Once Upon a Time in New York

by Herbert Mitgang

  Rothstein lived quietly in the Fairfield Hotel at 20 West Seventy second Street, one of several buildings he owned, but he made lindy’s his informal headquarters. It was an easy run in his Rolls-Royce to the restaurant between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth on Broadway. Leo “Lindy” Lindemann sat at the cash register, greeting the regulars and encouraging them to try the flanken with white horseradish today; unsuccessfully, Mrs. Lindemann discouraged the patronage of the gamblers and mobsters. She preferred the gossip columnists, actors, and second bananas who dropped in for a bite to eat after the theater and the last show at the Gaiety on Forty-sixth Street and the other burlesque houses off the Main Stem.

  Not far away, at his special table, Damon Runyon, the Hearst newspaper columnist—who came from Manhattan, Kansas, but much preferred this Manhattan—was making mental notes for the prototypes of Harry the Horse, Milk Ear Willie, Big Nig, and Sorrowful Jones. They were fairly closely based on the con artists and sporting ladies who surrounded him at the fictional restaurant he called Mindy’s. These characters in his first book, Guys and Dolls, would later become the basis for the classic Broadway musical.

  The time was the 1920s, and Tammany’s James John Walker, the elegant Beau James, was serving as the popular mayor of New York City. In a lawless era, when almost anything went, the lives and fortunes of the mayor and the gambler were destined to intersect in sinister ways.

  Big Arnie was New York’s gambling czar. He was a fence and a smuggler, a fixer of horse races and baseball scores. Students of American fiction know Arnold Rothstein under a different moniker: Meyer Wolfshiem. (That was the name F. Scott Fitzgerald originally gave him in The Great Gatsby. In later editions of the novel, the name is spelled “Wolfsheim.”) Fitzgerald wrote that Wolfshiem was the gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series; it helped to define Wolfshiem’s character.

  That year, the Chicago White Sox were favored to beat the Cincinnati Reds. Gamblers bribed a group of White Sox players to throw the games. It was surmised that Rothstein arranged the fix. Underworld snitches informed Rothstein in plenty of time for him to place his own bets. He had been approached at Jamaica Racetrack in Queens by a go-between and told that the Series could be fixed for $100,000—a bribe of $20,000 each to five Sox players. With that advance knowledge, but without himself investing, Rothstein made a bundle betting against the Black Sox, as they came to be called.

  Fitzgerald altered the facts, but captured the truth about Rothstein during a conversation between Nick Carraway, the narrator, and Gatsby:

  “He becomes very sentimental sometimes,” explained Gatsby. “This is one of his sentimental days. He’s quite a character around New York—a denizen of Broadway.”

  “Who is he anyhow—an actor?”

  “No.”

  “A dentist?”

  “Meyer Wolfshiem? No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919.”

  “Fixed the World Series?” I repeated.

  The idea staggered me. I remembered of course that the World Series had been fixed in 1919 but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

  “How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute.

  “He just saw the opportunity.”

  “Why isn’t he in jail?”

  “They can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart man.”

  Fitzgerald liked to tell friends that he had actually met Rothstein. When he and Ring Lardner, the short-story writer, were Long Island neighbors in Great Neck (West Egg in the novel), Lardner once introduced Fitzgerald to the gambler. It could have been at the home of Herbert Bayard Swope, the fabled reporter and editor of the New York World (“the OLD World,” to newspaper lovers), who gave weekend parties for the swells and the molls at his estate that overlooked the fictional “courtesy bay” (actually, Manhasset Bay) and Daisy Buchanan’s green light. Lardner’s modest house was within shouting distance of the Swope estate.

  Although Rothstein was never known to have bequeathed his winnings from a fixed daily double to a nonprofit foundation for the improvement of the breed, animal or human, he did contribute to American literature by unwittingly lending his reputation, if not his name, to Fitzgerald’s story of unrequited dreams in the “fresh, green breast of the New World” that the novelist envisioned on “two eggs” of land protruding into Long Island Sound.

