Joe Bruno's Mobsters - Six Volume Set (16 page)

Paul concluded, from the evidence compiled more than 130 years earlier, that Payne had gotten Rogers pregnant, and on Sunday July 25, 1841, he ferried her off to Hoboken to have an abortion. While her mother and former fiancée were looking for Rogers, Rogers was recuperating from the abortion in a Hoboken inn.

Payne then returned to Hoboken on Tuesday, July 27, to pick up Rogers and bring her back to New York City. When Rogers told Payne she was breaking off their relationship, Paul concluded Payne strangled Rogers, then dropped her body into the Hudson River. Paul also deduced from the circumstances that Rogers's brief disappearance in 1838 was for the same reason: to have an abortion.

After Rogers's death, Payne started drinking heavily. On October 7, 1841, Payne, after making the rounds of several New York City bars, purchased the poison laudanum. He took the ferry to Hoboken, then went to Nick Moore's House, where he got properly drunk. Soused, Payne staggered, holding a bottle of brandy, to the very spot in the woods where Rogers's clothing had been found.

There, Payne wrote on a piece of paper, “To the world, here I am on the very spot. May God forgive me for my misspent life.”

Payne put the note in his pocket, drank the laudanum, and washed it down with the brandy. Then he laid down and died.

The newspapers, and the New York City police, thinking Rogers had been killed on Sunday, for which Payne had an airtight alibi, figured Payne had committed suicide because the love of his life had been murdered. Yet, the police investigation had been so cursory, incomplete, and
totally inefficient, they never considered the fact that it was impossible for Rogers to have been killed four days before she was found, because her body was still in the state of rigor mortis.

Although the murder of Mary Rogers has never officially been solved, her death was not in vain. The complete incompetency of the New York City police force, combined with  pressure from an outraged New York City press and populace, compelled the city to totally revamp its policing procedures.

Starting in 1845, Watchmen and Roundsmen became obsolete, as New York City finally created a police force, comprised of men specifically trained to prevent and investigate crimes.

R
othstein, Arnold (The Brain)

Arnold Rothstein was the most notorious gambler of his time; a bootlegger of great proportions and a master-fixer of everything imaginable. Rothstein was so adept at what he did, he reportedly fixed the 1919 World Series.

Rothstein was born on January 18, 1882, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His father, Abraham Rothstein, owned a dry-goods store and a cotton processing plant. Rothstein's father, a devout Jew, was also a mover and shaker in New York City politics, and he was called by his friends, “Abe the Just.” Abe Rothstein was so popular with the New York City politicians, in 1919 a dinner was staged in his honor, which was attended by New York Governor Al Smith and Judge Louis Brandeis.

Yet, young Arnold wanted no part of his father's life. At the age of 15, Arnold began sneaking away from his fancy Upper East Side home to mingle with the fast-moving crowd on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Rothstein loved to gamble, and soon he was a fixture at downtown card and dice games.

Having limited funds at that age, Rothstein would “borrow” money from his father in outlandish ways. As the Sabbath approached, Abe Rothstein would stash his money and jewelry in a dresser drawer in his bedroom. Young Rothstein, knowing his father's habits, would take the money from his father's drawer, spend all day gambling, then replace the money before sundown. One time, he even stole his father's watch and pawned it. That day, Rothstein won big at poker. Then before sundown, Rothstein redeemed his father's watch from the pawnbroker and put it back into his father's drawer, without his father being any the wiser.

Rothstein later explained his passion for gambling. He said, “I always gambled. I can't remember when I didn't. Maybe I gambled just to show my father he couldn't tell me what to do. When I gambled, nothing else mattered. I could play for hours and not know how much time had passed.”

Successful gamblers sometimes make enemies, and Rothstein was no exception. In 1911, several gamblers, he had regularly taken to the cleaners, decided to teach Rothstein a lesson. As good as he was with dice and cards, Rothstein was even better with a pool stick. So his “pals” imported pool shark Jack Conway from Philadelphia to show Rothstein he wasn't the pool player he thought he was.

After Conway challenged him to a match, Rothstein got to pick the pool parlor in which they would play. Rothstein picked John McGraw's Pool Room, owned by the legendary former manager of the New York Giants. Every known New York City gambler was in the pool room that night, mostly betting against the cocky Rothstein. After Rothstein lost the first match to 100 (probably on purpose), he and Conway engaged in a 40-hour marathon, in which Rothstein won every 2 out of 3 matches they played. During that two-day period, Rothstein won thousands of
dollars, and he earned a reputation of being cool and collected under pressure.

