Rothstein (30 page)

Others claimed it was more than pertinency. “Have you any idea who might have been behind all these happenings?” Assistant Corporation Counsel Russell L. Tarbox asked Officer Stearne. Stearne didn’t hesitant: “Everybody figured that Arnold Rothstein had something to do with it.”

That didn’t amuse Kahn. “What everybody figures too often is something nobody knows,” he snapped. “Strike the last question and answer from the record.” Kahn recommended that judge Levy grant the injunction.

The Park View case served as prologue to an emerging political donnybrook. Tammany boss Charles E Murphy died in April 1924, and Governor Alfred E. Smith seized the opportunity to cajole Tammany into dumping his old enemy, the dull and dull-witted Mayor John F. “Red Mike” Hylan. Unfortunately, the best candidate the organization could recruit to challenge the incumbent was glib, brilliant-but morally flawed-State Senate Minority Leader James J. Walker, known not only for efforts to legalize boxing and Sunday baseball in the state and for his songwriting (“Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?”)-but also for his laziness, woman izing, and high living. Hylan wouldn’t go quietly, however, and faced Walker in a primary. At first “Red Mike” stepped gingerly around the Rothstein issue, claiming he was waging “a campaign against the underworld element” masterminded by a nefarious unnamed “Pool Room King.” Eventually he got around to naming names. Campaigning at Queens P.S. 93, the wooden Hylan abandoned his usual prepared texts to accuse new Tammany leader George W. Olvany of colluding both with transit interests (Red Mike’s bete noire) “and Arnold Rothstein, the big gambler.”

Olvany denied all: “Now that Mayor Hylan has stated that my alleged pool room king and big gambler advisor is Arnold Rothstein … I want to state that I do not know Arnold Rothstein …. that I have never met [him], that I have never had breakfast, lunch, dinner or supper with [him], and that I would not know [Rothstein] if I saw [him] on the street.”

Al Smith ridiculed (but didn’t actually deny) Hylan’s charges, pointing out that it wasn’t Rothstein who nominated Walker at Tammany Hall, but rather, Daniel E. Finn, a member of the mayor’s own cabinet. “The Mayor either does not know a gambler when he sees one or he does not know who made that nominating speech.”

Meanwhile Hylan grew obsessed with A. R.‘s influence. “Too many policemen are friends of Rothstein,” he informed a press conference, oblivious to the fact that he, not Walker, oversaw the NYPD. “Too many public officials are also his friends. That explains why places with which he is reported to be connected seem able to operate without molestation.”

The public didn’t care. Walker was the type of good-time, wisecracking mayor that 1920s New York demanded. He won the primary by 100,000 votes, carrying even Hylan’s home borough of Brooklyn. Even before the votes were in, judge Levy felt safe enough to do A. R.‘s bidding. Sanctimoniously sniffing “there is something rotten in Denmark,” Levy, nonetheless, issued a permanent injunction shielding the Park View Athletic Club. Rothstein had won again. Rothstein always won.

MANHATTAN IS AN ISLAND of neighborhoods, little worlds with a separate look and feel of their own, and Arnold Rothstein knew how to make money in each. Times Square. The Upper West Side. The Lower East Side. Wall Street. Fourteenth Street. Harlem.

The Garment District.

There was much to buy and sell in the Garment District. Protection. Suits. Coats. Dresses. Furs. Cops. Judges. And Arnold Rothstein excelled at merchandising the latter two commodities, excelled at bringing together New Yorkers of much influence and little conscience.

The garment industry was decades old, but still seemed new and unformed, waiting for organization and order. Competition was fierce, and management battled for every advantage. Garment shops battled each other for orders and customers. Management battled labor, and labor battled itself.

Industry working conditions were often abysmal. Factories were filthy, unhealthy, unsafe. Wives and mothers often worked at home, sewing garments and earning as little as four or five cents per hour. Women working in factories were frequently charged for the needles and lockers they used, the electricity their machines ran on, the very chairs they sat on-all at a profit to the owners. The advent of the “task” system, known today as “piecework,” only aggravated alreadyfrayed labor-management relations.

