Rothstein (51 page)

In Luciano’s final years, he planned to have a movie made of his life, an idea that irritated and frightened his fellow mob lords. He died of a heart attack at Naples on January 26, 1962 as he was about to meet a film producer.

HENRY LusTIG, A. R.‘s brother-in-law, continued making money with the Longchamps restaurant chain. But Lustig cheated not only A. R., he cheated on his wife, and Edith Rothstein Lustig committed suicide in 1936.

Lustig remarried, branched into racing with the prestigious Longchamps Arms stable, and was sufficiently prosperous to purchase George Vanderbilt’s estate at Sands Points, Long Island. In December 1945, however, federal authorities indicted him for falsifying books and records to avoid payment of $2,872,766 in income and wartime excess-profit taxes. He entered Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in October 1947. Paroled in September 1949, he died at age sixty-six at his Stanhope Hotel apartment on September 17, 1958. Lustig left the legal minimum to his widow. Another third of his estate went to his thirteen-year-old son, Henry Alan Lustig. In 1960, his widow, Marjorie Shaw Lustig, petitioned New York State Supreme Court to have their son’s name changed to Henry Alan Shaw, “to save him from further shame and embarrassment” resulting from his father’s wartime tax evasions.

BILLY MAHARG returned to obscurity after the 1919 World Series. He never married, and until about 1940 he lived in a room at Philadelphia’s Haymarket Hotel at 12th and Cambria-within walking distance of his job as a guard at the Ford Motor Company’s Lincoln Division plant at Broad and Lehigh. For amusement he hunted small game outside the city and kept ten to twelve hunting dogs on the family farm in nearby Burholme. Retiring at age sixty-five, he moved to Burholme and puttered at farming and maintained his friendship with Grover Cleveland Alexander. Maharg died of arteriosclerotic heart disease at a Philadelphia hospital on November 20, 1953. At the time of his death, he was supplying novelist Margaret Mitchell with information on Alexander for a planned-but never written-book.

Like Sleepy Bill Burns, Billy Maharg’s obituary did not appear in the following edition of the Official Baseball Guide.

JUDGE FRANCIS X. MANCUSO, who ordered bail for A. R.‘s associates in the St. Francis Hotel shootings, resigned from the Court of General Sessions on September 3, 1929 after questions arose regarding the $5 million failure of the City Trust Company, of which he served as chairman. He was also indicted (charges were later dropped) for “fraudulent insolvency” in connection with that institution. However, he remained as boss of East Harlem’s 16th Assembly District until 1951. That year Frank Costello, testifying before Congress, conceded he knew Mancuso better than anyone else in Tammany. The following year, Mancuso admitted that he was a blood relative of Costello. Judge Mancuso died at age eighty-two in Daytona Beach on July 8, 1970.

MARTIN T. MANTON, defense attorney in the second Becker trial, became Chief Judge of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and was mentioned as a possibility for the United States Supreme Court. However, Manton had a problem. He took bribes, often from both sides in the same case. (He explained he would decide the case upon its merits and return the losing party’s money.) In 1939, facing impeachment, “Preying Manton” resigned from the bench. Convicted of accepting $186,000 in bribes, he served two years in prison and died on November 17, 1946.

JAMES MARSHALL, whose testimony ultimately fried Charles Becker, was arrested in September 1919 for extorting funds from fellow black Ruth Gleason. Frederick J. Groehl, formerly assistant district attorney under Charles Whitman, represented him. No charges were ever brought.

W. FRANK MCGEE, convicted bucketshop operator, was released from Sing Sing in June 1928. He quickly reverted to a life of con games and was wanted by Waukegan and Chicago police. On February 24, 1934, a penniless alcoholic calling himself Frank Welton died at New York’s St. Vincent’s Hospital. For five days the body lay unclaimed. It turned out to be the fifty-eight-yearold McGee. Authorities contacted McGee’s ex-wife, actress Louise Groody, to assist in the burial. She refused. Only the generosity of a New York undertaker saved McGee from a pauper’s grave.

JOHN MCGRAw, suffering not only from ill health but from financial reverses resulting from gambling and real estate speculation, resigned as Giants manager in June 1932. That winter he returned to his old haunts in Havana, but he suffered from more than could be cured by the Cuban sunshine. McGraw died of cancer and uremia at New Rochelle Hospital on February 25, 1934. Baseball elected him to its Hall of Fame in 1944.

GEORGE V. MCLAUGHLIN, Jimmy Walker’s first police commissioner, returned to banking, heading the Brooklyn Trust Company, where he maneuvered his righthand man Walter O’Malley into an ownership position in the Brooklyn Dodgers. He died of a heart attack at age eighty on December 7, 1967.

