The times were changing in November 1928. The Big Money from Wall Street would soon vanish. Prohibition would follow. Tammany Hall would soon be out of power. Maybe A. R. would have adjusted. He was smart enough and tough enough. But maybe he, too, would have wound up behind bars-like Capone, Lepke, or Luciano. You never know. Arnold Rothstein died at forty-six. Most of his contemporaries survived him. Some for months. Some for years. Some for decades. Tidying up the loose ends of the life of Arnold Rothstein, here is the fate of these members of the supporting cast. One cannot help concluding that while crime pays temporarily, in the long run its bill usually comes due with a rate of interest even A. R. dared not charge:
NICKY ARNSTEIN emerged from Leavenworth on December 21, 1925. His marriage to Fanny Brice survived jail but wilted from verbal abuse and adultery. They divorced in 1927. "I didn't even go back to New York for my clothes," Arnstein would recall. "She auctioned them off with her furniture later. I was through."
In 1964, when Arnstein's son-in-law, producer Ray Stark, was working to bring Funny Girl, the story of the Brice-Arnstein romance, to Broadway, he feared Arnstein would sue over his onstage portrayal. Stark invited Nicky to New York for the premiere. While in Manhattan, Arnstein hit Stark up for money repeatedly. When the producer finally had enough, so did Arnstein, who returned home, huffing, "I don't want to see what they will make me into."
Nicky Arnstein died at age eighty-six in Los Angeles on October 2, 1965.
ABE ATTELL continued finding himself in and out of trouble. In July 1929, he beat the rap for scalping fight tickets. In 1931 Justice Department officials raided an unlicensed New Jersey radio station linked to a $100 million-a-year, twelve-ship, rum-running operation. Inside, they discovered a little black book containing several references to Attell.
Eventually, the Little Champ went straight. He owned Abe Attell's Steak and Chop House at 1667 Broadway (and was charged with staying open illegally on primary day, a benign transgression by Attell standards) and another bar, May O'Brien's (named after his second wife) at East 55th Street and Second Avenue.
In the late 1950s he appeared with several other ex-boxers, on the television quiz show, The $64,000 Challenge, against a team featuring Dr. Joyce Brothers. He later acted shocked to find it was fixed. (In typical Attell fashion, he denied everything.)
Boxing's oldest living ex-champion died at age eighty-five on February 6, 1970 in New Paltz, New York. Despite having fixed the 1919 World Series, he was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame in 1955, the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1982, the San Francisco Boxing Hall of Fame in 1985, and the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY JOAB H. BANTON'S handling of the Rothstein case ruined his dreams of a judgeship. He returned to private practice, never again held public office, and died at age seventy-nine on May 29, 1942.
GEORGE YOUNG BAUCHLE died forgotten at age sixty in suburban Port Chester in July 1939. The Times decorously termed him "well known as a first nighter, automobilist, and patron of various sports."
HYMAN "GILLIE" BILLER, widely thought to have perished during his flight from New York following Rothstein's murder, reappeared in Miami in January 1930, penniless and supposedly fearing extradition. Less than two weeks later, District Attorney Crain quashed Biller's indictment-an almost unprecedented dismissal in a murder case where the suspect remained a fugitive. That April, Biller returned quietly to New York. In early August, police discovered him gambling at Yankee Stadium and, despite his loud protests, ejected him from the ballpark. That was his last time in the public eye.
FANNY BRICE had second thoughts about divorcing Nicky Arnstein. "I didn't believe we were through . . . ," she later contended. "I knew I was just as much in love with Nick as the day I first saw him." In February 1929, however, she married showman Billy Rose at a City Hall civil ceremony. Brice eventually turned her back on the ethnic humor that launched her success, and gained perhaps even greater fame in Hollywood and on radio as bratty, accentless "Baby Snooks."
She died at age fifty-nine on May 29, 1951, of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
LEPKE BuCHALTER and Gurrah Shapiro continued labor racketeering. In 1936 federal authorities convicted both of Sherman Antitrust Act violations. In 1937 they won a new trial, but before it began, they disappeared. Buchalter remained at large until the night of August 24, 1939, when he dramatically surrendered to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and gossip columnist Walter Winchell. "Mr. Hoover," said Winchell, "meet Lepke."
"Nice to meet you," Lepke replied calmly. "Let's go."
Buchalter thought that surrendering to the FBI would secure immunity from prosecution by Manhattan District Attorney Thomas Dewey for the murder of candy-store owner Joseph Rosen. Lepke was wrong. The feds double-crossed him and turned him over to Dewey. After numerous delays, Buchalter went to the chair at Sing Sing on March 4, 1944.
NATHAN BURKAN, after gutting A. R.'s papers, returned to the lucrative world of copyright law, becoming general counsel for Columbia Pictures and one of several counsels for United Artists. He died of "acute indigestion" at his Great Neck estate on June 6, 1936. He was then working on the Gloria Vanderbilt custody case, representing Gloria's mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt.
SLEEPY BILL BURNS virtually disappeared following the Black Sox Scandal. He died at age seventy-three at the Trammel Rest Home in Ramona, California on June 6, 1953. Burns' obituary did not appear in the following edition of the Official Baseball Guide.
