Arnold Rothstein: The Gambler Who Helped Build New York's Underworld
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At 10.53pm on Sunday 4th November 1928, a desk sergeant at Manhattan's West 47th Street station logged a call about a man shot at the Park Central Hotel. By midnight the man had a name, and it was the biggest one on Broadway. Arnold Rothstein, the gambler they called The Brain, was bleeding out from a bullet in the gut.
He'd fixed horse races, bankrolled bootleggers and lent money to judges. He'd been accused of rigging a World Series and taught a generation of gangsters how to run crime like a business. And when the detectives asked him who'd pulled the trigger, he wouldn't tell them. Ninety-eight years later, officially, we still don't know.
Quick Answers
Who was Arnold Rothstein? A New York gambler, loan shark and fixer who financed Prohibition-era crime and mentored Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello.
Who killed Arnold Rothstein? Nobody was ever convicted. Gambler George McManus was charged but acquitted in 1929.
When did he die? He was shot on 4th November 1928 and died on 6th November, Election Day, aged 46.
Why was he shot? The leading theory ties it to a poker debt he refused to pay, though even the police later backed away from that motive.
Did he fix the 1919 World Series? It was never proven. He was widely blamed for the Black Sox scandal but historians still argue over how involved he was.
The Boy Who Hated His Brother
Arnold Rothstein was born in Manhattan on 17th January 1882, the son of Abraham Rothstein, a well-off and devout Jewish businessman. He grew up comfortable, which makes what came next all the more striking. This wasn't a kid dragged into crime by poverty. He chose it.
His childhood story as told by Crime Library is a strange one. Arnold was eaten up with jealousy of his older brother Harry, the golden boy who was studying to become a rabbi. One night his father walked into the bedroom to find young Arnold standing over the sleeping Harry with a knife. Asked to explain himself, the boy simply said: "I hate Harry."
School bored him, apart from maths. His brother Edgar later admitted he'd do Arnold's homework for him, except the arithmetic, because Arnold loved playing with numbers. He walked out of Boys' High School for good in 1898 at 16 and drifted into the pool halls and dice games of the Tenderloin, where a head for odds was worth more than any diploma.
By around 20 he'd made enough to run his own gambling house. By the 1910s he was a fixture of Broadway, with a private booth at Lindy's restaurant that doubled as his office. Gamblers, bootleggers, politicians and showgirls all came to that booth. Rothstein didn't need to go looking for business. It came to him.
Mr Big, The Brain and The Big Bankroll
Rothstein collected nicknames the way other men collected debts. He was A.R., The Fixer, The Man Uptown and Mr Big. His biographer Leo Katcher, who wrote The Big Bankroll in 1959, called him "the J. P. Morgan of the underworld", and that's probably the best description anyone's managed.
Because that's what he really was: a banker. If you wanted to open a speakeasy, run a rum boat or start a gambling joint, Rothstein could put up the money. If a cop needed paying or a magistrate needed persuading, he knew who to talk to. He lent at eye-watering rates, bought property across the city and acted as a go-between when the gangs fell out, charging handsomely for keeping the peace.
He also had a talent for spotting young criminals with promise. Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello and Dutch Schultz all came up under his wing, and Jack "Legs" Diamond started out as his bodyguard. What they learnt from him was organisation. Rothstein didn't brawl in the street. He kept books, spread risk and treated crime as a business with a balance sheet.
The Black Sox Scandal
The fix that made Rothstein famous, and that he always denied, was the 1919 World Series. The heavily favoured Chicago White Sox lost to the Cincinnati Reds, and within a year it came out that several players had taken money to throw games. Eight of them were later banned from baseball for life.
The plot ran through former boxing champion Abe Attell and Boston gambler Joseph "Sport" Sullivan, and Rothstein's name was all over it. When a Chicago grand jury looked into it in 1920, he turned up, insisted he'd turned the scheme down and walked out without a charge. Historians are still split. Some think he bankrolled the whole thing. Others think Attell ran it without his blessing and Rothstein simply bet on what he knew.