Rothstein's prowess at gambling caught the eye of local politician and a mighty fine crook himself: Big Tim Sullivan. Sullivan hired Rothstein, now called “The Brian” by his associates, to manage his gambling concession at the Metropole Hotel on 43
rd
  Street. That was the big break Rothstein had been waiting for.

Rothstein parlayed his stint at the Metropole into owning his own gambling joint on Broadway, in the glitzy Tenderloin section of Manhattan. Rothstein's reputation attracted such known gamblers as Charles Gates (son of John W. “Bet a Million” Gates), Julius Fleischmann (the Yeast King), Joseph Seagram (Canadian Whiskey baron), Henry Sinclair of Sinclair Oil, and Percival Hill, who owed the American Tobacco Company. Playing poker, Hill once lost $250,000 in one night to Rothstein.

In 1919, after Prohibition was enacted, Rothstein became a major bootlegger. He fell in with several young criminals, including Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, both of whom looked up to the classy Rothstein as their mentor. Rothstein made sure all his young Turks made money, by cutting them into every whiskey deal he was involved with. It was during this period, that Rothstein received his second nickname: “The Fixer.”

Rothstein had sucked up to Tammany boss Charley Murphy, and using Murphy's clout, Rothstein fixed thousands of bootlegging criminal cases. Out of 6,902 liquor-related cases that made it to court, with Rothstein's influence, 400 never made it to trial and an incredible 6,074 were dismissed completely.

In 1919, through former featherweight champion Abe Attell, several Chicago White Sox baseball players approached Rothstein about fixing that year's baseball World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. It's not clear whether Rothstein actually bankrolled the fix, or turned them down completely. However, what is clear, is that Rothstein bet $60,000 on the Reds, and he pocketed a cool $270,000.

In 1928, the wear and tear of all his dealings and double-dealings had a severe effect on Rothstein. He started to lose more often than he won at cards. Rothstein's downfall started when he got involved in a marathon poker game, that began at the Park Central Hotel on September 8, and ended on September 12. Among the gamblers involved were Nate Raymond and Titanic Thomson. When the dust settled, Rothstein had lost $320,000 to Raymond and Thomson, which he refused to pay because he claimed the game was fixed.

On November 4, 1928, Rothstein was eating at Lindy's Restaurant, when he received a phone call requesting his presence at the Park Central Hotel to discuss the payment of his gambling debt. Before he left Lindy's, Rothstein told the waitress, “I don't pay off on fixed poker.”

Because guns are traditionally not allowed at such meetings, Rothstein gave his gun to an associate to hold until he got back.

A few hours later, the Park Central doorman found Rothstein slumped over a banister in the hotel.

“Please call a taxi,” Rothstein told the doorman. “I've been shot.”

Rothstein was taken to the Polyclinic Hospital with a bullet in his gut. When the police asked him who had shot him, Rothstein replied, “Don't worry. I'll take care of it myself.”

Rothstein fell in and out of delirium for several days. One afternoon, his estranged wife came to the hospital to see him. Rothstein told her, “I want to go home. All I do is sleep here. I can sleep at home.”

Rothstein died a few hours later at the age of 46. No one was ever arrested for Rothstein's murder.

Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein's funeral was attended by every card-shark and gangster in New York City. Lucky Luciano said later about Rothstein, “Arnold taught me how to dress. He taught me how not to wear loud things, how to have taste. If Arnold had lived longer, he could have made me real elegant.”

S
chultz, Dutch (Arthur Flegenheimer)

Mob bosses come in all shapes and sizes. Some are brilliant. Some are just plain dumb. Almost all are homicidal maniacs. However, only one was a certified lunatic, and his name was Dutch Schultz.

In 1902, Schultz was born Arthur Flegenheimer to German/Jewish parents in the Bronx. His father abandoned the family at an early age, and young Flegenheimer took assorted jobs, including one at the Schultz Trucking Company. Despite his legitimate work at the trucking company, young Flegenheimer took up with a gang of crooks, who during Prohibition, did a little illegal importing of hooch (from Canada to New York City) on the side.

When he was pinched for the first time by the cops, Flegenheimer gave his name as Dutch Schultz, which was the name of the son of the boss of the Schultz Trucking Company. Later, the headline-happy Schultz would tell the press that he changed his name to Dutch Schultz because it fit in the newspaper headlines better than Arthur Flegenheimer did.

“If I had kept the name of  Flegenheimer,” Schultz said. “Nobody would have ever heard of me.”

Schultz quit the trucking business, and he decided he could make a mint off the Harlem numbers rackets, where it was reported that the locals bet a staggering $35,000 a day. Schultz set up a gang that included crazed killer Bo Weinberg, mathematical genius Otto “Abbadabba” Berman, and Lulu Rosenkrantz, who could kill with the best of them too. Schultz and his crew invited the black gangsters, who ran the numbers show in Harlem, to a meeting. When the black gangsters arrived, Schultz put a 45 caliber pistol on the table and told them, “I'm now your partner.”