MAURICE CANTOR lost his assembly seat in the 1930 election. Shortly thereafter he moved out of New York City to Long Beach, Long Island. In the 1930s he defended such hoodlums as Salvatore Spitale and Lucky Luciano henchman Jack Eisenstein. In 1959 he reappeared in public view during an investigation of corruption at Roosevelt Raceway.
HAL CHASE never appeared in major-league baseball after the 1919 season, but played semipro ball until age fifty. Increasingly alcoholic, he drifted around Arizona and California mining towns, ultimately being supported by his sister and her husband. Neither could stand him. Chase died of beriberi on May 18, 1947 in Colusa, California.
DAPPER DON COLLINS, con man and sometimes rumrunner, continued his illicit ways. He was sentenced to sixteen months for swindling New Jersey apple farmer Thomas Weber out of $30,000. "This was an excellent prison," he told reporters on his release in August 1930. "I recommend it as a wonderful vacation spot." He then announced he was heading for Paris-and-like Judge Craterwas never seen again.
BETTY COMPTON, Jimmy Walker's mistress and later his wife, died of cancer, aged forty, in New York on July 12, 1944. Walker and Betty's fourth husband, Theodore Knappen, moved in together to keep her infant child (fathered by Knappen) and the two children Walker and Compton had adopted together. It didn't work out.
STEPHEN CRANE, after being run out of New York following the Charles Becker-Dora Clark affair, took up reporting in Florida. Crane, whose first book was Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, clearly had a soft spot in his heart for prostitutes, soon taking up with Jacksonville madam Cora Taylor. After covering wars in Cuba and the Balkans, Crane died of tuberculosis in Baden, Germany, in 1900 at age twenty-eight.
"NICK THE GREEK" DANDOLOS continued as one of America's premier high-stakes gamblers, once reputedly winning $50 million in a single night. During his career he won or lost approximately $500 million. In the summer of 1949 Dandolos challenged gambler Johnny Moss to a legendary high-stakes, full-view-of-the-public, five-month poker marathon at Las Vegas's Horseshoe Casino. Dandolos lost $2 million. Exhausted, he pushed back his chair, calmly said, "Mr. Moss, I have to let you go," and went to bed. The Greek died broke in Los Angeles on Christmas Day, 1966. Friends paid for his funeral, burying him in a golden casket.
JACK DEMPSEY became a beloved elder statesman of sport, opening a popular restaurant in the Brill Building, at 1619 Broadway, just a few doors down from Lindy's. The Manassa Mauler died of a heart attack at age eighty-seven in New York City on May 31, 1983.
LEGS DIAMOND spun out of control. In July 1929 at his Broadway nightclub, the Hotsy Totsy Club, Diamond and associate Charles Entratta fatally shot William "Red" Cassidy and Simon Walker. Through witness intimidation, Diamond escaped punishment, but soon became embroiled in a gang war against Dutch Schultz. In October 1929, he found himself riddled with bullets at the Hotel Monticello. For safety he moved operations to the Catskill Mountains. On the night of December 18, 1931, unknown assailants shot and killed Diamond in a shabby Albany, New York row house, a property now owned by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy, author of Legs.
Some have said that Dutch Schultz's gang killed Diamond. Others say Lucky Luciano's. Numerous other theories have been advanced. Suffice it to say that Diamond had a lot of enemies. Legs's widow, Alice Kenny Diamond, was the solitary mourner at his funeral. She committed suicide at an Ocean Avenue (Brooklyn) rooming house in 1933.
NATHANIEL I. "NAT" EVANS, A. R.'s partner in gambling houses and the World Series fix, died on February 6, 1935, leaving his only heir, his son Jules, to sue seventeen different insurance companies to collect on the loss of The Brook.
"JAKE THE BARBER" FACTOR, con man extraordinary, found England demanding his extradition for his Rothstein-backed stock scams. To avoid this fate, he had Al Capone's old gang fake his kidnapping, framing their rival, mobster Roger Touhy, in the bargain. Factor went to jail anyway-for mail fraud in 1943. He was released in February 1948. By 1955 the mob deemed Factor sufficiently respectable to become front man for their lucrative Las Vegas Stardust Casino.
In December 1962, Factor's considerable donations to John E Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign-and the slush fund for Kennedy's Bay of Pigs fiasco-paid dividends in the form of a highly questionable presidential pardon. Factor later became a generous benefactor to Southern California's minority community. He died in 1984 at age ninety-one.
STARR FAITHFULL, the girl in the chorus line at the Woodmansten Inn when Jimmy Walker learned of A. R.'s murder, soon came to her own sad end. On June 8, 1931 her bruised body washed ashore at Long Island's West Long Beach. Local authorities announced it was foul play and that a well-known-but unnamed-politician was involved. Her case briefly aroused considerable public interest, but ultimately nothing further was learned concerning her demise. Novelist John O'Hara based his 1935 novel, Butterfield 8, on the case. Elizabeth Taylor won her first Academy Award for her portrayal of the Faithfull character, Gloria Wandrous, in the 1960 film version.
