Rothstein (46 page)

And so, a year and a half after A. R.‘s death, his threatened “terrible record” had destroyed only a single crooked narcotics chief in far-off Washington. Colonel Nutt, it appeared, would be just about the only casualty resulting from the Big Bankroll’s demise. George McManus was a free man. So was Hyman Biller.

District Attorney Banton conveniently ignored-and Tammany’s Nathan Burkan carefully disposed of-any incriminating documents Arnold Rothstein had left behind. Banton and Burkan had made the world a safer place for the politicians, cops, and judges who had profited from acquaintance with Rothstein. At City Hall, at the Tammany Wigwam, at Police Headquarters, those whose nerves had frayed, whose brows had beaded with sweat, now slept like babes. The world would always suspect, but mercifully would never really know, the full scope of A. R.‘s power. The System survived.

And then judge Albert J. Vitale gave a banquet.

Jimmy Walker had it right. A. R.‘s death did indeed mean “trouble from here on in.” With a mayoral election on the ballot in 1929, Walker’s opponents hammered away at the Rothstein murder case. Capitalizing on the scandal were Republican Congressman Fiorello “The Little Flower” LaGuardia, a colorful progressive representing an overwhelmingly Italian East Harlem district; Ralph E. Enright, “Red Mike” Hylan’s old police commissioner, on something called the Square Deal Party; and even Socialist Norman Thomas.

Thomas had run for president in 1928, for mayor in 1925, for governor in 1924. Economics, the struggle of the working class, decent housing-these should have topped Thomas’s priorities. They didn’t. The first plank of his 1929 platform dwelt on crime and an increasingly corrupt city government-and the unfinished business of Room 349:

The recovery of elemental justice. This means making an end of the complex alliance of politicians, fixers, racketeers, the Police Department and magistrates; an alliance on which the unpunished Rothstein murder set a lurid light…

Only LaGuardia possessed any chance of unseating Walker, but not much of one. He also played the Rothstein card, alleging A. R. had extended a series of “loans”-in actuality, bribes-to Tammany politicians. “He gave the money,” Fiorello charged, “and never expected to get it back.”

District Attorney Joab Banton blandly replied that Rothstein’s papers revealed no loans whatsoever to politicians or those in public life. LaGuardia counterattacked, revealing Rothstein’s June 1929 “loan” to Bronx Magistrate Albert H. Vitale. “If there is one thing we need in this city it is honest magistrates,” LaGuardia argued. “I am going to clean out the whole lot of them. I will say that the judges of the magistrates’ courts were never so low as they are today.”

Vitale admitted borrowing from Rothstein, saying the loan had been negotiated through an unnamed “professional man of high standing”-as if who served as middleman made any difference. After a flurry in the press, the issue soon died.

Evidence of Rothstein’s dealings with Vitale had survived Nathan Burkan’s purge of A. R.‘s files. Countless other entries regarding Tammany notables had not. Rothstein recorded his most sensitive financial dealings in seven black 5”x7”, loose-leaf notebooks. One listed A. R.‘s debts. Four others detailed money owed him, largely to the Rothmere Mortgage Company. Tammany attorney and district leader Nathan Burkan discovered them in a filing cabinet at Rothstein’s Fifth Avenue home. They and other papers went to a vault at the Bank of America, then to District Attorney Banton’s office for presentation to a grand jury. Items relating to drug trafficking went to United States Attorney Charles H. Tuttle.

Along the way, most of the significant items disappeared. A. R. kept his notebooks meticulously in his own hand. On receiving full payment for a loan, he drew a line through that entry. When every record on a page had been crossed-off, he ripped it from the book.

Suspicions were inescapable that additional pages were removed after his demise. The authorities said otherwise. “Not even a little corner is missing,” District Attorney Banton reported cheerfully. “Of course, I cannot say what happened to the Rothstein papers before the grand jury received them, but from the looks of them, they were intact. You usually can tell if papers are missing.”

Not in a loose-leaf notebook you can’t.

In November 1929, Jimmy Walker overwhelmingly crushed Fiorello LaGuardia. George McManus proceeded safely to trial and to freedom. LaGuardia’s career seemed as dead as A. R. But Jimmy Walker’s safe and profitable little world changed when on the evening of December 7, 1929, the Bronx’s Tepecano Democratic Club held a testimonial (i.e., fund-raiser) at the Roman Gardens Restaurant, 187th Street and Southern Boulevard.

