Kill The Dutchman! – Paul Sann, 1971 ★★★½

Who Was Dutch Schultz?

The book sat in my father’s den cabinet for years; I knew its title back when Richard Scarry and Crayola were my reading companions. Forty-six years later I finally got around to reading Kill The Dutchman!, wondering after just one thing: What took me so long?

After all, I do love crime stories, and criminal legends don’t get much bigger than Dutch Schultz. Sure, more know his Chicago contemporary Al Capone, but Schultz was a true original. A product of a fatherless Bronx family born Arthur Flegenheimer, Schultz became one of Prohibition’s leading profiteers. His illegal activities in and around New York City included numbers running and restaurant extortion.

Yet few people know, and fewer care, about such details. Dutch Schultz is a crime legend the same way as Billy the Kid, a killer whose best-known killing was his own. That’s where Paul Sann comes in. His look back on Schultz’s legacy begins at the end, on an unseasonably warm autumn day in 1935 at the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey.

Schultz’s killer found him in a bathroom, taking a leak. “It was a rather awkward and undignified way for the Dutchman to catch it – with something other than a gun in his shooting hand – when his vaunted luck finally ran out,” Sann writes.

As familiar as I am with Dutch’s name, I actually knew Sann’s almost as long, as co-author of one of my favorite boyhood books, Pictorial History Of The Wild West. A veteran New York Post editor, Sann employs a tough-nosed tabloidy argot that favors verb over adjective and gets points across with minimal fuss.

Sann’s eye for tangy detail comes through right away as he sets the scene of Dutch’s death. While Schultz and three companions settle in for a last meal, a waiter brings the cook a cup of coffee from an urn indecorously set beside a toilet. Upstairs, a three-piece band plays for an audience of two couples, “easily outnumbered by the help in the place.” On the sidewalk outside, a mysterious man in a green suit twirls a keychain decorated with a figure of a white horse.

Then the guns went off. Schultz and three companions were left mortally wounded, though not yet dead. Police asked who did it.

Sann relates Schultz’s reply: “I don’t know who shot me. It was somebody who didn’t like me, I guess.”

Dutch did have other things to say during the day that he lingered, much of it transcribed by a police secretary. It’s a famous soliloquy of rambling, morphine-induced nonsense that has in places a feeling of beat poetry. “A boy has never wept...nor dashed a thousand kim,” Schultz uttered. William S. Burroughs used it as the basis of a screenplay.

Sann devotes an entire chapter to the transcript, “The Last Words Of Dutch Schultz,” then analyzes certain phrases for keys to what triggered his doom:

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.

I don’t see it myself, but you see why Dutch’s last words continue to captivate, and why Sann as well as others strive to pull meaning from them. Schultz’s ramblings had a sense of connectedness about them, fleeting funhouse glimpses of a life of crime as fed through the fractured, literate sensibility of one who lived and died by his wits.

At the heart of Schultz’s criminal empire were a street urchin’s need to survive and government policy flawed in concept and execution.

“They say I was a Beer Baron,” Sann quotes Schultz telling a reporter. “Well, what if I was? We got Repeal, haven’t we? I get a laugh out of anybody calling anybody who gave the people beer a public enemy. If that is the case, how about Roosevelt?”

Franklin Roosevelt ran for President in 1932 on a platform that included ending Prohibition; Sann notes many times how Schultz’s “needle-beer” business, fueled by ether alcohol, served a grateful public. When arrested for the first time as an adult for tax evasion in 1932, Schultz beat the rap by pleading ignorance. His lawyer, he said, didn’t tell him he had to pay income tax on revenue he earned illegally.

A happy crowd greets Dutch Schultz, with hat in center, after he was acquitted of income-tax evasion in Malone, New York, 1935. Schultz spent his time in upstate New York successfully cultivating the good wishes of the local population. Image from http://www.visitmalone.com/blog/2015/06/search-lost-treasure-dutch-schultz.

A New York State jury agreed. Sann explains why:

What jury in the mid-Thirties was going to hold still for a moth-eared tax case against a reformed bootlegger who had labored against so many adversaries, paying off crooked cops and all that, to wet the parched throats of his neighbors? How many juries, for that matter, were going to convict anybody for cribbing on his taxes? This sport had achieved a national acceptance by then.

