The Rothman Scandal (22 page)

“No eggs, and no cream. But an egg cream is what it's called.”

“What's it taste like?” He took a sip. “Hmm. It tastes like—well, it doesn't taste like much of anything, does it. Kind of fizzy.”

“We Jews say that egg creams are good for the soul.”

He smiled a thin smile. “Good for the soul,” he repeated. “Well, in a way that's rather appropriate, considering the business at hand. Ho, these gentlemen are my attorneys, and we are in the cheery process of preparing my last will and testament.”

The two men rose a little stiffly and uncomfortably, and shook Ho's hand.

“Ho,” Jim Meister said, “to whom would you bequeath an estate that is totally bankrupt? To whom would you leave an estate that is way over the Plimsoll line with debt? Not to your worst enemy, I suppose. And yet, if I am going to declare bankruptcy, it is apparently advisable that I prepare a last will and testament and leave all my bad debts to somebody, or so these boys tell me. Whom would you leave it all to, Ho?”

Ho shook his head. He didn't know.

“And yet a man must have a last will and testament,” he said. “I have no wife. I have no children. I have only a few nieces and nephews, who are already quite rich, and who would hardly be overjoyed at inheriting my IOUs.” He passed his hand across his face. “What if I were to leave it to you, Ho? What if I left all my debts to you? Would you accept them?”

“Yes.”

He was smiling the same thin smile. “No,” he said. “I was only making a joke, and not a very funny one at that. No, Ho, I wouldn't do a thing like that to you.” He took another sip of his egg cream, and made a face. “Egg cream,” he said.

“There's things I could do with the paper, Jim.”

“Things? What things?”

“Things. Lots of things.”

Meister was smiling again. Then he said, “Well, gentlemen, why not? What's there to lose? Let's leave my entire, worthless estate to Ho Rothman here.”

There was a silence. Then, clearing his throat, one of the lawyers said, “Surely you're not serious, James.”

“Oh, but I surely am. Quite serious. Absolutely serious. Deadly serious. That's supposed to be a joke too, considering the fact that we're drawing up my last will and testament.” He laughed harshly.

“James, once we get this bankruptcy matter out of the way, you'll be able to get this company back on its feet in no time.”

“Will I? I wonder,” he said.

“Of course you will. You're a young man, in your prime, James.”

“I wonder,” he said again. “But, for the time being, let's leave everything to Ho.”

“James, your will is merely a technicality. But it is a technicality that should not be undertaken frivolously. This is a serious matter, James.”

“But I
am
serious.”

“James, we cannot permit you to make this young and—excuse me, Rothman—ignorant young boy your heir.”

“But it's
my will
, isn't it?” he almost shouted.

“Of course, James, but—”

“And—ignorant? I'm not so sure.” His eyes were fixed hard on Ho now. “I see something in this young boy's face that I used to see in my own face when I looked in the mirror when I was his age. Courage, and intelligence, and determination, and—things. Other things. Or things I used to think I saw in my own face. Or maybe just things I wanted to see, and perhaps they weren't really there, after all—who knows? Ho—are you sure you want to inherit this can of worms?”

“James, we—”

“Shut up! Let him answer!”

“Yes,” Ho said.

Jim Meister pressed his palms on his desktop. “Very well, gentlemen,” he said. “That's the way I want my will to read. ‘I bequeath my entire estate to Ho Rothman, who crossed the picket line.' No—wait. Change that wording to read ‘To Ho Rothman, who bought me an egg cream.'”

And that was the way the will was written, and witnessed by the lawyers, that afternoon.

That night, James Meister III, the grandson of the paper's founder whose bronze bust loomed imperially over the entrance lobby above the legend “Through truth and integrity, there is light”—words the senior Meister certainly never uttered—locked himself in the library of his great graystone mansion in East Orange, the house in which he had been born forty-two years earlier, and put a bullet through his head.

As the sole heir to the debt-ravaged Meister estate, there were two things Ho knew he must do. He must put the East Orange mansion up for sale; but the house itself was heavily mortgaged, and Ho was certain that a house of that size would not sell quickly for anything close to what the property was worth. More pressing was the problem of saving the newspaper from being sold at public auction for back taxes in ten days' time. How he accomplished this became one of his favorites of the stories he liked to tell around the family dinner table at “Rothmere.”

