Rothstein (19 page)

Despite his early success with the ponies, after Dandolos switched to poker and dice, he had little interest in racing. At Saratoga, he established headquarters at hotels such as the Grand Union, taking on all comers. On one occasion, he nonchalantly played a series of $10,00 freeze-outs of singlehanded stud.

Dandolos regularly visited The Brook. The Greek loved challenges, and he considered beating A. R. the biggest challenge of all. At poker, Arnold would just wear him down. Dandolos might possess good hands, accumulating a big pot, but eventually his luck would turn, he’d make a mistake, and A. R.‘s superior resources would simply outlast him. “As long as The Brook operated, Nick was a welcome visitor,” noted Rothstein biographer Leo Katcher.

Among the greatest of Saratoga characters was “Subway Sam” Rosoff, a loud, slovenly, Minsk-born construction magnate. Rosoff arrived in America at age fourteen, and, according to his boast, never attended school a day in his life. After his parents landed in New York, they departed promptly for the Midwest, abandoning Rosoff to fend for himself. He peddled newspapers under the Brooklyn Bridge and lived in the Newsboys’ Lodging House on East 42nd Street. He sold candy aboard trains, entered the salvage business, moved into sand and gravel and waste hauling, and finally into construction. He made money each step of the way.

Rosoff loved gambling and loved Saratoga, holding forth at his grand mansion on Union Avenue, dispensing alms to gamblers in need. In a town full of high rollers, he may have been the highest. Rothstein wanted Sam’s business at The Brook, but feared it all the same. Rosoff had as much cash as the house-maybe more-and more important, the will to risk it. He could keep gambling until he broke the bank.

On a night in August 1920, Rosoff got particularly lucky, at one point $400,000 to the good. Arnold’s pride-and business senseprevented him from shutting the game down for the night. But fearful that Rosoff might cash out and depart with the Brook’s entire cash reserve, A. R. phoned stockbroker Charles Stoneham, asking to borrow the contents of Stoneham’s Nelson Avenue home vault: $300,000 on that particular night. But Arnold didn’t need it. By the time Stoneham arrived, Rosoff was $100,000 in the hole.

Even before The Brook opened, Stoneham was one of the biggest men in Saratoga. During the First World War, he threw one memorable party at the United States Hotel, inviting hundreds of guests and stripping the town of its champagne stocks to provide proper refreshment. At evening’s end, Stoneham tipped each waiter $100 and the wine steward $500.

Mere incapacitation couldn’t prevent Stoneham from gambling at The Brook. Laid up with a sprained knee, he phoned A. R.: “What color came up last on the wheel?”

“The black.”

“Bet a thousand for me on the red next turn.”

“You’re on. The wheel is spinning,” said A. R.

Red came up, but Stoneham remained on the line and eventually lost $70,000.

In such an atmosphere, it was important to lose like a gentleman. Harry Sinclair dropped $48,000 one night-and left a $2,000 tip. Tulsa Oilman Joshua “The Prince of Petroleum” Cosden lost $300,000 one evening, $200,000 the next, and won $20,000 the next-and boasted jokingly of his “winnings.”

Then there was Colonel Henry Simms, who lost $60,000 at The Brook and went about town, bragging how much he lost. After all, only the filthy rich could afford to lose such sums. This annoyed A. R., who by now didn’t need stories of his own winning floating around. Word of big losers only depressed business. He approached Simms: “Colonel, I hear you’re telling people that you’re a gambling man. How come you only play for chicken feed when you come to The Brook?”

Suddenly Simms didn’t consider $60,000 a trifling sum, and as he stammered, Rothstein offered him some “real action”: $100,000 on a single coin toss. Simms refused and A. R. taunted him to try his luck against the boys employed at the stables. “Next time you want to gamble, Colonel, try there,” he jeered. “They match pennies every day.”

The Colonel never dared return to The Brook.

Rothstein’s Brook abounded with the trappings of elegance and sophistication, but A. R. himself could not fully abandon old habits. As Rothstein would lurk on cold New York streets hoping to catch some poor soul who owed him a mere hundred dollars, he employed similar methods in Saratoga. At 5:30 one Sunday evening, a wealthy New York City real estate man handed A. R. a $7,500 check to cover the evening’s losses. The man could afford it. He had known Rothstein for years. There should have been no problem.

