THERE MUST HAVE BEEN A DEEP HURT SOMEWHERE IN ARTHUR Flegenheimer's earliest days, because while he could be quite garrulous about his young manhood in The Bronx, he never wanted to talk about the Yorkville time. Indeed, it wasn't until he turned up for his tax trial in Syracuse in the spring of 1935, sitting for his first
(and last) full-dress press conference, that he conceded that he was really a product of the Manhattan area which around the
turn of the century had begun to draw off huge numbers of German-Jewish immigrants from the Lower East Side ghetto. He said he was born at 1690 Second Avenue, off 89th Street, on August 6, 1902.
He said his parents were not religious and had never taken him to a synagogue. He said his father was a glazier, then a
baker for a while and then ran a livery stable. Where was he now? "He died when I was 14." The story before
that was that Herman Flegenheimer had deserted his small brood in 1910, when Arthur was eight. What about that? "He just
died, that's all," Schultz said, cutting off the subject.
Whenever it was, Emma Neu Flegenheimer moved out of Yorkville to the lower Bronx. Schultz went to Public
School 12, where the principal was Dr. John F. (Jafsie) Condon, the man who in 1932 would toss the $50,000 ransom money for the Lindbergh baby over the wall in St. Raymond's Cemetery. Schultz said he stayed in PS 12 until the sixth grade, and
liked it, especially the courses in history and composition, but had to quit at 14 to help support the family. "It was tough bucks them days," he said, and, perhaps mindful of all the money the U.S. was trying to pry from him at the time, like $92,000 and some change, he added, "It's tough bucks now." He said he sold papers and cut-rate two-cent "El"-to-subway transfers around the busy station at 149th Street and Third Avenue in the South Bronx's Hub, ran errands, worked as an office boy. "When I got a little older," he went on, "I worked at printing. I was a feeder and pressman. I worked in quite a few places. I worked at composition roofing, too, when I was 17." Would he go back to roofing if he beat the
government's case and wanted to stay out of trouble? "I don't know," he said, smiling faintly over the silly question. Schultz passed over something else that happened in his 17th year--the first of the 13 arrests which would mark the career he ultimately chose over the more pedestrian occupations.
In December 1919, he was convicted of unlawful entry and sentenced to an indeterminate term in the Blackwell's Island Penitentiary. This old gray stone pile, put up over the East River in 1832 because the treacherous tides would make escape almost impossible, proved so uncongenial to young Arthur that he had to be transferred to Westhampton Prison Farms, near Goshen. The boy didn't care too much for that correctional institution either, so he broke out. He was
recaptured within 15 hours and two more months were tagged on to the only prison sentence he would ever suffer. He did 15 months all together.
Apart from his arrest in the original tax case and again in Perth Amboy when he turned himself in four weeks before the Palace shoot-'em-up, Schultz's varied record included brief brushes with the law, under a splendid variety of names, for everything from such mundane items as disorderly conduct (1926 and 1928) to grand larceny (1921) to felonious assault (1924, 1930 and 1931) to assault and robbery (1929), robbery with a gun (1929), and Sullivan Law (1931) to homicide with a gun (1928). Asked about all this once, the glib Dutchman had an answer ready.
"That solves itself," he said. "Every time the cops started one of their supposed clean-ups and all, they'd send some cop over to wherever I was located and they'd charge me with anything. Then some A. & P. clerk would come and identify me for some stickup just to get their name in the papers, and next day I'd be turned out. That's how come I got a record."
Was it that simple?
No.
The tousle-haired Arthur, a pool shark and a kid with an eye for the easy dollar, glorying in a never-proven reputation as a tough guy, found kindred souls in one slum neighborhood after another as the struggling Emma Flegenheimer moved around The Bronx. Still a stripling, Arthur began to
hang around the Bergen Social Club, home of the Bergen Gang, near the Yankee Stadium of the early Babe Ruth days. Somewhere along the way, Arthur fell in with a local
hoodlum named Marcel Poffo whose substantial police record had endowed him with some note. Only a year or so Arthur's senior, Poffo made it all the way from simple exercises in burglary to post-graduate efforts in bank robberies before somebody dumped his bullet-and-knife-riddled body onto a lonely piece of real estate near the Westchester Country Club in Harrison in 1933. In the beginning, he served as Arthur's drill sergeant in basic training: boosting packages off delivery trucks, looting the neighborhood stores, breaking into
apartments, sticking up dice games that wouldn't pay for protection. Little things like that. It was in this period that Arthur carelessly got caught cleaning out that Bronx flat. Between Blackwell's Island and Westhampton, he came back into the streets suitably hardened and deemed to be entitled to the new name of Dutch Schultz, supposedly borrowed from a much-feared brawler in the early days of the enemy Frog Hollow Gang.
