Arnold Rothstein meets Meyer Lansky
Arnold Rothstein in his office, 1920. Library of Congress.
On this day in 1920 … Okay, so no one seems to have recorded the exact date that Arnold Rothstein met Meyer Lansky. Most accounts have it as “late 1919 or early 1920.” All accounts have it at the Bar Mitzvah of the son of a mutual friend, and Brian Berger (unclear what his sources are) places it in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
1920 was a big year for Rothstein, who would, that autumn, be brought up on charges of fixing the 1919 World Series. But the meeting was a bigger deal for Lansky, as his association with Rothstein is what would bring him into the big leagues of organized crime.
Undated mugshot of Meyer Lansky. Sciencesource.com
Years later, Lansky would describe himself sitting and listening for hours while Rothstein outlined his plans for their future organization:
There's going to be a growing demand for good whiskey in the United States. And when I say good whiskey that is exactly what I mean. I'm not talking about the rotgut rubbish your Italian friends are busy making in their chamber pots right now on the Lower East Side. That's O.K. for the poor creatures who don't know any better.
I'm talking about the best Scotch whiskey from Britain. There's a fortune to be made from importing the stuff into the United States. I don't mean just the odd dozen cases or partial shipment now and then. Prohibition is going to last a long time and then one day it'll be abandoned. But it's going to be with us for quite a while, that's for sure. I can see that more and more people are going to ignore the law, and they're going to pay anything you ask to get their hands on good-quality liquor. I know what I'm talking about, because as you know I mix with society people who have money. It's going to be the chic thing to have good whiskey when you have guests. The rich will vie with one another to be lavish with the Scotch. That's where our opportunity is-to provide them with all the liquor they can possibly pass on to their guests or guzzle themselves. And we can make a fortune meeting this need.
I want to set up a sound business for importing and distributing Scotch. It is illegal, of course, and will require running risks, but I don't think you mind that. I have the contacts to buy the stuff. I know the Scottish distillers and they know me. I've played poker with them. I've taken a lot of money from them. We're very good friends and there's no problem there. Would you like to discuss this with your Italian friends and let me know? But we have to move quickly. Other people are going to get on the bandwagon....
I will travel to London and Edinburgh and other major European cities and see the Scotch distillers. I'll lay out hard cash and ask them to deliver their top-quality whiskey to us. We'll have crews we can trust and ships to bring it across the Atlantic. The total cargo will be the Scotch I will buy from the distillers. We'll avoid running risks by unloading the cargo at sea and taking delivery outside the American three-mile limit. We'll have to hire or buy a fleet of small fast speedboats and that type of thing, so the cargo can he distributed at night to special places we'll set up on the coast. Either they can let us have the whiskey on the ocean that way, or we can take delivery from one of the nearby Caribbean islands-Cuba may be a good place. It will be your job to smuggle the Scotch into the United States and then distribute it.
A. R.'s exposition as to the why of rum-running required no profound insights. His view of how revealed the mind of a shrewd busi nessman, attuned to branding, customer satisfaction, and long-term profitability:
But first I want to lay down an important principle, and this is something I want to be very clear about: We must maintain a reputation for having only the very best whiskey. There are two ways of making money out of this, as I see it. There's the quick and rather stupid way-we could get cheap rotgut whiskey or open the cases and bottles we import, dilute it, and mix it with the cheap stuff being produced over here. We could certainly make very high profits for a while that way. But we would simply get a reputation like your pal Masseria as being merchants of cheap, disgusting booze which might even kill people. We'd have only the lowest kind of clientele. I want to go for the society people, because that's where the big money is.