previously on Mafia.

Arnold Rothstein stepped from the shadows of big-time gambling into the mob spotlight after fixing the 1919 World Series.

So what happened was Rothstein heard that there could be big dull for the players if they double-crossed Kaminsky.

Took a bribe and blew the world serious.

And somebody's players thought this was a way of revenge, retaliation, for Kaminsky underpaying them.

Rothstein's pockets and connections ran deep and ran even deeper with the advent of prohibition and

selling top shelf booze. Arnold Rothstein's gambling house in Saratoga and Long Beach, Long Island,

were very high-class operations. He decided that that was the way to make money in boot lagging.

You bring the good stuff over from Scotland, over from England, you sell it to the best people.

And like any good businessman, Rothstein recruited a hand-picked group of protégés to do his bidding.

But not all of them were good choices.

And Luciano and Lansky saw themselves as progressers. They saw duck shults as what would be called in Yiddish,

a Vildachaya, an animal. And duck shults was someone they wanted very much to get away from.

This is Mafia.

The

We're the group of violent but competent criminals at his disposal.

Rothstein had gone from high stakes gambler to the richest crook in the nation.

But Rothstein himself was no thug. He was simply a businessman.

Eric Dezenhall is the author of The Devil Himself.

He was really a racketeer rather than a gangster because he wasn't an especially violent guy.

He was all about business. Unlike almost every other one of these gangsters,

he grew up rich. He was from a very nice family.

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