LITTLE MARTY KROMPIER WAS A BIG MAN ON NEW YORK'S Broadway once the collective ruin of the Lawless Decade gave way to the hopefully more sedate Thirties. The policy racket's $65,000-a-week payroll, scooped up in the Palace Chop House following the shooting orgy there, listed the glib and dandy Krompier as the third highest toiler in the Dutch Schultz vineyard. He was down for $1,500 per against the $1,875 bounties drawn by the top resident guns, Lulu Rosenkrantz and Abe Landau.
Now if $1,500 a week, every week, seemed rather high in the wake of the Great Depression (how many corporation executives got that much?), consider Mr. Krompier's multiple responsibilities in the highly diversified Schultz operation.
He was the chief enforcer and Keeper of the Peace in the policy business, while Rosenkrantz and Landau occupied themselves more exclusively with the personal health and well-being of the Chairman of the Board. Little Marty was the man the Dutchman sent around whenever the native policy bankers of Harlem, Negro and Puerto Rican and Cuban, grew emboldened and demanded a larger share of the take from their white master. He was the Dutchman's ambassador to the satellite industry that was shaking down some 240 New York eating places; he settled the internal disputes between the Schultz hirelings and the occasionally recalcitrant union official or restaurant owner. He was in the Schultz inner circle, along with the brothers Weinberg, Bo and George, that helped Jimmy Hines install Bill Dodge as District Attorney in 1933 so that the law would not deal too harshly with the small fry of the numbers game when the honest cops showed up and arrested them (Krompier knew what to do about cops like that; once he had a couple of them moved off the Broadway beat just for harassing Marty Krompier). Going back into the more leisurely bootlegging days, he was at Schultz's side in the 1931 Club Abbey battle which retired Chink Sherman to a hospital for an extended period of recuperation.
In his spare time, Krompier looked after the interests of his employer in the boxing industry in the shadow cast by Owney Madden, who had managed to pick up a world's heavyweight title with the most ungainly glass-chinned tiger of them all--Primo Camera. For Schultz, Krompier was entrusted with the care and feeding of an Italian gladiator rechristened Nathan Mann, who at a mere five-ten and 180 pounds just didn't have the brawn to go all the way with the big boys. Mann's proudest achievement was a win over Bob Pastor but then he ran into Joe Louis (KO, three rounds) and it was all downhill after that. Except for Mann, who after all did get out of boxing's "underneath" into main events in Madison Square Garden, Krompier produced no true gems for the Dutchman in the fistfight racket. This was the only known area in which this $1,500-a-week executive had failed the front office.
So it was that on the night of October 23, 1935, Marty Krompier was in New York minding the store while Lulu Rosenkrantz and Abe Landau were in Newark guarding the body.
It started out like a quiet night.
The Krompier social schedule called for a fast trip uptown with his brother Jules and Sammy Gold, a bookmaker pal, to take in an evening's boxing at the New Park Casino, a hole-in-the-wall club where some chattels from Krompier's own Lenox A. C. were going on display. And then, the accustomed pre-midnight visit to the Hollywood Barber Shop, next door to the Palace Theater in the subway arcade at Broadway and 47th Street. The fastidious Krompier always stopped there for a quick shave before setting out on his late rounds along the Great White Way. The shop was a congenial way station whether a man needed tonsorial attention or not. On this night, Walter Winchell had been there just ahead of Krompier. So were Abe Bronson, manager of vaudevillian Willie Howard, and Harold Scadron, proprietor of light heavyweight champion Bob Olin. Monte Proser, press agent and night club operator who had handled a couple of the Dutchman's Broadway joints, was playing the pinball machine near the coat rack when John (John the Barber, of course) Sideri patted the last sprinkle of after-shave lotion on Krompier, applied a touch of talcum to the back of the neck, and said, "OK, Marty, all done."
Krompier bounded up and reached for his coat. The barber idly dusted the chair. Jules Krompier waited in the corner. Sammy Gold stood to Proser's right, watching the pinball game. The Negro attendant ran his whiskbroom over Krompier's threads and then drew the green shade--the closing signal--on the door.
It was 12:01 A.M., and at that moment the door burst open violently and a late arrival stood framed in it coldly surveying the scene with a .38-caliber pistol pointed at the man nearest to the coat rack.
This was just about 100 minutes after the guns had gone off in Newark. Upstairs on Broadway newsboys at that moment were hawking replate editions of the Daily News and Mirror with the first sparse details of that gory saga of the post-Prohibition gangland wars.
The gunman in the Hollywood doorway had the help of a passing B.M.T. express on the level below to muffle the sound of his labors. His first shot went into the ceiling--perhaps because he was a trifle more nervous than a professional killer is supposed to be, perhaps to give the Negro attendant time to jump away from the target.
The next four bullets hit Marty Krompier with a degree of accuracy that might have killed any other man--one in the chest, one in the belly, one in each arm. Two other slugs, in the left arm and side, apparently strays, felled Sammy Gold. Nobody else was wounded but the gunman had three confederates arrayed behind him in the arcade and the lead thrown in those burning seconds suggested that one of his restless playmates had gotten off a few shots for insurance purposes. This theory was backed up when a still-warm .38 was retrieved near the barber shop door with only four spent shells in it; the lead gunner had emptied his revolver.
As the raiding party turned and fled, Krompier toppled toward Proser, clutching the press agent's suspenders and gasping, "They got me." Proser, with his pants starting to fall, reached down in time to keep the badly wounded hoodlum's head from banging against the linoleum floor. Minutes later, the Police were on hand, along with a quickly gathering band of reporters who had been roaming the midtown haunts to find Krompier and, hopefully, solicit his informed comments on the bloodbath across the river. With more experience help at hand, Proser adjusted his trousers and went to the wall phone to dial Walter Winchell at the Mirror office nine blocks away. "You blew it, pal," the breathless press agent told the man who invented the Broadway gossip column "They just shot Krompier in here." Winchell, of course, raced back to his favorite tonsorial parlor to cover the story.
