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"He was a criminal. ... But who will close the gates of mercy?"
-MONSIGNOR JOHN L. BELFORD
CHAPTER IX
A FUNERAL--AND SOME POST MORTEMS
WHILE HE LIVED AND DIED SO SPECTACULARLY, THE FUNERAL of Arthur Flegenheimer had to be recorded as one of the more private chapters in his life, conducted in such extraordinary secrecy that it even had cloak-and-dagger touches. The reporters, photographers and newsreel men who massed outside the Coughlin Funeral Home on
Manhattan's Tenth Avenue on the bleak Monday following his demise were destined to come away empty-handed.
When the press arrived at 6:00 A.M., one of the brothers Couglin said that the body already had been removed but
nobody believed him. In time, a crowd of some 2,000 was on hand and the balconies of Roosevelt Hospital, across the
way, were jammed with the curious, but hours passed and nothing happened. There was a flurry of activity finally, at
10:30 A.M., when a mahogany casket was borne out of the funeral home followed by eight mourners. The newsreel cameras
started to grind and the crowd edged closer, held back by six badly outnumbered patrolmen, but the Coughlins protested
that the casket contained the body of a neighborhood woman, name of Katherine Picket, and why didn't they all go away?
It turned out that Dutch
Schulz's coffin--a simple box of chestnut wood, hardly befitting the man's station--had been removed at 5:00 A.M. for a slow 10:30 A.M. rendezvous with the funeral party on Central Avenue in Yonkers
and then whisked off to the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, 25 miles north of the city in Westchester County.
There Father Mclnerney performed a 15-minute Catholic service, omitting the eulogy, and the bare
mourning party departed, but not before Emma Flegenheimer, bent in
sorrow, had a Jewish prayer shawl draped over the coffin. Apart from the gangster's mother, as
near as could be learned, the graveside witnesses were limited to Frances Flegenheimer, Schultz's
sister, Helen, with her husband, Henry Ursprung, and an elderly, gray-haired man said to be a brother-in-law
of the deceased's mother. On a hillside plot overlooking the Bronx River Valley, the Dutchman reposed in a
grave just 20 feet from the stage's Anna Held and fairly close to Larry Fay, the flashy but relatively minor
racket bum (taxis, booze, milk and night spots) who had been killed in 1932 by a drunken doorman outside his
own Casa Blanca club. Schultz's grave
cost $350 and the total cost of the very modest funeral was put at $1,200.
In Manhattan, the reporters didn't know any of this until the funeral home invited them in at 1:00 P.M. and gave out the sparse
details.
Another item came to light at the same time. It turned out that when the funeral party arrived at Coughlin's in the predawn there
were two uninvited guests on hand--Leo I. Keyes, a Treasury agent, and John A. Ross, an attorney on the staff of the State
Tax Commission, there to serve writs on Schultz's mother and Frances Flegenheimer calling for the surrender of all of the
Dutchman's records for tax purposes. The government had a lien for $115,000 against the Schultz estate, if it could ever
find any such thing, and New York State had a claim in for another $70,279. Ross approached one of the two young women--he did not know whether it was Frances or Helen Ursprung--and handed her the court order. The woman threw the order to the sidewalk and in the same motion whacked the state's emissary with her handbag.
The controversy surrounding Schultz hardly ended with his burial, of course. The funeral was barely over when the great debate began: what right did that man have to be laid to rest with the rites of the Catholic Church? John A. Toomey, S.J., took up the problem in the Catholic weekly, America, noting at the outset that there were thousands of people saying that "if a guy like that can go to heaven there won't be anybody in hell." But the article went on:
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To these thousands, glaring contradictions appeared to be involved. Here was the Catholic Church, which always had impressed on her children a horror of even the slightest sin; which had ceaselessly warned them concerning the danger of presuming on the chances of a death-bed conversion, which had ever inculcated high ideals in asceticism, in selflessness, in heroic virtue; here was the Catholic Church beckoning into her fold a man who through his entire life had represented everything which the Church abhorred and condemned.
