by Beth Raymer
A twenty-inch snowfall confined me to the Israeli’s apartment for two of the longest days of my life. In the shadows of his living room, he played Israeli fight songs on his Casio keyboard. On day two, I was jumping rope in the hallway when the phone rang.
“I’m only doing this because I’m concerned for your near future,” Dink said. His cheerful tone signaled that he had, indeed, found a way to maximize his gains. I couldn’t believe I had actually followed his advice and tried to get a legit job. His big Roll-n-Roaster-franchise lecture hadn’t even been sincere. He was just in a bad mood because the Patriots weren’t covering the spread. When would I learn?
He gave me the phone number of Bernard Rose. A “harmless maniac” Dink had known since he was a teenager, Bernard had a gambling and bookmaking office on Long Island.
Without hesitation I hung up on Dink and dialed the number.
“Right, right, Dinky’s friend,” Bernard remembered out loud. “You like pizza? You been to Ronkonkoma? The. Best. Pizza. Famous for its pizza. Take the railroad to Ronkonkoma and look for the most miserable guy driving a limo. That’s Mikey.”
As the morning sun pushed the temperature up from the negative into the single digits, I hightailed it through the Long Island Rail Road parking lot and jumped into the back of Bernard’s stretch limo. It was warm back there and had a greasy smell, which seemed to fit with Mikey’s surliness. Navigating the slushy streets, he kept a running monologue under his breath. Like hell I’m gonna let yuh in. Nice blinker, tough guy.
Through the tinted windows, I watched people wave to me from their cars. Parents pointed me out to their kids. They thought I was famous.
In the back of a pizzeria, at a red-and-white-checkered table, the three-hundred-seventy-pound Bernard Rose sat splay-legged, the lower half of his belly hovering just a foot or so from the floor. Gripping a chocolate éclair the size of a hoagie, he smiled to himself as he read the paper.
“Today is the most beautiful day in the history of the world!” Bernard beamed. His black, unruly eyebrows curled into glittering blue eyes. The gray at his temples glistened with perspiration. “Cher is coming to Madison Square Garden!”
“Ah, Christ,” Mikey said, disgusted. “Well guess what? I ain’t drivin’ yuh there.” He plopped into a corner booth, where he sat, bemoaning his existence for the entire afternoon.
Bernard offered me a seat and poured me a glass of root beer. “I had the weirdest dream last night,” he began, creating instant intimacy. “I was real aggravated yesterday. My wife was mad at me. My parents came over so I’m trying to hide my gambling. They pick a time to leave and it’s halftime of all the four o’clock games. Torture! I can’t leave the computer to tell them good-bye so I pretend to be stuck in the chair …”
Across the room, a waiter delivered food to an elderly woman lunching alone. Bernard cupped his hands at the corners of his mouth and shouted, “Vera! How come you’re getting served before me?”
“Because, Bernard,” said Vera, “I’m special.”
“That’s my weakness,” Bernard whispered. “Women with a lot of personality.”
Waiters arrived at our table, balancing pizzas, bowls of spaghetti, Caesar salads, baskets of garlic knots, and French fries. Bernard took one last bite of his éclair, set it on top of his cell phone, and tucked a paper napkin beneath his third chin.
“Meatballs make me so happy it’s scary,” he said. “Anyways, yesterday. Lots of aggravation. Very rough sleep.”
He wound pasta around his fork until it resembled a fat spool of yarn. “So, my dream. I was dead. Dead! I was watching my own funeral and I could hear everything everybody was saying. My wife was telling somebody that she wanted me to come back to life. That she loved me and she was upset that she never told me. Are you tasting this marinara?”
With each colossal bite, Bernard’s fat cheeks and bulbous nose grew rosy with delight. His greasy lips had a hard time keeping pace with his racing mind and rapid speech. He was looking to get into the pineapple import business, the ice-cream-cone business, the popcorn-machine business. He dreamed of starting up his own premium-rate telephone service: 1-900-BAD-BEAT, a number gamblers could call when they suffered a heartbreaking loss and needed to vent. “Ninety-nine cents a minute. Think of the advertising! ‘If you need assistance with debt consolidation please press one.’
“I’ll trade you,” he said. “My pepperoncini for your garlic knot.”
