Rothstein (22 page)

-E Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The Black Sox scandal is not just a riddle wrapped in an enigma inside a mystery. It is a labyrinth of fixes, doublecrosses, cover-ups, and a con so big, so audacious, it nearly ruined professional baseball.

And manipulating it all was Arnold Rothstein.

Eliot Asinof’s Eight Men Out, the standard history of the Black Sox fix, relates a far different tale-A. R. is a mere latecomer to one portion of the fix, a mere bystander to the other. Asinof places the crime’s origin in Boston in September 1919, when the Black Sox approached gambler Sport Sullivan, who then turned to Rothstein for backing. In the interim, however, the Black Sox approached two small-time gamblers, Sleepy Bill Burns and Billy Maharg, about rigging the outcome. They, too, solicited A. R., but he turned them down. A. R.‘s sometime henchman, ex-boxing champion Abe Attell, pretending to be Arnold’s agent, went ahead fixing the series with Burns and Maharg-but without A. R.

On examination, much of this scenario doesn’t make sense. But Eight Men Out is such a well-written book, that it’s easy to gloss over the inconsistencies. On even closer examination, many dates, many sequences of events, make even less sense. In fact, they’re impossible. Which leaves us with yet another mystery in the life of Arnold Rothstein, but a solvable one if we sift through all the clues. Some are small hints that by themselves mean little. Some are huge inconvenient guideposts ignored for decades. Add them up, and the sum is the true story of the Black Sox scandal-a far more complex and intriguing tale.

One huge, inconvenient piece of evidence is not ignored for lack of credibility. Its source has major credibility. History has ignored it because it just never fit in, never quite made sense until now.

In August 1919, as during every August, A. R. summered in Saratoga, betting on the ponies and operating his brand-new gambling house, The Brook. Also in town was former Chicago Cubs owner Charles “Lucky Charlie” Weeghman. At The Brook, Weeghman chanced to meet a friend from Chicago’s North Side, gambler Mont Tennes. Tennes, who controlled racing wire services nationwide, had gambling and underworld sources nationwide. It was his business to know things. What he knew in Saratoga was that the upcoming World Series was going to be fixed.

A. R. told him. A. R. told him a lot. As Weeghman remembered it, Rothstein himself, Abe Attell, Nat Evans, and Nicky Arnstein were working the gambling end of the fix. Chicago first baseman Chick Gandil and infielder Fred McMullen were the players involved.

Pitcher Eddie Cicotte was in on it, too. Earlier that August, the White Sox visited Boston for a three-game series, and Cicotte was busy trying to cajole Buck Weaver into joining the burgeoning scheme. Boston was home to Joseph J. “Sport” Sullivan, one of Beantown’s most prominent bookmakers-and Boston, and particularly Boston’s ballparks-had many fine bookmakers.

Sport knew all about baseball. Some even said he had fixed the 1914 Philadelphia Athletics-Boston Braves World Series. Everyone had expected an easy Athletics triumph, but the upstart Braves swept four straight. The biggest winner on that little venture was Broadway’s George M. Cohan. Sport Sullivan was his betting broker.

The White Sox returned to Boston in midSeptember. Buck Weaver remained reluctant, but that didn’t matter. Gandil and Cicotte would do business. Sullivan met them at Chicago’s team hotel, the Buckminster, a cozy little place just blocks from Fenway Park. Some said the players approached Sullivan. Gandil said otherwise. It really didn’t matter. Both sides knew what they wanted.

Gandil claimed Sullivan suggested that he and Cicotte entice five or six additional teammates into the plot. Sport promised $10,000 to any player involved. Gandil thought recruiting so many players was too risky. “Don’t be silly,” Sullivan responded. “It’s been pulled before and it can be again.”

Gandil knew what that meant. He’d known Sullivan for a long time. He’d heard the whispers about the 1914 Series. And you didn’t have to go back that far. The American League heard rumors that the 1918 Red Sox-Cubs World Series was fixed-and would have investigated them had the league office not been cash-strapped from the war. There were even question marks surrounding the 1917 Series. John McGraw suspected his second baseman Buck Herzog of taking a dive on that one.

Gandil and Ed Cicotte invited six other players into the conspiracy: Fred McMullin, Buck Weaver, Swede Risberg, Lefty Williams, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Happy Felsch. “Not that we loved them,” Gandil would say, “because there never was much love among the White Sox. Let’s just say we disliked them the least.” Weaver probably never agreed to join the plot, but neither would he inform management of its existence.

