THE TIMES WERE CHANGING and had been for quite a while.
A. R.'s early world, the twilight of Victorianism, appeared respectable, straight-laced, prim, proper. In reality it was wide-open, tolerating, and indeed reveling in prostitution, gambling, gluttony, and drunkenness. The Gilded Age. Fin de siecle. The Gay Nineties. Nouveau-riche business tycoons. The mauve decadence of seven-percent solutions, Oscar Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley.
Inevitably, reaction came. Progressive Era reformers did indeed accomplish everything the textbooks credit them with: battling bigcity bosses, regulating rapacious monopolies, restricting child labor, taking the first halting steps toward worker safety and consumer health. That was but part of their agenda. They also targeted what we gingerly call "private morality," but what they dared call "vice."
In Manhattan, the crackdown started with prostitution. In February 1892, the Reverend Charles H. Parkhurst, minister of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, delivered a sermon that shocked his congregation, alleging ties between brothels, police, and Tammany itself ("that lying, perjured, rum-soaked, libidinous lot"). Summoned by a grand jury to prove his allegations, he suddenly realized he possessed no actual evidence-and was laughed out of the room. To gather this evidence, he then conducted an elaborate personal undercover investigation of the city's underworld: the worst whorehouses, its most dangerous saloons. Soon he had proof, and the city listened. Eventually, even Tammany listened. When in 1902, prim, churchgoing Charles F. Murphy succeeded venal Richard Croker as head of the machine, Murphy ended its reliance on white-slave trade payoffs. Prostitution didn't end. It just moved from ornate brothels to hotel rooms and street corners. But its heyday was past.
The process repeated itself with gambling. In New York State, a series of laws crippled the racetracks; by 1911, they had been shuttered. The real blow fell to Manhattan's gambling industry with Beansy Rosenthal's murder. Again, as with prostitution and the tracks, the ornate, wide-open gambling houses shut down, replaced with floating games of chance.
Which left the saloon. The institution possessed its benefits, serving as a community focal point and a welcoming post for immigrants, but it harbored society's worst elements: gamblers, whores, thugs, ward politicians, petty-and often not so petty-criminals. Temperance and prohibitionist sentiment simmered nationally for decades, but never gained much ground. Then, just before World War I, the prohibition movement accelerated, augmented not just by the spirit of the times, but by an efficient political infrastructure. Older antialcohol groups such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union found themselves joined by the aggressive new Anti-Saloon League, an organization that combined grassroots fervor, a powerful publishing program, and hardball lobbying and politicking. Liquor interests dug in their heels, refusing to acknowledge their sins, to cleanse the corner saloon. In short order, they lost everything. In January 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution banned the "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" within the national borders. Prohibition was here to stayfor thirteen years.
The Eighteenth Amendment did not create organized criminal gangs, crooked cops, or venal politicians, but it provided them with fantastically lucrative opportunities-as it did for Arnold Rothstein. Some say A. R. was once again merely a Big Bankroll, who by mag nitude of nerve and cash attracted opportunities like a magnet, adding his own special skills to the process, but reactive nonetheless.
They are wrong.
Most biographical treatments provide the following story. As Prohibition began, two low-level hoodlums, Waxey Gordon (ne Irving Wexler) and Big Maxey Greenberg, needed Arnold to fund their purchase of a supply of Canadian liquor. Gordon, basically a Lower East Side thug, was a former pickpocket, Benny Fein strong-arm man, and dope peddler of little charm and less education. Maxey Greenberg hailed from St. Louis, where he worked for William "Jellyroll" Egan's "Egan's Rats," primarily a union-busting outfit. In 1917 Greenberg had received ten years for grand larceny, but in 1919 Egan employed his political connections to weasel a presidential pardon for Greenberg. Maxey, however, soon departed for Detroit, conveniently located across the river from Windsor, Ontario and Canada's virtually limitless amounts of high-quality liquor. Greenberg needed $175,000 to start his rum-running network. Neither he nor his new friend Waxey Gordon possessed $175,000.
Waxey had worked for Rothstein in labor racketeering. In October 1919, Gordon arranged a meeting with A. R. on a Central Park bench. Gordon and Greenberg knew Rothstein's interest rates would be steep, but also knew of no one else who could bankroll their operation.
