Rothstein (5 page)

That too was another part of the gambling’s charm, but still not all of it. A. R. loved the sheer rebellion of it all. Abraham Rothstein was “Abraham the Just.” Gambling was not just illegal under New York State statutes, it was strictly forbidden by Abraham’s code of conduct. To gamble meant not only thumbing your nose at fate-and at the Irish cop on the beat-it meant declaring war on ancient values. Declaring war on Abraham Rothstein.

Traditional Judaism forbids gambling for money. One recent Rothstein scholar, Dr. Michael Alexander, put it this way:

Gambling itself was a particularly rebellious behavior. More precisely, professional dice playing had been prohibited in the Talmud not once, but twice. According to Jewish law, a dice player cannot act as a witness. The reasons suggested in the tradition are several, including the notions that gambling is tantamount to robbery and that a gambler wasted time and money instead of tending to the “welfare of the world. ” Moreover, as the rabbis teach in the great ethical tract “Avot,” “Human hope is but a worm. ” If hope in things mortal is founded upon vanity, how much more its sale.

Vanity. Robbery. That’s how Abraham Rothstein defined his wayward son’s growing habit. “Gambling is a sin,” he scolded. A. R. not only failed to listen, he dared exploit his father’s piety to facilitate his own vice. The devout Abraham did not wear jewelry on the Sabbath. Each Friday night, before leaving for synagogue he’d remove his big gold watch and place it in a dresser drawer. As Abraham walked down the stairs and onto the street, Arnold raced to his father’s bedroom to grab the timepiece and pawn it for thirty or forty dollars, using the proceeds to finance gambling and loan sharking. If luck were with him, he’d redeem the watch, and sneak it back before his father discovered its absence. If not …

If not, Abraham Rothstein had yet another reason for disappointment in his son, and Arnold for drawing even farther away from his father. Yes, it was risky business but, after all, gambling is risk. Risk energized Arnold, made him feel important, provided him with the potential for great riches, and set him apart from the stodgy world of his father. To Arnold Rothstein-and to so many of his contemporaries-gambling was modernity. It was America. It was New York.

Gambling today is largely homogenized and sanitized into neat state-sanctioned lotteries, the neon ghettos of family-friendly Las Vegas, the lairs of blue-haired ladies in bingo halls and the growing plague of second-and third-rate casinos across America and Canada.

A century ago, gambling was an adventure, and not only a more male-dominated adventure, but also, when practiced right, an upperclass adventure. Yesterday’s rich were obsessed with gambling, con gregating at such luxurious gambling meccas as Monte Carlo, Newport, and Saratoga Springs. If their fortunes increased, so much the better. If not, well … it was all akin to some high-Victorian potlatch. The amount you lost-and the grace displayed in the process-only heightened your status.

You needed big money to gamble in such fashion, but if you were less affluent, wagers could still be placed nearly anywhere else: in saloons, and back rooms, and back alleys. You lived by your wits and moved not only among the unscrupulous but the violent. Gambling was not pumping tokens into chrome-plated, one-armed bandits, it was confronting real bandits, armed either with a billy club or with an extra ace of clubs hidden up their sleeve. Either way, you played at your peril.

Gambling was everywhere, but it was particularly ubiquitous in New York, young Arnold Rothstein’s New York.

“Is there any gambling in New York?” wrote one observer of 1904 Manhattan. “Why, there’s almost nothing else!”

Already, the geography of Arnold Rothstein’s world of gambling and loansharking and various and sundry swindles was emerging. Times Square-Broadway-was being born.

Before Manhattan moved skyward, it moved northward. The theaters, the big department stores, the fashionable neighborhoods all moved uptown. And so did gambling. By the mid-1890s Manhattan’s gaming establishments had migrated to the West 40’s-the Roaring Forties. The neighborhood boasted any number of role models for Arnold. Some rough-and-tumble, some with the veneer of respectability. A. R. figured himself the gentleman-gambler type, and no gambler was more the gentleman than Richard Canfield, proprietor of New York’s premier gambling house. No gambler embodied “class” more than Canfield. Perhaps not in a personal sense, for Canfield drank, smoked, and ate to excess (and wore a very tight corset to compensate). But his professional manners were impeccable. He never cheated, thinking it simply unnecessary. “The percentage in favor of a gambling house,” he observed, “is sufficient to guarantee the profits of the house. All any gambler wants is to have to play a long enough time and he’ll get all the money any player has.”

