Rothstein (25 page)

Rothstein sits in the box with the owner [Charles Stoneham] of the New York Giants. He has the entree to the exclusive clubhouses on race tracks; he is prominent at fights.

Baseball’s establishment press savagely ridiculed Fullerton’s charges. Sporting News editor Earl Obenshain issued this unmistakably antiSemitic diatribe:

Because a lot of dirty, long-nosed, thick-lipped, and strongsmelling gamblers butted into the World Series-an American event, by the way-and some of said gentlemen got crossed, stories were peddled that there was something wrong with the way the games were played. Some of the Chicago players laid down for a price, said the scandalmongers… . [White Sox owner Charles] Comiskey has met that by offering $10,000 [sic] for any sort of clue that will bear out such a charge. He might have well offered a million. There will be no takers because there is no such evidence, except in the mucky minds of stinkers who-because they are crooked-think all the rest of world can’t play straight.

Fueling the rumors were the big mouths of those involved. Late in July 1920, the White Sox were in New York to play the Yankees. The afternoon’s game was rained out, and Kid Gleason headed for Dinty Moore’s bar on Times Square. What Gleason heard amazed him. He rushed to phone Chicago Tribune reporter Jim Crusinberry. “Come up to Dinty Moore’s,” Gleason whispered. “I’m at the bar with Abe Attell. He’s talking, and I want you to hear it.”

Crusinberry and his roommate, fellow Tribune sportswriter Ring Lardner, hurried over and quietly ordered drinks. For their benefit, Gleason restarted the conversation: “So it was Arnold Rothstein who put up the dough for the fix.”

“That was it, Kid,” Attell responded. “You know, Kid, I hated to do that to you, but I thought I was going to make a lot of money and I needed it, and then the big guy doublecrossed me, and I never got but a small part of what he promised.”

In August 1920 a flurry of anonymous tips reached the Chicago Cubs front office. One of their games against the Phillies would be thrown. Under pressure from Cruisenberry and the Tribune, a Chicago grand jury convened under judge Charles McDonald to investigate the matter-and then ignored it, focusing instead on the 1919 Series. Charles Weeghman appeared and testified about Mont Tennes and Arnold Rothstein, about events in Saratoga in August 1919, and what Tennes told him after the Series concerning the seven players involved. Tennes denied everything.

Dominoes started falling. Giants pitcher Rube Benton implicated Sleepy Bill Burns, Hal Chase, and pitcher jean Dubuc. Benton also testified that while in Cincinnati, he had heard rumors of a Pittsburgh gambling syndicate fixing the Series through Gandil, Felsch, Williams, and Cicotte.

On September 27, 1920 Billy Maharg spilled his guts to the Philadelphia North American-about Bill Burns and Eddie Cicotte at the Ansonia, about A. R. blowing up at the Astor grill, about Attell and Bennett/Zelser and a cash-filled room at the Sinton, about a telegram from A. R., about angry playersand how the whole stupid scheme exploded in his face.

Maharg’s confession unhinged Eddie Cicotte. The next morning, awash in tears, he told all to Comiskey, Alfred Austrian, and Kid Gleason-and then to the grand jury. Shoeless Joe Jackson and Lefty Williams confessed the following day. Williams added something new to the public’s knowledge: the names of gamblers Sport Sullivan and “Rachael Brown” (Nat Evans’s alias during the series). Happy Felsch admitted his own guilt to an enterprising reporter from the Chicago Evening American.

That same day, John McGraw appeared before the grand jury, discussing an assortment of crooks: Chase, Dubuc, catcher Heinle Zimmermann, and outfielder Benny Kauff. In New York, detective Val O’Farrell-the same O’Farrell present when Bill Burns propositioned A. R. at the Astor-claimed that not only Burns, but Kauff (whom O’Farrell claimed was close friends with Attell), and a gambler named “Orbie” or “Arbie” were among the first to know of the fix. O’Farrell also contended that it was Kauff and Attell who first solicited A. R.‘s backing for the scheme.

Things were only beginning to get curiouser and curiouser.

Rothstein’s scheme had clearly proven too clever by half. Maharg was to have served as an alibi, a fall guy. Now, he was the prime witness for whoever dared prosecute this mess, convincingly tying Attell, Zelser, and company to the fix. Sport Sullivan and Nat Evans should have known enough to work directly with Gandil or Risberg, mugs who could keep their mouths shut. Instead they met face-to-face with weaklings like Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams-men who would talk.

