Rothstein (42 page)

Rothstein’s lifeless body being carried from the Polyclinic Hospital on the morning of November 5, 1928. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Arnold Rothstein’s grave, Union Field Cemetery, Queens. To the left is his brother Harry’s.

Thus began the financial scrambling. City and federal investigators pawed through A. R.‘s home, his office, and through a series of safetydeposit boxes, expecting to uncover millions in cash, in jewels, in bonds. Trustees of Nicky Arnstein’s bankruptcy, hoping to finally recover $4 million in still-missing Liberty Bonds, initiated their own search through A. R.‘s effects.

Not surprisingly A. R. hid his cash in a wide variety of ways, hiding assets in accounts and holdings using twenty-one separate proxies: his wife Carolyn, his late girlfriend Bobbie Winthrop, Sidney Stajer, Tom Farley, Fats Walsh, Sam Brown, attorney Isaiah Leebove, drug smuggler George Ufner, fight promoter Billy Gibson, and assorted other goons and stooges.

Investigators learned that A. R.‘s financial empire had degenerated into a finely tuned, but ultimately unstable house of cards. While he lived, it had its tensions-millions of dollars tied up in real estate, drug deals, and high-interest loans to shady characters. But despite increasing difficulties, A. R. managed to hold it all together. With his death, the wheels fell off. Mortgages came due. Drug runners went off on their own, taking narcotics shipments with them. Gambling debts owed A. R. suddenly didn’t have to be repaid. Loans, recorded only in indecipherable symbols in Arnold’s little black account books, could safely be forgotten.

Mortgage payments of $115,000 were payable on the Fairfield. The Rothmere Mortgage Corp owed banks $140,000. Judgments and mortgage foreclosures against the juniper Holding Corp. amounted to another $42,000. A. R.‘s numerous employees were owed $152,000 in unpaid salaries.

Herbert Bayard Swope’s paper, the World had an explanationgreed:

The irony of it is, according to one of Rothstein’s associates, that in an effort to pyramid his fortune, an effort that took the semblance of greed within the last few years, he fairly wrecked it. To capture the highest possible interest on his loans he accepted friendship for collateral. Now that he is dead, it seems the particular friendship upon which Rothstein relied will yield scant dividends to his heirs.

Political interests appeared on all sides. There was, of course, Assemblyman Cantor himself. Cantor, Bill Wellman, and Inez Norton hired State Senator Thomas I. Sheridan, a Democrat from Manhattan’s 16th District, to protect their interests in Rothstein’s estate. Another state senator, Elmer E Quinn, from Jimmy Walker’s old 12th District, represented Fats Walsh. Estate coadministrators Cantor, Wellman, and Samuel Brown engaged attorney Nathan Burkan, Tammany’s leader in the 17th Assembly District.

The most significant political ties belonged to George McManus, whose Tammany connections approached those of Rothstein himself. At one point Big George even operated games out of City Clerk Michael J. Cruise’s East 32nd Street political club. His best relations, however, lay with West Harlem’s Tammany chieftain, James J. Hines, now the organization’s most powerful and corrupt local leader.

Hines’s father had been a blacksmith and Tammany captain, and Jimmy followed both professions, shoeing over 40,000 horses (160,000 hooves; 1.28 million nails) and, at age seventeen, taking over his father’s election district. He became alderman at age thirty, and 11th Assembly District leader at 35. Hines ruled through usual Tammany methods-both good (hard work and charity), and bad (vote fraud and graft). He awoke early, spending mornings listening to constituents’ woes. Each afternoon (when not at the track) he did what he could to help:

A man comes to me, any man. A man I never saw before or heard of. I don’t know whether he’s Republican or Democrat, but he wants something, and even before he’s through talking, I am trying to see if there isn’t some way I can satisfy him. Well, I do satisfy him. He votes for us. So do all his relatives. You know they do. He’s grateful. He feels good toward us. We give him something he wanted.

Some voters just wanted cash. Hines provided that too, especially on election day. The Amsterdam News, one of the city’s two black papers, explained:

Of the 35,000 votes in Mr. Hines’ district, nearly 5,000 are colored. They loved Hines dearly for the most part because he always looked after members of the district club [the Monongahela Democratic Club on Manhattan Avenue] … For years, during his heyday, Boss Hines, as he was called, gave out $1 bills two nights a week at the clubhouse.

Whites also lined up for Jimmy’s largesse. In November 1932, thousands assembled outside Hines’s Monongahela Club. Each received a dollar and the advice. “Vote every star”-cast your vote for every candidate on the Democratic line.

