by Damon Runyon
These witnesses had been instructed to show up yesterday morning with the idea that they might be called, and one of the first to arrive was “Titanic Slim,” otherwise Alvin C. Thomas, the golf-playing gambling man, whose illness in Milwaukee caused a postponement of the trial a week ago.
“Titanic Slim” was attended by Sidney Stajer, a rotund young man who was one of Rothstein’s closest friends, and who is beneficiary to the tune of $75,000 under the terms of the dead gambler’s will. At first the cops didn’t want to admit “Titanic Slim” to the portals of justice, as he didn’t look like a witness, but he finally got into the building only to learn he was excused.
The photographers took great interest in the drawling-voiced, soft-mannered, high roller from the South, and Sidney Stajer scowled at them fiercely, but Sidney really means no harm by his scowls. Sidney is not a hard man and ordinarily would smile very pleasantly for the photographers, but it makes him cross to get up before noon.
The State’s famous material witness, Bridget Farry, chambermaid at the Park Central, put in an appearance with Beatrice Jackson, a telephone operator at the same hotel. Bridget was positively gorgeous in an emerald-green dress and gold-heeled slippers. Also she had silver stockings and a silver band around her blond hair. She wore no hat. A hat would have concealed the band.
Bridget, who was held by the State in durance vile for quite a spell, is just a bit stoutish, but she was certainly all dressed up like Mrs. Astor’s horse. She sat with Miss Jackson on a bench just outside the portals of justice and exchanged repartee with the cops, the reporters and the photographers.
Bridget is nobody’s sap when it comes to talking back to folks. Finally she left the building, and was galloping lightly along to escape the photographers, when her gold-heeled slippers played her false, and she stumbled and fell.
An ambulance was summoned posthaste, as the lady seemed to be injured, but an enterprising gal reporter from a tab scooped her up into a taxicab, and departed with the witness to unknown parts. It is said Bridget’s shinbone was scuffed up by the fall.
Some of the State’s witnesses were quite busy at the telephone booths while in the building getting bets down on the Bowie races. It is a severe handicap to summon a man to such a remote quarter as the Criminal Courts Building along toward post time.
November 21, 1929
Twelve good men, and glum, are now hunched up in the jury box, in Judge Nott’s court, and they are all ready to start in trying to find out about the murder of Arnold Rothstein.
But the hours are really tough on a lot of folks who will figure more or less prominently in the trial. Some of the boys were wondering if Judge Nott would entertain a motion to switch his hours around and start in at 4 P.M., the usual hour of adjournment, and run to 10:30 A.M., which is a gentleman’s bedtime. The consensus is he wouldn’t.
George Brothers, one of District Attorney Banton’s assistants, who is in charge of the prosecution, will probably open the forensic fury for the State of New York this morning, explaining to the dozen morose inmates of the jury box just what the state expects to prove against the defendant, to wit, that George McManus is the party who shot Arnold Rothstein in the stomach in the Park Central Hotel the night of November 4, a year ago.
You may not recall the circumstances, but McManus is one of four persons indicted for the crime. Another is Hyman Biller, an obscure denizen of the brightlights region of Manhattan Island, who probably wouldn’t be recognized by more than two persons if he walked into any joint in town, such is his obscurity.
Then there is good old John Doe and good old Richard Roe, possibly the same Doe and Roe who have been wanted in forty-nine different spots for crimes ranging from bigamy to disorderly conduct for a hundred years past. Tough guys, old John and Richard, and always getting in jams. McManus is the only one on trial for the killing of Rothstein, probably for the reason he is the only one handy.
November 22, 1929
“Give me a deck of cards,” said “Red” Martin Bowe plaintively, peering anxiously around Judge Nott’s court room in the dim light of yesterday afternoon, as if silently beseeching a friendly volunteer in an emergency.
“Get me a deck of cards, and I’ll show you.”
You see Red Martin Bowe had suddenly come upon a dilemma in his forty-odd years of traveling up and down the earth. He had come upon a fellow citizen who didn’t seem to savvy the elemental pastime of stud poker, and high spading, which Martin probably thought, if he ever gave the matter any consideration, is taught in the grammar schools of this great nation—or should be.
