Dutch Schultz: The Greed and Ego That Got a Mob Boss Killed

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Arthur Flegenheimer was born in the Bronx in 1901 to German Jewish immigrants, abandoned by his father as a child, and out of school by the eighth grade. A job with a trucking company put him in the right place when the Volstead Act took effect, and under the name Dutch Schultz he built a beer empire with speakeasy owner Joey Noe. This episode follows how he held it: through terror rather than loyalty, most infamously in the kidnapping of rival Joe Rock, who was hung from a meat hook, deliberately infected, and left blind after a $35,000 ransom.

The same need for total control became his undoing. Schultz paid elite enforcers a flat salary, which drove Vincent Coll into open revolt, and he cut the pay of his numbers runners to cover legal bills, which produced a strike among his own criminals. He beat Thomas Dewey's tax case by charming the town of Malone, New York, then returned to find Lucky Luciano minding his rackets. When the Commission refused to approve Dewey's assassination and Schultz vowed to do it anyway, the syndicate voted to remove him instead.

• Schultz ran a restaurant racket through an official sounding owners association, using corrupt unions, strikes, and stink bombs to force owners to pay dues.
• At a hotel meeting over missing money, he shot enforcer Jules Martin in the mouth mid sentence. His lawyer Dixie Davis said he did it as casually as picking his teeth.
• Mayor Fiorello La Guardia ordered Schultz arrested on sight in the five boroughs, pushing him into exile in Newark, New Jersey.
• On October 23, 1935, Murder Inc. gunmen shot him in the men's room of the Palace Chop House. He handed a hospital intern $3,000 in cash and asked for Catholic last rites.
• His delirious last words about dog biscuits inspired William S. Burroughs, and a safe said to hold roughly seven million dollars, buried in the Catskills, has never been found.