Dutch Schultz - Last Words and Posthumous Events

Last Words and Posthumous Events

Schultz's last words were a strange stream-of-consciousness babble. They were taken down by a police stenographer. This includes the famous:

A boy has never wept...nor dashed a thousand kim.

But the entire text (linked below) is much more rambling, for example:

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.

One of his last utterances was a reference to "French Canadian bean soup" (French Canadian pea soup is a popular dish that is still produced as canned goods by many food companies).

Schultz's last words inspired a number of writers to devote works related to them. Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs published a screenplay in novel form entitled The Last Words of Dutch Schultz in the early 1970s, while Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson connected Schultz's words to a global Illuminati-related conspiracy, making them a major part of 1975's The Illuminatus! Trilogy. (In Wilson's and Shea's story, Schultz's ramblings are a coded message.) The Coil track Circles of Mania includes the line "I'm writhing, perspiring like Dutch Schultz at 106 degrees."

In his 1960 anthology Parodies, Dwight Macdonald presents Schultz's last words as a parody of Gertrude Stein.

After Schultz's death, it was discovered that he and his wife had never gone through an official marriage ceremony, and the possible existence of another wife emerged with the discovery of letters and pictures of another woman and children among his effects at the hotel where he was staying in Newark. This was never resolved, as his common-law wife refused to talk about it and the mystery woman never came forward. Two other women also called at the morgue to receive his effects, but their identities were never established. Though estimated to be worth $7 million when he died, no trace of the money was ever found.

By receiving last rites, Schultz was guaranteed interment in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne in Westchester County, New York, although at the request of his Orthodox Jewish mother, Schultz's body was draped with a talit, a traditional Jewish prayer shawl.

Several actors have played Dutch Schultz in films:Vic Morrow in Portrait of a Mobster (1960), James Remar in The Cotton Club (1984), Dustin Hoffman in Billy Bathgate (1991), Bruce Nozick in Hit the Dutchman (1992), Lance Henriksen in The Outfit (1993), and Tim Roth in Hoodlum (1997).

The building that housed the Palace Chop House was torn down in 2008.