It was a theory Arnold Rothstein, with his bankroll growing from his still small-time killings, could appreciate-although he never did fully grasp the concept of not cheating.

But there was more to Canfield than reluctance to stoop to a blackguard’s ways. He was educated, intelligent, literate, a charming conversationalist, and among his generation’s most respected connoisseurs of art. In May 1888, after operating casinos successfully in Providence and Saratoga, he opened a fashionable club at Madison Square and East 26th Street. His impeccability made the Madison Square Club the premier destination for gamblers with taste, style, and lots of cash. But Manhattan was shifting farther uptown. Carnegie Hall, with the great Tchaikovsky gracing its first night, opened its doors at Seventh and 57th in 1891. The great restaurants also traveled northward. Delmonico’s, haunt of the rich and powerful, moved up Fifth Avenue, from East 26th Street to East 44th. Sherry’s, its rival, was just across the way.

More important, just a few blocks west was Longacre Squarenot yet called Times Square-but already emerging as Manhattan’s theatrical and dining epicenter. The people Arnold Rothstein was most interested in-gamblers-tended to congregate at Shanley’s on Broadway between 42nd and 43rd. Far more prominent folk, however, gathered at Rector’s. Here dined the cream of Broadway society-prizefighter Gentleman Jim Corbett; financier Diamond Jim Brady; his girlfriend, actress Lillian Russell; millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw and his bride Evelyn Nesbitt; architect Stanford White, whom the insane Thaw would kill in a jealous rage over his wife; theatrical producers Charles Frohman and Clyde Fitch; Broadway stars George M. Cohan and Anna Held; writers 0. Henry and Richard Harding Davis; composer Victor Herbert.

When every other place closed, one moved to Jack’s at West 43rd and Sixth, across from the city’s biggest theater, the brand-new Hippodrome, to breakfast on Irish bacon and champagne. Only the naive believed that Jack could serve so much liquor, so long after hours, without a well-compensated wink from Tammany.

The West 40s was now where the action was, and smart men like Richard Canfield knew it. In 1899 he purchased a four-story brownstone at 5 East 44th Street for $75,000, spent another $400,000 remodeling it (topping the $200,000 restaurateur Charles Rector spent outfitting his opulent establishment), and untold thousands more bribing cops to keep it open. Canfield’s new Saratoga Club exceeded even his own exceptional standards. The New York Times marveled:

It is the finest place of its kind in this country if not in the world, and the nightly play is enormous. It draws its patrons from the wealthiest men in the country, and while it is not hard for a man whose appearance denotes a fair measure of affluence to pass its portals, the “shoestring gambler” does not long remain its guest.

The entire big brownstone house is fitted throughout with extreme magnificence. The rarest Eastern carpets are upon its floors, and masterpieces of art adorn its walls. The furniture, consisting mainly of divans and davenports, are marvels of beauty and luxuriousness.

The gaming room on the second floor extends the length and width of the house and is a noble hall in proportions. In it are the most elaborate gambling layouts in this country, consisting of roulette wheels, faro tables, baccarat tables, and rouge et noir. Baccarat, faro and roulette are the principal games, and at times for certain players the limit is absolutely removed.

Servants throughout the house attend to the wants of the players and the place is conducted much like one of the most exclusive clubs. Entertainment is free to the guests. The costliest dishes game, pates and the rarest wines are served throughout the night. Everything is conducted with the utmost decorum. There are no loud words or heated arguments, all such being quietly but firmly stopped at their incipiency.

Gambling, the gentleman’s pastime.

A. R. read about Canfield in the papers, heard about him on the street. He aspired to meet his standards. The cheap stuss parlors of the Lower East Side and the sawdust-covered floors and backrooms of Bowery gin joints held little attraction. He coveted success not failure, upward mobility not barroom squalor. He wanted to rebel, but he also wished to rule.

Like Canfield, Arnold did not begin his gambling career in the Roaring Forties. Yes, he started out downtown but did not remain there long. An early haunt was Sunny Smith’s poolroom on busy Fourteenth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues. Smith’s was not a poolroom in the sense of today’s poolrooms. It may have contained a billiard table of two, but originally the term “poolroom”and pool itself-referred to “pools” of money placed on horse races and baseball games. Smith’s attracted not just billiardists, but gamblers, assorted lowlifes, and some very affordable ladies of the evening.

