Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (11 page)

There was only one problem. Every copy of his wife’s memoir seemed to have disappeared. Even the copy at the New York Public Library had vanished sometime in the 1970s. I eventually tracked down what seems to be the only remaining copy, in the Library of Congress, so I sat there in the shadow of the Senate and tried to reconstruct him piece by piece. This is the story I found—of how Arnold taught the world to deal drugs.

In the mid-1920s, Arnold Rothstein would stand on a street corner by the flickering neon crush of Times Square, waiting for someone—anyone—who owed him money to walk by.

The streets of the city were thick with people in hock to Rothstein, and—like Anslinger—he could make people afraid just by looking at them. At first glance, though, it was harder to see why. He was 5 feet 7, pale and baby-faced,
¹
with small, feminine hands.
²
He never fidgeted, or drank,
³
or raised a fist. He refused even to chew gum.
⁴
He was sober and smart to the last thread of his perfectly tailored suits,
⁵
but everybody in New York City knew that Rothstein could have you killed just by snapping his fingers—and that he had bought so many NYPD cops and politicians that he would never be punished for it.

Rothstein’s wife, a Broadway chorus girl named Carolyn, had a habit of driving past, and she would call out to him. But she, too, was afraid. Later, she would write:

Often on my way home
⁶
in a car, I would have myself driven slowly up Broadway, past Forty-seventh to Fiftieth street. It might be a cold night, or a rainy one. Or it might be snowing. But more often than not, Arnold would be there. I would ask him to come home. He would shake his head and say: “I’m waiting to see someone to collect from” . . . He would stay out in all kinds of weather to collect small sums, even amounts as low as fifty dollars. Yet, he might have made thousands that same day. The amounts, it always seemed to me, were not what counted so much with Arnold, as the percentages. He was playing with chips, and the chips must show a profit.

It was the height of the Jazz Age, and Arnold Rothstein was the most feared man in New York City. After he had shaken down enough cash from people for the day, he would sit until long after dawn in Lindy’s,
⁷
a café in the throng of Times Square, and orchestrate his network of fraud,
⁸
theft, and extortion. At the tables around him were the members of the Manhattan underworld and overworld huddled together: actors and songwriters, boxers and their managers, columnists and Communists, cops and criminals. Carolyn said it was like a “water hole
⁹
in the jungle where beasts of prey and their natural enemies gather under a very real, but invisible, flag of truce for refreshment.”

On one of these nights, at a table nearby, two men were writing a musical whose main characters were based on Arnold and Carolyn; they were going to call it
Guys and Dolls
.
¹⁰
The musical would be funny. Arnold, though, was not; when he laughed, everybody thought it was strangely artificial. “I learned that when he laughed the laughter
¹¹
was a surface demonstration, a combination of the movement of face muscles synchronized with a sound, counterfeiting, but not partaking of, hilarity,” Carolyn recalled years later.

But to us, Arnold matters most for just one reason. He was about to be handed the biggest black market in history.

Nobody could understand how Arnold got this way. His father—who had witnessed his toddler son standing over his sleeping brother with a knife—was one of the most beloved men in Manhattan’s Jewish community. Avraham Rothstein’s family had fled vicious anti-Jewish mobs in Russia for the Lower East Side in the 1880s; Avraham started out sewing caps, then worked his way up in the garment trade and eventually became a wealthy cotton goods dealer. If you had a problem in the Orthodox Jewish community, you’d come to him, and he would adjudicate: he was so scrupulously fair they called him “Abe the Just.”

They would call his son a lot of things, but never “just.”

Even as a small boy, Arnold had one marked quality beyond his coldness: an astonishing ability with mathematics. He could manipulate numbers and odds in a way that startled people. From the age of twelve, he knew that his father wouldn’t dream of carrying cash from the setting of the sun on Friday night to the end of the Sabbath the next day, so Arnold stole the money from his wallet, played craps, and won so often and so big he could always replace the cash
¹²
without anyone’s noticing. By the time he ran away
¹³
from home at seventeen to be a traveling salesman, Arnold knew he could crack card games better than anyone else.

He was starting to regard himself as a superman, far above the dumb herd, explaining later: “There are two million fools
¹⁴
to one brainy man.” He was the brainy man, and he was going to get his due from the fools.

And the Brain—as he now insisted on being called—soon discovered the greatest truth of gambling: the only way to win every time is to own the casino. So he set up a series of underground gambling dens across New York City, and when they got busted, one after another, he invented the “floating” craps game: a never-ending craps shoot that skipped from shadowy venue to dusky basement across the island. He carried the cash on him, up to a hundred thousand dollars at a time, and he obsessively counted
¹⁵
the money, by hand, again and again. He had a tactile relationship with cash. The crinkle of banknotes was his music and his muse. He took no pleasure from the games themselves, only the end result; even after years spent at racetracks, he couldn’t tell one horse from another. He knew only their statistics,
¹⁶
and the cash that would whir his way at the end.

