DUTCH SCHULTZ DID NOT GO BACK TO HIS NATIVE HEARTH from Malone, even though there was a new son, born during his trial, waiting for him in Frances Flegenheimer's modest
apartment in Queens. While he had said that it was "absurd" and "ridiculous" for Fiorello LaGuardia to imagine that he could keep him out of the city, he had some excellent reasons for staying away: He was still the city's Number One fugitive on a newly upholstered tax rap, there was still an outstanding federal tax warrant out for him on the counts which had been severed in the Syracuse and Malone trials, and the state had a warrant ready to serve in the event that Milton Bernard kept filibustering for a negotiated settlement instead of coming around with a check for $36,000 and change.
So the Dutchman repaired to the rolling green acres of Connecticut, where the Fairfield County horsy set not only embraced him like a
long-lost son, home from the legal wars, but even detected a certain long-dormant charm in his gunbearer, Lulu Rosenkrantz.
Operating first out of a modest suite in Bridgeport's Stratfield Hotel and later from a $12.50-a-day room in the same city's Barnum Hotel, the gangland duo took at once to the bridle path, where one caustic observer was immediately reminded of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Without the windmill, that is. In any event, the pair soon found themselves sorting out invitations from one hostess after another in the shore society of Westport, Fairfield, Belle Island and Stamford. One of the bedazzled socialites summed it up this way for a New York Sun reporter some time later: "My dear, Arthur was the answer to a hostess's prayer. When it became known that he had been invited to your party, you had nothing to worry about. Everyone came....And, really, he was charming. It was hard to believe all those horrid stories."
The Dutchman had an easy entree in that part of the woods because he was an old client of Dudley Brothwell, a Fairfield riding master. Brothwell rated Schultz an excellent horseman but he must have been exaggerating ever so slightly, since he never let him accept any bids to ride to hounds with the lifted pinky crowd, evidently counting this exercise too dangerous. The riding master, by the way, turned up later as one of the witnesses Tom Dewey used to corroborate the hidden kinship between Schultz and Jimmy Hines. Brothwell testified that the political muscleman had dropped in on the policy overlord at his stables. From the accounts of Dixie Davis and George Weinberg, the stable summit, even apart from its fragrance, was something less than a joyous reunion. The way the verbose Davis told it, Fairfield's new social lion--fresh off a brisk canter on his very own steed, Sun Tan, presumably--greeted his political buddy this way: "You know, I have got a lot of trouble and a lot of expense and everybody is being cut. Until this case is over I will have to cut everybody and, Jimmy, I am sorry I will have to cut you along with everybody else. I will make it up to you when this case is over. When I beat the case, I will make it up to you." Davis said the chop was from $500 down to $250 a week and Weinberg furnished the quotes from the cooperative Hines' assent: "Well, if things are tough, I suppose I will have to take a cut."
Tom Dewey, with his case resting on the testimony of such questionably repentant sinners as Davis, Weinberg and Harry Schoenhaus, had another respectable witness behind Brothwell to help him nail down the connection between the mob and Hines. Charles W. Hughes testified that when he was assistant manager of the Hotel Barnum in the summer of 1935 he saw Hines with the Dutchman and some of his troops.
The Connecticut idyll--not all fun and games, obviously--ended on September 24 when Schultz checked out of the Barnum and casually announced that he was going to New York to join the SRO throng taking in the Max Baer-Joe Louis fight at Yankee Stadium. This had the sound of an unlikely surrender in the old stamping ground, of all places, but it didn't happen that way. Instead, the next day, U.S. Commissioner Morris Spritzer in New Brunswick, New Jersey, had a call from State Senator Toolan inquiring whether he could hope for reasonable bail, like $10,000, if Arthur Flegenheimer chanced to drop in on him. Spritzer told the counselor he could not give him any such assurance. Then the Commissioner called J. Howard Carter, Chief Assistant to Francis W. H. Adams, the new United States Attorney in Manhattan, and asked him what he would consider a proper neighborhood for bond in the case at hand. Carter said he thought $75,000 would be about right. This dour piece of intelligence must have been conveyed in
unmistakable terms to Mr. Flegenheimer's authorized spokesman, the Senator, for New Brunswick was denied the distinction of accepting the second surrender of Dutch Schultz and the scene switched to Perth Amboy.