Popular culture made its mind up, though. F. Scott Fitzgerald based Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby on him, describing the character as "the man who fixed the World's Series back in 1919". Damon Runyon later turned him into Nathan Detroit, who ended up in Guys and Dolls, and he resurfaced again as a major character in Boardwalk Empire.
Taking Saratoga for a Ride
If the World Series fix is murky, the 1921 Travers Stakes is about as close as Rothstein ever came to leaving fingerprints. He owned a decent colt called Sporting Blood, which raced under the name Redstone Stable. The favourite was Harry Payne Whitney's filly Prudery, who'd already beaten Sporting Blood by four lengths that summer.
Then Rothstein reportedly got word that Prudery was off her feed. On the morning of the race, his friend Sam Hildreth, one of the top trainers in the country, entered Grey Lag, the Belmont Stakes winner. Grey Lag instantly became the favourite and the odds on Sporting Blood drifted out to around 3-1. Rothstein's agents spread about $150,000 on his horse with bookmakers. Minutes before the off, Hildreth scratched Grey Lag without a word of explanation.
Sporting Blood went past the struggling Prudery to win by two lengths. The Daily Racing Form puts the official purse at $10,275, plus a reported $450,000 from bookies around the country. Nothing was ever proven against him or Hildreth. Rothstein then sold Sporting Blood for $60,000, put the rest of his horses up for sale and wound up Redstone Stable by the end of October. He'd got what he came for.
Prohibition and the Business of Crime
When America went dry in 1920, Rothstein saw the opportunity faster than almost anyone. He financed bootleggers, bought into speakeasies and helped bring in liquor from Canada and across the Atlantic at a time when even Winston Churchill needed a doctor's note to get a drink in the States. Federal investigators also came to suspect he was financing narcotics smuggling, possibly with Luciano involved.
He wasn't the type to drive a truck or fire a gun himself. He provided the money, the contacts and the protection, and took his cut. Men like Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, whose crew later fed into the killing machine known as Murder Inc, learnt the trade from him. Rothstein had dragged the New York underworld out of the street gang era and into something closer to a corporation.
The Card Game That Killed Him
Rothstein's luck turned in September 1928. Over a marathon game of stud poker, he ran up losses reported at anywhere between $200,000 and $320,000. George "Hump" McManus, a big Irish gambler and friend of Rothstein, had organised the game and lost $51,000 himself, so the other players leant on him to collect. Rothstein refused to pay. He was convinced the game had been rigged.
Weeks went by. Then on the evening of 4th November, Rothstein was sitting in his booth at Lindy's when he took a phone call around 10.15pm. He told an associate, Jimmy Meehan, that McManus wanted him over at the Park Central, handed Meehan his revolver to look after and walked up Seventh Avenue. McManus was waiting in room 349, booked under the name George Richards.
Nobody knows exactly what happened next. A single .38 bullet hit Rothstein in the lower abdomen. Allan May's account for Crime Library says the gun was flung out of the window, bounced off a parked taxi and landed in the street. Hotel staff found Rothstein staggering down the service stairs clutching his stomach, asking someone to get him a cab home.
The Code of Silence
He was rushed to the Polyclinic Hospital, where surgeons found the bullet had severed an artery. Detective Patrick Floyd, who'd known him for years, leaned over the bed and asked who'd shot him. Rothstein's reply, recorded by The Mob Museum, was pure underworld: "You know me better than that, Paddy." He told police he'd deal with it himself.
While he drifted in and out of consciousness, his lawyer Maurice Cantor put a new will in front of him. Rothstein's wife Carolyn saw her share cut from a half to a third, while his mistress, former Ziegfeld dancer Inez Norton, did rather better. Cantor wrote himself in for five per cent. The will ended up being fought over in court, which tells you most of what you need to know about how it was signed.
Rothstein died at about 10.20am on Tuesday 6th November 1928. It was Election Day, and there's a grim joke in the timing. He'd bet heavily on Herbert Hoover, and his death voided wagers that would have paid him around $570,000. He was buried the next day at Union Field Cemetery in Queens, wrapped in a prayer shawl in the Jewish tradition his father had hoped he'd follow.
