WHEN THE AMBULANCES ROLLED INTO NEWARK CITY HOSPITAL with that badly mauled dinner party from the Palace Chop House, the two internes on surgical duty, Edward J. Yorke and Royal A. Schaaf, had 14 minutes to go before signing out on a 48-hour weekend break.
Instead, just after midnight, they formed the nucleus of a 20-man operating team which would go to work in relays for the next 27 hours and 20 minutes in a heroic but vain effort to reverse a judgment made by some professional men in another calling.
While it surely did not occur to the medical fraternity, the incidental stakes for Newark were rather high: if all four victims died, New Jersey's largest city would acquire the unhappy distinction of having served as host for the second largest multiple gangland execution in the nation's history. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Al Capone's adopted Chicago, just six years before, came quickly to mind as the lights burned through the long night at Police Headquarters. In that panorama of death, five card-carrying members of the Bugs Moran gang and two casual visitors had been lined up against a garage wall on North Clark Street and cut down in the withering fire of two machine guns and two shotguns. There was no suspense at all in arriving at the casualty toll in that one. It was just a matter of counting seven bodies.
In Newark, it was a cliff hanger from the start.
The first to go was the oldest and surely the man the enemy cared the least about, Otto Berman, the mob's Abbadabba and Damon Runyon's softhearted Regret.
Nobody was more amused than Runyon, by the way, when the first stories out of the Newark abattoir described Berman as a plug ugly who was one of the Dutch Schultz bodyguards. In The Bloodhounds of Broadway, where he made his debut as a Runyon character, Abbadabba was introduced with this mild description:
"Generally, he is talking about nothing but horses, and how he gets beat three dirty noses the day before at Belmont, or wherever the horses are running. In all the years I remember Regret, he must get beat ten thousand noses, and always they are dirty noses to hear him tell it."
Regret also turned up in Guys and Dolls, Blue Plate Special and Money from Home. Runyon sometimes identified him as a reformed gunbearer for Arnold Rothstein and Legs Diamond, but that was just local color. The sports writer-turned-author knew the blue-eyed Berman well, so well that when the end came in Newark he rushed right into print to set the record straight on the strong-arm bit. "He would have been about as efficient a bodyguard as a five-year-old child," Runyon wrote in Hearst's New York American. The closest the round man had ever come to physical force--on the record, in any event--was in a case of attempted rape back in 1916. It was his only arrest, and Berman beat it.
For a high roller who had touched the tightfisted Dutchman for $10,000 a week for a while, all tax-free, and who was once credited with handicapping 28 winners in 29 races, Berman departed the high life in such penury that no one could ever again dare to challenge the item of foolproof wisdom
which holds that all horseplayers die broke. There was $87.22 in his pockets when they carried him into the hospital, and all his known estate added up to was $7,000, strongly suggesting that there were days when Abbadabba had 28 losers in 29 races.
Berman, also known to the police as Dutch Otto, passed from the scene at 2:55 A.M. on October 24, just about four and a half hours after those uninvited guests had dropped in on the money counters in the Palace.
The next to go, as the autumn sun lit up the ragged Newark skyline at 6:30 A.M., was Abe Landau, who had all but bled to death through that severed artery in his neck even before they got him on the operating table. Landau, who went back to Schultz's early bootlegging days in The Bronx in 1929, had $344.10 on his person when they brought him in, and there was no evidence that he had left much more than that behind. And for a life of crime dating back at least to 1916, when he was 21, he passed from the scene with a rather skimpy police record. He paid a $2 fine for disorderly conduct in 1916 and served a sentence in the pen for felonious assault in the same year but then managed to stay out of the law's grasping arms until 1934, when he beat a homicide rap growing out of the sudden death of a fledgling Schultz rival in The Bronx. One of the nicknames the police had down for Landau was The Misfit, but it's rather hard to figure out what he had done to earn it. With the Dutchman, he always ranked very high: dependable, sure, loyal. On the nights when the guard detail came down to one man, even while Bo Weinberg was alive and well, it was a good bet that Landau would be the guy walking beside the policy magnate.
While the first two checkouts occurred in plenty of time to spruce up the Newark story for the early afternoon editions, Schultz and Lulu Rosenkrantz were to hold on a good deed longer.
The high drama, of course, centered around the third-floor recovery room which would be the Dutchman's last sanctuary from his enemies both inside and outside the law. On a bench in the corridor, a lonely deathwatch gathered early in the day--the gangster's mother, Mrs. Emma Neu Flegenheimer, and his sister Helen and her husband, Henry Orsprung, called Peanuts because he had charge of the vending machines in the Schultz speakeasies before his brother-in-law found him a minor job in the policy business.
