Authors: Beth Raymer
She chose neither and filed for divorce.
At a friend’s house, Tulip stared at the Alcoholics Anonymous workbook splayed across her lap. She was taking inventory of all the people she had harmed through the years, recalling the sadness her addiction had caused to herself and others. One memory came immediately to mind, the one that had weighed on her all these years and sickened her more than all the rest. If she wanted to recover fully, she had to confront it. Her sponsor had warned her that step five was the most difficult. What Tulip would’ve given for one, just one, super Vicodin. She dragged the phone over to the bed and called her dad.
Between fits and sobs, tears running down her hot cheeks, she apologized. For the time when she was fifteen and she stole all of his quarters. Five hundred dollars’ worth. She and a friend. They made it look like a robbery. They did it to get speed and then they shot up.
“Dad,” Tulip cried. “I’m so sorry, I need you to forgive me. Please forgive me.”
“Quarters
, sweetie?” He didn’t remember any stolen quarters. But of course, of course he forgave her.
Step five. Check.
Tulip graduated from AA and went to work as a clerk, taking bets at Del Mar Racetrack in San Diego. For the first time in twenty-five years she listened to her beloved Beatles albums, sober.
In the grandstands, beneath the tote board, Tulip, with her golden complexion and blond chin-length bob, registered the horseplayers’ bets. “The two to win for three dollars, here you go,” and she slid the bettor his ticket. She looked forward to a round of
golf after her shift. No longer in need of an instructor, she’d play as a single.
The same year that Tulip got sober, Dink, dressed in suit and tie, sat beside his attorney, Burdick—a friend from Dink’s fantasy baseball league. The person whom the FBI believed Dink worked for—a Detroit bookmaker named Henry Hilf—was actually just one of Dink’s customers. Through his mob ties, however, Hilf had established a nationwide multimillion-dollar bookmaking syndicate that operated in Detroit, Miami, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas, the Ohio Valley, and New York City. The FBI was confident Dink was in the Mafia.
“I booked seventeen policemen who I played softball with. That didn’t make me a cop,” Dink said to Burdick. “They can’t say that because I booked a guy in the mob I’m a mobster!”
This was something that most people, law enforcement included, either had a hard time understanding, or didn’t want to understand. Most bookmakers did not know their customers personally. They were, in most cases, just voices over a telephone that placed bets using code names. If an agent or a friend put someone into Dink’s office, Dink had no way of knowing if the new customer was a butcher, baker, mayor, or mobster.
“I never met that guy,” Dink continued. “I just booked him. I’m in the market where you get a five-hundred-dollar fine and a night in jail. Keep me in that market.”
Burdick told him he wouldn’t go to jail. He would never be able to make book again without risking prison time, but he would not go to jail.
The Honorable George E. Woods entered the courtroom.
“All rise.”
The United States of America versus Donald Dershowitz. A.k.a. Dinky.
“You may be seated.”
“Mr. Burdick. Did your client take bets from Mr. Henry Hilf?” the judge asked.
“Yes, your honor,” Burdick replied. “He’s a New York City bookmaker, that’s his job. Nothing more than that.”
“Mr. Dershowitz, you’re getting a ten-thousand-dollar fine and one year at a corrections center,” the judge said. “I don’t have any facility. You and your attorney figure that out.”
As quick as a coin flip, court was adjourned.
Burdick explained to Dink his two choices: Club Fed or a halfway house. Mortified, Dink ran to a pay phone and called his friend Cathy, at her jewelry store in Chinatown. Most of her family had been in the mob; some were serving time. She was an old hand when it came to listening to people spew their sentencing anxieties.
“Oh, Dinky,” she said, calmly. “It’s gonna be okay. Pick a halfway house, they’re easy. They’re like a joke. You go out every day. Everybody’s low-level criminals.”
“I won’t be able to sleep!” Dink said, panic-stricken. “I’m not gonna be able to sleep one night there. What am I gonna tell my mother? Oh, God, the food! I’m gonna get sick.”
“You’ll learn to sleep,” Cathy said. “You’ll adjust.”
Dink researched his options. One place caught his attention: the Pacific Furlough correctional facility in San Diego. The weather would be nice. Ira, his closest friend from childhood, lived there. Dave the Rave had a condo right on the beach. Roscoe, a longtime acquaintance, owned a deli nearby and if Dink worked there he could fulfill the sentencing requirement that he have a job. The Furlough was only fifteen miles from Tijuana. He could explore the Mexican sports-betting market. And, most important, he’d be close to Del Mar racetrack.
