The Wizards of Odds
In Texas, gambling on the results of football, from Pop Warner to Pro games, may be a more popular sport than, well, football.
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And in case the bettor doesn't want to go through any trouble at all, those same publications carry the ads of tipsters who, for a price that ranges from $30 to $200 a week, will supply the would-be bettor with what he hopes are picks based on the inside information and superior judgments of the tipster's intelligence network. This network is usually just a fellow with a knack for picking winners and subscriptions to the newspapers in every city where there is a professional or important college team. There are between 50 and lOO of these "sports information services" in the United States, and it is not unusual for them to gross $30,000 to $40,000 a week during the season. They find customers through ads placed in pre-season football yearbooks where they are displayed at least as prominently as the ads for muscle building courses and Oriental defense systems. They have names such as "The Prophet," "Huey's," "The Strong Safety," "The Mason-Dixon Football Service," and "Doc's" ("If you have the symptoms of a loser, get well with DOC'S FOOTBALL SERVICE.") Their ads all promise an astronomical winning percentage: "Last year's picks 91 per cent against Vegas line." Some promise "All Selections Based on Computerized Information" while others brag "Nothing Done By Computer"; and, for the young modern who likes to play by feel, there is K. E. Hopkins' "Astrological Sports Predictions," whose ad says, "There are three Sagittarian teams in pro football. Last year all three made the conference championship—Miami, Washington, Dallas." So?
A person who wants to bet finds a bookie through someone who is already betting. In most cases the newcomer's bets will be combined with his friend's for a while; then, if everything works out, the newcomer is given his own code number or initials and is on his own. At the end of the season most bookies close up shop until fall, when they contact their customers again with a new number to call, a new place and time for payoffs, and a new code. All this will change several times during the season as well.
Every week when games are scheduled a bookie obtains by Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, a list of the point spreads for the games that weekend. That list is called the line and booking football games is impossible without it. A typical listing looks like this:
PITTSBURGH 3 Los Angeles
The capital letters mean Pittsburgh is the home team; the team in the left column is the favored team; the number is the points that team is favored by, in this case Pittsburgh by three over Los Angeles. If Pittsburgh wins, but wins by only one or two points, the people betting on Los Angeles win their bets. If the difference is exactly three points, it's a tie and all bets are off.
Occasionally the line lists a game with a line drawn through the names of each team. That game is scratched. No bookie will accept a bet on it. The line makers suspect, or know of, something fishy concerning the game. Over the past few years the team most frequently scratched has been the Kansas City Chiefs.
In the past many Texas bookmakers used a line from "up north" called the Minnesota line; today most bookies use a line originating in Las Vegas. The line's function is not to pick winners but to handicap the teams so they each have an equal chance of winning. This handicapping will hopefully produce an equal amount of betting on each team in a given game. Equal betting is the bookie's dream: He will use the loser's money to payoff the winners. But, because a winning bet of $100 only pays $190 (the original $100 bet plus $90 winnings), a bookie makes a cool ten per cent, no matter which team wins, whenever he can equalize his bets.
When the betting on one team gets too heavy, the bookie has a problem. The heavily bet team may lose, which is lucky for the bookie; but then again that team may win leaving the bookie with a lot of winning money to come up with and not enough losing money to cover it. Most bookies are "players," that is they bet on games themselves, but they are not players as far as their business is concerned. There are two ways the bookie can even the betting. The easiest way is simply to change the point spread. If the Cowboys are favored by seven over Baltimore and still getting a lot of action, a change to seven and a half or eight might induce gamblers who haven't bet to put their money on Baltimore. If a change in the points doesn't work, the bookie lays off his extra money: He tries to find another bookie who has too much money bet on Baltimore and would like to find more Cowboy action. The two bookies get together, even up their books, and now no matter which team wins they will be able to pay off all the bets and retain their ten per cent "juice," which in this case they split.
