Read Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series for Free Online Page A

Rothstein had yet another reason for disappointment in his son, and Arnold for drawing even farther away from his father. Yes, it was risky business but, after all, gambling is risk. Risk energized Arnold, made him feel important, provided him with the potential for great riches, and set him apart from the stodgy world of his father. To Arnold Rothstein-and to so many of his contemporaries-gambling was modernity. It was America. It was New York.
    Gambling today is largely homogenized and sanitized into neat state-sanctioned lotteries, the neon ghettos of family-friendly Las Vegas, the lairs of blue-haired ladies in bingo halls and the growing plague of second- and third-rate casinos across America and Canada.
    A century ago, gambling was an adventure, and not only a more male-dominated adventure, but also, when practiced right, an upperclass adventure. Yesterday's rich were obsessed with gambling, con gregating at such luxurious gambling meccas as Monte Carlo, Newport, and Saratoga Springs. If their fortunes increased, so much the better. If not, well ... it was all akin to some high-Victorian potlatch. The amount you lost-and the grace displayed in the process-only heightened your status.
    You needed big money to gamble in such fashion, but if you were less affluent, wagers could still be placed nearly anywhere else: in saloons, and back rooms, and back alleys. You lived by your wits and moved not only among the unscrupulous but the violent. Gambling was not pumping tokens into chrome-plated, one-armed bandits, it was confronting real bandits, armed either with a billy club or with an extra ace of clubs hidden up their sleeve. Either way, you played at your peril.
    Gambling was everywhere, but it was particularly ubiquitous in New York, young Arnold Rothstein's New York.
    "Is there any gambling in New York?" wrote one observer of 1904 Manhattan. "Why, there's almost nothing else!"
    Already, the geography of Arnold Rothstein's world of gambling and loan-sharking and various and sundry swindles was emerging. Times Square-Broadway-was being born.
    Before Manhattan moved skyward, it moved northward. The theaters, the big department stores, the fashionable neighborhoods all moved uptown. And so did gambling. By the mid-1890s Manhattan's gaming establishments had migrated to the West 40's-the Roaring Forties. The neighborhood boasted any number of role models for Arnold. Some rough-and-tumble, some with the veneer of respectability. A. R. figured himself the gentleman-gambler type, and no gambler was more the gentleman than Richard Canfield, proprietor of New York's premier gambling house. No gambler embodied "class" more than Canfield. Perhaps not in a personal sense, for Canfield drank, smoked, and ate to excess (and wore a very tight corset to compensate). But his professional manners were impeccable. He never cheated, thinking it simply unnecessary. "The percentage in favor of a gambling house," he observed, "is sufficient to guarantee the profits of the house. All any gambler wants is to have to play a long enough time and he'll get all the money any player has."
    It was a theory Arnold Rothstein, with his bankroll growing from his still small-time killings, could appreciate-although he never did fully grasp the concept of not cheating.
    But there was more to Canfield than reluctance to stoop to a blackguard's ways. He was educated, intelligent, literate, a charming conversationalist, and among his generation's most respected connoisseurs of art. In May 1888, after operating casinos successfully in Providence and Saratoga, he opened a fashionable club at Madison Square and East 26th Street. His impeccability made the Madison Square Club the premier destination for gamblers with taste, style, and lots of cash. But Manhattan was shifting farther uptown. Carnegie Hall, with the great Tchaikovsky gracing its first night, opened its doors at Seventh and 57th in 1891. The great restaurants also traveled northward. Delmonico's, haunt