"Dutch Schultz" with the angels! "Dutch Schultz" whose beer-trucks once rumbled over the Bronx, whose gorillas blustered through the sidewalks! "Dutch Schultz" associating with the holy saints in Heaven!
He to get the same reward as valiant souls who have clung to the Faith through a ceaseless hurricane of trial and temptation. It seemed more than unjust. It seemed ridiculous, preposterous, almost laughable.
But it may not be so laughable after all. There were a number of things not taken into account by the ... judges. One little thing they missed completely was the fact that there is just One in the entire universe Who is capable of accurately judging the complex skein of a man's life. The influence of bad example, of
environment in general: of heredity; the lack of religious training; the exact strength of temptations. ... That One is God Almighty. No one else can even begin to do the job.
Another element that appeared to be fumbled was the interesting truth that the time of mercy for sinners does not expire until the moment of death; that there is no crime and no series of crime....which God will not forgive, this side of eternity, to the truly contrite of heart.
The dynamic power of Divine Grace to move the most obdurate heart to repentance was also omitted from the consideration. Indeed, the intimate and
essential connection of grace with final salvation is widely overlooked. ...
Other important bits of evidence were neglected as the clamorous verdict was reached: for example, the fact that nothing happens in this world without the
permission of God. The reason "Schultz" was not killed instantly was because it was God's will that he be not killed instantly, and so he was conscious the morning after, and able to receive the grace of conversion, a grace that comes from God.
If "Schultz's" conversion was sincere, it means that God gave him a last chance to save his soul, and that "Dutch" took advantage of the offer. It does not mean that God, or His Church, condoned the evil life of "Schultz" but that ... God judged he should be given another opportunity to save his soul....
After all, Heaven belongs to God. If He wants "Dutch Schultz" to be there, it is difficult to see what we can do about it. Perhaps, instead of worrying about "Schultz" a somewhat more profitable occupation for us would be to do a little more worrying about our own salvation--to make sure we get there ourselves. We may not be given the opportunity for a death-bed repentance. Relatively few are given that chance.
And whether we meet "Schultz" in Heaven or not, there is one individual we are certain to encounter there; a gentleman who was in more or less the same line as "Schultz"--the Thief who, as he was dying on Calvary, asked the Man on the next Cross for forgiveness and who heard that Man say: "This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise." |
The penitent thief and the Man on the Cross at Calvary also were called to mind by the Right Reverend Monsignor John L. Belford, pastor of the Roman Catholic Church of the Nativity in Brooklyn, in a defense of Father McInerney's ministrations to Schultz. In an article for The Monitor, a church publication, Monsignor Belford decried "the cries of shame ... from Catholics and non-Catholics ... who thought it a crime to administer the sacraments of the church to a man who had been all his life not only a stranger to religion but a particularly vile and violent criminal," and he went on:
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Was Dutch Schultz worse than the penitent thief? He was a criminal. He seemed unworthy of the least consideration. Perhaps he was. But who will close the gates of mercy? The fact that he received the sacraments is no guarantee that he received God's forgiveness.
If he was not really penitent, the priest's absolution had no effect. Yet that priest did right when he baptized or absolved him. The dying man said he was sorry he had offended God; he declared he would do all in his power to avoid sin in the future and to repair the harm he had done. If he meant this, God ratified the action of the minister.
But, remember, the sinner contracts two debts; the debt of guilt and the debt of pain. God can forgive the former and insist on payment of the latter. He could forgive Schultz and yet keep him in purgatory until the end of time to atone, so far as man can atone, for his wickedness.
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The religious issue, of course, was overshadowed by much larger earthly matters, such as the endless curiosity of the law enforcement community over the sheet of paper which showed that even in adversity, hounded by society, the Dutchman had been able to rake in $827,253 in the scant six weeks before his demise.
