Rothstein (4 page)

ABRAHAM ROTHSTEIN HEARD SOBBING.

It came from a closet in his East 79th Street home. He opened the door. Inside was his fiveyear-old son Arnold. He tried comforting him, cradling him in his arms. The boy pushed him away.

“You hate me,” he said. “She hates me and you hate me, but you all love Harry. Nobody loves me.”

Harry. Abraham knew of his son Arnold’s insecurities, of the jealousy, even the hatred Arnold felt for his older brother. “You are our son,” he said. “We love all of you alike.”

“It’s a lie,” Arnold shot back. “If she loved me, she wouldn’t leave me. She’d take me and leave Harry here.”

Harry. Esther Rothstein had left for San Francisco, her first visit home since her marriage, the first since her father’s death. She took with her, her oldest son, Harry, and Edith, the baby of the family. She left behind Arnold and his younger brother Edgar.

Many a fiveyear-old has reacted as Arnold Rothstein did that night: a flare-up, a temper tantrum that would pass. But this was no isolated incident. Arnold was a deeply disturbed child, filled with pathological hatred for his older brother. And the child would be father to the man. True, he would gradually move from shyness to confidence, holding forth at various Broadway haunts, mixing with show people and socialites and politicians, with writers and celebrities. But Arnold Rothstein could never quite overcome the pain he felt as a child, an ache worse than any gambling loss.

There was no real reason for A. R. to have felt this way, none for his insecurity, nor for his fear of his older brother. No real reason, actually, to eventually become what he did: a gambler, a cheat, a rumrunner. No reason to become a drug smuggler, or a political fixer. No reason to become any of those things. Not if ancestry or upbringing counts. For Arnold Rothstein came from very good stock. Not Lower East Side stock. Not tenement stock. Good stock. After all, he was Abe Rothstein’s boy.

They called Abraham Elijah Rothstein, “Abe the just,” a richly earned compliment. Most of New York’s Jews in the late nineteenth century were immigrants, fresh off the boat and scrambling to make a new life in a new land. They quickly abandoned old beliefs and old customs-turned to American ways, or at least what greenhorns thought were American ways.

Abraham’s parents, Harris and Rosa Rothstein, had fled the pogroms of their native Russian-ruled Bessarabia. Abraham Rothstein was born on Henry Street, on the Lower East Side, in 1856. He worked hard, following in his father’s profession as a cap maker. Later he emerged as a highly successful cotton-goods dealer.

He made a very comfortable living. But far more noteworthy than the living Abraham Rothstein made was the life he made. He lived his life and practiced his trade according to the faith of his fathers. Most native-born Jews rejected orthodoxy, embracing secularism and Americanism. Some turned socialist or Zionist. Abraham Rothstein chose tradition. He attended synagogue, observed the Sabbath, lived according to the Decalogue-and was soon known to all who knew him (and many who didn’t) as “Abe the just.”

“My father bequeathed me a way of life,” Abraham Rothstein explained decades later. “He taught me a way of life. He taught me, above all, to love God and to honor Him. Secondly, he taught me to honor all men and love them as brothers. He told me whatever I received I received from God and that no man can honor God more greatly than by sharing his possessions with others. This I have tried to do.”

He not only was active in the Bessarabian Landsmannschaft-most native-born Jews abandoned such old-country organizations to the greenhorns-he found his bride through it. The arrangement was not a matter of simply returning to the Lower East Side or even crossing over to Brooklyn. The marriage was brokered with a family in San Francisco, that of general-store owner Jacob Solomon Rothschild and his wife Minnie. Twentythree-yearold Abraham Rothstein traveled cross-country to meet his seventeen-year-old bride and on September 3, 1879, married her at her family home.

They met only on the day of their wedding. Abraham was to have arrived a few days earlier, so the couple might know each other at least superficially. But transcontinental travel was problematic, and he arrived mere hours before the ceremony. “When we married, we did not love each other,” Esther would recall. “How could you love a stranger? But all the material for love was there. I respected Abraham, I knew he was a good man or my father would not have approved of him. From the first moment he was gentle to me and considerate. Love, of course, came later.”

