Rothstein (2 page)

The cowardly racketeer who lived in A.R.‘s Fairfield Hotel, controlled New York’s produce supply, and literally penned written contracts to have his enemies rubbed out.

The country-boy cardsharp and legendary golf hustler who sat in on Rothstein fatal card game at Jimmy Meehan s.

The erudite ex-Marine who defeated Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight crown. Did he need a little help from A.R.‘s friends?

JAMES J. “GENTLEMAN JIMMY” WALKER

New York’s flamboyant jazz Age mayor. Rothstein’s connections to his political machine proved profitable-and ultimately career-ending.

Jimmy Walker’s former law partner and police commissioner. Walker made him take the fall for not solving a crime that nobody wanted solved.

JOHN B. WATSON

Father of the behaviorist school of psychology. Expelled from the faculty at John Hopkins. A.R.‘s shrink.

Gotham’s most dapper city official. Officially, he assumed the police commissionership to solve A.R.‘s murder. His real agenda: Purge the department of its honest cops.

Bill Fallon’s faithful mistress, but ultimately the cause for his break with Nicky Arnstein.

One of the worst of New York’s crop of venal judges. Discovery of his “loan” from A.R. helped topple “the system.”

Editor of Hearst’s New York American. He paid the ultimate price for keeping on Rothstein ‘s trail.

A.R.‘s longtime mistress. He went to her funeral-and then to the track.

Crusading Manhattan district attorney. Did he make a deal with Rothstein to solve Beansy Rosenthal’s murder-and further his gubernatorial ambitions?

R. BET HE WAS GOING TO DIE.

It was Sunday, November 4, 1928, and Arnold Rothstein sat in his office, calmly filling out a $50,000 life insurance policy on himself. A. R. liked to pretend he was in the insurance business, or in real

estate or bail bonds, any sort of “legitimate” business. His 45 West 57th Street offices housed his various holdings: Rothstein, Simon Company, Inc.; the Hooper Realty Corporation; the Rothmere Mortgage Corporation, Inc.; the Juniper Holding Company, Inc.; the Lark Holding Company, Inc.; the Cedar Point Realty Corporation; the Rothstein Brokerage Corporation; the Redstone Building Company; the Rugro Holding Corporation; and, as one of his functionaries would soon put it: “corporations of minor importance in which the decedent was interested as a stockholder.” Yes, Arnold Rothstein of Fifth Avenue, mild of manner, conservative, cautious, and understated in speech, habit, and dress, teetotaler and nonsmoker; could claim-and invariably did-to be simply the proverbial “legitimate” businessman.

Nobody believed him.

For, Arnold Rothstein-the “Big Bankroll,” the “Great Brain,” “The Man Uptown”-was not what he took such pains to appear to be. In one sense, his charade was a dismal failure. Most Americans thought of him as a gambler and, in fact, most Americans had heard of him. After all, A. R. had not only fixed the 1919 World Series; he had gotten away with it.

Yet, even being America’s most notorious gambler was just part of Rothstein’s disguise, another layer of the onion to be peeled off until you got to—

Until you got to what? Where did the real Arnold Rothstein begin? As the ruthless millionaire usurer lurking for hours on bitter cold Manhattan streets to waylay some poor soul who owed him one or two hundred dollars? The middleman between other gamblers and gangsters and Tammany Hall’s biggest bosses? The fence for millions in stolen goods? The shadowy figure manipulating Garment District labor wars until small-time hoodlums no longer worked for the unions and bosses, but gave orders to both labor and management? The financier of Prohibition-era speakeasies and rumrunners? The shadowy figure now working with feverish diligence to create a massive intercontinental drug trade?

Or was it that like the onion, once you peeled all the layers away, there was … nothing.

A mystery. A smiling, witty but ultimately cold and gray presence that overwhelmed everyone and everything about him. “To understand it all,” one associate would say, “you had to know Rothstein. He lived only for money-he even liked the feel of it. He wasn’t right even with himself. For every friend he had a thousand enemies.”

Yet everyone went to A. R. when they needed something. Everyone had to pretend to be his friend. He was the man who made things happen, who put people together.

The ultimate middleman.

New York American reporter Nat Ferber didn’t like Arnold but he sized him up pretty well. “Arnold Rothstein was chiefly a busybody,” Ferber observed:

with a passion for dabbling in the affairs of others. He was also a fixer, a gobetween, not merely between lawbreakers and politicians, but between one type of racketeer and another. Because he measured his success in these roles by only one yardstick, money-he was always on the make. It follows that I might have placed his penchant for making money first, but this was a trait he shared with many. As a fixer and a gobetween, he stood alone.

