Rothstein (33 page)

Nicky unleashed an unbridled tirade against Gertie Vanderbilt and against his attorney’s diligence, concluding with the accusation that Fallon should have delivered an acquittal, not a mistrial. Infuriated, Fallon shot back. “Look here. You don’t know a thing about law, and less about morals. You were lucky to get off as well as you did. If you don’t like it, you can get another attorney.”

They continued on in this vein until Arnstein yelled. “To hell with you and her! If you want to bitch up your life, go ahead. But I’m damned if you’ll bitch mine up. I don’t mind how much you drink or chase around, but when you go off your nut about this woman, how in hell-”

And with that, Bill Fallon walked off the case.

He abandoned Nicky’s defense to his now-former partner, Eugene McGee (McGee broke up the firm when Fallon jettisoned Arnstein.) In Arnstein’s second trial, McGee faced William Lahey, the District of Columbia’s toughest federal prosecutor, and never being much of a courtroom presence, McGee found himself overmatched. Swallowing his pride, he called Fallon for advice: Should Nicky take the stand? The Great Mouthpiece said no, and McGee listened. It was bad advice. The jury brought in a verdict of guilty. “Fallon did this to me,” Arnstein muttered. “Fallon sent me into this. Goddamn that woman! “

Star prosecution witness Joe Gluck had sworn he received no promises of immunity. Yet, he and his brother Irving, another defendant, received suspended sentences. The news outraged presiding Judge Gould, and might well have caused him to free the accused had it not outraged him so much so that on May 20, 1921-the day of Nicky Arnstein’s sentencing-he dropped dead of a heart attack.

Gould’s replacement, judge Frederick L. Siddons, sentenced Arnstein to two years in Leavenworth. Many believed that had Arnstein taken the stand in his own defense, Siddons would have extended mercy to him. Nicky Arnstein spoke more truth than he knew when fumed: “Fallon did this to me.”

Arnstein also faced charges in Manhattan, and Assistant District Attorney John T. Dooling looked forward to bringing them to court: “The real story of the big bond robbery has never really been told, but when Arnstein and his crowd are tried in New York it will be known. There are more ends to this conspiracy and robbery than any one unfamiliar with it imagines.”

The “real story,” of course, led to Arnold Rothstein. However, neither John Dooling nor any member of the district attorney’s staff would ever present it to any jury.

Dooling had difficulties of his own. Tammany Hall had difficulties of its own. Tammany overlord Charles E Murphy and West Harlem district leader Jimmy Hines detested each other. After Murphy tried and failed to oust Hines from his district position, Hines (assisted by his attorney Joseph E Shalleck, a Fallon protege) retaliated, using his considerable influence within the judicial system to wrest control of a sitting grand jury. The Almirall grand jury (so called after foreman, Raymond E Almirall) was originally empaneled to probe postwar radicalism. Instead it turned into the ultimate runaway grand jury, investigating not only Charlie Murphy, but also the district attorney’s office itself, specifically Dooling and fellow Assistant District Attorney James E. Smith. Charges of corruption against Dooling were dropped eventually-but he paid a price for peering too closely into Arnold Rothstein’s business-paid a price and learned a lesson.

N JUNE 1928 A. R. placed his hand upon a bible, swore to tell the truth, and proceeded to perjure himself: “I don’t bet on football or boxing.”

He didn’t lie about football. Football made him uncomfortable. Twenty-two men running around in a dozen different directions. Too many variables; too much to fix. But A. R. lied about boxing. In his crowd, boxers were everywhere. Everyone followed boxing. Everyone bet on boxing.

Boxing meant big money. Not for everyone, but certainly to A. R. and his political friends, people who protected you and made things happen or not happen. Boxing was an enterprise the law often frowned on, and when that happened those making or enforcing the law often grew rich-especially in Tammany’s New York.

Politicians controlled boxing more than any other sport-and profited from their influence. Throughout the 1920s, the New York State Boxing Commission denied Jack Dempsey a license-unless he agreed to fight talented black challenger Harry Wills. The commission had defensible overt reasons: Dempsey was sitting on his championship. Wills, while not a great fighter, was decent enough to earn a title fight. Dempsey had certainly fought worse. But more to the point was that certain Tammany politicians owned a significant portion of Mr. Wills.

Arnold Rothstein’s political connections proved very handy. A fellow named Billy Gibson, who managed some up-and-coming fighters, wanted a license to promote fights. He went to Rothstein. Rothstein went to Tammany’s “Big Tom” Foley, and everything was taken care of. Rothstein’s generosity had a price. Gibson wisely tendered A. R. a significant token of gratitude: 10 percent of young lightweight Benny Leonard and all his earnings.

