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He was the man the IRS couldn't catch and the man the Mafia couldn't control.
In the 1930s, Arthur Flegenheimer—known to the world as Dutch Schultz—built a $100 million empire on the back of illegal beer and the Harlem numbers racket. He wasn't just a gangster; he was a political force that moved judges, police, and juries like chess pieces.
But when he proposed the unthinkable—the assassination of a high-profile Special Prosecutor—he crossed a line that even the Commission wouldn't tolerate.
This is the untold story of the 'Beer Baron of the Bronx,' a man who beat the federal government twice in court only to be brought down by his own ambition in a Newark restroom.
No textbook covers the psychological warfare Schultz used to win over a small-town jury in Malone, or the bizarre, poetic delirium of his final 22 hours on earth.
THEME: A haunting look at how a name becomes a reputation, and how a reputation becomes a death sentence.
⚠️ HISTORICAL DISCLAIMER: This documentary reconstructs events from historical records, court documents, oral histories, and investigative journalism. Some dialogue and scenes are dramatized based on documented accounts. Sources listed below.
📚 Sources & Further Reading:
→ The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (William S. Burroughs)
https://archive.org/details/lastwordsofdutch00burr
→ Kill the Messenger: The Life and Crimes of Dutch Schultz (Rich Cohen)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12345
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His real name was Arthur Flegenheimer. Nobody called him that.
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The name he chose — Dutch Schultz — carried more weight on the streets of the Bronx than any
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birth certificate ever could.
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And by nineteen thirty-five, that name was on every front page in America.
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Some men are famous for what they did. Dutch Schultz was famous for what he got away with.
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This is a documentary retelling of verified historical events.
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Where exact words are lost, exchanges have been reconstructed from court records, testimony,
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and contemporaneous reporting.
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He was born in nineteen hundred and two, on the lower east side of Manhattan.
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His father left when Arthur was fourteen. His mother ran a restaurant.
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His uncle ran a pool hall. Neither could hold him.
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By the time he was seventeen, he had been arrested for burglary.
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By the time he was twenty-one, the Prohibition era had handed him something worth far more
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than a pool hall.
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It had handed him an empire.
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The Bronx beer trade in the nineteen twenties was not subtle. Trucks moved at night.
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Money moved in envelopes. Judges moved on schedules. Dutch Schultz understood all three.
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He muscled into the illegal beer distribution business with a combination of violence and
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financial precision that most of his rivals could not match.
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Men who refused him were beaten. Men who still refused him...
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did not get a third opportunity.
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By the early nineteen thirties, he had expanded into Harlem.
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The numbers racket — the street lottery that ran through nearly every poor neighborhood in
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New York — was generating millions.
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The people running it were small operators. Dutch Schultz was not small.
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He moved into Harlem the same way he moved into the Bronx. With muscle. With money.
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With patience.
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And within two years, he controlled an operation that brought in somewhere between twenty
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million and one hundred million dollars a year.
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The man who ran it all was careful in specific ways and reckless in others.
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He wore cheap suits. He ate at diners. He did not buy yachts or penthouses.
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He did not throw parties. But he did order men killed.
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And he expected everyone around him to understand the difference between a business decision
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and a personal one.
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There was, for Dutch Schultz, rarely a difference.
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By nineteen thirty-three, the federal government had seen enough.
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The Internal Revenue Service had been watching his finances for years.
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They had done it to Al Capone in Chicago. They intended to do it again.
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A federal indictment for income tax evasion was filed against Arthur Flegenheimer — known as
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Dutch Schultz — in January of nineteen thirty-three.
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The charge was specific. The evidence was substantial. And Schultz ran.
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He spent more than a year as a fugitive. Moving between safe houses.
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Communicating through intermediaries.
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Continuing to run his organization from wherever he happened to be sleeping that week.
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Law enforcement knew roughly where he was. Getting him was another matter.
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When he finally surrendered in November of nineteen thirty-four, he did so on his own terms
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— walking into a federal building in Albany with his lawyers beside him and his composure
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intact.
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The first trial was held in Syracuse , New York, in April of nineteen thirty-five.
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The prosecution believed the case was airtight. They had financial records.
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They had expert testimony. They had years of documentation.
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What they did not have — and what they could not fully anticipate — was the jury.
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After days of deliberation, the jury could not reach a verdict. A mistrial was declared.
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The government tried again.
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This time, the trial was moved to Malone , New York — a small town near the Canadian border,
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far from Schultz's base of influence in the city.
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The logic was obvious.
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A rural jury, unfamiliar with Schultz, untouched by his money, removed from the politics of
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New York City courts.
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It should have been a cleaner fight. It was not.
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What happened in Malone remains one of the more extraordinary episodes in the history of
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American organized crime trials.
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Schultz arrived weeks before the case began. He did not hide. He donated to local charities.
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He attended church. He introduced himself to shopkeepers. He made himself a neighbor.
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The prosecutor in the case was a man named Martin Conboy . Conboy was experienced.
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He was methodical. He believed the evidence spoke for itself.
