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Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Dutch Schultz's secret buried treasure

Arthur Flegenheimer, aka Dutch Schultz, was a 1930s German-Jewish-American gangster who was killed while taking a leak in a New Jersey bar. After he was shot, Schultz delivered a fantastically strange stream-of-consciousness rant involving "French Canadian bean soup" and this brilliant bit:

You can play jacks, and girls do that with a soft ball and do tricks with it.
Oh, Oh, dog Biscuit, and when he is happy he doesn't get snappy.


Of course, Schultz's last words later inspired writers William S. Burroughs, Robert Anton Wilson, and Robert Shea. Besides his mastery of avant-garde poetry, Schultz is also famous for a secret he took to his grave: the location of a safe loaded with $7 million that he buried somewhere in upstate New York. It has never been found. Or if it has, the finders ain't talking. From Mental Floss's "Six Lost Treasures Just Waiting To Be Found":
 Images DutchThe only other person (besides Schultz) who knew where the safe was buried was the bodyguard who helped him dig the hole. Shortly after, both men were gunned down by hitmen inside the Palace Chophouse Restaurant in Newark, New Jersey.

On his deathbed, Schultz began hallucinating and rambling after the rusty bullets used by the assassins caused an infection. A court stenographer was brought in to record his statements and some believe his incoherent references to something hidden in the woods in Phoenicia, New York, might be a clue to the location of his buried loot. Of course the meaning of his words is cryptic and not 100% reliable, but that hasn’t stopped hundreds of people from looking.

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