A. R. certainly had the money, his fortune recently augmented from fixing a World Series. He also had a counterproposal. He demanded every piece of property Greenberg owned as collateral and further insisted that Maxey write a massive life insurance policy on himself with A. R.'s firm. That was just the beginning. A. R. would become senior partner in their enterprise-and, above all, he didn't want anything routed through greedy Canadian middlemen. The booze would be purchased outright in Great Britain, and shipped directly to the States. A. R. hated middlemen; they only skimmed away his profits.
Possessing no alternative, Greenberg and Gordon agreed. Rothstein had planned everything. He even had his own purchasing agent, Harry Mather, a Lower East Side native now lying low in England to avoid bucket-shop charges. Mather bought 20,000 cases of scotch and hired a freighter to ship them across the Atlantic.
Off the eastern Long Island coast, a small flotilla of speedboats sped the booze to shore. A waiting convoy of trucks (guarded by Legs Diamond and his brother Eddie) hauled it to the city. Such operations required the acquiescence of Coast Guardsmen, state troopers, and Suffolk and Nassau County Police. Yet all transpired flawlessly, returning fabulous profits to the new partnership.
Ten shipments arrived uneventfully. The Coast Guard prepared to intercept the eleventh. Aware of their plan, Rothstein ordered the ship to Cuba, where he still sold his cargo profitably. But the experience (and the potential loss of a massive investment) unnerved him.
The above is all true-except for abandoning rum-running and losing his nerve. A. R. never really left the business. He merely surrendered daily oversight of the operation. He still drew sizable profits from the trade. Before Greenberg and Gordon ever dared think of approaching A. R., Rothstein had already developed the entire scenario in his own mind-and assembled a smart, tough team of young hoodlums to implement it, men who would change the world of organized crime forever.
Eighteen-year-old Meyer Lansky (born Maier Suchowljansky in Grodno, Poland) was a young man on the way up, a petty Lower East Side gambler who graduated quickly to labor racketeering. The 5'5" Lansky-"Little Man"-and Rothstein first met in Brooklyn, in either 1919 or 1920, at the bar mitzvah of the son of a mutual friend. Rothstein invited Lansky to dine with him in Manhattan. The opportunity made Lansky nervous. He was little more than an unexperienced punk. A. R. was the biggest man in town. If Meyer knew what Arnold had in mind for him, he would have been even more nervous.
Indeed, Rothstein liked what he saw in Lansky, but he must have heard a great deal about the "Little Man" before that meeting. He also had to know about Lansky's budding organization. Otherwise, Arnold would never have proposed what he did: that Meyer Lansky and his associates, Lucky Luciano (Charlie Lucania), Ben "Bugsy" Siegel, Dutch Schultz (Arthur Flegenheimer), Abner "Longie" Zwillman, Charley Adonis, Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, and Albert Anastasia, would assist him in assembling the biggest liquorsmuggling ring in the history of the world.
Lansky's group was what A. R. needed: young, smart, flexible. Older gang leaders, the "Moustache Petes" like Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano, were too set in their ways. The Italians wouldn't work with the Jews. The Jews distrusted the Italians. The Sicilians shunned the Neapolitans. But these kids-and they were kidslooked beyond nationalities to the talent inside, just like Arnold. If a dollar could be made, they'd make it, and they were young enough to be molded in A. R.'s own image.
"We sat talking for six hours," Lansky remembered decades later. "It was a big surprise to me, Rothstein told me quite frankly that he picked me because I was ambitious and `hungry.'
"But I felt I had nothing to lose. He knew I was working with Charlie Lucania-as he was still known-and that we could call upon our friends, the mixture of Jews and Italians who were loyal to us."
Rothstein liked Lansky and took time to explain how they would collaborate not only in the short term, but in the years to come, and how if his gang was smart it could make more money than they could ever dream of:
There's going to be a growing demand for good whiskey in the United States. And when I say good whiskey that is exactly what I mean. I'm not talking about the rotgut rubbish your Italian friends are busy making in their chamber pots right now on the Lower East Side. That's O.K. for the poor creatures who don't know any better.