Now, long out of his knickers, wearing a jaunty cap and chewing tobacco, Arthur also enjoyed an occasional glimpse at the more affluent citizens of the Dry Decade as they trooped into the Hub's Criterion Restaurant, operated by Billy Gibson, one-time manager of Gene Tunney and Benny Leonard, or into Legs Diamond's Bronx Theatrical Club across the way. It is altogether conceivable that these envious peeks into the higher social life of The Bronx suggested to the boy that there was money in beer and liquor even at a moment when the ruling fathers in Washington had declared all spirits null, void, evil, and against the law as well.
There is a famous retired detective in The Bronx, laden with honors, who knew L'il Arthur in those days and never ceased to wonder over his meteoric rise. This is Fred
Schaedel, the big, good-natured cop who served as the human target the day the celebrated Francis (Two-Gun) Crowley earned his nickname. It happened in March 1931 when a brother-in-law of Crowley's invited Schaedel to a midtown office building to accept the surrender of the youthful
desperado, wanted in a double murder in The Bronx. Crowley did show up, and he let the detective relieve him of his shooting iron. Then he changed his mind, drew a smaller model out of a shirt sleeve, sprayed Schaedel with bullets in the pelvis, bladder and thigh, and escaped. Even while the detective was still recuperating, Crowley was trapped in a West Side rooming house on May 7 in a Hollywood-style shootout with 150 cops, finally taken by Detective Johnny Broderick, and put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing eight months later. So much for that. The Dutch Schultz that Schaedel knew had his moments of bad temper but could never be equated with a gun-crazed animal like Francis Crowley.
Schaedel remembers Schultz in the old Morrisania district as one of the street-corner toughs in a gang which also
included the handsome Vincent Coll and a boy named Thomas (Fatty) Walsh, who also would go on to worse things.
Schaedel lived in the same neighborhood and occasionally had to fight his way past those guys, especially when he was
escorting his kid sister home from her piano lessons. Schultz's later descriptions of all his earnest labors as a boy always amused the cop, although he did recall that a roofer in the neighborhood had at times succeeded in getting Arthur and some of his playmates to work for him. The Flegenheimers were in such dire straits then that Arthur's mother was functioning as the janitor of a tenement; in her time she had also taken in washing to feed the children and while Arthur always said his family was not religious, people in that building recalled a familiar sight: little Emma Flegenheimer buying kosher chickens for the traditional Friday family dinner.
Somewhere in this period our hero, a bare 19 and already in police hands three times, on his burglary conviction and in a larceny case under the name of Charles Harmon and an assault case in his own name, figured in an episode so remarkable that it would be aired in the United States Senate 18 years later.
Arthur Flegenheimer, of all people, became a Deputy Sheriff in The Bronx, appointed by Edward J. Flynn, then Sheriff of that borough but destined for much larger things. Schultz was appointed in July 1925 and held his brass potsy until he made the mistake of getting picked up in a raid on Jack Diamond's Bronx club after a shooting there in the winter of 1926. That arrest made Schultz an ex-Deputy Sheriff, but it did not inconvenience him in any other way.
Flynn, in time Boss of The Bronx and the single most influential Democratic machine leader in the nation, helped Franklin Delano Roosevelt along the path to the White House and in 1943 Mr. Roosevelt returned the favor by naming him his Ambassador to Australia. It was then that the matter of Deputy Sheriff Arthur Flegenheimer came up again, figuring rather prominently in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearings on the nomination.
Flynn, in his defense, said that when he named that Flegenheimer fellow, among "several hundred" simultaneous appointments, he did not know the man was something less than an adornment in the Borough of Universities. In his rebuttal when the thing was initially raised by Tom Dewey in his 1938 race for District Attorney, Flynn had made the additional point that law enforcement in The Bronx was so stern and relentless that once a police ax squad demolished his headquarters early in the bootlegging game "Schultz never operated in our county." This was grievously in error, of course, since the Dutchman continued to run his beer business from The Bronx until the very day that Repeal knocked him out. In any case, with his qualifications under challenge on issues beyond the matter of that badge for the budding gangster in his bailiwick, Ed Flynn withdrew his name rather than let the nomination face the test of a floor fight and a certain close vote.
Why would Arthur Flegenheimer want to be an unpaid Deputy Sheriff, among his other aspirations? For the same reason that Lulu Rosenkrantz took the trouble to pick up a badge in New Jersey years later when the now grown-up mobsters had to spend some time over there. The badge gave a man the right to carry a gun without getting arrested for it.
