In 1919, Arnold Rothstein was the king of New York. His fingers were in everything: casinos, girls, booze, fixes. Then came the World Series.

Part One:

Apprenticeship

I t was a time of nicknames. Baseball players, gamblers, politicians, theater people, kids in hydrants, kids cannonballing into rivers. Conferred by physical freakishness, character, a lisp, a fastball, a hemline. Hump, Chick, It Girl, Shoeless, Rajah, Bugsy, Beansy, Legs, Titanic, Big Train, Big Brain. Arnold was Big Brain. Since he was a kid. A way of level gazing. A way of imagining. Preternatural equipoise.

If you can’t dream big, can’t buy the World Series, was there ever a point of dreaming in America anyway? That’s what Big Brain said. America’s unusually made for such things. Running railroads through the continent, invention of the assembly line, gutting iron from the mountains. Moral corruption. But it’s something else too. Belief in the formidable business of being, and being in business. Arnold Rothstein—grandson of a first generation needle & thread man living on Baxter Street, Five Points, son of a cloth merchant, brother of a rabbi—could become Arnold Rothstein, the Bankroll, the Big Brain, the Operator, the man in the corner at Lindy’s every afternoon. Arnold Rothstein (ארנולד רוטשטיין), ordering matzoh balls and corned beef, the two phones in the corner jangling for him, someone whispering in his ear. Harpo Marx, Al Jolson, Jack Dempsey, Bayard Swope, Yip Harburg, Lottie Pickford, showgirls, stage managers, every day was the joke, the arrangement, the dispatching of men to settle disputes, the liverwurst sandwiches. Lindy’s was where you heard, Waiter there’s a fly in my soup. Doing the backstroke. Harpo said it first, probably. Arnold always laughed like something was caught in his throat, then a wry smile, taking you into his confidence.

In the old days he sold door-to-door. 1902, 03. His young twenties. To get away from his father’s house, he said, where he slept in the same boxy wallpapered room he used to share with his brother. He had two suits, slicked back his hair, looking respectable, looking like someone you’d invite into the house for a glass of ice water or cocoa. For a while he sold ladies shoes, coffins on the installment plan. Backyard swimming pools too. He elaborated on the convenience of an oasis in your back yard, no more beaches with oily kids and grandmas, no more sand in your creme cheese sandwich and beer. Unlike the encyclopedia guys, with pools you didn’t have to convince housewives with eighth grade educations of the necessity of knowledge, so much information to take in and improve you. Blue backyard oasises everyone understood, drifting on your back, gliding like a dolphin underwater. With coffins, the necessity was for something sturdy, for an eventuality that was very very far off, of course, God willing. Don’t want to be a burden to your kids when the time comes, he crooned. You’ll thank me.

In the earliest hours, the pocked asphalt roads of these far-off Long Island towns, slick with dew, glinted with what could have been diamond dust. The air was clean, untroubled. On a bench, he’d unfold newspaper wrapping, eating his kipper sandwich and reading the headlines, sipping coffee from his thermos. He studied the maps. The mishmash of grand tudor-style houses, ramshackle farms, two bedroom Sears houses with asphalt siding, the windows of the downtown shops subdued before morning slipped into the working day, tickled him with a feeling of righteous superiority. He gathered knowledge of people’s private deeds, the mechanics of their necessities, the secrets of wobbly chairs, moth-eaten carpets, steam curlers in a woman’s hair. Port Jefferson, at the end of the LIRR, was an old tourist and shipbuilding town. But the tourist trade had dried up, and fewer and fewer ships were built there. Houses were widely spaced, paint peeling from the clapboards, the concrete walkways to the front door freshly crumbling. From the shadowed thresholds, housewives greeted him like old maids. Inside were linoleum floors, scuffed, unrepaired furniture, pictures of praying Jesus, sunsets, schooners, on the walls. They all competed, men in suits and ties, lugging their cases, for the true buyer: of shoes, pools, sewing machines, patent remedies, beauty potions, Bibles, brushes, coffins. All looking for the buyer who would see the virtue of buying a coffin, preferably two, thirty years in advance of its necessity, who said, Well, I never considered myself extravagant, but they are pretty shoes.… He set out the brochures, showed the mid-heels, shoes with bows, one strap, two straps, two-toned oxfords, patent leather. The various model pools. If they could afford it was never his business. Poor had same opportunities as the rich, and if down the line they got behind, reneged, missed payments, the home office would send a letter, send someone out.

