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

by David Pietrusza

  The Nomad, manned by Dapper Don, a gun-toting crew of three, and a very attractive blue-eyed blonde, "Mrs. Cromwell," now brought the contraband to Philadelphia or, more specifically, to the Mathis Yacht boatyard across the river at Camden. As the Nomad approached shore, a watchman shouted they weren't allowed to dock there.

  "Don't be an ass, me good fellow," Collins cheerfully responded, affecting his finest Philadelphia Main Line accent, "We're putting her on the marines railway for repairs in the morning."

  While the guard pondered this new information, a large truck roared up, increasing his alarm. The nonplussed Collins explained matter-of-factly: "Why we've got to get the furniture off, haven't we?"

  Of course.

  Collins unloaded half his "furniture" at Camden. He removed the remainder in nearby Chester County, Pennsylvania. Here the story becomes murky. Either police nabbed Dapper Don and he paid a $500 fine for his transgressions (reasonable overhead), or Legs Diamond, whom Rothstein had engaged to transport the booze on land, helped himself to 150 cases of Scotch that Ratsy had purchased for his own use (an unreasonable overhead). Either way Collins fared, the purchase was yet another big score for the Big Bankroll.

  Legs Diamond was clearly making a name for himself-and trouble for everyone else. No longer merely Rothstein's bodyguard and all-around henchman, he branched out for himself, butting heads with New York's other established bootleggers: Waxey Gordon, Dutch Schultz, Bill Dwyer, Frankie Yale, Frank Costello. Rothstein had bankrolled Diamond's first efforts, and Diamond's rivals avoided an open confrontation with him, wary of upsetting A. R. But Rothstein alternately extended and withdrew his protection to the vicious Diamond. When Diamond and Big Bill Dwyer (another bootlegger owing his start to A. R.) battled over territory, Rothstein tacitly supported Dwyer. A few years later, when Diamond and Bronx beer baron Dutch Schultz went head-to-head, A. R. hired a small army of goons to support his onetime bodyguard. The Dutchman backed down.

  Occasionally, A. R. functioned as peacemaker. In the late 1920s Waxey Gordon and Owney "The Killer" Madden fought over turf in Manhattan. Tiring of the carnage, they asked Rothstein to arbitrate. He settled their differences in twenty minutes, parceling out neighborhoods, maximizing their profitability, and minimize their irritability. Gordon and Madden each paid Arnold $250,000 for his services. In A. R.'s world, blessed indeed were the peacemakers.

  There were myriad ways to profit from the Eighteenth Amendment. Selling supplies for home brew was one, and on May 16, 1920, Sidney Stajer was charged with selling such ingredients-in the name of Arnold's "Redstone Material and Supply Company." Providing bailing for incarcerated bootleggers was another. (The first time was for a Harry Koppel, on January 18, 1920, just seventeen days after Prohibition began.) Financing speakeasies would also prove lucrative. A. R. had no desire to operate such joints, he just wanted lucrative interest rates from those who did: His most famous such client was horse-faced racketeer Larry Fay. Beginning as a lowly cabdriver, Fay combined three unlikely occupations-speakeasies, taxicabs, and milk distribution. In 1920 he took a fare to Montreal and discovered just how cheaply Canadian booze could be purchased, easily smuggled across the border, and profitably sold in Manhattan. Fay used his rum-running profits-plus cash advanced by A. R.-to purchase a fleet of nickel-plated cabs, vehicles distinguished by their horns (playing a distinctive musical tune) and their doors (sporting huge swastikas, Fay's personal good-luck symbol). And if riders still weren't interested, Fay hired thugs to shoo them away from the competition.

  When Fay entered the speakeasy racket, A. R. again provided capital. Fay's first establishment, the El Fay Club, boasted two noticeable attractions: multiple swastikas on its facade and brash hostess Mary Louise Cecilia "Texas" Guinan. Guinan had recently been employed as the rough-riding cowgirl star of a series of low-grade silent westerns. "We never changed plots-only the horses," she quipped. In Manhattan the rough-hewn Guinan fleeced sophisticated customers with overpriced food, liquor, and cover charges (greeting them with a hearty "Hello, sucker!") and made them feel good about it. But Fay's clubs were too high profile and kept getting padlocked. He moved into yet another racket, working with West Harlem Tammany chieftain Jimmy Hines to cartelize the city's milk supply. Their New York Milk Chain Association rented office space from ... Arnold Rothstein.

