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"Well, I'd do it again. I was proud of him and I'll be proud to tell my children about their father."
-FRANCES FLEGENHEIMER
CHAPTER VIII
ORDEAL FOR FRANCES
ONCE DUTCH SCHULTZ EXPIRED, TO BE FOLLOWED AT 3:20 the next morning by the all but indestructible Lulu
Rosenkrantz, the spotlight turned on the woman--one of the women, surely--that he left behind.
Frances Flegenheimer faced a most difficult time mostly because the Newark authorities couldn't understand why
she hadn't turned right around and come back to those soiled precincts when she picked up the Daily Mirror in Manhattan and discovered that her one true love had suffered a rather serious bullet wound.
Deputy Police Chief Haller had a long session with the redhead on the afternoon of October 24 and simply could not be persuaded that she had gone off to bed, like any square wife on any square night when hubby was out of town, after reading the bad news. Haller thought that everything about Frances Flegenheimer was "highly suspicious." He didn't even care for the way the 21-year-old carried off the role of the grieving widow, not even when the tears welled up in those blue-gray eyes. The hard-boiled Chief never thought there were enough tears. To him, the girl was "more angry than sad."
That was harsh, to be sure, but Frances had furnished the basis for it with her own fibs. She
initially denied having been in
Newark at all when the guns went off, saying she had last seen her Arthur at the Robert Treat on the preceding Sunday. Haller
wasn't buying that. He had no less than three witnesses who could place her in the Palace some two hours before the shooting.
He brought in one of them, Frank
Fredericks, and the bartender took one look and said yes, that was the woman who came in to see the Dutchman. It was only then
that Frances Flegenheimer decided that a little more candor might be in order.
"I shall tell you the truth," she said, but there was a fast qualification:
"Why should I be mixed up in this thing? Just because I am married to this man? I don't want to be mixed up in this thing."
The Essex County Prosecutor, William A. Wachenfeld, was in this particular session at Police Headquarters,
and under his softer questioning Frances finally told her story about seeing Schultz, getting packed off to the movies,
returning to the tavern at 11:20 P.M. and departing for home when she saw the crowd outside.
"I thought it was a raid," she said.
Who else was in the Palace while she was there?
Just Lou (Rosenkrantz) and Arthur, she said. No one else? Well, a man named Mike, in a light suit, took her to Arthur in the back room. What about Landau and Berman? Lou was the only one she saw with Arthur. Did she know Marty Krompier? "I don't want to answer any questions."
Here there was a break for another vain trip to the bedside but later that evening,
indeed at the very moment that Dutch Schultz was being pronounced dead, Haller had the girl in for another
question-and-answer period:
Q. Have you any desire to aid the police?
A. I don't know of any men.
Q. Aren't you interested?
A. I can't see how I can be of help. The first time I lied.
Q. Do you know Marty Krompier?
A. Maybe I do and maybe I don't.
This sort of thing prompted the District Attorney to decide that Frances ought to be detained as a material witness and, while an attorney from the Dutchman's legal battery protested that the whole proceeding was "un-American and
inhuman," she was held the next day in $10,000 bail. Three of the other material witnesses, Jack Friedman, Ben Birkenfeld and King Lou, were let out on $1,000 bonds.
For Frances Flegenheimer, now looking badly frayed in her role as the child bride of Dutch Schultz, the worst was yet to come. She had that last visit with Arthur 15 minutes before the end and her tough guy's terrified, small boy's pleading ("...pull me out, I am half crazy. They won't let me get up; they died [sic] my shoes") would sound in her ears forever. She was back on Haller's grill before Arthur died but it was 10:30 P.M. when she learned that she was going to be arrested and 2:00 A.M. before she was finally told that she
wouldn't have to go to the hospital any more. "I'm all right," she sobbed then. "He's gone. Gone." Then she broke down and someone produced a blanket and a pillow and they let her stretch out on a desk. In the morning, a court appearance, with her auburn tresses in terrible disarray, her face covered by a handkerchief to foil the cameramen--and a bombshell.
"I wouldn't be surprised," Haller told the reporters after the hearing, "if another woman appears to lay claim to the title of Mrs. Schultz."
