Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (12 page)

When it came to addicts, Rothstein was as repulsed as Anslinger. The day he found one of his associates sucking on an opium pipe, he threw him out.
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But it’s not hard to see why Arnold stuck with his new trade. The
World
newspaper
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reported: “For every $1000 spent in purchasing opium, smuggling it into the country and dispensing it, those at the top of the pyramid collect $6000 or more in profit.” Arnold soon discovered that when you control the massive revenue offered by the drug industry, individual police and politicians are easy to buy. His profit margins were so vast he could outbid the salaries cops earned from the state. “The police,” a journalist wrote in 1929, “were as gracious to him
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as they were to a police commissioner.” This is why every time Arnold Rothstein was caught committing violence, the charges “mysteriously” vanished.

Arnold tamed the police with an approach that, years later, would be distilled by his successors, the Mexican drug cartels, into a single elegant phrase:
plato o plomo
.
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Silver or lead. Take our bribe, or take a bullet. Every now and then, there would be a police officer who refused to accept these ground rules. When two detectives,
³²
John Walsh and Josh McLaughlin, broke into one of Rothstein’s illegal dens one night, he shot at them, suspecting they were robbers. The judge dismissed
³³
the case. A journalist asked: What’s “a little pistol practice
³⁴
with policemen as targets” when you are Arnold Rothstein?

He did to law enforcement what he did to the World Series: he turned it into a performance the watching public believed was real, when it was in fact a puppet show. Enough of the players on the field worked for him to guarantee his success every time.

But no matter how rich he got, he lived exactly the same, eating at Lindy’s late into every night. There was only one luxury he allowed himself. He paid a dentist
³⁵
to remove every one of his teeth, and insert shiny white ones in their place.

At some point, Arnold began to kill. This is where the camera lens of history becomes misted up and it gets harder to see what really happened. For obvious reasons, nobody recorded the names and details of Arnold’s victims. We can only infer that they existed through hints here and there. Everyone—even hardcore gangsters—was terrified of him; we know you don’t get that reputation only through wisecracks. There is only one of Rothstein’s likely victims whose name is traceable now. The biographer David Pietrusza was able to dig it up—and that is because the victim was the third richest man in the world.

One day, Arnold met in a hotel on East Forty-Second Street with Captain Alfred Lowenstein, a financier so rich that when the Germans seized Belgium during World War One, Lowenstein reputedly offered to buy it back with his own cash.
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With Rothstein, the captain signed the biggest drug deal in history up to that point, a plan to mass-market a range of opiates to a growing new market. Soon after making the pact, he got on his private plane and flew to Europe.

When the plane landed, Captain Lowenstein was not on board. The staff said he had gone to the toilet and not come back. The
New York Times
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reported that “it was practically impossible to open such a door if the plane were flying at ordinary cruising speed.” Presumably, whatever Rothstein got in the deal up front, he kept.

As I pieced together Arnold’s story in the shadow of the Capitol, I kept thinking of all the dry sociology studies I had been reading about the drug war—and they began to make sense. They explain that when a popular product is criminalized, it does not disappear. Instead, criminals start to control the supply and sale of the product. They have to get it into the country, transport it to where it’s wanted, and sell it on the street. At every stage, their product is vulnerable. If somebody comes along and steals it, they can’t go to the police or the courts to get it back. So they can only defend their property one way: by violence.

But you don’t want to be having a shoot-out every day—that’s no way to run a business. So you have to establish a reputation: a reputation for being terrifying. People must believe that you are so violent and brutal that they are too afraid to even try to pick a fight with you. You can only establish that reputation with attention-grabbing acts of brutality.

The American sociologist Philippe Bourgois would give this process a name: “a culture of terror.”
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But the first person to notice and begin to articulate this dynamic was a half-drunk, nicotine-encrusted tabloid journalist, Donald Henderson Clarke, whose beat was to hang out in bars, from Midtown to the Bowery, with Rothstein and his fellow thugs.

It is hard, he wrote, to convey “the fear with which
³⁹
Rothstein was regarded. Get in bad with a Police Commissioner, or a District Attorney, or a Governor, or anyone like that and you could figure out with a fair degree of certainty what might happen to you on the basis of what you had done. Get in bad with Arnold Rothstein, and all the figuring in the world wouldn’t get you anywhere. It’s true that nothing might happen to you but Fear. But that’s an awful calamity to come upon any man.”

