At 10:15 on the night of October 23rd, 1935, the back room of the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey, was quiet in the way a room gets quiet when powerful men are talking business. Four men sat around a table littered with dinner plates and beer glasses. Out front, a dozen regular patrons nursed their drinks, unaware of who was sitting 30 feet behind them.
One of the four men stood up. He excused himself and walked to the restroom at the back of the hall. He did not know that he had approximately 90 seconds left as a free man on this earth.
His name was Arthur Flegenheimer. The newspapers called him Dutch Schultz. He was 33 years old, and he was credited with ordering 136 murders in less than a decade. He controlled the numbers racket across Harlem, the beer trade across the Bronx, and a political machine that had bought judges and buried witnesses. He was worth an estimated $7 million in cash hidden somewhere no one has ever found.
Tonight, none of that would save him. In approximately 60 seconds of gunfire, every man in that back room would be shot. All four would be dead before sunrise.
But here is what makes this story different from every other mob hit in American history. When police asked the dying Schultz who shot him, he gave one coherent answer: the boss himself. Then he slipped into delirium and began speaking words that have haunted investigators for nearly 90 years. Words about dog biscuits, softballs, and a boy who never wept.
Were these the ramblings of a dying brain? Or was Dutch Schultz, with his last breaths, trying to tell someone where he hid $7 million?
The killers were not rival gangsters. They were sent by the very organization Schultz belonged to. His own friends ordered his death. The question is why.
Arthur Flegenheimer grew up poor in the Bronx, the son of German Jewish immigrants. His father Herman walked out when Arthur was 14, just left, no explanation, no forwarding address. His mother Emma took in laundry to keep the family alive.
Arthur dropped out after eighth grade. By 16, he was running with the Bergen gang, burglarizing apartments along the Grand Concourse. By 20, he had his first arrest. By 25, he had a new name, Dutch Schultz, borrowed from a dead gang leader because it sounded tougher than Flegenheimer.
The numbers racket is where Schultz became rich. It was a penny lottery played by working-class families across Harlem. Nickels and dimes bet on three-digit numbers, and Schultz’s operation collected thousands of those bets every single day. At its peak, the racket was pulling in tens of thousands of dollars a week.
He did not build quietly. He built with blood, and everyone in New York knew it. He hired Otto Berman, a mild-mannered accountant, to manage the books. Berman made Schultz millions. He turned chaos into columns, and he never carried a gun.
By 1933, organized crime in New York had reorganized itself under a body called the Commission, essentially a board of directors for murder. Lucky Luciano sat at its head. The Commission existed to keep the peace between families and prevent the kind of public bloodshed that brought federal heat.
The men who enforced the Commission’s will were young Jews from the same slums Schultz came from. The newspapers would later call them Murder Incorporated. They killed for $5,000 a job, the price of a nice car in 1935. They answered to a man named Louis Lepke Buchalter, a former garment worker who had personally authorized more than 80 murders.
This is the world Dutch Schultz operated in. A world where your business partners could vote to kill you if you threatened the peace. By the fall of 1935, Dutch Schultz had done exactly that.
Around Schultz that night sat three men whose lives were bound to his by money, loyalty, and the absence of any other option. Otto Berman, the accountant, 45 years old, kept the books. Abe Landau, the enforcer, 40 years old, had survived being shot in the lung by Vincent Coll’s men three years earlier. Bernard “Lulu” Rosenkrantz, 35, was a former boxer turned wheelman and enforcer.
Schultz had moved his entire operation across the river to Newark because a young prosecutor named Thomas Dewey was tearing his empire apart in Manhattan. He thought Newark was safe. He thought distance meant protection. He was hiding, and he did not realize his hiding place had already been reported to the men who wanted him dead.
The two men walking toward the Palace Chop House that night were young, hungry, and terrifyingly calm. Charles “the Bug” Workman was 25 years old, a petty thief from Philadelphia who had drifted into Murder Incorporated’s orbit because killing paid better than stealing. Emanuel “Mendy” Weiss was 29, the son of a tailor, and one of the most reliable killers in New York.
They carried .38 caliber pistols. Workman also had a .45. They had a driver waiting outside with the engine running.
The decision to kill Dutch Schultz was not made in anger. It was made in a meeting room by a vote, like a corporate board deciding to fire a liability.
