Ink finds mob treasure?

No, but here’s what we did discover

By Aidan Dusenbury-Dalto | Manor Ink

Phoenicia, NY – Dutch Schultz, born Arthur Simon Flegenheimer, was an American mobster who is a local legend. He lived from 1901 until 1935, and when he died, the secret of his hidden treasure perished with him.

Schultz’s underworld operations were based in New York City in the 1920s and ’30s. He made his fortune in various organized crime-related activities, including bootlegging and the numbers racket. Schultz lived a lavish lifestyle and often vacationed, as did other mobsters, in the Catskills, only a few hours from his stomping grounds of Manhattan. Like many members of “The Family,” Schultz caught the attention of local law enforcement for his nefarious sources of income and penchant for violence.

The NYPD soon began a campaign to put Schultz behind bars, and weakened his reputation with multiple tax evasion trials, led by Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who later became Governor of New York and the Republican nominee for President in 1944. Afraid of being sent to jail, Schultz reportedly had a special safe constructed and used it to hide cash and bonds worth $7 million, worth about $152 million today. He and his bodyguard hid the safe in a secret location in upstate New York. Some speculate the hiding place was near the hamlet of Phoenicia.

Schultz’s murder and the lost map

In an effort to avoid conviction, Schultz asked the “Mafia Commission” for permission to kill Prosecutor Dewey, but they refused. When Schultz disobeyed the mob bosses and made plans to kill Dewey, the Commission ordered his murder in 1935. Schultz and his three henchmen were subsequently gunned down at a tavern in Newark, NJ.

Word got around that Schultz had made a map showing where his treasure had been buried and had entrusted it to another of his underlings, Marty Krompier. Krompier was then gunned down in the Loch Sheldrake Hotel, and different stories about whether the map was found on his body ensued. One story claimed Jacob Shapiro, the mobster who ordered the hit on Krompier, found the map but tore it up, thinking it was a fraud because he had never heard of Phoenicia. Whatever the truth, to this day Dutch Schultz’s buried treasure has never been recovered.

The Ink joins the search

This reporter and Mentor Art Steinhauer took a trip to the quaint Catskills town of Phoenicia to talk with local folks about Schultz while hoping to gather some clues as to where his treasure might be buried.

Walking down Main Street, we spoke with several people about Schultz, and some were more eager than others to talk about the decades-old mystery. A few conversations got awkward, as asking random people on the street about a mobster’s buried treasure while holding a shovel isn’t exactly a typical Sunday activity.

One man told us that Schultz would frequently visit the small town, staying at the now-demolished Phoenicia Hotel. He had heard that the land surrounding the old hotel might be the safe’s final resting place. We investigated the site, but could find no treasure. We then met a woman in a coffee shop who told us her grandfather was a crony of another famous Prohibition era gangster, John “Legs” Diamond, a nemesis of Schultz’s who had a house in the Phoenicia area. She didn’t have any knowledge about the buried cash, but suggested we check out the Devil’s Tombstone Campground area, a spot mentioned in a couple of documentaries. Unfortunately, even armed with our metal detector, no historical buried treasure was uncovered. So the safe and its secrets remain out there, waiting to be found.