The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  Burns reminded Attell that the players had forty thousand dollars coming to them.

  “It’s all out on bets,” Attell dismissed the question, “besides, who needs them?”

  Attell’s stupidity and greed, Burns realized, was not only endangering the whole fix: it was likely to get somebody killed. Burns went after him.

  “Bennett”—real name Zelser—stepped between the men. Burns restrained himself; but reminded Attell that Williams, in losing a game while still managing to look good, had been masterful. He also reminded Attell that the players had kept their part of the bargain. The brothers took Attell aside for a conference. Finally Attell pulled ten thousand dollars out from under a mattress and placed it in Burns’ hand.

  “That’s the whole bit,” he announced, “all of it.”

  Burns stared at the bills. What made Attell think the players, promised a hundred thousand, would settle for ten?

  “You give it to them,” he told Maharg helplessly.

  Maharg was a bum—but he wasn’t that big a bum. He recoiled. Burns was crooked. He wasn’t that crooked. The advantage Attell held over both was his touch of pure reptile.

  Burns, still bemused, went for the door with the ten grand still in his hand. Attell stopped him before he reached it.

  “Tell them burns to win the third game,” he instructed Burns and Maharg.

  The pair left quietly.

  Beyond the problem of how to tell the players they’d been double-crossed, was another: how were they going to bet the third game now? The one pitcher the players didn’t want to win behind was Kerr. But how could they go on blowing games without a payoff?

  The players themselves, except for Weaver, hadn’t figured it out. Weaver had no problem because he wasn’t playing for a payoff. Indeed, he was playing as if to prove he wasn’t bought. Weaver couldn’t bear to lose.

  Nor could Schalk. It was Schalk who decided the third game. For gamblers and players alike.

  Unable to figure it, wanting to be sure, Burns phoned Gandil the morning of the game. How was it going to go?

  “The boys have talked it over,” Gandil reassured him. “They’ve decided to go along. The game will go the same way as the first two.”

  Although Dick Kerr had neither the power, the experience nor the control of Cicotte and Williams, Schalk had made a winning pitcher of him in his first year in the majors. Kerr never crossed Schalk on a pitch.

  Schalk, sharply aware that the first two games had been thrown, never called for a pitch that would give Risberg a chance to blow the game. For all the chances Risberg got that day, he might as well have been sitting on the bench beside his bar-buddy, McMullin. Cincinnati got three scratch singles and not a man got past second. Final score: Chicago 3/Cincinnati 0. Gandil, who’d singled in two runs, was a hero.

  Burns walked into Gandil’s room that evening, inwardly fuming but trying to look friendly. Cicotte, Risberg, McMullin and Williams were there. Attell had twenty thousand dollars more to pay off, he assured the little group.

  The group expressed no interest.

  Burns then gave his game away: he’d bet on the Reds. He’d crashed. So had Maharg. So had Attell.

  Now he needed his thousand.

  Thousand what?

  Thousand dollars.

  What thousand dollars?

  His ten percent of the ten thousand he’d gotten from Attell and delivered.

  Gandil studied him a moment.

  “It’s all out on bets,” he assured Burns.

  “Gimme a grand or I’ll tell everything!”

  Gandil turned away. Burns looked around. Nobody in the room was interested in him anymore.

  That was the end of the 1919 World Series for Sleepy Bill Burns.

  Until he got on the witness stand a year later.

  In the fifth inning of the fourth game, with the score 0-0, Cicotte fielded an easy grounder, then threw it over Gandil’s head into the grandstand. The next batter lined a clean single to left. Jackson fielded the ball cleanly and threw on a dead line to the plate to catch the runner rounding third. Cicotte deflected Jackson’s throw with his glove. The runner scored. Cicotte was still trying to earn his ten thousand. Final score: Cincinnati 2/Chicago 0.

  In the fifth game, still in Chicago, Williams didn’t give Cincinnati a hit for five innings. In the sixth he gave up three hits and a walk. Combined with Felsch’s wild throw, four runs scored.

  The Reds needed only one more game.

