Rothstein (52 page)

SENATOR WILLIAM H. REYNOLDS, who originally owned Rothstein’s Long Beach property, eventually gained title to property on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street-which he sold to Walter Chrysler for construction of the Chrysler Building.

GEORGE GRAHAM RICE, while in Atlanta Penitentiary, found himself indicted for tax evasion. Acting as his own attorney, he demanded that, among others, Max D. Steuer, Charles Whitman, and the administrator of Rothstein’s estate be subpoenaed as defense witnesses. After a vigorous three-hour summation, he won acquittal on October 29, 1931.

TEx RICKARD, the fight promoter who predicted A. R.‘s murder, barely outlived him. He died of appendicitis on January 6, 1929. Jack Dempsey was at his bedside. Rickard had been right to worry about the stock market. Most of his estate vanished when Wall Street crashed that October.

BALD JACK ROSE, Charles Becker’s accomplice in killing Beansy Rosenthal, talked about writing his memoirs, flirted with an unlikely career as an evangelist (often at High Episcopal congregations), and eventually became a caterer on Long Island. A cocktail was named in his honor. It consists of 1 1/2 ounces applejack, 1/2 ounce grenadine, 1 1/2 tablespoons lime juice, and ice cubes. Combine all ingredients, shake vigorously, and strain.

SUBWAY SAM ROSOFF, among the highest rollers at A. R.‘s Brook club, continued building subways, making money, and gambling heavily. For the 1930 Travers Stakes at Saratoga 1930 Max Kalik gave Rosoff “special” 500-to-1 odds on Jim Dandy (the normal odds were a more modest 100-to-1). Subway Sam plunked down $500-Jim Dandy won by eight lengths-and collected five $50,000 checks from Kalik. Rosoff died at age sixty-eight of a “chronic intestinal condition” at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital on April 9, 1951.

ABRAHAM ELIJAH ROTHSTEIN eventually moved into Beth Israel Hospital, an institution for which he had performed significant philanthropic work, “where,” as the New York Times noted, “his kindly nature endeared him to staff and fellow patients. With liberty to come and go as he pleased, the patriarchal Rothstein was considered `part of the hospital’ until his final illness.” He died at age eighty-two on November 20, 1939.

ARNOLD ROTHSTEIN’s estate was originally appraised, in March 1934, at $1,757,572. Wrangling over its division continued through 1939, by which time the actual value of its assets had plummeted to $286,232. After debts, funeral, and administrative expenses were subtracted, its value fell again to just $56,196. None of this included certain unsatisfied claims, including $409,360 to his widow, $50,000 due to the debtors of E. M. Fuller & Co., $20,000 to Irving Berlin, Inc., and $12,500 to silent film star Alice Terry.

ESTHER ROTHSCHILD ROTHSTEIN died after a four-and-a-half-month illness at Mount Sinai Hospital June 7, 1936. She was seventy-four.

CAROLYN GREEN ROTHSTEIN was soon romantically linked to British carpet merchant Robert Behar. They married, but soon separated. In May 1934 she published her memoir, Now I’ll Tell (ghosted by Donald Henderson Clarke) that the Fox Film Corporation made into a motion picture improbably starring Spencer Tracy as “Murray Golden”-and featuring a yet-unknown Shirley Temple in a bit part. Reviewers praised Tracy, but the film did only mediocre business. “Mrs. Rothstein,” Clarke noted, “was consulted frequently during the preparation of the scenario, at which time she was engaged in getting her own material in shape. A motion picture is not constructed on the plan of a book of facts. In this instance, both the film and the book of facts have been built upon the same material, but the film has been fictionalized, as is necessary.” Clarke was right. The film placed even more emphasis of A. R.‘s relationship with Carolyn Rothstein, than her own book did, and included a highly fanciful theory regarding her role in his death. In any case, playwright Mark Linder sued Fox, claiming they had plagiarized his failed stage play Room 349 (alternately titled “Bumped Off”).

JACK ROTHSTONE and Fay Lewisohn divorced in October 1934, but he soon repeated his act of eloping with well-to-do young women. In March 1936 Rothstone, forty, eloped with twenty-one-yearold Bernice Levy, daughter of Manhattan Borough President Samuel Levy, also a wealthy attorney, real estate magnate, and philanthropist.

DAMON RUNYON continued fictionalizing the Broadway of the 1920s and 1930s, and Hollywood eventually made twenty-seven films from his short stories, most notably Guys and Dolls, Little Miss Marker, Lady for a Day, and Pocketful of Miracles. In 1938 Runyon devel oped throat cancer and eventually lost his voice. It was just part of what he would eventually endure: a daughter’s mental illness, an I. R. S. investigation for back taxes, the nervous breakdown of his first wife, and the desertion of his second. No wonder that when his son suggested he ask a friend of his father to visit the dying author, the voiceless Runyon typed out: “No one is close to me. Remember that.” When Runyon died in December 1946, World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker flew low over Broadway, scattering his ashes over the street the writer loved.