For Bernard our meeting was probably just a favor to Dink, a chance to get out of the office and order a few more items off the menu without the guilt. But for me, it was the first time since leaving Vegas that I was sitting across from someone, enjoying myself. Watching him smile and chew, the afternoon light coming in through the frosty picture window behind, I was seized with the urge to crawl into his lap and rattle off my Christmas list.
“Dinky says you’re an independent thinker,” Bernard said. “I like that. Let’s think of a job for you.”
“Make her get her Class B license,” Mikey said from the booth. “Make her drive the limo.”
“I’m good on the phones,” I said, ignoring Mikey. “And I like going on pay and collects.”
“Ah, Christ. Who doesn’t?” Mikey said.
With the last garlic knot, Bernard soaked up the grease from his plate. “Got it! Hows about you pick up the donuts in the morning. Love Boston creams. Addicted! What we’ll do is, you’ll be my girl Friday. Girl-Friday-dream-therapist. That’s you.”
Leaning in closer, he whispered, “I’ll pay you forty dollars an hour. It’s more than Mikey makes.”
Double what I made at Dink Inc.: “Perfect,” I said.
Surrendering to the empty baskets and pizza trays, Bernard removed the napkin from his chin and set it gently atop his plate. He slapped his hands together, cleaning the crumbs from his palms. “Done,” he said. “Let’s go get a pedicure.”
I moved out of the Israeli’s immediately and into the second floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn, walking distance to the Flatbush Avenue LIRR terminal. Five mornings a week, the stretch limo waited for me outside the Ronkonkoma station. Grudgingly, Mikey set aside the sports section and drove me to Dunkin’ Donuts, where I’d pick up a dozen Boston creams and two large black coffees in styrofoam containers and bring them to Bernard’s office.
Named after Bernard’s favorite sandwich, BLT Inc. was on the fourth floor of a characterless building overlooking the Long Island Expressway. The “rent-a-space” was a tiny, windowless room with access to a lobby that supplied a copy machine, a stapler, and Sarah, a communal secretary with a matronly bun and obvious crush on Bernard. BLT shared the floor with three other businesses. But they weren’t really businesses. They were just divorced men past forty who didn’t have a lot going for them. One of the guys lived in his rent-a-space, a secret Sarah was kind enough to keep to herself. On Fridays, as an end-of-the-week goodwill gesture, Bernard ordered BLTs for everyone on our floor, which I delivered, courtesy of BLT.
From the moment I met Bernard, I understood why Dink called him harmless. But it wasn’t until the door to BLT closed that I witnessed the other half of Dink’s description, maniac. How the man generated money through booking, betting, hedging, arbitraging, middling, and scalping, the way he pinched pennies and shaved points and chopped numbers. It wasn’t gambling. It was cannibalism.
Unlike Dink, who handicapped games and employed a crew to search for weak lines, Bernard had no raw handicapping skills and he worked alone. He was, however, an exceptionally gifted mathematician who was utterly confident in his unique arbitrage system. The strategies he used in his sports betting—scouring the market, placing big bets on small discrepancies between bookmakers’ lines—were no different from the strategies hedge funds use to exploit small deviations in commodities prices or foreign-exchange rates. Sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, he sat in front of his computers booking bets, making bets, calculating sixteen-team-if-reverse-round-robins in his head and taking advantage o
f the very large, very liquid, no-risk betting opportunities created by the Internet. He referred to his gambling style as “grinding,” and fellow bookmakers around the world knew him as the Industrial Sander.
“Charting, it’s alls about the charting,” he’d say. Though I never once saw him chart anything. Nor did I see him use a calculator. The amount of money that moved through BLT on a daily basis made Dink Inc. look downright conservative. Even when Dink found a very cheap price on a matchup he absolutely loved, I never saw him bet more than seven thousand dollars on a game. When Bernard found the best of it, there was no limit to what he bet. No matter how marginal the mathematical advantage, he would keep betting and betting and betting—hundreds of thousands of dollars—until the kickoff, tip-off, or first pitch took the game off the board. Only after the game started did Bernard consider how much he had riding on it.
