Nearly 100 years ago, with the dying breath of New York’s most provocative Mob entrepreneur, one of America’s great unsolved gangland mysteries was born. Arnold Rothstein, New York’s most notorious gambler and the founder of organized crime in America, is shot and killed during a poker game at the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan. After finding Rothstein bleeding profusely at the service entrance of the hotel, police followed his trail of blood back to a suite where a group of men were playing cards. Reportedly, Rothstein had nothing good in his final hand. It was the night of November 4, 1928, at 10:15 p.m., a telephone call came in to Lindy’s restaurant, on Broadway, thought he didn't own the establishment, this was Arnold Rothstein’s unofficial office. The caller asked to speak with one of the establishment’s regulars. Rothstein excused himself from the table, took the call, returned moments later and handed a long-barreled, pearl-handled pistol to his associate James Meehan. He parted ways with Meehan and ventured off to the Park Central Hotel, reportedly headed for Room 349 there. Within an hour, Arnold Rothstein – the man known around town as “The Brain” and “The Big Bankroll” – took a violent jolt of hot lead to the abdomen. Hotel employees saw him stumbling and bleeding badly at a hotel service door before collapsing. An ambulance rushed him to Polyclinic Hospital, where surgeons struggled to remove the slug and perform a blood transfusion. New York Police Detective Patrick Floyd, a familiar face to Rothstein, tried to glean some information.

“Who shot ya, A.R.?” Floyd asked.