Secret Life of an Old-School New York Bookie

Are you a gambling man?” Vera asks me. She hands an envelope to a bartender at the Meatpacking District as she sips on a whiskey and ginger ale. The envelope contains cash for one of her customers. Vera’s a bookie and also a runner, and also to be clear, Vera’s not her name.
She’s a small-time bookie, or a bookmaker, a person who takes stakes and leaves commission off them. She publications football tickets and collects them from pubs, theater stagehands, workers at job sites, and sometimes building supers. Printed on the tickets that are the size of a grocery receipt are spreads for college football and NFL games. At precisely the exact same time, she’s a”runner,” another slang term to describe somebody who delivers cash or spread amounts to some boss. Typically bookies are men, not women, and it is as though she is on the pursuit for new blood, looking for young gamblers to enlist. The paper world of football gambling has shrunk in the face of the exceptionally popular, embattled daily dream sites like FanDuel or even DraftKings.
“Business is down because of FanDuel, DraftKings,” Vera says. “Guy bet $32 and won two million. That is a load of shit. I want to meet him.” There’s a nostalgic feel to circling the amounts of a football spread. The tickets have what look like hints of rust on the borders. The faculty season has finished, and she didn’t do so bad this year, Vera states. What is left, however, are pool stakes for the Super Bowl.
Vera started running numbers back when she was two years old at a snack bar where she worked as a waitress. The chef called on a phone in the hallway and she’d deliver his bets to bookies for horse races. It leant an allure of young defiance. The same was true when she first bartended in the’80s. “Jimmy said in the start,’I will use you. Just so that you know,”’ she says, recalling a deceased boss. “`You go in the bar, bullshit together with the boys. You can talk soccer with a guy, you can pull them in, and then they are yours. ”’ Jimmy died of a brain hemorrhage. Her next boss died of cancer. Vera says she overcome breast cancer , although she smokes. She failed radioactive treatment and refused chemo.
Dead bosses left behind customers to conduct and she’d oversee them. Other runners despised her in the beginning. They could not understand why she’d have more clientele . “And they’d say,’who the fuck is the donkey, coming here carrying my occupation? ”’ she says like the men are throwing their dead weight about. Sometimes the other runners duped her, for instance a runner we will call”Tommy” kept winnings that he was supposed to hand off to her for himself. “Tommy liked to put coke up his nose, and play cards, and he liked the girls in Atlantic City. He’d go and give Sam $7,000 and fuck off with the other $3,000. He tells the supervisor,’Go tell the wide.’ And I says, ‘Fuck you. It is like I’m just a fucking broad to you. I don’t count. ”’ It is obviously prohibited for a runner to spend winnings or cash meant for customers on private vices. But fellow runners and gambling policemen trust . She never speaks bad about them, their characters, winnings, or names. She never whines if she does not make commission. She says she could”keep her mouth closed” that is why she is a runner for almost 25 years.
When she pays clients, she buys in person, never secretly leaving envelopes of money behind toilets or under sinks in tavern bathrooms. Through time, however, she’s dropped around $25,000 from men not paying their losses. “There’s a great deal of losers out there,” she explained,”just brazen.” For the football tickets, she capital her very own”bank” that is self-generated, almost informally, by establishing her value on the achievement of the school season’s first couple of weeks of stakes in the fall.
“I ai not giving you no more amounts,” Vera says and drinks from her black straw. Ice cubes turn the whiskey into a lighter tan. She reaches for her cigarettes and zips her coat. She questions the recent alterations in the spread with this weekend’s Super Bowl between the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos and squints in her beverage and pays the bartender. Her movements lumber, as her ideas do. The favorability of the Panthers has changed from three to four-and-a-half to five fast in the past week. She wants the Panthers to win by six or seven in order for her wager to be a success, and forecasts Cam Newton will direct them to some double-digit win over Peyton Manning.
External, she lights a cigarette before moving to a new pub. Someone she didn’t want to see had sat down in the first one. She says there is a man there who will harass her. She continues farther north.
In the next pub, a poster tacked to the wall beyond the counter shows a 100-square Super Bowl grid “boxes.” “Are you running any Super Bowls?” Vera asks.
To win a Super Bowl box, at the end of each quarter, the last digit of either of the groups’ scores will need to match the number of your chosen box in the grid. The bartender hands Vera the grid. The bar lights brighten. Vera traces her finger across its outline, explaining that if the score is Broncos, 24, and Panthers, 27, by the third quarter, that’s row 4 and column . Prize money varies each quarter, and the pool only works properly if bar patrons purchase out all the squares.
Vera recalls a pool in 1990, the Giants-Buffalo Super Bowl XXV. Buffalo dropped 19 to 20 after missing a field goal from 47 yards. Each of the Bills knelt and prayed for that area goal. “Cops in the 20th Precinct won. It was 0 9,” she says, describing the box amounts that matched 0 and 9. But her deceased boss wasted the $50,000 pool within the course of the year, spending it on lease, gas and cigarettes. Bettors had paid payments through the year for $500 boxes. Nobody got paid. There was a”contract in his life.”
The bartender stows a white envelope of cash before attaching an apricot-honey mixture for Jell-O shots. Vera rolls up a napkin and twists it in a beer which looks flat to give it foam.
“For the very first bookie I worked for, my title was’Ice,’ long until Ice-T,” she says, holding out her hand, rubbing at which the ring with her codename would fit. “He got me a ring, which I dropped. Twenty-one diamonds, created’ICE. ”’ The bookie told her he had it inscribed ICE since she had been”a cold-hearted bitch.”

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