No matter how much money he had, Rothstein always believed he was behind and had to find a way to make more. When he first met
¹⁷
his future wife, Carolyn, at a friend’s party, he said 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 all a sporting man hunted was a victim with money, and all he shot was craps.”
¹⁸
On the night of their wedding, he told her he would need to pawn her engagement ring
¹⁹
to free up funds, and she handed it over without complaining.

He guarded his money without a smile. One day, a gambler Rothstein knew called him long distance. He said was broke and desperately needed five hundred dollars to get back to New York and back in the game.

“I can’t hear you,” Arnold said into the phone. The gambler kept repeating his request. “I can’t hear you,” Arnold repeated. The caller fiddled with his phone until the operator interrupted:

“But Mr. Rothstein, I can hear him distinctly,” she said.

“All right,” Arnold replied, “then you give it to him,” and hung up.
²⁰

He was used to rigging bets. “I knew my limitations
²¹
when I was fifteen years old, and since that time I never played any game with a man I knew I couldn’t beat,” he said. At the racetrack, he would pay jockeys
²²
to throw the race, and gradually, year by year, he took this to a higher level. The bets got bigger and his winnings got more improbable, until he finally reached the biggest, most watched, most adrenaline-soaked game in America: the World Series. Fifty million Americans were listening in 1919 when, against all the odds and every prediction, the Cincinnati Reds beat the far-and-away favorites, the White Sox. Long after the gasps were silent and the stadium was full only of echoes, the reason emerged: Rothstein had paid eight White Sox players to throw the match. All eight players were charged with fraud—and all were mysteriously acquitted.

In accounts of Arnold’s story, I found that word appearing again and again: “mysteriously.”

A man like Arnold Rothstein would always have been able to ferret out some criminal opportunity, but Arnold was handed two of the largest industries in America, tax-free. He immediately spotted that the prohibition of booze and drugs was the biggest lottery win for gangsters in history. There will always be large numbers of people who want to get drunk or high, and if they can’t do it legally, they will do it illegally.

“Prohibition is going
²³
to last a long time and then one day it’ll be abandoned,” Rothstein told his associates. “But it’s going to be with us for quite a while, that’s for sure. I can see that more and more people are going to ignore the law . . . and we can make a fortune meeting this need.”

Under prohibition, dealers were starting to discover, you can sell whatever crap you want: Who’s going to complain to the police that they were poisoned by your illicit booze? Outbreaks of mass alcohol poisoning
²⁴
spread across America: in one incident alone, five hundred people were permanently crippled in Wichita, Kansas. But the market for illegal alcohol would live on for thirteen years, and then Franklin Roosevelt—desperate for new sources of tax revenue—would make it legal again in 1933. The greater gift, Rothstein saw, was in the market for drugs. They, surely, would stay banned far into the future.

At first the street peddlers had controlled the trade, and they got their supply in one of two ways: by staging heists of legal opiates as they were delivered to hospitals, or by ordering in bulk from legal suppliers in Mexico or Canada under fake company names.
²⁵
In 1922, Congress cracked down on this. Rothstein saw that these small-time crooks were missing the bigger opportunity anyway: this, he concluded, was a task for industrial manufacturing and industrial-scale smuggling. He sent his men to buy in bulk in Europe, where factories could still legally make heroin, shipped it over, and then distributed it to street sellers across New York and beyond.

For his system to work, Rothstein had to invent the modern drug gang. There had been gangs in New York City for generations, but they were small-time hoodlums
²⁶
who spent most of their energy beating each other up. Arnold’s gangs were as disciplined as military units, and he made sure they had only one passion: the bottom line. That is how, by the mid-1920s, Rothstein and his new species of New York gang controlled the entire trade
²⁷
in heroin and cocaine on the Eastern seaboard of the United States.

We need to freeze the frame here for a moment, as Arnold stands by Times Square in the afternoon of the Jazz Age, looking for people who owe him money. At this moment, the heroin clinics are being shut down by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics across the United States. This is a hinge point in history. It is the moment when the control of drugs is transferred to the most dangerous people. As the result of the Harrison Act and its subsequent hard-line interpretation by Harry’s bureau, it is passing from Henry Smith Williams and his colleagues to Arnold Rothstein and his thugs. It wasn’t by the law of nature. It was by political decree.