There, the next morning, the Deputy Chief of Police, John F. Murray, received an anonymous phone call inquiring whether he would like to make a "good arrest." Murray said he always liked to make good arrests and the caller told him to wait at his desk. Half an hour later the phone rang again and the officer was advised that if he proceeded to Room 407 of the Packer Hotel he would find Dutch Schultz there. Murray went to the hotel with Detective Lieutenant James Nolan, ascertained that Room 407 had been rented a few minutes earlier to "Morris Golden and party," and hurried upstairs. "Morris Golden and party" proved to be Dutch Schultz, just like the man said, and his favorite bondsman, Max Silverman. Two other gentlemen who had accompanied the pair to the little Jersey town, quite possibly two men who looked a lot like Lulu Rosenkrantz and Abe Landau, were not in the room but did turn up--riding shotgun, so to speak--in a sedan that followed the car in which Murray and Nolan escorted the Dutchman to Police
Headquarters.
Booked on suspicion of being a fugitive, the prisoner was taken before Acting Recorder Harry S. Medinets, who proved to be most kindly disposed toward him. Medinets had a wire from Frank Adams imploring him to hold the Dutchman without bond because of the long-standing warrant, but he wasn't impressed at all. "You are entitled to the same treatment every prisoner gets before this court," the Recorder told Schultz. "I will permit bail in this case."
How much? Why, $10,000, the very amount Senator Toolan had tried to arrange in New Brunswick, and it was promptly furnished. Asked later why he had set such low bond, Medinets said, "I was not going to keep a man in jail just because he has a bad record. He is a human being just as anyone else."
Frank Adams did not quite agree with that assessment. He sent Howard Carter scurrying over to Newark to get a bench warrant from Federal Judge William Clark calling for the Dutchman's rearrest on the untried income tax counts. Pretty soon the darling of the Fairfield County hunt set, a symphony in soft brown, found himself before Judge Clark surrounded by as diverse an aggregation of lawyers as had ever been assembled in that courtroom: ex-Governor Silzer, Senator Toolan, J. Richard Davis (of course), and a third local man, Harry Weinberger.
This powerhouse legal battery, citing the government's interminable "persecution" of the citizen before the bar, submitted that any bail in the tax case higher than, say, $25,000 would be oppressive. Carter, in turn, advanced the view that $75,000 really would be more like it. Judge Clark, noting acidly that the surrender in Perth Amboy apparently had been arranged with a pre-set low bail in mind, went along with Carter. The Judge then cast a cold eye on the surety bonds put before him and, lo, the Dutchman found himself behind bars once more, this time in the rather low-class Hudson County Jail in Jersey City.
Four days later the legal battalions won a $25,000 cut in the bail from the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia and on October 1st their client emerged into the free air again. The reporters were waiting, as usual, and Schultz turned to them after slipping a $5 bill to the doorkeeper and telling him to go buy himself a cigar.
Where was the Dutchman going? "I don't know," he said, "but I do know the Federal Government is hounding me. They tried me on the same charge in New York, and now they dug up a new trick to repeat the manuever."
Actually, the government hadn't quite run out of "new tricks."
Lest there be any arguments about double jeopardy in the use of the old indictment, the Adams office had come up on October 9th with a brand new true bill. This one cited Arthur Flegenheimer on eleven counts of failing to file tax returns for 1929, 1930 and 1931--all misdemeanors by contrast with the felony of willful tax evasion cited in the original case. Now the government charged that Schultz had earned a nifty $928, 707.35 in the years in question and that his failure to file returns had cheated Uncle out of $200,726.62. He faced a possible sentence of eleven years in prison and $100,000 in fines on the new grunt.
