Authors: Beth Raymer
Only when the captain prepared for takeoff did Dink turn away from his ticker and lower his glasses.
“Terrible. Dreadful. Horrendous,” he said, heavy-eyed. “Today was not a profitable day.”
It was my first time flying first class. Not quite believing in my luck, I ordered champagne.
When Dink Dershowitz was eleven years old his mother, Freda, took him and his friend Howie on a subway ride to the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens. Alongside the General Motors Futurama exhibit and the stained-glass windows of the Vatican pavilion was a more modest display that captured Dink and Howie’s attention.
It was the Minnesota state exhibit. As the two friends admired a large stuffed moose, something caught their eye. Hanging on the wall, above the moose’s antlers, numbers scrolled across a small black screen: the updated scores for the Minnesota Twins game. Twins 4, White Sox 3, bottom of the sixth.
A sports ticker. Dink was awestruck.
“Can you believe it?” Dink whispered to Howie. “In the future, no matter where we are in the world, we’ll be able to see baseball scores!”
Scores. Even as a kid that was what interested Dink most. Not which team was winning or losing, but by how much.
One morning, on his way to Hebrew school, Dink came upon a group of older kids crouched in a circle. They looked over their
shoulders, making sure the rabbi was nowhere in sight, and then flipped their baseball cards toward a wall. The kid whose card landed closest to the wall won. “Flipping” was a game of skill. But these kids weren’t just playing to see who could win the most cards; they were gambling. And Dink, with his thick eyeglasses, lanky frame, and high IQ—the highest in Hebrew school—joined them.
From flipping cards, the kids moved on to pitching pennies, which led to nickels. But by that time, Dink had gone. His seventh-grade math scores were so high that he skipped the eighth grade. The next year he was accepted to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the most selective public school in the city and one of the most mathematically rigorous schools in the country. As a fourteen-year-old sophomore, Dink ran the Stuyvesant baseball pool. Thirty-five cents to bet on which major league team would score the most runs in a week. You picked your teams from a hat.
But Dink’s gambling education wasn’t limited to flipping cards and running baseball pools. At home in his tiny Rochdale Village apartment in Queens, he learned horse-betting techniques from his father, Solomon, a mailman who moonlighted as a two-dollar horse bettor.
There were only a few things in life that Solly enjoyed: the
New York Daily Mirror
, the TV show
Car 54, Where Are You?
, and agonizing over his weekly horse bet. Each Monday, Solly began studying the newspapers and keeping charts of horse workouts at the Aqueduct and Belmont raceways. Solly bet two dollars on one horse per week, and fretted over where to put those dollars. Every day, he walked over to the OTB and thought about which horse he should bet on. He came home, pulled a cigarette from his hard pack of Camels, ran his palm over his slicked-back blond hair, and reread the papers. Finally, after twenty-six hours of studying the workouts, Solly placed a bet.
On the following morning, Solly fetched the paper, carried it over to the kitchen table, and stood, stoically. His immaculately pressed gray flannel suit enhanced his tall, slim physique. He lit a cigarette.
Across from him, Freda sat, dishtowel over her shoulder, separating the dairy from the nondairy silverware. In the living room, Dink, their only child, entertained himself by playing an indoor variation of stoopball. He raucously bounced a ball off the wall and yelled
Foul!
when the ball hit furniture.
Solly unfolded the paper directly to the sports section and quickly covered the horse-race results with his thumb.
Inhale.
With the hesitancy of a man reading a love letter that his wife has written to someone else, Solly slowly dragged his thumb over the print, revealing the words one letter at a time.
Exhale.
“I
knew
I shouldn’t have bet that horse! I liked all these other horses and they all won! Why’d I pick this bum?”
He’d grab his hat and extinguish his cigarette. Mutter something about his wife being a jinx. Then catch the train for his hour-and-a-half commute to the James A. Farley Post Office in Manhattan.
On the rare occasions Solly won, he sang “Oyfn Pripetshik,” his favorite Yiddish song.
Whatever the outcome, the moment the front door slammed, Dink gathered his father’s charts, picked a horse, usually based on its name, and made a bet in his mind to see if he would win.