So he called for a deck of cards. He probably felt the question was fatuous but he was willing to do his best to enlighten this apparently very benighted fellow, Ferdinand Pecora, the chief representative of Old John Law on the premises, and to show the twelve good men, and glum, in the jury box just how that celebrated card game was conducted which the State of New York is trying to show cost Arnold Rothstein his life at the hands of George McManus.
But no deck of cards was immediately forthcoming. So Martin Bowe didn’t get to give his ocular demonstration to the assembled citizens, though a man came dashing in a little later with a nice red deck, while even Judge Nott was still snorting over Martin Bowe’s request.
Possibly if Mr. Pecora can show a night off later some of the boys who sat in the back room yesterday might be induced to give him a lesson or two in stud poker. Also high spading.
Martin Bowe is a big, picturesque-looking chap, who is getting bald above the ears, and who speaks with slow drawl and very low. In fact all the witnesses displayed a remarkable tendency to pitch their voices low in marked contrast with their natural vocal bent under ordinary circumstances and the attorneys had to keep admonishing them to talk louder.
“Gambler,” said Bowe, quietly, and without embarrassment, when asked his business. Then he went on to tell about the card game that will probably be remarked for many years as Broadway’s most famous joust. It began on a Saturday night and lasted into the Sunday night following. Martin said he previously played five or six hours at a stretch, and then would lie down and take a rest. He stated:
“It started with bridge, then we got to playing stud. The game got slow, and then some wanted to sport a little so they started betting on the high spade.”
“I lose,” remarked Bowe calmly, when Pecora asked how he came out. McManus was in the game. Also Rothstein, “Titanic,” Meyer Boston, Nate Raymond, “Sol—somebody.” A chap named Joe Bernstein was present, and several others he didn’t remember, though Sam Boston later testified Bernstein was “doing something and he wasn’t playing.” It is this Bernstein, a California young man, who “beat” Rothstein for $69,000 though Bernstein was never actually in the play. He bet from the outside.
As near as Bowe could recollect, Raymond, Rothstein, McManus and Bernstein were bettors on the high card. He heard McManus lost about $50,000. Rothstein was keeping a score on the winnings and losings. McManus paid off partly in cash and partly by check, while Rothstein was putting cash in his pocket, and would give out I.O.Us. Bowe said he heard Rothstein lost over $200,000. The redoubtable “Titanic” won between $20,000 and $25,000 from McManus. Pecora asked: “What about Meyer Boston?”
“He wins.”
Under cross-examination by James D. C. Murray, Bowe said he had often known McManus to bet as much as $50,000 on one horse race and never complain if he lost. He said:
“It’s an everyday occurrence with him. He always paid with a smile.”
After the game, he said, Rothstein and McManus were very friendly; they often ate together at Lindy’s. Rothstein won something from McManus in the game, but Bowe didn’t know how much.
It was a rather big day for the defense. In his opening address to the jury, George Brothers, assistant district attorney, didn’t seem to offer much motive for the possible killing of Rothstein by McManus other than the ill feeling that might have been engendered over the game in which they both lost.
> That, and the fact that McManus fled after the killing, seemed his strongest points, while Attorney Murray quickly made it clear that part of the defense will be that Rothstein wasn’t shot in room No. 349 at all, and that he certainly wasn’t shot by George McManus.
Murray worked at length on Dr. Charles D. Norris, the city Medical Examiner, trying to bring out from the witness that the nature of the wound sustained by Rothstein and the resultant shock would have prevented Rothstein from walking down three flights of stairs, and pushing open two or three heavy doors to reach the spot in the service entrance of the hotel where he was found, especially without leaving some trace of blood.
During the examination of the doctor, the expensive clothes that Arnold Rothstein used to wear so jauntily were displayed, now crumpled and soiled. The white silk shirt was among the ghastly exhibits, but the $45 custom-made shoes that were his hobby, and the sox were missing. Dr. Norris didn’t know what had become of them.
The jurors, most of them business men on their own hook, or identified in salaried capacities with business, were a study while Martin Bowe and Sam Boston were testifying, especially Bowe, for he spoke as calmly of winning and losing $50,000 as if he were discussing the price of his morning paper.
