Arnold Rothstein

• 1. Introduction

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  Arnold Rothstein, a New York gambler nicknamed The Brain, lay wounded in a hospital while police asked who had shot him. He refused to help. "You stick to your trade," he told the officers. "I'll stick to mine." Pressed again, he answered with what sounded like a joke: "Me mudder did it." It was a fitting last act for a man who built his fortune on information, favors and well-judged risk. Rothstein became a kingpin of the Jewish Mob in New York City, and writers and filmmakers kept him alive in fiction for generations. Yet much of his life is tangled in rumor. Did he really help fix a famous baseball World Series? How did a businessman's son from a respectable family become a teacher to future crime bosses? And who actually fired the shot that killed him?

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• 2. A Difficult Child

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  Abraham Rothstein was known around New York as "Abe the Just." He was an affluent Ashkenazi Jewish businessman with a reputation for upright character. His wife was Esther Rothschilds, and on the 17th of January 1882 she gave birth in New York City to their son Arnold. The boy was gifted at mathematics but bored by school, and he had a reputation as a difficult child.

  His older brother Harry studied to become a rabbi, and Arnold felt a deep envy toward him. Their father thought the younger boy craved the center of attention. Abe grew frustrated whenever Arnold failed to get it.

  Gambling began in childhood, no matter how often his father scolded him. In 1921 someone asked Rothstein how he became a gambler. He answered: "I always gambled. I can't remember when I didn't. Maybe I gambled just to show my father he couldn't tell me what to do, but I don't think so. I think I gambled because I loved the excitement. When I gambled, nothing else mattered." That craving for excitement soon found a permanent address in Manhattan.

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• 3. Odds And Information

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  By 1910 Rothstein had moved to the Tenderloin district of Manhattan, where he opened a casino at the age of 28. He also put money into a horse racing track at Havre de Grace, Maryland. He was reputed to have fixed many of the races he won there.

  His real edge was information. Rothstein built a wide network of informants and was willing to pay a premium for a good tip, whatever its source. Some of his father's banker associates supplied very deep pockets. By the age of 30, these successes had made him a millionaire.

  The 1921 Travers Stakes shows how such schemes allegedly worked. Under the pseudonym "Redstone Stable," Rothstein owned a popular racehorse named Sporting Blood. He allegedly conspired with the leading trainer Sam Hildreth to push the horse's odds higher. On the morning of the race, Hildreth entered an outstanding three-year-old named Grey Lag, and Sporting Blood's odds rose to 3-1.

  Rothstein bet $150,000 through bookmakers. He had allegedly been told that the second favorite, Prudery, was off her feed. Just before post time, Hildreth scratched Grey Lag without any explanation. Sporting Blood won, and Rothstein collected over $500,000 in bets plus the purse. A conspiracy was never proved. Horses were not the only sporting contest to carry his shadow.

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• 4. The Black Sox Question

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  In 1919, according to the allegations, Rothstein's agents paid members of the Chicago White Sox to lose the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Rothstein reportedly bet against Chicago and made a large profit. The episode became known as the "Black Sox Scandal." The evidence on whether he truly took part cuts both ways.

  Rothstein was summoned to Chicago to testify before a grand jury. He presented himself as an innocent businessman who wanted to clear his name. He pointed at the gambler Abe Attell: "The whole thing started when Abe Attell and some other cheap gamblers decided to frame the Series and make a killing." He added that Attell had probably used his name: "I don't doubt that Attell used my name to put it over. That's been done by smarter men than Abe." Prosecutors found no evidence linking Rothstein to the affair, and he was never indicted.

  A second version of the story begins with Joseph "Sport" Sullivan, a gambler who supposedly urged Rothstein to help fix the Series. Rothstein turned him down. When Attell made an offer, Rothstein reconsidered. With rivals competing to rig the games, the risk seemed worth taking, and he could hide his part. The biographer David Pietrusza suggests he worked both ends of the fix, with Sullivan and with Attell. Michael Alexander concluded that Attell fixed the Series "probably without Arnold Rothstein's approval." That, he wrote, "did not prevent Rothstein from betting on the Series with inside knowledge."

  Leo Katcher described what happened to the case. He said the grand jury's records and minutes vanished, along with the signed confessions of Cicotte, Williams and Jackson. With its evidence gone, the state asked the players to repeat their confessions on the stand. They refused, citing the Fifth Amendment, and the judge had no choice but to dismiss the case. Katcher argued that, on the official record and on the statement of State Attorney Maclay Hoyne, Rothstein was never involved. He added that it was never proved the Series had been fixed at all.

  The dismissal did not save the players. Kenesaw Mountain Landis, newly named as the first Commissioner of Major League Baseball, permanently banned all eight defendants from playing or coaching in the league.

  Katcher also weighed in on the money. Rothstein always maintained that he won less than $100,000. The real figure, Katcher said, was about $350,000, and it could have been much larger. Whatever the truth in Chicago, Rothstein's next great opportunity came from the law itself, when Prohibition began.

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• 5. Prohibition Bankroll

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  Along the Hudson River, and across the Great Lakes from Canada into Upstate New York, liquor poured into the state once Prohibition began. Rothstein saw openings in bootlegging and narcotics and bought holdings in a number of speakeasies. He became the first to import illegal Scotch whisky in his own fleet of transatlantic freighters. His bet was that expensive liquor would be the "chic thing to have."

  Banking support and high-level political connections let him go around Tammany Hall and deal directly with the street gangs. His organization came to include Meyer Lansky, Jack "Legs" Diamond, Charles "Lucky" Luciano and Dutch Schultz. Their combined gangs, and their double-dealing against their own bosses, undermined the late 19th-century style of political gangsterism. His other nicknames were Mr. Big, The Fixer, The Man Uptown and The Big Bankroll.

