Arthur Flegenheimer dropped out of school at 14, after his father abandoned the family. He took honest work as a paper boy, an office worker, a printer's apprentice, and a roofer, but within a few years he found more lucrative work as an enforcer, pickpocket, and robber of illegal gambling operations. In his late teens he served more than a year in the penitentiary for breaking and entering, which was the only crime of which he was ever convicted. In prison he made valuable criminal contacts, and when he was released from jail he told his gangland cohorts to call him "Dutch Schultz", the name of an especially brutal gangster from the Bronx's Frog Hollow Gang of the late 1890s. Little is known about that first Dutch Schultz, but his namesake became one of the most ruthless and violent gangsters of his era.
He was among New York's leading bootleggers during the Eighteenth Amendment's prohibition of alcohol, opening several clandestine bars in the Bronx, which were stocked with hard liquor smuggled in from Canada and a gang-brewed beer that tasted awful but sold briskly in the absence of any other choices. He was among the leaders ofLucky Luciano's Murder, Inc., and used these connections to expand his chain of speakeasies into Manhattan, which led to a bloody gang war.
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