Such beneficence required immense amounts of nontraceable cash. True, Hines owned a firm, which occasionally did city business, but payoffs were his main source of income. With the advent of Prohibition-and, later, the Harlem numbers racket-his haul became enormous.

Virtually every mobster in town paid tribute to Hines. Big Bill Dwyer, Frankie Uale, Owney Madden, Legs Diamond, Lepke Buchalter, Gurrah Shapiro, Lucky Luciano, Dandy Phil Kastel, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Frank Erickson, Meyer Lansky, and Larry Fay-as well as dozens of lesser-known and less-powerful punks-did business with him. Arnold Rothstein operated the gambling concession above the Monongahela Club.

With immense wealth at his disposal, Hines’s power stretched far beyond West Harlem. Even the most powerful learned to fear him. Early in 1918, one Louis N. Hartog needed a source of glucose for British beer brewers. Hines suggested that Tammany overlord Charles Francis Murphy could assist in securing the necessary government permits. Murphy not only helped, he invested $175,000 in Hartog’s North Kensington Refinery. The partnership soon soured, and lawsuits and countersuits followed. Murphy blamed Hines, and attempted unsuccessfully to drive him from power.

Hines possessed labyrinthine connections, especially regarding the selection of juries, and soon retaliated. Through Hines’s machinations, a grand jury investigating wartime subversion turned its attention to wartime profiteering and indicted Murphy.

Murphy counterattacked when Jimmy sought the Manhattan Borough Presidency. Hines engaged scores of gangsters to harass opponents and repeat-vote, but the ostensibly statesmanlike Murphy played even rougher. Murphy’s ally, district leader William P. Ken-neally, brutally beat Hines’s top henchman and closest friend, attorney Joseph Shalleck. Two policemen stood nearby, doing nothing to stop him.

Jimmy lost the primary, and relations with Murphy remained hostile. But both still had business to do with the other. Their gobetween was Arnold Rothstein. Of course, Rothstein’s dealings with Hines went far beyond acting as his intermediary. As Hines performed favors for his constituents, Rothstein assisted Hines and his associates. It might have been as simple as allowing Hines’s wife, Geneva, to entertain friends at A. R.‘s Hotel Fairfield-at no charge. Or pestering John McGraw for Giants season passes for Hines and his three sons. Or paying Hines’s $34,000 gambling debt to bookmaker Kid Rags-one I. O. U. that A. R. never collected. However, their most ongoing connection was Maurice Cantor. Jimmy Hines owned A. R.‘s last attorney lock, stock, and barrel.

When Murphy died, and the ineffectual judge George W. Olvany assumed Tammany leadership, Rothstein’s power only increased, as Hines and a new rival, Albert J. Marinelli, battled for power behind the scenes. And something else was happening. While Murphy lived, politicians held sway over gangsters; but with both labor racketeering and Prohibition pumping money into mob pockets, power shifted from men with votes to men with money and guns. A. R. became more-not less-significant to men like Hines.

But now A. R. was gone, and in the minutes following Rothstein’s shooting, Hump McManus needed Jimmy Hines more than ever. From a pay phone on the corner of 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, McManus called Hines. Jimmy didn’t turn his back on his protege. Hell, he’d known and liked Big George since he was a boy. No, he wouldn’t turn away. It just wasn’t in him.

Hines ordered McManus to stay put. In due time, a Buick sedan pulled up. “Get in,” called Bo Weinberg, Dutch Schultz’s closest henchman. Weinberg drove McManus to an apartment on the Bronx’s Mosholu Parkway, where he’d remain until Jimmy Hines decided on his next move.

Hines would expend a lot of cash to keep his friend afloat-some to cops, some to witnesses, some to McManus himself. As the New York Sun reported in December 1928:

The police were looking for McManus. They found out that his money was in the Bank of America. They watched the bank. Regularly, once a week, a check for $1,000, signed by McManus and made out to [Hines attorney Joe] Shalleck, came into the bank for payment. The police shadowed Mr. Shalleck, believing he must be in touch with McManus. Mr. Shalleck said he wasn’t, but they called him before the Grand jury to explain. He did.

He said that along in last October McManus was pressed for money and came to him to borrow $20,000. He lent him that amount, and McManus gave him twenty signed checks for $1,000 each, predated, spaced a week apart, for payment. As the weeks came along Mr. Shalleck sent in the checks in rotation, and that’s all there was to it. Nothing, as Mr. Shalleck pointed out, to do with who killed Arnold Rothstein.

