Read: Rothstein by David Pietrusza 📚
This book is a huge achievement. It takes a high-living New York grifter who got shot by a victim of one of his ripoffs and makes a dull plodding story of it.
Arthur Rothstein was a fixer, gambler and scammer in early 20th century New York, lurching between poker games with showbiz impresarios, buying race courses, drug running, arguments with Hearst, flings with showgirls, a rift with his Orthodox Jew family, to hanging round on streetcorners in the early hours to shark homeless losers. He’s apparently the model for Fitzgerald’s Gatsby.
It’s pitched as ‘the life and times of the criminal genius who fixed the World Series’ but that’s about three chapters, and they’re all about who might’ve met whom in what New York hotel room, what they might’ve said, and how they subsequently screwed each other over. That sounds fascinating but it’s all written in such plodding unsuspenseful prose that any sense of forward movement is lost.
Rather than digging into the person, the narrative is drowned in detail - lists of semi-relevant characters, details of court cases that don’t really go anywhere. Pietrusza doesn’t corrall the many many facts into a coherent story, and I ran out of patience.