Somewhere in the period in his life when, with Ed Flynn's help, he enlisted on the side of the law, Arthur did engage in an occupation which while only faintly illegal never was
included in the employment dossier he furnished for the press. He was a sometime helper on the wagons of the brothers Otto and Jake Gass, who had a small trucking business until
prohibition taught them that there was more money in carrying beer than almost anything else. Similarly, a friend of Arthur's named Joey Noe (pronounced Noy), whose father was a beer pipe cleaner, was finding out that there was more money in the barrel than in the cleaning of the pipes. The brew cost $3 or $4 a keg to make then, went to the illicit distributors for $8 or $9 and brought $18 or $19 in the speakeasies. For both Joey and Arthur, these simple economics had considerable appeal. Joey made the first move: he set up a hole-in-the-wall speakeasy of his own in a Brook Avenue tenement,
christened it the Hub Social Club, and eventually took Arthur in with him. This was in 1928, and it was the beginning of a business partnership that would be sundered only by enemy guns.
Joey and Arthur, both in their mid-twenties, set up a series of other watering places with their Brook Avenue profits and it took them no time at all to decide that they might as well furnish the beer for their rivals as well. All this required was three old trucks and a connection with a brewer named Frankie Dunn in Union City, New Jersey--and some muscle. It was just like the movies of the time. Somebody came in, tilted his fedora back on his head, ordered a beer, licked his lips, made a face, said something about the brew being unfit for human consumption, asked where the slop was coming from, and then said, "Well, from now on ya gonna buy it from us." After that, you bought it from "us" or "us" came back with some helpers and wrecked your joint, never failing to open up all the taps in the process.
Joey and Arthur, enormously persuasive, had to do nothing more than dispose of some competing beer-runners to set up what amounted to a monopoly in the central portion of the borough, fanning out from their own flagship operations in the Mott Haven section.
As in any enterprise nourished by the profit motive, of course, the two chums did run into some spoilsports, notably a pair of brothers named John and Joe Rock who had
established a foothold in The Bronx while Joey and Arthur were still standing around on street corners and bothering the nicer people, like Fred Schaedel. John Rock stepped aside with a decent show of early resistance but Joe, made of sterner Irish stuff, refused to withdraw from the beer business. He paid a very high price: he was kidnapped one night, beaten, hung by the thumbs on a meat hook and then blindfolded with a strip of gauze which, so the story goes, had been dipped into a mixture containing the drippings from a gonorrhea infection. Whatever the potion was, Joe Rock came out of it a blind man--and even at that there was a story that the family had to ante up a $35,000 ransom to get back what was left
of him.
This lesson was not lost on the remnants of the bootlegging fraternity. It hardly could have been, for by this time Joey and Arthur had some imposing helpmates around them. Bo Weinberg was one of their persuaders. Vincent Coil and his kid brother, Peter, were in the organization. Larry Carney, a very tough customer and an early Schultz loyalist, was on hand, along with Fatty Walsh, who later became an Arnold Rothstein bodyguard and died under a hail of bullets in a Coral Gables card game. Joey Rio, just coming up in the rackets and due to stake out East Harlem for himself, handled occasional strong-arm assignments. So did Edward (Fats) McCarthy, also known as Edward Popke and John the Polack, the much-vaunted trigger man who in time would split away to the rebel Coll force and later still pick up such extraordinary credits--unconfirmed, of course--as the
assassinations both of Legs Diamond and of Mr. Coll himself. Troops of the McCarthy caliber made the Bronx combination a force to be reckoned with at the outset. You could take over a South American government with a band like that.
The operation grew so fast, dealing the hard stuff as well as beer, that the ferried spirits from Jersey, too slow, had to be supplemented by deals with Frenchy Dillon and Jay Culhane, who had brewery operations on both sides of the river. Now an expanded fleet began to rumble up the West Side and over the bridges into The Bronx or ride the cobblestones of upper Broadway down from Yonkers, generally traveling at night to some 17 drops and hardly ever disturbed by the federal liquor snoops, which tells you something about that piece of hypocritical frippery called Prohibition.
One of the Noe-Schultz drops, an underground affair called "The Tins," was so elaborate it was practically a showplace. Near the Mott Haven railroad yards, it had disappearing elevators which took empty beer trucks down into a huge loading area and sent them up fully packed and on their way not only to Bronx outlets but eventually moving as well into Manhattan's upper West Side and Washington Heights and
down into Yorkville and Harlem. The modest little wholesale operation was now a big business. As it grew, the young entrepreneurs also found themselves buying beer from such gentlemen as Owney Madden and William V. (Big Bill) Dwyer; they were on the big time.