  Prohibition agents had few effective weapons against the liquor trade, but padlocking properties (as they did with Texas Guinan's clubs) was among the most valuable. Sites could be shuttered for a year, a powerful disincentive to landlords renting to speakeasies and bootleggers, or to operating illegally on your own property. In Chicago authorities once shuttered an entire 125-room hotel. In Northern California they padlocked a hollowed-out, twenty-fourfoot-diameter redwood housing a fifty-gallon still. Even in wide-open New York, during one particularly energetic thirteen-month period, 500 speakeasies were padlocked.

  But there was a flip side to the law: Any property raided unjustly could become off-limits to police and Prohibition agents for a year. Bill Fallon's law partner, Gene McGee, brought that statute and its implications to A. R.'s attention, and Rothstein profited from it, using his connections to have the NYPD "raid" evidence-free properties, securing raid-preventing injunctions, and then renting these sites at premium rates-as much as $50,000 extra per property by 1924.

  The same principle held for gambling. In the early summer of 1925, police raided four gaming locations, including West 44th Street's Teepee Democratic Club and West 48th Street's Park View Athletic Club. Owners petitioned Supreme Court Justice (and former fixer in the Rosenthal case) Aaron J. Levy for injunctive relief against further raids. This infuriated Corporation Counsel Nicholson, who charged the raids were designed to trigger these injunctions-and further that it was hardly coincidental that the plaintiffs had not filed any motions until Aaron Levy was the one Supreme Court justice left on duty in the city.

  Levy ordered attorney and former New York University philosophy professor Joseph Kahn to referee the matter. Police Officer Arthur Stearne testified how departmental "higher-ups" ordered the conveniently evidence-free Park View raided in an obvious attempt to trigger an injunction. Stearne reported how officers not sufficiently cooperating in this farce found themselves demoted and transferred to remote outer-borough precincts. It also transpired that the firm of Arnold Rothstein & Co. had obtained the surety bond necessary for the Park View Athletic Club's suit. The news only amused Professor Kahn. "Mr. Rothstein," he observed, "appears to have an amazing pertinency in many of these injunction proceedings."

  Others claimed it was more than pertinency. "Have you any idea who might have been behind all these happenings?" Assistant Corporation Counsel Russell L. Tarbox asked Officer Stearne. Stearne didn't hesitant: "Everybody figured that Arnold Rothstein had something to do with it."

  That didn't amuse Kahn. "What everybody figures too often is something nobody knows," he snapped. "Strike the last question and answer from the record." Kahn recommended that judge Levy grant the injunction.

  The Park View case served as prologue to an emerging political donnybrook. Tammany boss Charles E Murphy died in April 1924, and Governor Alfred E. Smith seized the opportunity to cajole Tammany into dumping his old enemy, the dull and dull-witted Mayor John F. "Red Mike" Hylan. Unfortunately, the best candidate the organization could recruit to challenge the incumbent was glib, brilliant-but morally flawed-State Senate Minority Leader James J. Walker, known not only for efforts to legalize boxing and Sunday baseball in the state and for his songwriting ("Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?")-but also for his laziness, woman izing, and high living. Hylan wouldn't go quietly, however, and faced Walker in a primary. At first "Red Mike" stepped gingerly around the Rothstein issue, claiming he was waging "a campaign against the underworld element" masterminded by a nefarious unnamed "Pool Room King." Eventually he got around to naming names. Campaigning at Queens P.S. 93, the wooden Hylan abandoned his usual prepared texts to accuse new Tammany leader Georg
e W. Olvany of colluding both with transit interests (Red Mike's bete noire) "and Arnold Rothstein, the big gambler."

  Olvany denied all: "Now that Mayor Hylan has stated that my alleged pool room king and big gambler advisor is Arnold Rothstein ... I want to state that I do not know Arnold Rothstein .... that I have never met [him], that I have never had breakfast, lunch, dinner or supper with [him], and that I would not know [Rothstein] if I saw [him] on the street."

  Al Smith ridiculed (but didn't actually deny) Hylan's charges, pointing out that it wasn't Rothstein who nominated Walker at Tammany Hall, but rather, Daniel E. Finn, a member of the mayor's own cabinet. "The Mayor either does not know a gambler when he sees one or he does not know who made that nominating speech."

