Authors: Beth Raymer
Like most people who have suffered a traumatic event, Bernard split his life into two categories: all that came before and all that came after what he referred to as the “1983 Broke.”
Before the 1983 Broke, Bernard was thin, boyish, and profligate. Growing up in Sands Point, on Long Island, Bernard had as neighbors the power broker William Shea (whose eponymous stadium was the home field of the New York Mets), the CEOs of MGM and Pfizer, and the singer Perry Como, who, on Halloween, handed out silver dollars in lieu of candy. Still, it was the Rose residence that the neighborhood kids flocked to. At Bernard’s, they could eat sandwiches and play cards with the gregarious mathematical prodigy who, at three years old, began beating his mom at her own game—gin rummy—while keeping score in his head. When the Roses went grocery shopping, Bernard rode along in the cart and kept a running figure of each item tossed inside. Arriving at the checkout line, he’d announce the grand total, tax included.
Though everyone in the Rose family enjoyed a good card game, there was something in the way Bernard played poker at age twelve, the way he thrived in the high-action environment, that made his mother uncomfortable. Returning home from the office one afternoon, she found Bernard hosting a poker tournament at the dining room table. For his friends’ refreshment, he had put out an impressive spread of crackers, cheeses, and deli meats served atop a polished silver tray garnished with fruit. Hand after hand, he was fleecing every single one of them.
Bernard’s interest shifted from poker to sports gambling when he was fourteen. Working weekends at his father’s beer-and-soda store, Bernard noticed the unkempt customer who, no matter the weather, wore a bright red fireman’s jacket. Bernard assumed Barfy was homeless. But then he noticed his father bought stuff from Barfy. Football parlay sheets.
“You can bet whatever team you want?” a mystified Bernard asked his father. “You don’t have to have someone bet against you?”
Bernard and his friends loved football and they always tried to
bet each other. But every Sunday they all agreed the Jets would win and that was the end of it.
“Nope,” his dad said. “That’s what a bookmaker’s for. Lay fifty-five dollars to win fifty and it’s no problem.”
For Bernard, this information marked a true awakening. Barfy, football sheets: life was beginning to make sense. Crunching sports statistics gave Bernard the intellectual stimulation he craved and by his senior year, he was making enough money from cards and betting Barfy to buy his own custom-made leisure suits. Textured and four shades of brown, just like the kind Perry Como wore. Bernard couldn’t wait until he had to give the lunch lady a couple dollars so he could pull his huge wad of cash out in front of everybody. The pull of money was very strong. Just feeling the weight of it in his pocket gave Bernard a shot of libido.
Bernard’s popularity was such that at sixteen, when he started booking, he quickly out-customered Barfy and even Dinky, who was four years older. Not wanting to be an accomplice to her son’s illegal activity, but loving him too much to throw him out, Bernard’s mom rented him a caretaker’s cottage on a nearby country estate. Nestled among evergreens and a lily pond, the cottage was the perfect cover for the illegal high-stakes gambling taking place inside. Free from the oppressiveness of home and school, Bernard became the renegade scientist of bookmaking. Carrying out erratic mathematical experiments in the forms of live betting and reverse parlays, he laid off with other bookies, booked people against each other, and cross-booked six different racetracks.
To his friends, he was a god. And to this day, they still remember the afternoon in 1977 when they first discovered just how much Bernard was worth. Overhearing him on the phone, taking five- and ten-thousand-dollar bets for over an hour, a friend finally asked, “Bernard, how are you dealing that high?” With some persuasion, Bernard revealed his bankroll. He had made two and a half million dollars from gambling. He was nineteen years old.
Mesmerized, his new entourage tagged along with him everywhere he went, which of course included Roosevelt Raceway. Most
of the entourage had never spent time at the track and it seemed to them a very strange place. There were a lot of different cliques and within each huddle there seemed to be a lot of secrecy going on. Bernard navigated each group effortlessly, leaving his entourage to eat SuperPretzels and pretend to understand the exacta board.
One evening, Bernard returned to them. He looked electrified. “You see that guy?” he whispered, nodding toward a kid just a few years older than them.
Certain that the kid had given Bernard a tip that would make them all rich, the entourage gathered in closer.
“That guy,” Bernard said. “He’s married!”
