Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series

by David Pietrusza

  On A. R.'s first excursion, three or four associates accompanied him. One of them wasn't a professional gambler, but nonetheless proved notable: twenty-year-old boxer Abe "The Little Champ" Attell. Abe was little, just 5'4"and 122 pounds. He was also an actual champ, of sorts, possessing a still-somewhat dubious claim to the world featherweight title. Attell began fighting on the streets and in the alleys of San Francisco, generally against larger Irish neighbors. In August 1900 he earned his first professional purse of $15. His mother hadn't wanted him to fight but when Abe brought home the news of his victory-and the cash-she wanted to know when he'd fight again. He fought ten days later. By October 1901 Attell laid claim to the vacant featherweight title, although he would not fully solidify his hold on it until 1908.

  In Saratoga Rothstein, Attell, and their comrades pooled their capital, placed their bets, and lost everything down to their last $100. Then their luck changed, and their bankroll swelled to $2,000. A. R. held the cash-and promptly slipped away and boarded a train to Manhattan, leaving his friends not only broke, but on the hook for room and board. Local authorities tossed them into jail. Eventually they secured their bail and their freedom.

  In September 1908 A. R. had met someone special. Twenty-yearold raven-haired chorus girl Carolyn Green was not a star, never had been a star, never would be a star. But to twenty-six-year-old Arnold Rothstein she was everything he ever wanted.

  Arnold informed Carolyn coyly that he was a "sporting man." "I thought that a sporting man was one who hunted and shot," she wrote. "It wasn't until later that I learned that all a sporting man hunted was a victim with money, and that all he shot was craps." Actually, her new friend operated a poolroom in the small West 51st Street apartment he shared with gambler Felix Duffy. Arnold and Duffy took whatever bets they could over the two or three telephones installed in the place.

  For a showgirl, Carolyn boasted a reasonably middle-class background, as respectable as Arnold's. At least, the story she circulated was that her father was a retired wholesale meat broker; she still lived at the family's Gramercy Park town house; and until meeting Arnold, she never dated without others present. Actually her father was a Ninth Avenue butcher, and there was no town house. The Greens bounced from apartment to apartment in the West 40s.

  In 1906 Carolyn completed studies at the Rodney School of Elocution, and shortly thereafter met budding playwright James Forbes, who had just written his first Broadway effort, The Chorus Lady. Carolyn played "Mae Delaney," a small part that required her to try to pick "a winner at a race by sticking a pin blindly into a programme." Rose Stahl, an established leading lady, filled The Chorus Lady's title role ("Maggie Pepper"), helping make the show the hit of the 1906-7 season.

  The Chorus Lady ran for eight months before going on the road for an interminable series of one-night stands that caused Carolyn Green to yearn for a settled life:

  I remember as we hurtled through the night on a train through Pennsylvania-or it may have been Kansas-I looked out at the little country houses, with kerosene lamps burning cozily behind curtained windows, and thought how comfortable and safe was the life of the persons who sat behind those curtains around those softly glowing lamps.

  They weren't rushing madly around the country, putting on and taking off make-up, living in impossible hotel rooms, catching trains, and playing eight performances a week whether they felt ill or well.

  Carolyn returned to Manhattan between road bookings of the show and twice for its Broadway revivals. During one such visit, she met A. R. A mutual acquaintance named Albert Saunders threw a supper party at West 43rd Street's Hotel Cadillac. Eight diners feasted on lobster and sipped champagne. Teetotaler A. R. skipped the champagne.

  Rothstein noticed only one guest. He took Carolyn home in a hansom cab. The following night he called at her theater and took her to dine. Carolyn remembered:

  Arnold, at that time, was a slim young man with sensitive face, brown, laughing eyes, and a gentle manner. I cannot emphasize too much this gentleness of manner, which was one of his most alluring characteristics.

  He was always extremely well tailored and presented a most dapper appearance, noticeable even on Broadway where it was the fashion to be well groomed.

  Above everything else, from the moment he had been introduced, he had paid no attention to any one except me. That flattered me, his manner charmed me, his appearance pleased me. I was as much in love with him as he was with me.

