In New York, for 90 years, they have been looking for the treasures of the richest gangster in the city: so far unsuccessfully

The American 1920s are the beauties in feathers on the cabaret stage, the bright signs of gambling establishments, the struggle of the people against prohibition and the mafia. Members of criminal gangs were considered the richest people in the United States. In terms of money, the bootlegger and racketeer Dutch Schultz stood out among the gangster party, reports Onliner.

At the beginning of the 2th century, he was considered the richest criminal in New York. On some deliveries of alcohol mafiosi earned hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time, he wore $XNUMX shirts, lived in the ghetto, and saved every cent. Interestingly, after the death of Schultz, all his savings disappeared without a trace.

The Dutchman Schultz was not of Dutch origin. And he wasn't Schultz either. He simply took his nickname and stole it from another famous New York gangster. Friends told the guy that he was very similar to that Schultz: also blue-eyed, stocky and aggressive. In fact, the young gangster's name was Arthur Flegenheimer. Yes, he was afraid that a complex surname could interfere with his media presence. Therefore, I chose a more sonorous pseudonym that would look good in the headlines of newspapers. Agree, Dutch Schultz sounds stylish.

Arthur-Schulz was born in 1902 to Jewish immigrants from Germany.

He grew up in the slums of the Bronx among the Irish and Italians, so he watched criminal skirmishes from childhood. This, plus the departure of his father from the family and total poverty, determined his future fate. The Dutchman for some time tried to earn honestly: he carried mail, stamped courier items, painted houses. And then he spat on this business and got a job in a nightclub, where he began to steal bets on dice games. Later, with colleagues, petty mafiosi, the guy put together a gang of burglars.

Schultz first went to prison at the age of 17. It was said that he was an unruly prisoner. Therefore, from the cell he was sent into exile on an island farm. But the burglar managed to make friends with reputable gangsters who promised to pat for him in the wild. After his release, the Dutchman was introduced to eminent Italian mafia bosses Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky.

On the subject: “The Last Boss of Brighton”: an American wrote a book about the Russian mafia in New York by Beebe Nayfeld

Around this time, Prohibition was introduced in the United States. A gangster named Joey Noe hired him to escort illegal beer shipments from New Jersey. In the beginning, the Dutchman's task was simply to swing his shotgun at the right time. However, very quickly, the young mafioso became a full-fledged co-owner of Noe's business. Together, they began to open more and more clandestine breweries. The beer was of extremely dubious quality. But New York bartenders, in order to avoid severe damage to the knee joints, tried to pour Schultz and Noe's liquor in increased volumes. Other bootleggers were eliminated according to the same scheme. The gang of the Dutchman hung the main competitor on hooks by the thumbs and put a bandage over his eyes with gonorrheal secretions.

By the age of 23, Schultz had become the beer king of New York and earned his first million dollars.

To estimate the capital of the mafia in the modern equivalent, multiply the amount by twenty. The annual turnover of the joint business was more than $20 million ($400 million in modern money). These are huge sums, even by the standards of big mafia business in America in the 1920s.

When Prohibition was repealed, the Dutchman had to find new sources of income. In the early 1930s, the mafia had this scheme: gangsters opened trade unions and organized voluntary-compulsory entry for businesses. Refusal to pay large union dues led to mass strikes by workers and bombs in office buildings. Thus, under the leadership of Schultz, an association for the protection of the rights of catering workers appeared, which nightmared all the top restaurants and cafeterias in New York.

The Dutchman also organized underground lotteries. Every day in the parks they accepted bets on randomly falling numbers. Thanks to the schemes developed by the accountant Otto Berman, the gangster always remained in the black. Berman was a mathematical genius. In a matter of seconds, he could calculate the winning combination and the amount that his person had to deposit at the last moment and break the entire bank. For services, Otto received $ 162 thousand (in current money) per week. And, perhaps, it was the minimum of all the money earned.

It sounded great, of course. But the trouble was that Schultz was pretty tired of everyone.

The Dutchman's Gang at the time was considered the only criminal organization capable of competing with the legendary Five Families of the New York Mafia. And all five disliked the ex-bootlegger for his perverse cruelty. According to contemporaries, for Schultz to shoot a man was like picking his teeth. Schultz cut out the heart of one of the ill-wishers with a penknife. The rest of the clans tried to uphold codes of honor and cooperate with the police for mutual benefit. And the organized criminal group of the Dutch made indiscriminate raids, regardless of anyone.

The police, of course, couldn't stand it. Jay Edgar Hoover declared Dutch Schultz public enemy number one. The famous prosecutor Thomas Dewey sat on the tail of the gangster. In 1934, they tried to imprison Schultz on charges of tax evasion. The Dutchman eventually paid off, but spent a lot of time on litigation and transferring business to other states. During this time, the Irish managed to squeeze out some of the old breweries and trade union offices. In 1935, an embittered Schultz ordered the assassination of Dewey. This was the last straw: the mafia bosses issued a black mark to the Dutchman himself.

On October 23, 1935, Schultz, Berman and two bodyguards were shot dead by hitmen during dinner at a restaurant.

Three associates of the gangster died from their wounds almost immediately. And the Dutchman, whom the doctors managed to operate on, was dying for a few more days. There were police officers around the hospital bed. They wanted to extract some useful information from the criminal. The stenographers outlined Schultz's dying ravings about "the boy who never cried" and "the dog Biscuit." The words about “millions because of which he was killed” also got into the report. And also "hidden money, which is enough to buy them all." Then the legend about the lost treasures of Schultz appeared, which still worries the minds of treasure hunters.

In itself, the muttering of a bleeding criminal does not confirm the presence of a treasure. But there was evidence that during the legal battle, Schultz ordered a huge waterproof safe. He was afraid that he would go to jail, so he wanted to save what he had accumulated. According to some of Hollandets' accomplices, then their boss had about $138 million in banknotes and valuable bonds. It was them that the mafiosi put in a safe, probably hidden in the Catskill mountain range, 200 kilometers from New York.