  Meanwhile Hylan grew obsessed with A. R.'s influence. "Too many policemen are friends of Rothstein," he informed a press conference, oblivious to the fact that he, not Walker, oversaw the NYPD. "Too many public officials are also his friends. That explains why places with which he is reported to be connected seem able to operate without molestation."

  The public didn't care. Walker was the type of good-time, wisecracking mayor that 1920s New York demanded. He won the primary by 100,000 votes, carrying even Hylan's home borough of Brooklyn. Even before the votes were in, judge Levy felt safe enough to do A. R.'s bidding. Sanctimoniously sniffing "there is something rotten in Denmark," Levy, nonetheless, issued a permanent injunction shielding the Park View Athletic Club. Rothstein had won again. Rothstein always won.

  MANHATTAN IS AN ISLAND of neighborhoods, little worlds with a separate look and feel of their own, and Arnold Rothstein knew how to make money in each. Times Square. The Upper West Side. The Lower East Side. Wall Street. Fourteenth Street. Harlem.

  The Garment District.

  There was much to buy and sell in the Garment District. Protection. Suits. Coats. Dresses. Furs. Cops. Judges. And Arnold Rothstein excelled at merchandising the latter two commodities, excelled at bringing together New Yorkers of much influence and little conscience.

  The garment industry was decades old, but still seemed new and unformed, waiting for organization and order. Competition was fierce, and management battled for every advantage. Garment shops battled each other for orders and customers. Management battled labor, and labor battled itself.

  Industry working conditions were often abysmal. Factories were filthy, unhealthy, unsafe. Wives and mothers often worked at home, sewing garments and earning as little as four or five cents per hour. Women working in factories were frequently charged for the needles and lockers they used, the electricity their machines ran on, the very chairs they sat on-all at a profit to the owners. The advent of the "task" system, known today as "piecework," only aggravated alreadyfrayed labor-management relations.

  In the years before World War I, labor "peace" ended. In November 1909, 20,000 female shirtwaist workers, in the "Uprising of the 20,000," went on strike in New York. Aided by sympathetic society women, they obtained some modest concessions, including free supplies, better sanitary conditions, a fifty-two-hour week. Then, in July 1910, 60,000 male cloakmakers followed their lead. On March 25, 1911, a fire at Greenwich Village's Triangle Shirtwaist Company (one of the firms whose labor policies triggered the "Uprising of 20,000") took the lives of 146 workers trapped in its unsafe Washington Square factory. The tragedy triggered national outrage and led to the passage of three dozen state labor laws. New unions, such as the Fur Workers National Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America sprang into existence.

  Violence accompanied change. It wasn't mere freelance, spontaneous violence. Garment-industry labor and management hired gangsters like Monk Eastman, Jack Zelig, Kid Twist, Pincus "Pinchy" Paul, and "Joe the Greaser" Rosenzweig to threaten, beat or, if necessary, kill their opposition. Ideology obsessed the Lower East Side, as arguments raged in every coffee house and tenement on the merits of socialism, anarchism, Zionism, or any number of isms and subisms. But most labor goons were practical and nonpartisan. Whoever paid, they worked for. Whoever didn't, they blackjacked. Not surprisingly, Arnold Rothstein was present at the very creation of garmenttrade mob influence.

  In 1914 police arrested Benjamin "Dopey Benny" Fein, a Big Jack Zelig protege now employing his muscle for organized labor, on extortion charges. Fein's union employers turned to Rothstein for bail. A. R. told them to let Fein rot. Rothstein had his reasons. He had his own thugs who could replace Benny. And he could please his friends in Mayor John Purroy Mitchell's new administration by sacrificing this prounion hoodlum.

  The union obeyed A. R.'s bidding, though Fein had been loyal to labor. ("My heart lay with the workers.") In 1912 one garment industry boss offered Fein $15,000 to work management's side of a strike, cracking labor heads. "He put fifteen $1,000 bills in front of me," Fein recalled, "and I said to him, `No, sir, I won't take it.' I said ... `I don't double cross my friends.' "

  But Fein was also expensive. He demanded $12 per day for himself (his chief rival, "Joe the Greaser" Rosenzweig, received just $8) and $7.50 for each of his men. He also insisted on insurance for any on-the-job accidents. Unionists, who desired such benefits for themselves, proved less than enthusiastic about protecting their own "employees."

