The Treasure of Arthur Flegenheimer

Get out your mining gear folks...your metal detectors and your divining rods and your psychic friends...and your shovels and picks and hoes...while I tell you where to find buried treasure ...which I know you will all surely share with me when you find it...for it will have been I, will it not, who guided you there in the first place.

It was the 1920's. The Capone era...Chicago...where 1000 rival gangsters died in the streets within a ten year span. But in New York, things were different. In New York, you didn't kill for pleasure or anger. You only killed for business. It was the way it was supposed to be. Tammany ruled, and if you played ball, you did okay.

But not everyone was happy. There was a young Third Avenue hood who felt the world of the Roaring Twenties and the wealth of the bootleggers were passing him by. At the age of eighteen, Arthur Flegenheimer opened a saloon and adopted the name of a once-feared member of the Frog Hollow Gang by the name of Dutch Schultz...and made it his.

Dutch Schultz ran speakeasies, "importing" liquor from Canada and creating his own beer, which tasted terrible, though he had an obvious following. During his short career, the Dutchman was responsible for 135 murders. During this time, the then District Attorney Thomas Dewey became a threat, and Schultz decided to kill him and get him out of the way. But...alas and alack...before execution day arrived, Schultz was arrested for Income Tax evasion. A common tale of those days.

Schultz could not foresee the outcome of the trial. So he had a steel box created by an ironworker in which to hide some of his booty...which consisted of thousand dollar bills, and diamonds, and gold coins, and jewelry, and other precious doo-dads.

The steel box was loaded into Schultz's car, and he and a friend by the name of Rosenkrantz, drove to upstate New York, to the Catskills, close to Phoenicia, where they stopped near a group of pine trees on the bank of Esopus Creek...and buried the steel box with all its goodies.

Well...as it turned out, Schultz was not convicted. But he did not return to get his stuff. He was not a trusting soul, and he felt his hiding place was probably better than any safety deposit box...so he let it be.

Rosenkrantz however, had a big mouth. He drew a map of the treasure, marking it carefully. But Rosenkrantz didn't live too long, and before his death, gave the map to a fellow by the name of Krompier who let the world know he had the map to Schultz's millions. He was killed for the map by fellow gangsters, and though they then stole the map from him, they could not read it. They did not know enough of the area.

Many searched for the treasure, but the map was lost and the treasure never found. However...please do keep this in mind. There was a witness to Schultz's burying of the treasure--Rosenkrantz was with him at the time--and this elevates the story of Schultz's buried wealth out of the area of myth and into the bright light of reality. Gold, folks. Gold, and diamonds, and jewelry, and money. Buried. Out there. Near Phoenicia. Somewhere along the Esopus Creek. Near a group of pine trees. Back then, it was all worth somewhere around seven million dollars. Today's worth...who knows? But it's waiting for you...waiting to be discovered by some lucky individual, who has a little time to spare, and doesn't mind shoveling up dirt in the wooded lands of the Catskills. Who knows...I might take a trip up there myself...this Sunday maybe...in a rented bus with a new sign on the side that says "Tyler-Adam Corp.--Treasure Hunting Expedition." Anyone want to come along?

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