“Nonsense!” Freda said. “How can they do this to you?”
“I’m a bookmaker.”
“Do they know you graduated from Stuyvesant?”
Behind them, on the living room wall, hung a four-foot-tall acrylic painting of Dink reading from the Torah on the day of his Bar Mitzvah. A royal blue yarmulke covered his curls.
“Ma, I’m gonna be out every day. I’m gonna work at my friend’s deli.”
“You’re a bookmaker?”
“It’s not real jail. It’s night jail. I’ll be out ten hours a day. I’ll watch
Tom and Jerry
every day. You’re allowed to bring your own TV.”
“Tell me the prosecutor’s name. I’ll call our state congressman and have him send the judge a letter.”
“Not gonna happen. One year in night jail, Ma. That’s all.”
Before his sentence began, Dink flew to San Diego and rented a room in his friend’s condo. On his first visit to the track, he went to the grandstands. Beneath the tote board, taking bets, was a young lady with large breasts. Her name was Diane and she and Dink began dating. When the line at Diane’s window was too long, Dink went to the clerk stationed to the right of Diane. The petite blonde, Diane told him, was once married to a jockey. Dink cashed in his winning tickets and tipped Tulip twenty bucks. He was generous like that. And anyway, she was cute.
During the visits Dink made to Tulip’s window, the two became friendly enough that they shared their stories. He was about to serve a year at the Furlough. She was in the middle of a divorce, staying with friends.
“You’re welcome to stay at my place, ’cause I’m gonna be in night jail,” he told her.
She took him up on the offer.
Dink stood on a patch of burnt grass holding his Knicks duffel bag and an eighteen-inch color TV. The Pacific Furlough correctional facility was an old Army barracks painted institutional green and surrounded by a chain-link fence. The guard beside the gate pressed his finger to his nostril and blew. Snot smacked against the cracked sidewalk.
Inside, when Dink’s eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw rows of
pillowless bunk beds pushed close together. A breeze from the Pacific squeezed its way through the Furlough’s barred windows and wisped across the black and brown faces of the men in the TV room as they watched
Under Siege
for the third time that day. The draft blew through the bathroom, which had no doors on the stalls, no lids on the toilets, and into the cafeteria, carrying with it a stench that made a plateful of corned beef hash taste as bad as it looked. Dink held his breath as he unpacked his bag. He would try anything in the square world to get away from this smelly, snorey, shitty place.
Refuge was found at Roscoe’s deli. A small-time gambler and petty thief, Roscoe, it was rumored, was in the Witness Protection Program. Paranoid that everyone was stealing from him, Roscoe emptied the till a dozen times a day. He got over on every possible angle, underreporting his earnings, and saving pennies by buying non-brand-name mayo and muffins where he could swing deals. But he let Dink work the cash register six hours, five days a week, and for that Dink was grateful.
To kill an extra hour before returning to the halfway house, Dink attended Gamblers Anonymous meetings. With no intention of quitting gambling—
ever
—Dink relaxed and listened to stories from men and women who didn’t lose much, just all they had. The head of the chapter was a teller at Del Mar who stole money from the racetrack, bet it into the machine, lost, and had to reimburse the track. One man claimed that he lost all of his money by betting his savings on a fixed race. The horse that was supposed to win was ahead by ten lengths when, three steps from the wire, he broke his leg. He swore he would never go to the track again (Dink later saw him at the track). Another man produced sports for television. He borrowed money and stole money, bet millions on football and baseball games, and finally lost his job. “I produce sports!” he said during one meeting. “If I can’t win, how can anybody else win?”
All these people thought that they were smart. Then they lost all of their money, and decided they were sick. Dink wondered why they didn’t decide that they were just stupid.
After GA, Dink would stop by the condo to shower. He enjoyed
seeing Tulip. They talked about the track, her AA meetings, movies she had seen. Tulip looked forward to Dink’s shower visits. He always made her laugh. It didn’t surprise her one bit, the evening she found herself on her tiptoes, giving Dink a kiss.
