Surviving the Mob (8 page)

With rare exceptions, the New York game had betting limits designed to protect the house from suffering major losses to a hot roll. The normal betting cap was $300. Sometimes that was raised to $500, depending on the players and the mood and bankroll of the operators.

The house started a $300-limit game with a bank of around $30,000. When higher limits were in effect, the bank was in the area of $100,000. Unless high rollers made arrangements for a special game, they were held to the limits no matter how much money they had in their pockets. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t play higher.

To satisfy those who craved more action, players could bet directly with one another without going through the house. This was pure “street craps,” where one player “faded” another’s action. If a shooter wanted to bet $500 on a game with a $300 limit, he could offer the extra $200 to whomever was willing to book the action. Once he had a fader, that portion of the wager was strictly between the players; the house had no financial interest in the outcome of those bets either way.

This side action was often booked at negotiated terms, but only the uninitiated “squares” would accept a bet at diminished odds. For the most part, the players in these games knew their stuff and understood dice probabilities cold. Hence, it was far more likely for man-to-man bets above the limit to be covered at correct odds.

“It wasn’t uncommon for a guy with money looking for action to lay two grand to win a grand on the four or ten, which was an even bet for both players,” says Andrew. “They didn’t care about getting an edge. They just wanted to gamble high.”

Another difference in the underground dice games was that most of the customers were “wrong bettors,” meaning they bet on the “don’t” side of the layout. It’s the opposite in legal casinos, where almost everyone bets the pass line, or the “do” side. There was a good reason for betting wrong in the underground game: better odds.

The version of the game played in the legal casinos is what the gangsters call “Western craps.” That’s not the game the Gambino family ran. Their game was a derivative known as “New York craps.” The two are similar in many respects, but have major differences as well. The man who ran the games for the Gambinos believes those differences made his offering more player-friendly.

The biggest difference was in the basic pass and don’t pass bets, which aren’t even called that in New York craps.
Instead, there was a bet called “Win or Lose.” Betting Win worked exactly like a pass line bet in the standard game. And betting Lose was similar to a bet on don’t pass, with one major difference—there were no “barred” numbers.

In the legal-casino game of craps, on the “come-out” roll, don’t pass bettors lose on a 7 or 11 and win on a 2 or 3, but only tie if a 12 is rolled. It’s called “barring the 12” and it’s the way the house gets its 1.4% edge against the don’ts. If they didn’t bar the 12, the don’t bettors would enjoy the same 1.4% advantage that the house does against pass-line bettors. Incredibly, this was the case in New York craps (and the reason most bet on the don’t side). There was a saying, “Right bettors go broke; wrong bettors go on vacation.”

“How could we do it and still make a profit? It was human nature,” Andrew insists. “The limits on the Win or Lose bets were set well below the limits on the other bets—usually a hundred dollars. Also, there were no come or don’t come options, so there was no way to get more action unless you made one of the other bets, all of which carried a house advantage. Everyone did, of course. The Win and Lose bets were the ultimate loss leader.”

“You say it makes no sense?” added Andrew’s mentor, who dealt New York craps for decades. “The guys didn’t like the bar twelve, so we took it out. We made millions of dollars year after year dealing the game just like that.”

The heart of the game was the “boxes,” which displayed the point numbers 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10. You could “place” or “lay” the numbers at any time and this is where most of the action was. Here, too, the deal was better for the player than in standard casino craps. For example, laying against the numbers in a legal casino yields a casino edge of between 2.4% and 4%, while in New York craps, the edges ranged between 1.64% and 2.44%. Why play in Vegas?

Another variation was that hardway bets were only good for one roll. A one-roll hardway, known as a “hop,” carries a
higher house edge than a standard hardway. And since the outcome is determined in a single roll, this policy induced the gamblers to make more bets at a higher vig, thus earning the house more profit.

But other than hardway hops, the odds in New York craps were better for the players. They had to be, because of the general level of sophistication and mathematical competence of their customers. The mob’s crap customers weren’t dummies.

And the games were generally clean. Andrew knows of instances where a dealer switched in gaffed dice, but that was rare. Math and human nature were enough to get the money at dice and there was a certain reverence for craps that didn’t exist for cards and other games.

“These players wanted to shoot craps,” Andrew says. “They didn’t play blackjack or poker on the side. They were there to bet on dice the way they had all their lives, so for the most part, we had to keep the games pure.”

The dealers came from everywhere and the talent pool was surprisingly rich. Some had dealt craps in the legal casinos of Atlantic City or Vegas, but most had simply grown up around the game and could deal it in their sleep.

If a player tapped out and needed money to get back in the game, no problem. The operator was responsible for having a shylock on site to make loans. Call it the Gambinos’ version of today’s ATM machines.

Interestingly, booze was never available during the game. A lunch was served before play started and a waitress was on hand to deliver beverages, but it was strictly non-alcoholic.

The daughter of a man who owned one of the buildings the Gambinos rented to run their games became a federal prosecutor years later. In an ironic side note, she vigorously went after the very men whose money her father probably used to put her through law school.