And that cemented the deal.

Yet Schultz was not satisfied with just making a ton of cash off the Harlem numbers racket. He wanted to make 100 tons of cash; maybe even more. So, he enlisted the genius mind of Abbadabba Berman to rig the Harlem numbers game so that he could achieve his goal.

The
Harlem Age
newspaper, instead of using the
New York Clearing House Reports
for its daily three-digit number, used Cincinnati's Coney Island Race track to determine the winning numbers. The only problem was, Schultz owned that particular race track. So all Berman had to do was go over the thousands of slips bet that particular day, and before the seventh race at the track, he knew which numbers Schultz did not want to win. Then one phone call to the race track, and like magic, the final numbers were altered for Schultz's monetary benefit.

Schultz had one simple rule that helped propel him to the top: if someone stole a dime of his cash, that person would soon die. His longtime lawyer, J. Richard “Dixie” Davis, Schultz's conduit to the crooked politicians who protected Schultz's flank, once said, “You can insult Arthur's girl. Spit in his face. Push him around. And he'll laugh. But don't steal a dollar from his accounts. If you do, you're dead.”

Two such men, who were deposited into the hereafter by Schultz, were Vincent “Mad Dog” Cole and Jack “Legs” Diamond. After Schultz's men pumped several bullets into Diamond's head in an upstate hotel, Schultz said, “Just another punk caught with his hands in my pocket.”

The killings of Diamond and Cole propelled Schultz into the big time, and soon he became an equal in a syndicate of gangsters, which included Lucky Luciano, Louie “Lepke” Buchalter, Meyer Lansky, Albert Anastasia, and Joe “Adonis” Doto. While the rest of the crew were immaculate dressers, Schultz dressed one step above a Bowery bum. Even though he was raking in millions, Schultz never spent more than $35 for a suit, or $2 for a shirt.

Lucky Luciano once said of Schultz, “Dutch was the cheapest guy I ever knew. The guy had a couple of million bucks, and he dressed like a pig.”

As for his insistence on not dressing up to his mob stature, Schultz said, “I think only queers wear silk shirts.”

As time passed, the rest of the syndicate grew weary of  Schultz's erratic ways. One such example of his lunacy was when Schultz, in order to beat a tax-evasion case in upstate Malone, New York, converted to Catholicism in order to butter up the all-Catholic jury. His scheme worked, and Schultz was acquitted on all counts.

Another time, at a syndicate meeting, Schultz became upset over a wisecrack Joe Adonis made about Schultz's chintzy clothes. Schultz, who had a bad case of the flu, grabbed Adonis in a headlock, and he blew hard into his face.

“See you (expletive) star. Now you've got the flu too.”

Adonis did indeed catch the flu from Schultz, which did not make him and the rest of the syndicate particularly happy.

Schultz's downfall was his insistence that the syndicate kill New York City Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who was on a mission to crack down on all the mobs, especially Schultz's. Schultz called a meeting of the nine-member syndicate, and he demanded Dewey's head on a plate. The other members thought killing Dewey was a terrible idea, because they were convinced, if Dewey was offed, an avalanche of criminal investigations would surely fall down on their heads. Schultz's proposal was voted down 8-1.

Schultz stormed  from  the meeting, saying, “I still say he ought to be hit. And if nobody else is going to do it, I'm
gonna hit him myself. Within 48 hours.”

The other syndicate  members, knowing Schultz was not one to bluff, immediately voted unanimously that Schultz was the one who had to go; and quickly, before Dewey was dead.

On October 23, 1935, the day following the fateful votes, Schultz, Berman, Lulu Rosenkrantz, and Abe Landau were in the Palace Chop House and Tavern in Newark, New Jersey, ostensibly to discuss how best to do away with Dewey. Schultz was in the bathroom, when Charlie “The Bug” Workman and Mendy Weiss slipped quietly through the front door.

With Weiss standing guard outside the bathroom door, Workman quietly entered the bathroom, looking for possible witnesses. Instead, he found a started Schultz just zipping up his pants. Workman plugged Schultz once, right in the middle of the chest. Satisfied Schultz was dead, Workman and Weiss rushed into the main dining room, and they shot numerous holes into Berman, Rosenkrantz, and Landau, killing all three men.

Schultz was rushed to the hospital, and he lay delirious for two days. While lying in his hospital deathbed, Schultz spouted such idiocies as:
Oh Duckie, see we skipped again
. And,
Please mother, crack down on the Chinaman's friends and Hitler's commander. 
And,
Louie, didn't I give you my doorbell?

