Free Surviving the Mob by Dennis Griffin Page A

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 piecetoward 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.
    “We treated the winners well,” Andrew says. “But if they were too good, we fucked up their lines. This wasn’t Vegas; we could change the line instantly when we needed to. But we never chased a winner. By that I mean we never punished a winner by shutting him out or telling him to go elsewhere.”

RACE BETTING
    The race-betting business was also run out of the sports office. Horses drew far less action than sports, but it was a good earner. The mob’s payouts were better than the competition’s, which was the New York Off-Track Betting parlors; to pay their costs, the OTBs took out too much. So players could get more on winning tickets from the illegal joints.
    “We took a lot of business away from the OTBs,” says Andrew. “We offered food and had the same simulcast live feeds showing mostly every racetrack in the country. We extended small amounts of credit to good customers and offered a twenty-five-percent kickback on the weekly loss, because these guys were never gonna win. As the proverb goes, ‘All horse bettors die broke and live