'Once upon a time, when New York City lived and breathed, there was a man marked for death, like us all ...'

Arnold Rothstein was one of the most mysterious figures in Manhattan's history: a godfather of organized crime - rumoured to have fixed baseball's World Series - yet a peer of the Morgans and Rockefellers. But one night in 1928 he was shot in the stomach and died shortly afterwards, refusing to speak a word concerning his own murder.

Nick Tosches jumps feet first into Rothstein's life to lay bare his legacy - to New York and to the whole Western world - and to try and make some sense of what the 'king of the Jews' means to us. What we get back is an angry howl right out of the tortured heart of America itself.