Rothstein (34 page)

A. R. asked who was responsible. Gibson responded vaguely: “I just got the word.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Rothstein replied, calling Hoff the next day. All of A. R.‘s worlds were small worlds. Rothstein and Hoff had done business in bootleg liquor in 1921. “Gibson’s my pal,” he told Boo Boo. “I want you to protect him.”

“Tell him to see me,” Hoff replied.

Gibson met Hoff in Philadelphia. On his return to New York, Billy informed A. R. “Boo Boo says it’s all right. Can he make good?” Rothstein assured Gibson he could. Later Hoff told A. R., “I sent the word out. This is my territory and what I say goes. I’m betting Tunney.” With that assurance Rothstein bet $125,000 on Tunney at four-to-one odds.

That translated into a $500,000 payoff.

A. R. wouldn’t plunge $125,000 on anyone’s say-so-unless Mr. Anyone had taken very positive and effective actions to affect the outcome. And that’s what Jack Dempsey would soon allege. After fighting a controversial tune-up against Jack Sharkey, Dempsey signed for a Tunney rematch, but before lacing up his gloves the Manassa Mauler accused Hoff, Attell (“the tool of a big New York gambling clique”), and Gibson of having worked to rig the first fight.

Dempsey published an extraordinary open letter to Tunney in the Chicago Herald and Examiner, charging that on reaching Philadelphia he was told “there’s something phony about this fight.” He asked Tunney for:

a little explanation to the public and to me-about all the angles involved in that suit which … Hoff fired at you [Hoff f and Tunney were already wrangling about the terms of their agreement].

I pressed the point and was told that some sort of deal had been made whereby somebody was going to steal my title for you: that when I went into the ring I didn’t have a chance to win unless I knocked you out by hitting you on the top of the head-and that I might get disqualified even then.

I was told that somebody with some sort of political power-of power in boxing affairs in Philadelphia-was going to see to it that a referee and one of the judges would be there to assist you; that if we both were on our feet at the end of the tenth that I’d lose the decision; that if I hit you at any point lower than the top of your head and dropped you, that somebody would yell “foul!” in your behalf.

Dempsey continued, explaining how betting turned heavily in Tunney’s favor-until Tommy Reilly, “a 100 percent square-shooter,” was chosen to referee. Still, Jack wanted to know:

What was the meaning of the second conference you had with Abe Attell; what was the meaning of Gibson conferring with Attell; what was the meaning of Attell seeing Hoff in [sic] behalf of you both? And, finally, what was the meaning of the secret conference you and Gibson had with Hoff on the evening of fight day, after which the gamblers passed out the word, “Sink the ship on Tunney: he can’t lose.”

As the story comes to me, Attell went to see you in your camp at Stroudsburg. After a lengthy conference with you he raced back to Philadelphia with your pure and innocent manager, Billy Gibson. And then Attell hurried along and had a meeting with Hoff.

As I understand it, Hoff is something of a political power in Philadelphia. He is supposed to be a rather mighty figure in boxing affairs, and the old saying goes that “Whatever `Boo Boo’ wants-well, that’s what `Boo Boo’ gets. “

Attell, the tool for the gambling clique; “Boo Boo” Hoff, the political and boxing power in Philadelphia; and Gibson, your manager, had various meetings, all secret. And then you arrived in Philadelphia for the next chapter in the story finds you in a meeting with Hoff and Gibson-one that lasted until about 6 on the fight night.

Since then I learned that some sort of written contract was entered into involving Hoff, Gibson and yourself. Stories about it differ considerably. But the document itself has been made public. It strikes me as a strange document-one that puzzles the public as it puzzles me, and it is one that I think should be explained.

The contract stated, in substance, that Gibson borrowed $20,000 from Hoff and that Gibson agreed to pay back the $20,000 and nothing else-if you did not win the fight. But it contains a peculiar clause to the effect that if you won the fight Gibson was to pay back Hoff the $20,000 and, as a sort of bonus or something like that, that you were to give Hoff 20 percent of all your earnings as champion. You signed as a party to the agreement.

Can’t we all have a little explanation about this?

You knew that if you won the title it would be worth at least $1,000,000 to you. Why were you agreeable to paying Hoff approximately $200,000 bonus for a loan of $20,000? What could Hoff do to help you on to victory that would be worth $200,000?

I think that you did make some explanation to the public like this, as regards the agreement:

“Gibson needed $20,000 to put through some real estate deal in New York and borrowed $20,000 from Hoffthat’s all there was to it.”

