Rothstein (39 page)

Carolyn responded noncommittally, not really knowing what to say.

He had a request, one he didn’t have to make, but he asked anyway: “I wonder if you’d mind if I went to the funeral.”

“Why, certainly not.”

“I think I should go.”

And so he did-getting up early to do it, but he went-and then, as usual, he went to the track.

On Christmas Eve 1927, Carolyn Rothstein sailed for Europe, bound for Paris, London, and the Riviera, not returning until October 16, 1928. When she did, she found a different Rothstein, one worried about money, with his back to the wall.

All was far from right in the world of Arnold Rothstein. For years, everything he touched-gambling, booze, dope, real estate, loansharking, fencing stolen goods-yielded immense profits. Now the gods of chance turned against him.

But it was not all luck. Something inside him had changed. “When I first knew him,” his trainer Max Hirsch once noted, “he impressed me as a level-headed, clean-living man, and I never met anyone who had such a quick knack for figures. He made sense in everything he said. And then, suddenly, he began to act strange and I suspected maybe he was taking dope.”

It wasn’t dope, but it might as well have been. It was greed.

Real estate speculation cost him a fortune. Late in A. R.‘s life, an unlikely fellow joined the Rothstein entourage. Most of Arnold’s cronies were New Yorkers, by birth or longevity. Indiana-born William Wellman was neither. At a very young age, he managed Barney Oldfield, the race-car driver. A bit later, he worked as Madison Square Garden’s assistant manager. Somewhere along the way, he divined that Detroit’s version of the Garden-the Coliseumpossessed financial possibilities. Wellman advised. Rothstein invested.

Wellman soon discovered that local political forces were skimming potential profits-and would continue to do so. Wellman summoned up his courage and advised Rothstein of his error, but also devised a way for A. R. to escape without loss. Rather than being angry for being lured into such a scheme in the first place, Arnold brought Wellman to New York to manage his growing real estate empire, which included not only numerous Manhattan apartment houses and office buildings, but also the new $400,000 Cedar Point Golf Course in Woodmere, Long Island.

Wellman had A. R.‘s confidence, but, nonetheless, took pains to approach him gingerly, never talking business with him in the afternoon when Rothstein was fresh out of bed. “He is too full of life [at 3:00 P.M.], too keen and too nervous for me to try to sell him anything now. Wait until midnight at Lindy’s when his business edge has worn off, and he is tired and almost normally human. Then I can talk to Arnold Rothstein the human being and not the master mind.”

It would have been better for A. R. if Wellman had spoken to him in early afternoons. Wellman’s worst idea was the development of a 120-acre section of Maspeth, Queens into a variety of ill-chosen uses: a 200-unit housing development, a golf course, a greyhound track, and even a motor speedway. Wellman supposedly convinced Rothstein of the profitability of each venture, and Rothstein added his own angles: letting the mortgage on each home, selling insurance to each inhabitant of what he named juniper Park.

It was a money pit.

The land cost $400,000. Each week for almost three years, A. R. peeled off $5,000 in cash for Wellman, but he could never bring himself to drive to Maspeth. If he had, he would have seen how the grandstand for the dog track had collapsed. He would have seen hideous, badly built houses; building supplies rotting unprotected in open fields and on weed-infested front yards.

Finally he asked Carolyn to visit and report back to him. She saw it all and, fearing A. R.‘s wrath, nonetheless told the truth. Arnold now went to the location himself. Emerging from his limousine, the first sight greeting him was a hot-water heater sitting on a front lawn. Other sights weren’t much better. He returned to his car and ordered his chauffeur back to Manhattan-where he didn’t want to talk about it with his wife. The episode ultimately cost him over $1 million.

His gambling luck also vanished. On Memorial Day 1928, A. R. attended Belmont, not intending to do much betting. In the first race he lost $2,000 on the favorite. He vowed to recoup on the next race and walk away. He lost. Eventually A. R. bet all six races. He lost all six, dropping $130,000. He never lived to pay off.

That was just the beginning. Police investigating the manufacture of crooked roulette wheels traced one to a Rothstein-financed gambling house in suburban Nassau County. They raided it and jailed its staff. Later they traced more crooked wheels to Chicago, Cleveland, and Cincinnati-all to Rothstein-backed houses.

He lost $11,000 to entertainer Lou Clayton (of Clayton, Jackson, and Durante), and again neglected to pay. Clayton threatened to spread word on Broadway of Rothstein the “welsher.” A. R. hated being called that-certainly not for a mere eleven grand-and finally paid.