It was an indelicate way to put it at best but Haller, stubbornly clinging to the notion that Frances may have led the executioners to the Palace, even unwittingly,
wasn't stopping there. He conceded that the girl was the mother of the Dutchman's infants--Anne Davis Flegenheimer, named
for the Schultz mouthpiece and born on June 26, 1934, and John David, born the preceding July 25 while Schultz was on trial
upstate--but he observed that there was an interesting exchange of correspondence among the items picked up in the gangster's
suite at the Robert Treat. He was talking about a packet of missives bearing the salutation "Poppy" and
signed "Mommy." Without producing any texts for the more
dedicated historians, Haller read from one small sample: "Poppy, I am so lonesome for you. Wish I could come East and
join you. We are looking forward to a reunion. Mommy."
The Chief's saucy recitation didn't end there.
One letter," he went on, "had a picture of a woman and two children, but the woman was not
this Mrs. Schultz and the children appeared too old to be hers."
This morsel, the icing on the cake for the Roman feast the newspapers were enjoying while the Dutchman's remains were in storage in the Newark morgue, needed no
qualification. The Chief said that Frances Flegenheimer had been treated to the dubious pleasure of a peek at
the photo and had agreed that the children in it were nothing at all like the ones she had brought forth for her Arthur.
Was there any lingering doubt about the possible existence of another Mrs. Arthur Flegenheimer? The
unchivalrous Haller's communiqué also included the revelation that Frances Flegenheimer had never been joined to the broken-nosed Romeo
in any civil marriage ceremony; all the girl had, or said she had, was a "letter of contract" formalizing her
union with the guy.
This item never was explained, even when the tight-lipped Frances sat for two lengthy interviews in 1938 with
Maureen McKernan, one of the legendary women reporters, then on The New York Post. Frances just wouldn't talk about it.
She did say that she had met Arthur in 1932 at the Maison Royal, one of the stops on his night-crawling rounds. She said she was
impressed with his good English, his good manners, his quiet dress and his unassuming ways. She said it was love at first sight,
like it happened the first time he handed her his $4.95 fedora and looked into her limpid eyes. She said the
union took place three months later and had always been harmonious in the three years before that pistol broke it up. She told
Maureen McKernan that 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. She said she would always treasure
the bracelet because "Arthur said it represented his life and interests," which made one wonder why the Dutchman hadn't added a bottle of beer or a gold policy slip or two to the little trinket.
But then Frances didn't care for the image of Arthur as a plug-ugly and an unlettered hoodlum. She said he loved
the better things in life, like the printed word; she said she had finished reading Hervey Allen's jumbo-sized
best-selling Anthony Adverse to him at the Robert Treat just a few nights before the end. That gargantuan project,
the ultimate test for any pair of lovebirds holed up in an unfamiliar bed, should have cleared up any question about all the
cozy hours the happy couple had spent together in Newark in those last weeks.
Did Frances Flegenheimer have any regrets?
No. She said she was proud of Arthur and would be proud to tell the children about him. "He used to say that the Prohibition law was made by racketeers and that
he was doing a public service providing liquor for people who wanted it. He said he and his kind were victims of a vicious
law." And the policy racket? Frances skipped it.
While the Post interview did not touch on the "letter of contract" bit, it is entirely
conceivable that the Dutchman, out of his vast store of legal knowledge, all acquired the hard way, knew that a man also
could get arrested just for having more than one legal-wedded wife. But Frances scoffed at this. "There was no other woman," she said.
This item would never be settled.
The "Mommy" of the intriguingly mysterious Newark
letters, otherwise unidentified, was lost to history at the outset, but she wasn't alone very long. Even while the
newsprint was still wet on
Haller's peek-a-boo revelations, the New York Daily News hit the streets with this tantalizing headline:
DUTCH HAD WIFE 3;
HID RICHES FOR HER
In this account, so blazing hot that the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate
copyrighted it lest it be pilfered by us second-story men on the other gazettes, it turned out that the Dutchman's
real love was a party named Ann,
nothing more, and that his devotion to this babe was so all-encompassing that he had made "magnificent financial
provision"
for her in the form of a cool million dollars nestling in a Boston bank vault. Schultz, said this News
scoop, "was haunted by the notion that Ann would be cut off without a cent when the inevitable gang guns took their
toll of him. Associates revealed that he often commented on the
comparative poverty at death of Jack Diamond and other mobsters who've passed on. He was determined to be smarter than they were. So he put $1,000,000 in the Boston vault, with
the proviso that it was never to be touched except by Ann."
Oh, that lucky Ann.
