Lay the Favorite

by Beth Raymer

  Stocky goons armed with machine guns motioned our car through the sports book’s gate. Surveillance cameras followed us from the parking lot to the receptionist’s desk, up the elevator, and along the hallway, where more armed guards stood one after the other.

  Inside, the betting floor resembled your typical offshore call center if it were designed for a porn film. Just-out-of-college Latinas in tube tops, miniskirts, and platform heels sat cross-legged behind computer screens. “Me-jammy Heat, game two twenty-four, minus six,” they enunciated into the microphones of their headsets. Between calls they brushed their long hair and applied fruit-flavored lip gloss. The few male employees took up seats in the far back row, beside the foosball table. The nonstop ringing of telephones and clerks confirming bets ranging from ten dollars to ten thousand dollars sounded the book’s success.

  Beeber, a red-faced American in his forties, ran the place. He sat at a metal desk in a back office enclosed in bulletproof glass. Dink knocked on the glass, interrupting the animated conversation Beeber was having with himself. His bodyguard stood at his side. Beeber had no patience with small talk. If Dink was serious about opening up offshore, he said, wiping sweat from his sideburns, he ought to know a few things going in. First and foremost, there had been some kidnappings. American bookmakers and their families had been kidnapped and held for ransom. It was wise to have bodyguards. Ex-policemen made for excellent protection. They could also help get you a gun. You should be packed at all times. Second, the electricity went out constantly and employees were never on time. Many of them had drug problems. If you had high blood pressure, Fuggetaboudit. Extortion attacks, another major problem. Russian computer hackers were sending e-mails threatening to take your Web site off-line the morning of the Super Bowl. You had to Western Union the cocksuckers forty grand to get them off your back. Not fun.

  “I think he’s paranoid from doing too many drugs,” I whispered to Dink as Beeber and his bodyguard walked to the men’s room. “He’s got, like, specks of cocaine all over his face.”

  “I think that’s dandruff,” Dink said. “I really don’t think the stuff he’s saying is that farfetched.”

  “He sits behind bulletproof glass fifteen hours a day! Who does he think is gonna come gun him down? The dude across the street selling oranges from his oxcart?”

  “Maybe he has poor relations with some bad people back east, who knows,” Dink said. “Save it ’til we leave. There’s cameras everywhere, people can probably hear what you’re saying.”

  “Russian computer hackers?” I whispered.

  The second sports book we visited was a sleek four-floor operation that employed a thousand Costa Ricans and offered free on-site day care. There were no bulletproof windows or bodyguards in sight. Framed photographs of players from the New York Giants and a wedding picture of the bookie’s mother and father hung from his office walls. Leonard, the owner, seemed more levelheaded than Beeber. I asked about the Russian hackers.

  “Well, we’re guessing they’re Russian; they asked that the money be wired to St. Petersburg,” said Leonard. But the hackers, in his opinion, should’ve been the least of anyone’s concerns. The biggest enemy was, still, the U.S. government, which did not approve of Costa Rica’s cozy relationship with the betting industry. Try as they might to escape the United States’ antigambling laws, offshore bookmakers still worried that the U.S. government would find ways to prosecute them. Bookmaking might be legal in Costa Rica, but the fact that most customers were American meant that, in the eyes of the United States, they could still be tried under American law. The specific law, the gambling community had recently found out, was U.S. Code Title 18, Section 1084, commonly known as the Wire Act. Born of then attorney general Robert Kennedy’s efforts to break the Mafia’s violent grip on American life, the 1961 law made it illegal to use phone wires to place bets across state and international lines. But it remained a matter of opinion whether the law could be applied to the highly unregulated world of the Internet. The bookmaker who would become involved in the precedent-setting case was a U.C. Berkeley graduate with a degree in nuclear engineering; a self-proclaimed “nice Jewish boy from Long Island” named Jay Cohen.

  Everyone in the gambling world had heard of Jay Cohen and everyone shared the same worry: if they can bust Jay, they can bust anyone.