Schultz's temperature rose to 106 degrees, and on October 25 he fell into a coma and died. His former pals in the syndicate, overjoyed and more than little relieved, divided Schultz's
prosperous operations equally amongst themselves.

S
iegel, Benjamin (Bugsy)

Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel is the man most responsible for the birth of the city of Las Vegas, which became the gambling capital of the world.

Siegel was born Benjamin Siegelbaum on February 28, 1906, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. As a teenager, Siegel crossed the bridge to Manhattan, and he started a gang on Lafayette Street, which skirted the border of Little Italy, with another thug named Moe Sedway. Their main racket was  shaking down pushcart owners for protection money, and if they weren't paid quickly enough, they burnt down the poor owners' pushcarts.

Soon, Siegel teamed up with Meyer Lansky, the man who would shape his life, and eventually, his death. Together they formed the “Bugs and Meyer Gang,” which started out in auto theft and ended up handling hit contracts for bootleggers, who were having their shipments hijacked. This tidy little killing business was the forerunner to the infamous “Murder Incorporated,” which handled hundreds of contract killings during the 1930's.

In the late 1920's, Siegel and Lansky hooked up with ambitious Italian mobsters Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Vito Genovese, Joe Bonanno, Albert Anastasia, and Tommy Lucchese. Together they formed a National Crime Commission, which controlled all organized crime in America, for many years to come. Siegel was the main hitman for the group, and in 1931, he led the four-man hit-squad which riddled Joe “The Boss” Masseria's body with bullets in a Coney Island Restaurant. Siegel developed the reputation as a man who not only killed frequently, but enjoyed killing, with the glee of a schoolboy on his first date.

In the late 1930's, The Commission sent Siegel to California to take over their West Coast rackets, including the lucrative racing wire, which transmitted horse race results to thousands of bookie joints throughout the country. Siegel pushed aside West Coast mob boss Jack Dragna, who was told by Lansky and Luciano, if he didn't step down and hand the racing wire reins over to Siegel, bad things would happen to him quickly. Dragna did as he was told, and Dragna soon disappeared from the California organized crime scene.

While in Hollywood, Siegel, who was movie-star-good-looking, was a renowned ladies man, who sometimes bedded down three or four starlets at a time. He hung around with such movie hunks as Clark Cable, Gary Cooper, George Raft, and Cary Grant. The girls he bedded included Jean Harlow, Wendy Barry, Marie McDonald, Virginia Hill, and Italian Countess Dorothy DiFrasso.

Even though Siegel was busy with the broads, he always found time to do a little killing on the side. In 1939, on orders from New York City Jewish mob boss Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, Siegel whacked Harry "Big Greenie" Greenberg, who was singing like a canary to the feds. Siegel was arrested for Greenberg's murder, but after a witness conveniently disappeared, Siegel was acquitted of all charges.

The bad publicity from the Greenberg trial ruined Siegel's man-about-town reputation in Hollywood. As a result, the Commission sent Siegel to the deserts of Nevada, to scout sites for a hotel/casino they wanted to build. Siegel found the perfect location in Las Vegas, and he convinced the boys from New York City, including his pal Lansky, to invest millions of dollars in an opulent night club, Siegel dubbed “The Flamingo Hotel.”

The building of the “The Flamingo Hotel” was a disaster from the start. Siegel's insistence on only the best of everything skyrocketed the costs to a staggering $6 million, which annoyed
his partners in New York City more than just a little bit. Furthermore, there were concerns that maybe Siegel was skimming a little construction money off the top, to fund his actions with the ladies.

In December 1946, the opening night of “The Flamingo Hotel” was an unmitigated disaster. Siegel had moved up the opening date from March 1947, while the hotel was still in the late stages of being built. Since “The Flamingo Hotel” did not show well (the lobby was draped with ugly drop cloths), the Hollywood crowd they had depended upon to generate business stayed away.

In a few short months, “The Flamingo Hotel” was more than a quarter of a million dollars in the red. Losing money on gambling was unheard of in the mob, and as a result,  Siegel's partners in New York City made a business decision that Siegel's days on earth must end as soon as possible.

Contrary to what has been written in the past, longtime pal Lansky had no problem signing off on Siegel's death warrant. Lansky said that “business is business,” and Siegel was bad for business.

On June 20, 1947, Siegel was sitting on the living room couch, in the Beverly Hills home of his girlfriend Virginia Hill, reading the
Los Angeles Times
. Suddenly, two rifle bullets, fired from an open window, struck Siegel in the face. One bullet hit his right cheek and settled in his brain. The second hit him in the nose, then pierced his right eye.