BRIDGET FARRY, the cleaning lady who wouldn't testify against Hump McManus, secured a $75-per-month job as a laundress in Harlem's St. Joseph's Home. "That is a city hospital," noted the authors of Gang Rule in New York, "wherein jobs are usually provided for amenable or useful persons by politicians." However, she left to operate a Second Avenue lunch counter. It failed, and in June 1934, Farry (now Mrs. John T. Walsh) was spotted picketing City Hall, carrying a placard reading: "LaGuardia: I want a food ticket or a job. If you can't do any better, then get out. There are plenty of intelligent men to take your place. I won't leave 'til I get it." His failure to emerge only further enraged Farry. "If he is a man," she stormed, "why don't he come out here? I'll beat the brains out of him."
LARRY FAY'S fortunes collapsed as the 1920s ended. His milk rackets fell apart. His last attempt at a nightclub, West 56th Street's cheesy Casa Blanca, barely scraped by. Fay laid off help and cut salaries by half, including that of doorman Edward Maloney. On New Year's Day 1932, Maloney complained drunkenly that he could not support his wife and four children-and shot Fay four times. Fay had a mere thirty cents in his pockets. Few noticed his passing. Fewer attended his funeral.
DOPEY BENNY FEIN, the early labor racketeer, was arrested for murder in 1914 but released for lack of evidence. Shortly after a 1917 arrest for assault, he retired from labor racketeering, entering the manufacturing phase of the business. He retired from that ten years later and disappeared from public view.
EMIT. E. FUCHS, Rothstein's attorney in the St. Francis Hotel shooting incident, became owner of the Boston Braves in 1926. In 1929 he pled no contest to spending money illegally to influence the legalization of Sunday baseball in Boston. The Braves went bankrupt under his tenure, and he left the team in 1935, $300,000 in debt. Fuchs died at age eighty-three on December 5, 1961.
EDWARD M. FULLER, A. R.'s bucket-shop associate, after release from Sing Sing moved to Florida but fell on hard times. Facing foreclosure on his Miami home, depressed, and drinking heavily, on October 7, 1932 he pressed a revolver to his right temple and blew his brains out. He died the next day at age fifty.
WAXEY GORDON, the A. R.-backed bootlegger, became one of Thomas Dewey's biggest catches. Not only did Dewey convict him on incometax evasion (with information provided by Gordon rivals Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky), on the stand he humiliated Gordon's pathetic attempts at respectability. During the trial, Gordon's nineteenyear-old son, Teddy, died in an automobile accident. Dewey gave the heartbroken gangster permission to attend the funeral. Released from prison in 1940, Gordon never returned to his former glory. In 1951 an undercover narcotics agent nabbed Gordon as Gordon sold him a packet of heroin. He died in Alcatraz on June 24, 1952.
LOUISE GROODY, wife of swindler W. Frank McGee, lost most of her fortune in the 1929 stock market crash. In World War II she served in the Red Cross and later appeared on television in small roles or on panel discussions. She died of cancer at age sixty-four on September 16, 1961, thirty-six years to the day after opening in No, No, Nanette.
TEXAS GUINAN, queen of the speakeasies, left the New York nightclub circuit and took her act-forty showgirls and her horse, Pie face-on the road. At Vancouver, British Columbia she contracted amebic dysentery, received the last rites of the Catholic Church, and died on November 5, 1933. She was forty-nine. Twelve thousand persons viewed her open casket at Broadway's Campbell Funeral Parlor. She instructed it to be left open so "the suckers can get a good luck at me without a cover charge." Five hundred cars followed her funeral cortege to Gate of Heaven Cemetery, where mourners rioted, stole flowers off her casket, and damaged her vault.
WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST faced bankruptcy in the 1930s, and Citizen Kane, but survived both (he overcame insolvency with the help of a $1 million loan from mistress Marion Davies). He died at eighty-eight at Miss Davies's Beverly Hills mansion, on August 14, 1951. Hearst's family barred her from the funeral.
JAMES J. HINES, after so carefully sheltering George McManus, continued his association with hoodlums and racketeers, particularly profiting from Dutch Schultz's lucrative Harlem numbers racket. Prosecutors found Hines hard to indict, thanks to his scrupulous avoidance of bank accounts. Making matters worse were Hines's New Deal connections (he controlled all federal patronage in Manhattan after 1938) and the compliance of his reliable henchman ("Stupid, respectable, and my man"), Manhattan District Attorney William Copeland Dodge.
Things began changing in 1937, when Thomas E. Dewey defeated Dodge. The following July, police arrested Hines on charges of accepting payoffs to protect the numbers racket. His first trial, before Supreme Court Justice Ferdinand Pecora, ended in a mistrial that September. Next tried before judge Charles C. Nott, Jr. (presiding jurist in George McManus' abortive trial), on February 26, 1939 he was found guilty of "contriving, proposing, and drawing a lottery." Sentenced to four-to-eight years, he was paroled on September 19, 1944. Hines died at age eighty on March 26, 1957.
