Rothstein (37 page)

Fuller and McGee would now testify against Bill Fallon. They never were close friends with the attorney. Were it not for Tom Foley, Fallon would never have taken their case. In addition, when Coffin first demanded the missing E. M. Fuller papers, Fallon compounded his clients’ problems by announcing arrogantly that he had no obligation to turn over any documents, making their failure appear willful.

Also turning against Fallon was his 300-pound factotum Ernie Eidlitz, an all-around scoundrel with whom Bill shared all his business secrets. Fallon overlooked Eidlitz’s numerous faults until Ernie forged The Great Mouthpiece’s signature to one check too many. At Billy LaHiff’s Tavern, Fallon fired Eidlitz. The American quickly secured Eidlitz’s testimony against his former boss.

Fallon fled. While on the lam, he brooded about one client he never possessed much respect for: Arnold Rothstein. In the course of Fallon’s troubles, he and A. R. had split. Now they despised one another so fiercely that they plotted the other’s destruction.

“I wonder what Rothstein is saying?” Fallon announced to his most faithful girlfriend, Broadway showgirl Gertrude Vanderbilt. “He’ll be glad to see me on this spot.”

This puzzled her-shouldn’t Fallon worry about more important matters?

“Rothstein is peculiar,” Fallon retorted. “His whole aim in life is to school himself against fear. That’s why he goes up to the toughest characters on Broadway and browbeats them. His system is to take the play away from people. Well, he never could get away with it when I was around.”

Vanderbilt remained mystified, but Fallon continued: “He’s a contradiction in terms. A lot of us are that way. He actually loves his wife, no matter how much he has neglected her. I have it figured out; he thinks he is not worthy to touch her.”

Gertrude still didn’t want to hear anything about A. R., but Fallon’s rage built. He wanted revenge against The Big Bankroll and all his other supposed friends: “I have half a mind to drive into Broadway, challenge the whole gang of back-biters. The squealers!”

Vanderbilt, meanwhile, needed funds for Fallon’s continued flight, and cashed a check at Billy LaHiff’s. On her way out, she saw Rothstein-trying best not to notice him. But A. R. wouldn’t be ignored. “Why, Gertie,” he said, exuding maximum pleasantness, “where are you going? And where have you been?”

She was smart enough not to answer, responding curtly: “I’ve been cashing a check, if that means anything to you.”

“Well, now, Gertie, I would have cashed your check.”

“Not my check,” she shot back.

“Now look here, Gertie,” A. R. continued. “Bill was my pal. Of course he was careless, but nevertheless I know he needs money; and he can have it.”

“He’ll never come to you. So that’s that.”

Vanderbilt believed that someone followed her back to Fallon’s hideout. He moved, then moved again. But it was no use. On June 14, 1924, police arrested him. The Great Mouthpiece was now a ginsoaked, stubble-faced, cowering little man. But he retained some vanity and asked to shave before being led away. The cops wouldn’t let him; they feared he’d slit his throat.

While in hiding, Fallon had considered surrendering voluntarily. If he did, he would have needed bail money, a lot of it. He swallowed his pride-and his suspicions-and asked Rothstein. A. R. turned him down.

Bill Fallon was in the Tombs, deteriorating physically, and just about broke.

But he was not beaten.

Gertie Vanderbilt mortgaged her home to provide bail money. And Fallon, despite the steady alcoholic haze about him, retained his wits, the sharpest in any Manhattan courtroom. He would defend himself.

His defense was pure offense. If Fuller and McGee turned against Fallon (Bill always referred to himself in the third person), who could believe the word of such vultures-“confessed bucketeers and robber of millions of poor people”? Ernie Eidlitz? Of course, Eidlitz would testify against Fallon-of course, he would lie against Fallon. Fallon caught him stealing and fired him. The American had kept Eidlitz at great expense in luxurious hotels to lie against Fallon. The American had promised Eidlitz a job for life to lie.

The American. Hearst. Fallon’s mad genius took wing. He would not merely attack the integrity of Fuller and McGee and Eidlitz and Watson and Ferber. Any lawyer worth his salt-even an honest lawyer-would do that. No, The Great Mouthpiece would roll the dice and place William Randolph Hearst himself on trial.

Why, he argued, had Hearst targeted Fallon for destruction? It had nothing to do with bribery. It had to do with protecting Hearst’s precious public reputation.

