ARTHUR FLEGENHEIMER REALLY BEGAN TO FLY ONCE THE restraining hand of Joey Noe was lifted from his shoulders.
The bootleg operation flourished handsomely, knowing no bounds as the government all but gave up on any pretext of enforcing the Prohibition law, and the Dutchman appeared to be content to confine himself to the drinking needs of the populace and to stay away from the more tawdry rackets. In the Swanee Club one night, so expansive on $10 champagne that he was fumbling with some familiar quotes from Willie Shakespeare, a reporter dared to ask him whether he had ever done any business with such notables as Waxey Gordon and Chink Sherman, who were patrons of the same Harlem
establishment.
Schultz turned on his most serious expression.
"I may do a lot of lousy things," he said, "but I'll never make a living off women or narcotics."
He was telling the truth. In his time he did a lot of business with Polly Adler, the most conspicuous of the New York madams, but it was strictly as a paying customer. It had never occurred to him to declare himself in as a partner of Polly's, and he was evidently always content to let others feed off the organized traffic in flesh. This was true of the drug traffic as well. He never had a piece of that.
For all his affluence, Schultz did not move beyond his comparatively minor celebrity as Beer Baron of The Bronx until 1931. It was then that he went on the front pages to stay. The date was January 24. The place was the Club Abbey, on the first floor of the Hotel Harding on West 54th Street, and the party of the other part was Chink Sherman. Whatever bad feelings may have existed between the warring factions, it appeared that this particular pre-dawn engagement on an idle night out was fought over nothing more consequential than a girl or two.
Schultz came in first, with Marty Krompier and Larry Carney and two women, and took a table in the corner reserved for special guests, where Rene Bonnie, an entertainer in the place, joined the party. Little Marty was waltzing Miss Bonnie around the dance floor, his head nestled comfortably against her bosom, when Mr. Sherman arrived with a small party. In some manner, no clearer than in any other night club brawl, then or now, an unpleasantness arose between Mr. Krompier's dancing partner and a mysterious Lorraine in the Sherman entourage and presently there was a confrontation at the Schultz table. With the attention of no less than 80 customers drawn to the undignified display of loud and abusive language, all reason departed in very short order.
Somebody thoughtfully doused the lights, of course, before the big action started. When they came on again over the demolished special corner, Messrs. Schultz, Krompier and Carney were gone and the unfortunate Sherman was on the floor being ministered to by Mavis King, immediately
identified by the tabloids as the prettiest cigarette girl in New York. The racketeer's opening line to her was "Girlie, they got me. I'm dying." This was an understandable over-statement.
When Miss King delivered the fallen gladiator to Polyclinic Hospital, the inventory drawn up by a hastily summoned army of medical sleuths showed only that he had been shot three times (nose, chest and shooting arm), slashed on the face ten times or so with the jagged end of a beer bottle, banged over the head with a table leg and also touched up here and there with a heavy ornamental ash tray.
While the 80 Abbey witnesses, to the last guy and the last doll, could not furnish any precise information on the
identity of the combatants, the police were able to piece together the story of the action. The emerging consensus was that the broken-nosed guy in the cheap suit, Mr. Schultz, had been taken out rather early by a bullet or two and that the short one, Mr. Krompier, assisted by one of the girl troopers in the company, had inflicted most of the damage on the enemy commander, Mr. Sherman. The
communiqué from the thickly carpeted battlefield did concede, however, that the wafer-thin character on the Schultz side, Mr. Carney, had contributed a decent share of the defensive blows himself for all his
evident frailty, and this figured. Larry Carney had been a faithful servitor of the Dutchman since the day, long ago, when he fell a victim
of tuberculosis--mind you, TB itself was a killer then--and found himself shipped off to the clean air of Saranac in the Adirondacks, all expenses paid, while the Scourge was contained.