I'm talking about the best Scotch whiskey from Britain. There's a fortune to be made from importing the stuff into the United States. I don't mean just the odd dozen cases or partial shipment now and then. Prohibition is going to last a long time and then one day it'll be abandoned. But it's going to be with us for quite a while, that's for sure. I can see that more and more people are going to ignore the law, and they're going to pay anything you ask to get their hands on good-quality liquor. I know what I'm talking about, because as you know I mix with society people who have money. It's going to be the chic thing to have good whiskey when you have guests. The rich will vie with one another to be lavish with the Scotch. That's where our opportunity is-to provide them with all the liquor they can possibly pass on to their guests or guzzle themselves. And we can make a fortune meeting this need.
I want to set up a sound business for importing and distributing Scotch. It is illegal, of course, and will require running risks, but I don't think you mind that. I have the contacts to buy the stuff. I know the Scottish distillers and they know me. I've played poker with them. I've taken a lot of money from them. We're very good friends and there's no problem there. Would you like to discuss this with your Italian friends and let me know? But we have to move quickly. Other people are going to get on the bandwagon....
I will travel to London and Edinburgh and other major European cities and see the Scotch distillers. I'll lay out hard cash and ask them to deliver their top-quality whiskey to us. We'll have crews we can trust and ships to bring it across the Atlantic. The total cargo will be the Scotch I will buy from the distillers. We'll avoid running risks by unloading the cargo at sea and taking delivery outside the American three-mile limit. We'll have to hire or buy a fleet of small fast speedboats and that type of thing, so the cargo can he distributed at night to special places we'll set up on the coast. Either they can let us have the whiskey on the ocean that way, or we can take delivery from one of the nearby Caribbean islands-Cuba may be a good place. It will be your job to smuggle the Scotch into the United States and then distribute it.
A. R.'s exposition as to the why of rum-running required no profound insights. His view of how revealed the mind of a shrewd busi nessman, attuned to branding, customer satisfaction, and long-term profitability:
But first I want to lay down an important principle, and this is something I want to be very clear about: We must maintain a reputation for having only the very best whiskey. There are two ways of making money out of this, as I see it. There's the quick and rather stupid way-we could get cheap rotgut whiskey or open the cases and bottles we import, dilute it, and mix it with the cheap stuff being produced over here. We could certainly make very high profits for a while that way. But we would simply get a reputation like your pal Masseria as being merchants of cheap, disgusting booze which might even kill people. We'd have only the lowest kind of clientele. I want to go for the society people, because that's where the big money is.
Rothstein's formula began working like a charm, bringing immense riches not only to himself, but to Lansky and his coterie of young hoodlums. The basic ideas of the venture paralleled of running at any first-class gambling house: The business is lucrative enough without having to cheat, so don't. Treat customers with respect and they will return. Comport yourself with class and you attract clients with class-and the more class they possess, the more money they have. And the more money they arrive with, the more money you will depart with.
Rothstein certainly enjoyed such profitable company, but just as at Jack's, he also took pleasure in the relatively cultured and amusing. Sam Bloom, of Chicago's 20th Ward, was a member of Al Capone's outfit specializing in running booze from the Bahamas to Charleston, South Carolina. Eventually, he appeared in Manhattan, attempting to develop relations with New York mob interests. Bloom, a relatively cultured and well-read fellow (at least by mob standards), hit it off reasonably well with A. R. When he found a wealthy Scotsman ripe for fleecing, Bloom secured Rothstein's cooperation, and the two Americans staged a fixed high-stakes poker game, at first, letting the Scot win a few hands, but eventually taking him for $50,000 apiece. Afterward, Bloom took time to commiserate with his victim (you never know, after all, when you might need a sucker again), learning that he owned the majority of the distillery producing King's Ransom Scotch. King's Ransom was decent stuff, twelve-year-old full-bodied whiskey, the brand of hooch Bloom could safely dilute with cheaper stuff.
Bloom thought this an excellent opportunity to secure exclusive American importing rights to King's Ransom and approached Rothstein, Lansky, and Luciano with the idea. They weren't interested in adulterating any merchandise, but they were looking ahead, intrigued by the opportunity for exclusive rights to King's Ransom even after Prohibition. They agreed to advance a $100,000 deposit for their new partnership.
The Scotsman agreed. After all, $100,000 was what he had just lost. And to show what a gentleman he was, Bloom insisted that he receive no receipt in return. This relationship would be strictly one of honor.
