There was a man once. I don’t recall his name. Frequented the billiard parlors downtown. He made a comfortable living wagering whether he could swallow certain objects, billiard balls being a specialty. He’d pick a ball, take it down his gullet to here, then regurgitate it back up. And one evening, I decided to challenge this man to a wager. Ten thousand in cash for him to do the trick with a billiard ball of my choosing. Now, he knew I’d seen him do this a dozen times, so I can only surmise that he thought I was stupid. We laid down the cash and I handed him the cue ball. He swallowed it down. It lodged in his throat and he choked to death on the spot. What I knew and he didn’t was that the cue ball was one-sixteenth of an inch larger than the other balls. Just too large to swallow. Do you know what the moral of this tale is, Mr. Yale?[Arnold Rothstein]Don’t eat a cue ball?[Frankie Yale]The moral of this story is that if I’d cause a stranger to choke to death for my own amusement, what do you think I’ll do to you if you don’t tell me who ordered you to kill Colosimo?[Arnold Rothstein]
