Lay the Favorite

by Beth Raymer

  “New York’s moving, what do you want me to do?” Robbie J asked.

  “Call Jazz,” Dink said.

  Robbie J picked up two receivers and feverishly dialed two separate phones, simultaneously. Dink grabbed for his phone and dialed a number.

  “Responsibility to come on time to this job is number one,” Dink continued. His palm cupped the receiver pushed to his ear. “You have to have the mind for numbers and be able to pick up things that have to do with numbers, number two. And don’t steal, number three. Most people fail at one of those.” He uncupped his hand. “Nine-nine-two Dinky, lookin’ for a line on the New York Liberty, WNBA. Over for a dime, please.”

  Still seated in his office chair, Dink wheeled toward the window. “There’s more crew members, two very important ones. But one’s in a cage and one’s on a yacht in Europe.” He unpeeled two glossy photographs from the wall and handed them to me. One photo was a close-up of a fat brown hamster with watery black eyes. The other was of a petite blonde in her fifties with lips painted coral. She cradled dozens of banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills and proudly presented these bundles to the photographer, as though they were a newborn baby. “That’s Jyrki, my hamster”—named after Jyrki Lumme, a former NHL defenseman. “And Tulip, my wife.”

  Dink noticed that another race was about to start on one of the televisions. “I’m gonna bet the two here. First-time starter. Could be a total zero.

  “One-six-four Ivy,” he said into the receiver. “Hollywood Park, race four. The two to win for a nickel.”

  The horses shot out of the starting gate and Dink bounced up and down in his chair as though he were the jockey. Robbie J continued talking hurriedly on the phones. The two horses won and Dink shouted, “I’m a genius! I’m a genius!” He hovered over his racing form like a schoolboy trying to keep other kids from cheating, jotted something down, and quickly turned the page. “So?” he said. “You want the job?”

  I had no idea what my job would entail, but it was the best interview I had ever had.

  “Yes,” I said. “I want the job.”

  The next morning, I drove to the casino where Dink and I were scheduled to meet. The pitiless sun scalded the floor of the High Desert. Along the shoulder, brittle branched shrubs caught the litter tossed from passing cars and nearby construction sites. In the distance, rising out of rippled sand dunes, appeared the Rampart casino, a Mediterranean mansion surrounded by fifty acres of lush landscape. It was the first time since moving to Vegas that I had seen grass. Along the entranceway, jackrabbits found shade beneath the palm trees’ sprawling canopies.

  The casino’s sports book had the feel of a Fortune 500 retiree’s office. Watercolors of horses and boxers hung on the mahogany walls. In the back was a small bar with lit-up shelves showcasing highball glasses and bottles of top-shelf liquor. When I walked in, a group of old men turned and looked at me.

  “Ya lost, doll?” asked a man in his seventies. His steel-gray hair went nicely with his wire-framed glasses.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, shyly. “I’m meeting someone here.”

  “Who?” they wanted to know.

  “Dink,” I said.

  They smiled. “Dinky! Whadda ya meetin’ Dinky for?”

  “I work for him. I just got hired.”

  “You work in this business before?” asked a man whose eyeglasses were even thicker than Dink’s. “Bobby, by the way. Bobby the Owl.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re lucky,” said the Owl, “Dinky’s a good guy to work for. He buys his crew breakfast and lunch. If you can, try and bring us in some bagels, will ya?”

  “Excellent hockey bettor, Dinky. Guy’s made a fortune off that godforsaken sport,” said a young man at the ticket counter. Behind him, numbers flashed on an electronic board as massive and complicated as the giant train schedule in New York’s Penn Station. But instead of train schedules it listed every upcoming sporting event in the world.

  “Lemme give ya your first piece of advice,” the old man said. “After you leave here, go and get yourself a pair of galoshes. Your new boss is a crybaby. He thinks there’s a black cloud followin’ him all the time. His team’s up. Score’s one hundred to seventy-two. He has minus six. Guy’s a nervous wreck. Fidgetin’ round his chair like he’s got hemorrhoids. Nice wife though. Pretty. You should meet my wife. Beauty-ful woman. If you wanna see her, she’ll be on display today at three o’clock in the high-limit slot room.”