That Bernard viewed matrimony as big, inside information revealed the second gulf widening between him and his peers. His broke-ass friends were getting girls and Bernard wasn’t. Young, rich, gifted, but chronically love-shy, unable to even mutter the word “date,” Bernard, at nineteen, still called them “things.” He knew plenty of guys who went on “things,” but what impressed him most were the guys who were married. It seemed so nice to have a wife to spend money on and care for. But he was getting ahead of himself. God forbid he ever got lucky and found himself on a “thing” with a girl, let alone getting married. Deflated, his entourage rolled their eyes and Bernard let his thoughts drift back to long division.
Finally an older, very mature guy from the track (G.B., age twenty-four) became Bernard’s romance mentor. Offering Bernard guidance on how to adequately spend his money, G.B. helped him move out of the cottage and into a thirty-second-floor penthouse with a five-bridge view. He decorated and stocked the penthouse with all the items Bernard needed to draw in the girls: marijuana, every type of pill imaginable, Commodores albums, disco lights. To ring in 1978, G.B. threw a party, inviting everyone from the track. From behind the glass-beaded curtain, a dozen nineteen-year-old girls emerged, one after the other, like ducklings from tall grass. “Gentlemen,” G.B. announced, “meet the Swedish Connection!”
The Swedish, Bernard thought, make excellent meatballs.
None of the girls was actually Swedish, by the way. They were just trashy blond-haired girls from far Long Island. Not that it mattered. Across the room, Bernard watched as they giggled and did the hustle. Quick, quick, slow, slow, their hips swayed rhythmically inside their flare-legged jumpsuits. G.B. dropped Quaaludes into Bernard’s shirt pocket. It was at the height of the disco era—this was not the generic stuff. The pill kicked in and Bernard found the absence of compulsive thought soothing. Disco bulbs glowed red like meteorites sailing through the night and Bernard discovered he could be quite charming on Quaaludes. A raspberry-freckled Swede sat beside him on the davenport. Feeling that something was expected of him, he played with her hair. Between his fingertips, her dry, damaged split ends felt like crushed silk. The room pulsated.
Alas
.
In the same way a gentle kiss leads to more passionate kissing, that night’s party led to more refined partying, until it was no longer a party but a lifestyle. The Swedish Connection doubled. Bernard bought a water bed. The penthouse became a magnet for every addictive personality on Long Island trying to escape his wife. Friends on benders walked through glass patio doors and kept walking. They flipped their cars in the condo’s parking lot. Everyone lusted over the Korean hooker who came over to give massages, except for Bernard, who fell in love with a beautiful lost soul named Natasha.
Miraculously, as drugs dragged his friends through gutters or turned them into arrogant jerks, Bernard kept his wits. On any given night at Roosevelt, twenty-one-year-old Bernard, now Long Island’s most illustrious bookmaker, could be seen with his young wife, Natasha, in their matching his-and-hers full-length fur coats, just like the kind Joe Namath wore.
His glitz, however, did lead to unwanted attention. One morning, after a busy day of pay and collects, Bernard was just inside his front gate when he heard a noise. Turning around, he saw two men
jump out of a car. One pulled a gun, the other a knife. It happened fast. Bernard was scared.
“Special police unit!” yelled the man with the knife. “Get in the car!”
In the front passenger seat, Bernard felt the weight of the man behind him, leaning over the headrest, holding the knife to Bernard’s throat. Watching the exit signs whiz by as quick and vivid as a life review, he tried to anticipate their plan. The images in his head terrified him. He didn’t have much money on him, just thirty thousand in his pockets and forty thousand in his briefcase. Would they be mad there wasn’t more? Mad enough that he should risk jumping out of a car going sixty on the Union Turnpike?
In a chain-linked dirt lot, in an area nobody lived in, the robbers patted Bernard down and took the money from his pockets. They took Bernard’s Louis Vuitton briefcase, dumped the cash out, and then politely returned the case to him. “Minus the knife,” Bernard later recalled, “those guys were a real class act.”
Six months later: same place, different robbers, less class. Bernard felt the brunt of an object smashing the back of his head. When he opened his eyes, he was on his stomach. Change rolled from his pockets. Another blow and the robbers fled, with the briefcase.
