He Betrayed Dutch Schultz — They Cemented His Feet and Watched Him Drown – HT
September 9th, 1935. A Midtown Manhattan nightclub, New York City. Late evening, Abraham Bo Weinberg walked out of the club and into the night. He was 35 years old. He had been married for 5 months to a woman named Anime Turner. The wedding had been on April 23rd, a spring ceremony, the kind of event that implies a future.
He had been one of the most feared and most accomplished killers in the history of New York, organized crime. He had probably killed Jack Legs Diamond. He had probably killed Mad Dog Cole. He had almost certainly been one of the men who killed Salvatore Maranzano, the murder that ended the Castella Maresi war, and gave Lucky Luchiano the throne of the American mafia.
He had also, while his boss Dutch Schultz was underground fighting a federal tax indictment, quietly negotiated with Luchiano and Lepka Bukala to carve up Schulz’s operation and position himself as the man who ran what was left. He had never believed Dutch would come back. Dutch came back. Bo Weinberg walked out of the nightclub on September 9th, 1935 and was never seen again.
Dutch Schultz later told Vineberg’s brother George with the specific and casual matter of factness that Schultz applied to all violence we had a put a kimono on B. It was Schulz’s code. The kimono meant cement. The cement meant the East River. Bo Weinberg’s body was never found. 6 weeks later on October 23rd, 1935, Dutch Schultz was shot at the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey by gunman sent by the commission he had threatened to defy.
He lasted 22 hours in a hospital bed. He died of an infection from the bullet. He was 33 years old. Two men, boss and lieutenant, betrayer and betrayed, both dead within 6 weeks of each other in the autumn of 1935. Neither one of them saw it coming until it was too late. If you are watching this for the first time, subscribe right now and drop a comment telling us which state you are watching from.
New York, Texas, California, Florida, anywhere in the country. Hit subscribe, drop your state, then let us get into this because this story has two sides. The title says Bo Weinberg betrayed Dutch Schultz. That is accurate. But the more complete truth is that both men were operating in a world where loyalty and betrayal were not moral categories, but strategic calculations, and that both of them made the same fundamental error.
They each believed they understood what was coming. They were each wrong. This is the story of Bo Weinberg and what it cost him to miscalculate Dutch Schultz, the Bronx, the early 1920s. To understand Bo Weinberg, you have to understand the world that produced him, the specific and violent ecosystem of Jewish organized crime in New York during the prohibition era.
This is not a story that gets told as often as the Italian American mob narrative, but it is equally significant in the formation of New York’s criminal underworld during that period. The men who built the bootlegging infrastructure of 1920s New York were disproportionately Jewish. Lepa Bukala, Gura Shapiro, Maya Lansky, Bugsy Seagull, and Dutch Schultz himself.
Born Arthur Flegenheimimer, Abraham Weineberg and his brother George came from this world. They were recruited into Schulz’s operation as the bootlegging wars escalated in Manhattan in the late 1920s. Schultz was expanding from the Bronx into Manhattan. The expansion generated conflict with existing operators, most significantly with Jack Legs Diamond, who had his own operations in the same territory.
The conflict required men who could apply violence with competence and commitment. Bo Weinberg was that man. He was not simply violent. He was capable. There is a distinction in the criminal world between men who are willing to commit violence and men who are genuinely skilled at it, who can plan it, execute it cleanly, manage the aftermath, and move on without creating the kind of loose ends that generate prosecutions.
Vineberg was in the second category. He was a professional and across the most consequential years of Prohibition era New York, he was applied as a professional to some of the most significant targets in the underworld. The murder of Jack Legs Diamond in Albany on the night of December 18th, 1931.
Diamond had survived so many assassination attempts that the press had nicknamed him Clay Pigeon. He was shot to death while sleeping in his Albany rooming house, three shots to the head while he lay in bed. Weinberg was suspected. No charges were ever filed. The murder of Salvator Maranzano in September of 1931, 5 months after the killing of Joe, the boss, Maseria, had ended one side of the Castella Maris war.
Maranzano had declared himself boss of bosses. the Capo Dituti Capi, the supreme leader of the American mafia. Lucky Luchiano had concluded that this arrangement was incompatible with the modern criminal organization he intended to build. He sent men to Maranzano’s real estate office in the Grand Central area of Midtown Manhattan.
Bo Weinberg was among them, one of five gunmen who entered the office, disposed of Maranzano’s bodyguards, and shot and stabbed Maranzano to death. That murder ended the Castella Mari’s war. It made Luchiano the uncontested architect of the new American mafia, and Bo Weinberg was one of the men who made it happen. The murder of Vincent Mad Dog Call in February of 1932.
Cole had been in a West 23rd Street phone booth making a call when gunman entered the drugstore and fired submachine guns through the glass. Cole died in the phone booth. Weinberg was suspected. No charges were filed. Three of the most significant murders of the early 1930s, Diamond, Marenzano, Cole. None of them prosecuted.