You could see the jurors bending forward, some of them cupping their hands to their ears, and eyeing the witness with amazement. That stud and high spade game had been mentioned so often in the papers that it had come to be accepted as a Broadway fable. Probably no member of the jury, for none of them indicated in their examination that they are familiar with sporting life, took any stock in the tales of high rolling of the Broadway gamblers.
But here was a man who was in the game, who had lost $5,700 of his own money, and who knew what he was talking about. It was apparent the jurors were astounded by the blasé manner of Bowe as he spoke of McManus dropping $50,000 as “an everyday occurrence,” and even the voluble Sam Boston’s glib mention of handling hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly in bets on sporting events impresses them.
November 28, 1929
Nothing new having developed in the life and battles of Juror No. 9, or the Man with the Little Moustache, the trial of George McManus for the murder of Arnold Rothstein proceeded with reasonable tranquility yesterday.
Just before adjournment over Thanksgiving, to permit the jurors to restore their waning vitality with turkey and stuffin’, the State let it out rather quietly that it hasn’t been able to trace very far the pistol which is supposed to have ended the tumultuous life of “the master mind” a year ago.
On a pleasant day in last June—the fifteenth, to be exact—it seems that one Mr. Joe Novotny was standing behind the counter in his place of business at No. 51 West Fourth Street, in the thriving settlement of St. Paul, Minnesota, when in popped a party who was to Mr. Joe Novotny quite unknown, shopping for a rod, as the boys term a smoke-pole.
Mr. Novotny sold the stranger a .38-caliber Colt, which Mr. Novotny himself had but recently acquired from the firm of Janney, Sempler & Hill, of Minneapolis, for $22.85. The factory number of the Colt was 359,946. Mr. Novotny did not inquire the shopper’s name, because it seems there is no law requiring such inquisitiveness in Minnesota, and Mr. Novotny perhaps didn’t wish to appear nosy.
No doubt Mr. Novotny figures the stranger was a new settler in St. Paul and desired the Colt to protect himself against the wild Indians and wolves that are said to roam the streets of the city. Anyway, that’s the last Mr. Novotny saw of pistol No. 359,946, and all he knows about it, according to a stipulation presented by the State of New York to Judge Nott late yesterday afternoon, and agreed to by James D. C. Murray, attorney for George McManus, as Mr. Novotny’s testimony.
It may be that some miscreant subsequently stole the gun from the settler’s cabin in St. Paul or that he lent it to a pal who was going to New York, and wished to be well dressed, for the next we hear of No. 359,946 is its appearance in the vicinity of Fifty-sixth Street and Seventh Avenue, Manhattan Island, where it was picked up by one Bender, a taxi jockey, after the shooting of Arnold Rothstein. A stipulation with reference to said Bender also was submitted to Judge Nott.
The State of New York would have the jury in the trial of George McManus believe it was with this gun that Rothstein was shot in the stomach in room 349 in the Park Central Hotel, and that the gun was hurled through a window into the street after the shooting. It remains to be seen what the jury thinks about this proposition.
It is not thought it will take any stock in any theory that the gun walked from St. Paul to the corner of Fifty-sixth Street and Seventh Avenue.
If the settler who bought the gun from Mr. Novotny would step forward at this moment, he would be as welcome as the flowers in May. But those Northwestern settlers always are reticent.
It was around three o’clock in the afternoon when Mr. James McDonald, one of the assistant district attorneys, finished reading the 300 pages of testimony taken in the case to date to Mr. Edmund C. Shotwell, juror No. 2, who replaced Eugene Riker when Mr. Riker’s nerves bogged down on him.
It was the consensus that Mr. Shotwell was in better physical condition than Mr. McDonald at the conclusion of the reading, although at the start it looked as if Mr. McDonald would wear his man down with ease before page No. 204.
Juror No. 9, who is Norris Smith, the man with the little moustache, whose adventures have kept this trial from sinking far down into the inside of the public prints long ere this, sat in a chair in the row behind the staunch juror No. 2, which row is slightly elevated above the first row. Juror No. 9, who is slightly built and dapperly dressed, tweaked at his little moustache with his fingers and eyed the press section with baleful orbs.
