The Dedicated Gangster

THE BIG BANKROLL (369 pp.)--Leo Katcher--Harper ($5).

Gangster Arnold Rothstein's life story is the sort of straw out of which psychologists make their bricks. At the age of three, the future "Big Bankroll" of the underworld was found standing over his elder brother with a knife. Asked why, little Arnold said simply: "I hate Harry." By 14, Arnold was making money at dice and poker around Manhattan (to the horror -of his decent Jewish parents) and using it to buy the admiration of other East Side delinquents. In two years he was hiring out his money at 25% a week--"loans on Monday, payable the next Monday."

No wonder that by this time (he was 16) Rothstein had won the respect and almost the affection of Tammany Hall's East Side boss, "Big Tim" Sullivan. Rothstein went to work for Big Tim as a kind of errand boy, and began to show the wisdom he was later to express so clearly: "If a man is dumb, someone is going to get the best of him, so why not you?"

The Best of Everyone. The snag was that after getting the best of everyone, 24 hours a day, Rothstein still felt unwanted, unloved and even uncertain. But the cure for this was in his billfold: "Whenever he had self-doubts he could count his money." To facilitate this, Rothstein carried all his bills in his pocket--until the roll grew so fat from graft and gambling that he had to put some of it in the bank.

Arnold Rothstein was a dedicated man. His clothes were plain and neat. He drank nothing stronger than milk, had a fierce respect for "good" women, including his wife. He would boast to friends about his wife's fidelity, liked phoning her from nightspots, when she was asleep at home, and bleating: "Sweetheart, I want you to tell Tom 'hello' "--after which he would pass over the receiver for Tom to hear for himself the little woman's sleepy, saintly squeaks.

As the years passed and his sources of information became widespread and quite reliable, Rothstein made millions by investing in fixed situations and "just letting them happen." By betting on the fixes of others, Rothstein also kept his hands technically clean--he was never convicted of breaking the law. In the case of the 1919 World Series, Rothstein has often been accused of having fixed the Chicago White Sox players' defeat. He denied it, but he probably prompted the fix and certainly won $350,000 by betting on it.

The New Age. Eventually Rothstein owned pieces of so many sorts of businesses--including real estate, rumrunning, narcotics, bookmaking, insurance. Wall Street bucket shops, trade unions, racing stables, bail bonds--that he was quite unable to count his money. The result was fatal. Faced for once in his life with a big gambling debt, he had doubts about his solvency and refused to pay up. Eight weeks later, on Nov. 4, 1928, he was shot in the belly in Room 349 of the Park Central Hotel on Manhattan's Seventh Avenue and died two days later, after crying: "I've got to go home.'' His suspected murderer beat the rap.

Arnold Rothstein's importance, in the view of Biographer Katcher, is that he was a pioneer of modern crime. "He took the various elements that were needed to change crime from petty larceny into big business and fused them. The end result was a machine that runs smoothly today." Younger men--Capone, Luciano, Costello --made more money than Rothstein and ruled larger empires, but they owed the managerial revolution to their predecessor, the man whom Ernest Cuneo. La Guardia's biographer, described as "one of the most verminous characters ever to infest New York City."

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