It was shocking. Sitting at my little desk directly across from his, I watched Bernard frantically scribble on the backs of paper plates the hundreds of bets that he placed and booked. “Should I lay the sixteen minus the oh-two to get a take-back of plus seventeen minus the oh-nine?” he’d ask the office goldfish, while overfeeding it. The day’s climax came at six p.m., when the folks in China were just waking up. Their action came flying over the Internet gambling sites, creating awesome scalp and middle opportunities, or, as Bernard called it, “steam.”
“We’re steaming!” he’d holler, giving off a faint whiff of custard filling. “Complete bedlam! Bet, Beth, bet! Get on the phone! Steaming!”
Bernard was involved in every imaginable facet of gambling and bookmaking and I’d guess that about twenty-five, maybe thirty, percent of what he was up to was illegal. Point being, he should’ve been a little more discreet. As if the limousine and the yelling and the ever-ringing telephones weren’t enough to raise suspicion, each day, around noon, Wombat, Guppy, the Battler, Bernie the Bartender, and other gambling clients or “famous guests” that Bernard booked or went to the track or synagogue with staggered into our sweltering little office. Polite conversation quickly devolved into how much was owed to whom and when it could be paid. One of my girl Friday responsibilities was to make phone calls to see how we could move the money, calling Dookie’s guy who wanted to get paid in Yonkers and Scooter’s guy who needed money in Newark, confirming that Chinese John had a package ready for pickup at his restaurant in Flushing and Lenny Smalls was good for sixty dimes. Once the pay and collects were arranged, Bernard settled into his chair. With the famous guest at his side, he shared stories of what the guest was famous for.
“Totally famous. Invented the handoff. Put the money he owed you in a fancy Lord and Taylor string shopping bag and instead of saying hello, he walked past you and swung it right into your hand. Very graceful. Very athletic.
“Notoriously. Famous. Three ex-wives. All sued him for mental cruelty.
“Unbelievably famous. Super Bowl Sunday, 1981. Bet sixty thousand on the Eagles. Midway, first quarter, Eagles are down fourteen nothing. They were favored. He had no chance. All of a sudden, comes flying down the stairs with a dozen eggs, cracking them over his head. He was overheating. I said, ‘Drink water!’ but no. He rubbed egg all over his face. Fourteen nothin’. Famous.”
I would not be lying if I said these famous guests were the most socially inept misfits I’d ever met. Dink’s friends in Vegas … sure, some were a bit odd. But these guys still lived with their mothers. Watching them watch Bernard as he lifted their inadequacies into the heightened world of legend, I saw the faces of men who had never before heard anyone say something nice about them. Their smiles were so unnatural they looked more like agony. Bernard was an exceptional storyteller, but his real gift was his vulnerability. Sharing his unabashed love for Cher and pedicures was just the beginning. He talked freely of his visits to his “pill doctor,” his struggles with his weight and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the gloom he felt when he argued with his teenage son. The guests listened to Bernard in wonderment, as though they were waking up to the realization that they weren’t the only ones with such problems. I think Bernard was their only link to humanity.
“They all want to be your best friend,” I said, after a famous guest left.
“When you’re doing good everybody wants to be your best friend,” he said. “When you’re doing bad nobody wants to know you. That’s in any business in any part of life. If you live long enough, you’ll see what I mean.”
Like most people who have suffered a traumatic event, Bernard split his life into two categories: all that came before and all that came after what he referred to as the “1983 Broke.”
Before the 1983 Broke, Bernard was thin, boyish, and profligate. Growing up in Sands Point, on Long Island, Bernard had as neighbors the power broker William Shea (whose eponymous stadium was the home field of the New York Mets), the CEOs of MGM and Pfizer, and the singer Perry Como, who, on Halloween, handed out silver dollars in lieu of candy. Still, it was the Rose residence that the neighborhood kids flocked to. At Bernard’s, they could eat sandwiches and play cards with the gregarious mathematical prodigy who, at three years old, began beating his mom at her own game—gin rummy—while keeping score in his head. When the Roses went grocery shopping, Bernard rode along in the cart and kept a running figure of each item tossed inside. Arriving at the checkout line, he’d announce the grand total, tax included.
Though everyone in the Rose family enjoyed a good card game, there was something in the way Bernard played poker at age twelve, the way he thrived in the high-action environment, that made his mother uncomfortable. Returning home from the office one afternoon, she found Bernard hosting a poker tournament at the dining room table. For his friends’ refreshment, he had put out an impressive spread of crackers, cheeses, and deli meats served atop a polished silver tray garnished with fruit. Hand after hand, he was fleecing every single one of them.