The four-man firing squad made an easy escape.
Two fled by way of the B.M.T. platform and two others went upstairs into Broadway and walked away. Nobody saw anybody running--and nobody in the blood-splattered barber shop, where Krompier had now been installed in his favorite chair to await the ambulance, was very helpful about describing the intruder in the doorway. Proser, for his part said that while he faced the guy head-on it might as well have been "a six-foot brunette with a machine gun in one hand and an automatic in the other." In more recent years a producer of stage and night club shows in New York and Las Vegas, Proser now says he wasn't just kidding when he offered policy that garish description. "I didn't want to get mixed up in anything like that," he said, "because I knew the mob scene too damn well. Anyway, I couldn't have described the character with the heater if I tried. It all happened too fast--and my pants were falling down besides."
Krompier, a frightful sight, greeted the first police arrival with something none of the men in blue had ever expected to hear from those familiar lips: "Do something for me, do something for me." The cops stanched his wound with towel until the ambulance got there, but their old adversary wasn't going to do much for them. Did he have a good look at his assailant? "Sure. I'd know him if l saw him again." Okay, had he ever seen the man before? "No, I don't know him. I'd know him if I saw him again." Didn't he know what had happened to Dutch Schultz over in Newark? Was there any connection between the two shootings? "How do I know? It's gotta be one of them coincidences." The cops turned to Gold, stretched out alongside the adjoining chair. Did he know the gunman? "No, I never saw him before." Did he know Dutch Schultz? "I wouldn't know him if I fell over him." This might have been true. The police had nothing to link Gold, who always insisted that he was a commission merchant and not a guy who handled bets for a living, to the mob.
In Polyclinic Hospital, only four blocks from the barber shop and across the street from one of his own regular business stops, Madison Square Garden, Krompier had to suffer some more interrogation while a team of surgeons was being assembled for the dubious task of trying to save his life. The gangster cut the detectives short: "I can't tell you anything now. I can take it--can't you see I can take it?--but I'm taking enough now with the terrific pain."
In a criminal career dating back to 1918, marked by one youthful reformatory sentence for petty larceny and some quick discharges for such items as homicide, assault, grand larceny and violation of the Sullivan Law (no weapons, fellas), Krompier had been over some rough spots but this was the first time he had felt any lead coming at him.
The doctors called for blood and the cops obligingly sent over Krompier's brother Jules, then in custody as a material witness in the Late Late Show at the Hollywood. Another brother, Milton, came down from The Bronx and furnished a second transfusion. Natie Mann gave his blood, too, and then the surgeons went to work. The prognosis was all bad: the slug that entered Krompier's abdomen had ripped his insides apart before settling so deeply in the intestines that it couldn't be recovered. It was the same kind of wide-ranging wound that had proved fatal to Senator Huey P. Long, the Louisiana Kingfish, cut down by an assassin's bullet in the state capital at Baton Rouge just a month earlier. In Polyclinic, the word was that Mr. Schultz's jack-of-all-trades could not possibly live to see another sun light up the town.
The hardy gangster fooled them all, hanging on through a series of operations which proved so remarkable that the Polyclinic team eventually would receive a letter of commendation from the medical faculty at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. But while Sammy Gold was discharged within good time, recovered, Krompier was to be a guest of Polyclinic's for nine weeks--under round-the-clock guard all the way lest anyone come in and try to rob the doctors of their triumph.
Over this long stretch, in agony all the way, the man in their hospital gown developed a more or less general answer for the detectives who kept dropping in with that old nagging question.
"Tell us who shot you, Marty."
"I can't. The doctor has ordered me not to talk."
One day the patient did talk--to Detective Samuel Orbach, a familiar face from the Broadway beat.
"Who did it, Marty?"
"It's a swell day, isn't it? It must be warm outside."
Krompier sampled his final hospital lunch on New Year's Day. Then his brother Milton helped him into a fur coat that was too long for his five-foot-seven-inch frame and with the gangster's left arm dangling at his side and only partially useful (he would demonstrate this to a jury eight years later to beat a charge that he had lugged two heavy boxes of stolen rhinestones into a Fifth Avenue jewelry store to trade them in for cash), led him from his third-floor room to a waiting limousine.
But that wasn't the end of the Polyclinic chapter.
Five hours later, at 6:00 P.M., three sharply dressed men who looked as though they might have come right off the set of a Jimmy Cagney underworld melodrama approached a nurse who was sitting at the midtown hospital's third-floor reception desk making an entry in a patient's chart. Two of the visitors stood back a step or two. The third--and he had a scar on his right cheek, naturally--approached the young nurse and this colloquy ensued:
SCARFACE: Where's Krompier?
NURSE: Who are you?
SCARFACE: That's who I am (producing a gold shield ).
NURSE: You'll have to go to the information desk downstairs.
Just at that moment, a uniformed patrolman who had been checking on a routine accident case on the floor emerged in the far end of the corridor and one of the trio spotted him. "Come on, let's go," he whispered, "here comes a cop." With that, the misguided movie-style trio (didn't they know that Krompier would have had some delegates from the Police Department for company if he was still in the hospital?) fled down a stairway.
It remains a sound assumption that those three men had come to Polyclinic to finish the job on Marty Krompier, and it flows from that dreary fact that the little vice president of the Dutch Schultz conglomerate was a very lucky man indeed. But, then, he had known that long ago in October, because once he satisfied everybody that he wasn't quite ready to go he began to hear the rest of the Newark story . . .
