Once Upon a Time in New York Read online

  The editorial exaggerated Roosevelt’s anti-Tammany position at that time. It was Charlie Murphy, the Tammany boss, who had engineered the Roosevelt nomination for vice president in 1920. A candidate tied to Al Smith and Jimmy Walker could not help being linked to Tammany Hall but, as a resident of Hyde Park in Dutchess County, F.D.R. was not under the control of the Manhattan leadership. Nevertheless, the new governor recognized Tammany’s vote-counting ability in city and state affairs.

  Indeed, Mayor Walker had nominated Roosevelt for governor at the party’s state convention and campaigned for him. In his resplendent oratorical style, Walker called Roosevelt “a real, genuine, 100 percent American, and by that I mean a man who has studied and who knows the Declaration of Independence and refused to forget what has been written in that immortal document.”

  Beyond the Hudson, not everyone gave Roosevelt a similar stamp of approval. H. L. Mencken satirized him: “Roosevelt is one of the most charming of men, but like many another very charming man he leaves on the beholder the impression that he is also somewhat shallow and futile. It is hard to say precisely how that impression is produced; maybe his Christian Science smile is to blame, or the tenor overtones in his voice.”

  After the election, the dozen morning and evening daily newspapers in New York (this figure does not even count the foreign-language press) picked up the scent of the hunt for Rothstein’s killer. Spurred by Good Government reformers, the public demanded action by the district attorney and police department. From stoolies on parole and streetwise small-timers in the underworld, detectives began to piece together a mosaic of information about the crime.

  On the night of the shooting, Rothstein was sitting at his usual table at Lindy’s, noshing and sipping coffee with some friends, when a call came through to him at 10:45 P.M. He spoke briefly and then picked up his hat and coat. “George McManus wants me over at the Park Central,” he told his friends. Then he left alone, without a bodyguard. Rothstein himself did not carry a weapon; that was not his style or the source of his power.

  McManus, a gambler, was one of the out-of-towners with bankrolls of unknown origin who enjoyed life along the Rialto. Detectives claimed that he had been among the eight players in a card game in which Rothstein had lost $303,000. Of that small fortune, Rothstein still owed $219,000. McManus himself had lost $51,000 early in the same game, before the cards began to fall his way. It was understood by the players that Rothstein had not exactly welshed on his gambling debt; he promised to pay up as soon as he could get the cash together. Even to big-time gamblers in those free-spending years before the Wall Street crash, a couple of hundred grand was serious money.

  When settlement time came a few days later, Rothstein said he was short of ready cash, owing to his heavy investments in real estate. He failed to mention that, simultaneously, his secretive heroin and cocaine investments demanded large amounts of ready money because narcotics was strictly a cash-and-carry business.

  The big winner in the game was believed to be one “Nigger Nate” Raymond, who had known Rothstein for at least ten years. Nathan Raymond, a California businessman with vague connections to the sports world, had a swarthy complexion; hence his nickname. Roth-stein still had $60,000 in his pocket that night, but he refused to divvy it up among the winners. After all, $60,000 was little more to him than what the boys at Lindy’s called walking-around money.

  “I’m Rothstein,” he boasted. “My name ought to be good for the money.” He added that he would probably have to sell one of his apartment houses to raise the cash to pay off his losses.

  Two months passed. Rothstein still had not come up with the money for Nigger Nate and the other gamblers. On the weekend of the shooting, Rothstein and Raymond ran into each other in front of Lindy’s. Rothstein reassured him, “Nate, FU give you some of that money on Monday.”

  Ten minutes before he left Lindy’s to go to the Park Central in response to the phone call, Rothstein emerged from his Rolls-Royce and told Eugene Reiman, his longtime chauffeur and confidant, to go either to his home or to his office, at 45 West Fifty-seventh Street, and “get some dough.” Reiman departed, picked up the money, and returned to Lindy’s.

  There he was told that Rothstein had been “slugged” and taken to Polyclinic. The chauffeur immediately drove to the hospital and saw Rothstein in the emergency room. They were never alone together. The detectives did not say what happened to the dough Reiman was supposedly carrying to Rothstein.

