Free Surviving the Mob by Dennis Griffin

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. Realquick, 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.”

SPORTS BETTING
    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 hewas 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