Authors: Beth Raymer
Armed with only a number two pencil, Dink descended the narrow staircase. In the doorway stood seven FBI agents dressed in SWAT uniforms.
The FBI interviewed Dink and his crew separately. Everyone but Fat George told the truth. “I didn’t give up on anybody,” George whispered, returning to the office after being questioned. “I don’t know anything. I didn’t roll on anybody.” His loyalty, though sweet, was unnecessary. There was no disputing that the office had one purpose: bookmaking. While the agents sifted through the trash, collecting notebooks and sports schedules and scraps of paper, the phones rang incessantly. Every fifteen minutes, the sports wire divulged the newest line, the latest injury, and the updated scores, with its usual
ttt-ttt-ttt
.
The head agent handed Dink his business card. “I’ll get back to you,” he said. “We know who you’re working for.”
At the Bayside Diner, Dink, Lobster, Bobby Nebbish, and Fat George sat at a round table.
“It has not been a wonderful day,” Dink said. He considered the menu, then set it aside. He always ordered the tuna on rye. Today wouldn’t be any different.
“I didn’t roll on anybody,” Fat George said.
“George!” Lobster said, losing patience. “We were there! We were bookin’! It was obvious.”
“I didn’t say that,” Fat George said. “I told ’em, ‘I don’t know a thing.’”
“At least we’re not sleeping in jail tonight,” Nebbish said.
“I don’t know,” Dink said. “I think it’s worse that they let us go home. I might have a real situation here. The FBI is kind of scary.”
Lobster leaned closer to Dink and whispered over his menu, “Dinky, relax. You’re not in the Mafia. You’re just a Jewish bookmaker from Queens. That’s kinda clear.”
Dink was just a Jewish bookmaker from Queens. Everybody knew that. Growing up in Rochdale and Forest Hills and being in the gambling business, Dink had spent plenty of time around Italian mobsters. But they respected that Dink didn’t want to get involved in their businesses and have sit-downs. The Italian mobsters let the Jewish bookmakers be Jewish bookmakers and the Jewish bookmakers knew they could always go to Italian mobsters for help, but then they owed them.
“He said he knows who I work for,” Dink said. “How much trouble can you get in if the FBI thinks you just work for somebody?”
Long after his crew finished their sandwiches and left, Dink stayed at the diner. He couldn’t make sense out of the raid. Why hadn’t he gotten arrested? Lou, the bookmaker who got busted in Brooklyn, was mob related, and the FBI didn’t take him to jail, either. Same with Joey Useless, in Manhattan, whom the FBI
raided after they left Dinky’s. Three busts, three different types of bookmakers, and no jail.
“You want some more tea?” the waitress asked.
“Whatever,” Dink mumbled.
“It’s not whatever. A new tea bag you get charged for. Hot water you don’t.”
He was going to have to shut down. With the FBI privy to his every move, he knew that betting and booking and being seen with bettors and bookmakers wouldn’t be of help to anyone. But his business! For seventeen years he had worked at building his clientele and his reputation, not to mention his ego. He had persevered through the years when he was a terrible bookmaker to become a great bookmaker. His business had been prospering. It was worth something. For a moment, he considered selling it. His customers alone were worth probably four hundred thousand. If he sold it to someone competent, they could put four other clerks in those four seats and make five, six hundred thousand dollars a year without putting in a lot of work.
But now was not the time to be orchestrating deals. As he finished his tea, he realized that it was over. Tomorrow he would go to the office and collect his belongings. From a pay phone on Queens Boulevard, he would call a close friend and give him the business, for a small consideration. In the evening, he would drive to the track, sit on the steps, and get advice from the old guys. But he would never again be a bookmaker.
Holding a screwdriver in my right hand and the doorknob in my left, I leaned against the frame of the office door. The change-a-lock instructions lay at my feet. “I swear to God, I didn’t know her,” I said. “She recommended me because I gave her twenty percent off her curry!”
“You said you knew her well,” Dink said, turning the page of
Fuzzy Creatures
. He seemed too calm for a guy who’d just been robbed by his masseuse.