It always has seemed to me very strange that Gibson, with your sanction would have to borrow $20,000 from Hoff on fight night and agree to give Hoff about $200,000 possible when it would have been a simple matter for you or Gibson to borrow the money from Tex Rickard without a bonus agreement.

Reporters at Tunney’s Cedar Crest Country Club training camp, demanded answers. They got pure Tunney in response. “I will not dignify these charges with a denial,” he sniffed. “I have more important things to do. I am currently reading Of Human Bondage and I am going to return promptly to Mr. Maugham’s excellent work.”

The press didn’t care about Somerset Maugham. They asked again. “Utter trash,” Tunney replied. “At best, a cheap appeal for public sympathy. I have asked my attorney, Mr. Dudley Field Malone, to review these false allegations to see if they are actionable.”

Tunney finally did answer, issuing his own written statement. It didn’t go much beyond his original responses:

An open letter to Jack Dempsey:

My Dear Dempsey:

Your open letter to me has been brought to my attention.

My reaction is to ignore it and its evident trash completely.

However, I cannot resist saying that I consider it a cheap appeal for public sympathy.

Do you think this is sportsmanlike?

Gene Tunney

P.S.-I might add that I wrote this letter myself.

In boxing fists beat words. After Dempsey and Tunney entered the ring in Chicago’s massive Soldier Field, the public forgot any controversy surrounding their Philadelphia bout. And when Soldier Field produced the immortal “long count,” fans lost all interest in the original fightand in what Messrs. Attell and Rothstein might have pulled off.

Dempsey possessed more energy than in their first fight, but Tunney easily maintained control for six rounds. In the seventh, Dempsey connected with a brutal left hook to the chin. As Tunney crumpled, Jack landed four more punches to his head. Referee Dave Barry (a late addition, replacing a Capone-favored referee) counted to “six” over Tunney, before noticing Dempsey hadn’t retreated to a neutral corner as required by newly adopted Illinois Boxing Commission rules. Barry should have resumed counting at “seven.” He began at “one.” His infamous “long count” allowed the battered Tunney eighteen seconds before getting up from the canvas and kept him in the fight.

Something little noticed-but equally suspicious-happened in the next round. A refreshed Tunney landed a glancing blow that knocked the off-balance Dempsey to the canvas. The Manassa Mauler jumped to his feet at Barry’s count of “one.” But Barry shouldn’t have been counting at all. Gene Tunney was not in a neutral corner.

Who, indeed, could remember what had happened in Philadelphia? That was all so tame.

Or so it appeared. Years later, Abe Attell confided details of the two Dempsey-Tunney fights to famed “fight doctor” Ferdie Pachecho. He told of Hoff’s interest in Tunney and of Capone’s in Dempsey. The Chicago gangland boss loved Jack Dempsey. Scarface even reassured Jack he’d do whatever he could to assist the Manassa Mauler regain his title. Dempsey didn’t want that kind of “help,” and had the courage to tell him so. Capone backed down. Even Al Capone backed down from Jack Dempsey.

“In those days,” Attell informed Pacheco, “the mob boys took over cities as their territories. The Italians had Chicago; the Jews had Philly and some parts of Detroit.” Then Attell assumed the air of one revealing a great secret, that he was conveying what really happened in those two titanic fights: “What you had was this, Doc: It was the Italians against the Jews. The Jews won!”

Yes. One, in particular, took home $500,000.

A. R. knew more about boxing than he let on in court, and the boxing world knew quite a bit about him. In the fall of 1928 former New York American reporter Gene Fowler was doing publicity work for Tex Rickard. One day Rickard sat in his Madison Square Garden office, in a chair made of cattle horns, musing about the dangers of the stock market. Fowler wanted to know why he didn’t get out.

“Because I’m a gambler, that’s why,” Rickard shot back. “I play percentages, but I’m not a sure-thing gambler, like Arnold Rothstein. That ain’t gambling, and it ain’t adventure. I’m the kind of a gambler who gambles, and don’t look to a `fix’ to win. You know something? Rothstein is going to get hisself killed.”

Fowler asked if Tex had inside information.

“Yes and no,” Rickard responded. “You don’t need inside information down where I come from. A real gambler like me, a feller who likes it like some fellers love booze or women, and not just because it’s a marked-card deal or a fix, well, we got hunches, and we play ‘em. I knew all the time up in Alaska I’d never get shot. Me? I play percentage, but no fixing.”