There was always an answer when they said they had to ask their husbands. Look, if he doesn’t think a swimming pool is the best investment in family pleasure he’s ever made or will ever make, you can have your entire downpayment back, minus the small service fee. Tell me he won’t love you when he dangles his feet in that water, sipping a beer from the icebox.… Or, M’am, it’s hard to talk about the other life, I know, but, m’am, it’s not for you but for others you’re making a investment like this, at your young age. Would you like to see the hardwood, an oak, or something for a budget?

This was a portrait of Arnold Rothstein at twenty-three, a thousand other guys like him, on the make, on the LIRR on the way home, weary smile, flicking fleck of mud off his shoes, reviewing the day’s contracts. A thousand. A hundred thousand.

The first time he sold heroin, a little sample to a woman with kids running around the place, he made five bucks.

Next week, there were a couple of her friends too. He was on to something. Just something to perk up your day, he said. No different from laudanum, he said; for centuries women have used it to cure the neurasthenia. Less addictive than morphine. They came to him, and he knew where to get it from the Mott Street tong men, greenbacks the lingua franca of chinks and Jews. There was more money to be made running a few vials out to Port Jefferson than you could make on a week-long two-pools-a-day streak. This too was Arnold Rothstein at twenty-three.

W hat’s the shade to the shade? Arnold Rothstein was visible and invisible, ubiquitous, nowhere. He dwelled in ulterior dimensions. He knew the souls of the dispossessed, the insides of Long Island houses, the cancer-ridden grandmother in the back room. There are rents in the veneers of everyone. Flasks in pockets. A city councilman’s visits to certain precincts. The skimming of payroll. A backstory buried in newspaper vaults. Heroin on a nostril. An extra hand played. He could give people what they didn’t know they wanted until they wanted it more than anything they ever wanted.

He might have been a rabbi, his congregants venerating his exhortations and ministrations. There were variations of personal mysticism, a stability and mental capacity that could be called on when needed. At Lindy’s, seated between Harpo and Jack Dempsey, cloth napkin tucked in his collar, Arnold moved with the ancient rhythms of the Chumash. Frailty of the spirit in others was his specialty, he’d say. His talents in risk calculation and negotiation. It’s midmorning, March, 1909, Arnold is strolling west down 34th Street, past the 8th Ave, and the spectacle of Penn Station—New York’s beaux-arts Parthenon—causes him, briefly, to inhale, his eyes to widen as if in attempting to absorb its voluptuous proportions. There are friends with him, four or five, schoolboy-looking guys with pistols in wool trousers, switchblades, who keep a lively conversation going, occasionally including Arnold, who regards them, intermittently, with a tolerant shrug. Today, Teddy Roosevelt sets sail for Africa, from Hoboken, and the New York streets are crammed with hansom cabs, bicycles, pedestrians gathered along the Hudson River to see him off. The river is as steady as a lake, the sun’s rays eliciting highlights on its surface. Arnold regards the distant crowds with secret envy, hoping too to glimpse the ship. TR was his president, he tells the others, gleefully recounting a night when he encountered the future president, then New York police commissioner, on the beat. The two of them talked amiably about naval history, horses, whatnot, till Roosevelt, perhaps sensing no political advantage, or sniffing trouble, moved on. And you know what: he—Arnold—was carrying the day’s receipts from the two girls he had working for him, plus a loaded Browning 1900, he chuckles. It’s an unusually hot day, and his suit, a bespoke gray number, binds in the crotch, his silk shirt adhering to his back and shoulders. For a moment he sees a gray shape sliding between buildings down along the docks, there’s an eruption of applause, but it lasts only a moment, and then is gone. If it was the Roosevelt ship, the moment has already lost its grandness in its brevity. On 10th Ave a train brakes to a stop, and a bunch of the well-wishers climbs aboard.

In a southern Italian accent that gives every word the gravity of ages-old dispute, one of Arnold’s men announces, 452 West 34th.

So it is.

A boarding house, four stories, grated windows on ground floor, brick front, entered up a flight of brick stairs.

Arnold checks a notebook. Hold your horses.

Sure, Mr Rothstein.