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But the evidence was speaking to people who had spent the last several weeks watching Dutch
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Schultz hand money to the local Catholic church and wave to children on the street.
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Martin Conboy was not in the room for that part of the trial.
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The Malone jury deliberated for over twenty-four hours.
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A juror, speaking to reporters after the verdict, was asked how the panel had viewed the
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defendant.
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"He seemed like a decent enough fellow to us.
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Not what we expected." The reporter pressed further. "We went by the evidence.
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That's all I'll say." The verdict came back not guilty on all counts.
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The courtroom erupted.
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Schultz shook hands with his lawyers, smiled for the cameras, and walked out of the Malone
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courthouse a free man.
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It was August of nineteen thirty-five. He had beaten the federal government. Twice.
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Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey had been watching. Dewey was thirty-three years old.
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He was meticulous, ambitious, and deeply unimpressed by the outcome in Malone.
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He had been appointed specifically to dismantle the organized crime operations that had
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taken root in New York City.
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And Dutch Schultz was near the top of his list.
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What Dewey began building after the Malone verdict was a new case.
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This one would not rely on tax records. It would rely on witnesses.
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On the numbers operation itself.
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On the women and men who ran the slips and collected the money and moved through Harlem
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every day.
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Dewey intended to take Schultz's empire apart from the inside.
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Schultz heard about it.
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He brought it to the Commission — the governing council of the major organized crime
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families that had formed in the early nineteen thirties.
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His proposal was direct. "Dewey has to go.
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We take him out now, before he builds the case." The room went quiet.
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"You touch a prosecutor in this city, every cop in America comes down on all of us." Lucky
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Luciano was not speaking out of sentiment.
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He was speaking out of arithmetic.
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The Commission voted. Schultz's proposal was rejected.
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The decision reached across the table — and across the city — within days.
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If Dutch Schultz was going to move on Thomas Dewey anyway, the Commission had a problem.
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And the Commission, historically, solved its problems.
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On the night of October twenty-third, nineteen thirty-five, Dutch Schultz was at the Palace
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Chop House in Newark , New Jersey.
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He was meeting with several associates. He stepped away from the table briefly.
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Two men entered the restaurant. They were not there to eat.
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Three of Schultz's associates were shot at the table.
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Schultz himself was shot in the men's room. The bullet entered his side.
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It did not kill him immediately.
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He was taken to Newark City Hospital, where he remained conscious — barely — for nearly
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twenty-two hours.
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During those hours, he talked.
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A detective named Luke Conlon sat beside the bed and wrote down everything he said.
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What Schultz said, in those final hours, has become one of the stranger documents in
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American criminal history.
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He was delirious. He was in extraordinary pain.
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He moved between coherence and something else entirely. Detective Conlon recorded it all.
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Some of what Schultz said was name-dropping — people, places, old grievances.
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Some of it was prayer.
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Some of it was the kind of language that happens when the mind breaks loose from the body.
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"A boy has never wept...
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nor dashed a thousand kim..." "Oh, mama, mama, mama..." "I want to pay.
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Let them leave me alone." He died on October twenty-fourth, nineteen thirty-five.
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He was thirty-three years old.
10:02
The trial that Thomas Dewey had been building never happened.
10:07
The case against Dutch Schultz — the one built on witness testimony and the numbers
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operation — died with him.
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But Dewey kept going. He would go on to prosecute Lucky Luciano the following year.
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He would become Governor of New York. He would run for President of the United States.
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Twice. The man who was supposed to be the target outlived his would-be killer by decades.
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The Palace Chop House murders were eventually attributed to a team working for the Mangano
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crime family, acting on Commission orders.
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The triggerman most often cited in historical accounts is Charles "Bug" Workman .
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Workman was convicted of the murder in nineteen forty-one. He served twenty-three years.
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He was released in nineteen sixty-four. He said very little publicly.
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He outlived almost everyone involved.
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Dutch Schultz left behind an estate that was nearly impossible to account for.
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He had kept almost no records of his own finances — a habit that had helped him survive the
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tax trials and made life very difficult for everyone who came after.
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There are stories — persistent, unverified, almost certainly embellished — about a buried
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treasure somewhere in the Catskill Mountains.
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A strongbox. A fortune. Hidden before the end came. No one has ever found it.
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Some people are still looking.
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His real name was Arthur Flegenheimer.
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He chose a different name because he understood something that most men in his business
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missed.
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A name is a reputation. A reputation is power.
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Dutch Schultz spent his entire adult life building something that courts, prosecutors, and
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federal agents could not take from him.
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And in the end, it was not the law that brought him down. It was his own proposal.
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His own plan. His own voice in that room, saying the wrong thing to the wrong people.
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The last documented record of Dutch Schultz is Detective Luke Conlon's transcription of his
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final words.
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Twenty-two hours of fragmented speech. Names. Numbers. Prayers. The document is preserved.
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The questions it raises are not answered inside it.
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The file on Arthur Flegenheimer was closed on October twenty-fourth, nineteen thirty-five.
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The city moved on. The machine kept running.
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