A New York Tribune reporter visited A. R.‘s threestory stoneand-brick home at 355 West 84th Street to interview “a member of the family”-a source that sounded like the Great Brain himself.

“You can say that Maharg’s story is substantially correct,” the Tribune’s source admitted. “Arnold was never in on that deal at any stage. He told me that he was much surprised when the proposition was put up to him, and declared to Burns that he didn’t think it could be done. He never sent any telegrams to Attell in Cincinnati during the Series, and if Attell says he received any money or telegrams from him at that time [emphasis added-the telegram Attell produced to Burns and Maharg was sent the night before the Series started], it’s a lie. Why should Arnold be sending telegrams when he didn’t have a thing to do with the matter?

“I had heard long ago that Abe Attell had been bragging to friends how the deal was put over. He should keep on bragging now.”

That afternoon Abe Attell watched ball scores being posted upon a Times Square scoreboard-and heard of A. R.‘s comments. Realizing that Rothstein had no compunction about betraying him, he fired back, talking wildly and dangerously to a reporter:

You can say that the story placing the responsibility upon me for passing the $100,000 to the White Sox is a lie. It looks to me that Rothstein is behind the stories, and I am surprised at this, because I have been a good friend of Rothstein.

He is simply trying to pass the buck to me. It won’t go. I have retained a lawyer to take care of my interests and in a day or two I will tell what I know about this thing in a story that will shoot the lid sky high.

You can see that someone is trying to make it appear that I was responsible for the deal at the Astor. Well, I can tell you that I was not responsible for the `deal’ at the Astor. I can tell you I was not responsible for it. I will tell you what I knew about it at the proper time. Rothstein, I know, is trying to whitewash himself. Nobody can pass the buck to me. Maharg’s story of the fake telegrams and all the rest is all bunk, and all the rest, as far as I’m concerned is all bunk.

I have done many things for Rothstein, and when he didn’t have a cent I fed him and boarded him and even suffered a broken nose in defending him from a bootblack in Saratoga. We have not been on the best of terms for the last year, but I didn’t think he would open up this way.

At Boston’s Fenway Park, that busy September 29, 1920, Sport Sullivan watched the Sox trounce the A’s 10-0, and learned that Lefty Williams had implicated him before the grand jury. He fled the park and headed for New York. Perhaps Rothstein could find a way out of this madness. On the train he bought a paper and learned Attell was squealing on A. R. Where would all this stop?

It wasn’t about to stop with Sullivan. At Lindy’s, Sport promised a reporter to reveal “the whole inside story of the frameup…. They have made … made me a goat and I’m not going to stand for it…. I know the big man whose money it was that paid off the Sox playersand I’m going to name him.”

He couldn’t warn A. R. more clearly.

Rothstein grew edgier. From the beginning, he’d taken steps to protect himself. They hadn’t worked. Now he would have to buy politicians. Investigating the New York side of the matter was Manhattan District Attorney Edward Swann, who quickly declared Rothstein off limits. A. R., revealed Assistant District Attorney James E. Smith, wouldn’t be testifying before any grand jury “because of orders I have received from District Attorney Swann.”

It didn’t take much to control Swann. A. R.‘s Tammany friends were always helpful. Controlling the press was entirely different. A. R. wanted his operations to proceed quietly, anonymously. All this clamor only hurt business. Controlling the Chicago grand jury was equally difficult. Tammany didn’t rule Chicago, and A. R. had no desire to summer at Joliet.

Rothstein turned to thirty-four-yearold New York attorney William “The Great Mouthpiece” Fallon. Fallon had already established himself as not only the best-but the most spectaculardefense attorney in Manhattan. Relying on spellbinding oratorical skills and an uncanny ability to establish empathy with jurymen, he rarely lost a case. When these weapons proved insufficient, Bill Fallon employed obfuscation, demagoguery, judge baiting, concealment of evidence, bribery of witnesses, and jury tampering. With an entire nation outraged by the corruption of its national pastime, Fallon would have to employ virtually everything in his arsenal to save his client.