In the years before World War I, labor “peace” ended. In November 1909, 20,000 female shirtwaist workers, in the “Uprising of the 20,000,” went on strike in New York. Aided by sympathetic society women, they obtained some modest concessions, including free supplies, better sanitary conditions, a fifty-two-hour week. Then, in July 1910, 60,000 male cloakmakers followed their lead. On March 25, 1911, a fire at Greenwich Village’s Triangle Shirtwaist Company (one of the firms whose labor policies triggered the “Uprising of 20,000”) took the lives of 146 workers trapped in its unsafe Washington Square factory. The tragedy triggered national outrage and led to the passage of three dozen state labor laws. New unions, such as the Fur Workers National Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America sprang into existence.

Violence accompanied change. It wasn’t mere freelance, spontaneous violence. Garment-industry labor and management hired gangsters like Monk Eastman, Jack Zelig, Kid Twist, Pincus “Pinchy” Paul, and “Joe the Greaser” Rosenzweig to threaten, beat or, if necessary, kill their opposition. Ideology obsessed the Lower East Side, as arguments raged in every coffee house and tenement on the merits of socialism, anarchism, Zionism, or any number of isms and subisms. But most labor goons were practical and nonpartisan. Whoever paid, they worked for. Whoever didn’t, they blackjacked. Not surprisingly, Arnold Rothstein was present at the very creation of garmenttrade mob influence.

In 1914 police arrested Benjamin “Dopey Benny” Fein, a Big Jack Zelig protege now employing his muscle for organized labor, on extortion charges. Fein’s union employers turned to Rothstein for bail. A. R. told them to let Fein rot. Rothstein had his reasons. He had his own thugs who could replace Benny. And he could please his friends in Mayor John Purroy Mitchell’s new administration by sacrificing this prounion hoodlum.

The union obeyed A. R.‘s bidding, though Fein had been loyal to labor. (“My heart lay with the workers.”) In 1912 one garment industry boss offered Fein $15,000 to work management’s side of a strike, cracking labor heads. “He put fifteen $1,000 bills in front of me,” Fein recalled, “and I said to him, `No, sir, I won’t take it.’ I said … `I don’t double cross my friends.’ “

But Fein was also expensive. He demanded $12 per day for himself (his chief rival, “Joe the Greaser” Rosenzweig, received just $8) and $7.50 for each of his men. He also insisted on insurance for any on-the-job accidents. Unionists, who desired such benefits for themselves, proved less than enthusiastic about protecting their own “employees.”

Benny remained in the Tombs for months. In February 1915 he finally had enough. Now suspicious that the unions had not only connived in his continuing incarceration, but in entrapping him in the first place, Fein cut a deal with Manhattan District Attorney Charles Albert Perkins (Charles Whitman’s handpicked successor) to provide information about the violent methods his union patrons employed. Perkins summoned A. R. for questioning about financing these labor thugs-and let him go. A. R. got away, but Perkins indicted eleven hoodlums (including a number of “strong arm women” employed by Fein to terrorize female workers) along with twentythree officials of the United Hebrew Trades. Rothstein-who would not provide bail for Fein-now provided bail for all.

Unionists accused the new district attorney of participating in a gigantic “capitalist class” effort to “crush labor and its organizations.” When Perkins brought the first seven unionists to trial, defense attorney Morris Hillquit turned their plight into a crusade for social justice. All won acquittal. Before the hapless Perkins could try the rest of the accused, he was defeated in the November 1915 municipal elections. His successor, Edward Swann-elected with strong needle-trade union support-abandoned the remaining indictments.

The entire episode proved messier than Rothstein envisioned, but still he emerged profitably. Fein abandoned labor racketeering (going into garment manufacturing), and A. R. began inserting his own men into the vacuum left by Fein’s network. A. R. wasn’t about to lead these new troops into battle personally. That wasn’t his style-and he had more interesting activities, anyway. He placed “Little Augie” Orgen, formerly Fein’s henchman, in charge of labor racketeering. Orgen shared little of Benny’s old working-class sympathies, strong arming alternately for labor and management-sometimes even during the same strike.

Orgen (and by extension Rothstein) was also an equal-opportunity employer. Previous city gangs had been largely ethnic-all Irish, Jewish, or Italian. Orgen employed fellow Jews such as Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro, but also Irish (the Diamond brothers, Legs and Eddie), and Italians (Lucky Luciano) as his goons. More impressive than the polyglot nature of his workforce, however, was its sheer viciousness, resolve, and talent.