What juror No. 9 thinks of the inmates of the press section would probably be suppressed by the censors. And yet, without juror No. 9, where would this case be? It would be back next to pure reading matter—that’s where.
Juror No. 9 was alleged to have been discovered by newspaper men bouncing around a Greenwich Village shushery and talking about the McManus trial, though he convinced Judge Nott that he hadn’t done or said anything that might impair his status as a juror in the case. Finally it was learned juror No. 9 was shot up a bit in his apartment at No. 420 West Twentieth Street on February 20, 1928, by a young man who was first defended by James D. C. Murray, now McManus’s counsel.
November 30, 1929
Draw near, friend reader, for a touch of ooh-my-goodness has finally crept into the Roaring Forties’ most famous murder trial. Sc-an-dal, no less. Sh-h-h!
And where do you think we had to go to get it?
To Walnut Street, in the pleasant mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina. Folks, that’s sin in them hills!
Here we’d been going along quietly for days and days on end with the matter of George McManus, charged with plugging Arnold Rothstein with a .38, and the testimony had been pure and clean and nothing calculated to give Broadway a bad name, when in come a woman from the ol’ Tarheel State speaking of the strangest didoes.
A Mrs. Marian A. Putnam, she was, who runs the Putnam grill in Asheville, a lady of maybe forty-odd, a headliner for the State, who testified she had heard loud voices of men, and a crash coming from the vicinity of room 349 in the Park Central Hotel the night “the master mind” was “settled.” And that later she had seen a man wandering along the hallway on the third floor, with his hands pressed to his abdomen and “a terrible look on his face.”
Well, there seemed nothing in this narration to mar the peaceful trend of events, or to bring the blush of embarrassment for this city to the cheek of the most loyal Broadwayer. Then James D. C. Murray took charge of the witness and began addressing the lady on the most tender subjects, and developing the weirdest things. Really, you’d be surprised.
Handing the lady a registration card from the Park Central Hotel and assuming a gruff tone of voice several octaves over the perfunctory purr that has been the keynote of the trial to date, Murray asked, “Who are
the Mr. and Mrs. Putnam indicated by that card as registered at the Park Central on October 28, 1928?”
“I am Mrs. Putnam.”
“Who is Mr. Putnam?”
Mrs. Putnam hesitated briefly, and then replied, “A friend of mine to whom I am engaged.”
There were subdued snorts back in the court room as the spectators suddenly came up out of their dozes and turned off their snores to contemplate the lady on the witness stand.
Mrs. Putnam wore a rather smart-looking velvet dress, with a gray caracul coat with a dark squirrel collar, and a few diamonds here and there about her, indicating business is okay at the Putnam grill.
But she didn’t have the appearance of one who might insert a hotsy-totsy strain into the staid proceedings. She looked more like somebody’s mother, or aunt. She described herself as a widow, and here she was admitting something that savored of social error, especially as the lady subsequently remarked that “Mr. Putnam” had occupied the same boudoir with her.
The spectators sat up to listen and mumbled we were finally getting down to business in this trial.
Murray now produced a death certificate attesting to the demise of one Putnam, who died in 1913, the attorney asking, “The Mr. Putnam who occupied the room with you wasn’t the Mr. Putnam who died in 1913, was he?”
At this point Mrs. Putnam seemed deeply affected, possibly by the memory of the late Mr. P. She gulped and applied her handkerchief to her eyes, and the spectators eyed her intently, because they felt it would be a thrill if it transpired that the deceased Putnam had indeed returned to life the very night that “the master mind” was shot.
But it seems it wasn’t that Mr. Putnam, and Mr. Murray awoke some very antique echoes in the old court room as he shouted, “Who was it?”
Well, Mrs. Putnam, doubtless restrained by a feeling of delicacy, didn’t want to tell, and Judge Nott helpfully remarked that as long as she didn’t deny she was registered at the hotel, the name didn’t seem important. Murray argued Mrs. Putnam’s fiancé might be a material witness for the defense, so Judge Nott let him try to show it.
