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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"In Texas there's not too much except football. I close down during the rest of the year, not enough business to take the risk. And suppose you did have some guy who wanted to bet the fifth race at Aqueduct? How're you going to get the results down here? It's hard enough getting the football results. You can be watching TV on Saturday, all your bets in and hear the scores from the Texas teams about 80 times a minute, but try to get the score on the Oregon State-Washington game. Now I pay money for a phone number of this service that's supposed to give you all the results, but when you call the number it's always busy and then when you do get through, it's just this tape recording. They give you every score in the country. Do you have any idea how many goddam football games there are in this country every Saturday? There ought to be a law, no kidding. I've called up trying to get a score and waited listening to how St. Olafs beat Carleton and so on and gotten so bored that when my score did come on, I missed it and had to listen to the whole damn thing again.
"And collecting is a problem down here which it isn't back East. Houston, for instance, is a terrible town for welchers. It might be different if you could send out a couple of guys to break some arms, but there's no organization here. It's also part of the problem of running a business on credit. You got to give credit, it's the only way to run a bookmaking operation; but if somebody welches, you not only lose the money he owes you, which is bad enough, but you also lose the customer. I don't like running a business on credit.
"The syndicate isn't going to move in unless there's a public demand for it and I just don't see it happening. Most places in Texas you just don't have that neighborhood tradition and betting tradition among lower-middle-class people. Now a place like Pasadena looks like it would be perfect. The right kind of people living there, neighborhoods, everybody knowing everybody else. But they just bet among themselves or with some guy at the plant who's maybe a little sharper than the rest and tries to make it booking among his friends. And they're happy with that. They think it works great so, like I say, there's no public demand."
If you have two people doing business with each other, they have got to have something in common. Roscoe Pound
THE DALLAS METRO SQUAD IS now something less than three years old. In that time they have made more than 70 arrests for felonious bookmaking in Dallas and the surrounding area. Their energy is prodigious; the efforts of other Texas law enforcement agencies against gambling are negligible by comparison. During this series of arrests they have seized betting lists, cracked the codes they are sometimes kept in, and kept the activities of known gamblers under surveillance. They have confiscated telephones, books, money. ("That's what really hurts 'em," one investigator said, "when we get their money.") They have beat down doors, hung out in dreary joints night after night hoping to find something useful. They have checked files, names, initials, phone numbers to get a line on who's betting and how much. They have paid off their informant or informants, and used that information to carry out several series of raids with all the precision and efficiency they could muster. And how much has this done toward curbing gambling in Dallas? "Well, I can't say the volume has decreased a whole lot," another investigator said. "It's just going to take more time."
The Metro Squad was not organized as a strike force against gambling per se, but as a strike force against organized crime. Their members are drawn not only from the Dallas Police but from the police of surrounding communities. Federally funded, staffed with a lawyer, an accountant, and an investigative analyst to aid the field investigators, they have jurisdiction beyond the limits of the city of Dallas and even of Dallas county and they share information with local enforcement agencies and other Metro squads across the country. The hoped for result is a unified, coordinated, organized force against America's unified, coordinated, organized criminals. Why, then, this raging battle against gamblers?
The offices of the Metro Squad are in a squat, dirty, brownstone across the street from the Dallas Public Library. The building is only three stories high and the Metro Squad sits up on the third floor where the windows give a fine view of about 50 feet of grey Dallas sidewalk and the uniform, smooth, also grey wall of the Public Library.
A square, smoky-smelling elevator takes the visitor up to the Metro Squad offices where it opens on a small area enclosed by low, wooden partitions painted white but by now dirtied by hand prints, chips, a general accumulation of dust, and that indefinable dirtiness that seems to infect public buildings from the moment they are built. To the right is a long, narrow room just wide enough for two rows of grey, metal desks belonging to the ten investigators the Metro Squad employs and to the two stenographers, the investigative analyst and the accountant who are also part of the squad. Two smaller rooms, one at each end of the long room, house the offices of Lieutenant Posey of the Dallas Police, the head of the squad, and of Ed Mason, a young prosecuting attorney whose job is to make the work of the squad bear fruit in court. About six months ago, due to his efforts, a bookmaker was convicted and sent to prison, the first jail term for a bookmaker in Dallas in anyone's memory.
