Welcome back to Mafia, and in this audio boom original podcast series, we explore America's criminal underworld to reveal the lives and careers of its greatest gangsters.

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This series has been extensively researched and produced in consultation with experts, authors, and those who are actually there.

Previously on Mafia, Shultz is just too much of a hothead and has too much pride in way to sort of give in to any events and cold demands.

And he just doesn't have that sort of compromising gene that people like Arnold Rossstein, Lucky Lee Gianno, has.

1931 New York.

The city is in the midst of one of the bloodiest gang wars in its history, a war between Dutch Shultz, the so-called Beer Baron of the Bronx, and his most violent associate, Vincent Mad Dog Cole.

It was exactly the kind of open warfare that Lucky Luciano had been trying to end when he organized the mob in 1929.

Luciano realized if you could do it non-violently and get away with it, it was a lot better than doing it violently, then in the long run too much violence brought too much attention, too much attention from law enforcement, and that could be your undoing.

Public violence was something that gangsters at this time were starting to abhor, that they were perfectly happy with little private acts of violence or something happening in a back alley,

but shooting it out on the street in broad daylight was bad for business, it got a lot of bad publicity, and police, even if they were in the pay of the local gangsters, kind of felt obliged to do something about it, and politicians were under a lot of pressure to do something about it.

So other gangsters were quite appalled by this war between Dutch Shultz and Vincent Cole, especially that it seemed kind of pointless in a way, because Shultz probably could have come up with a much more peaceful solution.

Other than sort of engaging fights with machine guns on the street, this is mafia.

As long as only rival gang members were being hurt, the war was tolerated, but the situation changed quickly when the violence spread.

Author Nate Handley has researched the life and times of Dutch Shultz in depth.

It's war, it's very violent, even by New York gangsters standards, that's just, you know, hell on the streets, and both sides are not willing to negotiate, they're just shooting at each other, and that led into the horrific incident in which Vincent Cole and his gangsters shot up a bunch of children by trying to hit one of Dutch Shultz associates on the street.

Four children were hit. Five-year-old Michael Van Gally later died in the hospital.

The newspapers are starting to pay a lot of attention to Dutch Shultz, that all of a sudden, you know, he's rising from this sort of obscure thug in the Bronx, he's sort of getting a reputation in the media, and he's starting to attract the eye of the police, he's starting to attract the eye of politicians.

He's not quite on the radar as Lucky Luciano is, he's not quite on the radar as Al Capone is in Chicago, but this is really starting to raise his profile in a very dangerous way.

And you've got people who are coming into power like Mayor like Guardia, who would be come mayor, I don't know, a couple years after the war, and he really wants to clean up the city, and he really targets people like Dutch Shultz.

So he's gaining reputation, and in a lot of ways it's a very negative reputation because he's getting attention from police, from politicians, from the press, and a good gangster doesn't want that.

You want to be sort of in the background, managing things, you don't want to get your name in the paper, and you don't want prosecutors and police sort of looking over your shoulder.

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