The next morning, most likely September 20, Gandil informed Sullivan the deal was a go-cash in advance. Sport said it would take time to get the money. That was true. A. R. certainly had $80,000, but wasn’t about to hand it to either Sullivan or the players in midSeptember. The Big Bankroll would never allow that kind of money sit to idle for two full weeks. Rothstein would never part with a dollar, let alone eighty thousand of them, one second longer than necessary.

Meanwhile, in late summer 1919, former major-league pitcher Sleepy Bill Burns traveled north from his Texas ranch, peddling oil leases and reconnecting with old friends in baseball along the way. In the majors Burns would sometimes fall asleep on the bench in the middle of a ball game. When awake, he gambled, always ready for cards or craps. On leaving baseball, he speculated in petroleum. He did well, but not fabulously well.

Burns first visited St. Louis, trying to cajole players into investing in his properties. Next, he traveled to Chicago. When the Cubs left town, Burns followed them east by train. “He prefers traveling with a ball club,” observed the Chicago Daily News, “as he knows he can have a lot of entertainment.” In Cincinnati, Bill worked out with the Reds. In Philadelphia he met with the visiting New York Giants and their crooked, game-throwing first baseman, Hal Chase.

Reaching New York, Burns checked into the White Sox team hotel-the Ansonia. On Tuesday, September 16, 1919, a few days before the Sox met with Sullivan in Boston, wet ground conditions at the Polo Grounds canceled play against the Yankees. With nothing better to do, Eddie Cicotte began fixing a World Series, starting with a boast to Burns that the Sox would win the pennant. That wasn’t controversial-Chicago had paced the league since July 10 and now led Cleveland by eight games. Cicotte cryptically added he “would have something good” for Burns. There the conversation ended, but Burns comprehended Cicotte’s meaning.

Burns had company in New York-his friend, a thirty-eight-yearold gambler, ex-lightweight boxer, and sandlot ballplayer named Billy Maharg. They had known each other for a decade, and Maharg once spent a year at Burns’s Texas ranch. Maharg lived in Philadelphia, working for the Baldwin Locomotive plant. Maharg and Burns were preparing to travel north (or to Mexico, or to New Mexicoaccounts vary) for a hunting trip.

On Thursday morning, September 18, Burns and Maharg loitered in the Ansonia lobby. Maharg was writing a letter when Burns walked over and introduced Cicotte and Chick Gandil. Once Gandil determined Maharg was sufficiently crooked, he got down to business: the White Sox would throw the whole World Series or any part of it for $100,000.

Burns had money, but nowhere near that much. And $100,000 was just the beginning. A fixer required far more capital than that for the heavy betting necessary to turn a profit. Burns didn’t have $10,000, let alone $100,000. Maharg had less. Burns sent Maharg home to raise capital. “I saw some gamblers in Philadelphia,” Maharg later testified. “They told me it was too big a proposition for them to handle, and they recommended me to Arnold Rothstein …”

While Maharg traveled south, the White Sox moved north to Boston and, unknown to Burns, negotiated with Sport Sullivan. When Sullivan proposed the fix with Gandil and Cicotte, they proved clearly receptive. Gandil would say about that meeting: “The idea of taking seven or eight people in on the plot scared me.” The idea of a fix didn’t scare him. He’d been planning one with Sullivan for weeks. He’d been planning one with Burns and Maharg. He’d have planned one with anyone who even looked as if he had the cash or knew someone who did.

In Manhattan, Maharg and Burns pursued their funding, pursuing, in fact, Sport Sullivan’s source of funding-Arnold Rothstein. Maharg, bearing a letter of introduction from a Philadelphia gambler named Rossie, visited Rothstein’s office. A. R. wasn’t in. They sought him at Aqueduct-again, no luck. Burns and Maharg did, however, meet someone calling himself A. R.‘s “first lieutenant”: Curley Bennett. There really was a New York underworld character by the name of Joseph “Curley” Bennett. He operated a Broadway pool hall, pimped, and ran with Tom Foley’s branch of Tammany. Like Attell he had served as Arnold Rothstein’s bodyguard. But the fellow Burns and Maharg met wasn’t Bennett, he was Des Moines gambler David Zelser. As we shall see, Zelser had his reasons for not being properly introduced.

Through Zelser, Burns and Maharg scheduled a meeting with A. R. at 8:30 that night, most likely September 27, 1919, at the Astor Hotel grill. Three other men sat at A. R.‘s table: Val O’Farrell, one of the city’s premier private detectives, was one, and, depending on who told the story, a member of the local judiciary was another. Circumstances were not ideal for proposing the fix of the century. Burns and Maharg made their pitch anyway: Chicago would throw the Series for $100,000. If A. R. provided the bankroll, he could clean up.

