PHOENICIA, New York — The Catskill Mountains of upstate New York are an American national treasure, but it’s a treasure of a more literal kind that’s luring visitors from all over the continent.

They come with pickaxes and shovels and metal detectors, all seeking a buried hoard that, legend has it, could be worth up to $50 million.

The story that has fuelled the gold rush is this: New York City gangster Dutch Schultz, fearing a prison term, loaded a steel box with bonds, cash and gems, drove up to Phoenicia and buried it on the banks of Esopus Creek, to await the day when he could collect.

He didn’t get the jail term, but his assassination in 1935 put him out of the picture.

The rumour of a treasure had been around, locally, for ages but it received national attention in 2001 with news stories about a documentary produced by Laura Levine.

Levine, a New York painter and photographer, became obsessed with the tale when she moved to a summer cottage near Phoenicia. Her film, Digging for Dutch: the Search for the Lost Treasure of Dutch Schultz, delves into the legend.

Where is the treasure?

Everybody has an idea. It’s beneath a pine tree. Or a birch tree. Or a stone cairn. Or in a spot triangulated by a church steeple, a cross and an oak tree. The list goes on.

The local undertaker, Gene Gormley, says he had a map pinpointing the location. Where is it now?

“I sold it to a national treasure hunter,” Gormley tells me.

Why hasn’t it been dug up? “Because it’s where he can’t look,” says Gormley.

He won’t confirm the rumour that X marks a spot beneath the village bypass, built after the gangster’s death.

James Schick, a retired cartographer, drove here from Virginia after a story about the treasure on television sent him (in his words) “into a state.”

As Levine’s camera rolled, he told her that he’d had a vision in which he found himself standing next to Schultz as he buried the box. Says Levine: “He picked out landmarks that he ‘saw.’ But he didn’t find the treasure.”

Barbara Reem, a psychic, went on camera, too, and contacted Schultz in the after-life. But the old bootlegger gave nothing away.

Says Levine: “Dutch said, ‘If I were to tell you exactly where the treasure is, then there’d be no more search. There’d be no more fun and I wouldn’t be famous anymore.’”

But, to Reem, Schultz also mentioned the “Devil’s Face.”

There is indeed a rock outcrop called Devil’s Face here.

Town clerk Laurilyn Frasier believes Schultz did indeed bury his box near Esopus Creek “but I think either some of his men came back and dug it up, or it was washed away. The creek gets really wild in the spring; the floods take away the soil.”

Access

For more information on New York state visit the New York State Tourism website at www.iloveny.com.

For information on Digging for Dutch visit the film’s website at www.diggingfordutch.com.