New York Post, Sunday, November 15, 2020
nypost.com
By Michael KaplanU
PSTATE New Yo r k: home to Buf-
falo wings, Niagara Falls and a
gangster’s buried treasure?
Yes, legend has it that the Cat-
skills town of Phoenicia conceals
a trove of money, bonds and jewels that
once belonged to infamous New York
City bootlegger Dutch Schultz. The crim-
inal’s riches have been hunted for nearly
90 years, but after a recent breakthrough,
two intrepid men believe they’re about to
hit the jackpot.
Colorfully known as the Beer Baron of
The Bronx, Schultz made a fortune in the
1920s selling suds during Prohibition.
Born Arthur Simon Flegenheimer in 1902,
and raised in a slummy Bronx neighbor-
hood, Schultz, along with his thugs, made
a lucrative trade from hawking banned
booze, even though their brew was
known for being the most horrendous-
tasting stuff in town.
Chalk up the gangster’s success to a
convincing sales spiel. “He and his part-
ner Joey Noe were extremely brutal,”
Nate Hendley, author of “Dutch Schultz:
The Brazen Beer Baron of New York,”told The Post. “They would go to speak-
easies and threaten to beat the crap out of
[proprietors] who didn’t buy their beer.
One saloon owner, Joe Rock, foolish
enough to refuse, got hung by his thumbs.
A rag dipped in a gonorrhea sore was
placed over his eyes. It eventually blinded
him.”
After Prohibition ended in 1933, Dutch
padded his overflowing coffers even more
by strong-arming racketeers in Harlem,
and forcing them to cut him in as a part-
ner. But Manhattan prosecutor Thomas E.
Dewey (later to be governor and a failed
presidential candidate) vowed to stop
Schultz’s wrongdoings. In the wake of fel-
low gangster Al Capone’s conviction for
income-tax evasion, Dewey said Dutch
would be imprisoned by similar means.A
CCORDING to a new documentary,
“Secrets of the Dead: Gangster’s
Gold,” it’s believed that Schultz — a
miser who, said Hendley, “looked like an
unemployed clerk” — prepared for his
takedown by burying a princely sum of
cash, bonds and diamonds in the Cat-
skills. To this day, it’s never been found.
The TV documentary, which airs thisWednesday on PBS, follows a pair of Ca-
nadian treasure hunters, Steve Zazulyk
and Ryan Fazekas, who believe they are
closing in on the gangster’s cache. They
maintain the loot was worth $7 million at
the time it was hidden and about
$150 million today. While Dutch’s buried
treasure is hardly a secret — the show de-
picts two other teams, composed of ama-
teurs, seeking the same booty — Zazulyk
insisted he and his partner are better
equipped than those weekend warriors.
An arsenal of metal detectors and special
radar augments their skills and experi-
ence
“We have connections,” Zazulyk told
The Post. “The key person is Bruce Alter-
man,” referring to a private investigator
who lives in the area and claims to have
had a family member who told him stories
about Schultz. On the TV show, Alterman
provided recollections of his grandfather
that excited the treasure hunters whose
quest had already taken them through a
deeply wooded area near Yonkers and a
home in Bronxville, which may contain a
hidden tunnel used by Schultz.
“Bruce is privy to a lot of private infor-
mation that you would not mention tovery many people,” Zazulyk said. “Bruce
threaded the story together with time-
lines, details on how far [Dutch and his
gang] traveled and the roads they took.”
Alterman found a revealing article in a
1939 issue of Collier’s magazine. In it, a
former lawyer for Schultz recalled a two-
by-three-foot steel box filled with dia-
monds, gold coins and $1,000 bills.
“It is just a matter for someone to find
it,” Alterman says in the documentary.
Even the show’s director, Elizabeth Tro-
jian, is in on the hunt, invested emotion-
ally — and financially.
“My grandfather was muscle for Dutch
Schultz,” she told The Post. “He kept a
journal, and there were references to gold
coins.” As for Trojian’s material payoff,
she sounds less certain: “At first we were
saying I would get 10 percent. Now it’s
more like, ‘Let’s see how big it is.’ ”
Schultz evaded tax-related charges twice
and was killed by fellow mobsters after he
made noise about assassinating Dewey.
Fearing that the murder of a highly placed
public official would bring heat on Big Ap-
ple mobsters, a pair of hitmen from Mur-
der, Inc. shot Schultz in the restroom of
the Newark chop house he owned.There’s gold
in them there
Catskills!
Treasure hunters hot on the trail of late mobster’s stash