Most thugs involved in strong-arming labor or management, saw themselves as just that: thugs. But not A. R. He maintained an air of detached respectability in even the most nefarious enterprises. In 1922, he raised this skill to its apogee. The arbitration movement was gaining a certain vogue in America, and, if Rothstein had been anything in his career, he had been an arbitrator. So when he noticed an organization called the Arbitration Society of America taking shape, he saw it might contain a rather large niche for himself.

The ASA possessed national prestige, numbering among its supporters Sears, Roebuck president Julius Rosenwald, former United States Senator James Aloysius O’Gorman (D-NY), and numerous New York business leaders. Before finding a permanent home for its operations, however, it received A. R.‘s offer of free space at his 45-47 West 57th Street office building. For good measure, he enclosed a $500 check for his ASA dues. A. R. modestly suggested the building could even be renamed the “Arbitration Society Building”or, more amusingly (for a Rothstein-owned property), “The Hall of Justice.”

Nineteen twenty-six saw Arnold Rothstein play pivotal roles in two major garment-district strikes. Their story originated years before, half a world away. In 1917, V. I. Lenin took power in Russia, fueling hopes of world revolution. Communist governments briefly ruled Hungary and Bavaria. Strikes swept Western Europe and the United States. There was no need for compromise. No need to waste time infiltrating like-minded groups to further the Revolution. Worker and peasant rule seemed at hand.

In the spring of 1920, however, Lenin reevaluated his position. His treatise Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder derided those thought it unnecessary to infiltrate bourgeois institutions. When the Red Army met defeat at Warsaw in August 1920, it only validated his opinions. The Bolsheviks hoped their conquest of Poland would begin an easy westward march through Europe. But when the Poles humiliated the Red Army, Lenin realized that worldwide Communist rule wasn’t about to happen soon. He changed tactics.

Moscow ordered its fledgling American Communist Party to infiltrate the union movement. Party operatives, such as party General Secretary Charles E Ruthenberg, Russian-born Maurice L. Malkin, and Italian-born Eneo Sormenti, began organizing New York’s unions, with emphasis on the Garment District. Like unionists and bosses before them, they turned to hired muscle for help. Their early henchmen included Little Augie Pisano (ne Anthony Carfano) and Legs Diamond. Among unions coveted by the Party was the Fur Workers, and in late 1924 the Party hired the firm of Goodman & Snitkin. The attorneys offered highly practical advice: See Arnold Rothstein.

Maurice Malkin attended the Communist Party’s leaders’ first meeting with A. R.:

Rothstein promised to loan the Communist Party $1,775,000 at a rate of interest exceeding 25 percent. Repayment of the loan was guaranteed by Amtorg, the Russian-American Trading Corporation, which had recently opened offices on lower Broadway.

Rothstein also agreed to put us in touch with police officials and Magistrates who were on his regular payroll. As the Communist organizer of the strike we planned, I became the paymaster for these corrupt cops and judges who were to look the other way when the rough stuff started.

We were particularly eager to secure the aid, or at least the neutrality, of police in the areas where the fur industry was located (the Mercer Street, Fifth, West 30th and 47th Street stations). We received the assurance of many police that they would not take action against our gang. In cases where newspaper publicity might make booking a necessity, we had the assurance of the Magistrates that charges would be quietly disposed of.

Whether A. R. felt sympathetic to his new clients, we’ll never know. If he had any consideration for working people in general, we’ll never know. To Arnold Rothstein, everything was a business. “Rothstein was no Communist,” said Malkin. “He was charging us a high rate of interest and he was in it for what he could make out of it.”

Five thousand members of the Communist-led International Fur Workers Union struck in February 1926. The union’s playbook echoed Rothstein’s: bribe as many cops and judges as you could. Malkin revealed that $100,000 went to the police, and “between $45,000 and $50,000 was paid to [Detective] Johnny Broderick, head of the Industrial Squad.”

Non-Communists in the union movement weren’t blind to Rothstein’s involvement with their Marxist-Leninist enemies. American Federation of Labor Vice President Matthew Woll wrote Mayor Walker:

It is a common rumor, if not an understanding throughout the fur district, that “police protection” has been assured the Communist leaders and sympathizers. It is said that nearly ten days before the beginning of the present reign of terror, one Arnold Rothstein, said to be a famous or infamous gambler, had been the means of fixing the police in behalf of the Communists.

Walker did nothing to investigate charges of police payoffs, nothing to investigate Tammany’s friend Arnold Rothstein.