By the summer of 1935, Schultz was facing federal indictment from Thomas Dewey. Dewey was dismantling Schultz’s rackets piece by piece. Wiretaps, informants, grand jury subpoenas, one by one pulling apart the machinery that kept the money flowing.
Schultz, impulsive, violent, incapable of patience, announced to the Commission that he intended to solve the problem by assassinating Dewey, a sitting prosecutor, in broad daylight. He laid it out like a business plan, as though murdering a public official was simply another operational expense.
The room went silent. Lucky Luciano understood immediately what this meant. Kill a prosecutor, and every federal agency in the country descends on organized crime. Everything they had built would burn.
Luciano looked at Lepke Buchalter. Lepke looked back. The vote was taken. The hammer came down.
Lepke picked up the phone and called Murder Incorporated. The order was simple. Dutch Schultz dies tonight. Not next week. Tonight. Before he can move on Dewey.
Schultz’s own organization, the men he drank with, planned with, split profits with, voted to have him killed. Not because he had betrayed them. Not because he had stolen from them. Because he was going to do something so reckless, so publicly catastrophic, that they decided he was more dangerous alive than dead.
His crime was not treachery. His crime was stupidity.
The order went out on October 23rd. By nightfall, the killers were already in Newark, and Dutch Schultz had no idea he was about to become number 137 on someone else’s list.
The Palace Chop House sat on East Park Street in Newark, a low-slung restaurant with a long bar up front and a private dining room in the back. It was Schultz’s regular spot. Everyone knew it.
By 9:00 on the night of October 23rd, the back room was occupied. Schultz arrived with Rosenkrantz, Landau, and Berman. They ordered steaks and beer. The conversation was business, numbers, money, the usual machinery of an empire under siege.
At nearly the same hour, 8 miles away across the Hudson River, two other Schultz associates were being targeted. Martin Krompier, who ran Schultz’s policy operations in the Bronx, was shot multiple times in the chest, the arm, and the side. Sam Gold took rounds as well. Both men remarkably survived.
This was not one murder. It was a coordinated decapitation. Simultaneous strikes in two cities 8 miles apart, timed to the minute.
Workman and Weiss arrived at the Palace Chop House sometime after 10:00. Their driver parked the car on the street with the engine running. The plan was simple. Enter through the back door. Walk into the back room. Shoot everyone at the table. Walk out. Total elapsed time, under 2 minutes.
They entered through the rear. The hallway was dim. Through the doorway they could see the table. Three men sitting. But there was a problem. There were supposed to be four men at that table. One was missing.
Dutch Schultz, the primary target, was not at the table. He had stood up 60 seconds earlier and walked to the restroom. He was 15 feet away, behind a closed door, completely alone.
Weiss made the call without words. He kept moving toward the table, toward Berman, Landau, and Lulu. Workman peeled off toward the restroom door.
Inside, Schultz was standing at the urinal. The room was small, roughly 10 feet by 10 feet, tiled walls, a single bare bulb overhead. When the door opened, he turned and saw a man he did not recognize holding a .45 caliber pistol.
Six years later, testifying in federal court against Lepke Buchalter, Workman would admit the truth of that moment with startling honesty. He said he went into the men’s room and shot Schultz, but wasn’t certain who he was shooting.
A professional killer, sent specifically to murder Dutch Schultz, pulled the trigger on a man he couldn’t identify in the dim light of a Newark restroom.
One shot, a .45 to the abdomen. Schultz doubled over.
In the back room, Weiss opened fire. The first shot from Weiss’s .38 hit Otto Berman before the accountant could rise from his chair. The second and third followed within a heartbeat. Berman was gone before he understood what was happening.
Landau reacted. Of the three men at the table, he was the only one with the reflexes of a survivor. He threw himself sideways, reaching for something, a weapon, cover, anything. A .38 round caught him in the shoulder. Another hit his chest. He went down, but he was not dead. Not yet.
Rosenkrantz, the boxer, the driver, took rounds in the back. Multiple .38 slugs fired at a distance of less than 10 feet. The force drove him forward into the table, scattering plates and glasses across the floor. He collapsed.
The entire fusillade in the back room lasted between 30 and 60 seconds. In the time it takes to tie your shoes, three men were shot, and the room was filled with gunsmoke so thick that, according to later police reports, you could not see from one end to the other.
In the restroom, the .45 had already done its work. The round entered Schultz’s abdomen below the ribs. A devastating wound that tore through internal tissue and began the slow bleed that would kill him 22 hours later.