The guest of honor: club president judge Albert Vitale.

It was a night of good cheer. The crowd of fifty included former city magistrate Michael N. Delagi, longtime henchman of the nowdeceased “Big Tom” Foley; police detective Arthur C. Johnson; and two armed court attendants. Six other guests had criminal records, including hoodlums Joseph “Joe the Baker” Catania (nephew of mobster Ciro Terranova, the city’s “Artichoke King”) and Daniel lamascia. Catania would be killed in February 1930; lamascia-in the company of Dutch Schultz-would be gunned down by police in June 1931. All six, however, possessed something else in common: charges against them dismissed in various magistrates’ courts, including Vitale’s own venue. The Tepecano Democratic Club, however, believed in the rehabilitation of miscreants and their subsequent mainstreaming into the larger society: a full 10 percent of the club’s 300 members had police records.

At 1:30 A.M. Vitale was addressing the crowd when seven gunmen (six of whom were masked) burst in and ordered everyone to lie facedown.

“Ain’t you fellows ashamed of yourselves to hold up this dinner given to judge Vitale?” asked Ciro Terranova. “We’re all paisans ourselves.” Terranova seemed oddly cheerful.

Upon the dais, Vitale shook his head at Detective Johnson. “I figured,” Johnson would testify, “that he meant, `Don’t start anything.’ “

The robbers collected $2,000 in cash (including $40 from Vitale), $2,500 in jewels, and the weapons of the three law-enforcement officers presenta most embarrassing situation. Vitale ordered everyone not to phone the police. “Keep quiet and don’t say anything,” he told Johnson, saying he had the situation well in hand.

He did. “Around 4 am Sunday,” Johnson would recall. “I was called to the Tepecano Democratic Club, and Judge Vitale brought me to an anteroom where there was a desk. He pulled out the top righthand drawer and said, `There is your gun.’ I asked him where he had got the gun and he was unable to advise me, stating that it had come back and that was all he knew about it.”

But that was not all he knew about it. Vitale also secured the return of all cash and jewelry stolen that night.

The voting public had ignored LaGuardia’s campaign accusations about Vitale and Rothstein, but this outrage piqued their curiosity. What sort of judge consorted with Catania and lamascia? How could a judge obtain the return of the stolen goods so easily and quickly? Indeed, what sort of robbery was this?

By year’s end, the public had the answers. All revolved around Ciro Terranova.

Terranova, an associate of such mobsters as Dutch Schultz and Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria, extorted protection from much of New York’s produce trade, hence his nickname “The Artichoke King,” On June 1, 1928, a Terranova rival, Frankie Yale (nee Uale), was riding through Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood in his new Lincoln coupe. A black Nash pulled alongside. The four men inside emptied over one hundred .45 caliber and Thompson submachine-gun slugs into the Lincoln-and Yale-ruining a beautiful automobile, but providing the corpse necessary for New York’s most elaborate gangland funeral. Ten thousand admirers accompanied Yale’s $10,000 silver coffin to the cemetery. One hundred and twelve men surrounded his grave. Each held a rose, and while gravediggers shoveled earth over Frankie’s remains, each tossed his rose onto his coffin.

In June 1929, Yale’s associate, Frankie Marlow (nee Gandolfo Civito), followed him in death. Terranova engineered both murders, employing Chicago hit men for each. In fact, Al Capone owned the black Nash used in the Yale killing.

The Yale-Marlow killings might be mere footnotes in gangland history, had not Ciro Terranova been so cheap-or so stupid. He had agreed to pay $20,000 for the murders, but once Yale and Marlow were dead, he refused to pay anything beyond the $5,000 advance the killers had already received.

They would have killed the Artichoke King himself to get it, but realized there was little cash in that. Instead, they blackmailed him. Evidently, when Terranova put out a contract on someone, he literally put out a contract on someone. His hired guns actually possessed a piece of paper, detailing their obligations (i.e., kill Yale and Marlow) as well as Terranova’s (i.e., pay $20,000). Not caring much about their reputations (or evidently about the police) in the New York metropolitan area, they threatened to release the document.

Terranova promised to pay the assassins at Vitale’s fund-raiser. Instead, he contrived this faux-robbery to retrieve the embarrassing agreement. By Christmas 1929, police investigators figured this out and accused Ciro of conspiracy, assault, and robbery (but oddly enough not with Yale’s or Marlow’s murders). Terranova denied everything and, like George McManus, walked away a free man.

