‘Gangsterland: A Tour Through the Dark Heart of the Jazz-Age New York City’
By David Pietrusza
Diversion Books, 310 pages

David Pietrusza makes Arnold Rothstein (1882-1928) the presiding criminal genius of this entertaining, authoritative, and encyclopedic guide to the city’s colorful decade of crookedness.

Rothstein — whom his biographer describes as a “Gambler. Loan shark. Stolen jewel fence. Bootlegger. Drug smuggler. Casino and racing stable owner” — is as good a figure as any to herald the advent of the illicit 1920s, beginning with his fixing of the 1919 World Series and ending with his murder in 1928 after his “refusal to pay a dubious $300,000 gambling debt.”

My quotations are drawn from Mr. Pietrusza’s “cast of characters” — 140 of them, some of whom, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fiorella La Guardia, Jack Dempsey, and Walter Winchell, are still famous. Among the forgotten are Peaches Browning (Frances Belle Heenan), Sammy the Hook (Sam Ippolito), and William “The Great Mouthpiece” Fallon. Peaches’s “juicy divorce” from Edward “Daddy” Browning dominated tabloid headlines; the Hook’s $305,000 jewel robbery ended in such terror that he committed suicide; and Fallon, a former Westchester County prosecutor, went to work for the mob, specializing in jury tampering.

Mr. Pietrusza provides plenty of sensationalism in sprightly — I might almost say wise guy — potted biographies of Manhattan malefactors. Yet the historian/biographer evokes surprising, almost mournful accounts of all the theaters, restaurants, hotels, and other grand and seamy establishments that have been demolished or repurposed into contemporary enterprises. In Mr. Pietrusza’s heady prose, what no longer exists reappears in ghosts of a time and place faintly emanating from a multitude of fading photographs.

“Gangsterland” accomplishes what is impossible in a single-subject biography:  a roll call of the events and personalities that Rothstein inspired, promoted, bilked, and double crossed in collaborations that always seemed to accrue to his benefit, until they did not.

In addition to the cast of characters, a detailed “Gangsterland Chronology” and comprehensive index help to keep score on who did what to who and where, and when it all happened. For “armchair detectives” keen to work on a cold case, Mr. Pietrusza includes the NYPD Whalen Report on Rothstein’s unsolved murder.

With all the photographs and biographies, it is possible to use Mr. Pietrusza’s book as a map to the past, and a guide to the gallery of miscreants such as what can be seen in the drawing of “Honest John Kelly,” who, as Mr. Pietrusza’s caption notes, looks “Pretty Much as You Might Expect a Fellow Named ‘Honest John Kelly’ to Look.”

Stop at 142 East 42nd Street (466 Broadway at the southeast corner of West 42nd Street and Broadway), site of the Knickerbocker Hotel, built in 1905. Bill Fallon, Rothstein’s attorney, had offices there. Caruso lived in a 14-room apartment on the ninth floor between 1908 and 1920. George M. Cohan and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks passed through. 

Later, the Knickerbocker became the Newsweek building, and it is now condominiums.  At the end of this reprisal of the past, Mr. Pietrusza notes that a “remnant” of the Knickerbocker history “can be seen at the Times Square shuttle platform, where a locked door marked ‘Knickerbocker’ still survives.”

Many Tammany Hall politicians swagger through “Gangsterland,” and the result is not merely anecdotal but educational, with a rationale for Tammany provided by Nathan Burkan, a 17th Assembly District leader who helped settle the Rothstein estate’s “muddy affairs”:

“‘New York City could not get along without Tammany Hall,’ Burkan insisted. Only Tammany men actually wanted to get things done. They were superior to ‘men of education and culture and refinement who are continually pounding Tammany,’ Burkan argued, and had only words and no political organization. Burkan claimed ‘Ninety per cent of the men whom Tammany has brought into public life have made good.’”

He did not say exactly what he meant by “good,” before making his final pitch: “Who, if it were not for Tammany, would take care of the poor and unfortunate in the city?”

Mr. Pietrusza’s book has a mystique, a wistfulness. Gaze into the photographed interior of the Knickerbocker, which seems to have the shaded gloom of the past, and wonder what it would be like to see Fitzgerald or Fairbanks or Cohan walk though the hotel’s sumptuous interior that now can be lit only by the imagination.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”