In the matter of apprehending the ne'er-do-wells who would resort to so much violence over a little
misunderstanding, the primary sufferer in the Abbey encounter proved no more helpful than all those nearsighted witnesses. When Sherman was asked who-dun-it, he delivered himself of a statement which had long since become a standard around such underworld capitals as New York and Chicago. "If I knew them," said the Chink, "I could deal with them myself."
This battered cliche proved doubly frustrating to the police brass when it turned out that one of their very own sleuths, James J. Walsh, a figure of some note around Broadway because the unsportsmanlike Arnold Rothstein once creased him with a bullet for intruding on a sociable dice game in the Rothstein residence, happened to have been in the Abbey with the anti-Sherman force and had neglected to mention it to his superiors.
In his departmental trial later, Detective Walsh explained that he had encountered the Dutchman in the after-hours club by pure chance. "When Schultz saw me in there," Walsh testified, "he said, 'Hello, boss.' I asked Schultz if he had ever heard why his partner Joe Noe was shot, and why Noe and Louis Weinberg were shooting at each other three years ago. Schultz said he had never heard." Beyond this, the detective satisfied everybody that he himself had left the Abbey before the blood began to flow.
When the usual call went out for a roundup of all known hoodlums to get to the bottom of the unseemly display, a measure of the times came in a little exchange between reporters and the police involving the oft-arrested Larry Fay, whose name came up as an ex-partner in the fallen Sherman's Club Rendezvous. Fay also was in the Abbey on the lively night in question but when Lieutenant Walter Hourigan was asked whether he was going to submit a question or two to him, his answer was the very model of candor: "No. Talking to that guy is like talking to a wall."
And how about Arthur Flegenheimer? Well, that fellow would have to be taxed with an assault charge, or even something worse if Mr. Sherman, a mere 32 but a gambler of sorts and a dealer in junk and murder as well, then under
indictment for a 1928 gang killing way off the Broadway beat in Boston, fooled the doctors and succumbed to his multiple wounds. So the Lieutenant sure did want to talk to Arthur Flegenheimer.
Schultz, alas, did not respond to the open police solicitation. There was a little flurry on February 8 when the
gendarmes swooped down on a modest Bronx apartment where he was supposed to be holed up. He was not there but a birdlike blonde of 22, Jean McCarthy, was flushed out of bed while a search of the premises turned up a bloodstained jacket, two loaded sawed-off shotguns, and a .38-caliber
pistol. Could that jacket belong to Arthur Flegenheimer? Well, it had no labels with his name on it and the sleepy Mrs. McCarthy said she did not know anybody by that name. The detectives on the mission, William Cassidy and James
Kissane, insisted that she did so know Flegenheimer, or Schultz, or what have you, because she happened to be the legally wedded wife of Fats McCarthy, still on the Dutchman's payroll then.
Apart from this episode, the usual search of the usual haunts also failed to turn up the wounded Beer Baron, although the man was yet to demonstrate the full extent of his remarkable talent for staying outside the law's long arm when he did not wish to have any traffic with the law.
It turned out that the Dutchman, dented by one Sherman slug while his bulletproof vest deflected two others which might well have killed him, had undergone a leisurely period of tender care and recuperation and then, on April 4,
presented himself at the West 47th Street Precinct. The barrister with him put the question to the desk lieutenant: "Did somebody want to talk to Mr. Flegenheimer?" Of course, and in no time at all a whole array of witnesses--including Chink Sherman, patched together like new--were summoned to the venerable old Broadway station house to confront the
suspect. You can guess what happened if you have ever sampled the offerings of the silver screen, then or now: nobody
recognized the Beer Baron, even with that distinctively twisted nose of his, as having been among those present in the Abbey on that unfortunate night in January. Why, Chink Sherman himself didn't recognize the guy. Needless to say, nobody was ever going to recognize Marty Krompier or Larry Carney either.