  They continued dating. A. R. continued gambling, but though he made a living at it, he was not immune from periodic strings of bad luck. He was undergoing one now, and though he wished to impress his new girl, he didn't possess the requisite cash. "He sent me flowers on one or two occasions," Carolyn recalled, "but not more than that, had funds enough to take me to dinner, and drive me home in hansom cabs. He never made me any presents."

  Carolyn Rothstein's autobiography, Now I'll Tell, describes a straightforward, uncomplicated courtship. Boy meets girl. Boy dates girl. Boy marries girl. It was more complex. Shortly after they began dating, A. R. stopped calling, stopped visiting the Casino Theater. She learned A. R. was interrogating friends and acquaintances: What did they know about her? What were her habits? Her virtues? Her vices?

  Mostly her vices.

  Outraged, Carolyn exploded. "How dare you ask people about me? What business am I of yours?"

  Rothstein replied calmly. "A man has a right to know all about the girl he's thinking of marrying."

  Marrying?

  A. R.'s response startled Carolyn. But no more than his next move. He tipped his cap and walked silently away. She heard no more from him but soon thereafter received an invitation from attorney George Young Bauchle to a supper party at Delmonico's. She asked the maitre d' for Bauchle's party. He escorted her to a table for two. There sat A. R. He stood up and announced. "I'm the party, a party of one. I hope you're not angry."

  She was indeed, but calmed down. A. R. had his charms. And, after all, a dinner at Delmonico's was, well, a dinner at Delmonico's. Their courtship resumed.

  Soon another bump arose. Arnold had drifted away from his family, from Abraham Rothstein and his world. Now, strangely, A. R. wished to present his prospective bride to the family he had spurned. He informed her, "I want you to meet my family."

  "I'd like to," she responded. Meeting her potential in-laws was fairly standard for two people pledged to marry each other.

  "I've got to take you there," he said. "Believe me, it doesn't matter what they say or think. I'm a stranger to them. I live my own life."

  Now she caught his meaning: "But you say you have to take me to them."

  "That's right. It doesn't make any sense, but that's the way it is. It's something I have to do."

  "Maybe you're not such a stranger to them after all."

  He took her home, and Abraham Rothstein asked the inevitable question. He was, as Carolyn Rothstein bluntly put it, "an intensely religious man, a religious zealot."

  "Are you Jewish, Miss Green?"

  She explained that her father, Meyer Greenwald was Jewish; her mother, Susan McMahon, Catholic. "I have been brought up as a Catholic," she told the Rothsteins.

  "But you will change your religion if you and Arnold should marry, will you not?"

  "No, Mr. Rothstein," she responded-and she meant it. In her autobiography she wrote:

  I was brought up in the [Catholic] religion, and regularly partook of communion until my marriage with Arnold. After that I continued to attend church more or less regularly and, at times, as in the lovely Cathedral of Milan, have gone to church as often as twice daily. I have always found in church the deepest sense of peace and contentment. It has been, and still is, a place of refuge and help.

  She would not give up that sense of security. Abraham Rothstein could respect her feelings. But he respected his own religion more. "My son is a grown man," he responded. "I cannot live his life for him. If you should marry him, you have all my wishes for your happiness, but you cannot
have my approval. How could I approve losing my son?"

  "But you would not be losing him."

  "If he marries outside his faith, he will be lost to me. That is The Law."

  That was that. Carolyn and Arnold left his parents' home with Carolyn particularly discouraged. "Someday you'll hate me for coming between you and your family," she told her fiance. "I don't want that to happen. Maybe we ought to stop seeing each other."

  "It was just the way I knew it would be," said A. R. "Maybe I just wanted to hurt myself. But I won't let it change anything about us. I love you. I want to marry you. My father said I lived my own life. Well, it wouldn't be much of a life without you."

  "You're always talking about percentage. This time it's against you. Have you thought of that?"

  "Sometimes I buck the percentage. There are ways to even things up. I love you. Will you marry me?"

  Carolyn Green said yes.

