Dutch Schultz's Buried Fortune
Region — where it (roughly) is
Land & claims · BLM · live
The story
A gangster facing the end does not always go quietly. The legend says that Arthur Flegenheimer — better known to Prohibition-era New York as Dutch Schultz — went into the Catskills with a steel safe and a fortune, buried it where no one would think to look, and took the secret to his grave.
Schultz was as real as the violence that made him rich. A bootlegger and racketeer who built an empire on illegal beer and the numbers racket, he ran afoul of both the law and his own underworld. In 1935 that catching up with him turned fatal: he was murdered, gunned down as gangland scores were settled. And here the documented life shades into enduring legend, for the story holds that shortly before his death, Schultz spirited a steel safe packed with cash and bonds — reckoned in the millions — up into the wooded hills of the Catskills, and buried it.
If he did, he never said where. Whatever directions existed died with him in 1935, and ever since, the hills around Phoenicia have drawn treasure hunters certain that a gangster's fortune still lies somewhere under the leaf litter and granite. They have come with maps and metal detectors and theories, generation after generation, chasing a safe that may or may not exist.
None of them has found it. For all the digging, no buried Schultz fortune has ever been recovered — no safe, no cash, no bonds pulled from the Catskill soil to prove the tale. What survives is the certainty, not the gold: the unshakable belief that a dying gangster's millions are out there, waiting, just beneath the surface of a mountain hillside.
That belief has outlived everyone who could confirm it. The hunt goes on because the story is perfect — a doomed mobster, a hidden safe, a secret buried with him — and because no shovel has yet proven it wrong, or right.
Fact vs. legend: Dutch Schultz was a real Prohibition-era gangster, murdered in 1935 — that is documented. The steel safe of cash and bonds he supposedly buried in the Catskills is legend; despite ongoing treasure hunts, nothing has ever been found or verified. Search area: The point marks Catskills, NY (Phoenicia area) — the search area or landmark, not the treasure, whose exact location is unknown.