And so it went. A. R. and Bloom even allowed their new partner to win back a wee bit more of his money in card games, and for a while boatloads of aged Scotch traveled safely from Glasgow to Lansky's agents: Enoch "Nucky" Johnson in Atlantic City and Charles "King" Solomon in Boston. Then-one night-a huge shipment disappeared near Boston.
Solomon knew who did it. And who tipped off the culprits: Samuel Bloom. Solomon even provided Lansky with Bloom's motive: heavy gambling debts, especially to A. R. Lansky phoned Rothstein and learned the recently impecunious Bloom had just paid Rothstein a $100,000 debt. Bloom ended up in the East River, in the proverbial cement overcoat. His Scottish friend often asked about him,. but received only discreetly vague responses.
Another unsavory character Rothstein met through rum-running was Jack "Legs" Diamond. Originally from Philadelphia, Diamond had been a member of the West Side's Hudson Dusters gang, compiling an impressive arrest record before being drafted into the army in World War I. Diamond liked killing people, but evidently not for the government, as he had gone AWOL and spent a year in Leavenworth. On his release, Legs and his tubercular brother Eddie went to work for Rothstein, often, but not exclusively, as bodyguards. The Diamonds, along with Eugene Moran, formed the nucleus of guards protecting A. R.'s smuggled whiskey from Montauk Point to Manhattan. Guarding booze was lucrative-stealing it even more so. The Diamonds went into business for themselves, relieving independent rumrunners and bootleggers of their merchandise-and selling it to Rothstein, who resold it to other operators.
A noteworthy Lansky associate was a rising young Sicilian-born drug peddler and strong-arm man named Lucky Luciano (ne Salvatore Lucania). Before the Roaring Twenties were very old, Luciano would establish himself as overlord of New York's still-thriving network of pimps and whores, making a fortune selling them protection, and still more money from the liquor and drug trade.
Luciano was nowhere near as intelligent as Lansky. (Few mobsters, few people, were.) He not only sought guidance from Rothstein on business matters, but solicited advice on such basic etiquette as "how to behave when I meet classy broads."
"He taught me how to dress," said Luciano, "how not to wear loud things but to have good taste; he taught me how to use knives and forks, and things like that at the dinner table, about holdin' a door open for a girl, or helpin' her sit down by holdin' the chair. If Arnold had lived a little longer, he could've made me pretty elegant; he was the best etiquette teacher a guy could ever have-real smooth."
On one memorable occasion, Rothstein served as the fast-rising hoodlum's fashion adviser. In June 1923 Prohibition agents Lyons and Coyle caught Luciano on 14th Street carrying several ounces of pure heroin on his person. It was a stupid move, but Luciano smartly talked his way free by revealing a $75,000 heroin cache and betraying some associates in the process (Luciano later made the unlikely claim that the stash was hurriedly planted by his henchmen for that very purpose). The incident shredded his reputation. Lucky's high-class Park Avenue customers no longer felt comfortable buying booze from such a cheap drug peddler. His underworld compatriots feared him as a snitch. Meyer Lansky proposed a solution: Luciano could regain face with a single grand gesture. Accordingly, Luciano paid $25,000 for two hundred ringside seats for that September's Jack Dempsey-Luis Firpo title fight at the Polo Grounds-then gave them away to the most important people he could find: gangsters Al Capone, Johnny Torrio, and Boston's King Solomon; businessman Ben Gimbel; politicians Jimmy Hines, Al Marinelli, Kansas City's Democratic Party boss Jim Pendergast, and Pennsylvania's Republican boss, Congressman (and future United States Senator) William S. Vare; show people Flo Ziegfeld and Ziegfeld's archrival Earl Carroll; even Mayor Hylan's Police Commissioner Richard Enright. Suddenly Lucky Luciano was once again someone you wanted to know.
But to cap off fight night-and his comeback-Luciano needed the proper wardrobe. He asked A. R. to accompany him to Gimbel's Department Store to select the appropriate attire. `No, Charlie," Arnold corrected him. "John Wanamaker's men's department has the stuff you need. I'm going to turn you into another Francis X. Bushman."
