace Chop House. The men selected to do the deed were Charles Workman and Mendy Weiss, two hitmen with Murder, Inc. They simply entered the restaurant and opened fire. They hit all the men at the table multiple times, but Dutch wasn’t among them, having gone to the bathroom to relieve himself. Workman entered the men’s room and hit Schultz only once, but it was enough to get the job done.
Oddly enough, none of the four men died inside the restaurant. They were all taken to the hospital alive, and then started dropping one by one. Schultz lingered for an entire day, drifting in and out of consciousness. The police tried to question him, but he only delivered these strange, nonsensical ramblings, which, oddly enough, became popular enough that writer William S. Burroughs later used them to write a screenplay titled The Last Words of Dutch Schultz.
And so, the Dutchman was dead. His criminal empire was broken up piece by piece and divided among the Commission. Guess all that’s left now is to find his buried treasure…Wait, what?
That’s right. Schultz left behind a very unusual legacy more befitting a pirate than a mobster. For 90 years, there’s been talk that Dutch hid a large fortune somewhere in the Catskills, in the form of gold, jewels, and bonds, in a waterproof safe or a steel box, just in case he ever had to go on the run. Since then, treasure hunters have been on the lookout, trying to interpret Schultz’s last words as clues to his buried booty, as if he were the Sphinx or something. So far, no luck, but who knows, maybe someday someone will find the lost Dutchman’s gold.
