Lost Treasures

Dutch Schultz's Lost Catskills Treasure: Buried Fortune?

By The Unsolved Report Editorial Team · Last reviewed 2026-06-19

Did gangster Dutch Schultz bury a multimillion-dollar strongbox in the Catskills before his 1935 murder? The documented facts, the open mystery, and the legends.

For nearly ninety years, treasure hunters have walked the wooded ridges above Phoenicia, New York, carrying shovels, metal detectors, and a single stubborn hope: that somewhere beneath the leaf litter sits a steel box packed with a dead gangster's fortune. The box belonged — supposedly — to Dutch Schultz, a Prohibition beer baron gunned down in a Newark chophouse in 1935. He died without telling anyone where it was. If the box is real, it is still out there.

That "if" is the whole story. Here is what the historical record actually supports, where the genuine mystery begins, and which parts belong squarely in the realm of legend.

The Documented Facts

The man at the center of the tale was real, rich, and ruthless. Arthur Simon Flegenheimer was born in the Bronx on August 6, 1901, and adopted the alias "Dutch Schultz" as he rose through Prohibition-era bootlegging — work that earned him the nickname "Beer Baron" (The Mob Museum). After Prohibition ended, he muscled into Harlem's "numbers" lottery, rigging it with accountant Otto "Abbadabba" Berman so that low-payout numbers always won. By some estimates the racket grossed Schultz on the order of $35,000 a day and produced annual revenues in the millions — much of it untaxed (Casino.org). The point is simply this: Schultz genuinely controlled enormous, largely cash-based wealth.

His downfall was a young prosecutor. Special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey pursued Schultz relentlessly for tax evasion, hoping to topple him as the government had toppled Al Capone. Schultz beat the federal charges — one trial ended in a hung jury, the other in acquittal — but Dewey kept circling (Mental Floss). Schultz's proposed solution was to murder Dewey outright. The newly formed Mafia Commission refused to sanction killing so public a figure, and historians now broadly agree that this defiance is what got Schultz killed (The Mob Museum).

The killing itself is well documented. On the night of October 23, 1935, gunmen from Murder, Inc. — including Charles "The Bug" Workman — walked into the Palace Chop House at 12 East Park Street in Newark, New Jersey. Schultz was shot in the men's room; three associates, including bodyguard Bernard "Lulu" Rosenkrantz, were also hit (Washington Examiner). Schultz survived for roughly a day, dying of peritonitis on October 24, 1935 (Wikipedia: Dutch Schultz).

One stranger fact is also firmly on the record. As Schultz lay feverish and morphine-clouded in a Newark hospital, a police stenographer transcribed about two hours of his rambling, stream-of-consciousness speech. The New York Times published the transcript on October 26, 1935, and lines like "A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim" and "Oh, oh, dog biscuit" became infamous (Wikipedia: Dutch Schultz). The transcript so haunted later writers that beat novelist William S. Burroughs built an entire 1969 book, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, around it (CrimeReads). Schultz never named his killers, and — crucially — never gave usable directions to any buried fortune.

The Genuine Open Question

So where does the treasure come from? The earliest and most-cited source is Schultz's own lawyer, Dixie Davis. In a 1939 account associated with Collier's magazine, Davis described Schultz, fearing prison, having a special airtight steel safe built and stuffing it with cash, bonds, and diamonds — a figure usually given as roughly $7 million, with estimates ranging from about $5 to $9 million (Mental Floss). According to the legend that grew from Davis's account, Schultz and Rosenkrantz drove the box north into territory Schultz knew from his bootlegging days and buried it near Phoenicia, in the Catskills, somewhere close to Esopus Creek.

Here is the honest core of the mystery: almost nothing about the burial can be independently verified. As historians note, there is no solid evidence that Schultz or Rosenkrantz ever told anyone where the box was — or that the box ever existed at all. Whatever they knew died with them within roughly twenty-four hours of each other (Wikipedia: Dutch Schultz). What we can say with confidence is narrower and more interesting: Schultz was real, the money was real, his fear of Dewey was real, and the lawyer who knew his finances best is the one who first told the burial story. Everything past that point is inference layered on a single secondhand claim.