  Big Arnie could hardly be called one of Gotham’s beloved citizens, although he claimed that his personal philosophy was summed up in one word: “friendship.” One of his own lawyers, William J. Fallon, described Rothstein as “a man who dwells in doorways. A gray rat, waiting for his cheese.” Sometimes friendships failed, and rats squabbled.

  Rothstein, well-mannered and soft of speech, did not fit the popular stereotype of the professional gambler. But his associates were chary of trifling with him. He had an overweening confidence in his own brain. At one time August Belmont ruled Rothstein off Belmont Park. Later he was reinstated. Rothstein said that he had simply gone to Belmont and convinced him that his enormous winnings were the product of superior intelligence. The banker was said to admit that Rothstein’s moral code was better than those of many of his business associates.

  On November 4, 1928, after visiting some of his cronies in a floating card game in the Park Central Hotel, Rothstein was shot in the groin by what police said was an unknown assailant. Broadway intelligence said Rothstein had welshed on one of his big gambling debts and was being called to account.

  A story got around in bookmaking circles that, had he lived, Roth-stein would have collected nearly a million dollars betting that Franklin D. Roosevelt would win the race for governor of New York and that Alfred E. Smith, the former governor running for president of the United States, would lose to Herbert Hoover, two days after the shooting. It didn’t matter to the gambler that one was a Democrat and the other a Republican; worshippers of the large green denominations from the U.S. Treasury didn’t play politics. Rothstein was right on the money for both candidates. If he had lived that long, he could have paid his debts—but someone was impatient.

  The attempted killing was page-one news even in the staid New York Times. The above-the-fold headline, in the broadsheet’s traditional Latin Condensed type, read:

  ROTHSTEIN, GAMBLER,

  MYSTERIOUSLY SHOT;

  REFUSES TO TALK

  “When The Times prints scandalous news,” explained Adolph S. Ochs, the publisher, “it’s sociology.”

  Slowly, the facts began to emerge about the mysterious hit on Rothstein. Only weeks before, he had declared that he had given up gambling in favor of the real estate business. At one time he owned and subleased one thousand furnished apartments in the city. The regular crossover between his legal and illegal enterprises enabled him to move comfortably among the Tammany politicians who ruled the neighborhoods as independent enclaves. Rothstein often boasted that he had friends in the Social Register who frequented the finest speakeasies in Manhattan. There, behind sliding peepholes and closed doors, socialites paid well to drink his illegal Canadian whisky. What’s more, the women in sexy bias-cut satin dresses thought they were privileged characters when they rubbed shoulders with glamorous gangsters.

  Still alive the day after taking a bullet in his gut, Rothstein wouldn’t talk about the identity of the gunman, but detectives and police reporters began to assemble the fragmentary evidence picked up from informers in the alleys and streets around Hell’s Kitchen on the tough West Side.

  At eleven o’clock on the night of the shooting, the police found Rothstein in a state of collapse in the Fifty-sixth Street service entrance of the Park Central Hotel on Seventh Avenue. He had asked the doorman to call a doctor and a taxicab. It was first believed that Rothstein had been shot on the east si
de of Seventh Avenue. Police theorized that he had plodded grimly across the avenue, pushed through the hotel’s main entrance into the corridor, and made his way to the service entrance to find a taxi.

  But other clues cast doubt on this theory. A taxi driver, Albert Bender, told the police that a pistol had fallen on the sidewalk, as if it had been tossed from a sedan that he had seen. Then he changed his story; it might have been hurled from an apartment facing Seventh Avenue. The .38-caliber revolver, its handle chipped as if in an effort to hide fingerprints, was found. The police picked up five unexploded shells in the gutter.

  At Polyclinic Hospital, doctors discovered that the bullet had entered Rothstein’s abdomen. News of the shooting quickly traveled up and down Broadway. Within an hour, dozens of his friends lined the corridors of the hospital. Among the first to get there was a gentleman who answered only to the name Butch. He was willing to offer his blood for a transfusion; the offer was accepted.