He did much of his fixing at Lindy’s Restaurant in Times Square, spending so much time there that many thought he owned the place. Abe Scher, Lindy’s night cashier, was used to seeing Rothstein at Lindy’s and was familiar with his habits and desires. “Mr. Rothstein comes in,” Scher recalled:

Every night he comes here. Regular as clockwork, he comes here. Sunday night, Monday night, any night. Everybody knows that. Like always, there are some people waiting for him. They are waiting near his table, the same one where he is always sitting … You got to understand. This place, it is like an office for him. People come in and they are leaving messages for him. All day and night, they are telephoning for him here. It ain’t that Mr. Lindy likes the idea, but what can he do? An important man like Mr. Rothstein, you do not offend. So, like I am saying, he comes in and he goes to his table. He is saying “hello” to people and they are saying “hello” to him. Some fellows, they go to his table and they are talking confidential to him. You know, they are talking into his ear … Did he give anyone money? … Who knows? Mr. Rothstein you see, but you do not watch … Does he have his little black book? Is there a time when he is not having his little black book?

Half of Broadway treated Lindy’s as their clubhouse. Actors in one corner; songwriters and song pluggers in another; gamblers in yet another. Damon Runyon gravitated to Lindy’s newspapermen’s section and wrote about the inhabitants of the underworld section. In Guys and Dolls, Lindy’s became “Mindy’s” and Arnold Rothstein became “Nathan Detroit.” Elsewhere, Damon turned A. R. into “Armand Rosenthal, The Brain.”

“Nobody knows how much dough The Brain has,” Runyon wrote. “except that he must have plenty, because no matter how much dough is around, The Brain sooner or later gets hold of all of it.” You could find A. R. in Lindy’s almost any night, making deals, lending money at rates as high as 48 percent.

Arnold Rothstein compartmentalized his whole life into various segments, some legal, most illegal, a confusing, but profitable, mix of legitimacy and corruption. Most knew Arnold Rothstein as a gambler. He was much more. His “Big Bankroll” nickname revealed far more than one might surmise. From his earliest days on the streets, he carried huge amounts on his conservatively tailored person-eventually up to $100,000.

A big bankroll conferred immense power upon the bearer. Have a scheme? See Rothstein. In a jam? Go to Rothstein. You’d get the money on the spot, no paperwork, no wait. And so, A. R. fenced millions of dollars in stolen government bonds, backed New York’s biggest bootleggers, imported tons of illegal heroin and morphine, financed shady Wall Street bucket shops, bought and sold cops and politicians.

Rothstein wasn’t merely rich, he was smart. That was how he became rich. A. R. was “The Great Brain,” smarter and savvier than those around him, no matter what crowd he was with: the gamblers, the reporters, the politicians, the hoodlums, the showpeople, the “legitimate” businessmen. They knew it, he knew it; he prided himself on his overwhelming intelligence, his ability to calmly, coldly manipulate any situation.

He bristled when people said he cheated, even though he did cheat-especially since he cheated. “Because the majority of the human race are dubs and dumbbells,” he once boasted:

If you have a few brains and have learned to do things and size up people and situations they think you are crooked. You can’t make so much money, and not be a crook. If I had the time I could tell you how to make money in any line you want and make it straight.

A crook is a fool. A liar is a fool. I never saw one yet that didn’t hang himself if you gave him rope enough. To be a thief is an admission that you lack brains. A thief always has contempt for himself. Every man wants to be honest, to live clean, and keep his promises. But it takes brains, personality, and opinions. I back my opinion to win, every time.

I wasn’t fifteen years old before I had learned my limitations. I never played with a man I wasn’t sure I could beat. I knew how to size them up. I still do. That’s all there is to making money.

A. R. pretended to be almost everything he was not, including a gambler. He hated real gambling, because real gambling involved real risk. And Arnold hated risk. He was too smart to take risks.

