JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1851

“STEVENS:  Yet you invented the coincidence.
TEMPLE:  Mrs Gowan Stevens did.
STEVENS:  Temple Drake did. Mrs Gowan Stevens is not even fighting in this class. This is Temple Drake’s.
TEMPLE: Temple Drake is dead.
STEVENS:  The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
–Mr. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

This is a Wordle of the stenographic recording of the last words of the gangster Dutch Shultz, slipping quickly into dark oblivion, the stenographer (F.J. Lang) at the foot of his deathbed recording all the man had to say. Arthur (Dutch Schultz) Flegenheimer was in rough shape, laying there in Newark, shot with a bullet in his belly, spiking a 106-degree temperature, and sliding back and forth between states of  insanity and lucidity. And say stuff he did–responding to the questions of a police detective (including a Sergeant Luke Conlon), Schultz’s answers are remarkable for their tapestry of wrenching artfulness of drug-induced and mind-slipping schizo blather, sprinkled with infection induced fancy.  The cops were looking to see who it was that shot and put the Dutchmen in the bed–they weren’t going to get any responses worth anything.  A number of the law enforcement officials, local and federal, tried to analyze the oracle after Schultz’s death, but couldn’t make any sense of it all.

William S. Burroughs, a supreme black-humorist and still dead, had at this idea and transcript long ago, and did a wonderful job with the story, a real achievement. 

I wonder what the last words were of F.J. Lang and Sgt. Conlon.

This is about the only place where I can add a note about another notorious gangster, Arnold Rothstein, partner of Meyer Lansky and fixer of the Black Sox World Series of 1919. He also had police questioning him as he lay dying, shot by an unnamed and uncaught assailant in NYC in November 1928. When asked who shot him, one of Rothstein’s final replies was “Me mudder did it”.