Arnold’s men sprayed bullets across the city with the cheerful abandon of wedding guests tossing confetti. One of his chief henchmen, Jack “Legs” Diamond, was on the receiving end of so much return fire he was nicknamed “the human ammunition dump for the underworld.” But Rothstein and his men seemed always to come out on top, and as a result, nobody dared to cross them. One day, Arnold was on the subway when some anonymous pickpocket silently stole his pearl stickpin, the only personal adornment he had ever loved. Over dinner, with his mirthless laugh, he explained to some other gangsters how he’d been robbed: “Me, the wiseguy. What do you think of that?”

The next day, a package arrived at his house. It contained the stickpin
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and a note reading, “The guy who took it didn’t know who you were.”

While Arnold spread his terror, his wife, Carolyn, was virtually a prisoner in his house. He forbade her from going out after 6:00
P
.
M
.
, or to be contacted by anyone. He said it was because the police were constantly watching.
⁴⁰
He controlled everything about her: he ordered her not to bob her hair, saying she would “lose all dignity”
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if she did. At night, she recalled in her memoir, she would sit up listening to the roulette wheel from the underground gambling parlor her husband ran across the street. She could figure out if the house was winning by listening to whether the croupier was speedily raking in the chips
⁴²
or more slowly counting them out.
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As she waited up for him, the fragment of a memory from years ago kept coming back to Carolyn. When she was a dancer, she had cha-cha’d all over the country in a comedy show called
The Chorus Lady
. Once, on a train chugging through Pennsylvania—or maybe Kansas, she forgot the precise location—she had seen a long lazy row of country houses lit only by the flickering kerosene lamps inside. She tried to picture the lives of the people inside: calm and cool and safe.

Arnold came home every morning around five or six
⁴⁴
and immediately indulged his only addiction: glugging quarts of milk and eating trays of cakes in a frenzy. A giant leather screen hung in front of the windows to block the light. He woke at three in the afternoon and always groaned the same thing: “I don’t feel well.” He had a headache, or indigestion—his repressed way, perhaps, of dealing with what he must have known: that he could be killed at any moment.

He always promised Carolyn he would get out once he had enough, but she slowly realized there would never be enough
⁴⁵
for him. Besides, if he let go of the reins of violence for even a moment, he would be killed by the Rothstein wannabes jostling in the alleys of Broadway. Any sign of weakness would mean a bullet in an alleyway. “It’s too late.
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I can’t do it,” he told her. “I’ve gotten into it, and I can’t get out of it.”

He had always been freakishly fearless. One day, a gunman shoved a revolver into his stomach and demanded he hand over five hundred dollars. “When you get five hundred dollars out of me you’ll need it to pay your funeral expenses with,” he said. “Now think that over.”
⁴⁷
Yet beginning around 1926, something happened to Rothstein, and for the first time in his life, he seemed afraid.
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He was told that there was a serious threat to his life, and not long after, a man roughly the same height and appearance as Rothstein left his building. He was met by two gun-toting men who told him to get into their car. It was only after they had taken the man several blocks that they cursed: “We got the wrong man.”
⁴⁹

One night not long after that, Arnold woke Carolyn up, ashen-faced.

“I’ve just had a terrible experience,” he said. He had arrived at their apartment building and tried the door, but it was locked. “I rang the bell and knew it was sounding because I could hear it. Then I saw the elevator man lying on the couch. I thought he was bound and gagged.”
⁵⁰
Arnold ran several blocks to find a policeman—but when they returned, the door opened easily. Nothing was wrong.

Everything was in its place, except Arnold’s nerve. He was losing it.

In 1927, a car he used was found riddled with machine gun bullets as it waited for him outside the Hotel Fairfield on West Seventy-Second Street.
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Not long after that, Carolyn asked for a divorce.
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He knew what was coming—and so, in the end, it did. Arnold Rothstein was forty-seven years old when he staggered into the service entrance of the Park Central Hotel on Fifty-Sixth Street at 10:50
P
.
M
.
on November 5, 1928.
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The Brain had taken a bullet to the gut.
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“Get me a taxi,”
⁵⁵
he said. When the cops came instead and asked who did it, he mumbled: “If I live,
⁵⁶
I’ll tend to it; if I die, the gang will.”

It took him more than a day to die,
⁵⁷
in a hospital in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. As he lay there semicomatose, his lawyer and his mistress, a twenty-seven-year-old chorus girl (another one) named Inez Norton, “guided” his hand to write a new will.
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They thought they would inherit a fortune, but in fact, once his endless shuffling of money was picked apart, it turned out Arnold’s massive running debts exceeded his assets, and his lawyer and mistress got nothing.
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As it happened, Rothstein had taken out a fresh life $50,000 insurance policy the Saturday before. The check hadn’t reached the company: the payment was never made.
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