  Rothstein, who often carried as much as $100,000 in thousand-dollar bills in his front and side pockets, had a mere $6,500 in his wallet. Detectives from the West Forty-seventh Street station house questioned him about the incident: Did he know the gunman, or was the assailant a stranger? Apart from giving his age and home address, Rothstein remained mute. At 2:15 in the morning of November 5, the surgeons operated. At first, they probed in vain for the bullet; a few hours later they removed a thick nickel-jacketed lead slug. It proved to be the missing bullet that had been fired from the stubby .38-caliber Colt revolver found outside the Park Central.

  In the middle of the night, a new group of police officers arrived and took up positions outside Rothstein’s room and at the hospital entrance. The men in blue were there because a tipster had reported that hired gunmen were assembling who planned to finish off the wounded gambler. Rothstein owed big, possibly plus vigorish.

  A police captain with a touch of the philosopher told reporters that a man with as many friends as Rothstein was bound to have a few enemies as well. He revealed that a little more than a year ago, “somebody in the rackets tried to take him for a ride.” Instead of accepting the invitation, Rothstein ducked back into his office when he saw the door of the automobile swing open and the barrels of long guns inside.

  Thereafter, Rothstein hired a bodyguard to protect him around the clock. One of his bodyguards was Abe Attell, a canny ex-featherweight boxing champion. It so happened, insiders winked, that Attell was in Chicago when the Black Sox World Series was fixed. Another bodyguard was none other than Jack “Legs” Diamond, a trigger-happy gangster, who was paid a thousand dollars a week to protect Rothstein.

  As an apprentice thief with the Gopher Gang in Chelsea on Manhattan’s West Side, Legs got his nickname because of the speed he showed after stealing packages in warehouses and off trucks. A more romantic explanation later circulated: that he was called Legs because of his gracefulness on the dance floor. His specialties were the Charleston and the Black Bottom.

  In his dot-dot-dot gossip column, Walter Winchell branded him “On His Last Legs” Diamond because he had been shot at so many times by rival gangsters. Legs was a fearless gunsel and an enemy of Dutch Schultz, the beer baron whose real name was Arthur Flegenheimer. Both were in the speakeasy and policy rackets games. Sometimes their territories overlapped, an unhealthy condition for anyone who didn’t know his geography. The Dutchman’s protector was Jimmy Hines, a West Side Tammany leader, who later went to jail for “licensing” the racketeers in Hell’s Kitchen.

  Legs owned a piece of the Hotsy Totsy Club, a Prohibition joint on Fifty-fourth Street and Broadway. There he could be seen with his girlfriend, Kiki Roberts, a Ziegfeld Follies looker whose actual name was Marion Strasmick. After surviving dozens of shotgun pellets that peppered his slim body, Legs was tracked down in Albany. As he lay in a drunken stupor, a volley of bullets fired directly into his face, his head, and the back of his neck finally finished him off. Not long afterward, Dutch Schultz took a fatal hit himself, in Newark. The Dutchman’s deathbed ravings became the stuff of wonder and legend, including one memorable line: “Mother is the best bet, and don’t let Satan draw you too fast.”

  On his deathbed after two more transfusions, Rothstein still refused to reveal the name of the gunman or the reason why he had been shot. After the effects of the anesthetic given him for the operation had passed, Rothstein fell into a deep sleep. Waiting for him to wake up were Captain Edmund Meade, two detectives, Patrick Flood and John Green, and a stenographer from police headquarters. Detective Flood had known the gambler for a long time. He moved close to the bed. A look of recognition glinted in Rothstein’s brown eyes.

  “Hello, Paddy,” he said weakly.

  “Who shot you?” asked Flood.

  “Got nothing to say,” said Rothstein. “Nothing, nothing. Won’t talk about it.”

  At the insistence of the doctors the detectives abandoned their efforts and were ordered to leave the room. Rothstein’s mind clouded.

  His parents and estranged wife, Caroline, who lived at 912 Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park on the Upper East Side, were in the hospital when the doctors informed them he was sinking. They immediately summoned his lawyer, Maurice F. Cantor, who rushed to his bedside.

  Counselor-at-law Cantor was one of Rothstein’s links to the Tammany political machine. At the same time that his prominent client lay wounded in the hospital, Cantor was campaigning for state assemblyman as the Democratic candidate in the Eleventh Assembly District in Manhattan.