Father McInerney, the priest Schultz had sent for, stayed with the family much of the time. While it was never quite clear how the Dutchman had come to know the cleric, it is possible that they had met in the Hudson County Jail when Schultz was tossed in there after his surrender on the tax warrant. That institution happened to be on the McInerney rounds as a chaplain. Schultz, with his flair for liberal postures, said only that he had come to know and admire Father McInerney after learning that he had set up his parish in Livingston at a time when Ku Klux Klan elements supposedly were making that New Jersey town a little uncomfortable for Catholics.
Mrs. Flegenheimer had heard about the shooting on the radio in her Bronx apartment not long after it happened, and in the morning she had a call about it from a girl she had never met or talked to and could have known of only through the newspapers, Frances Flegenheimer. Arthur had never told his mother about setting up housekeeping with Frances. Was it because the girl was a Catholic? Was it because she was only 18? Was it because he had another wife somewhere? These questions would never be answered, surely not by the Schultz side of the family.
The aging Emma Flegenheimer, indeed, professed to know as little about her son's flashy career as the affairs of his heart. Under gentle questioning by Newark's Deputy Director of Public Safety, Avitus J. Dougherty, she insisted that she had never been aware of her son's eminence in the underworld, despite his ample press notices over the preceding four years. "Arthur never told me anything about his business," she said. "I don't know why anybody would want to shoot him." She said she had seen him on October 15--she didn't say where--and that "he seemed very happy then."
And what about the immense fortune that had poured into Arthur's king-sized pockets? Had any provision been made for his mother? Mrs. Flegenheimer, left with the children when they were young, her husband having either vanished or died, said she was the beneficiary of a $2,500 insurance policy on her son's life--for which she had paid the premiums--and that she had no knowledge of any other funds. A bank account containing $5,000 did turn up, but it is doubtful whether much of it was left to cut up after Mrs. Flegenheimer and Frances went to court over its disposition.
In the hospital, Frances Flegenheimer was not nearly as much in evidence as the Dutchman's family. She was otherwise occupied most of the time because the police thought she fit the description of the "mystery woman," now very large in the headlines, who had visited Schultz in the Palace a couple of hours before the shootings. The theory at first was that this woman may have led the firing squad to the scene. This was quickly discounted once the authorities had Frances in custody and she admitted, after balking, that she was the one in the tavern. She said that a "man in green" had led her to Arthur--the only name anyone around him ever used, by the way--but she said she had no idea who the man was.
Alternately hysterical, weeping and defiant under the incessant interrogation, the girl said she left the tavern before nine o'clock because Arthur had urgent business there and had suggested that she go to the 30-cent movie around the corner, the Terminal, and come back afterwards. She said she returned sometime after eleven, saw the crowd outside the Palace, thought there had been a raid or something, and elected to go back to New York, And then? She said that when she got off the Hudson Tubes in Manhattan she bought a tabloid, read about the shoot-'em-up in Newark, proceeded to Jackson Heights, tucked herself into bed for the night, arose and called Arthur's mother around 9:30 A.M., and then made haste for the hospital.
Deputy Chief Haller wasn't exactly delighted with that story.
"She says she did nothing to get in touch with anyone until 9:30 the next morning, although she knew her husband was near death," he said. "Her actions were contrary to all that might be expected of a wife--even a gangster's wife--unless she isn't telling the truth."
There would be more in that vein, much more, but first the situation up on Fairmount Avenue turned extremely grave.
To go back a step, Abbadabba Berman's quick departure had reduced the battlefield party just enough to accommodate it perfectly to the little hospital's facilities: three operating rooms and three patients requiring emergency surgery. Once Abe Landau expired, Lulu Rosenkrantz, even though his case was deemed hopeless on the face of it, drew off the major medical talents because there was so much to operate on. And then Dr. Schaaf turned to an exploration of the devastated Schultz interior with the equally weary Dr. Yorke and Dr. Charles J. Calasibetta, the senior resident interne in surgery, who himself had been on duty since 8:00 A.M. the day before.
Dr. Calasibetta, now on the Medical Examiner's staff in Newark, recalls that October 23 happened to be a rather lively day even before the stretcher bearers started arriving from Park Street. He had handled a ruptured appendix, a perforated ulcer and an assortment of accident cases--a fair order for a surgeon-in-training drawing a skinny $20 a month by way of a paycheck. He recalls that the operation on the Dutchman, some 90 minutes, readily revealed the damage to the spleen, stomach, colon and liver but did not bare the full course of that rusty .45 slug. The penetrations of the posterior wall of the stomach and the gall bladder escaped the weary, hurrying medical sleuths. Dr. Yorke, who eventually moved on to California, confirmed this. "We were quite surprised at the autopsy table," he told the author, "when we noted what we had missed in surgery."
Dr. Harrison S. Martland, the Medical Examiner then and in years to come so rich in honors that the Medical Center which replaced the old City Hospital in 1955 would be named for him, made the same observation, perhaps more wryly, when he performed the autopsy. There's no suggestion of negligence here, of course, because an army of surgeons might well have been unable to pin down the wild, erratic journey of that one zigzagging bullet. Then there's a question as to whether it would have mattered anyway. Schultz, hemorrhaging internally, also was being assailed by the worst possible enemy--peritonitis--before they got him on the table. This was ahead of the time of sulfa and penicillin, so the patient very likely had little chance against the inflammation even though he seemed to weather the long operation itself.