However, sex-and children-came much sooner. The newlyweds returned to New York, moving in with the groom’s parents, his older brother Lewis, and the Rothsteins’ Irish-born servant girl, Mary O’Reilly. Their first child, Harry (actually Bertram), arrived little more than nine months after their wedding July 18, 1880-at the family home at 270 Madison Avenue. Arnold arrived in 1882 on East 47th Street-a significant fact, because the Rothsteins moved about Manhattan at a dizzying pace, surely increasing an insecure child’s fear. Edgar was born in September 1883-at 1835 Lexington Avenue. Sister Edith followed in August 1886. Sarah arrived in March 1888 (on East 43rd Street). And finally, Jacob “Jack” was born in March 1891, when the family lived at 165 East 78th Street.

Arnold’s difficulties with older brother Harry began very early. Once when Arnold was just three, Abraham Rothstein stumbled upon a strange and frightening scene: Harry asleep; Arnold poised over him with a knife. “Why, my son?” the distraught father asked. “Why?”

“I hate Harry,” was all Arnold had to say. He meant it.

Harry’s trip to San Francisco with their mother compounded that hatred. “I think I remember this better than anything else that ever happened to me,” Rothstein confided to the noted psychologist John B. Watson just months before his death. “It was the only time I ever really cried.”

As time progressed, the differences between Harry and Arnold-and between Arnold and his father-only grew. Harry became a brilliant student, likable, a leader. Arnold withdrew, seeking out the darkness, playing in closets in basements. He cared nothing about academic subjects, and it showed. He resented teachers and ignored obligations. “From the start, however, he had the strange restlessness of the malcontent,” observed author Russell Crouse. “He did not like … school because the schoolteacher knew more than he did. Most of his time was spent in devising schemes to offset that superiority.”

Arnold fell behind one grade and then another. By fifth grade he and Edgar were classmates. “I’d do all the homework and Arnold would copy it and remember it,” Edgar recalled. “Except in arithmetic. Arnold did all the arithmetic. He loved to play with numbers.”

Harry followed Abraham Rothstein’s Orthodox ways. Arnold did not. Harry enthusiastically attended cheder (Hebrew school), attaining an easy fluency in Hebrew. At thirteen he pleased his parents by announcing plans to study for the rabbinate. Arnold had to be browbeaten into cheder, where he proved even more indifferent than at public school. Following his bar mitzvah, he announced, “I’ve had enough.”

“You should be proud of being a Jew,” Abraham would tell his recalcitrant son.

“Who cares about this stuff?” Arnold sneered. “This is America, not Jerusalem. I’m an American. Let Harry be a Jew.”

Arnold Rothstein wasn’t the only young Jew rebelling against the faith and the restraints of his father. Throughout New York other young men and women proclaimed their Americanism. They wanted nothing to do with the old ways. Each day, muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens noticed young men just like A. R.:

We saw it everywhere. Responding to a reported suicide, we would pass a synagogue where a score or more of boys were sitting hatless in their old clothes, smoking cigarettes on the steps outside, and their fathers, all dressed in black, with their high hats, uncut beards and temple curls, were going into the synagogue, tearing their hair and rending their garments…. Their sons were rebels against the law of Moses; they were lost souls to God, the family, and to Israel of old.

Abraham Rothstein’s was the older generation in the shul, Arnold’s, the generation who considered their fathers’ world dead. This was the nineteenth century. This was America. They would make their own world.

It was too often a criminal underworld centered on Abe Rothstein’s old neighborhood, the Lower East Side, one of the nation’s most vice-ridden districts. Rebellion manifested itself in ways far worse than smoking on synagogue steps. Thievery, prostitution, gambling, and gangsterism ran rampant. The place had always been tough. Originally such gangs as the “Plug Uglies” and “Dead Rabbits” dominated it. Then came the Irish “Whyos,” “the Gophers,” and the “White Hand Gang.” Now, it was the Jews’ turn: Monk Eastman (ne Joseph Osterman), Joseph “Yoski Nigger” Toblinsky. “Spanish Louis” (a Sephardic Jew). “Big Jack” Zelig, Max “Kid Twist” Zweibach, Nathan “Kid Dropper” Kaplan, Harry “Gyp the Blood” Horowitz, and “Dopey Benny” Fein. They stole and bullied and provided muscle for pimps and gamblers and the political bosses, the “Big Tim” Sullivans and “Silver Dollar” Smiths.

