Triple Zero

At 10:30 one evening last week, two men walked into the barroom of the Palace Chop House & Tavern, around the corner from Newark's Robert Treat Hotel. They ordered the bartender to lie down on the floor, keep his mouth shut. Passing down a narrow hall, the pair came to a rear dining room where three other men were seated around a table under an orange light. The two intruders jerked out revolvers, began to blaze away. The door of an adjoining toilet inched open. The gunmen sent one shot through it, turned, ran. The man in the toilet staggered out, made his way up the hall to the bar.

"Gimme two nickels," he called to the barman on the floor. "I want to make a call." He went to a wall telephone, rang police headquarters. "This is Dutch Schultz," he gasped. "Send an ambulance. I'm dying."

Police cars, press cars and ambulances screamed toward the scene of the latest event in the career of Arthur ("Dutch Schultz") Flegenheimer, New York City's most notorious racketeer, the nation's most prosperous post-Repeal criminal and the one big hoodlum against whom the U. S. Government could not make income tax charges stick (TIME, Aug. 12, et ante). At the Palace Chop House & Tavern, officers, newshawks and surgeons beheld a sight unparalleled since Chicago's St. Valentine's Day Massacre (TIME, Feb. 25. 1929). Lying on the sidewalk they found Abraham Landau, Flegenheimer henchman, where he had collapsed after a futile attempt to pink the two assassins. Just inside, Bernard Rosenkrantz, Flegen-heimer's chauffeur, sprawled in a pool of blood oozing from six wounds. In the rear room, which smelled like a shooting gallery, they found a roly-poly little man with wide, blue eyes. He was Otto Biederman, gambler and underworld clown whom Damon Runyon frequently put into his stories under the name of "Regret." Biederman's face was a red smear of holes ind blood. Leaning over the table with one bullet in his belly, was the mussy, 33-year-old German Jew who was the cause of it all.

"You been shot?" a police lieutenant

asked.

"Yeah. The pain is awful," moaned Arthur Flegenheimer.

"Why don't you lie down?" "I can't. It hurts too much." All the victims were wrapped in blankets, piled on stretchers, dispatched to Newark City Hospital. Twice this year in upState New York Federal prosecutors had failed to get juries to convict Flegenheimer for failing to pay taxes on a discoverable $480,000 income for 1929-31. Avoiding Manhattan, Schultz first hid in Connecticut, where he had taken up horseback riding this summer, later took refuge in New Jersey. There the Government went after him again, this time on a tax evasion indictment in the Southern New York district. Fighting a Federal motion to send him back to New York, Flegenheimer was at liberty on $50,000 bail when his enemies caught up with him in the Palace Chop House & Tavern.

That night's gang shooting was not confined to Newark. Across the Hudson River in Manhattan, enemies again struck at the Flegenheimer mob before its four members were off the operating tables of Newark City Hospital.

Just on the stroke of midnight in an underground barbershop in Times Square, Martin Krompier, Flegenheimer's right-hand man, found himself staring at a figure with a drawn gun. The gunman blew a hole in the ceiling to warn other occupants of the shop to scatter. Then he plugged Krompier four times.

In Brooklyn earlier the same day a hoodlum named Louis ("Pretty") Amberg, whose equally notorious brother Joseph had been murdered in a garage three weeks before, was hacked to death with a hatchet, left in a blazing sedan. Feeling as if the whole bloody business was some anachronistic throwback to the Prohibition Era, metropolitan police set about trying to make sense of the criminal carnage.

To the New York police, Flegenheimer himself had always been something of an enigma: a sloppy, unambitious burglar and package thief who became ruler of a great illegal beer distributing system in The Bronx, survived Repeal to go on into even more lucrative rackets. He was credited with running a waiters' union, a usurious system of small loans to the poor, several midtown night clubs in Manhattan. But the chief source of Flegenheimer's income was the policy game, the daily lottery which keeps most of Harlem's Negroes poor. Most players can bet only a few pennies at a time but total receipts run annually into the millions. On a table across which the Flegenheimer mob was shot in Newark, police found sheaves of financial figures, one adding machine slip totaling $827,000.

