Island of the Damned Read Online Free PDF Page B

Only a sucker will pay $15 or $20 for a silk shirt. Such display is vulgar. Hell, you can get a good one for two bucks.”
    Schultz’s associates – like his enemies – knew enough about him to see through this fusty image, which belied a steel core of remorseless cruelty – and an insatiable lust for money. A born businessman, he ruled his tightly run enterprises according to a strict profit motive: not for luxuries or status symbols, in which he wasn’t interested, but purely for the money. As his lawyer, Richard “Dixie” Davis, used to say about Schultz: “You can insult Arthur’s girl, even steal her from him, spit in his face, push him around and he’d laugh it off. But don’t steal even a dollar that belongs to him. You’re dead if you do.”
    What his aides feared most was his sudden explosive anger. Many saw him as a psychopath, without empathy, impervious to the suffering of others. When he suspected that Jules Martin, one of his associates in the restaurant racket, had attempted to defraud him of $25,000, he called Martin to a meeting at a hotel suite in New Jersey, where Schultz at the time was lying low, on the run from the New York authorities on charges of tax evasion. An argument flared up between Schultz and Martin, and, as Martin was loudly trying to talk his way out of any blame for the missing money, Schultz whipped his pistol from inside his trousers, where he always kept it, rammed it into Martin’s mouth as he was talking and pulled the trigger. Lawyer Dixie Davis, a terrified witness, recalled his employer’s action as mechanical, almost nonchalant. “It was simple and undramatic – just one quick motion of the hand. The Dutchman did that murder just as casually as if he were picking his teeth. No one had time to move. Julie Martin didn’t even have time to look surprised. Martin was right in the middle of a sentence as the gun blasted like a howitzer in the flimsy little hotel room.” Once Martin’s body was removed, Schultz worried that the blood from his shattered brains which now stained the carpet might be traced back to him if hotel staff called the police. Instantly, he came up with the perfect cover-up. He pointed to a recent recruit to his gang, a young teenage thug, and told one of his aides to hold the boy’s arms. He turned to Bo Weinberg, a burly thug of a man who carried out Schultz’s beatings and assassinations, snarling: “Break his nose.” When Weinberg hesitated, saying “What do I want to hurt the kid for?” Schultz shouted at him. “Do it.” Shrugging, Weinberg smashed his huge fists into the boy’s face, mashing it to a bloody pulp. As blood gushed from his shattered nose, Schultz pushed him onto a chair and held his head over the existing bloodstain on the carpet, letting the boy’s blood trickle onto the existing stain. Schultz then phoned down to the front desk asking for the hotel doctor to patch up a friend who had been in a fight over a card game.
    Another small time crook foolish enough to try and muscle in on one of Schultz’s rackets was Joseph Rock. He was kidnapped by Schultz’s thugs, who beat him senseless. For extra measure, Schultz ordered his enforcers to tape a piece of dirty gauze, covered in pus, tightly over Rock’s eyes. The gauze was contaminated with syphilis, and Rock eventually went blind. Joel Shapiro, who also believed he could outwit Schultz, fared equally badly, being rammed into a large barrel containing cement which was taken on a boat out of New York harbour and dumped into the Atlantic Ocean.
    Not only his rivals and enemies had reason to fear for their lives. So intense was Schultz’s paranoia that even those closest to him were not safe. Not even Bo Weinberg, one of his most faithful, trusted aides and brother of Schultz’s business manager, George Weinberg. Bo Weinberg eventually aroused his boss’s suspicion by spending time downtown in the company of rival mobsters. Even though there was no reason to doubt