Arnold Rothstein

Rothstein Arnold: The man who organized crime in America. Born 1882 to a Jewish Orthodox home. Died, November 4, 1928 Lived at 912 Fifth Avenue. AKA A. R., Mr. Big, The Fixer, The Big Bankroll, The Man Uptown, and The Brain. Rothstein had the pedigree and wherewithal to become much more than a common criminal, which, despite his underworld status, was what he was when he died. Rothstein was one of the early builders of organized crime in America. He would graduate a series of underlying into mobdom such as Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, Legs Diamond, Frank Erickson, Bugsy Seigel and Lucky Luciano (“He taught me how to dress” said Luciano "how to use knives and forks and things like that at the dinner table, about holdin’ a door open for a girl. If Arnold had lived a little longer, he could’ve made me pretty elegant”.)
He was born in Manhattan in an Orthodox home and his older brother would study to be a rabbi. Regardless, in his teens, Rothstein was already a pool hustle and small time gambler By the early 1900s, Rothstein thugs like Monk Eastman collecting his loans made throughout the Tenderloin District. He also financed Bucket shop operators, con men like the notorious conman Jake Factor, (Brother of cosmetic king Max Factor) who ran phony Wall Street investments firms. He was also invested in heroin, prostitution, white slavery, and fixing horse races.
It was rumored, but probably not true that Rothstein had fixed the 1919 World Series. After that, he was America’s favorite gangster. Called “Mister Broadway” in the newspapers he kept his own booth at Lindy’s restaurant in Manhattan and Fitzgerald based his character Meyer Wolfsheim in "The Great Gatsby" on Rothstein (The character Nathan Detroit in "Guys and Dolls." Was also a send off on Rothstein)
The bulk of Rothstein’s success was due to his partnership with the outrageous Tammany Hall Democratic boss Timothy “Big Tim” Sullivan who took care of Rothstein’s police and political protection matters.
When prohibition started, Rothstein underwrote a variety of bootleggers including Charlie Luciano, Frank Costello, Legs Jack Diamond, Louis Buchalter, Joe Masseria and Ciro Terranova. He also financed narcotic shipments from Asia. Waxey Gordon, a thug from New York’s Lower East Side was one of the many bootleggers that Rothstein put into business along with Maxie Greenberg.
Big Maxie Greenberg’s (1883-1933) double dealing with his boss, Willie Egan of Egan’s Rats had pushed Greenberg and his brother out of St. Louis and into Detroit, Michigan where he
had started smuggling whisky in to the United States from Canada and made incredible returns on his small investment. Prior to that, Greenberg was in charge of purchasing sacramental wine on behalf of Detroit’s rabbi’s, which was allowed by the prohibition laws.
Greenberg, a bank robber and railroad thief, sold most of the wine to resellers in St. Louis and Kansas City. Realizing that he could be come a millionaire within a year by bringing thousands of gallon of whisky over the boarder, as opposed to several hundred bottles of weak wine, Greenberg travelled to New York and working through Waxey Gordon, who had worked in the garment extortion business for Rothstein, set up a meeting with Rothstein in Central park.
There, sitting on a park bench, Greenberg (Who had once gotten a presidential pardon from Woodrow Wilson) made his pitch to Rothstein for a loan of just under $200,000. Rothstein said he would thing about it and told Gordon and Greenberg to come to his office the next afternoon. Rothstein said he would underwrite Greenberg, but that he wanted him and Gordon to work on bringing shipments from Europe to New York, were the demand for liquor was ten fold over Detroit. Greenberg and Gordon agreed to build a fleet of boats and handle the imports while Rothstein would handle finance and protection.
What the Greenberg and Gordon didn’t know was that Rothstein was using them to build a bigger picture. Rothstein understood that prohibition would not last, but the need for stolen diamonds from Africa and heroin from Asia would last. That was the real organization Gordon and Greenberg set up for Rothstein.
By 1929, Gordon and Greenberg were rich and successful. They owned at least twenty breweries and ran beer from Manhattan to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and north Maryland. Then, on April12, 1933, Frankie Carbo, a professional killer, murdered Greenberg inside the Carteret Hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis and Abner Zwillman had ordered the shooting. Unlike Waxey Gordon, who was willing to incorporate himself into the new national syndicate, Greenberg refused to cooperate.

On September 8, 1928, George McManus, a connected bookmaker and gambler, called together a high stakes poker game at a gambling house probably run by a hood named ‘Dolly’ Reilly.