Would he run again?
No. The Dutchman simply settled down in Newark while the new round of legal maneuvering got under way. He was going to fight extradition, of course, but it was apparent that he wasn't quaking in his boots over the prospect of going into a fresh courtroom battle again so soon after the protracted Syracuse and Malone trials.
Why? Well, for one thing he knew now that he had an infinitely stronger legal hand than AI Capone. The case against him was confined to his beer operation: nothing about policy, nothing about guys getting knocked off, nothing about any other racket. The case against "that dunce" in Chicago involved all kinds of dirty money, down to the killer wood alcohol to extortion and strong-arm stuff to gambling and, horrors, flesh-peddling. But needle beer? Hell, Prohibition had just been repealed as the most colossal legislative blunder in the nation's history; it was still a burning memory. What jury in the mid-Thirties was going to hold still for a moth-eared tax case against a reformed bootlegger who had labored against so many adversities, paying off crooked cops and all that, to wet the parched throats of his neighbors? How many juries, for that matter, were going to convict anybody for cribbing on his taxes? This sport had achieved a national acceptance by then.
Either that or Arthur Flegenheimer knew that you didn't need twelve good men and true to beat a law case. One juror would always be enough.
In Newark, the Dutchman turned rather gregarious, mounting a private public relations campaign in the process. One night, over a bagatelle game, he put his case before Vic Hamerslag, a reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger. It came out this way:
"Get this straight. I am not afraid to go back to New York to face that indictment. But I'm not exactly pleased at the prospect of going back and being slapped into jail without bail. That's what they want to do to me.
"If I knew I would be given the same rights as any other citizen against whom there are charges and would be admitted to a reasonable bail, I wouldn't hesitate a minute to go back.
"I've never failed to answer bail. The fact of the matter is that I'd appear even if I were paroled in my own custody. Of course, I realize that's impossible, but I do feel I'm entitled to reasonable bail."
Hamerslag asked why he didn't think he could get reasonable bail. The answer:
"Because that wouldn't be in keeping with their policy. They're after me and they're not going to leave anything unturned to embarrass and harrass me."
Why?
"They're after me now because some puny individuals in the government service can't stand up and take a licking like a man. By licking I mean they can't swallow that I was acquitted once and another jury disagreed on exactly the same charges they've got against me now. The only difference between the charges now and then is that they slapped a different name on them.... Now right here I'm going to tell you something, and I wouldn't give you a bum steer. Perjured witnesses were used against me in both trials and the government knew it.
"With all this, they're still at me. They couldn't take those lickings.... You want to remember that they got a new indictment against me since the arrest (in Perth Amboy), a sort of afterthought, you know. We have the prisoner, now we'll put some charges against him."
What about the Public Enemy No. 1 label?
"I never did anything to deserve that reputation, unless it was to supply good beer to people who wanted it--and a lot of them did."
What about the future, Hamerslag asked.
"I want to settle down and be a plain citizen and be given a chance to earn a living," Schultz said. "I want to be plain Arthur Flegenheimer and forget there ever was a Dutch Schultz. That bird has had too much trouble."
The Dutchman neglected to say--was it modesty or shyness?--how he meant to earn his living. He surely wasn't abdicating his rule over the Harlem policy racket.
In the same period, holding court in the Palace Chop House with Lulu Rosenkrantz and Abe Landau on hand to keep any disorderly strangers away, Schultz granted a rather curious interview to Isaac McAnally, a New York Post reporter he had come to trust over the years. This was the audience in which the Dutchman first told his story of the alleged miscarriage of justice in the execution of Toughy Odierno and Frank Utordano in the slaying of Joe Mullms back in 1931, an item touched on in this narrative in the account of the Schultz-Coll war [Chapter 12]. McAnally, chosen for the red-hot disclosure because the Post "might go after it stronger," said that Schultz professed to be very deeply concerned about the fate of Odierno and Giordano even though they were defectors from his own gang.
