(Originally published by the Daily News on November 5, 1928.)
Arnold Rothstein, called the maharajah of gamblers because he was regarded as having the power of life and death over his subjects, met the fate he always feared last night.
Rothstein was shot very mysteriously at 11:20 p.m. in the Park Central hotel at 56th st. and 7th ave., although officials of the hotel maintained the shooting took place in the street nearby.
This morning his life hung in the balance on the operating table at Polyclinic hospital while three of the most expensive surgeons probed for the bullet in the abdomen.
Even though death waited at the door, the notorious gambler on Broadway closed his lips and stuck to the code of the underworld.
His silence gave detectives trouble in learning the details of the shooting.
But one thing they did learn:
Months ago he lost $280,000 in a stud poker game and did not pay. In recent weeks the ugly name welcher was applied to the gambler around the night club circuit. It was said he had been given until Nov. 1 to pay or be “put on the spot,” as gangsters term an informal execution.
Several Different Versions.
A half-dozen versions of the shooting immediately sprang up last night.
Although hotel officials vigorously denied it, detectives heard that the oily little man of easy millions was shot in a room on the fifteenth floor of the hotel. A hotel employe saw Rothstein lying beside the hotel’s freight elevator entrance with his eyes closed. He was bleeding profusely from wounds to which a clip – the first-aid method of stopping blood flow – had been applied.
The employe, who was going on duty, punched the hotel time clock near by. A policeman was standing over the fallen monarch of Broadway.
“Get away and keep your mouth shut,” the policeman told him.
But officially all the detectives were able to learn is that – apparently appearing out of thin air – Rothstein ran toward Hotel Detective Lawrence Fallon at the side entrance to the hotel, crying:
“I’ve been shot – get me a taxicab.”
Fallon says that he informed a policeman and summoned an ambulance at once. Whatever happened, eventually Detectives Patrick Flood and John Green arrived at the scene with Dr. McGowan of City hospital on Welfare island.
“I’m not going in an ambulance – get me a cab,” Rothstein, though losing blood rapidly, insisted to detectives. He refused to go to a city hospital and when questioned regarding the shooting would only say:
“That’s my business – can’t you see I’m in bad shape, leave me alone.”
Police Get Gun.
He was taken to Polyclinic hospital in a private ambulance. There he would say no more than before.
“It’s my business.”
A swarm of those who always followed Rothstein’s bets gathered around the hotel. Al Bender, a taxicab driver, stepped up and handed a large 38-caliber revolver to a policeman saying he had found it at 7th ave. entrance to the hotel – an odd place to leave a revolver.
It was a brand new weapon with only one cartridge inside and that one exploded. This mystified detectives.
Meanwhile, despite the word from those in the know that Rothstein had “got it” in a room of the hotel, the management was repeating nervously:
“It didn’t happen in the hotel. It didn’t happen in the hotel.”
Physicians Call Wife.
When hospital physicians found that Rothstein’s life was ebbing, they summoned his wife from her apartment at 912 5th st. She, recently returned from Europe after an informal separation from the gambler gangster potentate, came to the hospital immediately and was waiting outside the operating room.
Detectives went to the spacious apartment at the Fairfield building on West 72d st. between Columbus ave. and Central Park West, where Rothstein slept in a hideaway behind closed doors. They found nobody who would talk to them in the building – which Rothstein recently purchased with his gambling winnings.
“They got Arnold Rothstein” – the cry Broadway has expected in vain for fifteen years – left the Rialto stunned last night. But those who knew the little power of the underworld gathered in huddles in night clubs to tell the story behind the shooting.
It seems that months ago Rothstein engaged in a little stud poker game with the boys.
Gambler Gets Tip.
He lost $280,000. Apparently even Arnold Rothstein did not have that amount in his back pocket. So he murmured something about tomorrow. That was okay with the winners – who knew Rothstein as a man who had gone to a bank daily for years depositing $40,000 or $30,000 or so as the proceeds of the profits from his string of gambling houses.
Weeks passed. Nothing happened. Accordingly the “winners” notified the King of Gamblers that living was very expensive in the Fifties, Arnold said he knew it – but that was all. This left the “winners” very anxious.
It is this anxiety that sent Arnold Rothstein to a hospital near death.