DUTCH SCHULTZ moved from numbers into slot machines, in partnership with Frank Costello and Dandy Phil Kastel. He soon faced trouble on numerous fronts. Fiorello La Guardia shut down his slots. The federal government prosecuted him (unsuccessfully) for incometax evasion-and, most ominously, he was high on Thomas E. Dewey’s list of targets.

Schultz favored a proactive approach to Dewey: He wanted to kill him. Fellow mobsters Lucky Luciano, Johnny Torrio, and Joe Adonis thought his plan counterproductive. Their alternative: Kill Schultz, before he killed Dewey and created more heat than they could possibly survive. On the night of October 23, 1935, Schultz dined with associates at Newark’s Palace Chop House. Gunmen Emmanuel “Mendy” Weiss and Charles “The Bug” Workman entered and shot them all.

JUDGE SAMUEL SEABURY remained a key supporter of Fiorello LaGuardia. He became an early supporter of anti-Nazi causes and, in 1950, wrote The New Federalism. He died at age eighty-five on May 7, 1958.

GURRAH SHAPIRO and Lepke Buchalter (see above) went into hiding on July 1937, but Shapiro, nervous and in declining health, couldn’t take the fugitive life. In April 1938, he surrendered at the Federal Detention Center on West Street, announcing solemnly, “I’m Jake Shapiro.” He spent the rest of his life in prison, first at the Federal Penitentiary near Ann Arbor, Michigan, then in New York State. In increasingly wretched health from diabetes and heart disease, he died at Sing Sing on June 9, 1947. He was just fifty.

JOSEPH E SHALLECK, Jimmy Hines’s attorney and loyal henchman, was disbarred in 1930 for bribing a juror in a federal mail-fraud case. Former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis handled his appeal, and Shalleck’s conviction was overturned by Appellate Court Judge Martin Manton (see above). During the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping, Shalleck reappeared in the public eye, issuing the following statement: “The important mob leaders are doing their very best to bring about the return of the baby.” Presumably, he spoke with their permission.

Joseph Shalleck died at age ninety-two at a Brooklyn nursing home on November 23, 1983.

STATE SENATOR ANDREW J. SHERIDAN was promised $40,000 for his work in handling the Rothstein estate. In 1935 he settled for $703.59.

HARRY SINCLAIR, another high-rolling patron of Rothstein’s, “loaned” $100,000 to Warren Harding’s Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall in return for oil leases on federal land at Teapot Dome, Wyoming. Fall went to jail for accepting the bribe, while a jury acquitted Sinclair of tendering it. However, Sinclair did serve nine months in federal prison for contempt of Congress. He died in Pasadena on November 10, 1956 at age eighty.

TOD SLOAN, A. R.‘s erstwhile partner in John McGraw’s pool hall, found a career acting in vaudeville and motion pictures. He died of cirrhosis of the liver on December 21, 1933.

ALFRED E. SMITH built the Empire State Building, broke with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and backed Republicans Alfred M. Landon and Wendell Willkie for president. He died at age seventy in New York City on October 4, 1944.

SIDNEY STAJER became involved in a bizarre incident regarding muckracking novelist Upton Sinclair’s 1934 run for the California governorship. Sinclair learned his political rivals had spent $15,000 to hire thirty gangsters “for the purpose of organizing the underworld [in New York] in opposition” to Lewis’ populist candidacy.

Wealthy young Sinclair associate Richard Crane Gartz met with Stajer to prevent this. Stajer told Gartz not to worry: The money had gotten into the wrong hands and nothing would probably be done against Sinclair. At first Stajer was unsympathetic to Sinclair, but Gartz won him over. The FBI interviewed Gartz, noting that Stajer

and other members of the underworld in New York wanted the [the patronage in the] Commissary Department and the Prison Department in California…. Stager [sic] also wanted Mr. Sinclair to refrain from interfering with any of stager’s [sic] gambling activities in California … Mr. Gartz stated that he informed Stager [sic] that Mr. Sinclair would not promise anything, but that in his opinion Mr. Sinclair would not interfere with the gamblers if they did not commit any overt act or do anything to arouse public opinion which would force Mr. Sinclair to take action.

Stajer’s only conviction was for criminal possession of postal stamps in December 1937. He died in Bellevue Hospital on December 11, 1940 at age fortyseven. Abe Attell claimed that he committed suicide.