FRANK MCMANUS, George’s brother, operated the Blossom Heath Grill on West 77th Street. In the early morning of May 22, 1931 bootlegger Charles “Vannie” Higgins wanted McManus to order a truckload of Higgins’s beer. McManus refused and ordered Higgins and two of his goons out of the place. What happened next is unknown, but at 4:00 A.M., Higgins’ men dropped him off at Polyclinic Hospital. He had four knife wounds in his chest, including one to his lung. Neither Higgins nor McManus admitted what happened. “I’m not trying to insult you,” Higgins told Assistant District Attorney Saul Price. “But I don’t want to talk to these cops.”

GEORGE MCMANUS suffered a heart attack on October 29, 1930 on learning his wife, Amanda, had been killed in an automobile accident. He remarried and, despite deteriorating health, remained among New York’s more prominent bookmakers. Yet something had changed. “McManus was never the same after the trial,” noted horseracing writer Toney Betts. “He made book openhandedly with other people’s money and got the reputation of welching and doing other things out of character.” He continued to be arrested for gambling, with arrests coming in March 1934, July 1934, and July 1938.

McManus died of heart disease at age forty-eight at his summer bungalow at Sea Girt, New Jersey on August 28, 1940. Three hundred friends and relatives attended his funeral at Park Avenue’s Church of St. Ignatius Loyola. Three floral cars bearing 100 displays followed his bronze casket to Gate of Heaven Cemetery.

LIEUTENANT STEPHEN B. MCMANUS retired at fortyseven from the Crime Prevention Bureau in December 1930, drawing a $2,000 annual pension. In March 1934 police arrested George and Steve McManus on bookmaking charges. The two men identified themselves as “John Brown” and “John Gorman.” Magistrate Thomas Aurelio freed both as “guilty but not proven,” when arresting officer Joseph Gallagher testified he could not identify either as those he overheard in wiretapped conversations handling bets. He died at age sixty-eight on May 30, 1963.

MAGISTRATE FRANCIS X. MCQUADE, the judge who helped sweep cop-shooting charges against A. R. under the rug, quarreled with Charles Stoneham and John McGraw, and sued Stoneham, charging he siphoned off New York Giants funds as loans to his personal enterprises. Stoneham countersued. At the trial after Stoneham’s counsel, Arthur Garfield Hays called McQuade a liar and a perjurer. McQuade’s attorney, Isaac Jacobsen, responded, more honestly than prudently, “All these men are of a type-all greedy, fighting menand a rough element was in control of the club.” McQuade wasn’t restored to his position as Giants treasurer but won three year’s worth of back pay ($30,000).

After resigning from the bench in the wake of the Seabury investigation, he worked briefly as an assistant corporation counsel.

McQuade later sued the city to recover his pension rights-and, once again, won. He died at his Riverside Drive home on April 7, 1955.

GEORGE Z. MEDALIE, after serving as attorney for A. R., Legs Diamond, and their drug-smuggling associates, was appointed by Herbert Hoover in February 1931 to succeed Charles H. Tuttle as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. There he gave young Thomas E. Dewey his start as a crime fighter. In September 1945, Dewey, now governor, appointed him to New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. Medalie, sixty-two, died of acute bronchitis in Albany on March 5, 1946.

JIMMY MEEHAN, host for A. R.‘s disastrous poker game with George McManus and Nate Raymond, later served prison terms for doping racehorses and in 1937 for assaulting and robbing Ziegfeld Follies showgirl Diana Lanzetti, sister-in-law of a United States congressman. In 1946 he was implicated in the embezzlement of $734,000 from Brooklyn’s Mergenthaler Linotype Company.

WILSON MIZNER graduated from opium to morphine addiction after being treated with the latter drug for a back-alley beating. He left New York in the early 1920s to promote the Florida real estate boom, often peddling underwater property. Once, a judge asked if Mizner was showing contempt for the court. “No, your Honor,” Mizner replied. “I’m trying to conceal it.”

Mizner drifted to Hollywood to turn out screenplays for Jack Warner, once delivering a carefully wrapped New York City phone book in place of a finished script. Before he died on April 3, 1933, a priest visited his bedside, stating, “I’m sure you’ll want to talk to me.” Mizner replied: “Why should I talk to you … I’ve just been talking to your boss.”

EUGENE MORAN, jeweler thief, Arrow shirt model, and A. R.‘s onetime $1,000-a-week bodyguard, went to work for Dutch Schultz and, in November 1928, just after A. R.‘s death, was one of five gunmen who attempted to murder Eddie Diamond. Brother Legs eventually killed them all. Moran was taken for a ride on August 9, 1929 and shot in the head. The Studebaker containing his lifeless body was set afire in the Newark city dump.