Recently Fallon had represented John McGraw, at the behest of Giants owner Charles Stoneham. After drinking and brawling one night at the Lambs Club with actor William Boyd, McGraw boarded a taxi to his West 109th Street apartment with two other men-one of whom, actor John Slavin, mysteriously fractured his skull. McGraw admitted purchasing four pints of whiskey at the Lambs Club-“I never fight unless I am drunk.” A grand jury indicted him for illegal possession of alcohol. By the time Fallon took the case to court, McGraw had changed his story, denying purchasing any liquor that evening, and claiming he couldn’t have, as he had generously given away all his cash to a needy Lambs Club cleaning woman. It was the sort of preposterous story Fallon’s clients told with regularity, and which regularly won them acquittal. The jury freed McGraw in five minutes.

As the Black Sox case broke, Rothstein engaged Fallon to represent Attell and Sullivan. Attell had implicated Rothstein by name on September 29. Fallon publicly advised The Little Champ to keep a discreet silence. He didn’t. A day after Fallon’s warning-Attell vowed to reveal the “master mind” behind the “whole scheme.” Broadway had only one “master mind”: Arnold Rothstein.

Fallon tried changing the subject, advancing a curious theory of his new client’s innocence:

The men [the Black Sox and the gamblers] undoubtedly are morally reprehensible, but it is my opinion that no crime has been committed. I consider the conspiracy indictment invalid as `conspiracy to commit an illegal act’ means nothing unless you can prove that throwing a ball game is an illegal act. This I am prepared to doubt. If the gamblers who are said to have fixed this series are not profiting by an illegal act, they cannot be prosecuted as such. Profiting as such is not an indictable offense.

On October 1 A. R. issued his own statement: he was selling his gambling houses and quitting all gambling for good. The slurs, the calumny he had been forced to endure, had finally proven too much. He told the World:

My friends know that I have never been connected with a crooked deal in my life, but I am heartily sick and tired of having my name dragged in on the slightest provocation or without provocation whenever a scandal comes up.

I have been victimized more than once and have been forced to bear the burden as best I could, simply because of the business that I was in and the peculiar moral code which governs it. But that is all past.

The unwarranted use of my name in this unfortunate scandal was the last straw. I made up my mind to retire from the gambling business as long ago as last June, as plenty of witnesses will testify, but this has led me to make the announcement publicly, instead of dropping out quietly as was my original plan.

From now on, I will devote most of my time and attention to the real estate business and to my racing stable. It is not pleasant to be what some may call a “social outcast,” and for the sake of my family and my friends I am glad that the chapter is closed.

A. R. went too far. Normally content to ignore his activities, the Times could not tolerate this drivel and unleashed a vitriolic editorial in his direction:

He Goes, but Is Not Driven

With patience at last exhausted, one Arnold Rothstein, who seems to be a man of commanding eminence in the circles in which he moves, has decided to give no more excuse to the censorious. It seems that in the past, whenever by any possibility his name could be linked with a current scandal, somebody has done it. Naturally this has worn upon the nerves of a man with a nature as sensitive as his. As he puts it in a printed interview of a length proportional to the importance of his determination, “it is not pleasant to be what some may call a `social outcast.’ ” And so. “I am going to devote most of my time to the real estate business and to my racing stables. “

It is interesting to note-and especially our police and the District Attorney’s office should be regardful-that Mr. Rothstein’s decision to retire from what he calls “the gambling business” is entirely an outcome of his own present preferences and desires. For years and years he has lived and prospered on the profits of what “some may call” criminal activities, and the only penalty has been the linking of his name with all the current scandals!

One easily can imagine how annoying that would be to him, but more serious inconveniences not infrequently have been endured by persons who did not confess, even after conviction, their lawbreaking as frankly as does Mr. Rothstein. Evidently he has no fear that his revelation now will have effects any more troublesome than did his continual conduct of a business which the law professes to hold criminal.

There is a mystery here, but presumably the police will regard it with “that baffled look” which has come to be their usual, if not habitual, expression.

And while Fallon defended Sullivan and Attell (what a remarkable coincidence if Attell actually had operated independently of A. R.), he nonetheless acted suspiciously like Rothstein’s counsel. On October 4, he announced: “Rothstein turned the proposition [the fix] down hard, calling the man who made it all sorts of names.”