That was the story they were whispering around the night clubs. But in the lobby of the Park Central, where racketing lieutenants of Rothstein gathered immediately after the shooting, they said:
“He must have got fresh with one woman too many.”
Police See Ruse.
Detectives smiled cynically at this statement. Rothstein’s lieutenants, they declared, were merely trying to throw them off the scent so that the gangster friends of the gambler could avenge the shooting in their own way.
No power in the gambling world of Broadway ever approached Rothstein’s in recent years. Thousands wouldn’t bet on a prize fight or big horse race until they learned how the suave little man with the raven locks and sanctified smile was placing his money.
Insurance Office Blind.
At 45 West 57th st. on a modest office door there is a simple sign:
“Arnold Rothstein & Co., Inc., Insurance.”
Behind this sign Arnold Rothstein, a suave little man of 46 with raven locks and the chilliest smile in the world, masked the greatest risk racket in the country.
You approached his office through a long narrow corridor. There, behind a battery of telephones that sprang at him from various angles like jumping jacks, he sat taking bets on anything from a dime to what-have-you?
“You newspaper fellows shouldn’t write those things about me being a gambler,” he would whine in the wheedling accents of a physician at a bedside.
“I’m trying to do a legitimate insurance business here and you fellows are always knocking me by calling me a gambler.
Called Fight Fixer.
“I didn’t do all those things they say, you know.”
That, at least, was true. Arnold Rothstein could not have, in one lifetime, accomplished everything that was credited to him. For example, sure-thing guys along Broadway credited him with fixing almost every big fight since Dempsey became champion.
In addition, they credited him with being the master mind behind the Fuller-McGee bucketing racket. And then they said – before Little Augie (Jacob Orgen), the notorious gangster, was killed – that Arnold Rothstein held a monopoly of the protection racket.
But, innocent though he may have been of many things, court records show that dapper Arnold did plenty for a little fellow.
Linked With For Strike.
Only last June, his own counsel, George Z. Medalie, told Supreme court that Rothstein had an “interest” in several large gambling enterprises and thought nothing of advancing $30,000 to a good customer after banking hours. Oddly enough, it happens that Medalie, often attorney for the gambling king, has been designated special assistant attorney general to prosecute election frauds.
And then E. M. Fuller, partner of Frank McGee in the bucketing racket that fleeced the innocent in Wall Street of more than $4,000,000, once testified that he lost $371,768 to Arnold.
The soft-shoe figure of Arnold of the chill smile also stalked behind all the fur strike trouble. The American Federation of Labor protested to Mayor Walker that Arnold arranged police protection for the Communists and their sluggers in the multiple fur strike riots.
Others charged that Rothstein handled protection for the right wing furriers as well. The gambling potentate always denied this.
Once when Little Augie and Ownie madden, last of the great gangsters, were arrested on charges of beating up right wing furriers and ruining property, Rothstein said:
“Little Augie is a fine little business man. They are persecuting him.”
Medalie, then known as attorney for Rothstein, appeared for the gangsters when their case was dismissed in Jefferson Market court – oddly enough on the motion of an assistant district attorney.
Was Gambler First.
Racketing, however, has only been a by-product of Rothstein’s undercover industries in recent years. First, because of a love of the game as well as a love of the profits, he was a gambler.
During the early years of the war he first became a great figure in Broadway’s gaming. “Honest John” Kelly, Canfield and the other oldsters of the green baize has been driven out of business in disgust because of prices exacted of them for protection.
Along came this raven-haired young man from the east side to pick up where they left off. Soon in 1914 and 1915, he was known as a gambling house keeper.
Then his gambling shifted to almost everything in the world of sport with the possible exception of squash racquets.
Literally thousands along Broadway would not bet on a horse race, a baseball game or a prize fight until they knew how Arnold Rothstein was laying his money.
With Abe Attell, once feather weight champion, he was mentioned in the famous Black Sox baseball scandal in 1919. Since then he has had uncanny luck betting – so uncanny that his following increased. He was not infallible, but he was good enough.
His winnings and losses, millions over a period of years, cannot be estimated. He was willing to bet any sum offered on a sporting event if the odds pleased him.
His luck recently has been uncannily good. For good instance, before the last world series, he bet $1,000 to $10,000 that the Yankees would win four straight from the Cardinals.
