by Fred Galvin
One of the fundamental and appealing aspects of sports betting is that it’s possible to consistently make a profit as long as you know what you are doing and apply the right strategies. It takes some work but it can be done. However, bookies count on the fact that most bettors lose money in the long run. There are several reasons why this is the case, one of which is the fact that bookmakers use certain techniques to make sure they are always at an advantage.
The basic principle of bookmaking is straightforward and pretty obvious—even to the most casual observer—as I once was. A bookie takes in money whenever he lays a bet to a customer and pays out money every time one of his customers wins a bet. Now, even that most casual observer can figure the idea is to take in more money than you pay out. The “art” of bookmaking is in making sure that happens more often than not. Unfair, you say? Depends on your perspective. Fast Frankie would take issue with that assessment.
Bookmakers can’t control the outcome of sports events, at least not usually. There have been some exceptions like the 1919 World Series in which the favored Chicago White Sox were paid to throw the series to the Cincinnati Reds. The fix was orchestrated by a New York mobster named Arnold Rothstein who would be in the Bookie Hall of Fame, if there was such a thing. Maybe there is. I wouldn’t bet against it, at least not through a bookie.
Anyway, while bookies can’t control the outcome of most sporting events, they can control how much they stand to win or lose on any particular result by setting the odds for all the wagers they lay, which ultimately enables them to ensure a profit. The main technique is the inclusion of the vig. It is built into the odds bookies set to help them make a profit. In essence, it’s a commission charged for laying bets.
Here are just a few bookie terms to round out your first and only lesson. Pay attention. There’s a quiz coming later.
Punter: One who makes a bet through a bookie.
Beard: A friend or acquaintance used to place bets in order to conceal the true identity of the punter. Don’t get too cocky. Fast Frankie has ways of determining who’s behind the beard.
Accumulator: A multiple bet where the punter wagers on a series of outcomes, all of which have to be correct for the return to be paid. This is a dangerous game that pays huge dividends if the punter is successful and can be very painful (fiscally and physically) if he is not.
Banker: A punter’s strong selection, his sure thing.
Credit Bet: A bet accepted by a bookie where no cash has been deposited, very dangerous for the punter.
Dime: $1,000
Dollar: $100
Fifty Cents: $50
Nickel: $500
Sharp: A sophisticated or professional gambler. These are well known to bookies like Fast Frankie as they pose the greatest chance of having to pay out.
There are some basic mistakes a bookie needs to avoid. Here is just a sampling:
Choose Your Clients Wisely: No matter how much you have written in net winners, what matters is collecting what is owed. In this respect the bookie must be a credit manager of sorts. He needs to check the client’s ability to pay by checking employment, residence, how he dresses, what type of ride he has. These can give an indication of what funds he may have in reserve to pay what he owes.
Don’t Let Clients Fall Too Far Behind: Preventing a client from getting completely buried and overwhelmed promotes his continued paying. For example, if he is able to pay his $500 ten to twelve times a year, that’s sustainable. But when he loses that much in consecutive weeks, he may well feel he’s buried and become a problem.
Don’t Get Too Greedy: Set a threshold for delinquent clients below which you will use “low-level” tactics to collect and above which you will use “more persuasive” methods. If a punter owes $400, you may want to get in his face and curse and threaten him but it’s not really worth too much effort. But if it’s $4,000 you may have to bring out the big guns. Literally. Sometimes just a showing of some hardware will be enough. However, a Louisville Slugger to the arm or kneecap can also cause a punter with short arms and deep pockets to loosen up. If that doesn’t work, there are other options which generally involve firearms and threats to relatives.
Women: Be very, very careful here. Wives of punters, especially punters who either don’t know how to lay down a smart bet and are married to women who react badly to being surprised by unexpectedly low bank balances for which the husband has no rational explanation, can be very bad news for a bookie. It has been known that when such a wife discovers her man has been involved with a bookie, the first call isn’t to the bookie. It’s to the police. And no bookie wants an officer of Five-0 to be sniffing around unless, of course, he wants to lay down a bet. And that does happen too.
Besides irate wives, arrests of bookies usually involve some type of mob connection or highly sophisticated betting rings taking in more than a million dollars per year. They were the ones that get the cops’ attention. The small fry with a few dozen clients simply weren’t worth our time. Also, since Ronnie and I were homicide cops, our interaction with bookies was almost nil, but not zero.
~~~
I imagine you now have a picture of a bookie’s basic operations. Now back to Fast Frankie Finacci, Made Man in New York City’s Mariucci crime family.
Frankie’s clients were a varied lot, most of whom, for whatever reasons, liked to bet mostly on sports and horses. They ranged from wealthy frat boys to athletes, the guys who collected the trash, firefighters, cops, doctors, lawyers, business executives, bankers, and former felons. (What is a former felon? I thought once a felon, always a felon.) Yes, I included cops, firefighters, and doctors. (Draw your own conclusions about lawyers.) As part of the cop fraternity, and cousins to that of firefighters, I’ll offer that we are human too and are not exempt from temptations.