Bernard’s interest shifted from poker to sports gambling when he was fourteen. Working weekends at his father’s beer-and-soda store, Bernard noticed the unkempt customer who, no matter the weather, wore a bright red fireman’s jacket. Bernard assumed Barfy was homeless. But then he noticed his father bought stuff from Barfy. Football parlay sheets.
“You can bet whatever team you want?” a mystified Bernard asked his father. “You don’t have to have someone bet against you?”
Bernard and his friends loved football and they always tried to bet each other. But every Sunday they all agreed the Jets would win and that was the end of it.
“Nope,” his dad said. “That’s what a bookmaker’s for. Lay fifty-five dollars to win fifty and it’s no problem.”
For Bernard, this information marked a true awakening. Barfy, football sheets: life was beginning to make sense. Crunching sports statistics gave Bernard the intellectual stimulation he craved and by his senior year, he was making enough money from cards and betting Barfy to buy his own custom-made leisure suits. Textured and four shades of brown, just like the kind Perry Como wore. Bernard couldn’t wait until he had to give the lunch lady a couple dollars so he could pull his huge wad of cash out in front of everybody. The pull of money was very strong. Just feeling the weight of it in his pocket gave Bernard a shot of libido.
Bernard’s popularity was such that at sixteen, when he started booking, he quickly out-customered Barfy and even Dinky, who was four years older. Not wanting to be an accomplice to her son’s illegal activity, but loving him too much to throw him out, Bernard’s mom rented him a caretaker’s cottage on a nearby country estate. Nestled among evergreens and a lily pond, the cottage was the perfect cover for the illegal high-stakes gambling taking place inside. Free from the oppressiveness of home and school, Bernard became the renegade scientist of bookmaking. Carrying out erratic mathematical experiments in the forms of live betting and reverse parlays, he laid off with other bookies, booked people against each other, and cross-booked six different racetracks.
To his friends, he was a god. And to this day,
they still remember the afternoon in 1977 when they first discovered just how much Bernard was worth. Overhearing him on the phone, taking five- and ten-thousand-dollar bets for over an hour, a friend finally asked, “Bernard, how are you dealing that high?” With some persuasion, Bernard revealed his bankroll. He had made two and a half million dollars from gambling. He was nineteen years old.
Mesmerized, his new entourage tagged along with him everywhere he went, which of course included Roosevelt Raceway. Most of the entourage had never spent time at the track and it seemed to them a very strange place. There were a lot of different cliques and within each huddle there seemed to be a lot of secrecy going on. Bernard navigated each group effortlessly, leaving his entourage to eat SuperPretzels and pretend to understand the exacta board.
One evening, Bernard returned to them. He looked electrified. “You see that guy?” he whispered, nodding toward a kid just a few years older than them.
Certain that the kid had given Bernard a tip that would make them all rich, the entourage gathered in closer.
“That guy,” Bernard said. “He’s married!”
That Bernard viewed matrimony as big, inside information revealed the second gulf widening between him and his peers. His broke-ass friends were getting girls and Bernard wasn’t. Young, rich, gifted, but chronically love-shy, unable to even mutter the word “date,” Bernard, at nineteen, still called them “things.” He knew plenty of guys who went on “things,” but what impressed him most were the guys who were married. It seemed so nice to have a wife to spend money on and care for. But he was getting ahead of himself. God forbid he ever got lucky and found himself on a “thing” with a girl, let alone getting married. Deflated, his entourage rolled their eyes and Bernard let his thoughts drift back to long division.
Finally an older, very mature guy from the track (G.B., age twenty-four) became Bernard’s romance mentor. Offering Bernard guidance on how to adequately spend his money, G.B. helped him move out of the cottage and into a thirty-second-floor penthouse with a five-bridge view. He decorated and stocked the penthouse with all the items Bernard needed to draw in the girls: marijuana, every type of pill imaginable, Commodores albums, disco lights. To ring in 1978, G.B. threw a party, inviting everyone from the track. From behind the glass-beaded curtain, a dozen nineteen-year-old girls emerged, one after the other, like ducklings from tall grass. “Gentlemen,” G.B. announced, “meet the Swedish Connection!”