Frosty Lady, driven by Carmine Abbatiello, paid $2.80 to show. Dink was a junior in high school and it was the first bet he ever made at a racetrack. Roosevelt Raceway in 1968 was the nation’s largest, most prestigious institution for the advancement of budding mathematicians and degenerate gamblers. On any given night, fifteen to twenty thousand people trotted around the grandstands, chewing on their miniature pencils. They put their money on long shot Shirley MacLaine or big favorite Nevele Pride, and twisted their
Daily News
into a bludgeon while rooting at the top of the stretch. That’s exactly where fifteen-year-old Dink was when Frosty Lady’s nose thrust first across the finish line. He made
eighty cents on his two dollars and thought that betting horses had to be the best way, ever, to make money. Dink stood six-foot-two and had a deep sense of purpose and belonging; the mutuel clerks never once asked to see his ID. He went to the track nearly every day thereafter. With his winnings, he bought a busted-up ’59 Chevy Bel Air. Sparks shot from the steering wheel each time he drove over a pothole.
Eventually the track became the axis around which all of Dink’s life revolved. It was where he made friends and money, took dates. Where he watched Hank Aaron break the home-run record. Where he was the day his father died, where he met his wife. And it was where he was introduced to many of the people who helped him throughout his career.
Lenny Goldfarb was a chubby gay bookmaker from Brooklyn who often hung out with Dink and his friends on the steps outside of Yonkers Raceway. He was always interested in seeing if there was any sexual potential with any of the young guys in the group, but even more interested in recruiting customers.
“Dinky!” Lenny hollered one night, as he approached Dink on the steps. Dink was only sixteen, but already a freshman at Queens College. “Dinky. Look. Why don’t ya get your friends together, and tell ’em to bet with me. I’ll give ya twenty-five percent of their losses. All you gotta do is make sure they pay when they lose, then give the money to me.”
A quarter sheet. Free money! Dink’s friends always lost when they bet on sports. Dink always lost too. Now all Dink had to do was simply exist and let his friends lose and he’d get twenty-five cents for each dollar they owed Lenny.
By being a part of Lenny’s business, Dink pocketed twenty, thirty extra dollars a week. More important, though, he learned how a bookmaker made money. In taking bets from gamblers the bookie is only concerned with making sure that, no matter what a game’s outcome, the amount he owes the winning gamblers is matched by the amount of money losing gamblers owe him. He could always gamble, and take a position on games to try and make more money,
but as long as he balanced his book, he would profit from the ten-percent commission he charged for taking a bet. This fee is called the vigorish, or the vig, the juice, the take. It’s a bookmaker’s livelihood. It’s also what makes his business illegal. In the United States, the layman is not allowed to charge a fee for taking a bet. That privilege belongs solely to the government-operated or -licensed racetracks, jai-alai frontons, casinos, off-track betting parlors, and state-sanctioned lottery systems.
Dink saw no harm in getting in on the government’s monopoly. After a few months, he caught on to the business and realized that if he booked his friends himself, he could make even more free money. That was the end of Lenny Goldfarb.
Dink gave his eight friends hundred-dollar limits and installed a phone line in his bedroom. In between poker games at the Queens College cafeteria and episodes of
The Gong Show
, he attended his accounting classes. In the evenings, he booked his friends. At night, he went to the track. “You need a secretary!” his mother scolded when he returned home from his long day. “Your phone hasn’t stopped. Louie Saphron called. Said he doesn’t want anything to do with the Jet bet.”
To avoid his mother’s suspicious stares and the probing that followed, Dink retreated to his bedroom. He fed his hamster and graded his friends’ bets to see how much they lost, then fell asleep watching the Knicks game.
Dinky brought home beautiful marks, wore his hair short, and stayed away from drugs. He loved his pleasures, though, and the way he put sports and friends before all else worried Freda. She thought Dinky needed structure so she had Solly set him up with a job at the post office.
Greetings from Amarillo, Texas! Utah, let this be heaven
. Dink figured he was faster at sorting mail than most and, therefore, entitled to read the backs of postcards. After four weeks he got fired for being nosy. After college, Dink worked as a sales-tax auditor. He incessantly sided with the store owners, doing
everything in his power so that they wouldn’t get screwed. He got called to task for showing up in jeans and sneakers and five months later he got fired. A relative got Dink a job at the New York State Housing Finance Agency. Eight months later, he quit.
