Free Everybody Goes to Jimmy's by Michael Mayo Page B

operation used three numbers from the stock exchange, but I’m only going on what I heard. I never took part in the racket myself, and things always look different from the outside. But I do know this—Jacob the Wise became a very rich man with his policy business.
    Now, everybody thinks that Dutch Schultz and Abbadabba Berman were the geniuses who figured out how to make the odds even better than 999 to 1 by placing heavy bets on particular races to screw around with the results. I heard Abbadabba brag that he’d added 15 percent to their weekly take.
    Maybe that’s true. I doubt it, but it could be. I also know that Dutch and Abbadabba didn’t do anything that Weiss and Benny “Numbers” Rosenbluth didn’t do better.
    Benny had some way of keeping tabs on heavily played number combinations during the day and then buying or selling stocks to jigger the numbers at the end of the day. According to him, he could bump the odds from 1,000 to 1 to 2,000 to 1, depending. He also had some way of making sure that key people in certain neighborhoods won regularly. These were the women and men that other people paid attention to, so Weiss’s game was a hell of a lot more popular than Dutch’s.
    What it all amounted to was that at the height of the Depression, Weiss’s policy operation was knocking down seventy thousand dollars a day, six days a week. That’s a hell of a lot of pennies and nickels.
    Sure, it cost a lot to keep the operation running, but Weiss did well enough to run a busy loan-sharking business, too. It was a hell of a sweet racket.
    I told Weeks that I didn’t think there would be much interest in that kind of gambling at my place. “Sometimes guys want to use the room upstairs for craps or poker, but we don’t get much call for that either. It’s not really big enough.” I hoped that would be the end of it. I was ready to go to the Chatham.
    Weeks slugged back his drink and said, “Everything’s gone to hell since we lost Benny Numbers.”
    â€œWhat?” said the Professor, perking up. “Who’s Benny Numbers?”
    I’d heard a lot of stories about what had happened to Numbers, none of them from guys that I had any reason to trust, so once Weeks started talking, I sat back and listened and tried not to think about the Chatham. A little anyway.
    Weeks had been working for Jacob the Wise for a long time, and he’d never say anything bad about him in public. Hell, Weeks hardly ever said anything. Besides being one of those silent types, he had a funny way of talking slowly through clenched teeth, like every word was painful. Word was that he’d been shot in the jaw robbing a bank with Harve Bailey, and he did have a funny mark near his neck that might have been a scar.
    Jacob Weiss was one of those smart guys who came from a respectable family that had disowned him years before he became a hoodlum. They took the money he gave them, but they still disowned him. And they were outraged when Benny Rosenbluth, one of the brightest kids in the neighborhood, from another respectable family, fell in with Jacob. He wasn’t related. For some reason, the Jews who worked on the wrong side of the law didn’t bring their relatives into the business the way the Italians did. At least, that was my experience, and I worked with a lot of ’em. But, the point is that Jacob loved the kid like the son he didn’t have. Benny was a natural for the policy racket. I heard that they called him “Numbers” from the time he was a little kid.
    Weiss was married, but his wife disapproved of his work even more than the rest of the family, so he kept company with younger women. And that, as Weeks saw it, was where the trouble started. Spring, a year ago, Weiss went up to Saratoga and came back with the dark and mysterious Signora Sophia on his arm. Weeks and Benny Numbers called her Sugartits.
    Weiss followed the routine with