None of them definitively attributed in a legal sense. All of them connected in mob history to the man who served as Dutch Schulz’s chief lieutenant and primary enforcer. By the early 1930s, Bo Weinberg was the most capable killer in one of the most powerful criminal operations in New York. He was Schultz’s right hand. He was trusted absolutely.
He was by any measure of what the prohibition era mob world valued exactly the person you wanted standing beside you. 1933 the federal government came for Dutch Schultz. The tax evasion indictment was the federal government’s preferred tool against major criminal figures in this era. It had destroyed Al Capone in 1931, sent him to Alcatraz for 11 years on the specific and legally provable charge of failing to report income that the government could demonstrate he had received.
The principle was the same for Schultz. The criminal income was impossible to prosecute directly. The witnesses were dead or unwilling to testify. The failure to pay taxes on that income was provable through financial records. Schulz made a decision. He would not be Capone. He would not go quietly to prison while prosecutors assembled their case.
He went underground. He became a federal fugitive while his lawyers fought the charges. And while the syndicate, the national organized crime structure that Luchiano had built, assessed what his continued absence meant for the organizational landscape. He left Bo Weinberg in charge. This is the moment that set everything in motion.
Vineberg was now running the Schultz operation, the numbers rackets in Harlem, the restaurant extortion in Manhattan, the lone sharking, the entire criminal infrastructure that had been generating tens of millions of dollars at its peak. He was the acting boss of one of the most powerful criminal organizations in New York.
With no timeline on when or whether Schultz would return, the syndicate moved quickly. Luchiano and Lepka Bukala made their case to Vineberg directly. Schultz was gone. The indictment was serious. The rational assumption was that Schultz’s era was over and that his operations needed to be absorbed into the syndicate structure rather than left running as an independent entity connected to a fugitive.
Lep took over the restaurant extortion. Luciano took over the Harlem numbers rackets. The empire that Schulz had built was distributed among the people who had been watching it generate money from the outside. Vineberg, by multiple accounts, did not need much convincing. He had looked at the situation and drawn the same conclusion the syndicate was drawing.
Dutch was finished. The tax indictment was insurmountable. The political and legal pressure was too great. A man who had gone underground rather than face the charges was not a man who was likely to beat them. The calculation made sense. The empire was being carved up anyway with or without Weineberg’s cooperation. By cooperating, he positioned himself to inherit a piece of what remained rather than being excluded from the reorganization entirely.
He was not simply going along with the syndicate’s demands. He was also negotiating for himself. He was telling Luchiano and Lepki that he was the man who should run what survived of the Schultz operation. Not as Schultz’s loyal left tenant, as the new boss. He had never seen Dutch Schultz beat a federal indictment before.
He had no reason to believe this one would be different. 1934 and into 1935. The Schultz legal campaign continued. As we covered in a previous episode about Dutch Schultz, the public relations campaign that Schultz mounted in the small upstate town of Malone was one of the more extraordinary performances in the history of American criminal defense.
He sent gifts to hospitalized children. He spent thousands on parties for local residents. He befriended the town’s people. He presented himself to the rural jurors who would decide his fate as an ordinary man, a businessman, a victim of prosecutorial overreach, a person rather than a headline. The jury in Malone acquitted him.
Dutch Schultz came back to New York. And what he found when he came back was the specific kind of wreckage that produces a specific kind of fury in men like Dutch Schultz. The numbers rackets were gone. Luchiano had them. The restaurant extortion was gone. Lepki had it. The operation he had built from street level Bronx bootlegging into a $20 million a year criminal enterprise had been distributed among his rivals while he was fighting to stay free.
He was furious in the specific and dangerous way that Dutch Schultz was always furious, not as a performer of anger, but as a man for whom anger produced immediate and lethal action, and the man most directly responsible for what had happened to his empire was the man he had left in charge of it, Bo Weinberg. They met. Accounts of that meeting are contradictory in their details, but consistent in their substance.
Schultz confronted Weineberg with what he knew. Weinberg, by some accounts, tried to explain. By others, he denied. By Dixie Davis’s account, and Davis was there, the lawyer who witnessed more of Schulz’s internal operations than any other outside observer, the confrontation was physical. Schultz hit Weineberg. Weineberg went to the floor.
Schulz stood over him. By one account, Schulz apologized to Davis for the scene. The specific fate of Jules Martin, the man Schultz stabbed and killed at a different meeting, the stabbing he described afterward, with the dead pan, I cut his heart out, was what awaited anyone who crossed Dutch Schultz at this level.
Weineberg had not just cooperated with the redistribution of Schulz’s empire, he had positioned himself as the heir to it. He had taken the relationship built across years of shared violence and mutual reliance and used it as the platform for a takeover. He had been convinced Schultz would never return to challenge. That level of betrayal did not produce a violent outburst. It produced a plan.