Other than having to explain to his mother why another job hadn’t worked out, Dink couldn’t have cared less about getting fired. With each tax form he reviewed, he found it increasingly difficult to continue his I-better-do-something-with-my-life-just-in-case attitude toward a career in accounting. It wasn’t like Dink to consider his future. The only time he did so was when he thought about tomorrow’s eighth race. Yet, here he was, twenty years old, at Yonkers and Roosevelt Raceway, consulting friends on whether or not he should try to become a full-time bookmaker.
The general advice from people in the business was this: Do it! Just don’t ever deal with bad people. Deal with normal people and gamblers. Don’t deal with the mob.
People who weren’t in the business said: It’s illegal! Try to see the big picture, will ya, Dinky? You don’t want to be surrounded with pathetic people your whole life. Stay with accounting. In the long term, you’ll work at a firm and be a partner one day.
Below the New York Rangers pennants taped to his bedroom walls, Dink lay in his twin bed and watched
The Tonight Show
. From the crack beneath his locked door, he saw the outline of his mother’s shoes. He could smell her lit cigarette. She was eavesdropping, as usual. Johnny Carson swung his phantom golf club stage left and Dink started thinking:
There were pathetic sewer workers, there were thriving sewer workers. Pathetic lawyers chasing ambulances and charismatic lawyers not chasing ambulances. It wasn’t what you did; it was how you did it. Bookmaking was illegal, but there weren’t any victims. The fine was three hundred bucks and a night in the pokey
.
The risk-reward profile seemed reasonable.
Dink thought about his dad at the post office. The long commute. The nine hours of standing. All for $6,100 a year. Where was the value? The older gamblers at the track were so much cooler
than the accountants and the mailmen. They did what they wanted. They enjoyed life.
Dink didn’t want to be a miserable accountant. He wanted to feel important. He wanted to use his math skills, get an informational edge, and match his wits against someone else’s. He wanted to make book.
Dink moved out of his parents’ house, into an apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, and slowly expanded his list of clients. Friends of friends, acquaintances, people from the track; with each customer Dink acquired, his size-fourteen sneaker slipped a tad deeper into New York City’s gambling rabbit hole. Five mornings a week, at the 108th Street drugstore in Queens, Jeff the pharmacist held a card game in the basement. Down the block, at the Poseidon seafood restaurant, Jimmy Fish housed poker games starting at noon. Lum’s, the Chinese restaurant near Main Street, was the place to go for thirteen-card pai gow. Gam Wau, on Northern Boulevard, offered a high-stakes rummy game after the lunch rush. The Bohack Supermarket two blocks down from Dink’s apartment wasn’t a supermarket, after all. It was a Vegas-style casino run by a rabbi.
Dink heard about the casino from a friend at the track. The NYPD wanted to raid the operation, the friend explained, but they couldn’t, on a technicality: Rabbi Schwartz rented the supermarket under the agreement that he was going to turn the Bohack into a synagogue and offer the community some religion. And Rabbi Schwartz stood by his word. Bohack
was
a legitimate shul. In the first aisle, propped atop a wooden pulpit, was an open Torah. You could touch the Torah and daven. Or you could make a right and shoot craps.
In the vacant supermarket-cum-temple crammed with gambling paraphernalia, Dink and one hundred or so others gathered nightly. Rabbi Schwartz, in navy blue suit and maroon tie, strutted up and down the cereal aisle overlooking the action at the roulette table. In the dairy section, men leaned over craps tables and looked on as the shooter diddled with the dice. In the storage area, aisles away
from the noise and commotion, poker players sat around a wooden table, their faces barely distinguishable under the halo of the room’s fluorescent lights.
In less than a year, the police shut the doors of Bohack after they discovered Rabbi Schwartz had a prior arrest for impersonating a priest. Dink and the rest of the congregation regrouped at a Mafia-run gambling parlor near Austin Street.
Dink came out ahead as a bookmaker because his customers were all
schmendericks:
good-natured suckers, they bet on the Knicks, the Jets, and the Mets every time they played.
Trouble started with the wiseguys.