Too young to gain entrance to Smith’s, Rothstein loitered outside trying to obtain the attention of someone inside to bet a dollar or two for him on a specific horse. Usually, all he got was a rude “Get the hell out of here, you’re too young.”

But he’d remain outside, and when the race was over-and Arnold’s choice had run out-of-the-money-a man would emerge to say: “Say, Kid, you said two bucks on So-and-So, didn’t you?” Arnold handed over his money eagerly. It took only a few such bets to learn a hard lesson. Gambling was for suckers. Not gambling-betting on sure things-was where the money was. Risk was OK-for the other guy.

“I knew my limitations when I was fifteen years old,” he recalled, “and since that time I never played any game with a man I knew I couldn’t beat.”

Intellectually, he knew that. Emotionally, he didn’t. Gamblers never really do. So he kept plunging, often disastrously. He left Boys High School after his second year. Some said he tired of the place. Some said his parents pulled him out.

At age sixteen or seventeen, Arnold went on the road as a salesman for his father’s company, freeing himself from what little control Abraham and Esther Rothstein still exerted. In Chicago in 1899, in a highstakes game of pinochle, he lost everything he had, including the expense money given him by his father. He bummed his way back to New York, and too ashamed to admit failure, did not return to the family business. Did not return home.

He took a room at the Broadway Central Hotel, down on lower Broadway, and found a job selling cigars. He couldn’t have chosen a worse-or better-line of work. Selling smokes to cigar stores and to saloons and to pool halls, at each stop he met more gamblers and more men who fancied themselves gamblers.

At first, he continued to sometimes win, sometimes lose. But he was blessed not only with a head for numbers but also with a keen overall intelligence. He learned quickly and soon discovered what bets, what games, what houses, to avoid. He learned to minimize risks, often by less-than-honorable methods. Soon he began to win consistently.

Even then he carried upon his person as big a bankroll as he could, using it not just to generate interest from loans to needy but desperate gamblers, but to generate interesting side bets. Casually, he’d pull a fifty-dollar bill from his roll and challenge associates to a game of “poker.” If, for example, the serial number read “D7 981376 7H,” Rothstein had three sevens. If the other party had “R7 546484 8T,” he possessed two pairs-a pair of fours and a pair of eights. Threeof-a-kind beats two pair, and Rothstein would win.

Eventually people noticed that A. R. won far more often than he lost. Some dared suggest he had previously inspected his bankroll, discarding inferior “hands,” and committing the remaining “hands” to memory. That was, of course, just a theory.

“He couldn’t stay on the level,” recalled one early acquaintance:

Right away he began “past-posting.” [placing a bet after post time, i.e., indulging even then in “sure-thing” gambling-the same scam he had learned the hard way at Sunny Smith’s] When I called him on it he told me it wasn’t wrong, just smart. He said now I was wise to it I ought to do some of it myself. It was easy money and no one had a right to pass up easy money.

He used to say, “Look out for Number One. If you don’t, no one else will. If a man is dumb, someone is going to get the best of him, so why not you? If you don’t, you’re as dumb as he is.” Rothstein was always looking for a little bit of the best of it. He used to say that just a half-point [one-half of one percent] could mean thousands over a length of time.

He knew percentages and knew how to take advantage of them. I learned a lot from him.

But there was more to A. R. than gambling. If he had been intrigued merely with the tossing of dice upon green cloth, or the flip of a card, he could have contented himself with dingy Lower East Side stuss parlors and pool halls. Arnold liked gambling, but he also enjoyed the people he met while gambling. He enjoyed the thrill of knowing “name” people, prominent athletes, and actors.

As Arnold Rothstein came of age, Times Square, as New York’s entertainment center, was blossoming as well. Prior to the turn of the century, the neighborhood was barely worth mentioning, as the theater district lay at Herald Square, a good quarter-mile to the south. In 1895, however, opera impresario Oscar Hammerstein I opened three theaters: the Olympic, the Lyric, and the Music Hall on Broadway between 44th and 45th Streets. Everyone talked of Hammerstein’s daring, but soon talked about his near bankruptcy. In 1899 a desperate Hammerstein scraped together $8,000 to open Hammerstein’s Victoria at West 42nd and Broadway. Its success paved the way for other theaters in Times Square. By 1906 the New York Times could write that any theater not within the area’s confines was “practically doomed.” The Great White Way was being invented.