  A persistent report went around that a pair of gangsters had been hired by one or more of Rothstein’s creditors to demonstrate that they meant business and, the weekend he was shot, said the gossips, was the last chance he was going to get to pay up. According to an unnamed pigeon questioned by the detectives, one of the gunmen lost his temper when Rothstein ridiculed him. He took out the Colt .38, angrily pointed the gun as if he were going to shoot Big Arnie in his testicles, and pulled the trigger, perhaps accidentally. The shot was a little high, but the bullet did its work even more effectively in the gambler’s gut.

  A Chesterfield overcoat with George McManus’s name embroidered inside was found in Room 349 at the Park Central. McManus had rented the room using the name George Richards. But McManus was nowhere to be found; he had disappeared from his usual gambling haunts and speakeasies right after the shooting. Detectives had reason to believe that he was the nervous triggerman who had been insulted by Rothstein.

  Three weeks after Rothstein was buried in a bronze coffin following a traditional Jewish service at Union Field Cemetery in Brooklyn, McManus turned himself in. His lawyer arranged for him to surrender to John Cordes, a detective, while getting a shave and a haircut in a barbershop on 242nd Street in upper Manhattan, far from the madding Broadway crowd. Cordes and McManus greeted each other like old acquaintances. Reading a magazine, the detective waited patiently in a nearby chair for the suspected killer to have his shave and hot towel finished before taking him downtown.

  McManus admitted that he was the one who had called Rothstein at Lindy’s and summoned him to the Park Central Hotel. He revealed that on the night of the big card game a few months before, Rothstein’s usual luck had run out and he ran up debts to several gamblers, including a group of California racetrack characters and someone known only as the St. Louis Kid. In the game, $500,000 in cash or IOUs was in circulation. At first, the men gambled with dice. Then straight poker was taken up, followed by stud poker.

  To speed up the action, the gamblers turned to “high spade.” This was played by cutting a deck, the winner being the holder of the highest spade. According to McManus, that night Rothstein dropped $340,000 at high spade.

  Rothstein had the reputation of being a prompt payer of his IOUs. But this time, not only did he fail to come through, he announced his suspicion that the big game had been crooked. This accusation from a gambling veteran at first seemed like a copout along Broadway, but when he repeated the charge, it was accepted that he might well have been duped. His accusation infuriated the men who had been trying to collect. Rumors soon reached informants up and down the West Side that Rothstein was going to be killed.

  When Rothstein heard that he was a marked man, he said, “I’m not going to give them a cent, and that goes for the gamblers and the gorillas. If they’re looking for me, I can be found any night at Lindy’s.” In politics and crime, in those days, reputation was everything.

  McManus, whose brother Thomas “Hump” McManus also operated floating card games, evidently was trusted by the wary Rothstein, who otherwise would not have gone alone to the hotel room. The brothers McManus were more or less respected as honest men engaged in dishonest activities. They knew how to keep the cops from making raids. Hump McManus had once been a first-grade detective assigned to police headquarters; retired, he still had connections that were useful in the gambling world.

  Arnold Rothstein’s murder had caused Mayor Walker and Tammany’s Sachems a good deal of embarrassment. It was brazen, yet no indictment was made a
fter McManus turned himself in. Among those criticizing City Hall for failing to solve the Rothstein case and bring his murderer to justice was Congressman Fiorello La Guardia. Jimmy Walker would not hear the last of him, then or in the years to come.

  Manhattan’s own “Little Flower” was a rare but popular Republican representative in a Democratic-controlled city. La Guardia was a formidable campaigner and a thorn in Walker’s side during every election. While he and Governor Roosevelt were on opposite sides politically, their thinking was alike on social and economic issues affecting the man in the street. La Guardia and New York’s Republican leaders were determined to make capital out of the Rothstein murder.