That was the end of it, except that nine more days elapsed before the police told anybody about it. This was most
disturbing to the great horde of newspapers (only eight) then reporting the never-dull New York scene, but Lieutenant Hourigan, backed by Assistant Chief Inspector John J. Sullivan, head of the detective force, had an explanation all ready. The Lieutenant said he had told Schultz on April 4 that "we don't expect to build you up into a hero by giving you a lot of publicity." The Inspector added that the Dutchman, even though he forswore any knowledge of any fight in the Abbey, ever, had been advised to watch his step in the future because the police were going to keep a sharper eye, or perhaps even eyes, on him from that moment on.
In fairness to Mr. Sherman a footnote is imperative here for those who would think ill of him for carrying anything so dangerous as the gun he had pinked Dutch Schultz with: Chink Sherman was a Deputy Sheriff in far-off Saratoga County, upstate. He had a right to arm
himself against the naughtier elements in the society of his time.
For Mr. Flegenheimer, l'affaire Abbey, however perilous, would pale by comparison with a traumatic experience he was to suffer on the splendidly moonlit night of June 18 in that same fun-filled year. This one began when two of the then more earnest sleuths on the rolls of New York's finest, Detectives Stephen DiRosa and Julius Salke, stationed themselves on a bench across the street from the plush building at 1212 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in response to a call from
a mysterious woman tipster. The woman had said that a new tenant bearing the name of Russell Jones, occupying a ninth-floor apartment ($2,500 a year, sort of high then) with a picture-postcard view of Central Park, really was Arthur Flegenheimer.
There seemed to be inordinately heavy traffic into the building that night, male and female, and judicious inquiry established that practically everybody was going to the apartment of Mr. Jones. Sensing an underworld summit of some kind, the detectives trained a pair of field glasses on the living room window of the four-room flat and settled back. Unbeknownst to them, somebody up there had binoculars pointed their way, possibly because the Dutchman was so squeamish at the time about being the Number One man on Vincent Coli's current drop-dead list.
In time, like 6:10 A.M., four men emerged from the building, crossed the avenue, and approached the bench.
"Who are you guys and whaddya doin' here?" one of them said, advancing to within ten feet.
"We are the law," Steve DiRosa replied, drawing his police special, "put up your hands."
The first man thereupon came up with a popgun of his own and the second reached for his belt, so DiRosa, one of the better marksmen in the department, let three shots go. One caught the pistol-wielder in the abdomen and one in the left wrist, the third going wild. As the wounded man fell to the pavement, the stocky one alongside him started running toward
101st Street and the other two vaulted the low stone wall into the park and disappeared into the balmy night.
The man who ran down the avenue, discarding a .38 Colt as Julius Salke pursued him, was Mr. Jones--or Arthur Flegenheimer. He came to an abrupt stop and put his hands up after the detective squeezed off one shot that whistled by him. Salke said that when he caught up, Schultz said to him, "Listen I've got a large sum of money. Take it and let me run. I'm having a lot of trouble. I'm on the edge. I'm being followed by mobsters. They want to give me the works. I don't fight cops." Salke brought the Dutchman back to DiRosa and asked him to identify the party who was on the ground, screaming in agony. Schultz refused.
"You're not going to leave your friend in this predicament," the detective said. "He's gonna die. Tell us who he is."
"It's Danny," Schultz replied, choking up. "Poor Danny Iamascia."
Poor Danny Iamascia was a long-time buddy and occasional bodyguard of the Dutchman's and a hoodlum of more than passing notice in the community. The detectives knew the name if not the face.
DiRosa stopped a cab for the hop-skip-and-jump to Mt. Sinai Hospital, three blocks up the avenue, and hauled the blood-drenched Iamascia into it, stretching him out on the floor, while Salke got in with his captive.
Somewhere along the brief way, Schultz tried to buy off both cops, according to DiRosa. "He said he was a rich man," the detective reported, "and if we would give him a break he would give us fifty grand and a house in Westchester apiece."