  Rothstein and Cantor were alone together for an hour. The gambler delivered instructions about the disposition of his fortune, supposedly including a list of persons to whom he owed money and those who owed money to him. He died on November 6,1928, leaving an estate estimated to be worth between five and ten million dollars.

  More important events than the infamous gambler’s death dominated the headlines. Two days later, the returns of the presidential and gubernatorial elections were played on page one in a 48-point banner in The New York Times that read:

  HOOVER WINS, THANKS NATION;

  ROOSEVELT CLAIMS HIS VICTORY

  The lead article reported that Governor Smith said he would never run for public office again, but “I will never lose my interest in public affairs, that is a sure thing.” Smith claimed to have no regrets about the campaign, but he looked less than his usual buoyant self on the night of the election: “The cigar, which was clamped between his teeth, never lighted until it was dropped to the floor after the radio had bluntly announced ‘a Hoover landslide,’ after which it was replaced by a fresh cigar that he smoked pleasantly.”

  Actually, Smith’s desire to be President did not end with his defeat. Four years later he still hoped to capture his party’s nomination. When Smith was denied the chance to run again, he turned bitter, abandoned his progressive goals for the blue-collar workers, and instead joined forces with big businessmen. He became president, at $50,000 a year, of the corporation formed to erect the Empire State Building. Although Smith received almost fifteen million votes—the largest number ever attained by a Democrat in a national race up to that time—about 21.5 million ballots were cast for Hoover. Smith was repudiated by his own party in the South and, even more humiliating, in his own state.

  “Well,” he acidly commented, “the time hasn’t come yet when a man can say his beads in the White House.”

  But the Happy Warrior was pleased that Roosevelt would replace him in Albany. Smith had thought that his own chances for victory would be enhanced with Roosevelt’s name on the same ticket and had pressured him to run. Although Smith and Roosevelt were not close intimates, both were loyal Democrats and allies on matters of social reform legislation for New York State.

  Thinking that he had lost the race for governor, Roosevelt had gone to bed early. In the morning, he discovered that he had won by a slim margin of about 24,500 out of 4.2 million votes cast. How did Roosevelt succeed and Smith fail in New York? Smith’s religion, of course, was
a deciding factor in his defeat. As a national candidate, Smith spent much of his time campaigning outside New York, believing that his popularity would assure victory in his home state.

  Roosevelt, by contrast, campaigned in almost every town and city, upstate and downstate—from Oswego to Elmira, Dunkirk to Batavia, Watertown to Boonville, Rome to Herkimer, Schenectady to Albany, and across the five boroughs of New York City. During his gubernatorial speeches, he invariably praised Smith’s presidential candidacy. But he also hammered away at his own proposed legislation and human concerns. In a typical speech on the campaign trail, Roosevelt said:

  “In social legislation, in education, in health, in better housing, in the care of the aged, we have gone far, but we must go farther.” He also showed concern for the millions of New Yorkers who depended on farming: “While there have been prosperity and growth in the cities, their measure has not extended to the rural communities. This is in part a national problem, but it also calls for immediate action in our own state.”

  In retrospect, Roosevelt’s campaign for governor was a preview of his future campaign for president.

  Almost immediately, there was talk that Albany would be Roosevelt’s stepping-stone to Washington. Even before he was sworn in as the new governor, The New York Times9s editorial page summed up his qualifications for the presidency:

  “Governor-elect Roosevelt is within reach of the Democratic party’s leadership. The manner in which this happened has many of the aspects of romance. Born a Roosevelt and a Democrat by preference, he first won his spurs by opposing Tammany as a State Senator in the legislature. In the Wilson regime as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he took the path of his more famous kinsman, Theodore Roosevelt. He was nominated for Vice President in 1920 but his party was defeated. Crippling health suddenly afflicted him. But destiny was not through with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Despite his physical infirmity, he threw himself into the cause of Governor Smith’s candidacy in 1924 and again in 1928. Not only is Roosevelt a victor in New York but he is warmly regarded by the Southern Democracy.”