The Metro Squad has determined its strategy and is sticking to it. Whatever happens in the court room, there can be no doubt about the squad's ability to discover and close down, at least temporarily, bookmaking operations. Generally speaking their information about local operations comes from an informant. The Metro Squad has a good one, or ones, who has the bookmakers looking suspiciously wondering who he is. So good has been his, or their, information that the Metro Squad has let several cases drop rather than produce the informant in court and thereby lose him and his connections forever. The ten field investigators, men drawn from the police forces of Dallas and surrounding communities, use the informant's information in deciding whom to place under surveillance. Then their life becomes a drudgery of watching and waiting as they try to collect everything they can on certain individuals' activities, associations, friends, partners, phone callers, anything they can get.
Meanwhile, back up on the third floor of the police building, the investigative analyst, the accountant, the attorney, and others try to piece together the information from the field investigators with information from other law enforcement agencies and with information gathered during past investigations in Dallas. "I never worry when a case gets dropped in court," Mason says, "because everything we learn fits in somewhere. The only way to put together a picture of how these things work is piece by piece."
One of the pieces they have been putting together is who is doing the betting. If the identity of a bettor can be determined by the bookmaker's seized records or by surveillance, the squad will try to get the bettor to testify against the bookmaker. They have a powerful lever against solid citizens who like to bet but for whom legal trouble would be at best embarrassing: Placing a bet with a bookmaker is punishable as a misdemeanor.
Their pursuit is so relentless because, according to Mason, the prosecuting attorney, "Most of the money to finance the operations of organized crime comes from gambling." Mason is the kind of person that school yearbooks might describe as studious. Below his boyish, clean-cut face he dresses in accepted lawyer fashion—dark suits, modestly striped shirts and ties, wing tipped shoes. His office is basically the same green and white municipal-building—bare as the rest, but relieved somewhat by the brown and red bindings of a long shelf of law books and further relieved, at least in intent, by prints of paintings by Monet and Eakins which he has stuck to the wall behind his desk.
He refers to gambling as one of the "so-called" victimless crimes. "Supposing I make a bet with a bookie and supposing I can afford it if I lose, well most people would say that nobody has been hurt. What they don't understand is that the money from bookmaking is washed by being channeled through mob-owned businesses like bars or used car lots and from there it goes right into their coffers where it's used to finance their further expansion. And don't let anyone tell you that bookmakers here are not connected with organized crime. We've traced money from here straight to the mob in other cities in the South and East. A bookie has to be connected with organized crime. In order to run his business he has to purchase the line, which is illegal and run by organized crime, and he has to be able to layoff which means he has to have contacts with bookmakers in other cities, which means he has contacts with organized crime. If we can't stop gambling in Dallas we're going to have big scale, organized criminal activity here, like they have in the East, sure as anything."
Yet if stopping gambling is the only way to stop organized crime, we are in trouble. People want to bet; others, who might not want to bet themselves, would still agree that a bet between two people should not be a crime. With that the case, it is easy enough to convince a jury of his peers that a bookmaker, who simply brokers bets, is not committing any real crime himself, certainly not a bad enough crime to send a man up the river. One bookmaker in Dallas, out on bail and awaiting trial, was arrested a second time for bookmaking. Out on bail again, he was arrested again, and then again, until he had nine separate counts against him. He did not serve a single day in prison.
Both police and bookmakers elsewhere in Texas claim that there is little or no organized crime connected with gambling in their territories; and whatever connections there are in Dallas with national criminal organizations, those organizations do not completely control gambling there the way they do in the East. The Metro Squad is concerned about the future which, from their point of view, looks difficult.
Texas bookmakers, though they may not be the quaint, child-loving types that Damon Runyon wrote about, have three aces up their sleeves that make for survival in Texas: They pay their debts—for who would bet with a bookie that didn't; they provide a service that people want—witness how many people bet; and they are informed about sports. The cops' problem is that such an act is tough to follow.
My Library