Once Iamascia was deposited in the hospital, the Beer Baron was taken a little further east, to the 104th Street station house. There, facing twin charges of felonious assault and violation of Mr. Sullivan's law, he asked for a sedative to calm his frayed nerves and then, according to DiRosa again, some further conversation about the coin of the realm took place in the back room. "Why don't you fellows give me a break?" the detective quoted the prisoner. "I've got plenty of money you fellows could use, and a good home for each of you. After all, fifty grand is a lot of money. Why don't you take it and give me a break?"
The Dutchman wasn't just boasting, it turned out. The necessary search of his person turned up an even $18,645, mostly in $500 and $100 notes, and a little black book recording collections of $52,000 in the preceding eleven days. The detectives were somehow not stirred by all that evidence of prosperity.
Later in the police lineup, an educational entertainment that had to be discarded once the Supreme Court ordained in the Sixties that you just couldn't go throwing nasty
questions at people who didn't happen to have their legal counsel right at hand, Schultz proved much less talkative.
"What was the name of the man shot with you this morning?" asked Assistant Chief Inspector Sullivan, an acquaintance from the Abbey frolic.
"No man was with me," the Dutchman replied. "I wasn't with anybody."
Wouldn't he admit that he knew Danny Iamascia?
No.
Wouldn't he admit that he threw a revolver (held aloft by the Inspector) into the gutter when Detective Salke was pursuing him?
No.
Did he know anything about the two loaded automatics found afterwards in the Fifth Avenue apartment?
No.
This sort of thing left the Inspector positively distraught. "It is a sad commentary on the detectives of the upper part of this city," he said for the benefit of the press and the assembled sleuths in the Lineup Room, "that this bum was allowed to roam around for so long with this gun."
The next stop was Magistrates' Court in Harlem and there the Dutchman, a mere 25 but now driven to the barricades again to stand off the state's ninth challenge to his personal honor in 12 years, heard himself described in somewhat
conflicting ways. Attorney Gilbert S. Rosenthal respectfully submitted (it's the only way in the courts) that his client was "a much-persecuted man and a victim of a police pickup."
Detective Salke disagreed. He insisted that the accused was "a notorious criminal and one of the worst young men in the city."
Bail was set at $15,000 on each count and furnished with blinding speed, but the prisoner was carted off to "The Flats," a sanctuary reserved for first offenders and very special guests on the fifth floor of the ancient Tombs Prison, when the District Attorney insisted that he was entitled to some time to investigate the source of those fast bonds. Once that was out of the way and Schultz emerged into the daylight again, he spoke as follows: "I wouldn't stay in that jail another night if they gave me the place. Who do they think I am? Some poor punk? Well, I'm not. I'm a big shot. I've got some mighty important business that needs my attention."
An immediate order of business, whatever else happened to be pressing upon him, was the matter of ordering a suitable wreath for Danny Iamascia, who had succumbed to his wounds the day after the shootout and was destined for one of the more classic underworld farewells. The Dutchman, a man of conservative tastes in dress and everything else,
selected a diamond-shaped bouquet of white roses and a white stuffed pigeon nestled in the middle of a cross bearing the word "Sympathy" across the bottom. Ciro Terranova, the Artichoke King, so called because he had thought to corner the market in that particular vegetable some years earlier, made the Dutchman look like a struggling beer salesman by comparison. His floral offering came in the form of a gate 15 feet high and fashioned of lilies, roses and carnations. The great variety of other scented tributes, bearing such legends as "Dear Pal," "From the Boys," "From your Best Pal," and "Why Did It Have to be You, Danny?" filled 35 cars in the cortege to St. Raymond's Cemetery, where Iamascia, strangely, had bought himself a whole stack of plots on the very day preceding his death. One wreath, incidentally,
simply said, "6:10 A.M."--the very moment that Steve DiRosa's quick trigger went off. The services at Our Lady of Carmel Church in The Bronx drew thousands and it took 125 cars to carry the mourners accompanying the body to St. Raymond's, where a low mass was performed because the Roman Catholic Archdiocese had ruled against a high requiem.
Young Danny was laid out in a coffin listed at $10,000 and stored away in a mausoleum advertised as a $25,000 item. Those numbers, coupled with the high incidentals, put his leave-taking in a rather heady class. Joe (The Baker) Catania, consigned to the spot on the preceding February 3 in some Mafia unpleasantness, had enjoyed a $40,000 funeral. And that wasn't embarrassingly far behind the $52,000 splash for Frankie Yale (Vale), a 1928 rubout victim who would
be remembered less for his assorted misdeeds than for the fact that two card-carrying widows, not one, showed up at the graveside. Iamascia had the more conventional one wife.
If you wonder why the 30-year-old Danny merited such an outpouring of grief and money (oh, they just don't have funerals like that in that broken-down town any more), his varied career had included services for both Terranova and Schultz, among other gangland luminaries, and had earned him a generously mixed bag of ten arrests between 1918 and 1924. Thus Danny was not without honor in his set. And beyond his more pedestrian adventures in crime Danny had earned considerable renown as one of the trio of professionals who had carried out a most delicate mission in 1929 when seven bandits invaded the Roman Gardens Restaurant in The Bronx and stuck up a jam-packed testimonial for Magistrate Albert H. Vitale, who had friends in all walks of life. The invaders came away with $2,000 in cash, $3,000 in jewelry, and the service revolver of Detective Arthur C. Johnson, another guest. Iamascia and, yes, the aforementioned Catania and another handy fellow named John Savino, alias Zacci, all in soup and fish themselves to honor the Honorable Vitale, were delegated to go downtown and get back what those brash bandits had carried off--and they did, quick like anything.
The intriguing matter of the Fifth Avenue gun duel would occupy much space in the press for a couple of months after the interment of the only casualty. Dutch Schultz, giving his occupation as "roofer" for his court pedigree in this case, was indicted on assorted counts carrying a possible 20 years behind bars. When he was arraigned, the state said it would prove that the accused had admitted to the police that he left the regal comfort of his apartment that morning in June and headed for the park bench with his trio of helpers because "he thought the two detectives were 'mobsters' and he had come down to 'give 'em the works.'"
There seemed to be some substance in that notion. No less than five murders had been chalked up in a flurry of the Schultz-Coll war (the next chapter in this serial of Old New York) in the week before the shootout, so it figured that the Dutchman might well have felt somewhat nervous at the
time. Perhaps, but it didn't serve to button up the case in the ensuing trial, held in a General Sessions courtroom ringed by 40 extra detectives because there were rumors abroad that somebody, maybe somebody like Vincent Coil, would rather see the defendant dead than stashed away in anything so secure as a prison.
Schultz beat the assault charges rather handily, his peers deciding in 5 hours and 15 minutes that there was no evidence that he had actually waved his own pea shooter at the two detectives. The state thereupon conceded that there wouldn't be any point in going before another jury with the
remaining Sullivan Law count. Why? The man on trial was able to produce a license for the very kind of automatic that had clattered to the pavement the morning Julius Salke
chased him down Manhattan's most antiseptic street. It seems that the former Deputy Sheriff of The Bronx had
picked up the permit through the simple device of persuading a Suffolk County judge, George W. Furman, that he was an
honest toiler in the employ of an emporium called the Belle Terrace Club in Port Jefferson, Long Island, and that his
assorted responsibilities included such a perilous chore as transporting large sums of money for the establishment's owners.
The Dutchman did have to suffer a small embarrassment while he was on trial, however. Leaving the steamy,
unsanitary old Criminal Courts Building after one session, he ran into trouble just because a couple of snoops on the outside detail, Detectives John J. Quinn and John J. Duffy, thought they spotted a shotgun nestling under some wrapping paper on the floor of the shiny Lincoln sedan Schultz and constant companion Marty Krompier were about to board for the short journey uptown. Well, it was a shotgun, a
single-barreled affair, and it had five shells in it, and it was in splendid working order, so the cops hustled the much-harassed Beer Baron over to the nearest station house.
Much more resplendent than usual in a soft blue summer suit and shirt to match, topped off by the inevitable gray fedora, the Dutchman protested with some vehemence. "What the hell is this? Another frameup? I never saw that gun before." Sure enough, the State of New York came up short versus Arthur Flegenheimer once again.
In the first place, Schultz insisted that the big Lincoln, conveniently armored with shatterproof windows half an inch thick, was a borrowed vehicle and so the blowgun must have belonged to two other guys. In the second and third places, learned counsel, named David Goldstein, cited an 1897 statute which held that it was not unlawful to possess a shotgun on the streets of New York unless felonious intent could be shown and an 1898 statute which held that a man had to have a blunderbuss in his actual possession--in his hot little hands, say, or somewhere on his person--to be
incarcerated for same. So the charge was dropped just as the Dutchman was recording his triumph in the larger case. This gave him two fresh wins over the law in but three days and pushed his string to ten in a row over The People in the twelve eventful years since some overzealous cop had caught him pilfering that apartment in The Bronx. It was a Won and Lost record one had to admire in any time or place--a tribute at once both to the great and hoary innocent-until-proven-guilty concept imported from the Mother Country and to the high skills engendered in the law schools here in the ever-progressive Colonies.
Now there remained the trifling matter of the $18,600 (let us forgo the small change) that constituted the Dutchman's other bulge on the morning of the shootout. Never mind what that Depression-time roll was for; the question was, who gets it?
Tom Dewey, then in the United States Attorney's office in Manhattan, went into Federal Court and filed a lien against the money even as the bloodstains were being washed off Fifth Avenue. The Treasury had Mr. Flegenheimer on its delinquency rolls as a chap who still owed $79,236.72 on his 1930 tax returns and Dewey thought it would be just dandy if the $18,600 could be applied against that debt. The court agreed quite readily but the Police Property Clerk demurred. He submitted that the green constituted evidence seized
during the commission of a crime and accordingly would have to remain in his custody until the defendant Flegenheimer's trial. When that was over, the pesky Dewey trotted around for the money once more but--oh, dastardly fate--even swifter feet had beaten him to the window.
Big feet, too. Long before Dewey made his dash, the Property Clerk and the office of the Corporation Counsel had enjoyed visits on behalf of the Schultz roll from the
persuasive J. Richard Davis and an acquaintance of his named James J. Hines, a townsman not without friends both in the constabulary and in the municipality's legal department. This formidable duet, just helping out, had submitted that the disputed roll really wasn't Arthur Flegenheimer's at all but belonged to Larry Carney. Larry Carney? Of course. The old con said he was too feeble to look after his own poke at the age of 50 and that Arthur, his long-time benefactor, had graciously consented to hold it for him in the dark night. Carney even put it in an affidavit and this moving affirmation of the greater-love-hath-no-man bit stood up when Dewey's superior, United States Attorney George Z. Medalie, went back into court and sued to recover the money.
In the long battle that followed, Arthur J.W. Hilly, Corporation Counsel in the administration of the fun-loving Night Mayor of New York, James J. Walker, argued successfully that his office had observed all the legal proprieties when it authorized the property Clerk to honor the Carney affidavit. Hilly submitted that one of his very own aides, George 0. Arkin, had personally studied the document before giving the signal for the transfer of all those big bills. "It was just an ordinary replevin action such as we handle every day in the week," said the city's highest legal officer, reminding the court that since the police had not established that the $18,600 represented the proceeds of a crime then "it was not theirs to hold." Jimmy Walker's Police Commissioner, gruff old Edward P. Mulrooney, found himself constrained to join in that view. It had not only not been established that the roll had come from any illicit source but the eminently fair men in blue had never so much as made any
such claim. So indeed it "was not theirs to hold."
It was Larry Carney's to hold.
And by now another year had turned on the calendar and it was time for Arthur and Larry and all the merry men of Arthur's court to turn their full attention to the very pressing problem represented by that nasty, ill-tempered Coll boy.