Sunday night, November 4, 1928, began for Rothstein not at Lindy’s, but at his “legitimate” West 57th Street offices. In two days, America would go to the polls. Rothstein had placed heavy bets on Herbert Hoover for president and Franklin Roosevelt for New York’s governor. It didn’t take a “Great Brain” to predict that Hoover would trounce Alfred E. Smith. Smith was too Catholic, too wet, and too “Tammany” to beat Hoover during unprecedented prosperity. But once again, Rothstein proved smarter than most. He had bet early on Hoover, long before Smith’s candidacy inevitably collapsed. Back in September, A. R. phoned Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Kansas City, to secure odds of 8-to-5 on Hoover. Now, they were 20-to-1.

It did, however, require some nerve to wager on Roosevelt. FDR hadn’t held elective office in over a decade; 1928 looked like a Republican year; and FDR’s opponent, New York Attorney General Albert Ottinger, was no pushover.

Rothstein’s treasurer Sam Brown helped total up the wagers that night. If Hoover and FDR triumphed, Rothstein cleared $570,000. If both lost, he lost $1,250,000. There were other combinations. If Hoover and Ottinger won, A. R.‘s winnings slipped to $300,000. If Smith and Ottinger won, he lost $900,000. He made one last bet that night, with gambler Meyer Boston.

As Rothstein prepared to leave, he received a call from Chicago’s North Sheridan Hotel, from a Joseph Unger. The topic: A. R.‘s newest-and now biggest-enterprise: drugs.

At 7:00 PM, A. R.‘s chauffeur, Eugene Reiman, drove Rothstein’s Rolls Royce to the Fairfield Hotel, where Rothstein had resided since his long-tottering marriage finally collapsed a few months previously. It wasn’t difficult for Rothstein to find a suite at the Fairfield. He owned it.

Inez Norton lived there, too. Norton, a thirty-two-yearold exmodel and Ziegfeld Follies showgirl was A. R.‘s current girlfriend. The tabloids said Inez was pretty; but her face was pudgy, her countenance hard. Two years before, she had married-and quickly divorced-a millionaire. Tonight, Arnold and Inez would dine at the Colony, Manhattan’s most fashionable restaurant. At the Plaza Hotel, A. R.‘s longsuffering, estranged wife, Carolyn, another blond former showgirl, supped with friends. A. R. and Carolyn were negotiating an end to their divorce, a process proceeding as amicably as such unpleasantries went.

Superficially, all seemed right in the world of Arnold Rothstein. “Arnold was very gay-his normal, natural self-and very much in love,” Inez Norton recalled. “He didn’t seem to have anything on his mind. He certainly didn’t fear anything.

“We spoke of many subjects, but mostly of love; and he said that he hoped soon to be free to marry me. He said everything would be mine-his property and the money-but I cared only for him.”

Sure, she did.

It had rained all day, and the windy and sleet-filled evening wasn’t any better. When dinner ended, A. R. and Inez took A. R.‘s limo to Times Square. Inez headed for the Rivoli, one of the area’s opulent new picture palaces, where she and a girlfriend watched Eric von Stroheim’s lavish The Wedding March-a silent film about the evils of marrying for money. Rothstein, who never went to movies, headed for Lindy’s. He had business to attend to. He always had businesseven if he didn’t know in advance what that business might be. Arnold Rothstein attracted business like a magnet.

It was 9:00 P.M. At Lindy’s A. R. checked messages, spoke briefly with associates, and for about an hour conversed in hushed tones, as he almost always did, with Damon Runyon. Rothstein did most of the talking.

Right around 10:00, A. R. checked his billfold. He felt tapped out and dispatched chauffeur Eugene Reiman “to get some dough.” At 10:12, six blocks away, Park Central Hotel switchboard operator Beatrice Jackson took a call from Room 349, a two-room suite, where three days previously a “George A. Richards, Newark, N.J.” had registered without benefit of luggage. “Richards” paid $12 cash for a day’s rent, paying again each morning thereafter.

“Place a call to Circle 3317,” the voice from Room 349 told Beatrice Jackson.

Circle 3317 was Lindy’s.

Lindy’s owner Leo Linderman liked “The Great Brain,” though his wife Clara despised him. However, neither Lindy nor Clara appreciated the incessant phone calls Rothstein received at their establishment. They ordered Abe Scher not to take any more of his calls, but not accommodating A. R. didn’t really seem like a good idea to the thin young man. So Abe passed the message on just one more time. He didn’t know who was calling. He didn’t have to know. He didn’t want to know. All he knew was: It’s for Rothstein. “Tell A. R. I want to talk with him,” said a voice Scher did not recognize-or one he would find convenient, no, essential, not to recognize.