Getting a line from a line service is a trick in itself. These services have extraordinary sources of information and long experience in analyzing that information, none of which is illegal. What is illegal, and a federal offense, is to transmit gambling information across state lines, exactly the thing the line services are in business to do. Every week they contact bookmakers in every major city, in most minor cities, and even in some out of the way filling stations on lonely highways that handle truck drivers and travelling salesmen.
The line is telephoned or mailed or shipped air freight or carried by a truck driver or whatever method seems necessary to get the point spreads to the line-maker's customers without the federal agents getting on to it. Distributing the line is difficult and risky enough that line brokers have sprung up, men who contract to get the line each week from the original source and then sell it to the various bookies around town. That way only one person is risking receiving gambling information from across state lines. The bookies then mail or deliver or phone the line to their customers.
And who are their customers? The college professor who wants to be one of the guys, the newspaper reporter, the barber, the doctor who wants to get his mind off his patients, the loan officer in a bank, the chiropractor, the dance instructor, the trial lawyer whose head is spinning from complicated testimony, the jewelry salesman, the rodeo cowboy, the laundry owner, the Cadillac dealer, the dentist who would otherwise dream about teeth, the building contractor, the football player.
Football pools, and all that, constitute the sustaining background of the life of a man upon whose faithful daily toil and exertion all the progress of society depends. Winston Churchill
YURI GAGARIN IS A BOOKIE who has plied his trade in Philadelphia, Detroit, and other points east as well as in various Texas cities. His comments, predicated on purely economic and practical bases, complement Sir Winston's more philosophical reasoning:
"If the cops down here were really smart they would do busts different. Here they blast into a place and take the poor son of a bitch down to the station and he pays a fine or gets somebody to go his bail and he's out and back in business again. The cops are happy because the papers come out with one of these 'Huge Gambling Ring Smashed' headlines so they get what they want which is the publicity. But the book gets what he wants, too. If you get busted all bets are off. If the bust shows up in the newspaper he's got nothing to worry about.
"Now when I was running a book in Philly the cops came in, sat me down and started taking bets. Hell, they were there for five or six hours on a Friday. Hundreds of bets coming in, horses, football, the World Series. The phone's ringing so much they have to use two cops to answer it. So after all that they burn my records and leave. They don't arrest me or nothin'. No newspapers, no headlines. I had to leave town. I couldn't go anywhere without people coming up to me asking where was the money I owed 'em.
"I've been busted so many ways. You know I like to live in houses where you have to scrape your tailpipe to get up the driveway and like to live on dead end streets so they can only come at you one way. One time I got an old house outside San Antonio and put in some phones and I mean it was in nowhere. I couldn't find it half the time. I kept my car out in back and had this escape route all planned out but just to make sure I rigged up these warning bells set off by trip wires I ran across the road. I thought I had them hid, but the cops saw them and kicked them out of the way and came through the door before I knew they were there. In the trial they must've shown those bells and wires to the jury 50 times. It looked bad.
"Another thing I never know is how many phones to put in. If you just get one you might not have enough; but if you get more than one the fella from the phone company might think it's a little weird. The cops keep in touch with those guys, you know. So I always debate that back and forth in my mind when I'm setting up. That's why I like to find places in cheap office buildings since that way I can put in one of those phones with three or four lines and a row of buttons and nobody thinks anything cause it's a business in an office, right?
"In the East it is a business in an office. They have guys back there who don't do anything all day but run around with a clipboard figuring who should layoff with who and making that five per cent day in day out. You see what most people don't realize is that the real support for big, organized bookmaking operations doesn't come from high rollers but from middle-class or lower-class people, working men and people like that. It's a neighborhood situation and every neighborhood has its book and the books are all tied together by the guys with the clip boards running around. And they've got all kinds of betting up there—numbers, football, baseball, basketball, the horses, hockey. Hell you probably could get a line for a handball game at the Y and have people standing in line to bet on it. It's a tradition up there.
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