A. R. knew that conservative understatement was the key to proper attire. After all, Luciano didn't want to look like the drug peddler and pimp that he was, and A. R. advised even more caution by having Lucky buy an off-the-rack suit, rather than risk having a tailor fashion something a tad flashy. He also suggested the necessary accessories. Luciano recalled decades later, "Arnold gimme a dozen French ties made by some guy by the name of Chavet. They was supposed to be the best and Arnold bought a hundred ties whenever he went to Paris. He also used to buy the silk for his shirts by the bolt at a place in France called Sulka, and he always would give me some as a present; that's how I get the rep for wearin' silk shirts and underwear and pajamas.
"So the night of the fight I had on a beautiful double-breasted dark oxford gray suit, a plain white shirt, a dark blue silk tie with little tiny horseshoes on it, which was Arnold's sense of humor. I had a charcoal gray herringbone cashmere topcoat, because it was a little cool, with a Cavanagh gray fedora, very plain. Rothstein gimme a whole new image, and it had a lotta influence on me. After that, I always wore gray suits and coats, and once in a while I'd throw in a blue serge."
Despite A. R.'s ongoing relationships with Lansky and Waxey Gordon, he was open to rum-running with others. In the early 1920s, veteran con artist Dapper Don Collins (ne Robert Arthur Tourbillon, or "Ratsy" for his initials) approached him. Collins had begun as a circus performer who jumped a speeding motorcycle across a ring of snarling lions. He quickly graduated to con games, badger games, white slavery, and pilfering pay phones-and, occasionally, jail-time. Once after swindling an upstate farmer out of $20,000, only Bill Fallon's efforts rescued him from another stretch in prison. "He's so decorative," Fallon explained. "There are so many frightful looking human beings around that I believe in doing all I can to preserve the ones who are easy to look at."
In 1921 Collins shot and wounded a romantic rival and fled to Philadelphia. There he posed as "Charles A. Cromwell," a society scion of his own invention. He had access to hundreds of cases of reasonably priced whiskey in the Bahamas and the means to transport them home as he had just purchased a World War I-surplus submarine chaser and refitted it as a luxury yacht, piquantly rechristened the Nomad. He did not, however, have the cash to pay for the booze.
Dapper Don informed Rothstein he could secure 1,200 cases (or 850 cases, 1,600 cases, or 2,000 cases-accounts vary) for just $75 each, and resell it stateside for $250 each. However, Rothstein distrusted Collins immensely, his suspicions aggravated by the $11,000 Dapper Don already owed him. Yet sometimes owing money to A. R. worked in your favor. If you had little chance of repaying your original loan, Arnold might advance you even more cash to recoup his original-now imperiled-investment.
But A. R. had to ensure that he wouldn't be placing any further investment at risk. Accordingly, he first found a buyer for the hooch. It made little sense for A. R. to purchase the Scotch, and only then hunt for customers, while Prohibition agents, local cops, and greedy gangsters hovered nearby. He found one in Waxey Gordon, who advanced 10 percent of what he would ultimately pay A. R. for the booze. This provided Arnold with a one-third of his purchase price.
Simultaneously, Rothstein dispatched Sid Stajer to the Bahamas to verify Collins's story. Was the Scotch available as promised? Or would Dapper Don merely pocket A. R.'s cash and sail off for parts unknown? Stajer learned the whiskey was available, but for only $60 a case. As Arnold had already instructed Sid to cut Collins out of the actual purchasing process, this meant extra profits for Rothstein.
The Nomad, manned by Dapper Don, a gun-toting crew of three, and a very attractive blue-eyed blonde, "Mrs. Cromwell," now brought the contraband to Philadelphia or, more specifically, to the Mathis Yacht boatyard across the river at Camden. As the Nomad approached shore, a watchman shouted they weren't allowed to dock there.
"Don't be an ass, me good fellow," Collins cheerfully responded, affecting his finest Philadelphia Main Line accent, "We're putting her on the marines railway for repairs in the morning."
While the guard pondered this new information, a large truck roared up, increasing his alarm. The nonplussed Collins explained matter-of-factly: "Why we've got to get the furniture off, haven't we?"
Of course.
