@MightyDR

It's all circumstantial, but everything points to Rothsteins business partners, aka the young Turks Luciano, Lansky, Costello, Adonis......


A couple of excerpts for you,....

“In this respect Rothstein was not unlike the robber barons of his times. But unlike Morgan, Mellon, and Rockefeller, his stock in trade was human vice.

Throughout the 1920s, Rothstein was America’s premier labor racketeer, bookmaker, bootlegger, and drug trafficker. He knew that people would drink despite Prohibition, hire prostitutes despite marriage, and gamble despite bad luck.

Having been an opium smoker in his youth, he also understood the euphoric hook of narcotic drugs.
(Similar to Luciano here...)

So, when the federal government outlawed opiated patent medicines in 1915 with the adoption of the Harrison Narcotic Act, he knew that people with no other cure for their ailments, as well as the thrill-seeking sporting
and theater crowds, would find a substitute on the black market.


Rothstein, however, always played the odds, and the profit margin in trading illicit narcotics wasn’t wide enough until 1921, when the Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal for doctors to prescribe narcotic drugs to addicts.

It was at this point, when the legitimate outlets vanished, that Rothstein cornered the wholesale black market. Using a procedure he had developed for smuggling liquor, he sent buyers to Europe and organized front companies for importation and distribution.

By the mid-1920s he was in sole control of the lucrative black market in heroin, morphine, opium, and cocaine, and had set up a sophisticated system of political payoffs, extortion, and collusion with the same gangsters who would eventually kill him and divvy up the spoils of his vast underworld.