Kill The Dutchman!: The Story of Dutch Schultz - Softcover

Sann, Paul; Sann, Howard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 098843010X ISBN 13: 9780988430105

Publisher: Birdye's Books LLC, 2015

Synopsis

On Oct. 23, 1935, a rusty, steel-jacketed .45 slug tore through the body Dutch Schultz. It was no accident. Schultz, 33, the Beer Baron of The Bronx who reaped $2 million a month as king of Harlem's numbers racket, had gone too far, threatening to murder Thomas E. Dewey—the racket’s prosecutor who’d drawn up the tax indictment against him. 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, though, lingering over a day, a police stenographer bedside recording his every word. Dutch’s surrealistic, Joycean stream-of-consciousness ramblings are reproduced in full and Sann explores the meaning of the poetic jumble of his last words: “I am a pretty good pretzeler [sic], Please crack down on the Chinaman’s friends and Hitler’s commander,” and his most majestic utterance, “Mother is the best bet and don’t let Satan draw you too fast.”

In this 1930s real-life whodunit, legendary New York newspaperman Paul Sann investigates the meteoric rise of gangster Dutch Schultz, mean-streaked bully, alleged killer and reader of books, tracking the blood-flecked story from the Lower East Side and Bronx sidewalks to Broadway night spots, to lavish Park Ave. penthouses and to City Hall—along the way uncovering the truces and alliances among politicians, judges, police, unions and racketeers.

“A masterpiece! . . . [Sann] makes us understand how the big cities of America worked in the years between the wars.”     –Pete Hamill, author of Snow in August, A Drinking Life and Forever

“One of the essential reads on the larger subject of the Prohibition era and its criminal legacy. . . . Sann [brings] humanity and profound literary skills to bear on a difficult subject, elevating the art of crime writing to new levels. Now, a new generation of readers can benefit from Paul Sann’s labors, and also, perhaps, be enthralled by the timeless quality of something that will always have value, no matter the technology: a great story rendered with elegance and authenticity by a master of the craft.”     –T.J. English, author of The Westies, Havana Nocturne and The Savage City

“Godfather readers will go for it.”     –United Press International

About this title

About the Author

Paul Sann (1914-1986) was one of the great newspapermen of his generation. A lifelong observer of organized crime, he previously wrote about outlaws and frontier desperados in Pictorial History of the Wild West (1954, with James D. Horan), and about gangsters in The Lawless Decade (1957)–his lively account of the Roaring Twenties, which was reprinted by Dover Publications in 2010. An authority on New York City crime and politics–“those Gold Dust Twins of Manhattan civilization”–Sann quit high school in 1931 to become a $12-a-week copyboy and, in turn, a reporter covering all the beats (courts, police, housing): a rewrite man, Washington correspondent, night city editor, managing editor, city editor, and, in 1949, executive editor, running the day-to-day operations of the New York Post for almost 29 years. In addition to writing front page headlines and “putting out” the first edition, even as an executive, Paul Sann never stopped being a reporter. In 1951, he broke the story of Joe DiMaggio’s retirement. In 1955, his explosive interview with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. In 1964, he covered The Beatles’ first invasion of the U.S., and, in 1968, he took to the blood-drenched streets of Chicago to cover the Democratic National Convention. In 1973, he traveled to the Soviet Union with New York Mayor John V. Lindsay under the guise of an “urban affairs expert,” but really to write the story of the dissident Moscow Jews battling to emigrate to Israel. In October of that year, when the Yom Kippur War broke out, Sann, then 59, flew to Israel to report on the war firsthand. KILL THE DUTCHMAN! is the fifth of Sann’s seven works of nonfiction.

Edition details

• Publisher: Birdye's Books LLC
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 098843010X
• ISBN 13: 9780988430105
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 356