  The general public, following the newspapers, began to wonder if there was something wrong with the way the police department was being run. There were unfounded and unproven allegations of a possible cover-up in this case. Of Rothstein’s drug trafficking, The Sun, a New York newspaper that often sounded like a house organ for the Republican party, editorialized:

  “All intelligent citizens know that such a business as Rothstein’s included many assets of evil and could not be conducted without the knowledge of men in authority. His operations were too large and his scope too generous to escape scrutiny—unless official eyes were intentionally deflected the other way.”

  The weak District Attorney’s Office was unable to find eyewitnesses among the professional gamblers, who could not speak without risking their own necks or kneecaps. So far as the men in Room 349 at the Park Central were concerned, they all might have been playing a friendly game of casino for pennies.

  Although the detectives produced little specific evidence, the high police command felt that an arrest had to be made to show that they were doing something. They wanted to respond to the constant calls for action made by political columnists and editorial writers. McManus was indicted for first-degree murder.

  When the Rothstein case broke, Joseph A. Warren was the police commissioner. Warren was considered a man of integrity, but police knowledge was clearly not his main qualification for the post. When Jimmy Walker was serving as a state assemblyman early in his career, he had an office in Warren’s law firm, and Warren often looked after Walker’s clients when the assemblyman was occupied in Albany. A year before Rothstein’s murder, Walker had persuaded Warren to take the commissioner’s job. He considered Joe Warren a close friend, who could be trusted not to interfere with gambling in the Tammany clubhouses.

  Unfortunately, the job was too much for Warren. He began to suffer emotionally and was close to a nervous breakdown even before the Rothstein murder. Under pressure from his own mentors in Tammany Hall, who realized that the unsolved murder was causing them political damage, Walker issued an ultimatum to his friend Warren: Dig up more information about Rothstein’s murder, or retire. Warren stepped down as police commissioner, entered a sanatorium in Connecticut and, less than a year after being forced out by his former law associate, died of a paralytic stroke.

  Mayor Walker had Warren’s replacement in mind even before his failing police commissioner resigned. Grover Aloysius Whalen had once served as commissioner of plant and structures, an influential Tammany job, under Mayor John “Red Mike” Hylan. The carrot-topped mayor was a former motorman on Brooklyn’s elevated railway lines who had lost his job after “rounding a curb too quickly.” Whalen had once served as Mayor Hylan’s personal secretary, and both were close to Tammany Hall.

  A glad-hander with a magnificent waxed mustache and a fine set of glistening teeth, Whalen was general manager of Wanamaker’s department store in 1928. Administrative experience was his main qualification for the sensitive police department post. It did him no harm that, like Jimmy Walker, the Tammany Hall Sachems, and most of the department heads in the NYPD, he had Irish-American roots. Mayor Walker was impressed by Whalen’s wealthy connections. And Whalen’s flashiness and expensive wardrobe were compatible with Walker’s style.

  Of Whalen’s appointment, Arthur “Bugs” Baer, a popular humorist, wrote: “Grover made as handsome a figure as ever nodded from the waist. He had the perfect teeth of an aluminum comb, and a wire walker would have mistaken the part in Grover’s hair for a continuation of his act.”

  Speaking of Whalen’s personality, Gene Fowler, a Hearst newspaper stalwart, commented, “Add spats, and stir with a cane.”

  With his perennial homburg tilted at a rakish angle, and a gardenia in his lapel, Police Commissioner Whalen greeted dignitaries on the steps of City Hall, ordered new uniforms for the cops, and, to show his own Americanism, encouraged anticommunist demonstrations in the streets.

  The case against McManus dragged on through the courts for almost a year before he was brought to trial. A noted criminal lawyer, James Murray, represented him and succeeded in having him released on bail of $50,000. The release was challenged in the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court and all the way up to the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, but McManus remained a free man.

  Finally, the trial ended with a hung jury. The Criminal Court judge directed a verdict of not guilty.

  Police Commissioner Whalen blamed others. “The failure to present incontrovertible evidence sufficient for a conviction was due entirely to the laxity of the police who had been assigned to the case originally and the commanding officers of the detective and uniformed forces at the time of the murder,” he said. “The case has never been fully explained, and as the laws of our country provide, every man must be considered innocent until proven guilty.”

