Arthur B. Mc Bride - Early Career

Early Career

McBride was born in Chicago, where he worked as a newsboy from the age of six. His first real job was for publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst's organization in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. He moved to Cleveland in 1913, when he was in his mid-twenties, to be circulation manager for the Cleveland News. It was a time when circulation battles over newsstands and street corners often turned violent. He started with the News on a $10,000 salary ($235,152 in today's dollars) and was charged with organizing the paper's newsboys. "This meant choosing strong young men comfortable fighting with fists, clubs, knives, chains and, when they could get them, handguns," author Ted Schwarz wrote. "They were the business equivalent of the street gang, and McBride's salary depended on how well he organized his newsboys to avoid losing their corners to one or more violent rivals."

Having built up a fortune in newspapers and purchased apartment buildings in the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood, McBride in 1930 went into business for himself. In 1931, he bought a majority stake in Cleveland's Zone Cab Company, which later merged with the Yellow Cab Company to form the city's biggest taxi operator. He also had taxi businesses in Akron and Canton, two cities southeast of Cleveland. As his taxi businesses prospered, McBride invested in real estate in Cleveland, Chicago and Florida. In the late 1930s, he leveraged his newspaper connections to launch a wire service that supplied bookmakers with the results of horse races. This put him in contact with organized crime figures who were behind gambling operations that relied on such services. He invested in the Continental Press and Empire News, both based in Cleveland and run by mobsters Morris "Mushy" Wexler and Sam "Gameboy" Miller. James Ragen, another friend and associate in the wire business, was murdered in 1946 in a Chicago gangland feud. A federal grand jury in 1940 indicted 18 people, including McBride and Wexler, over the supply of information used in gambling. The allegations were based on federal laws that forbade interstate transmission of lottery results; prosecutors treated the race results as lottery lists. He was never arrested or tried over his role in the business, however.