Surviving the Mob - Dennis Griffin [26]
“Collecting on Tuesday gave the gamblers the chance to finish off their betting week with the ‘Monday Night Football’ game. Players on a losing streak over the weekend loved to use the Monday game to try to recoup. It worked, sometimes. But just as often, trying to get even plunged the losers even deeper into debt. Then we’d monitor them. And there was no shortage of shylocks around in case a gambler needed a quick influx of cash to pay us off.”
If a bookie was getting too much action on a team, he laid off some of those bets to other books. That spread the risk around, so no individual bookie had to absorb a devastating loss. The families preferred to keep the money within their own operations, but they’d go outside to the shops of other families if necessary. Here, too, it was friendly business in the greater interests of keeping the money flowing for everyone.
When Andrew was operating, there wasn’t a strong connection to Las Vegas. That changed a few years later. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, coinciding with technological breakthroughs in communication devices (such as pagers and cell phones), it became expedient and efficient to use the Vegas books for the layoff. Certain guys with heavy Eastern accents all of a sudden became staples in various Sin City sports books (this was a big factor in the enactment of the “messenger-betting” rules that banned cell phones from the books until 2009).
Just like in Nevada, the bookies also moved the point spread on a game that posed a potential problem, in order to encourage customers to bet the other way. If the action on that game could be brought into balance, it mitigated the risk of a financial disaster.
Moving the point spreads was also a tactic used against winning players. In the business, this is known as dealing a “double line.” It means offering one line to the public, because you know they’ll take the worst of a number shaded against popular teams, and another to the wise guys who’d take advantage of that shading, if you let them, by betting the other way. Many offshore sports books employ this practice today.
“We treated the winners well,” Andrew says. “But if they were too good, we fucked up their lines. This wasn’t Vegas; we could change the line instantly when we needed to. But we never chased a winner. By that I mean we never punished a winner by shutting him out or telling him to go elsewhere.”
RACE BETTING
The race-betting business was also run out of the sports office. Horses drew far less action than sports, but it was a good earner. The mob’s payouts were better than the competition’s, which was the New York Off-Track Betting parlors; to pay their costs, the OTBs took out too much. So players could get more on winning tickets from the illegal joints.
“We took a lot of business away from the OTBs,” says Andrew. “We offered food and had the same simulcast live feeds showing mostly every racetrack in the country. We extended small amounts of credit to good customers and offered a twenty-five-percent kickback on the weekly loss, because these guys were never gonna win. As the proverb goes, ‘All horse bettors die broke and live with broken shoes.’”
People like Andrew, who booked through Nick Corozzo’s horse rooms, worked on a percentage basis. They received 25% of the profits on winning weeks, while Corozzo paid all the losses and put the operators on a make-up until they got the losses back. But losing weeks were the exception and not the rule in the Gambino-controlled sports- and race-betting venues. Andrew never experienced one and his peers were in the black the vast majority of the time.
NUMBERS
The illegal numbers game—also known as a “policy racket”—is a very simple proposition. The bettor picks three single-digit numbers. If they match the “daily number” announced the following day, he’s a winner.
In the early days, numbers betting