Rothstein (50 page)

JACK DEMPSEY became a beloved elder statesman of sport, opening a popular restaurant in the Brill Building, at 1619 Broadway, just a few doors down from Lindy’s. The Manassa Mauler died of a heart attack at age eighty-seven in New York City on May 31, 1983.

LEGS DIAMOND spun out of control. In July 1929 at his Broadway nightclub, the Hotsy Totsy Club, Diamond and associate Charles Entratta fatally shot William “Red” Cassidy and Simon Walker. Through witness intimidation, Diamond escaped punishment, but soon became embroiled in a gang war against Dutch Schultz. In October 1929, he found himself riddled with bullets at the Hotel Monticello. For safety he moved operations to the Catskill Mountains. On the night of December 18, 1931, unknown assailants shot and killed Diamond in a shabby Albany, New York row house, a property now owned by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy, author of Legs.

Some have said that Dutch Schultz’s gang killed Diamond. Others say Lucky Luciano’s. Numerous other theories have been advanced. Suffice it to say that Diamond had a lot of enemies. Legs’s widow, Alice Kenny Diamond, was the solitary mourner at his funeral. She committed suicide at an Ocean Avenue (Brooklyn) rooming house in 1933.

NATHANIEL I. “NAT” EVANS, A. R.‘s partner in gambling houses and the World Series fix, died on February 6, 1935, leaving his only heir, his son Jules, to sue seventeen different insurance companies to collect on the loss of The Brook.

“JAKE THE BARBER” FACTOR, con man extraordinary, found England demanding his extradition for his Rothstein-backed stock scams. To avoid this fate, he had Al Capone’s old gang fake his kidnapping, framing their rival, mobster Roger Touhy, in the bargain. Factor went to jail anyway-for mail fraud in 1943. He was released in February 1948. By 1955 the mob deemed Factor sufficiently respectable to become front man for their lucrative Las Vegas Stardust Casino.

In December 1962, Factor’s considerable donations to John E Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign-and the slush fund for Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco-paid dividends in the form of a highly questionable presidential pardon. Factor later became a generous benefactor to Southern California’s minority community. He died in 1984 at age ninety-one.

STARR FAITHFULL, the girl in the chorus line at the Woodmansten Inn when Jimmy Walker learned of A. R.‘s murder, soon came to her own sad end. On June 8, 1931 her bruised body washed ashore at Long Island’s West Long Beach. Local authorities announced it was foul play and that a well-known-but unnamed-politician was involved. Her case briefly aroused considerable public interest, but ultimately nothing further was learned concerning her demise. Novelist John O’Hara based his 1935 novel, Butterfield 8, on the case. Elizabeth Taylor won her first Academy Award for her portrayal of the Faithfull character, Gloria Wandrous, in the 1960 film version.

BRIDGET FARRY, the cleaning lady who wouldn’t testify against Hump McManus, secured a $75-per-month job as a laundress in Harlem’s St. Joseph’s Home. “That is a city hospital,” noted the authors of Gang Rule in New York, “wherein jobs are usually provided for amenable or useful persons by politicians.” However, she left to operate a Second Avenue lunch counter. It failed, and in June 1934, Farry (now Mrs. John T. Walsh) was spotted picketing City Hall, carrying a placard reading: “LaGuardia: I want a food ticket or a job. If you can’t do any better, then get out. There are plenty of intelligent men to take your place. I won’t leave ‘til I get it.” His failure to emerge only further enraged Farry. “If he is a man,” she stormed, “why don’t he come out here? I’ll beat the brains out of him.”

LARRY FAY’S fortunes collapsed as the 1920s ended. His milk rackets fell apart. His last attempt at a nightclub, West 56th Street’s cheesy Casa Blanca, barely scraped by. Fay laid off help and cut salaries by half, including that of doorman Edward Maloney. On New Year’s Day 1932, Maloney complained drunkenly that he could not support his wife and four children-and shot Fay four times. Fay had a mere thirty cents in his pockets. Few noticed his passing. Fewer attended his funeral.

DOPEY BENNY FEIN, the early labor racketeer, was arrested for murder in 1914 but released for lack of evidence. Shortly after a 1917 arrest for assault, he retired from labor racketeering, entering the manufacturing phase of the business. He retired from that ten years later and disappeared from public view.

EMIT. E. FUCHS, Rothstein’s attorney in the St. Francis Hotel shooting incident, became owner of the Boston Braves in 1926. In 1929 he pled no contest to spending money illegally to influence the legalization of Sunday baseball in Boston. The Braves went bankrupt under his tenure, and he left the team in 1935, $300,000 in debt. Fuchs died at age eighty-three on December 5, 1961.