They find him in the room. The kid’s four or five years younger than Arnold, with a chipped tooth, porridge colored skin and a spray of what might be freckles across his cheeks. He is very handsome in a long-lashed way, and doesn’t get up from the chair he’s sitting in, practically the single adornment in the room beside the bed and a vase of tulips. Clothes are in heaps on the floor. A sordid light enters through a single window, and outside he can hear kids arguing over jacks.

You know why I’m here, Abe.

I know.

You know that’s my father’s name?

What?

Able.

No.

Well—

Quite a coincidence.

It’s three dollars, isn’t it?

I gave this guy six bits on Saturday, says Abe.

Did he?

Yeah, says one of Arnold’s friends. Bennie. Little Bennie.

Interest, says Arnold. Do you believe we are serious?

Yeah.

Then why, why—? Please explain to me.

I wash dishes.

How much does a dishwasher make these days?

Twenty-five cents.

An hour?

Mr Rothstein—

I was a door-to-door salesman, did you know that?

Mr—

When someone missed payments, they sent someone to talk to the person.

Bennie’s my friend. He’ll tell you—

That so, Bennie?

Bennie is busy checking out a smallish walnut box with a horn the size of a tropical bloom jutting from it.

What’s this thing?

Phonograph.

Ask yourself, Are you someone that should have such an extravagance?

I live for music.

Music?

Bennie cranks the arm and drops the needle on the record: Billy Murray’s Yankee Doodle Boy plays in a jumpingly faithful rendition of what Billy Murray might have sounded like if he happened to be standing right in front if you.

Hey—how much something like this cost, Abe?

I lifted it.

Yeah?

Remember that time I loaned you my magic tricks in fourth grade?

I remember.

Bennie chuckles, more a snort. Arnold turns away, clucking disapproval. And one of the other boys—Flavio, a meek-looking dago from Five Points who can’t weigh more than a hundred and ten—leaps at Able and cracks him over the head with a pistol, twice—leaving a jagged gash where his hairline meets his forehead, and knocking the tulip vase over in the process. Curled into a ball, like one of those caterpillars that instinctively recoils from its merest nightmares, Able coos simperingly, rocking back and forth in passive anticipation of whatever’s coming next.

I love music, Bennie says.

He grabs the phonograph under his arm, takes an armful of acetates, and walks out the door. Arnold, waiting behind, cocks his head with grudging charity, rights the overturned flower vase, and replaces the flowers.

We’ll be back this afternoon, Able. It’s important a man keeps his word.

A rnold takes the New York Central to Saratoga for the ponies with Bayard Swope, a card player and newspaper man with a notoriously square head and an assured deftness of manners. His mouth cracks a grin, his laugh engaging, with the rollicking, tumbling quality of coal going down a chute. Men in the club car look up from their newspapers and drinks, distracted by their own lives, bemused perhaps. His friend’s natural mirth was a source of grudging amusement to Arnold too, whose mirth had always been doled out selectively, dryly. Looking over the Daily Racing Form, he suggests a private wager on Kennyman’s Doge, a promising three-year-old. Wary despite the gregariousness he’s known for, Bayard looks out the window at the solitary, scabbed farmhouses standing on the outskirts of what have names but barely qualify as villages. I’ll stake my own claim, thanks, he says with a tap on Arnold’s knee. In the grandstands they ease into seats toward the back of the pavilion, avoiding the hoi polloi. As always, there are those who know Bayard and can’t resist approaching. He lights up a stogie with a dramatic swoop of the match, glad-hands his constituents, giving them the good word. Together Arnold and Bayard watch a few races not worth betting on, half paying attention to the rolling grumble of horses around the track, when a single man approaches, bending close to Arnold. He’s tall, officious and reeks of tobacco and sweat. His whiskerless cheek is decorated by a slight scar under his eye, no more than half an inch.

Excuse me. The management is requesting that you leave the premises, Mr Rothstein, he says.

Leave?

Mr Rothstein—

Would you edify me?

Disreputable elements, Mr Rothstein— Some question of the jockeys— Thank you, before security—

The man is gone. Arnold crosses his legs, goes back to the form with a studied intensity of focus. In a few minutes he stands, straightens his necktie, and nods to Bayard as he steps over a couple young women in sporting attire.

I prefer the Jockey Club, he says.