CHARLES A. STONEHAM, New York Giants owner, bucketshop operator, and highstakes gambler, died of Bright’s disease in Hot Springs, Arkansas on January 6, 1936. The Spalding Official Base Ball Guide remarked delicately that he and “the late John J. McGraw … were associated in sporting ventures in this country and Cuba.” His son, the ineffectual, but less controversial, Horace C. Stoneham maintained control of the Giants until March 1976.

MAX D. STEUER, Bridgey Webber’s attorney, remained “Tammany’s favorite lawyer” but also had time to serve as counsel to a congressional committee and to represent such celebrities as crooner Rudy Vallee and mobsters “Boo Boo” Hoff and Johnny Torrio. “Mr. Steuer, in his later years,” noted the New York Times, “became noted for his extremely long radio speeches.” Steuer died of a heart attack at age sixty-eight on August 22, 1940.

JAMES M. SULLIVAN, Bald Jack Rose’s attorney, was appointed by Woodrow Wilson in August 1913 as “Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary” (ambassador) to Santo Domingo-with written support from Charles Whitman. In June 1915 Sullivan was removed from office for blatant corruption.

JOSEPH J. “SPORT” SULLIVAN popped up at Yankee Stadium during the 1926 World Series. Ban Johnson spotted him and had two special policemen escort Sullivan out of the ballpark.

HERBERT BAYARD SWOPE became executive editor of the New York World. A man of immense political influence, he later served as a New York State Racing Commissioner, a consultant to a Secretary of War, and on the American Atomic Energy Delegation to the United Nations. Ghostwriting for Bernard Baruch, he coined the phrase “cold war.”

His belief in Lieutenant Charles Becker’s guilt never waned, but memories of friendship with Arnold Rothstein grew conveniently dimmer. Suffering from pneumonia and heart disease, he died on June 20, 1958. In 1979 Swope was elected to the Croquet Foundation of America Hall of Fame. In 1999 the NYU School of Journalism named two of Swope’s pieces (his 1912 writing on NYC police corruption and a 1921 series, “The Klan Exposed”) as two of the one hundred best examples of twentieth-century American journalism.

MONT TENNES, the Chicago gambling king who knew so much, so early about the Black Sox, was, in February 1921, indicted for conspiring to promote gambling-but beat the wrap. In 1927 Tennes, weary of competition from Al Capone, retired permanently from gambling and the racewire service. He died of a heart attack in August 1941.

CIRO “THE ARTICHOKE KING” TERRANOVA eventually lost power to rising mobsters Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello. In April 1931 Terranova drove the getaway car in the murder of New York City Mafia head Joseph Masseria, but when Masseria’s assassins emerged from the slaying, they found that the trembling Terranova could barely start the car. His loss of nerve cost him the respect of his fellow mobsters, and in 1935 Luciano stripped Terranova of what little control he retained over the burgeoning Harlem numbers racket. Normally demotion meant death, but Luciano guessed correctly that Terranova lacked the guts to fight back. In December 1935, Mayor La Guardia drove Terranova out of the New York City artichoke market, cutting off his last source of income, and declaring him persona non grata in the city. If New York City police discovered him within the city limits they would arrest him for vagrancy. By 1937 Terranova lost even his Pelham Manor home. He died penniless at age forty-eight at East 19th Street’s Columbus Hospital in February 1938.

TITANIC THOMPSON, an active participant at the famed Rothstein-McManus-Raymond poker game, continued career highstakes gambling, golfing, and conning. At age sixty-two Tucson police sought his arrest for promoting a teenage prostitution ring. He died in 1978 in a Fort Worth nursing home. In 1999 golfer Gary McCord and producer Ron Shelton were reportedly planning a film based on his life.

GENE TUNNEY retired from the ring in 1928, married a millionaire’s daughter, and prospered in the world of business. In 1970 his son, John V. Tunney, became a United States Senator from California (some say Robert Redford’s character in The Candidate was based on young Tunney). The ex-heavyweight champion died at age eighty-one in Greenwich, Connecticut on November 7, 1978.

LEWIS J. VALENTINE, demoted in the wake of A. R.‘s slaying, was appointed police commissioner by Fiorello LaGuardia in September 1934. He remained commissioner, battling gambling and Tammany, until September 1945. Valentine died at age sixty-four in New York on December 16, 1946.

MAGISTRATE ALBERT VITALE, after resigning in disgrace from the bench, wasted no time in aiding the criminal element overtly, appearing in court on October 6, 1931 to defend Dutch Schultz’s notorious former henchman Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll. Vitale confined himself to practicing criminal law in the Bronx. The closest he again came to public office was as exalted ruler of Lodge 871 of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. He died at Mount Vernon Hospital at age sixty-two on September 8, 1949.