Abe Landau, a 39-year-old Jewish man, had risen from obscurity to become the quiet but indispensable chief henchman to New York crime boss Dutch Schultz. Unlike some of the loud, swaggering racketeers around him, Landau was known for his composure and brains; he handled delicate jobs, money, and negotiations, the trusted lieutenant Schultz relied on when a situation required “coolness and cunning rather than gunfire and brutality.” By the autumn of 1935, however, the world he helped Schultz build was under crushing pressure from prosecutors and rival mob bosses, and Landau's fate became tied to decisions far beyond his control.
Schultz had infuriated the National Crime Syndicate by insisting on murdering special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, whose tax-evasion cases were threatening his empire. The syndicate's ruling Commission, fearful that killing such a prominent lawman would bring unbearable heat on organized crime, refused permission.
When Schultz raged that he would kill Dewey anyway, the bosses quietly decided that he, not the prosecutor, had to die. They turned to Louis “Lepke” Buchalter's enforcement arm, Murder, Inc., and assigned two seasoned gunmen, Charles “The Bug” Workman and Emanuel “Mendy” Weiss, to hunt Schultz down and eliminate him along with his inner circle.
On the night of October 23, 1935, Landau followed his boss's well-worn routine to the Palace Chop House on East Park Street in Newark, New Jersey. Schultz used the modest restaurant as an informal headquarters; most evenings he gathered there with his tightest crew—accountant Otto “Abbadabba” Berman, bodyguard Bernard “Lulu” Rosenkrantz, and Landau—to eat, tally receipts, and talk business in the back room. Around 10:15 p.m., as rain and neon washed the Newark streets outside, Schultz stepped into the men's room. Moments later, Workman and Weiss pushed through the front door.
While Weiss held the bar staff and patrons at bay, Workman walked the length of the bar, casually opened the men's-room door, and fired into Schultz at close range. Then the two gunmen moved into the rear dining room, where Landau and the others were seated. They opened up with a storm of bullets. Berman was hit repeatedly and went down where he sat. Landau took at least three bullets—wounds to his back, left arm, and right wrist—and another round tore through his neck, severing his carotid artery. In the chaos that followed, some newspapers even misidentified him as “Leo Frank,” an error that only underscored how little the public knew of the quiet man at Schultz's side.
Despite his catastrophic injuries, Landau refused to die on the spot. Bleeding heavily and with his shooting hand mangled, he dragged himself to his feet, pulled a. 45 automatic, and staggered after Workman as the hitman bolted from the back room toward the street. Witnesses later recalled Landau weaving out of the restaurant and into the night, firing wildly down the sidewalk as he tried to bring the fleeing killer down. He didn't hit his target; Workman vanished into the darkness, abandoned when Weiss ordered their getaway car to pull away without him. Landau made it only a short distance before his strength failed. On the sidewalk near a trash can outside the Chop House, he collapsed, his clothes soaked with his own blood.
Inside the restaurant, Rosenkrantz, riddled with bullets himself, forced the bartender to give him change so he could call an ambulance. Soon police and ambulances converged on East Park Street. All four men—Schultz, Landau, Berman, and Rosenkrantz—were rushed to Newark City Hospital. Berman died quickly; Rosenkrantz and Schultz lingered, the latter babbling his now-famous, surreal deathbed ramblings to detectives and priests. Landau, with a major artery shredded and multiple gunshot wounds, had little chance. He survived the night only briefly, finally succumbing to his injuries at the hospital on October 24, 1935.
In the hours after the shooting, detectives struggled to pry answers from the dying gangsters. The code of the underworld held fast: Schultz never identified his killers, and Landau—if he was conscious enough to speak—left no recorded statement that pointed to the men who had ambushed them. Local authorities, stymied by the victims' silence and the quick disappearance of the gunmen, focused some of their ire on the establishments themselves, moving against the Palace Chop House and nearby Robert Treat Hotel for harboring criminals rather than producing immediate arrests for the massacre.
For several years, the murders of Schultz, Landau, and the others remained officially unsolved, their killers named only in whispers. Behind the scenes, however, information slowly surfaced. About five years after the shooting, during an unrelated criminal investigation, a convicted underworld figure identified Charlie Workman and Mendy Weiss as the gunmen, singling Workman out as the one who had gone into the men's room and then turned his weapon on the men in the back room. It was a tantalizing lead, but without cooperative witnesses from the night of the attack, prosecutors still lacked the full leverage they needed.
The breakthrough came when Murder, Inc. itself began to unravel. In 1940, hitman Abe Reles chose to save his own life by turning government witness, laying bare the inner workings of Buchalter's murder-for-hire arm. Among the cases he illuminated was the Palace Chop House massacre. Armed with insider testimony, New Jersey authorities finally indicted Charles Workman for the murder of Dutch Schultz and his henchmen, including Landau, in 1941. Eight days into his trial, Workman abruptly changed his plea to no contest and received a life sentence; he ultimately served about twenty-three years before being released in the mid-1960s. He was the only man ever convicted in connection with the killings that claimed Landau's life.
Emanuel “Mendy” Weiss, the second gunman, was never tried for the Schultz murders, though multiple historical and law-enforcement accounts continued to name him as one of the shooters who stepped into the Newark restaurant that night. Instead, Weiss was later convicted alongside Lepke Buchalter and Louis Capone for the murder of a Brooklyn candy-store owner and executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1944. The men who had ordered the hit—Commission bosses who feared Dewey's assassination more than they feared Schultz—escaped any legal reckoning for Landau's death, their role preserved mainly in the memories and testimonies of informants and the historians who later pieced the story together.
Abe Landau's life ended, fittingly and tragically, in a burst of gunfire not meant specifically for him but impossible for him to avoid. In death he was overshadowed by the larger-than-life figure of his boss, yet the details that survive paint the picture of a loyal lieutenant who, even with his throat torn and his arm shattered, tried to return fire and protect his crew. His fall outside the Palace Chop House marked not only the violent close of his own story but also the beginning of the end for the brutal network of killers who had been paid to erase him.
