Rothstein (47 page)

Governor Roosevelt had long despised Tammany. As a freshman state senator, in 1911 he led the fight blocking the appointment of Charles Francis Murphy’s candidate for United States Senate, William “Blue-Eyed Billy” Sheehan, a former lieutenant governor and speaker of the assembly, but, nonetheless, an unimpressive hack. Now Roosevelt wanted the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination and had to walk a fine line. He couldn’t appear too cozy with the corruptionridden machine, yet, he feared open war with his own state’s most powerful Democratic Party organization. In early 1930, Roosevelt vetoed a Republican-backed bill authorizing a wider investigation of New York City municipal corruption. Still, he knew he could not long resist the growing pressure for reform.

On March 10, 1931 FDR gave judge Seabury another assignment: to probe New York County’s ineffectual District Attorney Thomas C. T. Crain. Hyman Biller hadn’t been the only miscreant to escape justice under Crain’s feeble watch. Most recently Crain had botched the investigation of the Healey-Ewald judge-buying scandal. Before the month was over, Roosevelt signed legislation authorizing a $250,000 joint legislative committee for “the investigation of the departments of the government of the City of New York.” Again, Judge Seabury was in charge.

Wherever he looked Seabury found corruption. Prominent Tammanyites made a fortune peddling influence with the variancegranting Board of Standards and Appeals. From 1922 through 1930, Tammany bagman William E “Horse Doctor” Doyle, a former veterinarian, collected $2 million for appearances before the board. Former Tammany leader George W. Olvany’s law firm hauled in another $5 million. Olvany collected even more on his own. Asked if political connections helped his private practice, he grinned and said, “Well, it won’t hurt any.”

Many prominent Democrats displayed unusual frugality, one being Kings County Register James A. McQuade, who banked $520,000 while taking home less than $50,000 from his official position. McQuade responded with an incoherent tale of mysterious borrowings to support thirty-four starving relatives. McQuade should have been removed from office. Instead, in 1931, Brooklyn Democratic boss John McCooey nominated him for sheriff. He won.

Less fortunate was New York County Sheriff, former Deputy County Clerk, and leader of the Fourteenth Assembly District, the Honorable Thomas M. Farley-not to be confused with either A. R.‘s longtime servant Tom Farley or Tammany boss Tom Foley.

On October 6, 1931, the 250-pound Farley took the witness stand in his own defense. Seabury asked how, in the past seven years, Farley, earning just $87,000 in public service, banked $396,000. Farley responded with ingenious density, later memorialized as the song, “Little Tin Box” in the Broadway musical Fiorello!:

Q-You deposited during the year 1925 some $34,824-and during that time, what was your position?

A-Deputy County Clerk.

Q-And your salary?

A-I guess $6,000.

Q-Will you tell the Committee where you could have gotten that sum of money?

AMonies that I had saved.

Q-Where did you keep these monies that you had saved?

A-In a big box in a big safe.

Q-Was [it] fairly full when you withdrew the money?

A-It was full.

Q-Was this big box that was safely kept in the big safe a tin box?

A-A tin box.

Q-Sheriff, coming to 1926, did not your total deposits for that year amount to $49,746?

A-That is what I deposited.

Q-Sheriff, where did you get this money?

AMonies I saved.

Q-What is the most money you ever put in that tin box you have?

A-I had as much as $100,000 in it.

Q-When did you deposit that?

A-From time to time.

Then Seabury asked about the $83,000 he deposited in three banks in 1929:

A-Well, that came from the good box I had. [Laughter].

Q-Kind of a magic box?

A-It was a wonderful box.

Indeed it was a wonderful box, but not wonderful enough to save Sheriff Farley’s job. Governor Roosevelt removed Farley from office, noting that “as a matter of sound public policy … when a public official is under inquiry … and it appears that his scale of living, or the total of his bank deposits, far exceeds the public salary which he is known to receive, he … owes a positive public duty to the community to give a reasonable or creditable explanation of the sources of the deposits, or the source which enables him to maintain a scale of living beyond the amount of his salary.”

Such a principle spelled trouble for many in Tammany, most particularly for James J. Walker. “The Mayor of the Jazz Age” lived high, wide, and handsome. He enjoyed long and expensive European travel, partied at the best clubs, boasted an extensive and expensive wardrobe, and, last but not least, maintained a showgirl mistress, Miss Betty Compton.