As to why Flegenheimer was ambushed, police offered several explanations. One was that his legal difficulties had brought so much unpleasant public attention to the local anderworld that it was deemed prudent to eliminate him. Another theory was that since Flegenheimer's exile, other gangs had "muscled in" on his interests. While police estimate that no less than 135 lives have been lost as a direct result of Flegenheimer's outlaw enterprises, he was known to favor the conference rather than the revolver as an instrument of settling jurisdictional disputes. From his Newark hideout he had sent an emissary to Manhattan several weeks ago.This emissary had never returned, and word had gone round that he was to be found in a barrel of cement on the bottom of the Hudson River. Krompier was supposed to have been on a second goodwill mission when he was shot in the Times Square barbershop.

New York City's Police Commissioner Lewis Joseph Valentine had a theory all his own. To him the murder of Amberg and the assault on the Flegenheimer gang were plainly the outcroppings of a race war in the underworld--Italians v. Jews. Accordingly, he sent his men out to find Charles Luciana, called "Lucky" because he is one of the few men to survive a "ride." "Lucky" Luciana is a squint-eyed Latin who is supposed to run the Unione Siciliana, a society which has progressively usurped the privilege of catering to New York's night life. In their march of progress, reasoned Commissioner Valentine, the "socalled Italian gangs" had felt it necessary to wipe out the "Jewish gangs" of Messrs. Amberg & Flegenheimer.

But these wordly tribulations began to have less & less importance to the wounded Flegenheimer gangsters following the Newark shooting. Krompier was still alive. First to die in Newark was funny little Otto Biederman. Then Landau. Later Rosenkrantz. None named names as to their assailants. By next midafternoon, Flegenheimer had called for a Roman Catholic priest who baptized him into the faith of his 21-year-old, ex-cigaret-girl wife. Then Flegenheimer went into delirium. When police questioned him, they evoked an amazing babble, some of it wildly poetic, most of it completely Delphic:

John, please oh, did you buy the hotel? You promised a million--sure. . . . Oh, oh dog biscuits and when he is happy he doesn't get snappy--please, please to do this. Then Henry, Henry, Frankie you didn't meet him. You didn't even meet me. The glove will fit what I say oh Kayiyi, oh Kayiyi. Sure who cares when you are through? How do you know this? . . .

"Who shot you?" asked a policeman. The boss himself. . .. Yes, I don't know. I am sore and I am going up and I am "going to give you honey if I can. Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.

"What did the big fellow shoot you for?"

Him? John? Over a million, five million dollars. . . . Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. Talk to the sword. Shut up, you got a big mouth! Please help me up. . . . French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone.

His temperature at 106DEG, Arthur Flegenheimer then lapsed into coma. He had not given the police much of a clue as to who shot him, but "The Boss" is the name Unione Siciliana mobsters call "Lucky" Luciana. And the only underworld "John" the officers could think of who might pay "a million" for "the hotel" was Johnny Torrio, who went from Brooklyn to Chicago after the War, rose to power over the dead body of "Big Jim" Colosimo, turned Chicago's underworld over to Al Capone and retraced his steps to Brooklyn, where he is now a potent political figure.

In Harlem at twilight, poor Negroes with policy tickets grabbed at evening papers to see what lucky number had won Flegenheimer's lottery that day. They turned to the sport pages, found the figures for the three-race, five-race and seven-race pari-mutuel totals at Narragansett Park, R. I. They ran black fingers down the third digit column and blinked with surprise. The winning number was 000. It had not turned up in four years.

"Triple-zero!" they cried. : 'At's Dutch's number. 'At's good-bye Dutch. It's all over with 'at boy."

Arthur Flegenheimer drew life's blank at 8:35 o'clock that same evening. Next morning Harlem's blackmen scrambled by the hundreds to get their money down on the number they were sure would win that day: 835.

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