I shouldn’t have lied during the interview. I hadn’t known Amy at all. Perhaps that’s why I was more shocked than Dink to discover upon returning from San Diego that she had let herself into the office and stolen cash and winning wagering tickets. Dink wouldn’t tell me how much, but even with Dink in the room, swiping ten grand in casino chips off his desk was as easy as sweeping breadcrumbs into the palm of your hand.
In San Diego, we stayed at a five-star hotel in rooms with private balconies. For breakfast, we ate ham-and-cheese omelets at a restaurant overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Dink paid for everything. When I mentioned I wanted to go to film school one day, he
insisted we stop by the University of California at San Diego and tour the campus. He really was a sweet, generous man.
“I only said I knew her because I wanted the job,” I said, taking a seat next to him.
Dink finished the article about the potential hazards of organic hamster treats and closed the magazine. “I’m just giving you a hard time. I think she had a cocaine habit.”
“Really?” And then I remembered her black, oversized sunglasses.
“A terrible one. Sometimes she came to work nine hours late. On 9/11 she told me the government was looking for her and she didn’t come to work for two weeks.”
“Then why’d you tell me you had faith in her?”
“She was nice,” he said. Then, like a father taking an awkward situation and turning it into a learning opportunity, he shook his finger and added, “There are a higher percentage of thieves out there than you think.”
“Do you think she’ll show up for work tomorrow and pretend like nothing ever happened?” I said, thinking that’s exactly what I would do if I were Amy.
“No. I think she’ll run off to Reno. That’s where everyone goes after they steal from me. I think they all have a meeting there, at the Royal Moose, like in
Rocky and Bullwinkle
. They all belong to Local 12, the Villains, Thieves, and Scoundrels Union.”
I returned clearheaded to the job at hand: changing the locks on the office door so that my reference could never again break and enter.
Over the next three days, Dink sat with me in the office and gave me gambling tutorials. By the evening of our last session, my five-subject notebook was nearly full. Not with statistics and notes regarding important sports betting information, but intricate doodles: balloons and flowers and jungles with monkeys half hidden by palm trees. I hadn’t understood a thing Dink taught me. To look busy, I drew.
“We shop for the best value,” Dink said. “If we don’t get the best of it, I’ll be broke and you’ll be out of a job. When I die, I want my tombstone to say ‘Dinky. He died with the best of it.’”
It would be months on the job before I would understand the lessons Dink tried to teach me in those sessions. The first lesson I learned was that while it may be illegal to be a bookmaker, it is not illegal to gamble for a living. The second lesson was that despite the tens of thousands of dollars in bets he made each day, the money Dink bet was always his own. He did not take other people’s bets and was therefore not a bookie. Professional gambler was the occupation he listed when he filed his taxes. The bets he lost he used as tax write-offs. The fact that he had an office and employees, though it gave him an aura of officialdom, simply reflected the complexity of his betting. He couldn’t do it alone.
As a sports gambler, Dink’s job wasn’t simply to figure out which team would win. As I learned, if all you had to do to win money betting baseball was predict the winner, you, me, and everyone else in the world would bet on the first-place team every time they played and by the end of the regular season, we’d all be rich. But gamblers can’t make money by just betting on a team that wins more often than it loses. That’s because bookmakers create odds—otherwise known as lines—that, in essence, penalize people who bet on the favorite. The line is an attempt by bookmakers to make both teams in any given matchup appear equally attractive. They want their books balanced; they want as many people to bet on the underdog as on the favorite.
The key to winning money is knowing a good line when you see one. Value, not just who you think is going to win or lose, is the overriding consideration.
To understand value, Dink first determined for himself what he thought the line should be. He had become just like the wiseguy gamblers who had beaten him for hundreds of thousands of dollars when he was a novice bookmaker. Dink researched as much as possible about teams and specific matchups, weighing the relevant factors in order to arrive at his best educated guess as to each
game’s likely outcome. I had assumed that as a professional gambler Dink researched teams, weather, and statistics and made bets for himself based on that information, but it took me a while to understand what “shopping for the best value” entailed. Whether or not we thought a certain team was going to win didn’t matter. If the price was right, we bought it. When Dink said that we must always get the best of it, he meant that we must find a line that gave him an edge—a line that offered the most reward with the least risk. That, to me, didn’t seem like gambling. It seemed like we were bargain hunting for luck.