  In 1996, Cohen was a twenty-eight-year-old options trader in San Francisco who figured that opening an Internet sports book would be good business but wasn’t sure it was legal. His lawyers didn’t see any problems provided all the company’s employees and bank accounts existed in a jurisdiction that allowed gambling. One year and six hundred thousand dollars later, Cohen and his partners moved to Antigua and launched World Sports Exchange. Soon, Cohen had two thousand customers and was booking as much as two hundred million dollars a year.

  The rise of online gambling and the media attention it received angered social conservatives, who cautioned that the Internet made it too easy to turn into a degenerate gambler. No longer would you have to go through the trouble of finding a bookie. If you felt the sudden urge to bet the Eagles two minutes before kickoff, you could do so from the privacy of your own home. You could “bet with the click of a mouse,” which was the very phrase World Sports Exchange used to advertise its services.

  This didn’t make Las Vegas casinos and certain states very happy, either, since they were equally bent on protecting local gambling monopolies. Professional sports teams, though they relied on gambling to develop their audience, did not want to be associated with shady operations and threatened legal action against online gambling sites using their trademarked logos.

  Jay Cohen probably would have survived the increased legal scrutiny surrounding online betting had he not made one mistake. He couldn’t resist speaking to the media. It was the sort of hubris that revealed his inexperience in the world he had taken by storm. Seasoned gamblers knew that even where their profession had the stamp of legality, such legitimacy was tenuous at best. Gambling was loathed by many and always under public scrutiny; it was best to keep a low profile. That’s why successful gamblers leased their cars, always paid in cash, and instructed their kids to say that Dad worked in “consulting.” You never knew when or how you would be pulled down.

  Cohen, though, felt confident that his business was totally aboveboard, and he said so in the pages of The Wall Street Journal and Sports Illustrated and during prime time on 60 Minutes. He explained that he modeled his business on another sports book, one that was completely legal and operated freely in New York State. This was Capital OTB, the off-track betting corporation that served as the state’s bookie for horse racing. And just like World Sports Exchange, Capital OTB took bets by phone from bettors anywhere in the United States. If Capital OTB was legal, how could WSE, doing the same thing, be illegal?

  Cohen’s media crusade turned his brown eyes and baby fat into the public face of offshore Internet gambling. But once gambling had a face, the government had a target.

  In 1998, the United States charged Cohen in a criminal complaint with violating the Wire Act. As Attorney General Janet Reno said at the time, summing up the government’s position: “You can’t go offshore and hide. You can’t go online and hide.”

  Cohen did not view himself as some mobster in hiding. He was a law-abiding employer based in Antigua. The Wire Act did not apply. To prove his point, he returned to America to fight the charge, surrendering himself to FBI agents in New York City.

  When the trial began, the government attacked Cohen’s arguments in straightforward terms. It wasn’t enough that his company operated wholly in Antigua. By using phone lines to book American customers, the company had clearly violated the Wire Act. Signaling its intent to establish a precedent, the government said it didn’t matter that the Wire Act only referred to phone lines, which had been the traditional means of getting down with your local bookie. Had the Internet existed in 1961 it too would have been included in the law.

  Cohen was found
guilty on eight counts of violating the Wire Act and sentenced to twenty-one months in prison. After losing his appeal, he served his time at Nellis prison camp in Nevada, twenty-five miles north of the Las Vegas Strip.

  “And all that bullshit was before September eleventh,” Leonard said. “Now the government is propagandizing that bookmakers in Costa Rica may be funding terrorists. They’re saying there may be a link. That we may be wiring our winnings to Al-Qaeda. They’re using that as an excuse to shut us down.”

  “The government’s retarded,” Dink said. “People were bookmakers in the United States. They were never anything but bookmakers. Then they made the laws too tough so the bookmakers moved to Costa Rica. And now the bookmakers are funding terrorists by taking some bet on the Cubs from a guy in Chicago?”

