Negative Positive
Title: Portrait Of An Evil Genius
Review: David Pietrusza's bio of infamous gangster Arnold Rothstein is a wonderful read. Lots of vignettes involving rip-offs, double-crosses, fixed horse races and rigged trials as well as the hilarious exploits of Rothstein's crooked, shamelessly audacious lawyer William Fallon.Audacious is also the word that comes to mind when wondering how anyone could even think of fixing the World Series, let alone manage to pull it off. However, as the author notes, some of the White Sox players had been throwing games during the regular season that year so getting them to recruit a few more more players for a postseason fix was not that much of a stretch.Pietruzsa is on shaky ground though when wondering whether the first Jack Dempsey-Gene Tunney fight was thrown. On page 235 he claims Dempsey was poisoned by his bodyguard before the bout but provides no reference for this story. It appears to be a baseless rumor first mentioned in the pages of Roger Kahn's A Flame of Pure Fire.
Is the review positive or negative? 