He boarded a train for Manhattan, and when he went to his bank at 9:00 the next morning, he was informed that waiting for the doors to open that day was a special messengersent by Rothstein from Saratoga. A. R. wanted cash, and he wanted it literally without a second to spare.

One night in August, Rothstein was back at his usual table at Lindy’s, gingerly sinking his false teeth into an apple. A long-distance call arrived from Saratoga. Sidney Stager was broke and needed $500.

This was not a message Arnold wanted. “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!” he screamed into the receiver. Sidney kept increasing the volume of his voice, but A. R. still protested he couldn’t understand him. Finally the operator interrupted: “He says won’t you please send him $500?”

This A. R. understood. “If you heard him,” he snapped, “you send him the money.”

Suspicions of A. R.‘s fixing races at Saratoga fix abounded, but only one concrete example has come down to us-ironically, one that cost Rothstein money. Handicapping a four-horse race, Arnold saw easy profits in view. Odds on the field lay at 6-5, 2-1, 7-2, and 20-1. Two well-placed bribes by A. R. took the middle two entries out of the running, and Rothstein calculated that he’d win $100,000 on the favorite. A. R.‘s minions asked if they should take care of the 20-1 entry. “Forget about it,” he sneered. “I don’t like the fellow who trains that horse.”

The long shot won and, as one insider noted, “The big payoff was that the trainer Rothstein didn’t like could have been bought for a hundred-dollar bill.”

At Saratoga on August 27, 1920, Rothstein attempted one of his biggest coups: to win a $1 million on a single race. He had a twoyear-old maiden named Sailing B that he was reasonably sure could overtake that afternoon’s nondescript competition. When Sailing B opened at 30-to-1, A. R. saw his opportunity, contacting agents around the country. At precisely two minutes before post time, men in thirty-five gambling houses would start plunging on Sailing B. Timing was key. Premature betting would crash the odds and deprive The Big Bankroll of a potential $1.5 million.

But at precisely twenty-two minutes before post time a Detroit gambling house received a $1,500 bet on Sailing B. Word of this huge bet reached Saratoga, triggering a flurry of similar bets, and causing odds to fall before A. R.‘s agents got their bets down.

A. R.‘s hunch (or worse) proved correct. Sailing B won that day, and A. R. earned between $850,000 and $900,000. Still, the outcome enraged him: He might have won so much more. He learned that his own agent had placed the $1,500 bet. The reason: his $1 watch was running twenty minutes fast. A cheap watch deprived A. R. of over half-a-million dollars.

In August 1921 A. R. struck again. The occasion was the Travers Stakes, among the most prestigious of races at any track. A record crowd of 25,000 packed Saratoga. The New York Times described the atmosphere:

The afternoon’s assemblage was worthy of the magnificent racing offered. Clouds had started coming up about noon, and it threatened for a time to rain, but the danger passed, and the ominous look of the sky before the sport commenced had no effect whatever on the attendance. Many of the oldtimers said it was the greatest mass of spectators which ever elbowed their way into the classic course. Trains arriving yesterday and today had added their thousands to thousands already here. In addition, automobiles kept streaming into the town from every direction all through the morning, the array of glittering machines in the vast parking spaces at the track running into the thousands.

There did not appear to be another available inch of space when the first post bugle sounded. Women in brilliant gowns and hats met the eye everywhere. Many luncheon parties were given at the clubhouse, while it seemed as if every chair in every box was occupied.

Favored in the Travers was Harry Payne Whitney’s filly Prudery, recently winner of the Alabama, a three-year-old so overpowering that but one other horse was entered: Arnold Rothstein’s colt Sporting Blood.

In truth, A. R. had little faith in Sporting Blood’s chances but the idea of sure-thing second-place money attracted him. Word reached Arnold that Prudery wasn’t quite right-nothing you could put your finger on. But her temperament was off, and so were her workouts. Harry Payne Whitney might have scratched the horse, but even slightly weakened, Prudery still could defeat Sporting Blood, a horse yet to display anything special.

Besides Whitney and his staff-and Rothstein-no one knew Prudery was anything but perfect. And no one but Rothstein and his trainer Willie Booth knew that Sporting Blood was in the best form of his career, well above anything she had displayed before. For want of a better expression, Prudery was about to have a horse race on her hands.

But how to maximize profit? Here was the perennial question. Odds on Sporting Blood remained very favorable. Until recently, not even A. R. was about to lay down a penny on her. If he-directly or indirectly-now started betting big money, bookmakers would smell a rat, the odds would shift, and A. R. would be taking a still substantial risk for what would now be too proportionally small a reward.