  Congress, criminal complaints, prison camps: these were just abstract words to me. The money was what stuck. The two-hundred-thousand-dollar days; the fifteen-million-dollar months. The numbers these men were netting were as supersized as their chauffeur-driven Hummers, eight-thousand-square-foot compounds, and Costa Rican girlfriends’ newly implanted double-D silicone breasts. House parties were thrown nearly every night. The beginning of baseball season, a finalized divorce: there was always a reason to celebrate.

  The faint light of the moon led guests up a stone path to a bookmaker’s mountaintop estate. Hookers from the Del Rey dipped their toes into the heated infinity pool that overlooked three volcanoes. Friends visiting from the States snacked on the smorgasbord of sushi laid out around the teakwood deck. The air was cool, the plants and trees rain-rinsed. Lightning bugs flashed near the Jacuzzi where the bookmakers gathered. In velour tracksuits, sipping rum from highballs, they discussed the conversion of European hockey odds and rated each other’s fantasy basketball teams. The Costa Rican clerks—and their friends, siblings, cousins, and uncles—passed joints and took turns on a guitar. Arpeggios floated into the rustling mango trees until sunrise, when they yielded to birdsong.

  After such a party, my enthusiasm soared. On hotel stationery I would list potential employees for Dink’s offshore headquarters. My dad would make an awesome sales manager. Newly single (Brenda Baby had broken his heart), he’d been looking to flee to a foreign country to escape alimony payments to my mother. During my parents’ marriage, my mom never had a job, a result of my father’s old-fashioned attitude. On the grounds that she left him, Dad refused to pay alimony, leaving Mom, at fifty years old, to support herself on a minimum-wage retail job. Mom raised my sister and me and I felt she deserved alimony. It was the only thing my father and I argued about. “You know I love you kids,” Dad was fond of saying when I confronted him about Mom’s situation. “I just don’t want to give your mother any money.” If I offered him a job at Dink Inc. International, I could give him a high salary, then dock his paycheck a couple hundred bucks and send my mom some of the payment she was entitled to. And if my sister ever got clean, she might be right for a clerical position. It would be a win-win situation for the entire Raymer family.

  At the hooker bar inside the Del Rey, while waiting for Big Tim to chaperone us to our next excursion, I listed the estimated startup costs. I learned that online sports books required the same licenses as the country’s hot dog vendors. If we wanted one, we should talk to some guy named Enrique, who offered them at a discount.

  Mosquitoes swarmed around my ears and ankles. The sweet smell of the cabbie’s cigar clashed with his pine-scented cologne. Or was that a leak in the oil valve? I pressed my cheek against the sticky window and watched a malnourished rooster peck out litter floating in a flooded gutter. I began to see why the gamblers compared Costa Rica to the Wild West.

  Still, I kept my enthusiasm alive. Even when we visited bookmakers who admitted they were on the verge of bankruptcy, whose betting floor was as quiet and morose as a living room of mourners sitting shiva, I could only see potential. Their office space was orderly and centrally located. If they went out of business, we could take over their lease. Tactlessly, I asked how much they planned to sell their computer servers for.

  Dink, meanwhile, was miserable. It was his first time out of the country and it became obvious that he was more than a homebody—he was Rain Man. Without his daily direct feed of NHL games, chocolate milk, and fried potato knishes, his mood was agitated and at times he became hysterical. Realizing that his ticker didn’t work overseas, he banged it against his head. There wasn’t a satellite in the country that picked up hockey games, and each night Dink sat on the edge of the hotel bed, inches from the TV, repeating the word “brutal” with each click of the remote. He refused to sip Coca-Cola out of a little plastic bag, Central American style. When he ordered a pizza and it came topped with coconut, he refused to eat it, even when I volunteered to pick off the slivers, piece by piece. Losing patience, I threatened to punch him. He growled—actually showed his teeth—and marched out of the restaurant. From that evening on we ate our meals at the Denny’s by the airport and I never felt another twinge of romantic love for Dink ever again. And, ordering the “Moons Over My Hammy” sandwich for the third night in a row, I realized I had been wrong about Tulip. It wasn’t just money that kept her in the marriage. It couldn’t be. No amount of money could compensate for Dink’s stubbornness and constant self-loathing. She was a patient, loyal wife, and Dink was exceptionally lucky to have her.