  Their courtship continued, both maintaining their professional lives. A. R. gambled. Carolyn acted. In February 1909, producer and theater owner J. J. Shubert helped her secure a role in Leslie Stuart's Havana. Carolyn described it as "the sensation of the theatrical year." She was one of eight "Hello" girls, chorines often compared to the old Floradora Sextette, a natural comparison since Stuart had written both Floradora and Havana, but Carolyn had another comparison in mind. As in the case of the Floradora Sextette, she noted, most "Hello" girls made "successful marriages."

  She soon made a successful marriage herself, at least financially. One night after Carolyn was through with Havana, she and Arnold dined at Rector's. A. R. proposed formally, presenting her with a ring featuring a "cluster of white diamonds around a brown four-carat diamond which gave the effect of a daisy." Carolyn accepted again.

  Carolyn met many of A. R.'s friends, or at least the more respectable among them like Wilson Mizner, Hype Igoe, Tad Dorgan, John McGraw, Ben de Cassares, and Frank Ward O'Malley. But she found reporter Herbert Bayard Swope to be the most interesting. Swope was just plain brilliant. Born in St. Louis to immigrant German-Jewish parents (Schwab was the actual family name), young Herbert considered Harvard, briefly attended the University of Berlin, and returned home to cashier at a local racetrack. Swope enjoyed the company, the atmosphere-and the gambling-but his chosen occupation disconcerted his bourgeois family, who wanted him in more respectable pursuits, their best suggestion being an $8-a-week reporting job with Joseph Pulitzer's St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The PostDispatch soon noticed that Swope spent more time at the track than in the newsroom and fired him, but not before the newspaper business had entered his blood. He moved to Chicago, working for the Tribune and the Inter-Ocean. Hunting for young talent, the New York Herald lured Swope east. He moved to Manhattan, shared a flat with actor John Barrymore, continued gambling, and soon was fired again. He became a theatrical press agent, spent even more time gambling, met all the best-and worst-people, and returned to the press room, first to the Morning Telegraph, a racing paper, and again to the Herald.

  Swope and Rothstein had much in common. Born just twelve days apart, both came from middle-class, German-Jewish Orthodox families. Both loved gambling and being just a little smarter than the next person. Both would become the biggest men in their fields.

  Arnold and Carolyn often double-dated with Swope and his girlfriend, Margaret Honeyman "Pearl" Powell. Pearl would eventually reach the highest levels of society, while Carolyn remained a gambler's woman, albeit a phenomenally rich gambler's woman. Still Pearl never lost respect for her friend. "She was," Pearl would say of Carolyn, "more of a lady than most ladies I know."

  Carolyn Rothstein recounted that in August 1912 she and Pearl visited their beaus for a weekend in Saratoga. The truth is less chaste. Swope actually invited Pearl to live with him for the spa racing season. Pearl coyly asked who her chaperone on the trip would be, though she honored such niceties only when necessary.

  "Arnold Rothstein," replied Swope.

  "Thanks," Pearl shot back. "My mother will be so relieved. Do you think white slavery is preferable to black slavery?"

  "I'm an abolitionist," Swope retorted lamely, but Pearl wasn't dissuaded. She wanted to be with Swope, and middle-class conventions were not about to keep them apart.

  It's reasonable to assume that Carolyn Green also spent that August in Saratoga; that it was not three in a cottage, but four.

  In any case, on the couples' return from the track on August 12, 1909, Arnold bemoaned the fact that Carolyn would soon leave for the city and they would be apart; at least, that was Carolyn's version.

  "If we were married we could be together, Sweet," said A. R., "why not get married?"

  That made sense to Carolyn, though A. R., after a bad day at the track, could barely afford a license.

  Arnold acquired the necessary document, and the foursome drove to almost the city line, to 185 Washington Street, the "little white house," as Carolyn described it, of Saratoga Springs Justice of the Peace Fred B. Bradley. Arnold gave his occupation as "salesman." Both newlyweds gave their residence as "Saratoga Springs."

  Most likely the groom wore standard business attire on that Thursday night. The bride depicted her wardrobe:

  I was wearing a large black hat of Milan straw, a black-andwhite silk dress, black patent leather shoes, and black stockings. There were no flesh-colored stockings in those days, and well I remember my sense of shock when I saw flesh-colored stockings being worn for the first time. They seemed indecent.

