His initiation into the gang begins with a chilling murder at sea, during which one of Schultz’s associates, Bo Weinberg, has his feet set in a tub of cement.īut Billy has joined the gang at the end of Dutch Schultz’s reign over organized crime in his part of New York. With no father and a mother who is not altogether with it, Billy looks to Schultz and Berman to show him how to make it in the world. Billy is a fictional character, but he moves with the very real Schultz and his advisers, including Schultz’s genius accountant, Otto “Abbadabba” Berman, hit man Lulu Rosenkrantz and lawyer Dixie Davis. The 1991 movie stars Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman, Loren Dean, Bruce Willis, Steven Hill and Steve Buscemi (Boardwalk Empire).īilly Bathgate is a fifteen-year-old boy from the Bronx who becomes a protégé of the notorious Dutch Schultz, a hot-head New York mobster who made his money during the 1930s running beer and controlling the numbers racket. Published in 1989, Billy Bathgate won both the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. If you like intelligent and well-written historical fiction and New York stories about organized crime during the 1930s, check out Billy Bathgate, by E.
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