By this time, having outgrown the Brook Avenue GHQ, Noe and Schultz moved into an office building on East 149th Street and set themselves up a command post befitting both their broadened stature and its attendant dangers. The inner walls of their office were lined with steel and the front door was similarly bullet-proofed. To visit with the owners, you had to get past a character called Blind Sam who wasn't blind at all. He sat behind a ten-inch peephole and looked you over, and if you got past him you encountered two other guys with rifles at the ready.
So nobody was foolish enough to bother the Bronx playmates while they worked out of that imitation Fort Knox--nobody, that is, but the police. Fred Schaedel, who went way back with Joey Noe and had been confirmed with him in the same Catholic church, recalls that the ax raid which chased that operation off 149th Street, the bust that Boss Flynn had mentioned, turned up some rather interesting furnishings: a 12-gauge shotgun, a loaded magazine for a Thompson submachine gun, two brand new .38s, two loaded and well-used .45s equipped to carry silencers, and perhaps 2,000 rounds of ammo, like enough to start a small war. The owners, of course, were not on the premises when the law dropped in, wrecked the joint, and went away shaking its collective head. Joey and Arthur had come a long way from the original two-bit gin mill where to see the proprietors you just went up to the rough oak bar and stated your business and a
gentleman with a bulge under his left shoulder came out and delivered you into a creepy back room office.
This period was not without its humor, by the way. Former General Sessions Judge Edward J. Breslin, who was an
Assistant District Attorney in The Bronx at the time, recalled an arrest of the Dutchman that might have been open to
question. It seems that our hero sampled too much of his own bootleg brand in a Third Avenue speakeasy one day and, feeling the need of some fresh air, staggered out to his Packard touring sedan, curled up in the back seat and went to sleep after taking the precaution of wrapping a fist securely around a heavy wad of bills reposing in his left pants pocket. A short time later, Schultz was in the Morrisania station house when Breslin, who knew him, came in on some
business.
"What are you in for this time, Dutch?" Breslin asked.
"Me?" came the reply. "Disorderly conduct or something, but they should have booked the bum who brought me in instead."
Breslin asked why.
"I was sleepin' in my car when I felt some guy yankin' on my pocket, tryin' to get my roll, and it was this cop and when I wake up and grab his hand he arrests me."
The Dutchman beat that pinch, but it was one of the last of the lighter moments for him. Things were about to take a grim turn.
On the night of October 15, 1928, Arthur and Joey Noe, all but inseparable, dropped into the Swanee Club under the famous Apollo Theater on West 125th Street, Harlem's main drag. Not too many years back, Schultz was just a penny-ante thief and Noe was a kid helping his father clean beer pipes.
Now they were a pair of very prosperous dealers in the product that the Reverend Billy Sunday liked to call "Hell's best friend" and they were taking time out to sample some of the opposition's stuff. They had some business downtown, but they had hours to spare and there weren't many places in New York more congenial than the Swanee.
The Harlem watering spot, also known as Joe Ward's Uptown Club, played to the more affluent blacks as well as the white swells from downtown, 400 at a time. Its adornments included long-stemmed hostesses and twelve (12) chorus girls who didn't wear too much and stood out nicely under a rotating bank of colored lights. The decor featured a soft, pleasant Southern motif, with cardboard riverboats moving along a track on the wall and cotton fields for a backdrop. And the club had the best in bands and headline acts like the beautiful Evelyn Nesbit, the girl whose love had prompted millionaire Harry K. Thaw to go and kill the architect Stanford White (Evelyn, you remember, said Mr. White violated her when she was very young) back in 1906.
Miss Nesbit had all kinds of songs, including novelty numbers. On a given
night, you might walk in and hear her singing something like, When the banana skins are falling, I'll come sliding back to you.
And that wasn't all. The Swanee had an even more important lure for men who lived dangerously. It was neutral ground, where no man would dream of firing a gun in anger. The rule was that if you came in and encountered a rival mobster you had one drink and got the hell out of there--unless the other guy elected to leave first. In a word, a safe haven--so safe, indeed, that it was also a watering spot for off-duty cops. It was one of the Dutchman's favorite joints and on this night he tarried until the hours after dawn, leaving only when Noe insisted, rather firmly, that they had to go downtown. Noe, only an inch taller but much tougher, was possibly the only man Schultz ever took an order from, the one guy who could say "That's enough"
when he took one too many, and the one guy who could shut him up when he started blabbing in the late hours. There were two Daily Mirror reporters in the Swanee and when he was leaving, in high spirits, Schultz offered them a lift downtown in a Ford sedan he had outside. The reporters were dropped on Fifth Avenue where the Plaza looks out on the Pulitzer Fountain, the one in which F. Scott Fitzgerald had taken his much- headlined dip in that same live-it-up decade of the Twenties. "Okay, fellas, you can walk to your creepy office," Schultz said; "Joey and I got some business to attend to."
