Founding Father (February/March 1993 | Volume: 44, Issue: 1)

Founding Father

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Authors: Jill Jonnes

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February/March 1993 | Volume 44, Issue 1

Very late on the night of November 4,1928, Arnold Rothstein was found shot and critically wounded in the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan. Identified by The New York Times as “Broadway’s greatest chance-taker” and the accused but acquitted fixer of the 1919 World Series, the forty-six-year-old gambler was rushed to the hospital, where he held tight to the code of the underworld, refusing to shed light on his shooting. He lingered silently for forty-eight hours to die on election day, posthumously winning more than five hundred thousand dollars for having bet on Herbert Hoover.

But those early newspaper articles that described Rothstein merely as a clever gambler had assigned him too modest a role. In fact, he was an all-around criminal genius, one whose prodigious energy, imagination, and intellect had catapulted him to supremacy in an underworld that he changed forever. Rothstein, said one historian, permanently transformed American crime “from petty larceny into big business.”

The Brain, as Damon Runyon dubbed Rothstein, always thought big. The son of pious Orthodox Jews, Rothstein rejected their ways, and at a time when other gangsters were still working the traditional rackets, he masterminded a million-dollar stolen-bond business, pioneered and financed the first rum smuggling from Europe during Prohibition, and brought blackmail to new heights through labor racketeering. But it was his final criminal enterprise that stands as his most enduring legacy: organizing and bankrolling big-time international narcotics trafficking.

His involvement in drugs was unknown until his murder. New Yorkers were astonished to learn that this familiar Broadway denizen, famed for his Thoroughbred horses, women, chauffeured Rolls-Royce, and huge cash bankrolls (he had sixty-five hundred dollars on him when he was shot), was the brains and capital behind what federal prosecutors described as “a gang of international criminals who in recent years had smuggled millions of dollars in drugs into this country.” But this was indeed the case. Rothstein had seen an enormous opportunity and had moved ruthlessly to exploit it.

In the early years of the century, America realized it had a serious and fast-spreading drug problem, especially in the urban slums. By 1914 Congress had passed the Harrison Narcotic Act to restrict the previously easy access to morphine, cocaine, and heroin, and the government worked so doggedly and effectively that by the mid-1920s ready availability of the opiate and cocaine products of American pharmaceutical firms was finished at both the retail and wholesale levels. This left smuggling from Europe or Asia, theretofore minor, to supply virtually the whole illicit market. And this was the opportunity that Rothstein spotted.

Rothstein not only saw that an established and lucrative market of drug users and addicts had lost its ultimate source of supply; he moved in swiftly to create a whole new system to replace it. Rothstein possessed—as did no other gangster of his era—the capital to finance such an enterprise, the political clout to operate with impunity, and the connection