To start with, the "ice" figure--$27,000 in three months is what was recorded on some of the Schultz papers found in the Robert Treat--disturbed everybody. The Newark police hastened to point out that this had to have reference to payoffs made in New York, not in New Jersey, since the man had hardly been in the Garden State long enough to set up any business operations. The New York police brass, in turn, blushing ever so slightly, expressed the most intense and heartfelt desire to ferret out anyone on the force so depraved as to take money from a sinner like Arthur
Flegenheimer.
Lewis J. Valentine, up from the ranks himself and Fiorello LaGuardia's Police Commissioner, had said before that he would deal very harshly indeed with any such scoundrels on the force. In December 1934, while Schultz was upstate awaiting trial in the tax case against him and professing great anguish over the fact that his own favorite government had turned down an offer of $100,000 to settle the whole thing and start over, Valentine had made a speech which contained this line:
"Is there any reason why a bum like that (Arthur
Flegenheimer, of course) should be protected unless he was paying for protection?"
When the Commissioner was asked whether he meant that the roster of New York's finest included some bounders who may have been dipping their clammy hands into the Dutchman's tainted purse, even at that moment, he said he was convinced that any such naughtiness had ceased back on January 1, 1934 (the day the forces of light took over City Hall).
Now in the chill November following the Dutchman's sudden departure Lewis Valentine could do no better than offer the observation that nothing in the fastidious Schultz
accounting--a record that would put a neighborhood bank to shame--indicated that "any money was directly passed to any appointive or elective official." This was probably in response to a passing statement by Newark Police Chief
Harris about prominent names turning up in the Schultz papers. Harris never went any further and Valentine's remark
evidently was meant to let the citizenry know that none of the men who assumed the seats of power when Fusion's
LaGuardia moved in had taken any handouts from Arthur Flegenheimer or that ilk. It did not really mean that the policemen on the beats--and some of the brass-adorned types back in the station houses--weren't on the "pad," or payoff roster, that had made it possible for the policy banks to thrive in New York City year after year after year (into this writing in 1970, by the way).
Valentine did take pains to put down a reporter who inquired whether as much as 40 percent of the Dutchman's take had found its way, somewhere along the line, into police pockets. "No," he said, coining a non sequitur, "this was big business and they weren't paying out any such amount for protection." The Commissioner went on to point out that tracing any payoffs to individual cops was proving most
difficult because the Schultz accounts, for all their minute attention to detail, used initials, nicknames and symbols rather than full names.
Mayor LaGuardia, talking about the fraternity of crime, had issued his famous "muss 'em up" directive to the New York police after the Dutchman's death, and now Valentine went perhaps a step further. "I want the gangster to tip his hat to the cop today," he said. "I'll promote the men who kick these gorillas around and bring them in. And I'll demote any policemen who are friendly with gangsters."
But Valentine tried to soften the disclosure of the hefty Schultz payoffs by noting that the records indicated that in the more recent labors preceding his death the Dutchman had been taking more money out of the Coney Island track in Cincinnati, in a gambling operation of some kind, than he had out of policy. The racetrack funny business, whatever it was, would never be explained, but it did furnish still another reason for the presence of Abbadabba Berman, at one time the official handicapper at Coney Island, in the Palace Chop House with Schultz on the fatal night. The Commissioner also noted that the Schultz records showed operations in Westchester County and Connecticut as well but didn't say what they were. He said his men were also going over papers scattered amidst the garish wardrobe and rich items of
personal jewelry of the murdered Pretty Louis Amberg, picked up in a midtown hotel after that party's demise, just ahead of Schultz's, to see if by chance the "Jewish gangs" had been working in concert against the "Italian gangs" (Luciano, et al., even with guys like Lepke and Gurrah and Siegel and Lansky spoiling their ethnic purity). Valentine spoke of a "racial war of extermination," citing one impressive item in support of it: each and every victim in the October 23
carnage, in Newark and Manhattan, was Jewish. So were the Ambergs, for that matter, but there was at least a smidgen of reason to believe that their little war could have been with Schultz rather than the Italians.
