Prohibition Gangsters: The Rise and Fall of a Bad Generation

Chapter 10. Shot to Death

171 $ Prosecuting the crime lords for income tax evasion was an effective way for lawmen to put gangsters out of commission. But mobsters’ more immediate and cheaper strategy for eliminating their rivals—shooting them to death—did not require any expenses for courts, judges, accountants, and lawyers. The list of prominent criminals who never made it out of the 1920s is long and includes Arnold Rothstein, Dion O’Banion, Frank Yale, “Kid Dropper” Kaplan, and Hymie Weiss. At the start of the 1930s the most prominent murder victims were the feuding Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. More were to perish in that decade and beyond into the 1940s and 1950s. This chapter tells the story of some of the most notorious killings , when major criminals had their lives cut short in a burst of gunfire. Let us start with the feverish words of a dying mobster. Dutch Schultz, 1935 “Oh, oh. Dog biscuit. And when he is happy, he doesn’t get snappy. . . . the glove will fit what I say. . . . thinks he is grandpa again and he is jumping around. . . . get up your onions and we will throw up the truce flag. . . . he eats like a little sausage baloney maker . . . the sidewalk was in trouble and the bears were in trouble. . . . no payrolls, no walls, no coupons . . . a boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim . . . Sam, c h a p t e r 1 0 Shot to Death 172 The Fall you are a boiled man. . . . Mother is the best bet and don’t let Satan draw you too fast. . . . French Canadian bean soup.” The above are excerpts from a much longer text taken down by a Newark, New Jersey, police stenographer who sat by the bedside of Dutch Schultz in Newark City Hospital from four to six o’clock on the evening of October 24, 1935. Schultz had been shot the night before in a Newark restaurant. The wound had become infected, producing a fever of 106 degrees, and he lapsed into a ranting delirium. The police, thinking Schultz might say something that would reveal who had attacked him, had the stenographer take notes. But the transcribing effort was all in vain; he stopped talking , and at 8:35 p.m. he died. The two-hour transcript did not provide any clues to who killed him, despite later efforts to make sense of his gibberish . However, the stenographer’s work did impress the American literary avant-garde figure William S. Burroughs, who used it as the basis of a 1969 novel-screenplay entitled The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. The Dutchman ’s death symbolized not only stream-of-consciousness writing; it also is a prime example of the long list of 1920s Prohibition era crime lords who suffered violent deaths in the 1930s and beyond. At the end of the 1920s, Dutch Schultz had emerged as the Beer Baron of the Bronx, but he had the foresight to see that Prohibition might come to an end so he aggressively pursued other rackets to replace bootlegging. His partnership with political boss James Hines of Tammany Hall and his ever-scheming attorney Richard “Dixie” Davis helped Schultz develop his alternative pursuits. One of those rackets was labor extortion. He established a Metropolitan Restaurant and Cafeteria Association that owners were compelled to join and took over management of two unions of restaurant workers, Local 16 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employee International Alliance and Local 13 of the Delicatessen Countermen and Cafeteria Workers Union. He established another union for the men who washed the windows of New York buildings; those who refused to join seemed to get into accidents when their safety belts failed. Schultz also got into the Shot to Death 173 slot machine racket, installing peanut vending machines in speakeasies. Schultz realized that there was money well beyond peanuts in taking over the illegal betting industry known as “policy” or “numbers,” which operated in Harlem and was run mostly by African Americans and immigrants from Cuba and the West Indies. Each of an estimated forty independent “banks,” presided over by a boss, oversaw delivery of money and betting slips and payouts made to winners. Each bank had a “collector” who ran a network of people in the community, such as small merchants and apartment building superintendents, who took in the bets. A customer who plunked down ten cents to a dollar could get a payoff...