  His favorite office was Lindy's, at Broadway and 49th Street in Manhattan. Rothstein often stood on the corner surrounded by bodyguards and did business in the open. He placed bets there and collected debts from men who had lost the day before. He also mediated disputes between New York gangs and reportedly charged a hefty fee. Because he also dealt with the city's legitimate business world, he forced Tammany Hall to accept him as a necessary ally.

  His circle of associates was wide. Waxey Gordon worked as a rum-runner for him in the first years of Prohibition. Harry "Nig" Rosen joined him in narcotics in the mid-1920s. Enoch "Nucky" Johnson was a business partner during the bootlegging boom. The Belgian financier Alfred Loewenstein allegedly had a deal with him to supply America with European-made heroin. Many historians credit Rothstein as the first successful modern drug dealer.

  Luciano and Lansky learned the most. Rothstein supported Luciano early in his career and taught him how to be a full kingpin. Lansky was somewhat mentored by him during Prohibition. One assessment says Rothstein "transformed organized crime from a thuggish activity by hoodlums into a big business run like a corporation."

  By 1925 he was one of the nation's most powerful criminals. For a time he was the nation's largest bootlegger, until George Remus rose to challenge him. His reported wealth of over $10 million made him one of the richest gangsters in American history. It also set the stage for a debt he refused to pay.

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• 6. The Last Poker Game

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  On the 4th of November 1928, Rothstein was shot during a business meeting at the Park Central Hotel, at Seventh Avenue near 55th Street in Manhattan. He died two days later at the New York Polyclinic Hospital. The shooting was reportedly linked to a three-day, high-stakes poker game held in October. Rothstein owed $320,000 from it. He claimed the game was fixed and refused to pay.

  The gambler George "Hump" McManus was arrested for homicide but was later acquitted for lack of evidence. Kevin Cook, author of Titanic Thompson, offers a detailed account of the game. He says the gambler Titanic Thompson, born Alvin Clarence Thomas, and his associate Nate Raymond fixed it. After complicated side bets, Rothstein owed Raymond $319,000, much of which Raymond secretly agreed to pass on to Thompson. He owed Thompson another $30,000 and about $200,000 to the other gamblers present. McManus, meanwhile, owed Rothstein $51,000.

  Rothstein stalled. He said he could not pay until after the elections of November 1928, when he expected to win $550,000 for backing Herbert Hoover for president and Franklin D. Roosevelt for governor. At McManus's trial, Thompson testified and called him "a swell loser" who would never have shot Rothstein. According to Cook, Thompson later told acquaintances that the killer was McManus's bag man, Hyman Biller, who fled to Cuba soon afterward.

  A different theory comes from Kill the Dutchman!, a 1971 biography of Dutch Schultz. The crime reporter Paul Sann suggested that Schultz murdered Rothstein. In this telling, it was revenge for the killing of Schultz's friend and associate Joey Noe by Jack "Legs" Diamond, Rothstein's protege. Rothstein was buried at Union Field Cemetery in Ridgewood. The question of who held the gun was never settled, but the question of who would inherit his business was answered quickly.

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• 7. Break-Up Of An Empire

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  Frank Erickson, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and other former associates divided up Rothstein's criminal enterprises after his death. Prohibition was in full swing, street gangs were fighting over liquor distribution, and the carefully built political boss structure of the late 19th century had already collapsed.

  Tammany Hall, the New York political machine, was weakened but still relied on Rothstein to keep the new street gangs in check. His death finished it. As Tammany fell, the reformer Fiorello La Guardia rose in prominence, and he was elected Mayor of New York City in 1933.

  The fortune disappeared too. Ten years after Rothstein died, his brother Harry declared the estate insolvent.

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• 8. Fiction's Gangster

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  The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, features Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jewish gambler who befriends and mentors Jay Gatsby and is said to have fixed the World Series. Readers commonly assume the character alludes to Rothstein.

  Damon Runyon knew Rothstein personally as a newspaper reporter and later covered the trial of his alleged killer. Runyon's short story "The Brain Goes Home" offers a fictional version of his death. According to Pietrusza, Rothstein also inspired Nathan Detroit, who appears in the story "Blood Pressure" and in the musical Guys and Dolls.

  The stage came next. In 1930 Rothstein's girlfriend, Inez Norton, to whom he had left a substantial sum in his will, appeared in the Broadway play Room 349 by Mark Lindner. The play claimed to show the real circumstances of his murder. The film Street of Chance, also from 1930, starred William Powell as a gambler shot after cheating at poker, and it was widely recognized as based on Rothstein's murder.

  In the 1934 film Now I'll Tell, Spencer Tracy played a character named Murray Golden. The film was loosely based on the autobiography of Rothstein's widow, Carolyn Green Rothstein. Later actors in the role include Robert Lowery in 1960, David Janssen in 1961 and Michael Lerner in the 1988 film Eight Men Out. F. Murray Abraham played him in the 1991 film Mobsters, and Michael Stuhlbarg played him in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.

  In a deleted scene from The Godfather Part II, a man named Hyman Suchowsky tells Vito Corleone he admires Arnold Rothstein for fixing the 1919 World Series. Vito suggests he change his name, and he becomes Hyman Roth. The shortest trace of Rothstein may be in Martin Scorsese's 1995 film Casino. Its protagonist, Sam "Ace" Rothstein, carries his surname but was modeled on the sports bettor and fixer Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal.

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