  Just beyond the polluted, billboarded city of San José, voluptuous green hills peeped through wispy white clouds. If, just for one day, Dink left behind the noisy, air-conditioned sports books and the relentless talk of money won and lost, I was sure that his mood would improve and that he could reflect clearly on the endless possibilities of this new and exciting venture. I arranged for a day trip to the Tabacón resort, where we would soak in hot springs at the foot of an active volcano and have a heart-to-heart.

  It was Valentine’s Day weekend and lovers from all over the world shared flirty glances inside steamy thermal pools in the center of a tropical rain forest. Rushing waterfalls clapped against shiny black rock. In the high fog, tent bats slept inside banana leaves. Holding my Lava Flow mixed drink above water, I doggie-paddled to the center of the pool.

  “I can’t!” Dink shouted over squabbling parakeets. “I don’t know how to swim.” He cringed as if the act of breathing fresh air caused him great pain.

  “It’s four foot deep!” I shouted back.

  Hoisting his swimming trunks high over his marshmallow-white belly, he descended unsteadily into 106-degree water. His glasses fogged and he pulled them from his face. Without them, his small eyes darted and he looked confused. He walked toward me, slowly, his outstretched arms cutting through the steam. I thought he was pretending to be a mummy. I laughed and stirred my drink until, suddenly, I realized that Dink was truly scared and I rushed over to guide him to the sitting area. I cleaned his glasses underwater and dried them with a stranger’s towel. He slid them over his ears. They instantly fogged.

  “Can we please move here,” I said. “It’s time to take Dink Inc. to the international level. I’ll take care of all the start-up headache stuff. Just please let’s move here. I want to make a million dollars. I want the best of it!”

  He swayed his head and shoulders side to side, a mannerism of his that indicated uncertainty. He always swayed two minutes to post. “I don’t think this is the best of it,” he said. “I thought it would be easier. I thought it would be like working in Queens.”

  “This is as close to Queens as you’re gonna get,” I said.

  “No it’s not. In Queens there wasn’t anyone at my door with a machine gun.”

  “We don’t have to have the guy with the machine gun.”

  My naïveté hit a nerve. Potential dangers shot from Dink’s mouth like a string of firecrackers. Kidnappings, bodyguards, unreliable drug-addicted clerks, computer hackers, jail time. Dink was already a felon; if he were arrested again he would serve time in prison. When would I understand that? he asked, turning away from the sunb
urned couple French-kissing beside him. When would I understand how tough this business was?

  No bookmaker or gambler expects to get paid in full by everybody, every year. And that was just one of the job hazards. Personal masseuses will lift a few grand; betonsports.com will go bankrupt, have a fire sale in the middle of the night, and run away with whatever is left in their customers’ accounts. The real problems come when the FBI knocks down your door, freezes your bank accounts, and cleans out your security boxes. When you go before a judge and hear the words “conspiracy” and “racketeering.” Even more demoralizing were the inside jobs. Hand a casino runner one hundred grand to make bets every day and at some point the temptation will be too much. How many afternoons had Dink listened to one of his casino runners invent some phony robbery? I went to the mailbox, I had your money in a fanny pack, and I was held up at gunpoint. Nineteen grand, gone. Look, Dinky! See? I got punched in the face. Eighty grand, gone. Some of the employees didn’t even bother to concoct a lie. Bernie confessed to stealing ten grand to pay his mortgage. Fishman, while working as a runner, robbed Dink of twenty thousand. He claimed the money fell from his pocket, and then admitted that he lost it betting baseball. “Like an idiot he bet the biggest underdog in the series!” Dink said, growing more agitated with each recollection. “I told him, ‘If you’re gonna rob somebody, lay the favorite. You have a better chance of winning. Why would you take the underdog? You’re robbing! Bet the most likely winner so at least you can say “I won!”’”