EDWARD M. FULLER, A. R.‘s bucketshop associate, after release from Sing Sing moved to Florida but fell on hard times. Facing foreclosure on his Miami home, depressed, and drinking heavily, on October 7, 1932 he pressed a revolver to his right temple and blew his brains out. He died the next day at age fifty.

WAXEY GORDON, the A. R.-backed bootlegger, became one of Thomas Dewey’s biggest catches. Not only did Dewey convict him on incometax evasion (with information provided by Gordon rivals Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky), on the stand he humiliated Gordon’s pathetic attempts at respectability. During the trial, Gordon’s nineteenyear-old son, Teddy, died in an automobile accident. Dewey gave the heartbroken gangster permission to attend the funeral. Released from prison in 1940, Gordon never returned to his former glory. In 1951 an undercover narcotics agent nabbed Gordon as Gordon sold him a packet of heroin. He died in Alcatraz on June 24, 1952.

LOUISE GROODY, wife of swindler W. Frank McGee, lost most of her fortune in the 1929 stock market crash. In World War II she served in the Red Cross and later appeared on television in small roles or on panel discussions. She died of cancer at age sixty-four on September 16, 1961, thirty-six years to the day after opening in No, No, Nanette.

TEXAS GUINAN, queen of the speakeasies, left the New York nightclub circuit and took her act-forty showgirls and her horse, Pie face-on the road. At Vancouver, British Columbia she contracted amebic dysentery, received the last rites of the Catholic Church, and died on November 5, 1933. She was forty-nine. Twelve thousand persons viewed her open casket at Broadway’s Campbell Funeral Parlor. She instructed it to be left open so “the suckers can get a good luck at me without a cover charge.” Five hundred cars followed her funeral cortege to Gate of Heaven Cemetery, where mourners rioted, stole flowers off her casket, and damaged her vault.

WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST faced bankruptcy in the 1930s, and Citizen Kane, but survived both (he overcame insolvency with the help of a $1 million loan from mistress Marion Davies). He died at eighty-eight at Miss Davies’s Beverly Hills mansion, on August 14, 1951. Hearst’s family barred her from the funeral.

JAMES J. HINES, after so carefully sheltering George McManus, continued his association with hoodlums and racketeers, particularly profiting from Dutch Schultz’s lucrative Harlem numbers racket. Prosecutors found Hines hard to indict, thanks to his scrupulous avoidance of bank accounts. Making matters worse were Hines’s New Deal connections (he controlled all federal patronage in Manhattan after 1938) and the compliance of his reliable henchman (“Stupid, respectable, and my man”), Manhattan District Attorney William Copeland Dodge.

Things began changing in 1937, when Thomas E. Dewey defeated Dodge. The following July, police arrested Hines on charges of accepting payoffs to protect the numbers racket. His first trial, before Supreme Court Justice Ferdinand Pecora, ended in a mistrial that September. Next tried before judge Charles C. Nott, Jr. (presiding jurist in George McManus’ abortive trial), on February 26, 1939 he was found guilty of “contriving, proposing, and drawing a lottery.” Sentenced to four-to-eight years, he was paroled on September 19, 1944. Hines died at age eighty on March 26, 1957.

MAX HIRSCH, trainer at A. R.‘s Redstone Stables, trained three Kentucky Derby winners, one of whom, Assault, won the 1946 Triple Crown. He was elected to the Racing Hall of Fame in 1959. Hirsch died at age seventy-eight on April 3, 1969, in New Hyde Park, New York, the day his horse, Heartland, won at Aqueduct.

MAXIE “Boo Boo” HOFF, “protector” of Gene Tunney in the first Dempsey-Tunney fight, died broke in 1941 at age forty-eight.

MAYOR JOHN E “RED MIKE” HYLAN, several years after leaving City Hall, was appointed by his old foe Jimmy Walker to a $17,500-a-year judgeship in the Queens Children’s Court, where, said Walker, “the children can now be tried by their peer.” He died of a heart attack at his Forest Hills home on January 12, 1936.

SHOELESS JOE JACKSON, the slugging Black Sox leftfielder, maintained his innocence but never returned to organized baseball. Once he asked Commissioner Landis for another chance. “Jackson phoned,” Landis confided to sportswriter Frank “Buck” O’Neill, “and asked whether I would give him a fair hearing. I said, `I give every man a fair hearing.’ Then Jackson said, `Thanks, Judge. Do you know that those gamblers never paid me all they owed me.’ ” That was as far as Jackson’s hearing got-or needed to get.

In 1951 the South Carolina House of Representatives passed a resolution supporting Joe’s reinstatement. Broadway columnist Ed Sullivan scheduled Jackson for his Talk of the Town television show of December 16, 1951. Jackson died of a massive heart attack on December 5.

