From a crimereads.com story by Michael Cannell:
The mobster Dutch Schultz died eighty-five years ago this month after a pair of Murder, Inc gunmen shot him in the bathroom of a Newark, New Jersey chop house that served as his temporary meeting place and headquarters.
Schultz’s death earned the lurid front-page banner headlines you might expect from one of organized crime’s ruling figures. His passing also led to one of the oddest experiments in film history. Depression-era Hollywood fell in love with gangster films. . . .
At 10:15 on the night of October 23, 1935 two Murder, Inc, gunmen entered the Palace Chop House with a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun and a .38 calibre pistol. They found Shultz’s lieutenants in a back dining room tallying the weekly profits from policy rackets and gambling operations. Schultz himself was in the men’s room. He ducked the first shot. The second hit him just below his chest. . . .
By morning Schultz lay in a hospital bed with a 106-degree fever. A Newark detective rushed to question Schultz before he died, a stenographer at his side. In his morphine delirium Schultz babbled nonsense threats to his enemies and incoherent entreaties to his friends. . . .
Q: Who shot you?
A: 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.
Q: What did he shoot you for?
A: Him? John? Over a million, five million dollars….Come on, open the soap buckets. The chimney sweeps. Talk to the sword. Shut up, you big mouth. Please help me up. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone. . . .
The stream-of-consciousness ramblings were of no use to police, but they did earn a footnote in literary history. William Burroughs, a mentor of sorts to Jack Kerouac and other beat writers, saw a form of accidental poetry in Schultz’s blathering. In 1969, the same year Mario Puzo published “The Godfather,” Burroughs published “The Last Words of Dutch Schultz,” a 115-page book written in the form of a film script. . . .
The book begins with the shooting at the Palace Chop House and flashes back to scenes drawn from Schultz’s Bronx childhood and rise to power as a beer bootlegger, gambling magnate and tax evader hiding from the Internal Revenue Service. The transcript of Schultz’s last words plays alongside thirty-eight ghostly black-and-white photographs of Packard sedans, crap games, mug shots, truck caravans transporting bootleg beer, Tommy guns firing in drive-by shootings. It is a hallucinatory version of a standard gangland biopic. Kirkus Reviews called it “a kind of demented aria, full of unconscious gutter poetry.”. . .
For years the actor Dennis Hopper owned the rights, but nothing came of it.“The Last Words of Dutch Schultz” did make it to the stage. In 1988 a Chicago theater known for the unconventional mounted a production. Burroughs himself attended the opening, and earned a curtain call. The Chicago Tribune called it “entertaining, frequently gritty and full of ugly, funny, occasionally shocking surprises.”
In 2002 Dutch filmmaker Gerrit van Dijk produced a 22-minute version of the script combining live action and pencil-drawn animation. The actor Rutger Hauer speaks Schultz’s part in a slow gravelly baritone. The film unspools like a dying person’s life flashing before their eyes, just as Burroughs intended.
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MICHAEL CANNELL is the author of A Brotherhood Betrayed: The Man Behind the Rise and Fall of Murder, Inc., Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber and the Invention of Criminal Profiling, The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit, and I.M. Pei: Mandarin of Modernism. He was an editor at the New York Times for seven years and has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and many other publications. He lives in New York City.
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