start from his relationship with Dan Cody, but it is Meyer Wofsheim who gets Gatsby into illegal business operations. Wolfsheim, who finds out, is the man who fixed the 1919 World Series (Fitzgerald 78). He encounters Gatsby when he is discharges form the War and covered with medals.. Wolfsheim becomes a sort of second father figure for Gatsby, this “lord of the underworld” (Lehan “The Road to West Egg” 30). Wolfsheim declares, I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter” (Fitzgerald 179). It is true that, in a sense, Wolfsheim raised Gatsby, but he raised him into the world of artificial glamour that ultimately led to his destruction. The source of money holds no significance for Gatsby; however, his goal is simply to earn enough money to win Daisy’s love, and “it is with this money that comes from bootlegging, gambling and bucket shops that Gatsby makes the fortune that allows him to buy his mansion in West Egg” Lehan, “His Father’s Business” 57). In the beginning Daisy quips, “He owed some drugstores, a lot of drugstore. He built them up himself” (Fitzgerald 114). It’s true, Gatsby did own drugstores, but as Tom reveals in the denouncement scene at the Plaza Hotel, “He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side street drugstores and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter” (Fitzgerald 141). This scene concretizes Tom’s earlier claim that Gatsby was a bootlegger. Daisy becomes terrified at this revitalization, and the entire novel turns on what Daisy considers to be legitimate and illegitimate wealth (Lehan, “Inventing Gatsby” 65). Tom destroys the entire facade that Gatsby has built around himself, but as E.K. so truthfully stated:Gatsby, for all… the uncertain haziness in which his vague business connections and presumably ill-gotten wealth envelop him, he is far more real than t...
