It's a Crime
The Big Bankroll. By Leo Katcher. (Gollancz, 21s.) Many people must know who killed Arnold Rothstein in a Fifth Avenue hotel in 1928, but the law still doesn't. The thirty-year-old mystery adds to the interest of this carefully documented story of the man who built crime into big business; engineered grand alliances with politicians, labour unions, bookmakers, bootleggers and the police; and was famous enough to he introduced by Scott Fitzgerald into The Great Grusby as 'the man who fixed the World Series'—perhaps the only crime he didn't in fact commit. This well-written book —part biography, part social history—is as fascinating as a dozen works of fiction, and a good deal more frightening, for the machine that Rothstein built is still in running order.
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