KING OF RACKETEERS

Waipa Post, Volume 52, Issue 3705, 10 January 1936, Page 11

KING OF RACKETEERS

SHOT IN TAVERN. In the screened cabinet of the Newark chop-house and tavern where “Dutch” Schultz, notorious New York “racketeer” beer baron, was shot down and seriously wounded by gunmen the police found a balance sheet for the past month showing profits on his gambling enterprises of £165,450,5ays the News-Chronicje. He had been betrayed by a young woman who was led into his'presence by one of his bodyguard. She stayed for five minutes, and two minutes after she left the killers arrived. She had given them the exact information on where to find the king of racketeers.

Murder after murder in amazing succession, as racketeers fought for the remunerative underworld throne occupied by years by “Dutch,” led to the attack on him. Now, at last, his throne topples. After being shot he was delirious and kept repeating, “It is the journey’s end. This is my death. I’m not afraid of anybody. I won’t run.” He paid a tribute to the marksmanship of his attackers. “I don’t know who they were,” he said. “But they were pretty good shots.” Curiously enough, Schultz had never been convicted of a major crime. Yet he is debited by the police with having “ordered” dozens of murders, and Jack Diamond was one of his victims.

“Pretty” Amberg, whose burned body was found twelve hours before the attack on Schultz, was a notorious murderer. He was supposed to be the originator of the sack method by, which the victim was pinioned in a heavy bag with his legs and arms wired in such a way as to ensure strangulation as a result of his efforts to wriggle free. The police had named Amberg as a suspect in no less than eighteen murders, but though he was arrested fifteen times he was convicted o'nly once —for carrying concealed guns. While the assassins who attacked Schultz at Newark- are unknown, the police lay the murder, soon after the attack, of his chief bodyguard at the door of a 21-year-old gunman named Al Stern, who in the two months previously killed seven of his former underworld allies and wounded two others.

New York’s underworld bristled with excitement 'over the shooting of the chieftain and his lieutenants. Its grim prediction is that “boom times are ahead for the undertaking business.

With his “No. 1 Trigger Man” Bernard Rosenkanrz, Otto Berman, a jovial satellite famous or infamous as “Avisack,” the racing tipster, and another henchman, Leo Frank, “Dutch” -was studying the accounts of their gambling enterprises when he was attacked. A thick-necked, shortsighted man of thirty-five, he was sitting, as usual, with his back to the wall.

Suddenly two men entered the tavern and, shouting to the bartenders “Duck quickly!” opened fire. Despite their injuries Frank and Berman rushed into the street blazing after the fleeing assassins. “Dutch” meanwhile had slumped to the floor hit by a bullet, which doctors afterwards discovered, had passed through his liver.

Rosenkranz was afterwards found to possess an official policeman’s badge. He dragged himself to his feet and murmured to one of the bartenders, “Give me a nickel.” With the coin he telephoned to the police for an ambulance, which conveyed him to the hospital where Frank and Berman died cursing their slayers. Within half an hour of the escape of the Newark assassins, a second scene in the night’s melodrama was enacted—this time in a hairdresser’s shop at a busy corner - of Broadway, at 47th Street, where the electric signs of the “Great White Way” blaze their brightest. There Martin Krompier, chief bodyguard of Schultz, his brother Jules, and Sammy Gold, an associate “racketeer,” were having a midnight shave. A dark man wearing a brown overcoat opened the front door. He hesitated a moment as a porter began helping Martin Krompier on with his coat.

Then he fired a shot at the ceiling. As the porter sprang aside the man emptied his revolver in the bodies of Martin and Gold, who fell with wounds which proved mortal. Earlier in the day, in a blazing motor car near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was found the body of “Pretty” Amberg. He had been slain with an axe before his motor car was set afire.