JAMES D. C. MURRAY, George McManus’s defense attorney, continued as a criminal defense attorney, eventually representing over 500 clients accused of firstdegree murder. He also continued his association with mobsters. In the early 1930s, Dutch Schultz henchman Dixie Davis used Murray to attempt to convince Jimmy Hines to try to block Thomas E. Dewey’s appointment as a special prosecutor. Hines should have tried harder.

In 1954 Murray represented George “The Mad Bomber” Metesky, a disgruntled Con Edison employee who over the years had planted thirty-five bombs in the New York City area. Metesky was indeed mad, and Murray got him off with a sentence to Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Murray continued his practice until the age of seventy-nine. He died five years later, on October 15, 1967, at a Long Island nursing home.

ANNE NICHOLS never had another success to rival Abie’s Irish Rose. She died at age seventy-four on September 15, 1966 in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

INEZ NORTON, healthily tanned from a Florida vacation, announced in February 1930 that she would appear in Room 349, a Broadway play based on A. R.‘s life. It opened on April 15, 1930 at the National Theater, closing after fifteen performances. She continued to seek rich husbands. In the early 1930s columnist Walter Winchell announced she was engaged to San Francisco attorney J. W. Ehrlich. Ehrlich threatened to punch Winchell in the nose.

In December 1934 Norton met Thomas C. Neal, Jr., son of a retired Chicago banker. Though he was twenty-four and she was thirty-one, love bloomed. When in September 1935 they announced their plan to marry at New York’s Little Church Around the Corner, the prospective bridegroom’s father flew from Chicago to New York to discuss the matter with the couple, and the wedding was canceled. “Father believes I am too young to get married,” said Neal, Jr., “and wants me to give my attention to a business career.”

VAL O’FARRELL, A. R.‘s sometime detective, continued operating his agency, specializing during Prohibition years in bailing rich young speakeasy habitues out of legal (and illegal) difficulties. O’Farrell was assisting Nathan Burkan on the Gloria Vanderbilt custody case when he died of a stroke while at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel on October 7, 1934. He was fifty-eight.

FERDINAND PECORA found his ambitions to succeed Joab Banton as district attorney sidetracked by his failure in the Rothstein case. He briefly moved to Washington where he served as counsel to the Senate committee investigating the Wall Street crash. (The highlight of its hearings was the sight of a midget perched on banker J. P. Morgan’s lap.) Pecora returned to New York and ran and lost as an independent Recovery Party ticket for district attorney in 1934. He became a Supreme Court justice in 1935. In 1950 he secured the Democrat and Liberal Party nominations for mayor-and still lost to incompetent, mob-connected acting mayor Vincent Impelliteri. Pecora died at age eighty-nine on December 7, 1971 at Polyclinic Hospital.

NIGGER NATE RAYMOND continued gambling, swindling-and marrying. In April 1929 he planned to wed actress Mayme Love, a plan complicated by his existing marriage to actress Claire Ray. In September 1930, Miss Ray married Charles E. Carnevale, son of a wealthy real estate man who was thereupon shocked to read in the press that the former Mr. and Mrs. Raymond were still Mr. and Mrs. Raymond. In December 1931 Nate filed for annulment.

In 1931 Raymond was implicated in a con at Havre de Grace racetrack, involving switching two horses, Shem and Akhnahton. Painter Paddy Barrie had disguised three-year-old Akhnahton to look like lightly regarded twoyear-old Shem. Raymond bet heavily on Shem/Akhnaton at 52-1, but his exuberance exposed the whole scheme. That November he was ruled persona non grata at all Maryland tracks.

In January 1932 Raymond received a five-to-ten-year sentence for forgery. He gained freedom quickly, and in 1934 his name surfaced in the FBI’s investigation of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Small-time dope addict James Oscar Farrell was peddling a far-fetched account of the crime to heiress Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean, owner of the 44.52 carat Hope Diamond; close friend of the late First Lady Florence Kling Harding; alcoholic; and morphine addict. Farrell’s tale involved thirty-one individuals, including gangland figures Big Bill Dwyer and Waxey Gordon. Farrell also claimed Gordon’s men bumped off Arnold Rothstein-and that Raymond was in Room 349 when A. R. was ventilated.

Two years earlier, Mrs. McLean had already been swindled for $100,000 by former FBI agent Gaston B. Means and Norman T. Whitaker, a disbarred lawyer, future child molester-and one of America’s premier chess players. However, McLean learned from the experience, and had the FBI tape her conversations with Farrell.