MAX HIRSCH, trainer at A. R.'s Redstone Stables, trained three Kentucky Derby winners, one of whom, Assault, won the 1946 Triple Crown. He was elected to the Racing Hall of Fame in 1959. Hirsch died at age seventy-eight on April 3, 1969, in New Hyde Park, New York, the day his horse, Heartland, won at Aqueduct.
MAXIE "Boo Boo" HOFF, "protector" of Gene Tunney in the first Dempsey-Tunney fight, died broke in 1941 at age forty-eight.
MAYOR JOHN E "RED MIKE" HYLAN, several years after leaving City Hall, was appointed by his old foe Jimmy Walker to a $17,500-a-year judgeship in the Queens Children's Court, where, said Walker, "the children can now be tried by their peer." He died of a heart attack at his Forest Hills home on January 12, 1936.
SHOELESS JOE JACKSON, the slugging Black Sox leftfielder, maintained his innocence but never returned to organized baseball. Once he asked Commissioner Landis for another chance. "Jackson phoned," Landis confided to sportswriter Frank "Buck" O'Neill, "and asked whether I would give him a fair hearing. I said, `I give every man a fair hearing.' Then Jackson said, `Thanks, Judge. Do you know that those gamblers never paid me all they owed me.' " That was as far as Jackson's hearing got-or needed to get.
In 1951 the South Carolina House of Representatives passed a resolution supporting Joe's reinstatement. Broadway columnist Ed Sullivan scheduled Jackson for his Talk of the Town television show of December 16, 1951. Jackson died of a massive heart attack on December 5.
BYRON "BAN" JOHNSON, president of the American League, never regained the power he lost to new Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and lapsed into greater bouts of maudlin drunkenness. In July 1927, American League owners forced his retirement but wanted to honor the last eight years of his $40,000-a-year contract. Johnson wouldn't accept a cent. He died of diabetes at age sixty-seven on March 28, 1931. The story is told that Charles Comiskey came to the dying Johnson's bedside and held out his hand in friendship. Johnson wouldn't take it.
PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE, gold digger and steerer to A. R.'s gambling houses, married six times-each time for money. In 1925 Anita Loos modeled the mercenary Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes after Joyce. She starred in Earl Carroll's Vanities of 1923 and W. C. Fields's bizarre 1933 film, International House, receiving top billing over Fields. Soon afterward her beauty faded. On June 12, 1957, Joyce died of lung cancer at New York's Memorial Hospital. A deathbed convert to Catholicism, she asked for one last big show: burial from St. Patrick's Cathedral. Her services were instead held at the more modest St. Catherine of Siena.
MEYER LANSKY cemented his position as the kingpin of organized crime, working with Frank Costello and Dandy Phil Kastel in New Orleans and Bugsy Siegel on the West Coast and operated particularly profitably in Cuban casinos. This was just the start of Lansky's farflung international gambling operations, in places such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Haiti, and Hong Kong. In 1970, when the federal government sought his conviction on income-tax charges, he fled to Israel to avoid prosecution. When Israel returned him to the U.S., Lansky beat the rap, as well as a later attempt to deport him to his native Poland. He died of a heart attack at age eighty-one on January 15, 1983. His personal fortune had once been estimated at $400 million. Six years after his death his estate had dwindled to the extent that his son Buddy applied for-and received-Medicare to cover mounting medical bills.
AARON J. LEVY, Tammany's fixer in the Becker murder case, the judge who provided injunctive protection for the Park View A.C., and later the State Supreme Court judge who set George McManus free on bail, found himself dogged by charges of corruption. None stuck until 1952, when the New York State Crime Commission heard testimony of Levy's accepting gifts from those appearing before his court and calculated that his expenditures for the period 1946-51 exceeded his income by $80,561. Levy resigned from the bench. He died at age seventy-four on November 21, 1955 in St. Petersburg, Florida.
LEO LINDY argued with his business partner and in 1930 opened up a second Lindy's across Broadway. Both restaurants coexisted, until the original Lindy's-the one A. R. walked out of to his death-closed on July 27, 1957. Leo Lindy died less than two months later at age sixty-nine. His second restaurant shuttered its doors in September 1969.
LILLIAN LORRAINE, steerer to A. R.'s gambling house and mistress of Flo Ziegfeld, died broke and alone in New York City on April 17, 1955.
In Lorraine's declining years a reporter interviewed her. Lorraine confessed: "[Ziegfeld] had me in a tower suite at the Hotel Ansonia and he and his wife lived in the tower suite above. And I cheated on him, like he cheated on [his wife] Billie Burke. I had a whirl! I blew a lot of everybody's money, I got loaded, I was on the stuff, I got the syphilis, I tore around, stopped at nothing, if I wanted to do it I did it and didn't give a damn. I got knocked up, I had abortions, I broke up homes, I gave fellers the clap. So that's what happened."
"Well, Miss Lorraine," came the response, "if you had it to do over would you do anything different?"
"Yes," said Lorraine. "I never shoulda cut my hair."
LUCKY LucIANO narrowly escaped a brutal attempt on his life in 1931. He recovered and eliminated such rivals as Joe "The Boss" Masseria, Salvatore Maranzano, and Dutch Schultz. Together with Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Lepke Buchalter, Gurrah Shapiro, and Albert Anastasia, he ruled New York's rackets-until running afoul of prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who indicted him on charges of ninety counts of extortion and direction of harlotry. Luciano was sentenced to thirty to fifty years in Dannemora. During World War II federal officials secured Luciano's still-considerable influence to combat waterfront sabotage and to help pave the way for Mafia cooperation in the Allied invasion of Sicily. As a result, Luciano (twice previously denied parole) was released in 1945.
However, freedom meant exile-to his Italian homeland. But like many mob contemporaries, Luciano was drawn to Havana, and despite a U.S. government edict never to return to the Western Hemisphere, he traveled to Cuba. There he presided over an organizedcrime conclave that included Costello, Lansky, Willie Moretti, and Charles Fischetti. Discovered there, he was expelled and returned to Naples, where he continued to direct international drug smuggling and auto-theft operations.
In Luciano's final years, he planned to have a movie made of his life, an idea that irritated and frightened his fellow mob lords. He died of a heart attack at Naples on January 26, 1962 as he was about to meet a film producer.
HENRY LusTIG, A. R.'s brother-in-law, continued making money with the Longchamps restaurant chain. But Lustig cheated not only A. R., he cheated on his wife, and Edith Rothstein Lustig committed suicide in 1936.
Lustig remarried, branched into racing with the prestigious Longchamps Arms stable, and was sufficiently prosperous to purchase George Vanderbilt's estate at Sands Points, Long Island. In December 1945, however, federal authorities indicted him for falsifying books and records to avoid payment of $2,872,766 in income and wartime excess-profit taxes. He entered Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in October 1947. Paroled in September 1949, he died at age sixty-six at his Stanhope Hotel apartment on September 17, 1958. Lustig left the legal minimum to his widow. Another third of his estate went to his thirteen-year-old son, Henry Alan Lustig. In 1960, his widow, Marjorie Shaw Lustig, petitioned New York State Supreme Court to have their son's name changed to Henry Alan Shaw, "to save him from further shame and embarrassment" resulting from his father's wartime tax evasions.
BILLY MAHARG returned to obscurity after the 1919 World Series. He never married, and until about 1940 he lived in a room at Philadelphia's Haymarket Hotel at 12th and Cambria-within walking distance of his job as a guard at the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln Division plant at Broad and Lehigh. For amusement he hunted small game outside the city and kept ten to twelve hunting dogs on the family farm in nearby Burholme. Retiring at age sixty-five, he moved to Burholme and puttered at farming and maintained his friendship with Grover Cleveland Alexander. Maharg died of arteriosclerotic heart disease at a Philadelphia hospital on November 20, 1953. At the time of his death, he was supplying novelist Margaret Mitchell with information on Alexander for a planned-but never written-book.
Like Sleepy Bill Burns, Billy Maharg's obituary did not appear in the following edition of the Official Baseball Guide.
JUDGE FRANCIS X. MANCUSO, who ordered bail for A. R.'s associates in the St. Francis Hotel shootings, resigned from the Court of General Sessions on September 3, 1929 after questions arose regarding the $5 million failure of the City Trust Company, of which he served as chairman. He was also indicted (charges were later dropped) for "fraudulent insolvency" in connection with that institution. However, he remained as boss of East Harlem's 16th Assembly District until 1951. That year Frank Costello, testifying before Congress, conceded he knew Mancuso better than anyone else in Tammany. The following year, Mancuso admitted that he was a blood relative of Costello. Judge Mancuso died at age eighty-two in Daytona Beach on July 8, 1970.
MARTIN T. MANTON, defense attorney in the second Becker trial, became Chief Judge of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and was mentioned as a possibility for the United States Supreme Court. However, Manton had a problem. He took bribes, often from both sides in the same case. (He explained he would decide the case upon its merits and return the losing party's money.) In 1939, facing impeachment, "Preying Manton" resigned from the bench. Convicted of accepting $186,000 in bribes, he served two years in prison and died on November 17, 1946.
JAMES MARSHALL, whose testimony ultimately fried Charles Becker, was arrested in September 1919 for extorting funds from fellow black Ruth Gleason. Frederick J. Groehl, formerly assistant district attorney under Charles Whitman, represented him. No charges were ever brought.
W. FRANK MCGEE, convicted bucket-shop operator, was released from Sing Sing in June 1928. He quickly reverted to a life of con games and was wanted by Waukegan and Chicago police. On February 24, 1934, a penniless alcoholic calling himself Frank Welton died at New York's St. Vincent's Hospital. For five days the body lay unclaimed. It turned out to be the fifty-eight-year-old McGee. Authorities contacted McGee's ex-wife, actress Louise Groody, to assist in the burial. She refused. Only the generosity of a New York undertaker saved McGee from a pauper's grave.
JOHN MCGRAw, suffering not only from ill health but from financial reverses resulting from gambling and real estate speculation, resigned as Giants manager in June 1932. That winter he returned to his old haunts in Havana, but he suffered from more than could be cured by the Cuban sunshine. McGraw died of cancer and uremia at New Rochelle Hospital on February 25, 1934. Baseball elected him to its Hall of Fame in 1944.
GEORGE V. MCLAUGHLIN, Jimmy Walker's first police commissioner, returned to banking, heading the Brooklyn Trust Company, where he maneuvered his right-hand man Walter O'Malley into an ownership position in the Brooklyn Dodgers. He died of a heart attack at age eighty on December 7, 1967.
FRANK MCMANUS, George's brother, operated the Blossom Heath Grill on West 77th Street. In the early morning of May 22, 1931 bootlegger Charles "Vannie" Higgins wanted McManus to order a truckload of Higgins's beer. McManus refused and ordered Higgins and two of his goons out of the place. What happened next is unknown, but at 4:00 A.M., Higgins' men dropped him off at Polyclinic Hospital. He had four knife wounds in his chest, including one to his lung. Neither Higgins nor McManus admitted what happened. "I'm not trying to insult you," Higgins told Assistant District Attorney Saul Price. "But I don't want to talk to these cops."
GEORGE MCMANUS suffered a heart attack on October 29, 1930 on learning his wife, Amanda, had been killed in an automobile accident. He remarried and, despite deteriorating health, remained among New York's more prominent bookmakers. Yet something had changed. "McManus was never the same after the trial," noted horseracing writer Toney Betts. "He made book openhandedly with other people's money and got the reputation of welching and doing other things out of character." He continued to be arrested for gambling, with arrests coming in March 1934, July 1934, and July 1938.
McManus died of heart disease at age forty-eight at his summer bungalow at Sea Girt, New Jersey on August 28, 1940. Three hundred friends and relatives attended his funeral at Park Avenue's Church of St. Ignatius Loyola. Three floral cars bearing 100 displays followed his bronze casket to Gate of Heaven Cemetery.
LIEUTENANT STEPHEN B. MCMANUS retired at forty-seven from the Crime Prevention Bureau in December 1930, drawing a $2,000 annual pension. In March 1934 police arrested George and Steve McManus on bookmaking charges. The two men identified themselves as "John Brown" and "John Gorman." Magistrate Thomas Aurelio freed both as "guilty but not proven," when arresting officer Joseph Gallagher testified he could not identify either as those he overheard in wiretapped conversations handling bets. He died at age sixty-eight on May 30, 1963.
MAGISTRATE FRANCIS X. MCQUADE, the judge who helped sweep cop-shooting charges against A. R. under the rug, quarreled with Charles Stoneham and John McGraw, and sued Stoneham, charging he siphoned off New York Giants funds as loans to his personal enterprises. Stoneham countersued. At the trial after Stoneham's counsel, Arthur Garfield Hays called McQuade a liar and a perjurer. McQuade's attorney, Isaac Jacobsen, responded, more honestly than prudently, "All these men are of a type-all greedy, fighting menand a rough element was in control of the club." McQuade wasn't restored to his position as Giants treasurer but won three year's worth of back pay ($30,000).
After resigning from the bench in the wake of the Seabury investigation, he worked briefly as an assistant corporation counsel.
McQuade later sued the city to recover his pension rights-and, once again, won. He died at his Riverside Drive home on April 7, 1955.
GEORGE Z. MEDALIE, after serving as attorney for A. R., Legs Diamond, and their drug-smuggling associates, was appointed by Herbert Hoover in February 1931 to succeed Charles H. Tuttle as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. There he gave young Thomas E. Dewey his start as a crime fighter. In September 1945, Dewey, now governor, appointed him to New York's highest court, the Court of Appeals. Medalie, sixty-two, died of acute bronchitis in Albany on March 5, 1946.
JIMMY MEEHAN, host for A. R.'s disastrous poker game with George McManus and Nate Raymond, later served prison terms for doping racehorses and in 1937 for assaulting and robbing Ziegfeld Follies showgirl Diana Lanzetti, sister-in-law of a United States congressman. In 1946 he was implicated in the embezzlement of $734,000 from Brooklyn's Mergenthaler Linotype Company.
WILSON MIZNER graduated from opium to morphine addiction after being treated with the latter drug for a back-alley beating. He left New York in the early 1920s to promote the Florida real estate boom, often peddling underwater property. Once, a judge asked if Mizner was showing contempt for the court. "No, your Honor," Mizner replied. "I'm trying to conceal it."
Mizner drifted to Hollywood to turn out screenplays for Jack Warner, once delivering a carefully wrapped New York City phone book in place of a finished script. Before he died on April 3, 1933, a priest visited his bedside, stating, "I'm sure you'll want to talk to me." Mizner replied: "Why should I talk to you . . . I've just been talking to your boss."
EUGENE MORAN, jeweler thief, Arrow shirt model, and A. R.'s onetime $1,000-a-week bodyguard, went to work for Dutch Schultz and, in November 1928, just after A. R.'s death, was one of five gunmen who attempted to murder Eddie Diamond. Brother Legs eventually killed them all. Moran was taken for a ride on August 9, 1929 and shot in the head. The Studebaker containing his lifeless body was set afire in the Newark city dump.
JAMES D. C. MURRAY, George McManus's defense attorney, continued as a criminal defense attorney, eventually representing over 500 clients accused of first-degree murder. He also continued his association with mobsters. In the early 1930s, Dutch Schultz henchman Dixie Davis used Murray to attempt to convince Jimmy Hines to try to block Thomas E. Dewey's appointment as a special prosecutor. Hines should have tried harder.
In 1954 Murray represented George "The Mad Bomber" Metesky, a disgruntled Con Edison employee who over the years had planted thirty-five bombs in the New York City area. Metesky was indeed mad, and Murray got him off with a sentence to Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Murray continued his practice until the age of seventy-nine. He died five years later, on October 15, 1967, at a Long Island nursing home.
ANNE NICHOLS never had another success to rival Abie's Irish Rose. She died at age seventy-four on September 15, 1966 in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
INEZ NORTON, healthily tanned from a Florida vacation, announced in February 1930 that she would appear in Room 349, a Broadway play based on A. R.'s life. It opened on April 15, 1930 at the National Theater, closing after fifteen performances. She continued to seek rich husbands. In the early 1930s columnist Walter Winchell announced she was engaged to San Francisco attorney J. W. Ehrlich. Ehrlich threatened to punch Winchell in the nose.
In December 1934 Norton met Thomas C. Neal, Jr., son of a retired Chicago banker. Though he was twenty-four and she was thirty-one, love bloomed. When in September 1935 they announced their plan to marry at New York's Little Church Around the Corner, the prospective bridegroom's father flew from Chicago to New York to discuss the matter with the couple, and the wedding was canceled. "Father believes I am too young to get married," said Neal, Jr., "and wants me to give my attention to a business career."
VAL O'FARRELL, A. R.'s sometime detective, continued operating his agency, specializing during Prohibition years in bailing rich young speakeasy habitues out of legal (and illegal) difficulties. O'Farrell was assisting Nathan Burkan on the Gloria Vanderbilt custody case when he died of a stroke while at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel on October 7, 1934. He was fifty-eight.
FERDINAND PECORA found his ambitions to succeed Joab Banton as district attorney sidetracked by his failure in the Rothstein case. He briefly moved to Washington where he served as counsel to the Senate committee investigating the Wall Street crash. (The highlight of its hearings was the sight of a midget perched on banker J. P. Morgan's lap.) Pecora returned to New York and ran and lost as an independent Recovery Party ticket for district attorney in 1934. He became a Supreme Court justice in 1935. In 1950 he secured the Democrat and Liberal Party nominations for mayor-and still lost to incompetent, mob-connected acting mayor Vincent Impelliteri. Pecora died at age eighty-nine on December 7, 1971 at Polyclinic Hospital.
NIGGER NATE RAYMOND continued gambling, swindling-and marrying. In April 1929 he planned to wed actress Mayme Love, a plan complicated by his existing marriage to actress Claire Ray. In September 1930, Miss Ray married Charles E. Carnevale, son of a wealthy real estate man who was thereupon shocked to read in the press that the former Mr. and Mrs. Raymond were still Mr. and Mrs. Raymond. In December 1931 Nate filed for annulment.
In 1931 Raymond was implicated in a con at Havre de Grace racetrack, involving switching two horses, Shem and Akhnahton. Painter Paddy Barrie had disguised three-year-old Akhnahton to look like lightly regarded two-year-old Shem. Raymond bet heavily on Shem/Akhnaton at 52-1, but his exuberance exposed the whole scheme. That November he was ruled persona non grata at all Maryland tracks.
In January 1932 Raymond received a five-to-ten-year sentence for forgery. He gained freedom quickly, and in 1934 his name surfaced in the FBI's investigation of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Small-time dope addict James Oscar Farrell was peddling a far-fetched account of the crime to heiress Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean, owner of the 44.52 carat Hope Diamond; close friend of the late First Lady Florence Kling Harding; alcoholic; and morphine addict. Farrell's tale involved thirty-one individuals, including gangland figures Big Bill Dwyer and Waxey Gordon. Farrell also claimed Gordon's men bumped off Arnold Rothstein-and that Raymond was in Room 349 when A. R. was ventilated.
Two years earlier, Mrs. McLean had already been swindled for $100,000 by former FBI agent Gaston B. Means and Norman T. Whitaker, a disbarred lawyer, future child molester-and one of America's premier chess players. However, McLean learned from the experience, and had the FBI tape her conversations with Farrell.
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-year-old 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 forty-seven. Abe Attell claimed that he committed suicide.
CHARLES A. STONEHAM, New York Giants owner, bucket-shop operator, and high-stakes 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 race-wire 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 high-stakes 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.
MAYOR JAMES J. WALKER married his mistress, Betty Compton. La Guardia appointed Walker as impartial arbitrator for the garment industry at $20,000 per year. Compton and Walker divorced in March 1941, and the Mayor of the Jazz Age returned to the Church. "While it is true-too awfully true-that many acts of my life were in direct denial of the faith in which I believed," he confessed to a Communion breakfast, "I can say truthfully that never once did I try to convince myself or others that my acts were anything but what they were. Never once did I attempt to moralize or rationalize.... The glamour of other days I have found to be worthless tinsel, and all the allure of the world just so much seduction and deception."
