The garbled last message of the dying gangster have inspired more than the Sage of the Age's screenplay The Last Words of Dutch Schultz.

E.L. Doctorow's novel Billy Bathgate includes a reinterpretation of the last confession leading the eponymous protagonist to Dutch's hidden treasure.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy's crazy quilt tapestry of the mid-70's is built, in part, around the idea that the words are an encoded explanation of the great mystery. For example, French Canadian Bean Soup stands for Five Consecrated Bavarian Seers, the leaders of the Bavarian Illuminati, and a boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim represents the names of the major demons of Lovecraftian mythology.

Robert Anton Wilson's theory1 is that Dutch was involved with the secret societies that control all of mankind (which, if you look at the strange career of the little gangster, is not unreasonable) and, at the hour of his dying, felt free to reveal their secrets. Unfortunately, delirium and an internal censor prevented him from laying it all out in plainspeak.

did you hear me?


1 This theory, of course, is for the purposes of the novel. Although not insupportable, I did not intend to imply that this is RAW's only theory, simply one of many he puts forth in Illuminatus!. Thanks to LudditeAndroid and dTaylorSingletary for the sage advice and needed fixes to this w/u.

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