Detective John Cordes was assigned to the Rothstein case the morning after the shooting, a logical choice as he knew McManus, Hyman Biller, and Willie Essenheim by sight. Cordes was among the NYPD’s best detectives, the only officer twice awarded the departmental medal of honor. The first time he had foiled an armed robbery, while off duty, unarmed (he rarely carried a gun), and was shot four times (once by another off-duty officer who mistook him for a robber). Cordes was tough as nails. He was, however, yet another old chum of Jimmy Hines-as a boy Cordes had brought brewery horses to Hines’s blacksmith shop.

On Tuesday evening, November 27, 1928, Cordes received an anonymous call summoning him the next morning to a barbershop at West 242nd Street and Broadway to “arrest a man.” The caller didn’t mention any names, but Cordes believed in tips. He’d be there.

Inside the barbershop, Cordes found a man getting a shave. Another fellow sat nearby.

“Hello, George,” Cordes said to the man under the lather.

“Hello,” McManus snorted.

“What’ryeh doin’, George?”

“Why, I’m getting’ a haircut and a shave. Have one?”

“I just had a shave, a close one,” Cordes demurred. “How about you going downtown with me? You know you’re in a pretty tough spot.”

Of course, McManus would go downtown. After all, it had all been arranged.

“Sure,” George responded. “I’ll go with you in a minute; wait ‘til I get a haircut and shave.”

At headquarters, a well-groomed McManus admitted to entertaining Ruth Keyes in Room 349 on the night of the murder, but denied being there when A. R. was shot. He ducked out for fresh air-a bit of cold, wet air-without his topcoat. Learning of the shooting, he decided against returning for his coat. That was his story; he was sticking to it.

In the Tombs, he acted as if he were on vacation. In a sense, he was. Things were being taken care of. A story in the Sun reported on the accused killer’s relaxed schedule:

With his alibi all polished up, he sits waiting in Cell 112, reading all the newspapers in town, because the prison rules won’t permit him his books. He is in excellent health. He goes to the prison barber shop every morning to be refreshed by a shave, and bay rum and sweet scented talcum-to stretch out in the barber’s plush chair. He eats three meals a day of the best there is in the prison larder-and that is quite good. He pays for special meals prepared by the prison chefs from the prison’s full pantries. None of the bill of fare “slum” for him.

But perhaps Big George surrendered too soon. The prosecution possessed a witness he hadn’t counted on: Park Central chambermaid Bridget Farry-who had previously worked for Rothstein at the Fairfield. She remembered A. R. and recalled him kindly. Hearing of his death, she mourned, “A decenter, kinder man I never knew, and I’ll be lightin’ a candle for him this very night.”

Farry told police about Room 349 and the people in it: “I saw that the room hadn’t been made up during the day and so I went there and knocked at the door. A big feller, Irish as Paddy’s pig, comes to the door and says to me, `And what is it you want?’ I tell him I’m the maid and I want to clean up the room. `It needs no cleanin’,’ he says.

“My eyes tell me different. There’s these glasses and the dirty ashtrays and also there is a woman in the room. But it’s none of my business and if he ain’t wantin’ the room cleaned up, it’s less work for me and the better off I am for it.”

When police showed the voluble Miss Farry a photo of the suspect, she did not hesitate: “Sure, he’s the one. I’d know him anywhere.”

The time of her visit: 10:20 P.M.-according to the New York Sun. This virtually cornered McManus. Ruth Keyes placed him in Room 349 before the 10:12 P.M. call to Lindy’s. Farry put him there just eight minutes later. Her actions took courage. “I’m afraid they will kill me,” Farry told reporters. “I’ve been hounded to death since the day of the murder. Strange men have stopped me in the hotel corridors, on the sidewalk and even at the entrance to my home. All of them tell me to keep my mouth shut, or I’ll die.

“One man told me to grab a train for Chicago and be quick about it. Another reminded me of what happens to a `squealer.’ “

The case was clearly shaping up. “Circumstantial evidence is the strongest kind in the absence of direct witnesses to the actual shooting… ,” District Attorney Banton said cheerily. “There is no weak link at all. Every link is a strong one, a sound one.”

George McManus didn’t care what Joab Banton said. On November 30, the district attorney’s office brought Hump into court to formally be charged with murder. Unfortunately, their case was not quite ready, and no charges were actually pressed. McManus didn’t mind. He might have demanded his freedom, but that might have embarrassed his captors. There was no need for acrimony. After all, everyone was in this together. The tabloid New York Daily Mirror caught the spirit of the moment: