THE EXECUTIONERS MUST HAVE SUFFERED A FLICKERING moment of dismay when they stepped through that ten-foot passageway into the dining room of the Palace Chop House. Their information was that the man they wanted would be in the chair facing them--a perfect target under the bright orange-tinted light in that corner. He had been there every night for at least three weeks, conducting all his business there, seeing Frances Flegenheimer there, even entertaining select newspapermen there. He hadn't made that much of an effort, obviously, to keep his temporary command post in Newark all that secret.
But the Dutchman wasn't at the table.
It was no time to start asking polite questions, of course.
The gunman in front opened up even as he crossed the
threshold and noted that his quarry was missing. He turned a .38-caliber pistol on the trio in the corner, firing across the room with a marksman's accuracy while his huskier confederate, just as sure, swept the table with the sawed-off shotgun he had brought in under his coat.
This part of the unequal shootout was over within seconds.
Even as he whipped out his .45 Colt to return the invaders' fire, seven slugs ripped into Lulu Rosenkrantz, spraying his strong and compact five-foot-ten-inch frame from his chest and abdomen down to his right foot. The 36-year-old hoodlum must have had his back to the doorway, because one bullet went through his right wrist and two others landed in the right elbow and just above it, all from the rear. Withal, the hail of lead never dented the spanking new Essex County Deputy Sheriff's Badge--No. 74--which Rosenkrantz had acquired, ever so thoughtfully, when he took up residence with Dutch Schultz in the classy Robert Treat Hotel, just around the corner from the Palace. The brass potsy gave Lulu the right to carry his favorite shooting iron without being molested by the law, but this was one night when it wouldn't do him any good at all.
Otto Berman, the oldest of the trio and the one least suited for this kind of adversity because he was dragging around 220 pounds on a stubby little body, was hit six times. All the wounds--body, neck, wrist, elbow and shoulder--were on the left side, so Abbadabba, who was not armed, had to be in the chair in front of the window. He tumbled to the tile floor in a pool of blood and lay there, moaning.
Abe Landau, four years older than the taller Rosenkrantz on the ill-fated protection detail but in reasonably good trim at 180 pounds, must have been facing Abbadabba. The bullet which would do the most damage tore through his left shoulder from the back. Another one went through the upper left arm of the most dangerous of the Schultz gunners and a third tore a gaping hole through his right wrist while he was getting his .45 into action.
There were remarkably few wasted shots in that room. Two strays smashed the mirror. Four or five other bullets lodged in the sickly green walls, but they did not have to be strays, for five slugs went clear through Rosenkrantz's body, four went through Abbadabba's and all three went through Landau.
The Dutchman, of course, was on the premises--and he was not to be spared.
He had put on his light topcoat and gray fedora and stepped into the men's room just seconds before the twin messengers of death arrived, but the last bullet fired inside the Palace by the enemy had his name on it.
There was some talk afterwards to the effect that Schultz, in a twist of fate ideally ironic for the silver screen, where it would indeed turn up in due course, actually had been shot not by either of the assassins but by Lulu Rosenkrantz. This piece of melodrama stemmed mainly from the fact that Rosenkrantz, Landau and Berman all had been riddled by .38s or shotgun slugs whereas a .45-caliber bullet damaged their employer. And Rosenkrantz, as noted, was using a .45 Colt. The story that got around was that the Dutchman, a towering figure of bravery for this purpose, had heard the artillery and dashed out of the toilet to come to the aid of his beleaguered troops but the faithful Lulu, firing blindily in his terrible agony, mistook him for one of the raiders. The fact is that Schultz wasn't even armed, except for a cheap 3-1/2-inch switchblade pocketknife, and he was wounded in the pissoir, not in the back room. Beyond all this, the professional who wielded the .38 when he was operating on the trio at the table happened to have a .45 as well, just for insurance.
Back in New York later, talking to his own set with a nice mixture of remembered split-second violence and understandable pride in his chosen craft, the professional said he had summoned up the presence of mind to go looking for the Dutchman after that hail of fire raked the other three. He said he kicked open the men's room door, found his quarry relieving himself at one of the two urinals and got off a shot with that spare .45 even as the desperately wounded Rosenkrantz and Landau were pouring lead his way.
The mute evidence in the Palace bore the man out.
Schultz was hit with a rusty steel-jacketed .45 slug that crashed into his husky body just below the chest, on the left, and tore through the abdominal wall into the large intestine, gall bladder and liver before lodging on the floor near the urinal he had been using when the door opened. Although his assailant talked of having fired only one shot, a second bullet missed and smashed into the peeling wall over the second urinal.