A. R. decided a major distraction was in order. In town was another formidable three-year-old, Harry Sinclair’s chestnut colt Grey Lag, who earlier in the year had beaten Sporting Blood in the Belmont by three lengths. Rothstein cajoled Grey Lag’s trainer, Sam Hildreth, to enter the colt in the Travers.

A halfhour before post time, Hildreth scratched Grey Lag-again at A. R.‘s bidding. The betting public assumed Hildreth, a future Hall of Fame trainer, simply had second thoughts and had conceded the race to Prudery. Thus when A. R.‘s agents in the hinterlands increased betting on Sporting Blood, no one cared, thinking them “sucker bets.” In fact, many out-of-town bookmakers taking these bets were so certain of their futility, they pocketed the money and failed to report anything back to their Saratoga counterparts. Odds on Sporting Blood remained unnaturally high.

By post time A. R. had $150,000 on Sporting Blood. He had played his hand with cunning. Now it was up to Sporting Blood. The Times correspondent wrote:

The two got away to a perfect start, Sporting Blood showing in the front first. His lead was brief, however, for [Prudery jockey Laverne] Fator took the filly to the front at once, and rounding the clubhouse turn, the Whitney colors were to the fore. All the way down the back stretch the blue and brown silks were ahead, but the crimson and gold of the Redstone colors were never more than a length behind. It was an extremely pretty race to watch for Prudery failed to steal the lead which many had expected and Sporting Blood stuck right behind the speeding filly.

Coming around the far turn, the backers of Prudery began for the first time to sense danger, while the feeling, intangible, but there, seemed to sweep the stands that something unexpected was about to be witnessed. It was. [Jockey Lawrence] Lyke, giving Sporting Blood masterful handling, brought his mount right up to the withers of the filly. There the colt hung for a moment, then he began to go by her, and the race was over.

As the two turned into the stretch, the Crimson and Gold was leading the Blue and Brown by a short neck. Fator sat down to give one of those stirring finishes which he knows so well how to make. He cut the filly with the whip. Her lack of response told the story. Instead of bounding forward, Prudery frankly pinned back her ears, began to sulk, and announced, as plainly as if she had spoken, that she was through racing for the afternoon.

Sporting Blood romped home by two lengths, earning his owner a purse of $10,275, plus $450,000 in winning bets. Sam Hildreth received a cut.

Rothstein grew tired of Saratoga. He hated the six-hour auto trip from New York, and once there was no happier. It just wasn’t New York. It wasn’t Broadway. “I don’t like Saratoga. It’s too hot,” he’d complain to Carolyn, but that was nonsense. Manhattan was no cooler or less humid. One afternoon he won nearly $50,000 on a 3-1 shot in a two-horse race. By the fourth race, he sent Carolyn word that they were catching the 6:00 P.M. train to Grand Central. “Sweet,” he told her. “I wouldn’t stay here if I was sure I could make a million.”

Sometime around 1925, Rothstein sold his share of The Brook to Nat Evans. Yet he still retained a place in the town’s gaming industry. While running The Brook, he imported such up-and-coming hoodlums as Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano to operate its roulette wheels and chemin-de-fer tables. Before long they were on their own-with A. R.‘s backing-obtaining a percentage of the Chicago Club, a backstreet joint not far from the train station. Despite its shabby brick exterior, the establishment was among the nation’s most profitable gambling houses.

The Brook barely outlasted Rothstein. Evans sold the place to Max “Kid Rags” Kalik, “a widely known sportsman,” in June 1934, but regained the title following the racing season. On November 1, 1934, Evans insured the establishment and its contents for $117,000-a providential move. In the early morning of December 31, 1934, with Evans seriously ill in a New York City hospital, Arnold Rothstein’s once-grand Brook burned to the ground.

VIOLENCE STALKED Arnold Rothstein’s world. It had visited Beansy Rosenthal and Jack Zelig, and it trailed A. R., as he walked Manhattan’s dark streets carrying tens of thousands of dollars-or as he participated in a highstakes floating dice and poker game. Any number of people wanted what Arnold Rothstein had-and would employ force to take it from him.

He employed bodyguards-Abe Attell, Fats Walsh, and Legs Diamond among them. He carried a revolver-legally, of course. Never convicted of any crime, and with solid connections downtown, he had no difficulty in securing a permit.