The Commissioner said, finally, that he had information that four members of Detroit's Purple Gang had been
imported to New Jersey for the rubout of the Dutchman and his high command, but this would prove to be way off base.
Before that statement was made, a 2l-year-old killer named Albert Stein, alias Stern and nicknamed "The Teacher," had emerged as one of the prime early suspects in the New York end of the mission that wiped out the
Dutchman's gang. Stein, a junkie under indictment in the slaying of Patrolman John J. Frazer in Brooklyn in 1934, had been credited with seven gangland murders in a brief but busy span as a triggerman. The slayings of both Joe and Pretty Louis Amberg also seemed to the police to have his brand on them and when Marty Krompier was shot there was a report that three of the witnesses had identified photos of Stein as the barber shop gunman. All this proved academic just three days later when Stein was found dead in a broken-down Newark rooming house, evidently a suicide by gas.
For a while, the scatter-gun speculation also included the notion that Chink Sherman might have been the guy who killed the Dutchman. This proved to be terribly deficient, for when that Catskill grave yielded up the Chinaman on November 4 it was abundantly clear that he had been dead for quite a while, so thoroughly shot up and mutilated that he could never have been identified except for his fingerprints. The discovery of the cadaver, by the way, furnished some good public relations for the Dutchman, however
belatedly. It turned out that not long before he met his doom Sherman had come up with a million dollars worth of heroin from Romania only to suffer a summary rejection when he offered Schultz a piece of the profits in return for some help on the distribution end through the policy operation.
The story was that Schultz not only spurned the big score but also proceeded to take away some pieces Sherman had in the restaurant racket. When that happened, the guy began to talk about dipping into the numbers game to repair his
fortunes--and that probably explains his sudden exit better than anything else; the Dutchman never could abide the idea of poachers in the Harlem preserve.
As far as any live Schultz suspects were concerned, the police on both sides of the water were rather anxious to talk to Lucky Luciano and Johnny Torrio after the mass slayings in Newark, but Luciano happened to be in Miami, taking the sun, and Torrio was in St. Petersburg looking into a deal for some of his Florida real estate holdings. A report that
Luciano had made a quick trip to Newark the night before that grotesque scene was played out in the Palace was never confirmed. Abner (Longy) Zwillman did show up on
November 1 for an audience with the Newark bluecoats, and he managed to satisfy all hands that while there may have been some suspected misdeeds in his speckled past he personally had no involvement in the last supper of Dutch Schultz & Co.
Down in Washington in mid-November, the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover took a dim view of the revelations in the Schultz papers, scratched together not just from the Dutchman's ledger sheets but even from the backs of envelopes, napkins and remnants of paper bags. Hoover was mildly amused by the incidental outlays in the juicy racket operation ("newspapers today, 21 cents." "cigarettes for bondsman, 15 cents," "carfare bondsman to Newark, 25 cents"), but the item of $827,253 taken into the house from September 2 to the week before the assassinations bothered him considerably.
"That means $1 million every two months was being paid to just one racketeer," Hoover said. "From that you can get some idea of the effect of racketeering on the community, and don't forget that all this money was collected when Dutch Schultz was supposed to be laying low, taking things easy, because of Federal prosecutions. His profits may have been much higher while he was 'in the clear.' It's a big business, run by big business methods. Schultz's accounts were
obviously kept by an expert accountant. The entries were in perfect order, just like the books of a big corporation. And Schultz, who was notoriously close-fisted, knew where every penny went, even to buying the morning papers."
Hoover also took chilly note of the ice payments. "There are sizeable expenditures too, mostly for protection," he said.
"The identity of the persons to whom this was paid is known, and they are all under sharp scrutiny." Who were those
persons? "Due to the fact that the Schultz murder case is under active investigation at the present time, I am reluctant to make the names of these persons public, but the spotlight of publicity will be turned upon them in due time."
Something happened to that spotlight, for the Dutchman's payoff roster never did suffer any wholesale exposure. Only one name would come out--Jimmy Hines--and that was years away.
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