Collins unloaded half his "furniture" at Camden. He removed the remainder in nearby Chester County, Pennsylvania. Here the story becomes murky. Either police nabbed Dapper Don and he paid a $500 fine for his transgressions (reasonable overhead), or Legs Diamond, whom Rothstein had engaged to transport the booze on land, helped himself to 150 cases of Scotch that Ratsy had purchased for his own use (an unreasonable overhead). Either way Collins fared, the purchase was yet another big score for the Big Bankroll.
Legs Diamond was clearly making a name for himself-and trouble for everyone else. No longer merely Rothstein's bodyguard and all-around henchman, he branched out for himself, butting heads with New York's other established bootleggers: Waxey Gordon, Dutch Schultz, Bill Dwyer, Frankie Yale, Frank Costello. Rothstein had bankrolled Diamond's first efforts, and Diamond's rivals avoided an open confrontation with him, wary of upsetting A. R. But Rothstein alternately extended and withdrew his protection to the vicious Diamond. When Diamond and Big Bill Dwyer (another bootlegger owing his start to A. R.) battled over territory, Rothstein tacitly supported Dwyer. A few years later, when Diamond and Bronx beer baron Dutch Schultz went head-to-head, A. R. hired a small army of goons to support his onetime bodyguard. The Dutchman backed down.
Occasionally, A. R. functioned as peacemaker. In the late 1920s Waxey Gordon and Owney "The Killer" Madden fought over turf in Manhattan. Tiring of the carnage, they asked Rothstein to arbitrate. He settled their differences in twenty minutes, parceling out neighborhoods, maximizing their profitability, and minimize their irritability. Gordon and Madden each paid Arnold $250,000 for his services. In A. R.'s world, blessed indeed were the peacemakers.
There were myriad ways to profit from the Eighteenth Amendment. Selling supplies for home brew was one, and on May 16, 1920, Sidney Stajer was charged with selling such ingredients-in the name of Arnold's "Redstone Material and Supply Company." Providing bailing for incarcerated bootleggers was another. (The first time was for a Harry Koppel, on January 18, 1920, just seventeen days after Prohibition began.) Financing speakeasies would also prove lucrative. A. R. had no desire to operate such joints, he just wanted lucrative interest rates from those who did: His most famous such client was horse-faced racketeer Larry Fay. Beginning as a lowly cabdriver, Fay combined three unlikely occupations-speakeasies, taxicabs, and milk distribution. In 1920 he took a fare to Montreal and discovered just how cheaply Canadian booze could be purchased, easily smuggled across the border, and profitably sold in Manhattan. Fay used his rum-running profits-plus cash advanced by A. R.-to purchase a fleet of nickel-plated cabs, vehicles distinguished by their horns (playing a distinctive musical tune) and their doors (sporting huge swastikas, Fay's personal good-luck symbol). And if riders still weren't interested, Fay hired thugs to shoo them away from the competition.
When Fay entered the speakeasy racket, A. R. again provided capital. Fay's first establishment, the El Fay Club, boasted two noticeable attractions: multiple swastikas on its facade and brash hostess Mary Louise Cecilia "Texas" Guinan. Guinan had recently been employed as the rough-riding cowgirl star of a series of low-grade silent westerns. "We never changed plots-only the horses," she quipped. In Manhattan the rough-hewn Guinan fleeced sophisticated customers with overpriced food, liquor, and cover charges (greeting them with a hearty "Hello, sucker!") and made them feel good about it. But Fay's clubs were too high profile and kept getting padlocked. He moved into yet another racket, working with West Harlem Tammany chieftain Jimmy Hines to cartelize the city's milk supply. Their New York Milk Chain Association rented office space from ... Arnold Rothstein.
Prohibition agents had few effective weapons against the liquor trade, but padlocking properties (as they did with Texas Guinan's clubs) was among the most valuable. Sites could be shuttered for a year, a powerful disincentive to landlords renting to speakeasies and bootleggers, or to operating illegally on your own property. In Chicago authorities once shuttered an entire 125-room hotel. In Northern California they padlocked a hollowed-out, twenty-fourfoot-diameter redwood housing a fifty-gallon still. Even in wide-open New York, during one particularly energetic thirteen-month period, 500 speakeasies were padlocked.