And oh, that unlucky Frances. No vault and nothing under the rug and one embarrassment piling on another. Even while she was on the hot seat in the prosecutor's stuffy office a hearse from Manhattan, dispatched to pick up Arthur, was delivering a hefty painted doll to the Newark morgue for one last glimpse of the remains.
Francis X. Ginley, then a medical secretary for Dr. Martland and still in the Medical Examiner's office today,
recalls that the driver of the hearse parked the vehicle two blocks away to avoid the nosy reporters assigned to the morgue and
then approached him. "Have you ever seen a gangster's moll?" death's jockey asked. "They have some pips. I got
one in the car. Can I bring her in?" Ginley said he could indeed, so the driver scurried off and returned presently with a
flashy peroxide blonde in her mid-thirties, straight out of the Police Gazette or the Minsky burlesque line. The woman
identified herself as Mrs. Schultz and asked could she have one last look at the deceased? She was ushered inside and Sal Alfone,
keeper of the morgue, slid the body out of its chilly wall receptacle and gingerly withdrew the white sheet from the face,
whereupon the blonde, in sections, started to sag to the cold white floor.
Ginley and the hearse driver caught her just in time. Revived with a glass of water, "Mrs. Schultz" asked if she could
have the Dutchman's effects, like that blue
sapphire ring and the gold wristwatch the papers had mentioned. Ginley said no, the police had impounded everything and she
would have to wait.
How long?" the blonde asked, picking up strength now.
I don't know ma'am," the Medical Examiner's young helper replied. "That's up to the cops or the D.A."
The bodies--the Dutchman and the splendidly endowed visitor, that is--were then loaded on the wagon, parked at a side door now, but
Ginley had not seen the last of the women in the amorous Flegenheimer's other life.
Six weeks later, on a mission to City Hospital to pick up some papers for Dr. Martland, Ginley overheard a
conservatively dressed matron inquiring about the Schultz effects at the reception desk. "Just a minute," he said to
the clerk. "You better be sure this is Schultz's widow. There was one at the morgue when we had him over there--and there was
another one in the papers." The matron, perhaps ten years older than the frowzy blonde who had made that grim trip with the
hearse, turned an icy glare on Ginley, ignoring the clerk at the desk. "That must have been his lady friend," she
said. "I happen to be Mrs. Flegenheimer."
"Maybe she has proof," the clerk submitted.
"I most certainly do," the woman said, ruffling in an oversized black pocketbook and producing some legal-looking
documents which the interloper Ginley wasn't invited to examine. The clerk glanced at the papers, made an interoffice call,
and then told the woman that all of Schultz's effects had been taken out of the hospital by the police. That was the end of it.
Unfortunately, all the heat was off by then and nobody bothered to find out whether this woman was the "Mommy" of
those scented hotel room epistles, or the Daily News's filthy-rich Ann--or who. Nobody ever tried to find out who the
petitioner at the morgue was either. That one could not have been Frances Flegenheimer, of course; she was in
custody then, and Frank Ginley would have known her on sight anyway. He had seen her picture in the papers.
For Frances at that time, there was still no peace.
The police wanted to know more, a helluva lot more, about that fellow "Mike" who had ushered her to Arthur's side in the tavern. You will recall that the amiable bondsman, Max Silverman, had mentioned a party named Mikie at the Palace bar. The cops had an enormous curiosity about all this because they wanted to know about the character who was supposed to have been twirling that key chain outside the door before the enemy patrol made its spectacular entrance. The way the detectives had it, Frances had been brought to the Park Street rendezvous by a man in a pea-green suit and it was a man in that same garish outfit who was on the other end of that key chain. They counted four guys on the death squad--the lead gunner, the shotgun artist, the wheelman, and the fashion plate in green.
Well, it took time but after a while Frances began to remember some things about Mike-and Mike turned out to be none other than Mickey the Mock Marks, previously mentioned in this chronicle as one of the stray inhabitants of the Palace on that bad night. Of course, it wasn't as simple as all that, because the Mock denied Frances' story with some vehemence. Indeed, he denied knowing the girl at all. And if he didn't know her, how could he have delivered her unto Arthur Flegenheimer? So it came down to a question of who the liar was, and on November 6 Frances and Mr. Marks were brought together in a confrontation in Prosecutor Wachenfeld's office.