A short time later, toward 7:00 A.M., a fusillade of gunshots sounded in West 54th Street, off Sixth Avenue, and brought tenants of the Hotel Harding and other residential buildings on the street rushing to their windows to see a blue Cadillac speeding erratically away, going East. They saw the Caddy hit a parked car and keep going and when they leaned out they spotted a man stretched on the sidewalk in front of the Chateau Madrid. The man was Joey Noe. He was wearing a bulletproof vest but he had been shot in the right breast, lower spine and left hand and still managed to return the fire, shooting with both hands. On his person, the arriving police found a spanking new brass badge denoting that like his friend Arthur Flegenheimer before him he had recently been made a Deputy Sheriff of The Bronx (not by Ed Flynn, no longer Sheriff then).
Within the hour, a blue Cadillac with a missing door was found on the Lower East Side with the shot-up body of Louis Weinberg, alias Jacob Kaufman, alias Benjamin Greenberg, reposing in the back seat. The police quickly established that this was the gentleman who had traded all that gunfire with Dutch Schultz's partner. Noe himself didn't help, naturally. In Roosevelt Hospital, desperately wounded but facing a homicide charge if he lived, he would only say that he was parking his car when the Caddy drove up and two guys started shooting at him, so he had to get out his irons. Did he know his assailant? "I'll take care of it myself," he said. But that wasn't in the cards either. Removed to the Bellevue Hospital prison ward after a while, Noe wasted away to 90 pounds and died on November 21.
There is no question that Schultz was crushed. Noe was the closest intimate of all his days. He might have drawn some inspiration from a hoodlum like Marcel Poffo, but Noe, who always called him Arthur, as when they were kids on the street corner without a care in the world, put him on the golden highway. When Noe was with him, he could give the armed guard a night off, and Noe, for that matter, was the only one he ever took along when he went to see his mother.
So much for that. Where was the Dutchman when the lead started to fly? He never said anything about having been with his partner a few minutes earlier. He told Acting Police
Inspector Joseph A. Donovan that Joey was going to Jersey to handle a beer transaction and that when he heard of the shooting he went right over there himself "because the
business had to go on." Schultz was a little more candid with a detective friend. He told him that Noe had gone to the
Chateau Madrid with thousands of dollars to payoff on a big beer deal. Another version was that Noe actually was on an errand to collect some money Legs Diamond owed The Bronx boys.
Dixie Davis lent some support to the latter theory years later, adding some characteristic Davis flourishes. He said that Noe had indeed gone downtown to straighten out some problem with Diamond and that Schultz was in Big Bill Dwyer's office on the street when the cannons went off. Davis said the Dutchman leaped to a balcony, spotted two men shooting at Noe, drew his .38 and killed one while the other, wounded, leaped into the Caddy and got away. The trouble with that story--and there was trouble with so many of the counselor's stories-was that no other cadaver ever turned up on the street.
The Diamond angle may have had some validity, however. The police believed that the freewheeling Legs, who
employed Arthur Flegenheimer in his own mob once, briefly, and then found himself pushed out of The Bronx by the Noe-Schultz combination, set up the ambush outside the Chateau Madrid in the hopes of disposing of both of his old buddies in one night. And when Diamond met his own doom three years later, ending a tightwire career in which he had absorbed no less than 14 bullets and at least one dose of birdshot in four other attempts on his life dating back to 1924, the murder was charged to the Dutchman's open account in the matter of Joey
Noe.
Fresh off an acquittal that afternoon in a kidnapping-torture case, Diamond was trailed to a cheap Albany rooming house and killed after a long night of celebration first with his ever-loyal wife, Alice and then with his real love, Kiki
Roberts of The Follies, the former Marion Strasmick. The general consensus was that the hand that held the gun and poured three bullets into the gangster's whisky-soaked brain belonged to Fats McCarthy but Davis chalked it up for Bo Weinberg when he got around to talking in 1939. Maybe it was Weinberg but the Davis version had to be taken with a pinch of salt because in his more talkative years the counselor developed a habit of crediting the lovable Bo with almost any murder you might ask about, or even if you didn't ask.
The departure of Joey Noe, in any case, held out some splendid consolation for the bereaved Dutch Schultz.
He inherited the business and went on to bigger and better things.