Another good money maker for the Gambinos was running card games. Card gatherings were different from craps. These games targeted outsiders and
how
they got the money was less of an issue than simply getting it.

In poker, the house made its profit the traditional way, by raking the pot. They took 5% of the money bet on every hand and the earn from just one big-money game could reach several thousand dollars.

Although raking a percentage from poker didn’t involve cheating, blackjack was a different story. Blackjack games were much more like what you might expect (fear) from mob-run gambling. The games were dealt from 4- or 6-deck shoes and employed Vegas rules for the most part. But the rules didn’t really matter—the shoes the Gambino operators used to deal their blackjack games weren’t designed with the players’ best interests in mind.

One was called a “mirrored shoe.” As the name implies, this gizmo allowed the dealer to see what cards were about to be dealt before they came out, knowledge that was clearly beneficial to a master card manipulator.

The “tap 5” shoe was a man-made miracle for a dealer prone to getting the dreaded 16 hand on the deal. It could also be the death knell for a player who’d doubled down. A simple tap on the shoe automatically caused a 5 to appear as the next card. Players with a 19 or 20, or those who’d doubled or split pairs based on the dealer having a 6 up, watched a seemingly unconscious dealer routinely turn those nasty 15s and 16s into 20s and 21s time after time.

Andrew offers one example of how powerful the crooked blackjack dealers were. “This guy named Al ran weekly Las Vegas nights out of a synagogue. Every week Al got his clock cleaned on his blackjack tables. Finally, he hired cheats to deal for him. He paid out thirty percent of the take. Real
quick, Al recouped his losses and was turning a hefty profit. Once Al was back on his feet, the cheats asked that their cut be raised to sixty percent. Al refused. But that turned out to be an unwise business decision. The card mechanics moved on and Al went back to losing.”

Limits in these games were high—$25-$2,000 was typical—because the cheating insulated the crew from risk. But the devices were used only against strangers—the majority of whom tended to be Asian.

Andrew emphasizes this point. “Pretty much a hundred percent of the blackjack were swindle games that targeted high-rolling strangers. No friends or associates were allowed to participate, because this was strictly a robbery.”

Though not as venerable as craps, booking sports held a high position in the mob’s gambling pantheon. Sports betting has always been among gambling’s most restricted (by the government) activities, while simultaneously being something that millions of sports enthusiasts love to do. That made it a natural for operators of underground games.

“Betting with bookies is the same as betting in a sports book in Las Vegas,” Andrew explains, “only easier. When working with our bookies, the customer didn’t have to show up in person to make a bet. Instead, he was assigned a number and we handled the transactions over the phone. The customer called in to a central office” [these operations were referred to as “sports offices” rather than sports books], “identify his bookie, give his number, and place the bet.”

When he was making book, Andrew used the name “Sonny.” A call to the office from one of his customers might go something like this. “This is for Sonny twenty-seven. I’ll take the Redskins plus seven over the Giants for one-ten.”

That meant he was Sonny’s customer number 27 and he
was betting $110 that the Washington Redskins would either beat the New York Giants outright or lose by less than seven points. It was the standard bet-$110-to-win-$100 arrangement, same as it is in a legal Nevada sports book.

The Gambino bookmaking operation offered most sports—NFL, college football and basketball, NBA, MLB, boxing matches, etc. They dealt sides, totals, parlays, teasers, and other betting options, but no futures
ever
(that required accounting and the holding of money, the sorts of things that could lead to disputes). Limits were high—up to $5,000 on sides and $2,000 on totals, more than many Las Vegas books will take today. The opening lines came from several sources, including the famous “Vegas line” that originated out of the Stardust.

“When the office received a call,” Andrew explains, “we first checked the player’s ‘sheet’ to see how much credit he had. If his bet didn’t put him over his credit limit, we took his action.”

Credit was an integral part of the sports-betting puzzle. The guys manning the office updated the customer’s information after each game, so his credit situation was always current going into the next round of action. A player could get as much credit as the bosses thought he was worth and good for.

“They constantly monitored a guy’s action and followed his betting and borrowing patterns. For example, if someone was going on a losing streak, they knew the average of his prior bets and how much credit he usually carried. If he was all of a sudden betting more and losing, they intervened. Keep in mind that seven out of ten of our customers were people from the neighborhood and we knew their backgrounds and financial capabilities. We knew what most of them could afford.

“As a rule of thumb, when a guy owed, we allowed him to play for cash if he wanted to. If he won, we took a piece
toward what he owed when he cashed out. We worked with these guys, because getting heavy over a debt usually meant losing a customer that you knew would have money again and would find somewhere else to bet. Then you’d have to chase that money. Our method worked very well. Now, if a customer ran away with a big tab, we definitely tracked him down, because at that point, he was outright robbing us.”

Although bets were taken by phone, there still had to be personal contact between the bookie and his customers to settle up. This was done once a week on Tuesdays when the bookie drove around and met with his clients. Why Tuesday?

“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.