But Schultz did not die in that restroom. He did not even fall. 200 pounds of muscle and fury, Dutch Schultz absorbed the shot, staggered backward into the tiled wall, and grabbed at his stomach.
Workman, the man who had just shot him, was already backing out of the restroom. He had fired one round. He believed his target was down. In the dim light, he still was not entirely certain who he had just shot.
Schultz pushed off the wall. He staggered through the restroom door into the hallway. Blood was pooling in his shirt, running down his trousers, dripping onto the floor with each step. He made it to the back room, where his three associates lay bleeding or dead. And he collapsed.
He lay face down in a spreading pool of his own blood, groaning, already incoherent. The most feared gangster in New York City dying on the floor of a Newark chop house, shot by a man who didn’t even know his face.
What happened next reveals the true nature of this killing. Workman came back. He walked past Weiss, who was already heading for the exit. He walked past the bodies of Berman and Lulu. He walked to where Schultz lay face down on the floor, still alive, still breathing in ragged wet gasps.
And he knelt down. And he went through Schultz’s pockets for 1 to 2 minutes, an eternity in a crime scene, with witnesses in the next room, with sirens potentially already on the way.
Charles Workman rifled through the pockets of a dying man, looking for cash, looking for whatever Dutch Schultz carried. The professional killer, $5,000 already promised for the job, could not resist robbing his victim while his victim’s blood soaked through the knees of his trousers.
When Workman finally stood up and ran for the back door, the getaway car was gone. Weiss and the driver had waited 60 seconds, maybe 90, and then left without him.
Workman ran, on foot, through Newark’s dark streets, a mile and a half to a safe house. Days later, the argument exploded. Weiss told Lepke that Workman’s greed had wasted time and endangered everyone. Lepke sided with Weiss. Workman was frozen out, sent to lay low, exiled from the inner circle.
Back at the Palace Chop House, the immediate aftermath was chaos. The bartender called the police. The first officers arrived within minutes to find the back room looking like a slaughterhouse.
Lulu was the worst off. Multiple .38 rounds in his back, he was fading fast. He died before reaching the hospital or within moments of arrival. He was 35 years old.
Otto Berman, the accountant, the family man, was pronounced dead at 11:15 that night, less than an hour after the shooting. His wife would learn the news from a morning newspaper.
Landau, who’d survived everything, held on longer. The Russian immigrant who had endured being shot in the lung, who had survived Vincent Coll’s gunmen, lasted until the early morning hours of October 24th. Then his body gave out.
Three dead by sunrise. The accountant, the enforcer, the driver. Each man killed not for what he had done, but for who he sat next to. None of them were the target. All of them died anyway.
And Schultz, the actual target, was still alive. Barely.
They brought him to Newark City Hospital around 11:00 that night, roughly 30 minutes after the shooting. The doctors knew immediately that the abdominal wound was fatal. Too much internal damage, too much blood lost, infection already spreading through the perforated intestine.
A stenographer named F. J. Conlan arrived the following afternoon, October 24th, sometime around 4:00. Schultz had been dying for approximately 18 hours. He was feverish, delirious, fading in and out of consciousness.
Conlan sat at his bedside with a notepad and recorded everything the gangster said. What followed was 2 hours of the most famous deathbed rambling in American criminal history.
Conlan asked the question that mattered: “Who shot you?” Schultz’s eyes focused briefly, and he answered, “The boss himself.”
Then the coherence dissolved entirely. Schultz began speaking in what can only be described as poetry from a collapsing mind.
“A boy has never wept, nor dashed a thousand kin. And then, you can play jacks, and girls do that with a softball, and do tricks with it. And then, oh, oh, dog biscuit. And when he is happy, he doesn’t get snappy.”
The stenographer wrote it all down, every word. 2 hours of a dying brain firing its last signals into language that meant nothing or everything.
At 8:25 on the morning of October 24th, 1935, Dutch Schultz, Arthur Flegenheimer, age 33, son of an absent father and a laundry woman, stopped talking and stopped breathing.
By sunrise on October 24th, the final count was complete. Four men entered the back room of the Palace Chop House. Four men died. Lulu Rosenkrantz, age 35. Otto Berman, age 45. Abe Landau, age 40. Dutch Schultz, age 33.
Combined, these four men had lived 153 years. Combined, they died in under 22 hours, all from wounds inflicted in those 60 seconds of gunfire.