What he did was this. On the first morning of his inheritance he marched down the street to Newark's City Hall and submitted his sealed bid for the Times-Union Company properties. His bid was for ten thousand dollars. Later he would say that he was certain he had no chance of winning the company with a bid that low. But somewhere, in the back of Ho's mind, there must have been a hunch that he might win it. And win it he did. He received a notification in the mail that the
Times-Union
was his, the plant and the adjacent office building. He was given the usual “ten business days” to come up with the cash in the form of a certified check. Otherwise, the property would go to the next-highest bidder.

But—ten thousand dollars! He had worked for the paper for a little less than two years, and had saved less than two hundred dollars. For doing odd jobs around her house and yard, his landlady had reduced his rent to fifty cents a week, and that had helped. But still, two hundred dollars was a far cry from ten thousand. How, in ten days, could he possibly come up with the difference?

The answer was simple. He stole it. He robbed banks.

At this point in his story, he always paused for dramatic effect, and his audience, no matter how many times they had heard it before, was expected to gasp. “I was not Bonnie Clyde,” he would say with a chuckle. “But was close!” He had had one experience with a bank, it seemed, that impressed him. At a bank teller's window, a few months earlier, he had asked to have a twenty-dollar bill changed into smaller denominations. With wide-eyed amazement, he had watched as the careless girl placed the twenty-dollar bill on the counter in front of her, counted out twenty singles on top of it, and then pushed the entire sum across the counter to him. He had walked into that bank with twenty dollars, and walked out with forty—doubled his money! Banks, he had learned, could make mistakes.

At first, he thought he would try this bill-changing technique again, using increasingly larger bills. But, after a few tries, and finding tellers more attentive than the one who had given him his twenty-dollar bonus, he gave up on this, and decided on another tactic.

Sadye Rothman had always stressed the importance of establishing credit. Credit, she said, meant—first of all—having a bank account. And so Ho Rothman, with his two hundred dollars, went to a Newark bank and opened a checking account. With his fresh book of checks in his pocket, he hopped on the ferry for Manhattan—crossing state lines, he figured, might make the mechanics of his scheme a bit less easy to detect, and he was right—where, in a New York bank, he wrote out a check on the Newark bank for two hundred dollars, and opened a second checking account, with a new book of checks. Now, as far as the two banks were concerned, he had four hundred dollars—double his money—at least until his checks were processed by the central clearinghouse, which, in those days, could take as much as a week.

Next, it was back to the first bank, where he cashed out his first account, then back to the second bank to cash out the second. Back and forth he went, always using different banks and, of course, different names and addresses because, in America, it didn't really matter what name you used, and there were no such things as Social Security numbers. In a little notebook, he jotted down the names he was using, and the names of the different banks, as back and forth across the river he went, doubling his money with each trip. Four hundred became eight hundred, eight hundred became sixteen hundred, sixteen hundred became thirty-two hundred …

“Was not Ponzi scheme,” Ho Rothman would crow when he told this story. “Was Rothman scheme!”

Of course in this age of computers a Rothman scheme would probably not work so smoothly, even if it could be made to work at all, but those were older, more naïve and trusting, forgotten times. And, using the Rothman scheme, it took less than half a dozen ferry crossings of ten minutes' duration each before Ho Rothman had his certified check for ten thousand dollars and a few hundred dollars in cash to spare.

When he told of all this, as he often did, Ho was always careful to add that, when he became rich, he used his little notebook to write to all the banks he had defrauded that week, giving the names he had used to defraud them, and offering to repay them all, with full interest. To be sure, some of his dinner guests looked a little skeptical when he came to the paying-the-banks-back part of his story. But no one ever dared suggest that he was not telling the truth. “What a wonderful story, Ho,” they would say.

“Was better than Bonnie Clyde, eh? No guns!”

