Arnold Rothstein, known as the Brain, built a criminal empire with arithmetic instead of muscle. Born in New York City in 1882 to an affluent family, he was the son of Abraham Rothstein, a businessman so upright he was called Abe the Just, and the brother of a future rabbi. Arnold hated school, loved numbers, and gambled from childhood despite his father’s orders. By 1910, at 28, he ran his own casino in Manhattan’s Tenderloin district, invested in a racetrack at Havre de Grace, Maryland, and paid for a network of informants. He was a millionaire by 30.

This episode explains how a man who despised leaving anything to chance moved from playing the odds to engineering outcomes. It covers his hidden hand in the Black Sox scandal, his recognition that Prohibition was a national market, and his role as banker and mediator to New York’s gangs under the protection of Tammany Hall. It ends with the poker debt he refused to pay, the shooting at the Park Central Hotel on November 4, 1928, and the power vacuum that followed.

• Gamblers Sport Sullivan and Abe Attell each brought Rothstein a plan to bribe the White Sox. He hid behind layers of go-betweens and is estimated to have won about $350,000 betting on Cincinnati.
• Called before the Chicago grand jury, he posed as a wronged businessman and was never indicted. The grand jury records and signed player confessions later vanished.
• During Prohibition he bought freighters to import Scotch whisky and mentored Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky from his post outside Lindy’s restaurant on Broadway.
• In late 1928 he lost more than $300,000 in a three day poker game with Titanic Thompson and Nate Raymond, claimed it was fixed, and stalled on paying.
• Dying in the hospital, he told detectives to stick to their trade and he would stick to his. F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby on him.