A. R. not only parted with his luck, he began to part with his intellect, his judgment, his impeccable sense of calculation.

Carolyn Rothstein traced her husband’s downfall to close association with the Diamond brothers, Legs and Eddie. Arnold found the vicious Diamond brothers worth keeping around-allegedly compensating them $50,000 annually as bodyguards. ($30,000 for Legs; $20,000 for Eddie.) Their tenure had begun when A. R. learned that Chicago gangster Eugene “Red” McLaughlin planned to kidnap him for $100,000 ransom. McLaughlin never made it to New York. Cook County authorities found his body in a drainage ditch outside Chicago.

Perhaps Carolyn was right. Perhaps she wasn’t, but the Diamonds’ presence was indicative of a change in Arnold Rothstein. Once, he traveled in wealthy and reasonably respectable circles, with newspapermen and stockbrokers and steel barons. Increasingly now he surrounded himself with crude gunmen, labor racketeers, and narcotics smugglers and peddlers-the Diamonds, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky. Carolyn Rothstein believed that association with Legs and Eddie Diamond marked A. R.‘s “real beginning of the end.”

“The Diamonds,” she would write, “figured more and more prominently in my husband’s affairs, until finally, [they] and others of the underworld were his constant companions, instead of casual and useful acquaintances as had once been the case.”

Whatever-or whoever-it was, something inexplicable now drove him, pushing him to destruction. He didn’t need to gamble, to take risks, but he did. And he lost-a lot. Nicky Arnstein warned A. R. He couldn’t stop. “Why do you eat every day?” he told Nicky. “I can’t help it. It’s part of me. I just can’t stop. I don’t know what it is that drives me but I’ll gamble to the day that I die. I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

Others saw what was happening and didn’t like it, among them Meyer Lansky, a fellow emerging as the new Great Brain. Said Lansky:

The gambling fever that was always part of Arnie’s make-up appeared to have gone to his brain. It was like a disease and he was now in its last stages. He gambled wildly … He started to look like a man suffering from some terrible sickness…. There is only one way to win-and that is not to play. Every player, even Arnie Rothstein, king of them all, loses in the end, whether it’s the horses, craps, blackjack, roulette, or anything else. Only the house or the bank or the casino wins. That’s why I gave up firsthand gambling at a very early age. I ran crap games and dice games, I set up gambling joints and casinos. I knew I would always win that way. And I knew I would not end up like Rothstein.

End up like Rothstein? People all over Broadway knew how the story was going to end, although some preferred not to believe it. Fight promoter Tex Rickard had predicted it. And he wasn’t the only one. One Sunday night in early October 1928, Gene Fowler, then managing editor of the Daily Telegraph, heard the same story from one of his better reporters, Johnny O’Connor, who said it would happen that very evening in front of Lindy’s. Fowler, O’Connor, and assistant editor Ed Sullivan (not the Ed Sullivan) walked to Lindy’s to witness the crime. They waited. A. R. appeared. Nothing happened.

Fowler was miffed. “Johnny,” he complained. “I’m afraid the ball game has been called off on account of rain or something.”

“It’s only a matter of days,” O’Connor responded matter-of-factly. “Rothstein’s number is up.”

Telegraph publisher Joe Moore didn’t want his paper wasting time or newsprint on the story (“Even if Rothstein gets killed, we won’t print a line of it”), so Fowler passed it on to his close friend, Walter Howey, now Victor Watson’s replacement at the Mirror. Howey asked Hearst columnist Damon Runyon for verification. Runyon thought his pal Arnold was invincible. He advised Fowler and O’Connor to change their bootleggers and “better still, to quit drinking.”

There were plenty of reasons to kill Arnold Rothstein, plenty of reasons not to mourn him. And yet …

And yet for all his greed, his egoism, his repeated betrayal of those around him-and even of a national trust-he was yet a child of God, capable of occasional charity and compassion. And before we return to his deathbed across 50th Street from Tex Rickard’s Madison Square Garden office, we must in fairness report those who did mourn him. The Lanskys and the Lucianos would miss his business acumen, his intellect, the sense of class he imparted. Others still remembered that on more than one occasion, the Big Bankroll could peel a few bills off the top and use them for some good. The Hearst papers long pursued A. R., but following Arnold’s death Hearst’s Daily Mirror would note that while many cursed him, “others claimed many synagogues in Greater New York would not have been built had it not been for his quiet generosity.”