But there was a flip side to the law: Any property raided unjustly could become off-limits to police and Prohibition agents for a year. Bill Fallon's law partner, Gene McGee, brought that statute and its implications to A. R.'s attention, and Rothstein profited from it, using his connections to have the NYPD "raid" evidence-free properties, securing raid-preventing injunctions, and then renting these sites at premium rates-as much as $50,000 extra per property by 1924.
The same principle held for gambling. In the early summer of 1925, police raided four gaming locations, including West 44th Street's Teepee Democratic Club and West 48th Street's Park View Athletic Club. Owners petitioned Supreme Court Justice (and former fixer in the Rosenthal case) Aaron J. Levy for injunctive relief against further raids. This infuriated Corporation Counsel Nicholson, who charged the raids were designed to trigger these injunctions-and further that it was hardly coincidental that the plaintiffs had not filed any motions until Aaron Levy was the one Supreme Court justice left on duty in the city.
Levy ordered attorney and former New York University philosophy professor Joseph Kahn to referee the matter. Police Officer Arthur Stearne testified how departmental "higher-ups" ordered the conveniently evidence-free Park View raided in an obvious attempt to trigger an injunction. Stearne reported how officers not sufficiently cooperating in this farce found themselves demoted and transferred to remote outer-borough precincts. It also transpired that the firm of Arnold Rothstein & Co. had obtained the surety bond necessary for the Park View Athletic Club's suit. The news only amused Professor Kahn. "Mr. Rothstein," he observed, "appears to have an amazing pertinency in many of these injunction proceedings."
Others claimed it was more than pertinency. "Have you any idea who might have been behind all these happenings?" Assistant Corporation Counsel Russell L. Tarbox asked Officer Stearne. Stearne didn't hesitant: "Everybody figured that Arnold Rothstein had something to do with it."
That didn't amuse Kahn. "What everybody figures too often is something nobody knows," he snapped. "Strike the last question and answer from the record." Kahn recommended that judge Levy grant the injunction.
The Park View case served as prologue to an emerging political donnybrook. Tammany boss Charles E Murphy died in April 1924, and Governor Alfred E. Smith seized the opportunity to cajole Tammany into dumping his old enemy, the dull and dull-witted Mayor John F. "Red Mike" Hylan. Unfortunately, the best candidate the organization could recruit to challenge the incumbent was glib, brilliant-but morally flawed-State Senate Minority Leader James J. Walker, known not only for efforts to legalize boxing and Sunday baseball in the state and for his songwriting ("Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?")-but also for his laziness, woman izing, and high living. Hylan wouldn't go quietly, however, and faced Walker in a primary. At first "Red Mike" stepped gingerly around the Rothstein issue, claiming he was waging "a campaign against the underworld element" masterminded by a nefarious unnamed "Pool Room King." Eventually he got around to naming names. Campaigning at Queens P.S. 93, the wooden Hylan abandoned his usual prepared texts to accuse new Tammany leader George W. Olvany of colluding both with transit interests (Red Mike's bete noire) "and Arnold Rothstein, the big gambler."
Olvany denied all: "Now that Mayor Hylan has stated that my alleged pool room king and big gambler advisor is Arnold Rothstein ... I want to state that I do not know Arnold Rothstein .... that I have never met [him], that I have never had breakfast, lunch, dinner or supper with [him], and that I would not know [Rothstein] if I saw [him] on the street."
Al Smith ridiculed (but didn't actually deny) Hylan's charges, pointing out that it wasn't Rothstein who nominated Walker at Tammany Hall, but rather, Daniel E. Finn, a member of the mayor's own cabinet. "The Mayor either does not know a gambler when he sees one or he does not know who made that nominating speech."
Meanwhile Hylan grew obsessed with A. R.'s influence. "Too many policemen are friends of Rothstein," he informed a press conference, oblivious to the fact that he, not Walker, oversaw the NYPD. "Too many public officials are also his friends. That explains why places with which he is reported to be connected seem able to operate without molestation."
The public didn't care. Walker was the type of good-time, wisecracking mayor that 1920s New York demanded. He won the primary by 100,000 votes, carrying even Hylan's home borough of Brooklyn. Even before the votes were in, judge Levy felt safe enough to do A. R.'s bidding. Sanctimoniously sniffing "there is something rotten in Denmark," Levy, nonetheless, issued a permanent injunction shielding the Park View Athletic Club. Rothstein had won again. Rothstein always won.