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.