The Mirror told this story of his dealings with longtime henchman Jack “The Duke” Schettman and of other Broadway characters:

Two years ago [1926] “The Duke” had a breakdown. He had financial reverses at the same time. Sometimes they come together like that. Rothstein sent him to the mountain for three months. He paid all expenses. When “The Duke,” came back, he set him up in business. He took care of his family while he was away. That’s the kind of guy he was.

“The Duke” tried to pay him back.

“No,” said Rothstein, “you’ve been on the up-and-up with me, and everything is O.K.”

Look at Joe (“Dimples”) Bonnell. He got sick, too. Arnold paid for everything. Then he put Joe in the cigar store business at 116th St. and Lenox Ave. And it was the same way with Jack (“Stickpin Jack”) Friedman. He was sick for a year. Rothstein paid his rent, paid all his expenses, sent him to the mountains.

Why, I heard him myself, talking to his real estate agents, when they’d come to him and say that some of the tenants in his buildings were in a bad way and couldn’t pay the rent.

“Well, the rent don’t amount to much anyway, does it?” asked Arnold. And the agent says he guesses it isn’t so much. “Well, it’s o.k. if they pay you and it’s o.k. if they don’t; forget it,” says Arnold. That’s the kind of guy he was.

Inez Norton also mourned Arnold Rothstein, perhaps not for altogether altruistic reasons, but she mourned nonetheless. Inez had met A. R. sometime in 1927. The Daily News described her as “the gem of the Follies … one particular beauty in all Ziegfeld’s garden of beauties.” She bloomed but briefly, though, appearing in only one edition of the Follies, before leaving to wed a stage-door Johnny.

She was, by her own account, a true child of the jazz Age, a jazz baby, a flapper, providing this abbreviated autobiography to a reporter:

I … was raised in Jacksonville, Fla. My father was in the lumber business. I was educated in private schools and studied music and dancing. I loved the outdoors and was quite athletic. I developed into a champion swimmer and diver and employed this ability to good advantage when I took my first job as a double for Betty Compson in the film “Miami.” I came to New York [in 1923] and went on the stage.

I posed for James Montgomery Flagg, the famous illustrator. He insisted I was an unusual type.

Then came an unhappy episode in my life. I met Miles E. Reiser, when I was on the stage, and married him. He was a millionaire. We were not suited for each other and separated shortly.

Miss Norton’s short-lived marriage was actually far more interesting than that. They wed on April 21, 1926 in a civil ceremony at New York City’s Municipal Building. Their union soon disintegrated. On the night of April 8-9, 1928, Inez’s minions “surprised” Mr. Reiser at his room at the Hotel Prisament, finding him in the company of what the New York Sun tastefully described as “a woman, not his wife, who had retired for the night.”

It’s impossible to surmise anything but that the incident had been carefully orchestrated-by Arnold Rothstein. Until 1966, only one legal ground for divorce existed in New York: adultery. Those not wealthy enough to obtain relatively painless divorces in foreign lands (generally in Mexico, France, or Cuba) or in a handful of more divorce-friendly states (Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, and Texas), often staged “adulterous” incidents. Hence, not one-but two-gentlemen conveniently chanced to catch Mr. Reiser in flagrante delicto. Hence, the Hotel Prisament coincidentally housed Rothstein henchman Sidney Stajer. Hence, Rothstein attorney Maurice Cantor represented Miss Norton. Reiser failed to contest Inez’s action, and a divorce was granted barely three months later, on July 16, 1928.

Now she was free to pursue Arnold Rothstein. “I was very unhappy until I knew him,” she would claim. “We instantly took to each other. At the time I met Arnold I did not know he was married. Three weeks later he confessed he was, but told me he and he wife were living apart.”

He did all he could to impress her, introducing her to the best people he knew-“some of the celebrated persons in the world of society and affairs,” as she put it. He lavished gifts on her: a diamond ring, a thoroughbred racehorse, and not just installing her in a suite in the Fairfield Hotel, but constructing a rooftop tennis court for her benefit. As Lucky Luciano observed, The Big Bankroll “could spend it so fast just livin’ that it even made my head spin, and I was a pretty good spender myself.”

Inez claimed that A. R. proposed to her at his Cedar Point golf course-she had just beaten him in a match. “We loved each other,” she contended. “He acquainted his wife with our mutual esteem … he promised me a honeymoon on the French Riviera.”