Fowler kept asking what Rickard really knew, but Tex kept bobbing and weaving like the fighters he managed. Finally he got more specific. “It’s my guess that Rothstein will be shot before the year is out,” he ended the conversation. “He’s been askin’ for it. They tell me he’s been mighty slow lately makin’ good on some big losses in the floatin’ card games.”

Rickard’s prophecy would soon come true.

And when it did, A. R.‘s private papers revealed a secret. Among the people hiding the dead man’s assets were his wife, his mistress, his office functionaries, and his Broadway henchmen. Only one name came as a real surprise: “William Gibson of No. 505 Fifth Avenue.”

Billy Gibson … Gene Tunney’s manager.

ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN COULD EASILY HAVE walked away from gambling and loansharking and entered the world of legitimate business. In 1912 he was offered a $25,000-per year position as a stockbroker. He said no. Not that he ever wished to leave the demimonde of gambling. Not that he ever considered $25,000 a year enough money.

A. R. claimed that gamblers got a fairer shake in casinos than anybody did on Wall Street-and he wasn’t necessarily wrong. Wall Street could be as crooked as any Bowery stuss parlor or Broadway floating crap game. Disreputable brokers-often career con menpeddled worthless stocks, manipulated prices, and swindled millions from investors. Regulatory oversight barely existed. The federal government occasionally prosecuted brokers for mail fraud, but that was about it. Investors relied on local and state officials for protection. On Wall Street, that meant Tammany district attorneys and Tammanyinfluenced governors.

As Arnold Rothstein would say, “God help them.”

Wall Street scams often involved mining stock. Gold. Silver. Copper. Platinum. It didn’t matter. Mining was an ideal cover for fraud. There might be a fortune underground. There might not. Who knew? With manufacturing or shipping, you either had a factory or a ship, or you didn’t. Either you had merchandise or cargo or passengers, or you didn’t. With mining, there might be rich veins of gold underground-or there might not. You didn’t know until you put your money down.

Some of Arnold Rothstein’s best friends-strike that, his closest associates, he didn’t have, or want, friends-operated their own fraudulent brokerage houses. George Graham Rice. Charles Stoneham. Edward Markel Fuller. W. Frank McGee. Dandy Phil Kastel. If stock fraud was your line of work, it paid to know people like Rothstein, who could provide the necessary connections at Tammany Hall.

As the twentieth century began, an uneducated little Lower East Side hoodlum named Jacob Simon Herzig left Elmira Reformatory. Renaming himself George Graham Rice, he soon invented the racing tip sheet: but after a quarter-million-dollar miscalculation at a New Orleans track, Rice switched to peddling fraudulent mining stock. He again went to prison. In 1914, seemingly reformed, he penned his memoir, My Adventures with Your Money, warning investors:

You are a member of a race of gamblers. The instinct to speculate dominates you. You feel that you simply must take a chance. You can’t win, yet you are going to speculate and continue to speculate-and to lose. Lotteries, faro, roulette, and horse race betting being illegal, you play the stock game. In the stock game the cards (quotations or market fluctuations) are shuffled and riffled and stacked behind your back, after the dealer (the manipulator) knows on what side you have placed your bet, and you haven’t got a chance. When you and your brother gamblers are long of stocks in thinly margined accounts with brokers, the market is manipulated down, and when you are short of them, the prices are manipulated up.

Going straight didn’t interest Rice, for in many ways he resembled A. R. “Rice was unquestionably born with an extraordinary intellect,” noted one history of 1920s stock fraud. “With it he had imagination, a colossal nerve and an irrepressible ego. He was inspired not so much by ambition, and the desire for money as he was to prove that he, George Graham Rice, could accomplish anything he chose.”

Thus, Arnold Rothstein and George Graham Rice maintained a warm relationship, with A. R. spending a great deal of time with Rice (“a very interesting and unusual man, a brilliant and fascinating conversationalist” in Carolyn Rothstein’s words) and his equally shady attorneys.

But Rice and Rothstein did more than talk shop at the Cafe Madrid and various Broadway haunts. The Big Bankroll viewed Rice as a distinguished elder statesman in the art of fleecing suckers. And, putting sentiment aside, he saw him as a new source of profits and provided him with advice-and cash-to finance his operations. He also served as Rice’s landlord, renting him a floor of his 28-30 West 57th Street office building. Later, when business boomed, Rice rented a whole loft building on East 17th Street from A. R. “I remember,” wrote Carolyn Rothstein, “his outgoing mail was taken from his offices in great burlap bags.”