  In the tenth inning of the sixth game, with the score tied, the fix unfixed itself. Without talking it over, the players, as one, felt themselves free to win. Weaver doubled, Jackson singled and Gandil singled in the winning run. Final score: Chicago 5/Cincinnati 4.

  It took less than a hundred minutes to win the seventh game. Jackson drove in two runs with a long double, and Cicotte dominated the batters. Final score: Chicago 4/Cincinnati 1.

  Whose side were these guys on? Rothstein wondered. If Williams won the eighth game the series would be tied. And Kerr, who’d already beaten the Reds twice without support, would be hot to put them down once again.

  Arnold Rothstein abhorred violence, personally. What he abhorred even more was losing half a million dollars. If somebody had to be killed somebody had to be killed. He sent for Sullivan.

  Rothstein gave him the full treatment: cold yet courteous.

  There wasn’t going to be a ninth game.

  Not only was Williams going to lose it: he was going to lose it in the first inning.

  Those were Rothstein’s instructions.

  Then Rothstein smiled.

  Back in Boston, the meaning of that smile came upon Sullivan.

  He’d thought all he was investing was money. Now he knew he’d invested his life. He phoned The Man in the Bowler Hat.

  The Man in the Bowler was known to be scrupulous in fulfilling his own obligations; and presumed others to be equally scrupulous.

  He worked by contract. His business was simply to advise a designated party of a course of action he was to follow. He always specified the course; he did not have to specify the consequences of failing to follow it.

  Are there children, he inquired of Sullivan.

  No children.

  Unfortunate. With children it was simpler. A wife?

  Yes, there was a wife.

  The price was cheap. $500.00. Sullivan wired the money immediately.

  Watching Rothstein, Sullivan, Burns, Maharg and Attell and Gandil making their moves now, half a century after, is like watching a civilization of beetles in a dusty Mason jar.

  The three in the center who keep circling blindly for a way out, are Burns, Maharg and Gandil. The sluggish one, trying to keep up but always one move behind, is Sullivan. The one in the middle, who doesn’t move at all yet seems most aware of the movements of the others, is Rothstein. The one moving fastest, and most evasively, around the periphery, is Attell.

  Somehow, other than sustaining a solid punch in his mouth, Attell survives best of all.

  When Williams and his wife returned to their hotel, following dinner the evening before the eighth game, a man in a bowler blocked the hotel entrance. He dismissed Williams’ wife.

  Williams was to lose the next day, the man advised the pitcher. Williams turned away. The man got him by the wrist and held him.

  They weren’t talking about money, he explained: all the money had been paid. The question, rather, was whether or not Mrs. Williams was to go on living.

  Williams was going to lose the next day. Not only was he going to lose, but he was going to be knocked out. Not only was he going to be knocked out, but he was going to be knocked out in the first inning.

  No other way.

  Williams’ last practice-pitch, the following day, broke so sharply that Schalk almost dropped it. Going back to the mound, Williams glanced at the box, behind third base, where his wife was sitting.

  The second Cincinnati batter dropped a soft liner to short center for a single. The next batter
singled sharply to right. Williams, the most unhurried pitcher in baseball, began pitching hurriedly. Roush doubled to left, scoring a man in front of him.

  After fifteen pitches, Williams had given four hits and three runs, and still had only one man out. Gleason took him out. Final score: Cincinnati 11/Chicago 4.

  On the witness stand, a year after, he said nothing of the man in the bowler. He kept his grievance to himself.

  Time has diminished Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Those laurels, gained by an aristocratic bearing and imperiousness, have long withered. The verdict we once applauded as one of Olympian sagacity was nothing more, it has become plain, than a legal mugging by an enraptured Puritan.

  “Birds of a feather flock together!” he justified the expulsion of eight players from organized baseball—“association with gamblers and crooks can expect no leniency!”

  The judgement did not, however, apply to birds who owned baseball parks: theirs was plumage of another feather. It meant that Buck Weaver’s failure—to inform the front office of a conspiracy—had to be punished ruthlessly. But that the silence of Comiskey, with equal knowledge of corruption, deserved only praise.