  “Dinky!”

  Dink walked into the sports book, setting the room abuzz. The old men gravitated to him like reporters at a postgame interview. They wanted to know who he liked in hoops and what he thought about last night’s winner at the buzzer. And what about today’s games, was there any value in the Bruins line? Dink crossed his arms over his chest. He answered some of the questions with questions of his own, dismissed others, and tugged self-consciously on the bottom of his too-tight Caesars Palace T-shirt. A cocktail waitress passed by with a tray of coffees. She was young and blond and half naked and not one of the men turned to look at her.

  “Hey, I know you!” came a voice behind me.

  I turned around to see Chunky, a regular from the Thai restaurant. He used to come in and leave me hundred-dollar tips on his forty-dollar bill. Not wanting to walk the ten steps to the betting window, Chunky asked if I could make a bet for him. “Belmont, race two, fifty-dollar quinella for the five and the seven.” He handed me the money for the bet, then slipped me a hundred dollar tip.

  “No, I’ll do it for free,” I said. “I need to learn.”

  “Take the money,” the men sang in unison.

  “Take it,” Dink said. “Chunky’s on a roll. You’re struggling in life. If he wants to give you money, let him give you money.”

  “I’m not struggling in life,” I said.

  “You live in the worst neighborhood in Vegas,” Dink said. “Trust me, you’re struggling.”

  “I live there so I won’t struggle,” I said.

  “That means you’re struggling.”

  I took the money and wrote Chunky’s bet onto the back of my hand so I wouldn’t make a mistake at the window.

  Above us, horses raced on each of the fourteen television screens. Each time Dink began to teach me something about placing a bet, loud cheers and moans interrupted us. After a while, we stopped talking gambling and sipped our Coca-Colas.

  “Do you like music?” Dink asked. “There’s a Dink Inc. office field trip tomorrow. No one else can go. Adult responsibilities.”

  The field trip included flying to San Diego, catching a Mighty Ducks game in Anaheim, and seeing Dink’s favorite band, the Old 97’s. All expenses paid by Dink Inc.

  “Really?!” I shrieked. Then, in a calmer, less eager voice, I said I’d love to.

  “Here,” he said. Using both hands he pulled his wallet from his back pocket. It was as thick as a Big Mac. Money oozed from its corners. He handed me three hundred dollars. “To cover field-trip-related expenses.”

  The next morning I took Otis to the Courtyard animal hospital and spa and paid extra so he could have storybook hour and a suite to himself. Inside McCarran Airport, beside the Megabucks slot machines, I found Dink waiting for me. A New York Knickerbockers duffel bag hung from his shoulder; a white terry-cloth headband pushed his curls away from his face. He held his sports ticker, a beeper-sized gadget which displayed live scores, an inch from his eye. In an effort to bring the text into focus, he cocked his glasses, squinted his left eye shut, and scrunched up his nose. He peered into it with the intensity of a seventh grader looking at his first “tip and strip” nudie-girl pen. From the side of his mouth, his tongue curled upward.

  Only when the captain prepared for takeoff did Dink turn away from his ticker and lower his glasses.

  “Terrible. Dreadful. Horrendous,” he said, heavy-eyed. “Today was not a profitable day.”

  It was my first time flying first class. Not quite believing in my luck, I ordered c
hampagne.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dinky

  When Dink Dershowitz was eleven years old his mother, Freda, took him and his friend Howie on a subway ride to the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens. Alongside the General Motors Futurama exhibit and the stained-glass windows of the Vatican pavilion was a more modest display that captured Dink and Howie’s attention.

  It was the Minnesota state exhibit. As the two friends admired a large stuffed moose, something caught their eye. Hanging on the wall, above the moose’s antlers, numbers scrolled across a small black screen: the updated scores for the Minnesota Twins game. Twins 4, White Sox 3, bottom of the sixth.

  A sports ticker. Dink was awestruck.

  “Can you believe it?” Dink whispered to Howie. “In the future, no matter where we are in the world, we’ll be able to see baseball scores!”

  Scores. Even as a kid that was what interested Dink most. Not which team was winning or losing, but by how much.