While I personally kept my wagering to quarter–half poker games and precinct pools ranging from how long a particular romance between two cops would last to which rookie would be able to name the last five New York City mayors (de Blasio, Bloomberg, Giuliani, Dinkins, Koch) to who would win the Swing Shift Bar’s wet T-shirt contest (for a little more on the Swing Shift Bar, read Chapter 21 in Retribution by Fred Galvin).
Frankie was soon excelling in collections and producing a continuous stream of revenue for his underbosses. He did have a steady amount of “persuading” to do but more and more he was farming those jobs out to street muscle he had hired. As I mentioned earlier, after a year he was rewarded with his own section of the Lower East Side. Frankie learned the bookie business very quickly and earned the nickname Fast Frankie. To get such a promotion so quickly was a feather in his cap, or in his fedora if you prefer mobster metaphors.
Now that I think of it, what self-respecting Wiseguy would have a feather in his fedora? Or even wear a fedora? It would be such a cliché, no? Sure, there were the famous pictures of Al Capone always wearing a white fedora. You remember those pics, right? If not, google “Al Capone fedora image.” How ridiculous would Scarface Al look with a feather in his fedora? He’d be mistaken for a Bavarian Mafioso, which would certainly be a rare bird. But that was eighty years ago! Nobody even wears fedoras any more. Ever see a picture of John Gotti in a fedora? Never! Same with Fast Frankie and most present-day Wiseguys.
Anyway, I digress.
~~~
New York City, being New York City, had a plethora of professional sports teams. Of course, it was home to the Yankees and the Mets, the NFL’s Giants and Jets, the NBA’s Knicks and Nets, NHL’s Rangers and Islanders, as well as two soccer teams, the New York City Football Club and the New York Cosmos. Add Division I college teams like Saint John’s, Columbia, and Fordham and the supply was always there.
There were also plenty of opportunities to bet on horse racing. The most notable tracks were Belmont Park and Aqueduct Racetrack and not too far in New Jersey was Monmouth Park. Frankie made it convenient for his stable of gamblers in that they didn’t have to go to the track to place their wagers.
Like most pro
s in his position—yes, Fast Frankie was a professional, not in the sense that the term usually garners, but a professional just the same—Frankie knew how to gauge the potential of a client. He didn’t bother with the nickel-or-less action ($500 or less … see above) and routinely passed them off to one of several underling bookies he had in his section. But when a punter was talking about wagers in the four figures, and especially in the five-figure range, the standing instructions were that Frankie was to be personally informed. He frequently took the action himself.
With daily experience, Frankie was soon able to spot the professional gamblers, or sharps, who won enough to make a decent living, yet not so often that Frankie had to shut them off. There was a mutual respect, if you could call it that, between the bookie and the regular sharp. They both ate off the same plate and there was enough action to keep both their bellies full.
One characteristic that set Frankie apart was his ability to spot the gambler who had “a problem.” This was the guy, and sometimes the gal, who tended to bet impulsively, lose very frequently, and never seemed to come out ahead over the long term. Indeed, as time went on, they would gradually slip deeper and deeper into the hole. Sure, they would score occasionally, and sometimes were able to square their debt plus vig, but usually it was just enough to convince them that they had finally figured it out, which was never the case. To Frankie it was obvious that their wagering research wasn’t up to that of the professional sharp and many of their bets were driven more by emotion and desperation than by logic, research, and playing the odds.
It was obvious to Frankie that these clients were desperate to “hit it big” and retire to Florida or anywhere exotic. Frankie also knew that the “big” part of hitting it big was never big enough because this type of client was an addict and the addiction was just as strong as one to alcohol or drugs. While the latter two may surely result in the user’s death, gambling addiction can result in a different kind of death, one in which the user was still alive physically but with no way of living a normal life.
Frankie had developed a gift for exploiting any of these unfortunates who came his way. He knew that if they were handled properly they could provide a steady stream of revenue. The trick was keeping that carrot dangling in front of them, but always just out of reach. He knew that their tunnel vision focusing solely on that carrot would lead them deeper into his web. Every now and then he would let them take a nibble so that they would think they were just one more lunge away from grabbing the entire thing. But of course, since the carrot was on a stick moving forward with the poor soul, it remained just beyond grasp.
Gambling is more acceptable and accessible than ever before. With the exception of Hawaii and Utah, every state in the country offers some form of legalized gambling. Yes, your local 7-Eleven’s scratch-off Lotto is gambling sanctioned by your state. You do not even need to leave your house to gamble. All you need is an internet connection or a phone. Various surveys have determined that around two million people in the US are addicted to gambling, and for as many as twenty million citizens the habit seriously interferes with work and social life.
Eighty percent (yes, eighty percent) of Americans say they have gambled at least once in their lives and it is estimated that approximately twenty-five percent of that eighty gambles at a casino at least once a year. Granted, that incredible eighty-percent statistic includes informal gambling such as those who play poker games regularly and occasionally visit Vegas to dump fistfuls of coins into the slots all the way to the serious amateurs and professionals who utilize the services of characters like Fast Frankie Finacci.