  And so, in 1930, George McManus walked.

  As for Nigger Nate Raymond, detectives discovered that he was a wealthy “sportsman” from San Francisco but something less than a sterling character in the annals of sportsmanship. He had been barred from all baseball parks in the Pacific Coast League for complicity in bribery scandals. After returning to San Francisco, he rented a private plane and in it married Claire Omley, a movie actress. Among the witnesses at the wedding, which took place in the skies over northern Mexico, was Jack Dempsey, the former heavyweight champion of the world.

  So far as is known, Nigger Nate never collected his big score from the deceased gambler’s estate. Nobody went to jail for the murder of Arnold Rothstein.

  TWO

  The Boogy Era

  Not long after the acquittal of the leading suspect in the murder of Arnold Rothstein, a second mystery arose to embarrass Whalen’s police department and Walker’s administration.

  Joseph Force Crater, a state Supreme Court justice sitting in Manhattan, disappeared. He was one of Governor Roosevelt’s appointments, a bow to Tammany Hall: Judge Crater was close to the Democratic machine. On the way up the political ladder, he served as president of the Nineteenth Assembly District’s Cayuga Democratic Club on the Upper West Side. Crater was regarded as an upstanding man. In his choker collar, spats, and black robe, he looked every inch the dignified jurist.

  On a summer’s night in 1930 when he was last seen, Judge Crater had bought a single ticket to Dancing Partners, at the Belasco Theatre on West Forty-fourth Street. Either he had not gone to the show at all or he had walked out after the first act to keep an appointment. He went to Billy Haas’s Restaurant on West Forty-fifth Street, a show business hangout, hoisted a few Prohibition drinks with his friends, waved good-bye with his Panama hat to Sally Lou Ritz, a striking Follies girl, and walked into the night and posterity. His disappearance wasn’t reported to the public for a full month.

  Then sordid facts about Crater’s finances and private life emerged. At the same time that he lived respectably as a devoted husband on lower Fifth Avenue, he kept a divorcée in an apartment in midtown. His frequent recesses and adjournments were the subject of courtroom speculation by dirty minds about where and how he spent his afternoons—his personal matinees.

  Judge Crater’s reputation rested less on his abilities as a student of Sir William Blackstone’s commentaries on the law than on glowing reports from producer Florenz Ziegfeld’s heavenl
y showgirls. He was known to be a big spender and skirt chaser. City Hall scribes, a source of fun-and-games news that wasn’t always printable, enjoyed spreading the rumor that Judge Crater’s extraordinary sexual equipment enabled him to play the Ziegfeld chorus line with exceptional success.

  One of Crater’s girlfriends, Lorraine Fay, thought she was the forty-one-year-old judge’s one and only and planned to file a breach-of-promise suit against him. Another girlfriend, Marie Miller, was an attractive nightclub hostess. A third, Elaine Dawn, a former Ziegfeld girl, also worked in a nightclub after her days on the kick line were over. The most vivid of the tabloids, the suitably named Evening Graphic, known for its fake photo montages that featured intimate bedroom escapades, offered a simple explanation for Crater’s vanishing:

  “Sex is the direct reason for nine-tenths of missing persons.”

  Looking into Crater’s financial records for clues to his disappearance, investigators found that shortly after becoming a judge he took $22,500 out of his bank account—the exact amount of a year’s salary on the Supreme Court. The inference was drawn that he had paid his Tammany masters for the privilege of dispensing justice. The investigators also found that he participated in shady real estate deals.

  Around the police shacks in the boroughs and in Room 9 at City Hall, where the gentlemen of the press hung their upbrimmed fedoras, some reporters guessed that Judge Crater had accumulated bribes while on the bench, and then fled with one of his floozies. Eventually, he became Case No. 13595 in the records of the Bureau of Missing Persons. The city government expended an estimated quarter of a million dollars to track him down.