Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series [Anglais] [Broché]

Author David Peitrusza deserves plenty of kudos for his sweeping biography of Arnold Rothstein, the mad credited for fixing the 1919 World Series. In "Rothstein" we have an overview of the man and his times with perhaps too much of an emphasis on peripheral people and events. The reader will be regaled by stories of turn-of-the-century through prohibition era gamblers and big time criminals. Readers will acquire a greater knowledge of the East Coast underworld and some of the prominent figures who walked the line between criminal and legitimate. From casinos, race fixing and high society's degenerate gamblers to crooks both small time and big, "Rothstein" is an excellent account of the times of the famed gambler. Rothstein surely ranks as one of this country's most notorious criminal master minds.

As much as I enjoyed the book I would have liked getting to know the man himself a little better. While readers will enjoy an opportunity to learn what AR, (as Rothstein was sometimes called) did, where and with whom he did it you cannot be sure to understand what made him tick. His childhood and early years are skimmed over while great detail is given his murder and its subsequent investigation. Hopefully someone can come along who will provide a fuller view of Rothstein. For that biographer and anyone interested in a man immortalized by F. Scott Fitzgerald in "The Great Gatsby" Petrusza's book is a must-read. Whatever "Rothstein's faults as a biography, it is still a good read and highly recommended.

The life and times of the early twentieth century gangster, gambler and "fixer," Arnold Rothstein, this book takes us back to an era when gambling was still king in the newly consolidated city of Greater New York (created out of Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn as well as the townships that filled Queens and Staten Island in 1898). Rothstein came of age within this milieu, a man of vision and immense skill with numbers, as well as a remarkably huge moral blindspot. But in this last he was not alone as he existed in an environment of amoral excess, a time when politics in the city was characterized by widespread Tammany Hall corruption and dominance and when the police chiefs of the period were also numbered among the crime lords, running or sharing in the proceeds of gambling halls and houses of prostitution.

Round about 1914, with the murder of one of Rothstein's gambler cronies by a high police official who was notoriously brutal and crooked, the situation changed and reform politics took hold. This drove gambling and prostitution into the shadows though, inevitably, they didn't just disappear. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, the shrewd gambling maven, Rothstein, altered his operations, moving some of his gambling business out to Long Island and bankrolling floating games (which demanded less police collaboration in order to remain in operation) in Manhattan itself.

With the advent of World War I, followed by Prohibition, Arnold Rothstein saw new prospects and began backing bootleggers, giving the start to famous gangland kingpins like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. Rothstein, however, managed to always keep himself behind the scenes, the go-to guy for police and politician fixing, and for financing new crime ventures. All the while he lived the high life of a gambler (albeit with abstemious eating habits), prone to natty dressing with a penchant for playing the horses. (He even built his own stable of thoroughbreds at one point.) As rum-running began to be phased out, with the impending repeal of Prohibition, Arnold secretly bankrolled the illicit drug industry, again orchestrating the growth of new forms of organized crime.

A contemporary of men like Al Capone, Dutch Schultz, Legs Diamond and Owney Madden, Rothstein was a one-man show, rather than a gang leader. But he was the brain and bankroll behind the growth of many of these gangs, a virtual gangland cash cow and master manipulator of others. He's best known, today, for having engineered the fixing of the 1919 World Series, though no one was ever able to definitively link him to the operation at the time. This book does a yeoman's job of laying out the complexities of that story but fails, in the end, to really make the "fix" crystal clear. In 1928, with his luck on the wane, Rothstein was shot to death by an unknown assailant when he went to a hotel room to discuss a large gambling debt he had incurred.

No one ever got nailed for that killing, either, but this book makes an interesting case for what might have happened and why. In the end Rothstein died more or less friendless and estranged from his Catholic ex-wife and his east European Jewish family, having been reluctantly written off by his pious father, known in his community as "Abraham the Just." Rothstein seems to have been a man who took the path he did at least in part out of a sense of revolt against his father's piety and religious convictions (and a delight in proving again and again that he was much cleverer than his contemporaries). At the same time, he was always seeking to live up to his father's reputation as a problem solver for others. But Rothstein solved the problems of gangsters, gamblers and crooked politicians, a very different community than the one in which his father, Abraham, had moved.

In the end, this book provides a lot of useful information and a powerful picture of early twentieth century New York City. But we don't come away knowing as much about Rothstein as we might like. An enigma to his contemporaries, he seems to have remained that, even to posterity, and this book does not do enough to alter that fact, even now.

SWM

Tackling the biography is Arnold Rothstein is not like undertaking to deal with the life of most equally known men of even the same time. Rothstein was covered, as can be seen in the bibliography, in hundreds if not thousands of articles of the time in newspapers, magazines, books, and legends. The problem is not lack of words written, but lack of actual knowledge of the subject. Simply put, much of what has been written is legendary, apocryphal, repetitive, speculative or downright false, and it must have been an overwhelming task to wade through the junk to find the goods. Pietruszka has done as good a job of it as likely can be done at this remove.

Further complicating the task is the personality of the subject, in this case a man who was clearly highly intelligent, charismatic, and industrious, but was missing some kind of chip to his personal makeup that would have made him fully human. Judging from the book, AR loved the multiplication of money in any way possible, judging everything and everyone useful or not useful based strictly upon the expected financial return. Associates passed in and out of his life and he had no compunction about lying to them or ripping them off or leaving them hanging out to dry, to take whatever heat might come down in his wake, and he'd pick them back up again if there was money to be made with no personal feelings entering into it. It must have been hard to resist his charismatic pull, but harder to actually like the man.

Before reading this book I had known a little about Rothstein, mostly from the gambling/World Series angle. I had been unaware of his deep involvement in drugs and similar financial adventures. I wonder to what degree some of the crimes ascribed to Rothstein are simply a case of saying that because he was involved in this, with so-and-so, he MUST have been involved in that, with so-and-so. Notably, Rothstein's own little black book of records may well have been `edited' by the cops after it was found, and of course the missing sheets are missing. There seems to have been little actual written proof of much of anything Rothstein did, and there are so many conflicting stories and points of view it is hard to know the man's actual deeds with any certainty.

Rothstein's relationship with his wife stands in complete contrast: the one person from whom he did not intend to make money he put on such a pedestal that he found himself unable to approach her as a wife, as a woman, and of course this created further suffering.

I think that this man was a very one-sided genius, essentially an amoral machine. Pietruszka has done an excellent job of trying to separate fact from fiction of his fascinating subject.