Dr. Calasibetta recalls that once the Dutchman was in the ward 6 recovery room and out of the ether he showed early signs of a rally. "He coined his own name for the morphine," the doctor said, "and whenever he wanted another shot he could manage a smile, somehow, and say, 'How about another bon bon, Doc?' It was hard to turn the man down but in his shape the narcotic didn't help enough anyway."
As the day wore on, Schultz, at the outset the healthiest of the ill-fated quartet except for a single gallstone, began to sink rather rapidly. At 2:00 P.M., he called for Father Mclnerey, who had left the hospital briefly. The priest came back within half an hour and spent a few minutes with the dying man. When he came downstairs, the reporters asked him why he would minister to the Jewish Schultz.
"Because he sent for me," Father Mclnerney replied.
"What for?"
"He wants to die a Catholic."
"Will he die in the faith?"
"Yes. I baptized him and gave him the last rites of the church."
Even at that moment, another kind of farewell, drawn from the New Testament, was being delivered to the hospital's reception desk by a Western Union messenger. "As ye sow, so shall ye reap," said the wire. It was signed "Madam Queen of Policy," and it had come, of course, from Harlem's Mme. Stephanie St. Clair. This flamboyant figure, sometimes called the Tiger from Marseilles, truly had fought the Dutchman to the death. She not only had refused to yield her numbers bank to Schultz when he was on his triumphal armed march through the Negro community but also had gone to the Mayor and the District Attorney to protest the white mob's incursion into the multimillion dollar penny-ante game. That's the way Madam Queen played it; she didn't care if the whole town knew she was in policy so long as the white folks in the seats of power knew what the Dutchman was pulling off.
The St. Clair wire furnished nothing more than a grim tidbit for the army of newspapermen on the scene, held at bay most of the time in the hospital's oval driveway, but the heavy curtain around the dying moments of Arthur Flegenheimer was about to be penetrated.
A young reporter on the Newark Evening News staff, Harry Burke, who had the hospital on his beat and knew every corner of it, found a way to get around the wooden police barricades set before the elevators and the stairwell leading to the Dutchman's ward. Acting like a stray visitor, Burke slipped upstairs by way of a back staircase. He knew the nurse in charge on the third floor, Peggy Zartler, but he had an idea that he could do better with 20-year-old Mary Crawford, who had just finished her nurse's training in the same class with Kathleen Barneo, the girl who was shortly going to become Mrs. Harry Burke. Everything was going for the kid reporter that day. He found Mary Crawford at the big desk in the center of the floor, writing an entry into a less celebrated patient's chart. She had been in and out of the Dutchman's room helping Miss Zartler and the other nurses and she told Burke that the gangster appeared to be in delirium and was mumbling much of the time. She said that detectives working in relays had their ears to Schultz's lips but couldn't make any sense out of what he was saying. She had picked up a few things, though.
Burke slipped downstairs to the free phone in the emergency room and passed this intelligence on to his City Editor, Lloyd Flemly, not failing to include the more vivid sampling. plucked from the Dutchman's prose on Miss Crawford's quick trips to the sick room. Some of these valedictory utterances were explicit enough--"Journey's end. This is my death." And some weren't--"Let them come. I'm not afraid of anybody. I won't run. They're a bunch of fakers anyway."
When the News hit the streets early in the afternoon with these absorbing morsels, the police decided that it might be a good idea to supplement the scribblings of the detectives crowded around the bedside with a full stenographic record of the last words of Arthur Flegenheimer. Francis J. Long, the male secretary of Police Chief Harris, was ushered into the cramped 10-by-15-foot room at a moment when the patient's temperature had soared to 106 and he had been jabbering on and off for hours.
Long caught what he could. Sergeant Luke Conlon, head of the Newark Homicide Squad, stood alongside of him, dropping in questions now and then in the hope that in his extremity the dying racket overlord might let something slip that would either lead the local cops to the execution squad or perhaps tell the New York police some things they didn't know about the increasingly more affluent gangs in that playground. Up to that moment, an unofficial and possibly conservative estimate had put the roster of the New York dead in the underworld warfare since Repeal at 78. Dutch Schultz had to know about a goodly portion of those casualties, not to mention the sizeable band that had fallen earlier in his own two-year strife with Vincent Coll. Would his feverish rantings clear some unsolved murders off the books?
Francis Long took up his place near the bedside at 4:00 P.M. What he was able to make out, just the way he transcribed it, typing errors and all, follows. While much of it appears to be an incoherent jumble, the chapter which comes after the Dutchman's swan song will discuss the real identity of some of the men he was talking about and offer some insights into what he may have been trying to say on the way to his private hell.