  Benny remained in the Tombs for months. In February 1915 he finally had enough. Now suspicious that the unions had not only connived in his continuing incarceration, but in entrapping him in the first place, Fein cut a deal with Manhattan District Attorney Charles Albert Perkins (Charles Whitman's handpicked successor) to provide information about the violent methods his union patrons employed. Perkins summoned A. R. for questioning about financing these labor thugs-and let him go. A. R. got away, but Perkins indicted eleven hoodlums (including a number of "strong arm women" employed by Fein to terrorize female workers) along with twenty-three officials of the United Hebrew Trades. Rothstein-who would not provide bail for Fein-now provided bail for all.

  Unionists accused the new district attorney of participating in a gigantic "capitalist class" effort to "crush labor and its organizations." When Perkins brought the first seven unionists to trial, defense attorney Morris Hillquit turned their plight into a crusade for social justice. All won acquittal. Before the hapless Perkins could try the rest of the accused, he was defeated in the November 1915 municipal elections. His successor, Edward Swann-elected with strong needle-trade union support-abandoned the remaining indictments.

  The entire episode proved messier than Rothstein envisioned, but still he emerged profitably. Fein abandoned labor racketeering (going into garment manufacturing), and A. R. began inserting his own men into the vacuum left by Fein's network. A. R. wasn't about to lead these new troops into battle personally. That wasn't his style-and he had more interesting activities, anyway. He placed "Little Augie" Orgen, formerly Fein's henchman, in charge of labor racketeering. Orgen shared little of Benny's old working-class sympathies, strong arming alternately for labor and management-sometimes even during the same strike.

  Orgen (and by extension Rothstein) was also an equal-opportunity employer. Previous city gangs had been largely ethnic-all Irish, Jewish, or Italian. Orgen employed fellow Jews such as Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro, but also Irish (the Diamond brothers, Legs and Eddie), and Italians (Lucky Luciano) as his goons. More impressive than the polyglot nature of his workforce, however, was its sheer viciousness, resolve, and talent.

  Most thugs involved in strong-arming labor or management, saw themselves as just that: thugs. But not A. R. He maintained an air of detached respectability in even the most nefarious enterprises. In 1922, he raised this skill to its apogee. The arbitration movement was gaining a certain vogue in America, and, if Rothstein had been anything in his career, he had been an arbitrator. So when he noticed an organization called the Arbitration Society of America taking shape, he saw it might contain a rather large niche for himself.

  The ASA possessed national prestige, numbering among its supporters Sears, Roebuck president Julius R
osenwald, former United States Senator James Aloysius O'Gorman (D-NY), and numerous New York business leaders. Before finding a permanent home for its operations, however, it received A. R.'s offer of free space at his 45-47 West 57th Street office building. For good measure, he enclosed a $500 check for his ASA dues. A. R. modestly suggested the building could even be renamed the "Arbitration Society Building"or, more amusingly (for a Rothstein-owned property), "The Hall of Justice."

  Nineteen twenty-six saw Arnold Rothstein play pivotal roles in two major garment-district strikes. Their story originated years before, half a world away. In 1917, V. I. Lenin took power in Russia, fueling hopes of world revolution. Communist governments briefly ruled Hungary and Bavaria. Strikes swept Western Europe and the United States. There was no need for compromise. No need to waste time infiltrating like-minded groups to further the Revolution. Worker and peasant rule seemed at hand.

  In the spring of 1920, however, Lenin reevaluated his position. His treatise Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder derided those thought it unnecessary to infiltrate bourgeois institutions. When the Red Army met defeat at Warsaw in August 1920, it only validated his opinions. The Bolsheviks hoped their conquest of Poland would begin an easy westward march through Europe. But when the Poles humiliated the Red Army, Lenin realized that worldwide Communist rule wasn't about to happen soon. He changed tactics.

  Moscow ordered its fledgling American Communist Party to infiltrate the union movement. Party operatives, such as party General Secretary Charles E Ruthenberg, Russian-born Maurice L. Malkin, and Italian-born Eneo Sormenti, began organizing New York's unions, with emphasis on the Garment District. Like unionists and bosses before them, they turned to hired muscle for help. Their early henchmen included Little Augie Pisano (ne Anthony Carfano) and Legs Diamond. Among unions coveted by the Party was the Fur Workers, and in late 1924 the Party hired the firm of Goodman & Snitkin. The attorneys offered highly practical advice: See Arnold Rothstein.