By the time he became the legal owner of the
Newark Times-Union
, the paper had been shut down. Still, it must have been quite a moment when Ho walked down Bergen Street to look at his new property—a defunct newspaper, an empty office building, and a silent printing press. He must have wondered what to do next. “I was scaredest boy in Jersey!” he would tell his listeners. He was not quite seventeen years old.

And now, in the vast floor-through apartment at 720 Park Avenue, the ninety-four-year-old Ho Rothman lay quietly in his narrow hospital bed. His eyes were closed, and his breathing was gentle, but regular. Periodically, using her big watch, his private-duty nurse—today's eight-to-four was named Agnes O'Sullivan—checked his pulse. She did so in a desultory way, indifferently. It was always the same. Now she was sitting in Ho's old Barca-Lounger, with her knitting. She was knitting a sweater for her niece, the nun in Florida. Knit one, purl two, knit one, purl two. It was a black sweater. Agnes O'Sullivan hated black, but her niece's order banned bright colors. A yellow would have been pretty, but this sweater wasn't going to be pretty. It wasn't supposed to be. Simultaneously, as she knitted, she was reading a copy of the
Reader's Digest
, an article on how to test yourself for frigidity, and as she knitted and read, the television set was also going. “The Gong Show” was on.

In the gilt drawing room, Ho's wife, Aunt Lily, had just fixed her first martini. She needed a little something at this time of the day to dispel “that little sinking feeling” she experienced in mid-morning, and besides, Lenny Liebling was coming by in half an hour or so, and there was important business to discuss. Already, after the first sip of the martini, she was feeling a good deal better.

In the kitchen, the butler was polishing the silver, which, even though it was rarely used these days, Aunt Lily insisted be polished daily. Farther down the hall, the cook was taking a nap. It was too early to think about fixing Mr. Rothman's luncheon tray. Except in the room where the television was going, the house was quiet. This apartment, like “Rothmere,” was full of memories—parties, dinner dances, weddings, deaths—and these memories were all in Aunt Lily's head and, perhaps, in Ho Rothman's dreaming.

Agnes O'Sullivan was bored now with her knitting, bored with her
Reader's Digest
story, even bored with “The Gong Show.” Hers was the most boring job in the world, she often thought, just highly paid baby-sitting, sitting with an old man who should by rights be dead by now, but wasn't.

“It's an adv Alz case,” her rep at the agency had told her that morning before giving her the assignment. Adv Alz was nursing shorthand for advanced Alzheimer's. “And the file's marked “Difficult.'”

“What's difficult about him?” Agnes O'Sullivan had wanted to know.

“Well, they're R.P.A.J.s,” her rep had told her.

Agnes O'Sullivan hadn't known the meaning of this term.

“Rich Park Avenue Jews, and you know what that means. Just slap him with a Xanax if he gets obstrep.”

She put down her magazine now, and got to her feet. She probably ought to crank the old man's bed up now. The doctor's instructions had said that it was better for his circulation if he spent a certain amount of time in an upright position. But she didn't feel like cranking up his bed. That seemed too much like work, and what did they expect for a hundred and twenty dollars a day, fifteen percent to the agency? Instead, she began moving around the room, quietly opening and closing dresser drawers. Shirts, socks, handkerchiefs, underwear, the usual stuff. In one drawer she found what appeared to be his jewelry case, and she opened this. In it she saw, among more ordinary pieces, a pair of diamond and sapphire cuff links, and a matching set of studs. She tucked these quickly in the breast pocket of her starched white uniform.

“Stop, thief!”

Ho Rothman was sitting straight up in his bed now, his eyes wide open, pointing at her with one scrawny finger. “Stop, thief!” he screamed again. “Put those back! Lily! Lily! Pipple is robbing from us!
Lily!
Come quick! Get this
treyfeneh
out of here!”

12

Every magazine has what is called its “lead time,” which is to say the time between when the contents of a particular issue are decided upon, and story assignments are handed out, and the actual date of publication. Weekly magazines naturally have very short lead times, and often the final contents of a weekly are not determined until within hours of publication. The editor of a news weekly, for example, may have as many as three or four cover stories set in type and ready to print before deciding, at the last minute, which one to use.