The mystery has nonetheless proven durable enough to draw serious modern attention. The PBS series Secrets of the Dead devoted its "Gangster's Gold" episode to the hunt, following multiple teams who used ground-penetrating radar, satellite mapping, and archival photographs across the Catskills. They located what they believed were remains of a Schultz-era bootlegger tunnel in Bronxville — but the strongbox itself was not produced (PBS, Secrets of the Dead). That, in miniature, is the whole saga: tantalizing context, no box.

Theories and Interpretations (Labeled as Speculation)

What follows is folklore and conjecture — engaging, but unproven. Treat it accordingly.

Theory 1: The deathbed transcript is a coded map

Speculation. The most romantic idea holds that Schultz's feverish hospital monologue concealed clues to the burial site. Treasure seekers have seized on fragments — most famously a line warning not to let "Satan draw you too fast" — and linked them to Catskills landmarks such as a "Devil's Face" rock formation or the "Devil's Tombstone" boulder (Mental Floss). It is a wonderful idea with a fatal problem: the transcript reads as classic delirium, and a dying man drifting on morphine and a 106-degree fever is an unlikely cryptographer. No decoded "map" has ever led to anything.

Theory 2: There was a box, but it was moved or recovered long ago

Speculation. Some students of the case argue that if a strongbox existed, it almost certainly didn't stay in the woods. Mafia historian Allan May has questioned the logic of the Catskills story, suggesting Schultz could have chosen "a better and more secure hiding place closer to home" (Mental Floss). Under this reading, an associate, a tip-off, or Schultz himself relocated the money — and the empty mountainside is empty because there was never anything to find there.

Theory 3: The treasure is essentially a myth

Speculation, but the most defensible. The simplest explanation is that the buried-fortune story is a tall tale that hardened into "fact" through repetition. It rests largely on one source — a lawyer with his own reasons to burnish his client's mystique — and it has never been corroborated by physical evidence in nearly a century of searching. The legend persists because it is irresistible, not because it is proven.

Why people keep digging

Whatever the truth, the hunt has its own documented history. A 1972 account describes searchers combing the area "elbow to elbow," and by the late 1990s a Phoenicia librarian reported tourists routinely asking for treasure maps; one overeager digger reportedly destabilized nearby railroad track (Mental Floss). The Catskills are public and beloved, so a friendly reminder: dig responsibly, respect private property and park rules, and leave the landscape as you found it.

The lasting appeal of Dutch Schultz's lost strongbox isn't really the gold. It's the shape of the thing — a verifiably rich, verifiably murdered man, a single secondhand story, and a mountain range that has kept its silence. The facts take us right up to the edge of the woods. The rest, for now, remains genuinely unknown.

Sources & Further Reading

The Mob Museum — "'Beer Baron' Dutch Schultz gunned down 90 years ago"
PBS, Secrets of the Dead — "Gangster's Gold"
Mental Floss — "Bootlegger's Bounty: The Hidden Treasure of Gangster Dutch Schultz"
CrimeReads — "The Strange Poetry of a Notorious Gangster's Last Words"
Wikipedia — "Dutch Schultz" (for the NYT 1935 transcript and Burroughs's book)
Casino.org — "Public Enemy Number One: The Violent Life of Mobster Dutch Schultz"

Sources & further reading

https://themobmuseum.org/blog/beer-baron-dutch-schultz-gunned-down-90-years-ago/
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/gangsters-gold-promo/5446/
https://www.mentalfloss.com/history/mystery/dutch-schultz-treasure-mystery
https://crimereads.com/the-strange-poetry-of-a-notorious-gangsters-last-words/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Schultz
https://www.casino.org/blog/dutch-schultz/
https://washingtonexaminer.com/crime-history-mob-boss-taken-down-in-chophouse-massacre