The Mob's Invisible Banker

Before Luciano, Lansky and Costello, there was the man who taught them.

On the night of November 4, 1928, Arnold Rothstein took a phone call at his booth in Lindy's and walked six blocks north to the Park Central Hotel. A short while later, hotel staff found him on a service staircase with a bullet in his stomach. He refused to tell detectives who had shot him, and he died two days later, on Election Day. The case was never solved.

Rothstein rarely carried a gun and was never convicted of a crime. He didn't need to be a killer. He had money, information and the right friends. He bankrolled bootleggers, put up bail for thieves, settled disputes between gangs, and paid politicians, police and judges. He did all this while staying out of public view. Gamblers called him the Brain, the Fixer and the Big Bankroll. To the young criminals he trained, he showed something new: crime could be run like a business.

The Mob's Invisible Banker follows Rothstein's whole life. It begins with his boyhood as the rebellious son of a respected Jewish businessman. It covers Tammany Hall and Big Tim Sullivan, the casinos on West 46th Street and in Saratoga, the Becker-Rosenthal murder, and the 1919 World Series scandal that made his name. It ends with Prohibition and narcotics, the empire that grew out of them, and the poker game that may have killed him.

Built on court records, contemporary reporting and the major biographies, this book sorts the facts from the legends. It shows how one man in Manhattan helped create the modern American underworld.