Arnold Rothstein Quotes

There is a moment in The Great Gatsby when Jay Gatsby introduces Nick Carraway to Meyer Wolfsheim, mentioning offhandedly that he is the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. The idea staggers Gatsby’s idealistic young friend. Of course, Carraway knew the series had been thrown. But “if I had thought of it at all,” he says, “I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain.” It was unbelievable to him then, as it is to us now, that a single person could have been responsible for changing the outcome of an event watched by some fifty million people. In real life, the 1919 World Series was fixed not by Wolfsheim, but with great skill and audacity by Arnold Rothstein, a Jewish gangster. A young lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army named Dwight Eisenhower eagerly followed the game as the scores came in via telegram, and like everyone else, never suspected a thing. He would remark years later that the revelation of the conspiracy that had thrown the series produced a profound change in his perspective about the world; it taught him never to trust in first appearances.

The American gambling industry has increasingly become more complex since Wolfshiem/Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein fixed the World Series in 1919. In fact, Rothstein inspired future generations of Jewish mobsters that built an empire of crime.

As Carolyn Rothstein told it in her book, Now I’ll Tell,

Donald Henderson Clarke,

A. R. promised to abide by Belmont’s wishes—to limit bets, to avoid the track except for holidays. He soon broke those promises. “What are you doing here today?” Belmont asked one day as he spotted Arnold at the track. “It’s a holiday.” “A holiday?” “Why yes, you ought to know, Mr. Belmont. It’s Rosh Hashanah.

Christians commit crimes with their hands, the Jews use their reason.’ A typical Jewish big-time criminal was Jacob ‘Greasy Thumb’ Guzik (1887-1956), who was Al Capone’s bookkeeper and treasurer. Another was Arnold Rothstein (1882-1928), the pioneer of big business crime, who is portrayed as ‘The Brain’ in Damon Runyon’s stories, and by Scott Fitzgerald as Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. Then there was Meyer Lansky, who created and lost a gambling empire and had his application for Israeli citizenship turned down in 1971.