The very-married Mr. Hearst had a longtime mistress, stage and film star Marion Davies. Everyone knew of their affair, but no one dared mention it publicly. Fallon possessed birth certificates proving Marion Davies had delivered twins fathered by Hearst. Hearst had to silence Fallon, and if that meant ruining him with trumpedup bribery charges, that’s what Hearst would do—what Hearst and his highpaid stooges and their phony witnesses had done.

Fallon’s tale was nonsense, bluff, and diversion. Hearst had no vendetta against Fallon, only against Big Tom Foley. But Fallon’s own dishonesty and carelessness had left him vulnerable to prosecution. The American’s war against the bucket shops was winding down; a new war against the crookedest attorney in town would sell papers.

Beyond that, Hearst had no twins by Miss Davies, no offspring by her at all. “Believe me,” one of Miss Davies’s friends once exclaimed, “if Marion had one child by Hearst, she’d have worn it around her neck.”

But Fallon’s outrageous strategy worked: baiting the presiding judge; distancing himself from his former clients; discrediting his former henchman, Eidlitz; knocking holes in the story told by Charles Rendigs (“that miserable creature who faces ten years under a conviction for perjury”); questioning Joe Pani’s motives (he feared pros ecution for liquor-law violations); and above all making William Randolph Hearst the focus of the trial. Said Fallon to the jury:

Eidlitz said to me that he told Watson he was fearful he would be arrested, and that he [Eidlitz] knew I had the birth certificates of the children of a motion-picture actress, and that I knew Mr. Hearst had sent a woman, who pretended to be a countess, to Florida to get evidence against his wife. He said he had told Watson that I intended to use that information to blackmail Mr. Hearst.

Eidlitz said he told Mr. Watson that I had the number of the car and the name of the man who went to Mexico with the same party, the same moving-picture actress. He said a few days later Hearst communicated with Watson, and said to Watson: “Fallon must be destroyed.”

Newspapers of that era ignored the sexual indiscretions of the rich and powerful unless statements about these peccadilloes were uttered in a court of law. When Fallon mentioned William Randolph Hearst (and that was as early as the jury-selection process), the gloves came off. Every paper in town rushed to chronicle Fallon’s charges. Worse, Victor Watson had to phone Hearst to report this catastrophe. Hearst ordered Watson: Print it, print it on page one of the American.

Hanging over the trial was a more sinister presence than Hearst: Arnold Rothstein. At one point The Great Mouthpiece interrogated Victor Watson about a conversation they had:

FALLON: Was the name of anyone else [besides Tom Foley] mentioned in that conversation?

WATSON: I believe Stoneham’s name was mentioned and Arnold Rothstein.

FALLON: Don’t you remember telling me Arnold Rothstein was the one man you were going to get, no matter how long it took you?

WATSON: No, I said there were various rumors at different times reaching my ears about threats against my life, and among others I said I understood that Rothstein had made some foolish talk about shooting me.

Fallon scoffed at Watson’s fears and asked if he recalled Fallon saying “sweet things” (“one of the sweetest characters in the world”) about A. R. Watson didn’t-no doubt, because Fallon never uttered them. Fallon was toying both with Watson and with Rothstein.

Watson did, however, remember Rothstein’s attempt to bribe him. A. R. had requested American sports editor William S. Farnsworth to approach his editor-in-chief, Watson, with a proposition: “Would you ask Watson if he had a price.” Farnsworth returned with a terse-but coy-“yes” from his boss. At first that sounded positive. Then Rothstein correctly discerned its real meaning. “I don’t trust that fellow Watson,” he told Farnsworth. “He’s a devil. He wouldn’t take any money. What he means is that he wants me to squeal, and I can’t do that.”

Throughout his trial, Fallon had been excitable, argumentative, cutting. In summation, he became white hot, but with a passion that was controlled, brilliant, calculating, and when he concluded with the words, “All that the world means to me, I now leave in your hands,” he had done all he could. The trial concluded at 5:08 P.M. on August 8, 1924. Five hours later, the jury found him not guilty. The courtroom went wild, with Fallon’s friends rushing toward him to carry him from the courtroom. The Great Mouthpiece leaned over the press table. He had something to say to Nat Ferber: “Nat, I promise you I’ll never bribe another juror!”

But trouble still stalked Fallon. He resumed drinking-heavily. Few cases came his way. Some said potential clients feared Hearst’s influence, but the denizens of Fallon’s world had far more to fear from a far closer source: Arnold Rothstein. They took their business elsewhere.