In May 1917, Leonard won the championship. In January 1921, at Madison Square Garden, he defended his title against Richie Mitchell, a Wisconsin boy Benny had fought just a month before becoming champion. In 1917, Leonard knocked Mitchell out in the seventh. Benny, now confident he could dispatch Mitchell in round one, advised A. R. to bet $25,000 on the proposition. In the first two minutes, Leonard sent Mitchell to the canvas three times. Then Mitchell rebounded, slamming Benny with a right to the stomach and a hard left to the jaw. Leonard crumpled, and only the bell rescued him from oblivion. Struggling through the next three rounds, he eventually knocked out Mitchell in the sixth. But Leonard worried: What would Arnold say? More important: What would Arnold do?

In those days, however, Rothstein’s luck remained near-perfect. Relax, A. R. informed Benny. I never had a chance to place that bet.

Middleweight champion Harry “The Human Windmill” Greb was one of the dirtiest fighters ever. On the night of July 2, 1925, before a 40,000-fan Polo Grounds crowd, he defended his title against welterweight champ Mickey “The Toy Bulldog” Walker. His training camp featured as many dames as sparring partners-and Greb spent evenings enjoying himself in Manhattan’s speakeasies. At 2:00 A.M. the night before the fight, A. R. and fellow gamblers Sam Boston and Mike Best loitered in front of Lindy’s. A careening Yellow Cab pulled to a halt, and out fell drunken Harry Greb. Two chorus girls bounded out and packed Harry back in before the vehicle sped away.

Arnold Rothstein had sizable money on Mr. Greb, as did Boston and Best. Boston observed, “That bum don’t have a chance. You can’t drink and love all night and expect to lick a guy like Mickey Walker twenty-four hours later.” Boston, Best, and Rothstein all determined to quickly hedge their bets by getting some cash down on Walker.

As Greb climbed into the ring, he looked considerably better. “Hey Harry, how do you feel?” yelled one writer. “Great,” the middleweight champ responded. “How did those gamblers like my act last night?” Greb fought his usual dirty fight and could have been disqualified any number of times. But he wasn’t and outpointed Walker in fourteen rounds. He remained middleweight champion of the world, had outsmarted the great Arnold Rothstein-and most likely profited immensely in the bargain.

It’s unlikely that Greb staged his little burlesque merely for fun. Presumably, the champ and his friends had money down on him. But the odds weren’t very good. After all, A. R. had money down on Harry. So did Boston and Best. So did a lot of people. But Greb’s performance caused Rothstein, Boston, and Best-three of the city’s smartest gamblers-to shift their money to Walker. When they did, others followed. The odds shifted. Greb and company moved in-and cleaned up.

In September 1925, Mickey Walker and Californian Dave Shade opposed each other at Yankee Stadium. Shade, like Greb, was a big, dirty fighter. Like Greb, he hammered Walker. Everyone in the stadium awarded the decision to Shade-except the judges. They gave it to “The Toy Bulldog.” In the process, they enriched Arnold Rothstein. The next day’s newspapers complained that A. R. won $60,000 on the refs’ dubious judgment. Not true, corrected Arnold: he won $80,000.

Benny Leonard. Harry Greb. Mickey Walker. All had their following, but the biggest boxer of the Roaring Twenties, perhaps the biggest of all time-was former hobo and barroom fighter Jack Dempsey. The Manassa Mauler didn’t defeat opponents, he demolished them-when he found ones willing to fight. When, in July 1919, the 6′1″, 187-pound Dempsey took the title from 6′6″, 245 pound Jess Willard, he slammed The Pottawatomie Giant to the canvas seven times in the first round alone, shattering his jaw, breaking two ribs, closing his eye, damaging the hearing in one ear, and knocking out four teeth. Jack Dempsey fought to do more than just win.

Dempsey defeated Luis “The Wild Bull of the Pampas” Firpo in a brutal 1923 slugfest, and then took life easy. He avoided fighting Harry Willis, made movies, traveled extensively in Europe (in the company of such ladies as Peggy Hopkins Joyce). In 1925 he married money-hungry Hollywood actress Estelle Taylor, and that union only increased his disinclination to fight.

In September 1926, Dempsey finally fought again, against Gene Tunney, an ex-Marine from the sidewalks of Greenwich Village but, nonetheless, a fellow possessing annoying intellectual pretensions. Tunney bragged of how much he adored Shakespeare. In training for his challenge to Dempsey, he ostentatiously revealed that he took time to read Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. Tunney, never much of a puncher, was a wonderful scientific boxer, and promoter Tex Rickard booked a Dempsey-Tunney match for Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial Stadium. The hungry boxing public would have paid to see Dempsey fight the paunchy, middle-aged Rickard. To see Dempsey versus Tunney, 120,757 fans paid a $1.8 million gate. (The hot-ticket Willard fight had drawn just 20,000 fans and a $450,000 gate.)