  What good would it have done Weaver to inform? Gleason had ranted about Comiskey’s office, after the 1919 series, that the team had sold out: Comiskey had sat silent. Jackson, frightened and bewildered, had tried to talk to him; but had been turned out. And a year later Collins had come in to tell the old man that the team had sold the last games, in the last series of the 1920 season, the Sox had lost to Boston. The old man had refused to listen.

  Could other owners have punished Comiskey’s stars without suffering loss themselves, they would have been content to put all eight behind bars. Had they been able merely to destroy Comiskey and pick up his players, they would have been delighted. Had they been able to indict Rothstein without involving Comiskey, they would have sent him up the river for as long as law would allow. But there was no way of exposing corruption on the diamond, or in the boxes behind the backstop, without destroying the overall image of baseball as an honest game and its owners as incorruptible.

  When the Cleveland Indians, the New York Yankees and the Chicago White Sox tied into a three-way contention for the 1920 pennant, and American multitudes were thronging into the parks, the question of whether gamblers were controlling players could hardly have been more inopportune.

  The baseball establishment conspired desperately to keep the scandal from blowing the roof off the grandstand. Journals like Baseball Magazine and Sporting News, that fed at the owners’ troughs, denounced every reporter who expressed suspicion.

  Yet, when the scandal blew the roof at last, there was the righteous and churchly pontiff of Comiskey Park in bed with the coldest confidence man on the Eastern seaboard. There was The Grand Old Man and The Big Bankroll, under the maypole hand in hand, the one trying to save his franchise and his name; the other ready to pay off all down the line to keep from being subpoenaed.

  Comiskey retained Alfred Austrian, a corporation lawyer. Rothstein retained William J. Fallon—The Great Mouthpiece. The first thing on which Austrian and Fallon agreed was that evidence already in had to disappear itself.

  The evidence was the three signed confessions, obtained by an overly eager state’s attorney, in Chicago. Rothstein paid eighty thousand dollars for them, through Fallon. How Austrian got them remains unknown. Curiously, Rothstein never destroyed them. Years later, when the scandal had subsided and the documents were no longer explosive, they reappeared in a Chicago courtroom.

  What could Rothstein do, to save his own skin, other than cooperate with Comiskey to keep the rumors hushed? What, indeed, could the old man do? A serious investigation would force him to fire his stars—and what then? A precedent for snatching suspended athletes had already been set, by the New York Giants, in giving a contract to Hal Chase after Cincinnati had given the first-baseman the heave-ho for accepting bribes.

  The prospect, facing Comiskey, of having his pitchers facing Jackson and Felsch, was no less nightmarish than the possibility of his hitters having to face Cicotte and Williams. Moreover, if charges failed to hold, how about eight libel suits; each the size of his park?

  The old man’s strategy was to hide behind press releases and offers of rewards, that he never intended to pay, for evidence against any of his players.

  More ominous, to other owners, than the threat to Comiskey’s franchise, was a District of Columbia Decision of April, 1919, defining the baseball establishment to be in restraint of trade and violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

  The Baltimore Club, of the disbanded Federal League, had been dissolved in accordance with this decision. Exposure of corruption, the owners perceived, would not only mean severance of relations between major and minor leagues, but—worse—would make the Reserve Clause illegal.

  Imposed by the owners in every contract, this clause enabled owners to hire and hold players as chattels. It left physical risk to be entirely the player’s affair. A revision of the Reserve Clause would force owners to share responsibility for injuries sustained by the player that might terminate his career.

  The National and American League owners met to confront this frightening prospect squarely. They doubled the price of bleacher seats and went home congratulating one another on being members of such an honest group.

  But while the owners, Baseball Magazine and Sporting News, Alfred Austrian and William J. Fallon were blowing clouds of smoke across the diamonds, individual reporters were catching out the clowns.

  Ring Lardner had caught on early. And, to show the stars that he was on, devised a parody for singing in the cocktail lounges of trains bearing the players to New York:

  I’m forever blowing ball games

  Pretty ball games in the air....

  Fortune’s coming my way

  That’s why I don’t care—

  I’m forever blowing ball games

  And the gamblers treat us fair.

  Lardner wasn’t merely commenting on the series of the previous fall. He was aware that, though in contention for the 1920 pennant, the boys were still blowing crucial games.