BYRON “BAN” JOHNSON, president of the American League, never regained the power he lost to new Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and lapsed into greater bouts of maudlin drunkenness. In July 1927, American League owners forced his retirement but wanted to honor the last eight years of his $40,000-a-year contract. Johnson wouldn’t accept a cent. He died of diabetes at age sixty-seven on March 28, 1931. The story is told that Charles Comiskey came to the dying Johnson’s bedside and held out his hand in friendship. Johnson wouldn’t take it.

PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE, gold digger and steerer to A. R.‘s gambling houses, married six times-each time for money. In 1925 Anita Loos modeled the mercenary Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes after Joyce. She starred in Earl Carroll’s Vanities of 1923 and W. C. Fields’s bizarre 1933 film, International House, receiving top billing over Fields. Soon afterward her beauty faded. On June 12, 1957, Joyce died of lung cancer at New York’s Memorial Hospital. A deathbed convert to Catholicism, she asked for one last big show: burial from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Her services were instead held at the more modest St. Catherine of Siena.

MEYER LANSKY cemented his position as the kingpin of organized crime, working with Frank Costello and Dandy Phil Kastel in New Orleans and Bugsy Siegel on the West Coast and operated particularly profitably in Cuban casinos. This was just the start of Lansky’s farflung international gambling operations, in places such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Haiti, and Hong Kong. In 1970, when the federal government sought his conviction on incometax charges, he fled to Israel to avoid prosecution. When Israel returned him to the U.S., Lansky beat the rap, as well as a later attempt to deport him to his native Poland. He died of a heart attack at age eighty-one on January 15, 1983. His personal fortune had once been estimated at $400 million. Six years after his death his estate had dwindled to the extent that his son Buddy applied for-and received-Medicare to cover mounting medical bills.

AARON J. LEVY, Tammany’s fixer in the Becker murder case, the judge who provided injunctive protection for the Park View A.C., and later the State Supreme Court judge who set George McManus free on bail, found himself dogged by charges of corruption. None stuck until 1952, when the New York State Crime Commission heard testimony of Levy’s accepting gifts from those appearing before his court and calculated that his expenditures for the period 1946-51 exceeded his income by $80,561. Levy resigned from the bench. He died at age seventy-four on November 21, 1955 in St. Petersburg, Florida.

LEO LINDY argued with his business partner and in 1930 opened up a second Lindy’s across Broadway. Both restaurants coexisted, until the original Lindy’s-the one A. R. walked out of to his death-closed on July 27, 1957. Leo Lindy died less than two months later at age sixty-nine. His second restaurant shuttered its doors in September 1969.

LILLIAN LORRAINE, steerer to A. R.‘s gambling house and mistress of Flo Ziegfeld, died broke and alone in New York City on April 17, 1955.

In Lorraine’s declining years a reporter interviewed her. Lorraine confessed: “[Ziegfeld] had me in a tower suite at the Hotel Ansonia and he and his wife lived in the tower suite above. And I cheated on him, like he cheated on [his wife] Billie Burke. I had a whirl! I blew a lot of everybody’s money, I got loaded, I was on the stuff, I got the syphilis, I tore around, stopped at nothing, if I wanted to do it I did it and didn’t give a damn. I got knocked up, I had abortions, I broke up homes, I gave fellers the clap. So that’s what happened.”

“Well, Miss Lorraine,” came the response, “if you had it to do over would you do anything different?”

“Yes,” said Lorraine. “I never shoulda cut my hair.”

LUCKY LucIANO narrowly escaped a brutal attempt on his life in 1931. He recovered and eliminated such rivals as Joe “The Boss” Masseria, Salvatore Maranzano, and Dutch Schultz. Together with Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Lepke Buchalter, Gurrah Shapiro, and Albert Anastasia, he ruled New York’s rackets-until running afoul of prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who indicted him on charges of ninety counts of extortion and direction of harlotry. Luciano was sentenced to thirty to fifty years in Dannemora. During World War II federal officials secured Luciano’s still-considerable influence to combat waterfront sabotage and to help pave the way for Mafia cooperation in the Allied invasion of Sicily. As a result, Luciano (twice previously denied parole) was released in 1945.

However, freedom meant exile-to his Italian homeland. But like many mob contemporaries, Luciano was drawn to Havana, and despite a U.S. government edict never to return to the Western Hemisphere, he traveled to Cuba. There he presided over an organizedcrime conclave that included Costello, Lansky, Willie Moretti, and Charles Fischetti. Discovered there, he was expelled and returned to Naples, where he continued to direct international drug smuggling and auto-theft operations.