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.
Look back a moment: Schultz just happened to go the other way, minutes earlier, on the October morning in 1928 when his boyhood chum and bootlegging partner, Joey Noe, went on the spot outside Manhattan's Chateau Madrid. Schultz never even heard a shot fired in anger in the two-year war with a defecting playmate, Vincent Coll, that turned The Bronx and Manhattan into shooting galleries until a Tommy gun cut Coll into pieces in the famous drugstore ambush of 1932. Schultz suffered nothing worse than a superficial shoulder wound early in 1931 when he ran into a business rival, Charles (Chink) Sherman, in Manhattan's Club Abbey and the guns went off. And Schultz came out with nothing worse than a red face and a bad case of the shakes later that year in the celebrated Fifth A venue shootout in which a detective killed his pal Danny Iamascia. Schultz ran that time.
Not this time.
This time he could neither run nor fight. The chances are that he didn't even know what had hit him. He just clutched his right side, the great hurt registering in his wide brown eyes, and stepped forward out of the toilet.
The Battle of the Palace was not over at that point.
The mechanic with the sawed-off shotgun had turned and fled through the bar even as his co-worker was tending to the primary target, but the man who shot the Dutchman wasn't quite in the clear. Abe Landau, with blood spurting out of a severed artery in his neck and a hole in his shooting arm, staggered after him pumping fire, and behind Landau, on rubbery legs, came the unbelievable Rosenkrantz. Their errant revolvers--bear in mind that Lulu had three wounds in his business arm--turned the Palace into something more like a saloon in a Hollywood oateater. The flying slugs shattered the cigarette machine and a whole flock of display bottles, smashed into the front window and splintered the wall over the front entrance without stopping the man the Schultz gunners wanted.
Landau somehow got all the way to the street, still pressing the trigger, while his quarry, finding that his confederate and their wheelman had sped off without him, ran west toward Park Place. He might have been scratched by one slug from the uncertain hand of the Dutchman's favorite bodyguard, but he was in no real danger. Landau was outside the tavern only a second or two when he began to waver, reeled toward a garbage can near the Military Park Diner a few feet away, and sat down on it like a guy who had one too many. His blue steel.45, the pride of Smith & Wesson, slipped from his hand and clattered to the sidewalk. The clip was empty.
Rosenkrantz hardly constituted a threat to the retreating enemy either. All spent, he collapsed to the tavern floor without reaching the door.
The Dutchman himself made his way to the middle of the barroom just as Jack Friedman, quivering on the damp boards alongside his ice container and remembering how the machine guns sounded when he was in the trenches in France during the war, dared to rise from his refuge.
"The first thing I noticed was Schultz," Friedman said. "He came reeling out like he was intoxicated. He had a hard time staying on his pins and he was hanging on to his side. He didn't say a cockeyed thing. He just went over to a table and put his left hand on it kind of to steady him and then he plopped into a chair, just like a souse would. His head bounced on the table and I thought that was the end of him but pretty soon he moved. He said, 'Get a doctor, quick,' but when he said it another guy gets off the floor. He had blood all over his clothes but he gets up and he comes over to me and he looked like he was going to cry. He throws a quarter on the bar and he says, 'Give me change for that,' and I did."
The early story, still ringing down the ages, was that the Dutchman himself, often identified as a very thrifty fellow, had changed the quarter to make the life-and-death call without staking the telephone company to an extra twenty cents. But the man who got off the floor had to be the amazingly strong Rosenkrantz, for Landau was outside on that garbage can then and Schultz was in that chair near the middle of the bar with the blood gushing out of his side. Rosenkrantz, a frightful sight, hung on to the mahogany while he waited for the change, kicked over a spittoon inside the bar rail when he turned unsteadily for the phone near the door, and then, sagging against the booth, managed to dial O with his good hand and gasp, "I want the police, hurry up." The call went from the operator to Patrolman Patrick McNamara, on the board at Police Headquarters. The cop heard a faint, faltering voice say, "Send me an ambulance, I'm dying," but the only sound that came back when he asked where the call was coming from was that of the receiver banging against the wood below the coin box. McNamara didn't have to press the question. He was just following routine. He had already had a call about the shooting in the Palace (today it's the Service Cleaners, perhaps an appropriate transition) from someone in the bus terminal, and there were other calls coming in even at that moment.
Now Newark would marshal all of its resources in a heroic battle to save the lives of the four bullet-riddled strangers in the town. Nothing would be spared in this effort.