But not even Arnold Rothstein could tell John McGraw what to do. When, in 1924, Giants coach Cozy Dolan was implicated in a late-season game-fixing scandal, McGraw hired Fallon to defend him. Fallon threatened to sue Baseball Commissioner Mountain Landis for defamation of character. Landis issued his own threat, this one for Charles Stoneham: Call off McGraw and Fallon or I’ll run you out of baseball. Fallon backed down.

On a hot August evening in 1926, Fallon entertained a woman and another couple at his Hotel Belleclaire apartment. A former girlfriend burst in and attacked Fallon’s companion with a dog whip. He tried pulling her off. She flung acid into his eyes, which he wiped from his face with a ginsoaked piece of cloth. Miraculously, he was neither blinded nor disfigured.

One day Fallon was in Supreme Court, defending McGraw in a minor civil suit, when he crumpled to the floor. They carried Bill to his wife’s apartment at the Hotel Oxford, and there The Great Mouthpiece formulated his last defense-in the case of God v. Fallon. His old law partner, the now-disbarred Gene McGee, visited and heard Fallon’s line of reasoning:

You know, Gene, I never really sinned at all…. Everyone says I have sinned; that I’m paying the price of sin. That I tried to take life by a tour de force. Let’s confine ourselves to the issue and let’s not depart from the law. The law of sin is explicit and simple. To sin, one has to premeditate the sin. I never premeditated a sin. I acted spontaneously, always, and as the spirit moved me.

He paused. Maybe from exhaustion. Maybe for effect. With Fallon, even now, you never really knew. He grabbed McGee’s hand.

“You see, Gene, I never really premeditated anything at all-not even death.”

The next morning, Fallon felt better, stronger, cheerier. He wanted to go the Polo Grounds. Agnes Fallon tried dissuading him. He flashed a smile and responded firmly, “Do you think for a minute that I am going to lie here when I can go to see a ballgame.”

She again tried stopping him. But no one ever told Bill Fallon what to do. He went to the bathroom to shave-just as he wanted to on the day of his arrest. He always wanted to look his best.

He didn’t make it this time, either. Agnes Fallon heard a gasp. She found her husband on the floor, blood oozing from his mouth, dead from a heart attack.

William J. Fallon was fortyone.

Fallon’s sendoff was from the Church of the Ascension, at West 107th Street and Broadway. Val O’Farrell, John McGraw, and Charles Stoneham attended. McGraw, always a soft touch, paid for Fallon’s mahogany casket.

For Victor Watson, things had not progressed as planned. He had bagged Edward M. Fuller and Frank McGee-but who cared about them? Tom Foley had escaped. So had Rothstein and Charles Stoneham. The Fallon episode was not just a failure; it was a disaster. Seeing his name and, more to the point, Marion Davies’s name, dragged through the mud outraged William Randolph Hearst. Immediately after Fallon’s acquittal, Hearst transferred Watson to the Baltimore News, beginning a downward spiral for Watson, once one of the Hearst’s rising stars. Marital and financial difficulties compounded his depression. In November 1938, Watson checked into New York’s Abbey Hotel. On the back of a dirty envelope, he scribbled in pencil: “God forgive me for everything, I cannot …”

He then jumped from an eleventh-story window. Hundreds had crowded Fallon’s funeral. Only a handful attended Watson’s.

NOBODY LOVED ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN.

That was his complaint, not his actual problem. Arnold Rothstein was incapable of love-that is, of loving any human being. He loved money. He loved power. He loved the good life, the bright lights of Times Square, the thrill of fixing a World Series or a championship prizefight, the warm glow of knowing you were smarter than the next fellow-and his knowing it, too.

But people? Arnold Rothstein didn’t have friends. He had acquaintances, business associates, but not friends. Well, maybe one friend-Sidney Stajer. Yet, no one could fathom what bound the dapper millionaire gambler and the cheap little drug addict together. Nobody comprehended why A. R. tolerated Sidney, let alone was fond of him. Arnold’s marriage? A disaster, albeit one that took years to fully unravel and for Carolyn Rothstein to finally abandon.

A. R. retained but tatters of a family relationship. Marriage to a shiksa shattered what remained of a relationship with his father, but it had been irretrievably mutilated long before that. The son’s gambling, his lying, his dishonesty, his greed saddened and disgusted Abraham Rothstein. It was not what being a Jew was about. It was not what being a mensch was about.

Abraham and Arnold seemed so different, yet they shared a common trait, one that only grew in years to come. Because of Abraham Rothstein’s reputation as a just and holy man, many turned to him for guidance. Carolyn Rothstein wrote that her father-in-law “went out of his way to mediate difficulties between various groups in business.” Ironically, this attribute would become apparent in A. R.