Magistrate Vitale was not so lucky. The New York Bar Association demanded a formal investigation of the Tepecano incident, the Rothstein loan, and Vitale’s sizable savings. Over a four-year period in which Vitale had earned just $48,000, he had banked $165,000.

Connected to the Rothstein loan was the case of Charles Fawcett, accused of helping himself to the contents of Bronx storekeeper Joseph C. Harth’s cash register. A. R. secured attorney Frederick Kaplan (a Rothstein favorite and often Sidney Stajer’s attorney) to defend his associate, Fawcett. Kaplan immediately tried muscling Harth into dropping his complaint-indicating that the great Rothstein desired such an outcome. Harth refused, and when the case went before Vitale, it ended up like this:

ASSISTANT D.A.: What did you find when you looked in there?

KRAKAUER [a next-door neighbor]: I saw this defendant in the act of pushing the register drawer closed, with his hands full of money. He just put that in his pocket as I looked in.

ASSISTANT D.A.: Did you see this defendant taking the money out of the register?

KRAKAUER: Yes. It wasn’t right in the register; it was in his hand. I didn’t see him take it out of the register, but I seen him with his hands full of money closing the drawer.

KAPLAN: I move to strike out the last part of that answer.

VITALE: Strike it out.

VITALE [to arresting officer Richard Hannigan]: Have you anybody that saw the defendant taking the money out of the register, officer?

HANNIGAN: No.

VITALE: Case dismissed.

The inescapable conclusion: A. R. had fixed the case for Fawcett, most likely for a price.

Presenting evidence for the bar association against Vitale in the matter of his controversial loan from A. R. was George Z. Medalie, Rothstein’s attorney in the Edward M. Fuller bankruptcy matter. Said Medalie:

We do not pretend to know all about the Rothstein case. It is shrouded in mystery.

We begin with a loan that appears on its face to have been wholly unnecessary. Even though the respondent [Vitale] was desirous of making speculative profits, it is quite clear that he never needed to borrow this money from Rothstein, or from anyone else, for that purpose.

If he wanted about $20,000 with which to purchase on margin additional stock of the Bank of Italy in order to average his holdings by reason of the decline that the stock had suffered he had the securities that were available as collateral and he had the cash that was better than collateral. On June 30, 1928 he solemnly told the Claremont National Bank that he had on hand $37,000 in cash. He says on June 15 he had a large amount of cash on deposit with his banks.

Investigators found Vitale “guilty of gross carelessness, inattention, ignorance and incompetency.” In August 1930, the Appellate Division unanimously ordered him removed from office.

Suddenly everything about the city’s judiciary was suspect. On August 6, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater, a rising star on the city bench, made a substantial withdrawal from his Fifth Avenue bank, carefully removed some files from his office, and then traveled to West 45th Street, where he stepped into a taxicab … and simply … vanished. No one saw Crater again or discovered why he had gone. Many suspected he had something to hide-or that someone wanted him silenced.

On August 25 Governor Franklin Roosevelt appointed Samuel Seabury, presiding judge in the second Becker-Rosenthal trial, to conduct a full investigation of the Magistrates’ Courts. Seabury systematically uncovered a pattern of corruption involving not just judges, but police and prosecutors. The public didn’t mind corruption regarding gamblers or bootleggers, but it did mind authorities framing innocent women on prostitution charges. When Chile Mapocha Acuna, a former waiter at Reuben’s, accused twenty-eight police officers and numerous magistrates of entrapping hundreds of innocent women-nurses, landladies, ordinary housewives-for profit, the public was outraged.

Among the worst involved in this enterprise was the city’s first woman judge, jean Norris. But others soon joined her in resigning: George W. Simpson (for ill health-he had arthritis in one finger); Louis B. Brodsky, who transacted $7 million in real estate and stock deals while on the bench; A. R.‘s old associate, Francis X. McQuade, whose illegally holding of outside employment while serving as magistrate (including the post of treasurer of the New York Giants) finally attracted public notice; and Crater ally George F. Ewald, who in 1927 paid Tammany leader Martin J. Healey $10,000 for his judgeship.

Tammany Hall often played for keeps. No one really knew what happened to judge Crater, but everyone knew what happened to Vivian Gordon, a thirty-two-yearold redhead who was scheduled to testify about her bogus 1923 arrest by vice-squad police. On February 26, 1931, passersby found her strangled in Van Cortlandt Park. Her murder was never solved, but by now the public suspected the worst.