November 4, 1928: Arnold Rothstein is rubbed out. "The Brain," who led the Mob's fix of the 1919 World Series, was also the guy who figured out that Prohibition was the way to turn organized crime in America into big business, while Al Capone was still an up-and-comer.
But, like drug dealers who got hooked on their own product, the lure of his original line of work, gambling, proved too much for "The Big Bankroll." He lost $320,000 (about $5.47 million in 2022 money) in a 3-day high-stakes poker game. He said (O the irony) that the game was fixed, and refused to pay up.
He was shot at the Park Central Hotel in Midtown Manhattan (known as the Park Sheraton from 1948 until reverting to its original name in 1984), where a man then a rising star, Albert Anastasia, would see his reign as "the Boss of All Bosses" come to a similar end in 1957. It took Rothstein 2 days to die, and he refused to rat his killer out, telling the police, "You stick to your trade, I'll stick to mine." One source says that his last words were, "My mother did it."
But, like drug dealers who got hooked on their own product, the lure of his original line of work, gambling, proved too much for "The Big Bankroll." He lost $320,000 (about $5.47 million in 2022 money) in a 3-day high-stakes poker game. He said (O the irony) that the game was fixed, and refused to pay up.
He was shot at the Park Central Hotel in Midtown Manhattan (known as the Park Sheraton from 1948 until reverting to its original name in 1984), where a man then a rising star, Albert Anastasia, would see his reign as "the Boss of All Bosses" come to a similar end in 1957. It took Rothstein 2 days to die, and he refused to rat his killer out, telling the police, "You stick to your trade, I'll stick to mine." One source says that his last words were, "My mother did it."
He was 46, and he always knew he would come to such an end: A favorite saying of his was, "The odds on everything in life, including life itself, are six to five against."
A man was arrested for the murder, but was acquitted for lack of evidence, and they may have gotten the wrong guy anyway.
Rothstein was played by Robert Lowery (who played Batman in a 1949 film serial) in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond in 1960, future Fugitive star David Janssen in The Big Bankroll in 1961, Michael Lerner in Eight Men Out in 1988, F. Murray Abraham in Mobsters in 1991, and Michael Stuhlbarg on
Boardwalk Empire in the early 2010s.
In the 1974 film The Godfather Part II, Mario Puzo had Hyman Suchowsky, the character based on Meyer Lansky (played at that age by John Megna, when older by Lee Strasberg), give himself the "street name" Hyman Roth because he admired Rothstein.
In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald used Rothstein as a character, giving him the name Meyer Wolfsheim, a man who managed to "play with the faith of 50 million people." The character does not appear in the 1926 and 1949 film versions, but was played by Howard Da Silva in 1974, and by Indian film superstar Amitabh Bachchan in 2013.
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November 4, 1928 was a Sunday. Baseball was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL season wouldn't start for another 11 days. But these NFL games were played:
* The football version of the New York Giants and the Frankford Yellow Jackets, based in Northeast Philadelphia, played to a tie, 0-0 at the Polo Grounds.
* The football version of the New York Yankees lost to the Chicago Bears, 27-0 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.
* The Providence Steam Roller beat the Detroit Wolverines, 7-0 at the Cycledrome in Providence, Rhode Island. The Steam Roller (they officially wrote it as 2 words, no S on the end) went on to win the NFL Championship that season, but the Great Depression knocked them out of business in 1931.
* The Green Bay Packers beat the Pottsville Maroons, 26-14 at Minersville Park in Pottsville, Pennsylvania.
* The Chicago Cardinals, the Dayton Triangles were not scheduled to play that weekend.
I have no way of knowing of Arnold Rothstein had bets on any of these games.
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