Seabury now moved against the mayor himself. Slowly, methodically, Seabury’s staff crafted a case against Walker, as they had against the magistrates and the rest of the administration. On May 25, 1932, judge Seabury summoned Walker to the stand. On the first day, the mayor held his own, displaying the wit, charm, and intellect that so often compensated for sloth and arrogance. One exchange went like this:

SEAauRY: Apparently you are making a speech Mr. Mayor.

WALKER: Well, they’re not so bad. Did you ever listen to one of them?

Walker didn’t cow Seabury, and he kept grilling Walker. He wanted to know about $26,535 in bond profits Walker received from a transaction in which he invested nothing at all. He questioned Walker about his unhealthy interest in awarding a bus franchise to the supremely unqualified Equitable Coach Co. (from which he received a $10,000 line of credit for his 1927 trip to Paris). Seabury interrogated him about his friendship with publishing magnate Paul Block, who coveted a contract to supply ceramic subway tiles. Block had set up a joint brokerage account with Walker. Again, Walker contributed nothing-but netted after-tax profits of $246,692.

Walker’s ordeal on the stand lasted two days. When it ended, he traveled to Yankee Stadium to dedicate a monument to late Yankee manager Miller J. Huggins. After Walker’s first day of testimony, a Madison Square Garden crowd of 18,000 gathered at police academy graduation ceremonies had cheered him. A bit nervously, perhaps, but the masses remained his. Now they turned on him. When Walker marched from his field level box, the booing grew more deafening with each step he took. On reaching center field, he began:

Politics is like baseball.

In baseball the greatest star may be cheered for a home run today and then, on the very next day, be booed if he strikes out.

Gentleman Jimmy paused for effect, then continued: “That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it should be. Freedom of speech”-and with that he pointed upward to Old Glory—

is guaranteed by that emblem up there. It also guarantees us the right to criticize, or even to boo. If a politician pops out, fouls out, or strikes out, he must expect adverse criticism. If he cannot withstand the boos-and I mean b-o-o-s, and not b-o-o-z-e” [and with that, the crowd erupted in laughter] then he also should not pay attention to praise.

The great little fellow to whom this memorial tablet has been placed upon the scene of his many triumphs, Miller Huggins, sometimes heard his mighty team booed. Fame is a comet that chases its own tail in the sky. Huggins is now well beyond the reach of criticism or praise, but we still remember him as a wonderful man. It is so important to be a man first, and regard whatever else that comes to you or is denied you in the way of laurels as a secondary consideration. It is more important, when all else is over, and one has gone through the narrow door from which there is no returning, to have been loved than to have been exalted.

The crowd that had jeered minutes before now cheered thunderously.

Seabury didn’t cheer. On June 1, 1932, he interrogated the mayor’s older brother, Dr. William H. Walker, Jr., and New Yorkers discovered that for all their mayor’s faults, he was at least his brother’s keeper. Earning just $6,500 annually as a Board of Education medical examiner, Dr. Walker had banked $451,258 in the past four years. Testimony and documentation revealed that he had collected over $100,000 in kickbacks from four physicians working on city workmen’s compensation cases.

On August 11, 1932 Governor Roosevelt began a personal interrogation of the embattled mayor. Still thinking him a lightweight, few expected much from FDR. But his tough forcefulness and sharp grasp of details quickly eroded Jimmy Walker’s will to fight. On August 28, Mayor Walker’s younger brother George died of tuberculosis, halting the proceedings. On September 1, the mayor buried his brother and conferred with Tammany’s top dozen power brokers: Tammany’s new boss John Curry, Nathan Burkan, Max Steuer, Al Smith-all of them. They told Jimmy he could weather the storm and win reelection. All save Smith. He spat out: “Jim, you’re through.”

That night Walker resigned as mayor. Ten days later he sailed for Europe.

Wheels were falling off the Tammany wagon. Board of Aldermen President Joseph V. McKee became acting mayor-and he wasn’t horrible-but the organization dumped him to run the more pliable, but infinitely more stupid, Surrogate Court Judge John P. O’Brien. In a four-man special election, O’Brien won 51 percent of the vote, but proved disastrous as mayor. Asked who would be his police commissioner, O’Brien responded. “I don’t know. They haven’t told me yet.” Addressing a Harlem audience, he intoned, “I may be white, but my heart is as black as yours.” In November 1933 the public voted again for mayor, and with ex-mayor McKee running on the Recovery Party ticket, Fiorello LaGuardia won easily. Judge Samuel Seabury administered the oath making The Little Flower mayor of New York.

Jimmy Walker had it right.