"I don't say they didn't do a lot of other things," the gangster said, pounding the table with the flat of his hand, "but they didn't do that job."
You will recall that Odierno and Giordano, himself even then facing trial with Coll in the Harlem baby killing, were convicted on the testimony of two Edison Company repairmen who had a clear view of the Mullins spot killing. Schultz elected to skip that detail. In his version, the Coll gunmen could not have committed that deed in The Bronx because at that very moment they had their hands full elsewhere with two of his own beer truck drivers--snatched out of one of his speakeasies, he said, under the eyes of an off-duty police sergeant who happened to be tending bar for him. Schultz said the drivers, released unharmed, had assured him that Odierno and Giordano were their captors. He said he sent word to a man connected with the prosecution that the District Attorney had the wrong killers in the Mullins case and that he could prove it. "I told him," he said, "that if he sent those boys to the chair he would never be easy in his conscience again as long as he lived. But nobody ever came around to me."
McAnally pressed the Dutchman as to why he hadn't done more. Now there was a switch in his story.
"As a matter of fact," Schultz said, somewhat lamely, "when I sent the word I didn't say that I could prove both guys were innocent. I only said that I knew Odierno didn't do it. I always liked that Toughy Odierno. He was an amusing little guy and I felt sorry for him. I didn't give a damn about Giordano."
McAnally asked the Dutchman how he could have had any tender feelings in the case when the Coll torpedoes undoubtedly were gunning for him, too.
"Well, that didn't matter," he said. "When little Odierno was in the Death House I sent him dough so he could have cigarettes and stuff. Hell, you can't be mad at a guy when he's in that place."
Schultz offered no explanation for the fact that the doomed men might have beaten the rap by producing the two truck drivers with whom they were supposed to have idled away that fateful afternoon. Nor did he say why he hadn't produced the drivers, especially since he had such warm feelings towards his pal Toughy. The fact is, Odierno and Giordano, during an all-night sweating by police and Assistant District Attorney Breslin, had come up with a terribly defective alibi. The hoodlum pair said they were on a train coming down from Albany the day Joe Mullins was shot, but a crumpled dining car check stub found in their hotel room hideaway, supplemented by all kinds of testimony from New York Central trainmen, established that they had come down on a Pullman the day before the guns were aimed at the Schultz beer checker. Ed Breslin told the author that the mobsters caved in when their alibi was blown apart; besides, he noted dryly, Giordano couldn't quite explain how the revolver that killed Mullins
happened to be in his possession. The retired judge also described an amusing exchange between Police Commissioner Mulrooney and Vincent Coll when the Mick, swept up with the others in the Mullins dragnet, had to be turned out for lack of evidence.
"If we don't get you on this one we'll get you on another one," Mulrooney told the gangster.
"Commissioner," Coll replied, "that isn't nice to say."
Why did Dutch Schultz wait three years to tell his "inside" story of the case? He had no adequate answer when McAnally put the question. Why wouldn't he let the reporter acquaint the masses immediately with his hidden concern about the flagging eyesight of Lady Justice? Schultz said he didn't want to get involved in the thing until his tax troubles were over; then, he said, he might even put the reporter in touch with the friendly cop who was tending bar for him the day Odierno and Giordano were supposed to have staged that kidnapping. "You understand," he added, "the cop wouldn't say anything for publication. That would crucify him." To say the least.
When McAnally brought the tale back to his office the Post's City Editor, Walter Lister, decided that he would like to have a chat with the talkative Dutchman himself and maybe get something the paper could print--on any subject. The reporter arranged the interview for the night of October 17--again in the Palace Chop House and at the very round table where assassins' bullets would close out the saga of Arthur Flegenheimer just six days later. The unsigned story by Lister, later Managing Editor of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, furnished the last close-up of the gangster in the twilight of his immensely successful career. Here it is:
