SOMETHING ABOUT GAMBLING appealed to Arnold Rothstein.
Good gamblers possess a head for numbers. They might have been high-school or even grade school, dropouts. They might be nearilliterates. But most can recall any number that flashes before their eyes long after the fact, perform elaborate mathematical equationsand, most importantly, calculate odds and payoffs in a flash. At Harlem's Boys High School, Arnold Rothstein amazed his young colleagues, and sometimes even himself, with his manipulation of figures, but otherwise he proved an indifferent student-so lackadaisical that despite his intelligence and background, he dropped out.
Indifference wasn't A. R.'s only problem. There was a question of conceit. Already, he fancied himself just a little-well, maybe more than just a little-smarter than those around him.
That too was another part of the gambling's charm, but still not all of it. A. R. loved the sheer rebellion of it all. Abraham Rothstein was "Abraham the Just." Gambling was not just illegal under New York State statutes, it was strictly forbidden by Abraham's code of conduct. To gamble meant not only thumbing your nose at fate-and at the Irish cop on the beat-it meant declaring war on ancient values. Declaring war on Abraham Rothstein.
Traditional Judaism forbids gambling for money. One recent Rothstein scholar, Dr. Michael Alexander, put it this way:
Gambling itself was a particularly rebellious behavior. More precisely, professional dice playing had been prohibited in the Talmud not once, but twice. According to Jewish law, a dice player cannot act as a witness. The reasons suggested in the tradition are several, including the notions that gambling is tantamount to robbery and that a gambler wasted time and money instead of tending to the "welfare of the world. " Moreover, as the rabbis teach in the great ethical tract "Avot," "Human hope is but a worm. " If hope in things mortal is founded upon vanity, how much more its sale.
Vanity. Robbery. That's how Abraham Rothstein defined his wayward son's growing habit. "Gambling is a sin," he scolded. A. R. not only failed to listen, he dared exploit his father's piety to facilitate his own vice. The devout Abraham did not wear jewelry on the Sabbath. Each Friday night, before leaving for synagogue he'd remove his big gold watch and place it in a dresser drawer. As Abraham walked down the stairs and onto the street, Arnold raced to his father's bedroom to grab the timepiece and pawn it for thirty or forty dollars, using the proceeds to finance gambling and loan sharking. If luck were with him, he'd redeem the watch, and sneak it back before his father discovered its absence. If not ...
If not, Abraham Rothstein had yet another reason for disappointment in his son, and Arnold for drawing even farther away from his father. Yes, it was risky business but, after all, gambling is risk. Risk energized Arnold, made him feel important, provided him with the potential for great riches, and set him apart from the stodgy world of his father. To Arnold Rothstein-and to so many of his contemporaries-gambling was modernity. It was America. It was New York.
Gambling today is largely homogenized and sanitized into neat state-sanctioned lotteries, the neon ghettos of family-friendly Las Vegas, the lairs of blue-haired ladies in bingo halls and the growing plague of second- and third-rate casinos across America and Canada.
A century ago, gambling was an adventure, and not only a more male-dominated adventure, but also, when practiced right, an upperclass adventure. Yesterday's rich were obsessed with gambling, con gregating at such luxurious gambling meccas as Monte Carlo, Newport, and Saratoga Springs. If their fortunes increased, so much the better. If not, well ... it was all akin to some high-Victorian potlatch. The amount you lost-and the grace displayed in the process-only heightened your status.
You needed big money to gamble in such fashion, but if you were less affluent, wagers could still be placed nearly anywhere else: in saloons, and back rooms, and back alleys. You lived by your wits and moved not only among the unscrupulous but the violent. Gambling was not pumping tokens into chrome-plated, one-armed bandits, it was confronting real bandits, armed either with a billy club or with an extra ace of clubs hidden up their sleeve. Either way, you played at your peril.
Gambling was everywhere, but it was particularly ubiquitous in New York, young Arnold Rothstein's New York.
"Is there any gambling in New York?" wrote one observer of 1904 Manhattan. "Why, there's almost nothing else!"
Already, the geography of Arnold Rothstein's world of gambling and loan-sharking and various and sundry swindles was emerging. Times Square-Broadway-was being born.
Before Manhattan moved skyward, it moved northward. The theaters, the big department stores, the fashionable neighborhoods all moved uptown. And so did gambling. By the mid-1890s Manhattan's gaming establishments had migrated to the West 40's-the Roaring Forties. The neighborhood boasted any number of role models for Arnold. Some rough-and-tumble, some with the veneer of respectability. A. R. figured himself the gentleman-gambler type, and no gambler was more the gentleman than Richard Canfield, proprietor of New York's premier gambling house. No gambler embodied "class" more than Canfield. Perhaps not in a personal sense, for Canfield drank, smoked, and ate to excess (and wore a very tight corset to compensate). But his professional manners were impeccable. He never cheated, thinking it simply unnecessary. "The percentage in favor of a gambling house," he observed, "is sufficient to guarantee the profits of the house. All any gambler wants is to have to play a long enough time and he'll get all the money any player has."
It was a theory Arnold Rothstein, with his bankroll growing from his still small-time killings, could appreciate-although he never did fully grasp the concept of not cheating.
But there was more to Canfield than reluctance to stoop to a blackguard's ways. He was educated, intelligent, literate, a charming conversationalist, and among his generation's most respected connoisseurs of art. In May 1888, after operating casinos successfully in Providence and Saratoga, he opened a fashionable club at Madison Square and East 26th Street. His impeccability made the Madison Square Club the premier destination for gamblers with taste, style, and lots of cash. But Manhattan was shifting farther uptown. Carnegie Hall, with the great Tchaikovsky gracing its first night, opened its doors at Seventh and 57th in 1891. The great restaurants also traveled northward. Delmonico's, haunt of the rich and powerful, moved up Fifth Avenue, from East 26th Street to East 44th. Sherry's, its rival, was just across the way.
More important, just a few blocks west was Longacre Squarenot yet called Times Square-but already emerging as Manhattan's theatrical and dining epicenter. The people Arnold Rothstein was most interested in-gamblers-tended to congregate at Shanley's on Broadway between 42nd and 43rd. Far more prominent folk, however, gathered at Rector's. Here dined the cream of Broadway society-prizefighter Gentleman Jim Corbett; financier Diamond Jim Brady; his girlfriend, actress Lillian Russell; millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw and his bride Evelyn Nesbitt; architect Stanford White, whom the insane Thaw would kill in a jealous rage over his wife; theatrical producers Charles Frohman and Clyde Fitch; Broadway stars George M. Cohan and Anna Held; writers 0. Henry and Richard Harding Davis; composer Victor Herbert.
When every other place closed, one moved to Jack's at West 43rd and Sixth, across from the city's biggest theater, the brand-new Hippodrome, to breakfast on Irish bacon and champagne. Only the naive believed that Jack could serve so much liquor, so long after hours, without a well-compensated wink from Tammany.
The West 40s was now where the action was, and smart men like Richard Canfield knew it. In 1899 he purchased a four-story brownstone at 5 East 44th Street for $75,000, spent another $400,000 remodeling it (topping the $200,000 restaurateur Charles Rector spent outfitting his opulent establishment), and untold thousands more bribing cops to keep it open. Canfield's new Saratoga Club exceeded even his own exceptional standards. The New York Times marveled:
It is the finest place of its kind in this country if not in the world, and the nightly play is enormous. It draws its patrons from the wealthiest men in the country, and while it is not hard for a man whose appearance denotes a fair measure of affluence to pass its portals, the "shoestring gambler" does not long remain its guest.
The entire big brownstone house is fitted throughout with extreme magnificence. The rarest Eastern carpets are upon its floors, and masterpieces of art adorn its walls. The furniture, consisting mainly of divans and davenports, are marvels of beauty and luxuriousness.
The gaming room on the second floor extends the length and width of the house and is a noble hall in proportions. In it are the most elaborate gambling layouts in this country, consisting of roulette wheels, faro tables, baccarat tables, and rouge et noir. Baccarat, faro and roulette are the principal games, and at times for certain players the limit is absolutely removed.
Servants throughout the house attend to the wants of the players and the place is conducted much like one of the most exclusive clubs. Entertainment is free to the guests. The costliest dishes game, pates and the rarest wines are served throughout the night. Everything is conducted with the utmost decorum. There are no loud words or heated arguments, all such being quietly but firmly stopped at their incipiency.
Gambling, the gentleman's pastime.
A. R. read about Canfield in the papers, heard about him on the street. He aspired to meet his standards. The cheap stuss parlors of the Lower East Side and the sawdust-covered floors and backrooms of Bowery gin joints held little attraction. He coveted success not failure, upward mobility not barroom squalor. He wanted to rebel, but he also wished to rule.
Like Canfield, Arnold did not begin his gambling career in the Roaring Forties. Yes, he started out downtown but did not remain there long. An early haunt was Sunny Smith's poolroom on busy Fourteenth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues. Smith's was not a poolroom in the sense of today's poolrooms. It may have contained a billiard table of two, but originally the term "poolroom"and pool itself-referred to "pools" of money placed on horse races and baseball games. Smith's attracted not just billiardists, but gamblers, assorted lowlifes, and some very affordable ladies of the evening.
Too young to gain entrance to Smith's, Rothstein loitered outside trying to obtain the attention of someone inside to bet a dollar or two for him on a specific horse. Usually, all he got was a rude "Get the hell out of here, you're too young."
But he'd remain outside, and when the race was over-and Arnold's choice had run out-of-the-money-a man would emerge to say: "Say, Kid, you said two bucks on So-and-So, didn't you?" Arnold handed over his money eagerly. It took only a few such bets to learn a hard lesson. Gambling was for suckers. Not gambling-betting on sure things-was where the money was. Risk was OK-for the other guy.
"I knew my limitations when I was fifteen years old," he recalled, "and since that time I never played any game with a man I knew I couldn't beat."
Intellectually, he knew that. Emotionally, he didn't. Gamblers never really do. So he kept plunging, often disastrously. He left Boys High School after his second year. Some said he tired of the place. Some said his parents pulled him out.
At age sixteen or seventeen, Arnold went on the road as a salesman for his father's company, freeing himself from what little control Abraham and Esther Rothstein still exerted. In Chicago in 1899, in a high-stakes game of pinochle, he lost everything he had, including the expense money given him by his father. He bummed his way back to New York, and too ashamed to admit failure, did not return to the family business. Did not return home.
He took a room at the Broadway Central Hotel, down on lower Broadway, and found a job selling cigars. He couldn't have chosen a worse-or better-line of work. Selling smokes to cigar stores and to saloons and to pool halls, at each stop he met more gamblers and more men who fancied themselves gamblers.
At first, he continued to sometimes win, sometimes lose. But he was blessed not only with a head for numbers but also with a keen overall intelligence. He learned quickly and soon discovered what bets, what games, what houses, to avoid. He learned to minimize risks, often by less-than-honorable methods. Soon he began to win consistently.
Even then he carried upon his person as big a bankroll as he could, using it not just to generate interest from loans to needy but desperate gamblers, but to generate interesting side bets. Casually, he'd pull a fifty-dollar bill from his roll and challenge associates to a game of "poker." If, for example, the serial number read "D7 981376 7H," Rothstein had three sevens. If the other party had "R7 546484 8T," he possessed two pairs-a pair of fours and a pair of eights. Threeof-a-kind beats two pair, and Rothstein would win.
Eventually people noticed that A. R. won far more often than he lost. Some dared suggest he had previously inspected his bankroll, discarding inferior "hands," and committing the remaining "hands" to memory. That was, of course, just a theory.
"He couldn't stay on the level," recalled one early acquaintance:
Right away he began "past-posting." [placing a bet after post time, i.e., indulging even then in "sure-thing" gambling-the same scam he had learned the hard way at Sunny Smith's] When I called him on it he told me it wasn't wrong, just smart. He said now I was wise to it I ought to do some of it myself. It was easy money and no one had a right to pass up easy money.
He used to say, "Look out for Number One. If you don't, no one else will. If a man is dumb, someone is going to get the best of him, so why not you? If you don't, you're as dumb as he is." Rothstein was always looking for a little bit of the best of it. He used to say that just a half-point [one-half of one percent] could mean thousands over a length of time.
He knew percentages and knew how to take advantage of them. I learned a lot from him.
But there was more to A. R. than gambling. If he had been intrigued merely with the tossing of dice upon green cloth, or the flip of a card, he could have contented himself with dingy Lower East Side stuss parlors and pool halls. Arnold liked gambling, but he also enjoyed the people he met while gambling. He enjoyed the thrill of knowing "name" people, prominent athletes, and actors.
As Arnold Rothstein came of age, Times Square, as New York's entertainment center, was blossoming as well. Prior to the turn of the century, the neighborhood was barely worth mentioning, as the theater district lay at Herald Square, a good quarter-mile to the south. In 1895, however, opera impresario Oscar Hammerstein I opened three theaters: the Olympic, the Lyric, and the Music Hall on Broadway between 44th and 45th Streets. Everyone talked of Hammerstein's daring, but soon talked about his near bankruptcy. In 1899 a desperate Hammerstein scraped together $8,000 to open Hammerstein's Victoria at West 42nd and Broadway. Its success paved the way for other theaters in Times Square. By 1906 the New York Times could write that any theater not within the area's confines was "practically doomed." The Great White Way was being invented.
Hotels opened. Some, like the Algonquin on West 44th, were quite respectable. Most weren't. Prostitutes operated out of the Delavan, the Plymouth, the Garrick, the Valko, the Lyceum, the Churchill (run by an ex-police sergeant), the King Edward, and the Metropole. The Metropole, run by Tammany boss Big Tim Sullivan and the Considine brothers, George and Bill, featured not only prostitutes but gamblers. In 1904 Lord William Waldorf Astor brought the city's biggest and grandest hotel to Times Square-the opulent Astor, at Broadway and West 44th. Its bar soon would be among Manhattan's most prominent homosexual gathering places.
Times Square, however, could never have become Times Square without the Times. The New York Times relocated from Park Row to its new $1.7 million (budgeted at $250,000) Times Tower on New Years Eve 1904. At 375 feet, the paper's new headquarters was Manhattan's second tallest structure, just 10 feet short of the recently opened Flatiron Building at East 23rd and Broadway.
Now in his early twenties, A. R. loved everything in the new heart of the city. The clatter of the newly opened subways, the glamour of the grand hotels and theaters, the bantering crowds in the restaurants, and the boisterous gaiety of area's many theaters. Some sites he favored more than others. The Metropole was his kind of place. It made no secret that it catered to gamblers, and with Big Tim's political and police connections it didn't have to. Hammerstein's Victoria had similar charms. Monday matinees attracted smallish crowds, and they weren't there to see Blanch Walsh in Tolstoy's Resurrection. In the theater's basement, each Monday afternoon, bored stagehands and ushers organized a crap game. Soon toughs from the audience left the auditorium and joined the action, including gang members Monk Eastman, Whitey Lewis, and Dago Frank Cirofici, and gamblers Herman "Beansie" Rosenthal and Arnold Rothstein.
A. R. was already expert at virtually any card game, could handle a cue to his own profit, and would bet on anything that moved. At the Victoria, he learned to shoot craps-and he learned something more. The Victoria's basement was a fine place for Monday-afternoon gaming, but there remained an overall shortage of places to roll dice safely. A. R. recognized that he could profit in hosting such events and found a derelict barn downtown on Water Street-close by the Brooklyn Bridge and near his father's Henry Street birthplace. For three dollars, the barn's night watchman would look the other waya small price for A. R. to pay for a percentage of the handle.
On Water Street and at the Victoria, A. R. also learned the value of the Big Bankroll. A big wad of bills was good for the ego and good for impressing one's peers, but it had concretely tangible uses. When A. R. arrived at card and crap games, brandishing carefully husbanded savings from day jobs or other games, as often as not, he put it to work not by wagering on dice, but by lending it to those who would. Rates were steep: 20 percent by next Monday's matinees.
Growing businesses add employees, and Arnold's business was growing. He needed friends to collect for him because when people owed you money, they avoided you. He hired big, hard, ruthless friends like Monk Eastman, men he had long cultivated. "It was always the biggest, toughest boys whom he treated [to favors]," brother Edgar recalled of Arnold's school days. "I guess he wanted to get them on his side."
So some of the players in Rothstein's story were starting to come together. It's instructive to present a physical description of the main character in the drama. One of the best physical descriptions of Arnold Rothstein appeared in Donald Henderson Clarke's biography, In the Reign of Rothstein. Written shortly after A. R.'s death, it describes him very near to this point in time:
When he first appeared in the news [c. 1908], Rothstein was a slim, young man of twenty-six, with dark hair, a complexion remarkable for its smooth pallor as if he never had to worry about razors-white, skilful hands, and amazingly vital, sparkling, dark brown eyes.
The Rothstein eyes were features above all others that those who met him recalled most faithfully-those laughing, brilliant, restless eyes glowing in the pale but very expressive face.
He laughed a great deal. He looked worried when it suited him to appear worried. A casual observer might have said that Rothstein's face was an open book. It certainly was far from the ordinary concept of a "poker" face. In the course of an evening at table, or at play, it ran the whole gamut of expressions. But, mostly, it was a smiling, a laughing face....
He was about five feet seven inches tall, slim of figure, most meticulously garbed, not in the garish style of Broadway, but in the more subdued method of Fifth Avenue, and was extremely quick in his movements. In his later years, although most abstemious in eating, he gained weight, but he never lost anything of that pantherish quickness, which was more like the catlike suavity of muscular coordination that is Jack Dempsey's than anything else.
Rothstein put on a little paunch in later years, but never changed greatly from Henderson's description of the young man. He retained his unhealthy pallor, his grace, his charm, and a quality that Henderson did not here describe: an overarching ego that manifested itself in a cutting remark, an arched eyebrow, in cruelty and in toying with those unfortunate enough to need his cash or protection. As he grew wealthier and more powerful, his ego and cruelty grew: particularly in regard to money. When he died, a reporter for the New York World wrote:
He loved, almost viciously, to collect, and he hated, almost viciously, to pay. He took an almost perverted delight in postponing the payment of losses. There was something cruelly satisfactory to his senses in tantalizing and teasing the persons to whom he owed money. This perverted pleasure grew on him in his later years.
As Rothstein increased in confidence and in what passed for stature in Times Square, his supercilious manner grated upon those who considered themselves at least as crafty, and perhaps more so. One such group of wits congregated at "the big white room" at Jack's. A decade later, a similar clique formed at the Algonquin Hotel. The Algonquin Circle's members-poetess Dorothy Parker, humorist Robert Benchley, playwrights George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, and Robert Sherwood, critic Alexander Woollcott, columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Heywood Broun, comedian Harpo Marx, and New Yorker founder Harold Ross-are remembered today. But back around 1907, the group that gathered at Jack's proved just as clever, and just as cutting and witty-and rising young gambler Arnold Rothstein settled comfortably in their midst.
Rothstein didn't patronize Jack's just for conversation. He wanted customers for his new card games and for his primitive Water Street gambling house. But his already-large ego demanded he match wits with Broadway's cleverest lads. He found them at Jack's-newspapermen like "Spanish" O'Brien, Frank Ward O'Malley, Ben de Cas- sares, and Bruno Lessing; songwriter Grant Clarke, cartoonists Hype Igoe and "Tad" Dorgan; and all-around scamp Wilson Mizner.
In their time they more than had their followings. Despite his nickname and surname, editor "Spanish" O'Brien was born in Paris. Donald Henderson Clark pegged him as "a handsome, irresponsible Irishman ... who worked at editing newspapers as a sideline to his vocation of indulging in Homeric conversations with his friends."
New York Sun reporter Frank Ward O'Malley was too nice for the Broadway crowd. "There was never a man on Park Row," the Times later wrote, "who was more friendly or more sensitive to human nature." H. L. Mencken called O'Malley "one of the best reporters America has ever known." When O'Malley wasn't reporting, he was phrasemaking, providing us with the observation, "Life is just one damned thing after another"-and the term "brunch." O'Malley didn't enter journalism until age thirty-one after having "flopped," as he put it, in art ("Commercial illustrator ... for four years, drawing full-length portraits of vacuum cleaners and canned soup"). He described his newspaper career:
Reporter, New York Morning Sun, for fourteen years, thirteen of which were spent in Jack's restaurant.
Ben de Cassares, a collateral descendent of the philosopher Spinoza, worked for the Herald having just returned from Mexico City, where he founded El Diario. De Cassares, wrote Rothstein biographer Leo Katcher, would "balance a Seidel of Pilsner on his head and take the solar system by the oratorical tail and whirl it around the room to the dazzled delight of all and sundry."
When Rothstein wasn't listening to these gentlemen, he met songwriters like Clarke Grant and other newspaper people like Bruno Lessing. Grant wrote Fanny Brice's signature song "Second Hand Rose" and Ethel Waters's "Am I Blue?" Lessing wrote a daily column for William Randolph Hearst's newspapers, but that wasn't his real value to the journalistic empire. He edited-not news, opinion, theatrical reviews, or sports-but something of far more important to Mr. Hearst's readers: the Sunday comics.
Hype Igoe and Thomas A. "Tad" Dorgan were two friends who migrated east together from San Francisco and were now immensely talented cartoonists for Hearst's Evening Journal. Igoe dabbled at sportswriting among any number of odd activities. Playing the ukulele at Jack's was one. Refusing to wear an overcoat in even the coldest weather was another. This foible hospitalized him several times with pneumonia. Hype loved the cold, even refrigerating his ukulele to improve its sound.
Tad Dorgan was master of the early-twentieth century catchphrase. "Hot dog," "cat's pajamas," "yes, we have no bananas," "twentythree skidoo," "dumbbell," "drug-store cowboy," and "skimmer" are all Dorganisms.
Wilson Mizner proved to be a more memorable wordsmith than Igoe, Dorgan, or the entire bunch put together. But beyond that, he was simply a great character. Consider this description of Mizner, provided by his biographer, Alva Johnson:
Mizner had a vast firsthand criminal erudition, which he commercialized as a dramatist on Broadway and a screenwriter in Hollywood. At various times during his life, he had been a miner, confidence man, ballad singer, medical lecturer, man of letters, general utility man in a segregated district, cardsharp, hotel man, songwriter, dealer in imitation masterpieces of art, prizefighter, prizefight manager, Florida promoter, and roulettewheel fixer. He was an idol of low society and a pet of high. He knew women, as his brother Addison said, from the best homes and houses.
That's a lot to say about any one person in any one paragraph, but (and this is no criticism of its author), nonetheless, it shortchanges its subject. The 6'4", 250-pound Mizner was the son of Benjamin Harrison's minister plenipotentiary to Central America and the brother of an Episcopalian clergyman, but those were the last respectable facts about him. He soon took up opium smoking, and participated in the Klondike gold rush, operating badger games; robbing a restaurant to obtain chocolate for girlfriend "Nellie the Pig" Lamore; and grubstaking fellow prospector Sid Grauman (of Grauman's Chinese Theatre Fame).
Returning state side in 1905, the twenty-nine-year-old Mizner married forty-eight-year-old Mary Adelaide Yerkes, widow of traction magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes. The new Mrs. Mizner was worth between $2 million and $7.5 million. Mr. Mizner was penniless. They had been introduced by his brother Addison at Madison Square Garden, at the National Horse Show. When Addison asked Wilson where he was staying, he replied, "In a house of ill fame on FortyEighth Street." Mary Yerkes thought this amusing, but it was more amusing to be introduced to such a fellow than to be married to one. Mizner hired an artist to produce copies of the Yerkes mansion's artistic masterpieces and proceeded to sell them as originals. Pickings proved slim. At auction, a fake Last Supper was fetching just $6.00. "Six dollars!" Mizner exclaimed. "Can't I get at least one dollar a plate for this banquet?"
Mizner was next seen supervising the hauling of debris from the San Francisco earthquake. Returning to New York, he managed a sleazy Times Square hotel called the Rand, posting signs about the place with such mottos as "No opium-smoking in the elevators" and "Carry out your own dead." From there he moved to fight promotion and playwriting. Critics found his plays trashy.
Had Wilson Mizner bothered to write better plays, we would remember him at least as well that other great aphorist, Oscar Wilde. That may seem hyperbole, but the list of Mizner bon mots is lengthy. If his name is not particularly remembered, his witticisms are:
Always be nice to people on the way up; because you'll meet the same people on the way down.
Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research.
The best way to keep your friends is not to give them away.
I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
I can usually judge a fellow by what he laughs at.
The worst-tempered people I've ever met were the people who knew they were wrong.
A fellow who is always declaring he's no fool usually has his suspicions.
Don't talk about yourself; it will be done when you leave.
Life is a tough proposition and the first hundred years are the hardest.
A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.
For an aspiring young gambler like Arnold Rothstein to hold his own against Mizner, Dorgan, Igoe, and their acquaintances was no mean feat. A. R. could. Although both quick-witted and charming enough to gain admittance to this informal society, he was not well-liked. Some found him too cute, too cutting with his remarks, too full of himself-and, yes, a bit too Jewish. Mizner, for one, wanted to teach this "smart-aleck sheenie" a lesson. So did Dorgan and Igoe and a well-heeled gambler named Jack Francis.
They decided to put A. R. in his place, early on in their relationship, and turn a profit in the bargain. Among Rothstein's many strengths was his skill with the pool cue. Among his weaknesses was his ego. Mizner's friends imported wealthy, young Philadelphia stockbroker Jack Conaway to set Rothstein up. Conaway played pool, played just about anything actually, just for the thrill of it. He was an expert amateur jockey and just as expert a pool player, the champion of Philadelphia's elegant Racquet Club.
Mizner's crowd sprung their trap on Thursday night, November 18, 1909. With Conaway in tow, they took their regular table at Jack's. When A. R. arrived, the conversation centered on the usual athletic and theatrical subjects. Jack Francis very generally broached the topic of pool, discussing the merits of pocket-billiard and threecushion champ, the Cuban Alfredo De Oro, and other fine players such as Jake Schaefer and Willie Hoppe. Finally, Francis mentioned casually that young Mr. Conaway here was most likely the best amateur billiardist nationwide. Then they baited the hook: A. R., they said, you aren't nearly as good as you think you are; Conaway can take you easily.
It was the Times Square equivalent of calling out a gunfighter. Rothstein couldn't afford to have his skills or courage denigrated and snapped at the bait. Later, some Times Square observers thought he was suckered. Others thought he knew precisely what he was doing. A. R. peeled off a roll of bills, saying, "I'll bet $500 I can beat Mr. Conaway."
A. R. chose the venue, John McGraw's pool hall, just a few blocks south on Herald Square. John "The Little Napoleon" McGraw was one of the biggest men in baseball-actually, in all of sport. In the 1890s he played a hardscrabble third base for the rough-and-tumble Baltimore club, the immortal "Old Orioles," and was the toughest, savviest man on baseball's toughest, savviest team. As a manager, he transformed the hitherto-woebegone New York Giants franchise into baseball's powerhouse, establishing himself as baseball's greatest field general.
Most ballplayers and ex-ballplayers dreamt of running their own saloon. McGraw settled for a pool hall on Herald Square. In February 1906, with Willie Hoppe on hand, McGraw opened an establishment boasting fifteen of the most expensive tables "ever placed in a billiard room in the world." McGraw's partners were Jack Doyle, a prominent local gambler, and Tod Sloan, once one of the world's greatest jockeys. Sloan pioneered the upright or "monkey-on-a-stick" stance for jockeys, and served as the model for George M. Cohan's character "Little Johnny Jones," Cohan's ode to "Yankee Doodle Dandy." Sloan's betting habits got him banned from racing in 1900. He now supported himself as a bookmaker and actor.
In October 1908 McGraw moved across Herald Square, to the brand-new Marbridge Building, next door to the New York Herald. McGraw had some new partners, including Hoppe and Giants club secretary Fred Knowles. There were rumors of silent partners, among them young Arnold Rothstein. Business had picked up for Rothstein by 1908. He could swing a piece of McGraw's place and bring more than money to a partnership. His friends at Tammany Hall (some said A. R. had the gambling concession at Big Tim Sullivan's Metropole) had influence. Police protection for pool halls cost $300 a month, and even the great John McGraw had to pay it. A fellow with Rothstein's connections could prevent "misunderstandings."
Rothstein and Conaway started that Thursday night at 8:00 P.M. Their first match was for 50 points. Conaway squeaked by. The second match went to 100. Conaway led again, but Rothstein staged a spectacular run to win by a single ball. Betting now reached extremely serious levels. The rivals continued, playing game after game. At 2:00 A.M., McGraw's normal closing time, Rothstein seized a clear lead, but Conaway jeered that his foe was merely lucky. Rothstein knew better. They kept playing.
At dawn they were still at it. Friday came and went. The crowd kept betting, and A. R. kept winning. As evening arrived, with both participants exhausted, the game no longer featured championship quality play-only grueling tenacity. Conaway won occasionally, but couldn't quite catch up. Closing time came and went once more. By 2:00 A.M. McGraw had had enough. "I'll have you dead on my hands," he growled at the two weary combatants. "And if you don't want to sleep, some of the rest of us do."
Rothstein and Conaway begged McGraw to relent. But two hours later-at 4:00 A.M., thirty-two hours after play started-the Little Napoleon finally shut down. "You'd better get to a Turkish bath-the two of you. You can continue your little game some other time." And that's just what they did. Some said Arnold won $4,000 from the game at McGraw's. All in all, A. R.'s "friends" lost $10,000 backing Conaway.
On the way to the baths, Conaway and Rothstein agreed to meet in Philadelphia for $5,000. One can't be sure their rematch occurred, although those claiming it did say Rothstein won again.
More important than winning or losing, however, was the sheer notoriety of the match. Its marathon nature attracted major interest. The newspapers-and Manhattan boasted a dozen dailies at the time-picked up the story and reported the match as the longest continuously played game in history. They lionized the daring of the participants; the stakes wagered by them and their frenzied supporters; that it was all played out at the great John McGraw's.
When the match began, Arnold Rothstein was just one of the horde of gamblers infesting Times Square, when it concluded he was not just $4,000 wealthier, he was Broadway's newest celebrity.