First Diane, now Tulip. Dink had more women while he was in the halfway house than ever before. What was it about night jail that women found so sexy? The answer was easy: the eight o’clock curfew. Put a time limit on anything and life gets exciting. At a small table in the back of Yogi’s Sports Bar, the new couple ate dinner together nearly every night. Once the dishes were cleared, Tulip sat on Dink’s lap and rooted for the teams he needed to win.
It was at the Furlough, belly down on his top bunk, transistor radio against his shoulder, that Dink honed his gambling skills. With such an early curfew there was little else to do but listen to games and study sports. His bookmaker lifestyle may have seemed very far away, but Tijuana wasn’t. And the sports books there took bets ten minutes after kickoff as long as no one had scored. A team could have the ball on the 10-yard line and you could bet on that team, or the total. It was sports betting’s best-kept secret. Dink employed Ira, his oldest, most trustworthy friend, as his runner.
“Avoid customs. Park the car and walk over,” Dink instructed, handing Ira twenty grand.
His blue jeans stuffed with cash, Ira walked across the San Ysidro border. Immediately, he was besieged by contagious-looking three-year-olds begging for money. Past the kids and the cabstands and the Chavez fight posters tacked to plywood shacks, the Caliente hotel and casino rose in the distance.
Back at Roscoe’s deli, Dink was busy making the square world suit his needs. Directly across from the cash register, the newly installed sports ticker was just as glorious as Dink had imagined. The teenage employees Dink worked with every day stood by and watched as he stared up, slack-jawed, beholding the in-game updates that flashed in red, green, and gold, like sun-dappled stained glass.
“Why do you work here?” one of them asked.
“I’m interested in opening my own deli, one day,” Dink said.
He turned his attention back to the ticker:
Welcome to Sub-Marina! Mets 3 Cubs 2, bottom of the eighth
.
During his year of rehabilitation, Dink gambled—and won—more than he had ever won bookmaking in Queens. He beat the Tijuana sports books and because he was in good standing with the bookmakers back east, they gave him high limits and took his bets. It was all on the books and when his sentence was over he collected his winnings.
Arty owes me $80,000, I owe you $60,000. Can you pick it up? You’ll owe me $20,000. Louie owes me $90,000, I owe you $100,000, pick it up and I’ll give you the other $10,000 next week. You know how it is
.
With his debt to society paid in full, and a four-hundred-thousand-dollar bankroll, Dink and Tulip headed to Vegas and launched Dink Inc. Tulip, enticed by something new and exciting, became Dink’s first casino runner, stationed at Caesars Palace. Seven years had passed since their first date when Tulip finally asked, “Honey, are we
ever
gonna get married?”
“You have an open invitation,” Dink said.
They flew to New York and bought an engagement ring from Dink’s friend Cathy at her jewelry store in Chinatown.
It was during their first year of marriage, while the newlyweds were still negotiating their roles and discovering ways to work together, that I began working at Dink Inc. Tulip had recently cut back her hours, which was a source of tension between them. Dink had been a boss since he was twenty-two years old. Transactions were involved in every single relationship he had in his life and he had a difficult time understanding that Tulip was his wife and that she was not on the payroll. Tulip’s lifestyle—the clothes, the jewelry, the cars—made her an expensive proposition. He didn’t mind paying for her Pilates and daily rounds of golf, but it angered him when she spent money out of boredom. A job kept her out of the malls and also “helped with her mental sharpness.” Dink didn’t
think she did enough thinking in her life; she didn’t challenge herself. Right, Tulip thought. As if having a husband who gambled for a living wasn’t challenging enough.
One afternoon Tulip came into the office, just wanting to say hi. Playing on the four televisions were two hockey games and two baseball games. Dink was down fifty grand for the day and it wasn’t even two p.m. The moment Tulip turned the brass knob of the office door, two teams he needed to lose simultaneously scored a goal and hit a home run.
“No!” Dink screamed. He squeezed his eyes shut and beat the palm of his hand against his forehead, making his curls jump. He shot his hands to heaven, invoking the Almighty, as if He should be helping. “Tulip!” he shouted. “You’re a jinx!”
“I am not,” she said, injured. “I was going to cut your toenails but never mind.”
Thick, crooked, and purple, Dink’s toenails looked as if they had escaped from a petri dish. Only someone who truly loved Dink would stoop to such a chore. Tulip dropped the pink nail clippers into her purse.