  One morning, on his way to Hebrew school, Dink came upon a group of older kids crouched in a circle. They looked over their shoulders, making sure the rabbi was nowhere in sight, and then flipped their baseball cards toward a wall. The kid whose card landed closest to the wall won. “Flipping” was a game of skill. But these kids weren’t just playing to see who could win the most cards; they were gambling. And Dink, with his thick eyeglasses, lanky frame, and high IQ—the highest in Hebrew school—joined them.

  From flipping cards, the kids moved on to pitching pennies, which led to nickels. But by that time, Dink had gone. His seventh-grade math scores were so high that he skipped the eighth grade. The next year he was accepted to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the most selective public school in the city and one of the most mathematically rigorous schools in the country. As a fourteen-year-old sophomore, Dink ran the Stuyvesant baseball pool. Thirty-five cents to bet on which major league team would score the most runs in a week. You picked your teams from a hat.

  But Dink’s gambling education wasn’t limited to flipping cards and running baseball pools. At home in his tiny Rochdale Village apartment in Queens, he learned horse-betting techniques from his father, Solomon, a mailman who moonlighted as a two-dollar horse bettor.

  There were only a few things in life that Solly enjoyed: the New York Daily Mirror, the TV show Car 54, Where Are You?, and agonizing over his weekly horse bet. Each Monday, Solly began studying the newspapers and keeping charts of horse workouts at the Aqueduct and Belmont raceways. Solly bet two dollars on one horse per week, and fretted over where to put those dollars. Every day, he walked over to the OTB and thought about which horse he should bet on. He came home, pulled a cigarette from his hard pack of Camels, ran his palm over his slicked-back blond hair, and reread the papers. Finally, after twenty-six hours of studying the workouts, Solly placed a bet.

  On the following morning, Solly fetched the paper, carried it over to the kitchen table, and stood, stoically. His immaculately pressed gray flannel suit enhanced his tall, slim physique. He lit a cigarette.

  Across from him, Freda sat, dishtowel over her shoulder, separating the dairy from the nondairy silverware. In the living room, Dink, their only child, entertained himself by playing an indoor variation of stoopball. He raucously bounced a ball off the wall and yelled Foul! when the ball hit furniture.

  Solly unfolded the paper directly to the sports section and quickly covered the horse-race results with his thumb.

  Inhale.

  With the hesitancy of a man reading a love letter that his wife has written to someone else, Solly slowly dragged his thumb over the print, revealing the words one letter at a time.

  Exhale.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have bet that horse! I liked all these other horses and they all won! Why’d I pick this bum?”

  He’d grab his hat and extinguish his cigarette. Mutter something about his wife being a jinx. Then catch the train for his hour-and-a-half commute to the James A. Farley Post Office in Manhattan.

  On the rare occasions Solly won, he sang “Oyfn Pripetshik,” his favorite Yiddish song.

  Whatever the outcome, the moment the front door slammed, Dink gathered his father’s charts, picked a horse, usually based on its name, and made a bet in his mind to see if he would win.

  Frosty Lady, driven by Carmine Abbatiello, paid $2.80 to show. Dink was a junior in high school and it was the first bet he ever made at a racetrack. Roosevelt Raceway in 1968 was the nation’s largest, most prestigious institution for the advancement of budding mathematicians and degenerate gamblers. On any given night, fifteen to twenty thousand people trotted around the grandstands, chewing on their miniature pencils. They put their money on long shot Shirley MacLaine or big favorite Nevele Pride, and twisted their Daily News into a bludgeon while rooting at the top of the stretch. That’s exactly where fifteen-year-old Dink was when Frosty Lady’s nose thrust first across the finish line. He made eighty cents on his two dollars and thought that betting horses had to be the best way, ever, to make money. Dink stood six-foot-two and had a deep sense of purpose and belonging; the mutuel clerks never once asked to see his ID. He went to the track nearly every day thereafter. With his winnings, he bought a busted-up ’59 Chevy Bel Air. Sparks shot from the steering wheel each time he drove over a pothole.