April 23rd, 1935, New York City. Bo Vineberg married Anna May Turner. She was young. The marriage record listed her birth year as 1912, but census records suggest she may have been born as late as 1916. They were married in the spring with whatever sense of future a man in Vineberg’s position could project forward into the months ahead.
He was living on borrowed time and may or may not have known it. The months between Schulz’s return and the September 9th night were months in which both men were navigating an organizational and personal crisis of enormous complexity. Schultz was simultaneously managing his fury about Weineberg, fighting the political and legal pressure that Dwiey’s ongoing investigations were creating and dealing with the commission’s increasingly hostile response to his threats about killing Dwey. Weineberg was trying to navigate
the gap between the Schulz who had returned and the syndicate he had been negotiating with while Schulz was away. He was caught between two powers, neither of which now fully trusted him. Schultz knew what he had done. The syndicate knew he had been working with them, and that Schultz knew there was no safe position.
5 months after the wedding on September 9th, 1935, Bo Weinberg walked out of a Midtown nightclub and was never seen again. Three accounts of what happened that night exist in the historical record and they do not fully agree. The first is Gangland Law, the version that has been repeated in newspapers, books, and films for 90 years.
Schultz personally executed Vineberg with a 45 caliber automatic pistol in a Midtown hotel room. Clean, a settling of accounts by the man whose accounts needed settling. This version has the narrative satisfaction of the betrayed boss taking direct and personal revenge. The second account comes from Dixie Davis, Schultz’s lawyer and the most direct eyewitness to the internal workings of the Schultz organization in those final months.
Davis reported that he had witnessed Schultz’s bodyguard, Lulu Rosenrance, shoot Weinberg, in the back of a car after a night of drinking. Davis later maintained that the shooting could have been accidental, a qualifier that strains credul given the circumstances, but that Davis apparently felt compelled to include. The third detail is the most consistent across every source regardless of which account of the actual shooting is accurate.
Schultz told Weineberg’s brother George directly. We had to put a kimono on B. The kimono was Schultz’s code phrase. It meant the body had been encased in cement. It meant the East River. It meant that whatever had happened in that hotel room or that car, the end result was the same.
Bo Weinberg’s body was at the bottom of the East River in a concrete casing and it was never going to surface. Bo Weinberg was married 5 months. He had no children with Anime Turner. He was 35 years old. His body was never found. The cement shoes disposal fitting a body with concrete filled containers around the feet to ensure it sank and stayed sunk became one of the most enduring images of American mob violence in the popular imagination.
The phrase cement shoes became cultural shorthand for mob murder. And the specific origin of that phrase, the specific story most directly attached to it is Bo Weinberg going into the East River on the orders of the boss he had believed would never return. Bruce Willis played Bo Weinberg in the 1991 film Billy Bathgate based on Eel Dootoro’s 1989 novel of the same name.
The film opens with the disposal Weineberg being dropped alive into dark water with his feet in cement. Whether the disposal was postmortem or while Weineberg was still alive is one of the details that the conflicting accounts cannot resolve. The film made the live disposal version famous. The historical record leaves it uncertain.
What is not uncertain is that Dutch Schulz told George Weineberg his brother was gone. And the phrase he used, the kimono, the code tells you everything you need to know about how Dutch Schultz processed having killed the man who had been his right hand for the better part of a decade. It was business like everything else, 6 weeks.
That is how much time separated Bo Weinberg’s disappearance on September 9th, 1935 from the shooting of Dutch Schultz at the Palace Chop House in Newark on October 23rd, 1935. Schultz was already a marked man when he killed Weinberg. The commission had already begun its consideration of whether Dutch Schultz needed to be eliminated.
The threat to kill Thomas Dwey, the prosecutor who was coming after Schultz’s operations in New York, had been discussed at a commission meeting that Schultz had attended and stormed out of. Lepki had moved the motion that Schultz should die. The motion had carried. Schulz knew none of this when he put Bo Weinberg in the river.
Or perhaps he suspected something was wrong, but did not know how immediate the timeline was. The men who shot Schultz at the Palace Chop House, Mendy Weiss and Charlie the Bug Workman, arrived on October 23rd. Schultz was in the bathroom when workman pushed the door open and fired. The bullet entered his side. The infection killed him 22 hours later. He was 33 years old.
He died in a hospital bed, delirious, with a police stenographer recording whatever emerged from his consciousness as it came apart. The man who had put his most trusted left tenant in the East River in a cement casing was himself shot in a bathroom in Newark 6 weeks later by men executing a commission decision.
The man who had betrayed Dutch Schultz died at 35. The man who had killed him for the betrayal died at 33. The most feared criminal in New York, the most capable killer on his payroll, gone within 6 weeks of each other. And the $7 million Schultz had buried in the Catskills before any of this happened. still there 90 years later in a waterproof safe somewhere near Phoenicia, New York, waiting for someone who will probably never find