Arnold exploded. He wanted no part of their scheme. He wanted no part of them-and if they knew what was good for them, they’d never see him againabout anything.

In actuality, A. R. wanted no part of their fix. He had his own in motion with Sullivan. But there was something deeper going on. This was no sincere outburst, no fury generated by small-timers muscling in on his idea. Quiet calculation-not spontaneous anger-motivated Arnold Rothstein. He knew there would be a meeting. He knew its agenda: fixing the World Series. Despite the sensitive topic, A. R. scheduled a meeting not in his office, nor even in a relatively secluded back room at Reuben’s, but in the middle of the biggest, busiest hotel in Manhattan-in the very heart of Times Square, no less. Conveniently, with him were three witnesses, including former police officer O’Farrell. The normally reserved, soft-spoken Rothstein rejected Burns in violent terms “nearly coming to blows with the would-be fixer,” creating as noisy a scene as possible.

Rothstein ambushed Burns and Maharg. If his own Series plot went sour, if Sullivan or the players started to talk, Rothstein could blandly state (and did-repeatedly): Me? In on it? Never. Let me tell you how I ran those two cheap chiselers out of the Astor … I called them blackguards, you know, I called them skunks …

Rothstein had already dispatched Sport Sullivan to Chicago, with Nat Evans along to supervise him. He told Nat to travel under the name of Brown and gave him $80,000 cash for the fix. The whole idea bothered Evans. Too many people already knew too much about it. Don’t worry, said A. R.: “If nine guys go to bed with a girl she’ll have a tough time proving the tenth is the father.”

On September 29, Sullivan and Evans met the Black Sox at the Warner Hotel on Chicago’s South Side. The players wanted their $80,000 up front. Evans wanted collateral. Gandil said he’d give his word. Evans couldn’t keep from laughing, and retorted, “In my book, that’s not much collateral for eighty grand.”

Evans gave $40,000 to Sullivan, holding the rest back for bets. Sullivan kept $30,000 for his own betting, giving Gandil just $10,000. Gandil needed that $10,000-and quickly. Eddie Cicotte, who would open the Series on the mound, was making noises. He wouldn’t cooperate unless paid up front. “The day before I went to Cincinnati I put it up to them squarely for the last time that there would be nothing doing unless I had the money,” Cicotte would later confess. “That night I found the money under my pillow. There was $10,000. I counted it…. It was my price.”

Meanwhile Abe Attell had just returned to Manhattan. Retired from boxing, Attell supported himself in various ways, entertaining vaudeville audiences with tales of the old days, serving as A. R.‘s bodyguard-and gambling. But times were tough. Five days before the Series began, while in Chicago, he pawned his wife’s platinum and diamond ring for $125. Back in New York a day or two later, he needed to borrow more money. Beyond that, he needed a way to make money-quick money, easy money. Soon he heard rumors of what was happening in Chicago since his departure. Money was about to change hands between ballplayers and gamblers. One of those gamblers sounded like Nat Evans. At the Polo Grounds, Attell met the Giants’ Hal Chase. A couple of days after soliciting A. R. at the Astor, Burns had informed Chase there was going to be a fix (somewhat optimistically, it must be admitted, since he had nowhere near the money necessary to accomplish it). Chase told Attell, and Attell conveyed the news back to A. R. (“I told him he had better get off Chicago, as it [the Series] was going to be thrown.”) They met at the Astor. Sport Sullivan was present.

They, of course, knew all about it, but Attell’s report made A. R. nervous. What did Burns mean that the Series “was going to be thrown?” Did Burns know about Sport Sullivan? Did Chase? Rothstein changed his mind about Burns and Maharg. Not about financing their scheme-what was the point of that? But it might be wise to keep an eye on them. Arnold now ordered Attell and David Zelser to meet with Burns. Whether A. R. authorized them to use his name in their dealings, we’ll never know for sure, but they certainly did, and they laid it on thick for their audience.

Attell and Zelser, still pretending to be Curley Bennett, met Burns at his room at the Ansonia. Also present were Hal Chase and two of Chase’s teammates, pitchers jean Dubuc and Fred Toney. Toney left, but Dubuc remained. On trial in Chicago, Burns related what happened:

Q-When was the conversation?

A-Two days before the series [opened on October 1].

Q-What did they [Attell and Zelser/Bennett] meet you for?