The Vince Day character is very loosely based on Bill "The Great Mouthpiece" Fallon, one of the great criminal defense attorneys of the 1920s, who successfully defended gambler Arnold Rothstein in the "Black Sox" Fix of the 1919 World Series. Nevertheless, Fallon's daughter, Ruth, won a criminal libel judgment in a Syracuse, N.Y. police court, against the owner of a theater that showed the film. It was later overturned.
The $90,000 in embezzled funds would equate to nearly $1.6M in 2018.