  I always wore black and white in those days. We all wore corsets, of course, and I have a memory that my sleeves were rather large, and my skirts rather long.

  Arnold Rothstein and Carolyn Greenwald might have waited until morning to become man and wife, but no gambler would have made that play: marrying on Friday the thirteenth. Swope and Pearl Powell were the ceremony's only witnesses. The new couple retired to Rothstein and Swope's rented cottage.

  In New York, the Morning Telegraph's account of the ceremony concentrated more on the bride than the groom (whom it characterized as a broker), and noting her showgirl friends' chagrin at being excluded from the festivities.

  Carolyn Green's dreams had been answered. She soon woke from her reveries. Before leaving Saratoga, husband Arnold approached with a question. His luck at the track had not improved. Could he pawn her jewelry? Her engagement ring?

  She agreed. They barely had money for train fare to Manhattan and for establishing a home, at the new Hotel Ansonia, up at West 73rd and Broadway. The Ansonia was a fine place. Their single room wasn't. A flimsy partition separated the bed from "what might be called the dressing section." A suite it was not.

  It took Arnold six months to retrieve Carolyn's engagement ring. It would not be the last time he'd pawn her jewelry. Sometimes his back would be against the wall. That was understandable. Other times, he merely wanted to fatten his bankroll or possess more cash to put to work. "I don't need the money," he'd explain, "but I might. It gives me room to maneuver. Besides, it's one way of using someone else's money. I can lend it out at a lot more interest than I'm paying."

  Pawned jewelry was but part of Carolyn's problems. A. R. kept gambler's hours, living by night, arriving home at five or six each morning, and when no pressing business such as a horse race caused him to rise, sleeping until three in the afternoon. "I had this black hair," Carolyn Rothstein would recall of her wedding day, "and in two years it turned gray. Gambling did it."

  For a man who did not drink, his first words on awakening were invariably of discomfort: "I don't feel well." To salve his pain, A. R. would swig down some milk of magnesia, or perhaps, just milk. He loved milk and drank immense quantities of it. He loved sweets too, particularly cakes. Carolyn hid them from her husband or he would have lived on them.

  She did not have to hide herself from her husband, however. He hid from her. He slept, then he arose to tend business. Carolyn spent time with friends, mostly from her show-business days. Dark-haired Edith Kelly, choreographer of Havana, had
married and gone abroad, but Brownie Selwyn, and her husband, producer Archie Selwyn, remained. So did Pearl Honeyman. But A. R. demanded that his bride remain home evenings. So Carolyn spent virtually every night alone, becoming a voracious reader.

  In due course, things picked up. A. R. promised Carolyn that when he had $100,000 dollars, he'd walk away from gambling. The Rothsteins would live a normal life. They would spend evenings together, have a semblance of security, maybe even a family.

  He was lying.

  SHORTLY AFTER A. R. and Carolyn's wedding, Rothstein's gambling business picked up. "Your husband is going places," he announced cheerily. "I've got plans." Arnold didn't mean plans for a respectable occupation. He now possessed a $12,000 bankroll, nearly enough for his own gambling house.

  He was still short a couple of grand to start his business, and in the Fall of 1909 his new father-in-law loaned it to him. A. R. leased a three-story brownstone at 106 West 46th Street, just off Sixth Avenue, to serve as both home and gambling house. Thomas Farley, A. R.'s black retainer, would help run the place. A maid was hired to assist Carolyn and to clean the gambling parlor itself. Even with the luxury of domestic help, Carolyn found it barely habitable. The house was shabby, its mahogany dining-room furniture worn. She purchased some white bedroom furniture, but wasn't satisfied with her choice.

  The first floor contained two parlors, A. R.'s gambling rooms. The second floor featured two bedrooms and a bath. The Rothsteins slept in the rear bedroom, away from the street. With the odd hours he kept, Arnold needed to be as far from street noise as possible. To insulate himself from light and sound, he jammed a large leather screen against the window.