NOW FOR THE INELEGANTLY POSED, but inevitable, question: “Who done it?”

It is well and good to know of Arnold Rothstein’s connections to the Black Sox scandal, his dealings with police and politicians and racketeers, his big hauls at Saratoga and Aqueduct, his drug dealing, and bootlegging and loansharking; but if we do not finally know who murdered Arnold Rothstein-and why-we leave with a hollow feeling, our major question unanswered. We want our murder mysteries, but we want them solved.

Arnold Rothstein’s murder triggered three separate cover-ups. Everything about A. R. was complex, convoluted, layer upon layer. So it was with his death. Three separate cover-ups veiled the true story. The first, a Jimmy Hines-directed Tammany whitewash, resulted in a botched trial and George McManus’s acquittal. The second, a Jimmy Walker-inspired effort directed at the police-and his own police commissioner-that would purge the force of its best honest cops. And three, a wide-ranging cover-up by the police themselves aimed at protecting one of the department’s more prominent families.

Tammany did not rule Manhattan for a century by being stupid. Some of its officeholders possessed immense talents; a few were men of unusual integrity. The machine’s leaders, especially Charles Francis Murphy, recognized the necessity of presenting quality candidatesan Al Smith, a Robert Wagner-to the voters. The same held true in appointive positions-particularly in the police commissionership. Any number of undeserving relatives could be hidden in the streetcleaning department or on the docks commission, but a police commissioner must inspire public confidence. Taking office in 1926, Jimmy Walker selected George V. “George the Fifth” McLaughlin, a prominent Brooklyn banker and Al Smith’s former State Superintendent of Banking, as New York’s top policeman. McLaughlin took his reputation and job seriously, raiding political clubhouses that sheltered gambling, firing bad cops, promoting a number of honest and competent officers-including Lewis J. Valentine, Vincent Sweeney, and Dan Manger-and creating a special Confidential Squad to root out official corruption. Police and political establishments fought him at each turn. By April 1927, McLaughlin had had enough and resigned.

To succeed McLaughlin, the mayor selected his former law partner, Joseph A. Warren. Walker trusted Warren to refrain from excessive diligence, and to summarily demote any honest cop he could find. But Warren proved as honest as McLaughlin. He retained the Confidential Squad, promoted Valentine, and reauthorized investigations of police corruption and Tammany-related gambling. A major catch was Lieutenant Patrick Fitzgibbons, head of the Police Glee Club, caught when he sold 50,000 tickets to a Glee Club concert held in a hall seating 200.

When A. R. died in November 1928, the public demanded arrestsbut George McManus wasn’t about to surrender until Jimmy Hines and Nathan Burkan had done their work. Almost instantly, Walker saw he could use Rothstein’s death to rid himself of Warren and his damned Confidential Squad. He issued Warren an ultimatum: Find the killer in four days! When the deadline passed, as Walker knew it would, he demanded and received Warren’s grudging resignation.

The mayor’s new, more pliable commissioner was $100,000-a- year Wanamaker Department Store executive and Red Mike Hylan’s former personal secretary, dapper, mustachioed Grover Whelan. Whelan made a great show of raiding hapless bootleggers and speakeasies, but his real job was to root out and demoralize honest cops. He restored the crooked Lieutenant Fitzgibbons to rank. He abolished the Confidential Squad, demoted Lewis Valentine and his associates, and scattered them to the remotest precincts still within the city limits.

Walker’s plan worked like a dream.

Now the police cover-up-and the question: “Who done it?”

Certain answers exclude themselves. In January 1929, an unlikely source, The New Republic, analyzed the murder or, more accurately, analyzed who the murderer would not be. Their thinking:

A. R.‘s murder was not a premeditated shooting by gamblers.

Gamblers do not normally shoot people, they hire gunmen. Bald Jack Rose and company hated Herman Rosenthal enough to kill him several times over-but didn’t. They engaged professionals. The underworld has its own divisions of labor.

Hired killers did not murder Arnold Rothstein.

Hired killers do not lure victims to hotel rooms registered in their own hand, where they have ordered bootleg hooch and ginger ale, where they’ve boozily propositioned blondes from down the hall. Hired killers do not kill a man where they have paid for an extra night’s rent just a few hours before. No. They rub him out on the street, as happened to Beansy Rosenthal or Kid Dropper or Augie Orgen. Or at a Newark chophouse, as to Dutch Schultz. No rent to pay there. Or in a cheap apartment upstate, as to Legs Diamond. Let the victims pay the rent. After all, they had it coming.