  In New York he received a night-call from Kid Gleason: “Come up to Dinty Moore’s. I’m at the bar with Attell. He’s talking and I want you to hear it.”

  Lardner leaned on a corner of Dinty Moore’s bar.

  Rothstein had fixed the series, Attell was claiming. He himself had made bets, on the strength of rumors floating around: but everything he’d won on the first two games he’d lost by betting against Kerr in the third.

  “There’s your man, Kid,” Attell assured Gleason—“Rothstein.”

  It seemed to Lardner that The Little Champ was panicking.

  Harry Reutlinger of the Chicago American wasn’t a baseball buff. But he became bored by newspaper accounts of the scandal that were no more than hearsay. “Who’s the dumbest one of the bunch?” he inquired of several colleagues. “Felsch,” each assured him.

  Reutlinger came in on Felsch bearing a bottle of scotch.

  Hap, nursing a broken toe, was in a bathrobe. Hap wasn’t mad at anybody.

  “I didn’t like to be a squealer,” he confessed to Reutlinger after a couple drinks, “and I knew that if I stayed out of the deal they’d go ahead without me and I’d be that much money out without accomplishing anything. Had I stood my ground I might have stopped the whole deal. Don’t make it appear I’m putting up an alibi. I got my five thousand. We all share the blame equally.”

  Attell was roused out of bed early, in a morning shortly after, by a message from Maclay Hoyne, a Chicago D.A., inviting him to drop over to the Waldorf for a bit of a chat.

  Frightened, Attell fled to Lindy’s in hope of finding The Great Mouthpiece. As he was entering the restaurant a large-sized friend approached and Attell extended his hand. The large-sized friend smashed Attell full in the mouth with a large-sized fist: Attell hadn’t been hit that hard since he’d fought Harlem Tommy Murphy.


  Although his mouth was still bleeding when reporters gathered around him, that didn’t stop the mouth from talking. When he found Fallon, Attell demanded that Fallon afford him protection from District Attorneys, The Press, Old Friends who busted him in the mouth and Arnold Rothstein.

  Fallon was protective. He assured Attell that Rothstein was leaving for Europe and that he—Attell—would be wise to wait out the storm in Montreal. And provided Attell with funds to keep him there. He then advised Sport Sullivan that, since Attell was fleeing to Canada and Rothstein to Europe, Sullivan’s best move would be to Mexico.

  When the White Sox came to Boston, at the end of August, 1920, they had a half-game lead over Cleveland and New York. After both Cicotte and Williams had blown games they should have won, they returned to Chicago in third place. It was then that Collins reported to Comiskey that the games in Boston had been sold.

  The Grand Old Man had a telegram on his desk:

  I ACCEPT YOUR OFFER TO TELL WHAT I KNOW OF THE CROOKED

  WORLD SERIES OF 1919 AND WILL GO TO CHICAGO TO TESTIFY

  PROVIDED YOU HAVE A CERTIFIED CHECK FOR $10,000 WITH

  HARVEY WOODRUFF, SPORTS EDITOR OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE,

  TO BE TURNED OVER TO ME AFTER I TESTIFY. (Signed)

  Billy Maharg

  The old man didn’t need to pay anyone $10,000 for evidence that his team was controlled by gamblers. Collins was offering it gratis. The old man gave Collins no answer. He simply turned away. Then he tore up the telegram.

  The reporter who perceived that the players were still being controlled, by the same gamblers who’d enriched themselves on the 1919 series, and who put it all together, was Hugh Fullerton of the Chicago Tribune.

  His own paper, roaring daily, like the Great Bull of Bashen, about corruption in public life, fled like a hare for cover when confronted by the need for an act of simple honesty. (A rabbitlike reaction which the paper still attempts to dignify as “The Tribune Tradition.”) Fullerton had to look elsewhere for support.

  The New York Evening World published the story and the cat was out of the bag. Its challenge was that, inasmuch as the owners had been in possession of knowledge of corruption, but had concealed it from the public, they too were conspiring with gamblers. A Grand Jury was convened in Chicago and subpoenas issued.