  Eventually the track became the axis around which all of Dink’s life revolved. It was where he made friends and money, took dates. Where he watched Hank Aaron break the home-run record. Where he was the day his father died, where he met his wife. And it was where he was introduced to many of the people who helped him throughout his career.

  Lenny Goldfarb was a chubby gay bookmaker from Brooklyn who often hung out with Dink and his friends on the steps outside of Yonkers Raceway. He was always interested in seeing if there was any sexual potential with any of the young guys in the group, but even more interested in recruiting customers.

  “Dinky!” Lenny hollered one night, as he approached Dink on the steps. Dink was only sixteen, but already a freshman at Queens College. “Dinky. Look. Why don’t ya get your friends together, and tell ’em to bet with me. I’ll give ya twenty-five percent of their losses. All you gotta do is make sure they pay when they lose, then give the money to me.”

  A quarter sheet. Free money! Dink’s friends always lost when they bet on sports. Dink always lost too. Now all Dink had to do was simply exist and let his friends lose and he’d get twenty-five cents for each dollar they owed Lenny.

  By being a part of Lenny’s business, Dink pocketed twenty, thirty extra dollars a week. More important, though, he learned how a bookmaker made money. In taking bets from gamblers the bookie is only concerned with making sure that, no matter what a game’s outcome, the amount he owes the winning gamblers is matched by the amount of money losing gamblers owe him. He could always gamble, and take a position on games to try and make more money, but as long as he balanced his book, he would profit from the ten-percent commission he charged for taking a bet. This fee is called the vigorish, or the vig, the juice, the take. It’s a bookmaker’s livelihood. It’s also what makes his business illegal. In the United States, the layman is not allowed to charge a fee for taking a bet. That privilege belongs solely to the government-operated or -licensed racetracks, jai-alai frontons, casinos, off-track betting parlors, and state-sanctioned lottery systems.

  Dink saw no harm in getting in on the government’s monopoly. After a few months, he caught on to the business and realized that if he booked his friends himself, he could make even more free money. That was the end of Lenny Goldfarb.

  Dink gave his eight friends hundred-dollar limits and installed a phone line in his bedroom. In between poker games at the Queens College cafeteria and episodes of The Gong Show, he attended his accounting classes. In the evenings, he booked his friends. At night, he went to the track. “You need a secretary!” his mother scolded when he returned home from his long day. “Your phone hasn’t stopped. Louie Saphron called. Said he doesn’t want anythin
g to do with the Jet bet.”

  To avoid his mother’s suspicious stares and the probing that followed, Dink retreated to his bedroom. He fed his hamster and graded his friends’ bets to see how much they lost, then fell asleep watching the Knicks game.

  Dinky brought home beautiful marks, wore his hair short, and stayed away from drugs. He loved his pleasures, though, and the way he put sports and friends before all else worried Freda. She thought Dinky needed structure so she had Solly set him up with a job at the post office. Greetings from Amarillo, Texas! Utah, let this be heaven. Dink figured he was faster at sorting mail than most and, therefore, entitled to read the backs of postcards. After four weeks he got fired for being nosy. After college, Dink worked as a sales-tax auditor. He incessantly sided with the store owners, doing everything in his power so that they wouldn’t get screwed. He got called to task for showing up in jeans and sneakers and five months later he got fired. A relative got Dink a job at the New York State Housing Finance Agency. Eight months later, he quit.

  Other than having to explain to his mother why another job hadn’t worked out, Dink couldn’t have cared less about getting fired. With each tax form he reviewed, he found it increasingly difficult to continue his I-better-do-something-with-my-life-just-in-case attitude toward a career in accounting. It wasn’t like Dink to consider his future. The only time he did so was when he thought about tomorrow’s eighth race. Yet, here he was, twenty years old, at Yonkers and Roosevelt Raceway, consulting friends on whether or not he should try to become a full-time bookmaker.

  The general advice from people in the business was this: Do it! Just don’t ever deal with bad people. Deal with normal people and gamblers. Don’t deal with the mob.

  People who weren’t in the business said: It’s illegal! Try to see the big picture, will ya, Dinky? You don’t want to be surrounded with pathetic people your whole life. Stay with accounting. In the long term, you’ll work at a firm and be a partner one day.