Sann doesn’t paint Schultz as a Robin Hood, but a roguish affinity does creep through. Maybe because Sann himself made a living on the same rough streets, he had a soft spot for a guy like Schultz who killed people but also made time for books. In his downtime, Schultz read classics as well as popular fiction. He cared enough about the craft of writing to ask, in his last interview days before his death, that the reporter avoid splitting any infinitives when quoting him.

My own image of Dutch Schultz was long stuck on James Remar’s performance in the 1984 Francis Ford Coppola film The Cotton Club, a feral killer with a short fuse. That’s not easy to square with the man Sann presents, crooking an eyebrow at a New York Times reporter for writing Schultz was “a pushover for a blonde.”

“I don’t think ‘pushover for a blonde’ is any kind of language to write for a newspaper like the Times,” Sann quotes Schultz complaining, rather gently.

Schultz did have his standards when it came to crime, too. Once a reporter asked him what it was like to be Manhattan’s Al Capone. Schultz rejected the label: “I may do a lot of lousy things, but I’ll never make a living off women or narcotics.” This was true, Sann adds; Schultz scrupulously avoided the drug market, while only making time for prostitutes as a client.

After his death, his wife Frances Flegenheimer spoke about him to the press: “…her proudest possession, and she was wearing it at the time, was a gold bracelet from Arthur bearing such charms as a wine glass, a whisky bottle, a head of Christ on a medal – and a miniature revolver.” Sann adds it “made one wonder why the Dutchman hadn’t added a bottle of beer or a gold policy slip or two to the little trinket.”

Sann’s wry tone does a lot to make Kill The Dutchman! go down smooth. He focuses a lot on the period Schultz lived in, perhaps a reflection of the nostalgia many older members of the public, such as my father, carried for the decades they had grown up in. Sann takes time out to tell you what was playing on Broadway and in movie houses while Schultz and his fellow gangsters plied their trade.

More valuably, Sann gives the reader a taste for the gangland milieu of the period. Here’s his description of a popular watering hole on West 125^th Street in Harlem:

The Swanee had an even more important lure for men who lived dangerously. It was neutral ground, where no man would dream of firing a gun in anger. The rule was that if you came in and encountered a rival mobster you had one drink and got the hell out of there – unless the other guy elected to leave first.

Sann doesn’t cover all bases. He says little about Schultz’s restaurant-extortion racket, a key source of income, preferring to focus on his more victimless crimes. He’s less vague about the numbers racket, though he doesn’t explain quite how it helped to keep Schultz and his gang afloat after Prohibition.  Apparently Schultz’s crony Otto “Abbadabba” Berman had a system for exploiting the horse-race results used to pick numbers-game winners, but the details get muddled here.

Berman was one of the other three men shot with Schultz, all of whom were seated at a backroom table while Schultz relieved himself. Did they get it before Schultz, after Schultz, or at the same time? For all the time Sann spends at the Palace Chop House, he doesn’t answer this question so much as elide it.

As to why Schultz was killed, Sann notes the gangster was “in trouble,” both financially and when it came to his turf; Lucky Luciano wanted in on the Harlem numbers racket. There was also continued threat of prosecution from New York State District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey.

Sann’s long account of Schultz’s promotion of Dewey’s predecessor, William Dodge, a mob-friendly Democrat, is one of the highlights of his book. Schultz’s gang paid citizens to vote multiple times for Dodge. “…floaters were handed a variety of registration cards – the traditional ‘graveyard vote’ of the big-city machines – and some assorted dollar bills to compensate them for their labors.” Dodge squeaked through in the 1933 election, but Schultz’s days were numbered.

Sann’s account continues even after Schultz departs; he spends time on the fate of Schultz’s killer, Charlie Workman, who pled non vult to the charge of Schultz’s murder after swearing at a government witness in court. By 1971, Workman was out of prison and still working, legit this time, as a salesman.

By 1971, Schultz’s life was long over but still nestled in the living memory of many; Kill The Dutchman! makes it feel like yesterday.