If anyone could be accused of making cons a business, it’s safe to say Arnold Rothstein would be counted a guilty party.
Nicknamed “The Brain” because of an uncanny ability to calculate statistics and probabilities in his head, Rothstein was born in 1882 in Manhattan to Abraham and Esther Rothstein. Arnold enjoyed an affluent life growing up, but apparently was quite resentful of his older brother, who eventually became a rabbi.
“The Brain” started gambling early in life. He loved shooting dice as a kid, despite his father’s repeated admonishments against gambling. Arnold disregarded his father’s warnings and kept gambling. According to him, the action was all that mattered in the moment.
Rothstein had a flash of inspiration one day when he realized while gambling if he just tweaked the odds a bit in his favor then he could substantially increase his winnings. So he began fixing prop bets in a fashion only a guy with his intelligence could imagine.
One of the Brain’s more infamous prop bets involved getting suckers to bet which cube of sugar a fly would land on. Like one of his colleagues, Titanic Thompson, the Brain tweaked the odds in his favor by dipping one cube with a bit of insecticide and leaving that end face up.
The Brain excelled in one area Titanic Thompson did not: he knew how to play the ponies. A big fan of horse racing, Rothstein made several tidy sums betting on the outcomes of races using an extensive network of advisers and fixers.
He eventually earned enough money to start his own casino, and used his network of advisers, fixers, and snitches to start rigging serious games in a fashion best suited to fatten his bankroll.
When Prohibition rolled around, The Brain was smart enough to recognize a good business opportunity when he saw it. He knew people would pay for a drink no matter what the laws on the books said, and started running bootleg liquor all over New England thanks to his connections in supply lines across the Hudson River.
In fact, Rothstein’s Prohibition exploits are thought to be the basis for the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire.” While we’re talking fictional inspirations, Rothstein was also rumored to be the inspiration for Meyer Wolfsheim in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and Damon Runyon’s Nathan Detroit.
One con in particular stands out in Rothstein’s hall of infamous swindles: the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal where eight players of the Chicago White Sox allegedly threw the World Series for the Cincinnati Reds in exchange from payments to a gambling syndicate Rothstein supposedly masterminded. The Brain was indicted on the scheme, but never convicted.
“The Brain” was certainly smart enough to tell when he was being swindled, but didn’t quite grasp the notion of when it was time to grit your teeth and pay what you owe. In October of 1928, Rothstein found himself $320,000 in the hole over three days of playing in what he suspected (correctly) was a rigged poker game designed to take him for all he owned.
After day three, suspecting the fix was in for him, Rothstein declared the game rigged and said he wouldn’t pay a dime of what he purportedly owed.
This didn’t sit well with his other gambling partners or fellow cons, and a “business meeting” would be set up for the following month at the Park Central Hotel on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan for the Brain to pay his markers. Rothstein refused and was gunned down for welshing on his bets.
Arnold Rothstein lay in a hospital bed for two days after the shooting, refusing to answer police inquiries as to the identity of his would-be killer. According to one historian, all “The Brain” would say to the cops was “You stick to your trade. I’ll stick to mine.”
And he stuck to his trade until he died from complications stemming from that gunshot wound on November 6, 1928.
One nugget of information about “The Brain’s” murder trial is worth noting before we head into the weekend. Despite having misgivings about “The Brain” and his character, “Titanic” Thompson actually testified at the trial of Rothstein’s alleged killer.
Whether that testimony was truthful is another matter entirely.
That’s all for this week, folks! We’ll see you next Friday as we close out Con Artist History Month here at SJ. I’d like to end this week with a quote from the late Scott Hall’s speech when he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame a few years ago.
Hard work pays off, dreams come true. Bad times don’t last, but Bad Guys do.
Rest in Peace to one of the best Bad Guys of my childhood.
See you next week everybody!
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