Research shows that pathological gamblers and drug addicts share many of the same genetic predispositions for impulsiveness and reward seeking. Just as substance addicts require increasingly strong hits to get high, compulsive gamblers pursue ever riskier ventures. Likewise, both drug addicts and problem gamblers endure symptoms of withdrawal when separated from the chemical or thrill they desire.
Now, you may believe gambling addiction to be a malady of low life people without the brains to understand that constantly losing all your wages in one night, hitting up on your friends for “a loan” to tide them over (a loan both they and their friends know will never be repaid), or pawning or selling their personal belongings to get enough for the next action or to pay the bookie’s vig, is inherently self-destructive. If you do believe all that, you would be very much mistaken. True, there are many gambling addicts who are in that exact boat. However, also occupying that boat are doctors, lawyers, professional athletes, film stars, rock stars, politicians, and yes, cops. As I mentioned, all those professionals are human too and subject to temptations. I would just like to believe that they are more able to resist.
~~~
The usual drill for bookies associated with a crime family was to make their collections, record them in their Books, and kick up the proceeds to the boss of their section, typically a higher-level underboss in the Family. The underboss would then take his cut and kick the remainder back down to the bookie to do with as he pleased. After paying his men and greasing the necessary palms, a successful bookie like Fast Frankie could live very comfortably.
But the pressure was always on. The underboss always expected, that is demanded, his due. If the bookie had an off week, the underboss would perhaps cut him a little slack, albeit very little. Usually the message was something like “I’ll let you slide this week but you gotta make it up next week, get me?”
Soon Frankie had learned that he could hedge against a slow week and the required “make up” the following week by utilizing an age-old, but very dangerous practice: skimming off the top. If he just kind of “under-recorded” his weekly action, even by a small percentage, then what he needed to bump up to the underboss was more manageable. This worked as long as the amount of the skim and the under-recording of the weekly results were small enough as to be unnoticeable by the underboss. This required the utilization of a second Book which only Frankie knew about.
However, there was always danger, potentially of the fatal kind. It was not unusual for an underboss to make an unexpected call on one of his bookies and ask to see the Book just to determine if his weekly share was supported by the Book’s details. Of course, any bookie with half a brain—Fast Frankie Finacci barely qualified—would be certain that the Book the underboss saw reflected the numbers after the skim. Otherwise he’d be handing the underboss a loaded gun pointed squarely back at his own forehead. So in Frankie’s case it was always the second Book that was presented to the underboss. This could be a bit of a tap dance since the second Book was identical to the real Book with the exception of a few edited entries covering Frankie’s skim. He had to be very careful to keep them well separated.
As I mentioned, this was a very dangerous game to play. It could go sideways for Frankie any number of ways.
The underboss could get suspicious if the skim was not subtle enough. Or one of Frankie’s underlings could find out about it and blow the whistle on Frankie. An underling looking to climb the Family ladder may “show his loyalty” to the underboss by blowing in Frankie. Even if true, this would most likely blow up in the underling’s face as he would be viewed as a rat, even within the Family. Both Frankie and the underling would suffer the consequences, usually the ultimate consequences, which don’t take much imagination to envision.
Another thing that could happen was that Frankie could simply screw up by increasing his skimming enough to become noticeable by the underboss. Also, he would have to be careful not to suddenly show extravagant spending which would be suspicious to the underboss. Someone in Frankie’s position could never be seen as more lavish than the boss. This temptation was very difficult to ignore. After all, what’s the point of skimming extra cash if you couldn’t spend it?
The final danger was that Frankie’s first Book could be discovered. This would be disastrous because he would be very hard-pressed to rationalize its existence. In fact, the existence of this book wou
ld mean only one thing—well, actually two things. The obvious first thing was that skimming was going on. The second, and equally as obvious, was that the skimmer would very soon be wearing a pair of cement swim fins compliments of the Mariucci Family.
Any one of these could (and most likely would) result in a very bad day for Fast Frankie Finacci and such a bad day in a crime family was usually a last day.
Chapter 10: St. Augie’s
Please forgive me if the following may seem a bit melodramatic but, given the circumstances, I think I deserve to be cut a little slack …
Crying alone, completely alone, with no one to hug or to be hugged by has to be one of the saddest things there is to endure. Trust me, I know. I’ve been there. Experiencing profound grief completely alone is a depth of despair where no light can enter or escape. It is a black hole of anguish. One must experience it to truly know it.
I have.
It is also possible to have people around, strangers and caring people, and still be totally alone. When we see people actively engaging with their upbeat public personas, it gives the illusion that they all have these amazingly wonderful lives and each of them is happy and successful. All is lovely and perfect in their worlds and they have no problems. This idea is enough to make many of us feel separate from them, different from them, and alone. For better or worse, the reality is that all of us have insecurities and pain, worries and fears, problems, screw-ups, and flaws.