Not much can be said in their favor except that their prices were fairly reasonable. Jack Zelig’s rates ran:

Some had specialties. Gyp the Blood, leader of the “Lexington Avenue Gang,” could break a man’s spine over his back by bending him across his knee. For a few dollars he’d perform that act for onlookers. In a good mood (“I likes to hear the noise”), he might do it for free. Yoski “King of the Horse Poisoners” Nigger poisoned horses unless their owners paid off, personally dispatching over 200 animals. Monk Eastman, though, had a soft spot for kittens and birds (“kits and boids,” as he’d say) and, to some extent, for the fair sex. If called on to discipline a woman, he would say, “I only give her a little poke. Just enough to put a shanty on her glimmer. But I always take my knucks off.” Most of these creatures would meet violent ends.

A motley variety of ruffians, pickpockets, fences, and arsonists rounded out East Side crime. Harry Joblinsky and Abe Greenthal captained competing rings of pickpockets. Clinton Street’s corpulent “Mother” Frederika Mandelbaum operated a network of fences, moving massive quantities of stolen goods around New York and the nation. Professional arsonist Isaac Zucker was paid $25 per job to torch insured properties.

All this was bad enough, but one particular vice rotted the neighborhood’s moral fabric: prostitution. In the nineteenth century, white slavery was widespread, to an extent now virtually unimaginable. With sex largely unattainable with “respectable” single women, young men paid for sex. And with so many whores on the street, in the back rooms of saloons, and in brothels (both elegant and otherwise), many married men also succumbed to temptation. Prostitution was common among all ethnic and religious groups but was particularly prevalent on the Lower East Side. Hundreds of whores plied their trade, often in view of impressionable children. “Almost any child on the East Side in New York,” noted one contemporary study, “will tell you what a `nafke bias’ [whorehouse] is.” And children needn’t go as far as an actual brothel to see white slavery in operation. They could look out their windows, across the airshaft or backyard into other tenements. An old woman sum moned Lincoln Steffens to her apartment to witness what her children saw every night. “There they are watching, always they watch,” she told him, hoping against hope that he could do something about it. “They count the men who come of a night. Ninetythree one night. My oldest girl says she will go into that business when she grows up; she says it’s a good business, easy, and you can dress and eat well.”

A small army of pimps, called “cadets,” lived off the whores. Some “cadets” did more business than others. Motche Goldberg, the “King of the Vice Trust” began in the 1890s with just one girl. By 1912 his eight houses employed 114 prostitutes.

Gambling, too, was big business in America, big business in New York. By 1899 police payoffs (largely for gambling) on the island of Manhattan exceeded $3 million annually. How much cash changed hands across elegant green felt tables and in tenement apartments and the seedy back rooms of grocery stores and saloons can never be calculated. Americans, of course, had gambled everywhere, from Southern riverboats to western mining camps. American gambling had once been dominated by names like John “Old Smoke” Morrisey, “Honest John” Kelly, and Richard Canfield. Now gamblers with names like Herman Rosenthal, “Bridgey” Webber, “Bald Jack” Rose, Sam Schepps, Harry Vallon, and Sam Paul, operated from Lower East Side pool halls, stuss parlors, and politically protected gambling houses such as Third Avenue’s Sans Souci or the Hesper Club on Second.

Arnold Rothstein-son of “Abraham the Just”-progressed from troubled, jealous child to rebellious, irreligious youth to being part of this sordid universe. And if Arnold Rothstein was drawn magnetically to this world of gamblers, violence, and vice as a teenager, it would prove to be magnetically drawn to him. The toughs of the Bowery, the gamblers and saloon keepers of the Lower East Side, the dope peddlers of Chinatown recognized that the youth provided qualities they lacked so badly: brains, daring, and, yes, even classan understated, soft-spoken manner that coated old crimes with the veneer of old gentility.

“Not only was Rothstein the future of Jewish crime in New York,” one author would write a century later, “he was the future of all crime everywhere.”

He exaggerated … but only a little.

SOMETHING ABOUT GAMBLING appealed to Arnold Rothstein.

Good gamblers possess a head for numbers. They might have been high-school or even grade school, dropouts. They might be nearilliterates. But most can recall any number that flashes before their eyes long after the fact, perform elaborate mathematical equationsand, most importantly, calculate odds and payoffs in a flash. At Harlem’s Boys High School, Arnold Rothstein amazed his young colleagues, and sometimes even himself, with his manipulation of figures, but otherwise he proved an indifferent student-so lackadaisical that despite his intelligence and background, he dropped out.

Indifference wasn’t A. R.‘s only problem. There was a question of conceit. Already, he fancied himself just a little-well, maybe more than just a little-smarter than those around him.