Somebody was setting Bernard up and he didn’t want to stick around one more second to find out who. Bequeathing his penthouse to the Swedish Connection, he and Natasha, in her fringed-suede hot pants, took off for a safe, faraway place where nobody would know him and he could make book without worrying about getting killed. Another country? Well, maybe another zip code. On the corner of 60th and Columbus Circle in Manhattan, their new building had a rooftop swimming pool and a European bank just one block away.
From his desk, overlooking the horse-drawn carriages along Central Park South, Bernard made calls to friends and associates. “I’m somewheres far away,” he said, raising his voice for emphasis, as though the international connection was giving him trouble.
“But I’m still open, I still want your business. I’m still taking bets, high as the sky. Just on the lam, that’s all.”
Bernard adapted quickly to big-city gloss. Looking svelte and stylish with his close-cropped hair and leisure suits, he walked to the European bank every day to visit his money. The concierge led Bernard through the marbled, gilded hallway to his safe-deposit boxes. With the concierge’s help, Bernard had figured out how much money could fit in each box. Using hundred-dollar bills, and depending on how much breathing room one felt the stacks needed, they guessed roughly six hundred thousand dollars. Bernard had six boxes.
Bernard took high tea at the Plaza most days, surrounded by crystal hurricane lamps and Park Avenue ladies setting aside their fur muffs. Keeping to himself, he ate cucumber finger sandwiches and admired whatever extravagant purchase he’d made while killing the hours between the bank and teatime. On one particular afternoon, this meant a five-foot-tall eighteenth-century cast-iron coat tree. The saleslady said it was famous and Bernard couldn’t resist. He finished the last of the petits fours. Awash in the sound of the harp’s weeping tune, Bernard enjoyed the straight sugar rush.
On the evening of January 30, 1983, Super Bowl XVII, Bernard felt a thrill in his belly. It was as though he’d been waiting his entire life for this very kickoff. Many of his customers’ teasers had carried forward—about nine hundred thousand dollars’ worth—and all he could do was hold on to their action and hope like hell that the Dolphins, who were favored by three, lost to the Redskins. His work spread on the coffee table before him, Bernard called the penalties in his favor, “Pass interference, Blackwood,” before the officials did.
With the Redskins down by four going into the fourth, pacing, mumbling Bernard looked just as agonized as the coaches on the sidelines. Feverish, he felt an overwhelming desire to symmetrically
arrange the sodas in the refrigerator. A Quaalude slipped the world into C minor and gave Bernard the power he needed to endure the game’s pivotal moment when Washington, with time running out, ran its trademark play, the I-Right 70 Chip.
He’ll hand to Riggins. Good hole! He’s got the first down to the 40, the 30 …
Bernard’s kneecaps melted.
HE’S GONE, HE’S GONE!!! TOUCHDOWN, Washington Redskins!!
At game’s end, Bernard graded his work. Nine hundred thousand dollars richer, he flopped on the couch, let his jaw drop open in disbelief, and then smiled at the ceiling. On that cool, exhilarating evening, as light rain pattered the window and Natasha snuggled beside him, Bernard could not have foreseen that he would soon become obsessed with winning nine hundred thousand dollars every night, that he would immediately start dealing way too high, that his mathematical formulas would fail him, that he would see the piles of money go below three million, two million, and down to one point six, that desperation would send him chasing until the last pile of money had quickly dwindled down to the height of a book of matches, that within three weeks—three weeks!—of his legendary Super Bowl triumph he and Natasha, scared and stone broke, would be fighting in a roadside motel off I-95.
Greed is not a virtue. This wasn’t news to Bernard, he had guessed as much. But what he hadn’t guessed was that when his money left him, Natasha and his friends wouldn’t be far behind. Or that he would find himself twenty-three, divorced, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and working for his father. The people Bernard owed money to thought it was a cover. But it wasn’t. Bernard had gone straight and was now in the wholesale candy business. Truffles and coconut clusters, maple-nut goodies and Lindt Swiss classics—Bernard used food to soothe the heartbreak and depression. The waists on his brown and gray work slacks continued to grow: forty inches, forty-six, fifty-two. He slid the hangers,
searching for something, anything, that might fit, stopping just short of the full-length fur coat hanging, shredded and dead, in the very back of the closet.