Who Shot Arnold Rothstein?
McManus vanished after the shooting, hidden by Dutch Schultz's people, before arranging his own arrest in a Broadway barber's shop three weeks later. Police had found his Chesterfield overcoat in room 349 with his name sewn inside, along with a pile of empty whiskey bottles. But nobody could actually place him in the room when the shot was fired, and he was acquitted in 1929. According to Crime Library he walked out of court wearing the same coat that had just been shown to the jury as evidence.
The investigation was a shambles from start to finish. Thomas Rice of the New York State Crime Commission tore into it in a report splashed across the Brooklyn Eagle, pointing out that District Attorney Joab Banton eventually admitted he couldn't prove Rothstein had even been inside room 349. He might have been shot on the street.
There are plenty of theories. Crime historian Patrick Downey thinks it was an accident, with a drunk McManus or his bodyguard waving a gun about to look tough. David Pietrusza's biography claims McManus later admitted to a friend, while drunk, that he'd done it. Others have pointed at the notorious hustler Titanic Thompson, who'd played in the September game. And plenty of people suspected the police weren't trying very hard, because Rothstein's papers could have embarrassed a lot of powerful people.
The Park Central, at 870 Seventh Avenue, still stands. It went on to host another famous mob killing in 1957, when Albert Anastasia was shot dead in the hotel barber's chair.
The Papers That Brought Down a Mayor
That fear about Rothstein's files turned out to be justified. One of the estate's own lawyers told reporters that a lot of people would be in serious trouble once Rothstein's safe deposit boxes were opened. Mayor Jimmy Walker seemed to know it too. When the news reached him at a roadhouse that night, Sam Roberts writes that he turned to bandleader Vincent Lopez and said: "That means trouble from here on."
He was right. Scraps of paper left behind showed Rothstein had lent money to all sorts of officials. During his 1929 run for mayor, Fiorello La Guardia revealed that Bronx magistrate Albert Vitale had borrowed $19,600 from him. Weeks later, gunmen robbed a dinner held in Vitale's honour, and the stolen goods mysteriously turned up again after Vitale made a few phone calls. The fallout from the Vitale affair got him removed from the bench in 1930 and kicked off the Seabury investigations into Tammany Hall corruption, which ended with Walker resigning in 1932.
Rothstein's money didn't last much longer than his secrets. His estate was reckoned at somewhere between $1 million and $3 million when he died, but debts, lawsuits and lawyers chewed through it, and a decade later it was reported to be insolvent.
His real legacy was the men he trained. Luciano, Lansky and Costello took his methods and built the national crime syndicate that ran for decades after he was gone. New York's crime scene had been changing fast for years, as the city's crime scene photos from 1910 to 1920 show, but Rothstein was the one who worked out how to make it pay like a proper business. He just never worked out how to stop gambling.
Suggested Reading
Want more on The Brain? These are the books worth your time.
Rothstein: The Life, Times and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series by David Pietrusza. The most thorough modern biography, packed with detail on the Black Sox fix and the botched murder investigation.
The Big Bankroll: The Life and Times of Arnold Rothstein by Leo Katcher. The 1959 classic that first pieced his life together, written while many of the people who knew him were still around.
King of the Jews by Nick Tosches. A wild, opinionated and very readable take on Rothstein and the world that made him.
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Sources
Ninety years later, Arnold Rothstein murder still a mystery, The Mob Museum
Arnold Rothstein, Dark Genius of the Mob, Crime Library
Arnold Rothstein: Last Hours of Mr. Big, Crime Library
Men of Action: Arnold "The Big Bankroll" Rothstein, Card Player
Arnold Rothstein, Encyclopaedia Britannica
How Arnold Rothstein fixed the 1921 Travers Stakes (or did he?), Saratoga Living
Travers history challenge answers, Daily Racing Form
The Sinner of City Hall, Airmail
Vitale dinner holdup sparks investigations, Writers of Wrongs
The Death of Arnold Rothstein Part II, Infamous New York
Arnold Rothstein's murder is still unsolved nearly a century later, Grunge
Rothstein, Arnold, Encyclopedia.com