Oddsmakers predicted Dempsey’s easy victory. But on the morning of the fight, Dempsey bodyguard Mike Trent gave the champ a small glass of olive oil, a habit meant to aid digestion. Dempsey suffered something akin to food poisoning. On weigh-in, a pallid, wobbly champion was in no real shape to fight-particularly in the driving rainstorm that greeted both fighters at outdoor Sesquicentennial Stadium. Tunney easily took all ten rounds.

Writer Ring Lardner (who lost $500 on Dempsey) was among the many with suspicions. Damon Runyon didn’t know what to think, but the whole setup bothered him. If there was a fix, it’s unlikely Dempsey tanked voluntarily. He wasn’t that kind of a fighter, that kind of a man. This we know. But we also know that Abe Attell and Arnold Rothstein were on the scene, among the handful of observers predicting a Tunney victory. A. R., prominent at ringside, won a fortune on the longshot, Tunney. Attell was everywhere.

Events are as notoriously hazy as the Black Sox scandal. Some say Attell acted in Philadelphia as Rothstein’s agent. Some say Attell brokered the whole deal. Others say it all began when Tunney’s manager, Billy Gibson, approached A. R. Billy Gibson was, of course, very used to transacting business with Arnold Rothstein.

Both versions agree on this: Just days before the fight, Gibson and Tunney signed away 20 percent of all of Tunney’s future winnings to Philadelphia gang lord and sometime fight promoter Maxie “Boo Boo” Hoff. But the first version begins like this: Several days before the fight, Attell drove to Tunney’s Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania training camp. After all, everybody knew the Little Champ, and no one outside organized baseball seemed to mind that he had once fixed a World Series.

The Little Champ had kept busy since escaping punishment. In 1921 he opened an opulent women’s shoe store, the Ming Toy Bootery, next door to Broadway’s Roseland Ballroom. The following May, a watchman felt a drop of something fall upon his hand. It was gasoline, oozing from a five-gallon can, surrounded by some oilsoaked newspapers, in the store’s stairway. Abe claimed old enemies were attempting to “frame” him. “There is no reason I should set the store on fire,” he explained. “We are making money, and the business is in good financial condition.” The Ming Toy entered receivership that July. Later Abe moved into overt illegality, operating the Peacock Club, a West 48th Street speakeasy.

Attell shared more than a passing acquaintance with Tunney. They were close friends. In May 1923 Tunney lost to Harry Greb, his only defeat in sixty-eight pro bouts, absorbing a terrific beating and literally losing a quart of blood. Attell, watching from Tunney’s corner, rushed to a nearby drugstore and returned with enough adrenaline chloride to staunch Tunney’s bleeding. Grantland Rice, for one, always believed Attell saved Tunney’s life. At Sesquicentennial Stadium against Dempsey, Abe Attell was at Billy Gibson’s side before the fightand in Tunney’s dressing room afterward. It was Abe Attell who dressed the new champ before he went back out into the world.

But that’s getting ahead of our story. When Attell visited Tunney’s Stroudsburg training camp, Tunney and Gibson told him they needed to repay Tex Rickard $20,000 he had advanced for Tunney’s training-but were flat broke. Kindly sort that he was, Attell approached Boo Boo Hoff for the cash (Gibson couldn’t go to Hoff; he hadn’t spoken to him for years after reneging on booking Benny Leonard at South Philadelphia’s Shetzline Park). The day before the fight, Hoff provided $20,000 in exchange for 20 percent of Tunney’s future earnings as champion.

Truth is often stranger than fiction, but this tale is stranger beyond any norm. Why wouldn’t Rickard wait another day, after Tunney collected his purse, for his $20,000? Why did Gibson have to deal with Hoff? Why couldn’t he approach an old friend like, say, Arnold Rothstein-rather than an old enemy like Hoff? And what about the loan’s peculiar conditions: If Tunney lost, Hoff received his $20,000 backinterest free. If-and only if-Tunney won, Hoff received 20 percent of his earnings for the length of his championship. Hoff’s $20,000 loan might return as much as $400,000. What did Hoff provide beside $20,000?

The other version of events, directly involving Rothstein, makes little more sense-but hints at the real story, something far more sinister. One night at Lindy’s, a worried Billy Gibson approached A. R. Gibson had heard that powerful interests would prevent a Tunney victory. Since very few people-except for Abe Attell-gave Tunney much chance, Gibson’s comments were mystifying. Powerful interests wouldn’t stop Tunney, Jack Dempsey’s fists would.