On the night of October 23, 1935, four men were killed in Newark, New Jersey. The last of them to die, on the following day, was Arthur Flegenheimer, the Bronx gang leader who had called himself Dutch Schultz for most of his adult life. For more than five years the Newark police had no one to charge. The case came back to life only in 1940, when a murder-for-hire group in Brooklyn began to come apart and its members started talking to prosecutors. One of the men they named was Charles Workman.
Workman was indicted in Essex County, New Jersey, in 1941. He pleaded not guilty, then changed his plea to no contest. He remains the only person ever convicted in connection with the murder. He served 23 years in New Jersey state prisons, was paroled in 1964 and was released on March 10 of that year. He died in 1979.
The victim was born in the Bronx in 1902. He came up through the crew of the gambler Arnold Rothstein and rose during Prohibition on the beer trade, and after repeal he moved into the Harlem numbers game. In 1925 a Bronx sheriff briefly deputized him, and the badge was taken back within six months. By 1935 he was one of the most recognizable figures in New York crime, and one of the most pursued.
His trouble that year came from the special prosecutor who had been assigned to go after organized crime in New York. He resolved to have the prosecutor killed. The ruling council of the New York underworld, known to its members as the Commission, refused to allow it, and he made it plain that he would go ahead anyway. The council then voted to have him killed first, before his plan could bring the full weight of the law down on all of them. That account came from informers years later.
Three of the four men died within hours on the evening of October 23. The fourth, the man the killing was meant for, lived into the next day. On October 24 a police sergeant, with a police stenographer at the bedside, tried to question him between four and six in the afternoon. His answers drifted in and out of sense, and nothing in them gave the police a usable name. He died that day.
The investigation stalled almost from the start. The men around the victim gave Newark detectives little help in working out what had happened. Public attention, fed by the newspapers, swung toward the best-known names in the New York underworld, but those men had accounts of where they had been. The case went cold.
It reopened from an unexpected direction. In February 1940 a new district attorney took office in Kings County, which is Brooklyn. Within a couple of months his assistants were pulling in members of a group that had carried out killings on contract for the city's larger gangs. The first to agree to cooperate were two low-level men. A more senior figure followed, and the very real prospect of the death penalty gave each of them a reason to talk. Over the following months, a string of the group's members turned informer and began naming names. The information they gave helped the Brooklyn prosecutors solve 85 gangland killings, and the Newark murder of 1935 was among them.
One informer told the prosecutors that he had not taken part in the Newark killing but knew who had. His account named Workman as the man who carried out the killing, and named two others as the rest of the team, one of whom drove. In his telling, Workman had not been certain which of the men was his target.
That account was the backbone of the case. The second man named in it was never tried for the Newark killing; he was later tried and convicted for a separate murder and executed in Ossining, New York, in March 1944. That left Workman as the only defendant.
An Essex County grand jury indicted Workman in 1941. He pleaded not guilty at first, then changed his plea to no contest, a plea that accepts conviction without admitting the charge. He was the only person ever convicted in connection with the death.
His case ran at the same time as the larger Brooklyn prosecutions that the informers were feeding. In New York, the informers' testimony sent seven members of the group, among them its leader, to their executions between 1941 and 1944.
Workman served his sentence in the New Jersey state prison system. He was held first at the state prison in Trenton and was transferred to another state institution in 1952. By all accounts he was a model inmate. He kept quiet, never testified against anyone and never traded information for leniency.
After 23 years in custody he was granted parole in 1964. He had hoped to leave without notice. When he was released on March 10, 1964, a crowd of reporters was waiting, and he went the few steps to a waiting car without smiling, turning his head or saying a word. He spent his remaining years out of public view and died in 1979.
Workman's part in the killing rests on the word of an informer from inside the Brooklyn group, and Workman himself never gave his own version. His plea of no contest admitted nothing; it accepted conviction without a contest. His conviction covers the one death only. The three other men who died that night are not part of it.
1902: The victim is born in the Bronx, New York.
1925: A Bronx sheriff briefly deputizes him; the badge is withdrawn within six months.
October 23, 1935: Four men are killed in Newark, New Jersey.
October 24, 1935: The intended victim dies in Newark after police try to question him.
February 1940: A new district attorney takes office in Kings County.
1940: Members of a Brooklyn murder-for-hire group begin cooperating with prosecutors; one informer names Workman in the Newark killing.
1941: An Essex County grand jury indicts Workman; he pleads not guilty, then changes his plea to no contest and is convicted.
1952: Workman is transferred from the state prison in Trenton to another New Jersey institution.
1964: Workman is granted parole after 23 years.
March 10, 1964: Workman is released.
1979: Workman dies.