First, Dink had determined for himself what the line had to be to make it worth betting on. Then he had to find a line that came closest to that magical number. Like a company’s stock price, lines for each game were in constant flux, changing according to the demands of the market. To know how the market valued a particular game, Dink, like all professional gamblers, turned to the Internet.
Gone were the days of waiting in airports for out-of-town newspapers or searching for a bookmaker in the backstreets or bars. Starting in the mid-’90s, gamblers could suddenly go online and read reviews of offshore gambling businesses. They could open their
Daily Racing Forms
and see advertisements for gambling parlors based in the Dominican Republic. The first time Dink saw such an ad, he couldn’t believe it. Bookmakers? Advertising? At worst it was a police scam, he thought, and at best it was a swindle. Dink spoke to a lawyer. “Internet gambling is untested waters,” the lawyer explained. “But for now, it’s legal.” He told Dink to go for it.
Dink tested the waters and the waters were great. He didn’t have to wait for bookies to open. He could bet any time of day. Oddly, it seemed to make gambling so much more socially acceptable. Everyone, young and old, was talking sports-betting shop. It was just as normal as day-trading.
To keep track of the lines offered by sports books around the world, professional gamblers used Don Best Live Odds, an online service that for six hundred dollars a month gave a running tally of
the lines each sports book offered for any day’s games. In fact, Don Best Live Odds did for gamblers and bookmakers what Bloomberg terminals did for hedge-fund managers and stockbrokers. Where Bloomberg streamed stock quotes and the latest financial data, Don Best displayed the latest injury reports and lineup changes. It broadcasted line adjustments from a dozen offshore offices and a handful of licensed sports books in Las Vegas in real time.
As a Dink Inc. employee, I needed to learn how to read the lines on Don Best as they flashed across the office’s five monitors. Taking a closer look at the computer screen, I saw not just numbers and plus and minus signs; I saw fractions. I hadn’t passed a math class since junior high. A rush of incompetence washed over me. Feeling my face blush, I pulled my notebook close and added stripes to a toucan’s beak, completing my jungle scene.
At a quarter to eight I arrived at Dink Inc. for my first shift, convinced I would make a fatal mistake with Dink’s money.
Across from me, Robbie J worked on his rundown sheets—long pieces of paper with tiny blank boxes designed for listing the day’s matchups and the lines on each game. October brought preseason NBA, hockey, NFL, college football, and baseball playoffs. Fearing that it would take me too long to complete these sheets and that I would miss something, I wrote mine out the night before. With the televisions turned off, the office was quiet. The only sound came from underneath the table where Otis lay, licking his paws.
Tony, the casino runner, ogled an amateur porn site, stroking his thick beard and shifting his posture, as we all waited for Dink to arrive with his bankroll. Tony’s job was to visit several different casinos and call Dink with the lines each sports book had posted. This is what was referred to as “shopping for numbers.” Runners were necessary for two reasons. One, Don Best broadcasted the lines from just a handful of Las Vegas’s 110 licensed sports books. If Tony hustled, he was sure to find a bargain at one of the sports books elsewhere in Clark County for Dink to bet. The other reason was that betting limits were higher in person than they were over
the phone. If Dink found a cheap price on a team, why bet five hundred dollars over the phone when he could wager five thousand in person? What good was getting the best of it if you couldn’t bet the most on it?
In addition to Tony, Dink also had a casino runner based in Reno. Her name was Louise and she was eighty-five years old. Until Dink hired her, she was having a hard time making it on her Social Security alone.
As bet-out clerks, Robbie J and I also shopped for numbers, but instead of driving around Vegas we did our shopping by calling bookmakers or visiting their Web sites. This included the legal bookmakers, based offshore, and illegal bookmakers, based in big cities and small towns across America.
I took out a stack of index cards that I had made to memorize this new foreign language. The part of the business that caused me the most confusion was that the method of betting varied with each sport. You didn’t bet on baseball the same way you bet on basketball, and in hockey you could bet any number of ways. There was the Canadian line, a puck line, an East Coast line, and even a line called the Grand Salami.