Here is the arithmetic of this night. Two gunmen, four dead, 60 seconds, zero arrests. The most powerful gangster in New York, a man credited with ordering 136 murders, was killed by an organization he belonged to in a restaurant he thought was safe.
So, what did Schultz’s words mean? “The boss himself.” “Dog biscuit.” “A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kin.”
For decades, treasure hunters and amateur cryptographers have pored over Conlan’s transcript looking for coded messages, specifically, directions to the $7 million Schultz allegedly hid somewhere in upstate New York. The theory goes that Schultz, knowing he was dying, was trying to communicate the location of his fortune in language only an insider could decode.
The problem with this theory is everything else Schultz said. The transcript is 2 hours long. The vast majority of it is disconnected fragments, childlike nonsense, half-remembered conversations, the firing of a brain whose blood supply was failing.
The most likely truth is the simplest. Arthur Flegenheimer’s brain was dying. And dying brains produce language that sounds meaningful because we desperately want it to be.
The fortune that vanished, if it ever existed as a single hidden cache, has never been found. Not in 90 years of searching. The treasure died with the man. Or it never existed at all.
The men who pulled the triggers, Workman and Weiss, were employees. They had no personal hatred for Schultz. They were craftsmen performing a service. The men who ordered it, Luciano and Lepke, were colleagues protecting an investment.
In the world of organized crime, this was not betrayal. This was governance.
Days after the Palace Chop House shooting, Newark police identified a local hoodlum named Albert Stern as a possible triggerman or accomplice. Stern was 21 years old, young, expendable. Within weeks, he was found dead in a Newark boarding house, less than a mile from the Palace Chop House.
The official cause: suicide by strangulation. He had supposedly tied his own necktie to a gas jet and hanged himself. No one believed it.
By the morning of October 24th, every newspaper in New York carried the headline: “Beer Baron Slain. Dutch Schultz Murdered in Newark.” The public consumed it as spectacle. They did not know yet about the Commission vote. They would not learn the full truth until 6 years later.
The killing of Dutch Schultz was not an ending. It was a beginning, the first crack in an organization that would eventually consume itself entirely.
The decision to let Charles Workman live proved to be the most consequential mercy in organized crime history. In 1941, 6 years after the Palace Chop House, Workman turned government witness. He testified against Lepke Buchalter in federal court, providing the first insider account of how Murder Incorporated actually functioned.
Abe Reles, another Murder Incorporated operative, corroborated everything. He confirmed the Schultz hit. He confirmed the Dewey motive. Allie Tannenbaum added his own testimony.
The trials of 1941 ripped the organization apart from the inside, turning the most efficient killing machine in American crime into a parade of informants racing to cut deals.
Lepke Buchalter was convicted and electrocuted at Sing Sing in 1944, the only major organized crime boss in American history to receive the death penalty. Emanuel “Mendy” Weiss, the tailor’s son who fired the .38 rounds into Berman, Landau, and Rosenkrantz, was electrocuted the same year at the age of 38.
Workman received a reduced sentence for his cooperation. He was released in 1944. He lived quietly, anonymously, until 1966, dying of natural causes at 56. The killer outlived every one of his victims and every one of his bosses.
Here is what most accounts of the Schultz killing get wrong. Dutch Schultz was not shot at the table with his associates. He was alone in the restroom. He was shot by a man who could not see his face clearly, who fired a single round in dim light, and who later admitted under oath that he was not certain he was shooting the right person.
The iconic image, Schultz gunned down at dinner with his crew, defiant, dramatic, cinematic, is a myth. The reality is lonelier, darker, and far more pathetic. A man shot at a urinal by a stranger.
The Palace Chop House was demolished in the 1970s. Today, the site is an empty lot in Newark. There is no plaque, no monument, no marker. Grass grows through cracked concrete.
Schultz’s widow, Frances, received nothing from his estate, which officially did not exist. The $7 million, if real, remains hidden somewhere in upstate New York. 90 years of treasure hunters have found exactly zero.
It is still 10:15 on the night of October 23rd, 1935. A man stands up from a table in a back room in Newark. He walks to the restroom. He does not know that his own organization has voted him dead. He does not know that the man walking through the back door is 25 years old and cannot identify his face.
Arthur Flegenheimer, Dutch Schultz, has 90 seconds left, and he spends them alone.