The Last Words of Dutch Schultz

Following last month's Rimbaud column, the second part of Van Gogh's Ear, celebrating writing's greatest scumbags and deviants, is now online on 3:AM Magazine.

This month, it's the turn of the bullet-riddled mobster-poet Dutch Schultz

Poets come in all sorts of guises from misanthropic librarians to paranoid megalomaniacs. Few were as unlikely or unintentional as the bootlegger born Arthur Flegenheimer. Even by the standards of the time, Dutch Schultz was a piece of work. He’d risen from a being an errand boy to stick-up artist to organised crime boss through simple Darwinian ruthlessness, all delivered with a personal and sickening touch. When a rival Irish gangster Joe Rock objected to him muscling in on his territory, Schultz had him kidnapped, hung from a meathook and tortured, personally rubbing gonorrhoea pus into the hostage’s eyes, permanently blinding him. Another adversary was found with his heart cut out. Outflanked by business rivals though and too unpredictable to instil mass loyalty, Schultz’s reign was as brief as it was terrible.

Spying in on police frequencies, the paparazzi soon arrived at the blood-strewn eatery and began taking photos of the crime scene before the wounded had even made it to the ambulance. Underestimating the severity of their wounds, Schultz heckled the photographers and tried to bribe the paramedics while Rosencrantz demanded milkshakes. Given their injuries and the rusted bullets used by their assailants, they were in effect already dead, they just hadn’t realised it yet. Before he expired, Schultz bestowed on the world a lasting gift, a dispatch from the edge of life, in the form of a rambling stream of consciousness monologue. Without it, he would have remained just another arcane name of the mobster era like Cockeye Dunn, Tight-Lips Gusenberg or the Terrible Gennas. Instead, the lowlife got his moment of high art, his own cubist-opera recital to rival Molly Bloom or Tristan Tzara.