He died at age sixty-five on November 18, 1946.
FATS WALLER'S career developed nicely after Rothstein's death, branching out into radio and motion pictures. Returning from Hollywood, where he filmed Stormy Weather with Lena Horne, he contracted pneumonia. He died at age thirty-nine on December 15, 1942.
THOMAS "FATS" WALSH, A. R.'s erstwhile bodyguard, was shot following a card game on March 6, 1929 at Miami's Biltmore Hotel.
JOSEPH A. WARREN, the police commissioner fired for failing to solve A. R.'s murder, was already in poor health when Jimmy Walker pushed him out the door. The strain of his old friend's betrayal aggravated Warren's condition, and he sought treatment in a Connecticut sanitarium. He died from a paralytic stroke in August 1930 at age forty-seven. Walker appointed his widow to a $4,000-a-year position with the sanitation commission.
DR. JOHN B. WATSON, to whom A. R. referred Carolyn Rothstein in 1927, wrote The Psychological Care of the Infant and Child the following year. It remained the bible of child-care books until supplanted by Dr. Spock. Growing alcoholism aggravated his family relationships. His son William committed suicide after Watson violently questioned his decision to also enter psychology. Granddaughter, actress Marlette Hartley, blamed her alcohol and psychological problems on him. He died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1958, after ordering his unpublished papers burned.
CHARLES WEEGHMAN, the first to link A. R. to the 1919 World Series fix, never recovered financially from losing his Chicago restaurant chain. In 1927, Weeghman's old baseball colleagues, Jacob Ruppert, Harry Frazee, and Harry Sinclair, bankrolled his modest bar and grill at 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue. It failed, as did two other Manhattan restaurants he opened. Weeghman returned to Chicago and died of a stroke at age sixty-four on November 1, 1938.
Bo WEINBERG, the mobster who took George McManus into hiding, continued as Dutch Schultz's right-hand man. On September 31, 1931 he was one of four men posing as police who gunned down Mafia Boss of Bosses Salvatore Maranzano at his Park Avenue offices. In February 1932, Weinberg orchestrated the fatal machine-gunning of Schultz rival Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll in a West 23rd Street pharmacy phone booth. In 1936 the Dutchman discovered Weinberg plotting with his adversaries, Lucky Luciano and Newark mob boss Abner "Longy" Zwillman. Schultz murdered Weinberg, encased his body in cement and dumped him in the East River.
WILLIAM WELLMAN, onetime "boy manager" of Madison Square Garden and manager of A. R.'s disastrous Middle Village, Queens real estate holdings, barely survived his boss. He died of what the New York Times termed a "throat affection" at New York's Knickerbocker Hospital on April 7, 1931.
Rothstein and Wellman's housing development eventually caused other deaths-and profits. In December 1934, a group of youngsters were sledding on ice that had formed on the site's excavations. The ice broke and two brothers (aged nine and twelve) died. The next year New York City obtained 74 of its 127 acres in return for $334,000 in back taxes, planning to turn the area into parkland. It turned out that the entire development had been an elaborate hoax. A. R. had constructed what Mayor LaGuardia would later term "fake houses" on the site, structures built without even foundations. The idea was to sell the land to the city, but as vastly more expensive, "improved" property. "Armed guards and dogs kept investigators out but we finally got photographs and exposed the whole thing," said LaGuardia. Presumably, the dogs were not actually armed.
Rothstein and Wellman had actually been sitting on a legitimate fortune. Later that year, New York City started extracting peat moss on the grounds, eventually earning $500,000 from its sale.
GOVERNOR CHARLES S. WHITMAN'S governorship witnessed a few modest accomplishments: expansion of the barge canal, completion of the Catskill Aqueduct, establishment of the State Police (then known as the State Constabulary), compulsory physical and military training in New York's schools, and coordination of the state's war efforts-but nothing ever overtook his involvement with the Becker-Rosenthal case.
In 1916 he won reelection against judge Samuel Seabury. Seabury counted on support from former President Theodore Roosevelt, who had once told Seabury, "The truth is not in Whitman," but T. R. double-crossed him. In 1918 Whitman (now on the Republican and Prohibition tickets) narrowly (987,438 votes to 975,200) lost to Tom Foley protege President of the Board of Aldermen Alfred E. Smith.
When Fiorello La Guardia captured City Hall in 1933, Whitman and Seabury were among La Guardia's inner circle. He died at age seventy-eight at his University Club quarters on March 29, 1947.
In 1992 his granddaughter-in-law, Christine Todd Whitman, was elected Governor of New Jersey. She served as head of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, under President George W. Bush, in 2001-3.
DAVID ZELSER, the Des Moines gambler who posed as Curly Bennett, in 1923 opened a cigar store back in Des Moines, a city Ban Johnson was soon to charge was at the heart of nationwide gambling. He died in 1945 at age sixty-eight.
CARL T. ZORK, Abe Attell's henchman during the World Series fix, dropped dead in a downtown St. Louis tailor shop on January 17, 1947. He was sixty-eight.