KILL THE
DUTCHMAN!

On October 23, 1935, a rusty, steel-jacketed .45 slug tore through the body of Dutch Schultz lodging on the floor near the urinal he was using. It was no accident. Schultz — 33 years old, the Beer Baron of the Bronx and king of Harlem's numbers racket, reaping $2 million a month — had gone too far. The result was the biggest gangland execution since the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Al Capone's Chicago.

Schultz didn't die instantly. He lingered for over a day, a police stenographer at his bedside recording his every word. The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, his surrealistic, stream-of-consciousness ramblings — "I am a pretty good pretzeler. Talk to the sword. Canadian bean soup," and his most majestic utterance, "Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast" — are reproduced here in full.

In this 1930s real-life whodunit, New York newspaperman Paul Sann investigates the meteoric rise of the Dutchman: mean-streaked bully, alleged killer, reader of books. Sann tracks the blood-flecked story from the Lower East Side and Bronx sidewalks to Broadway nightspots, lavish Park Avenue penthouses, and City Hall — uncovering the truces and alliances among politicians, judges, police, unions, and racketeers.

Paul Sann was one of the great newspapermen of his generation. A lifelong observer of organized crime, he wrote about outlaws and frontier desperados in Pictorial History of the Wild West (with James D. Horan) and about gangsters in The Lawless Decade, his lively account of the Roaring Twenties, the colorful, turbulent, sensation-packed years between the First World War and the New Deal (reprinted by Dover in 2010).

An authority on New York City crime and politics, Sann quit high school in 1931, badgered the local paper to employ him as a copyboy and rose through the ranks as rewrite man, Washington correspondent, night city editor, managing editor, and city editor before becoming executive editor of the New York Post in 1949, running its day-to-day operations for Publisher Dorothy Schiff for almost 29 years.

He never stopped being a reporter. In 1955 his explosive interview with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In 1964 he joined the Beatles on their first invasion of the U.S. and Canada. In 1968 he reported on the bloody clashes on the streets of Chicago during the Vietnam protests at the Democratic National Convention, and, in 1973, at 59, he flew to Israel to cover the Yom Kippur War firsthand.