Q. (to Frances): Do you know this man?
A. Yes. He is the man who met me at the door of the Chop House and led me through the
tavern to my husband in the back room.
Q. (to Marks): Now that Mrs. Flegenheimer has recognized you, what have
you got to say?
A. She lied. I don't know her. I never saw her before.
I never saw her at the Palace that night.
That settled nothing, of course, but then there was no rush. Marks happened to be on ice as a material
witness and his memory just needed some thawing out. After a while, still insisting that he didn't know the girl, he remembered
that he had seen her in the tavern not once but three times, at 2:00 P.M., 6:00 P.M. and 9:00 P.M., on that ill-starred
October 23. Otherwise, his own story never changed. He said he went there to see the Chancellor-of-the-Exchequer-in-exile,
Lulu Rosenkrantz, and for no other reason.
There was a faintly damning item in the Mock's dossier just the same. New York detectives prowling around his
Bronx apartment came up with a key chain adorned with the figure of a white horse just like the one the suspected
fingerman in Newark had been twirling around. Silly, said the Mock, because he happened to be frittering away his time in a
nearby night club when everything hit the fan, not to
mention his pal Lulu, in the Chop House. Marks evidently was a victim of the inevitable over-reporting on the crime stories
of those days, because he did appear to be guilty of nothing more reprehensible than hanging out with the Schultz mob on the
wrong night. There was one flurry while he was in custody, however. An anonymous caller asked the Newark cops to tell the Mock,
please, that he would be knocked off if he did any talking, but that may have been a prank. After a while Marks, a sometime
chauffeur and handyman for the Dutchman in happier days, was turned loose with a mild admonition to the effect that he ought
to be more careful about the company he kept.
Apart from that stray character in the assassination drama, Max Silverman also had a problem
with the cops about his social itinerary on the fatal evening, but he too came out lily white as far as the fingering bit was
concerned. He had not one but five witnesses, including his own favorite hatcheck girl, to attest under oath that he was killing
time in another joint, the Blue Mirror, when the assassins reached the Palace. Beyond that, it figured that the bondsman had a
more urgent interest in collecting some cash from his friend Schultz than in having him staring helplessly into the business
end of a .45 with his yo-yo in his hand.
The Schultz work sheets tended to bear that out, for the records picked up by the cops showed that
while $18,000 already had been shoveled along to that expensive New Jersey legal battery another $8,000 was still due.
Silverman, you will recall, said that he had gone to the tavern to collect $10,500 for the lawyers and a few bob for
himself--and who would quarrel over the trifling difference between the $8,000 on the Dutchman's books and the $10,500
the bondsman said was due?
Speaking of money, it is well to pay an additional tribute here to the impeccable accounting habits of the mobster. Against such moderately impressive figures as that legal bite, one of the incidental items on the sheets showed a few cents owed on a couple of novels (Anthony Adverse wasn't enough?) borrowed from a circulating library by Arthur Flegenheimer, a self-confessed bookworm from way back.
The numbers, of course, from that whopping $827,253 income item down to the nickel-and-dime outlays,
turned out to have no meaning at all for Frances Flegenheimer. She always insisted that she had been left without means
because J. Richard Davis had made off with Arthur's available loose change. "Davis is the only Judas my husband ever
knew," she
said some time later. "Davis was the only one close enough to him to know how much he actually had. That Arthur
died almost a pauper is unbelievable. Davis has lived in luxury while Arthur's family has been struggling to get along."
The barrister, for his part, said he never knew where the Schultz rainy day money, once estimated at $7 million, had gone. He
said the Dutchman used to keep his spare bills, always in the larger denominations and frequently in gold banknotes because the
guy just adored that kind of paper, in a specially made steel box three feet long and two feet wide. He said he meant to go hunt
it up himself some day because his deceased client owed him, oh, $100,000 or so. He didn't say whether he would divvy up anything
beyond the 100 large with Frances or any of Arthur's other bereft survivors if he ever happened to stumble on that dandy box.
The fact is, Frances and her small brood could have used some help. Two months after the assassination she had to go to court
to establish her claim on two life insurance policies which her ever-loving soulmate had switched from his mother's name to hers
in 1933, the year after their odd union was sealed. The policies turned out to be worth $5,000 each, hardly a regal bounty for a
man of Arthur Flegenheimer's affluence, even in the Thirties. Hell, the Dutchman once blew that much on a bond for his bail-jumping
pal
Vincent Coll.
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