Secret Life of an Old-School New York Bookie

Are you a gambling man?” Vera asks me. She hands on an envelope to a bartender at the Meatpacking District as she sips on a whiskey and ginger ale. The envelope contains money for one. Vera’s a bookie and a runner, and to be apparent, Vera’s not her name.
She’s a small-time bookie, or a bookmaker, one who takes bets and leaves commission them off. She publications football tickets and collects them from pubs, theater stagehands, workers at job sites, and at times 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 is a”runner,” another slang term to describe someone who delivers cash or spread numbers to some boss. Typically bookies are men, not women, and it’s as though she’s on the chase for new blood, searching for young gamblers to enlist. The paper world of football betting has sunk in the surface of the wildly popular, embattled daily dream sites like FanDuel or DraftKings.
“Business is down due to FanDuel, DraftKings,” Vera says. “Guy bet $32 and won 2 million. That is a load of shit. I want to meet him” There is a nostalgic sense to circling the amounts of a football spread. The tickets have what seem like traces of rust on the borders. The college season has ended, and she didn’t do so bad this season, Vera says. What is left, though, are pool bets 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 telephone in the hallway and she’d deliver his bets to bookies for horse races. It leant a charm of youthful defiance. The same was true when she first bartended in the’80s. “Jimmy said in the beginning,’I will use you. Just so you understand,”’ she says, remembering a deceased supervisor. “`You go in the bar, bullshit together with the boys. You’re able to talk soccer with a guy, you are able to pull them , and then they are yours. ”’ Jimmy died of a brain hemorrhage. Her second boss died of brain cancer. Vera says she overcome breast cancer herself, although she still smokes. She underwent radioactive treatment and refused chemo.
Dead managers left behind clients to conduct and she would oversee them. Other runners despised her in the beginning. They couldn’t understand why she’d have more clientele . “And they would say,’who the fuck is the donkey, coming over here carrying my occupation? ”’ she states just like the guys are throwing their dead weight around. Sometimes the other runners duped her, for example a runner we will call”Tommy” maintained winnings he was supposed to hand off to her for himself. “Tommy liked to place coke up his noseand play cards, and he enjoyed the women in Atlantic City. He’d go and provide Sam $7,000 and fuck off with another $3,000. He tells the boss,’Go tell the wide.’ And I says, ‘Fuck you. It is like I’m just a fucking broad to you. I really don’t count. ”’ It’s of course forbidden to get a runner to devote cash or winnings meant for clients on private vices. But fellow runners and gambling policemen trust . She speaks bad about them, their figures, winnings, or titles. She whines if she does not make commission. She says she could”keep her mouth closed” which is why she is a runner for nearly 25 years.
When she pays customers, she exchanges in person, never leaving envelopes of cash behind bathrooms or beneath sinks in tavern bathrooms. Over time, though, she’s lost up to $25,000 from men not paying their losses. “There’s a lot of losers out there,” she explained,”just brazen.” For the soccer tickets, she funds her very own”bank” that’s self-generated, almost informally, by establishing her value on the success of the college season’s first few weeks of bets in the autumn.
“I ain’t giving you no more figures,” Vera states and beverages from her black stripes. Ice cubes turn the whiskey into a lighter tan. She reaches her cigarettes and zips her coat. She questions the recent alterations in the spread for this weekend’s Super Bowl between the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos and squints in her beverage and pays the bartender. Her moves lumber, as her thoughts do. The favorability of the Panthers has changed from three to four four-and-a-half to five fast in the past week. She wants the Panthers to win six or seven in order for her wager to be a success, and predicts Cam Newton will lead them to a double-digit triumph over Peyton Manning.
External, she lights a cigarette before going to a new bar. Someone she didn’t need to see had sat in the first one. She says there’s a man there who will frighten her. She continues farther north.
At the next pub, a poster tacked to the wall past the counter indicates a 100-square Super Bowl grid or”boxes” “Are you running any Super Bowls?” Vera asks.
To acquire a Super Bowl box, in the conclusion of each quarter, the last digit of either of the teams’ scores will need to match the number of your chosen box in the grid. The bartender hands Vera the grid. The pub lights brighten. Vera traces her finger throughout its outline, explaining that if the score is Broncos, 24, and Panthers, 27, by the third quarter, that’s row 4 and column 7. Prize money varies each quarter, and the pool only works properly if bar patrons buy out all the squares.
Vera remembers a pool in 1990, the Giants-Buffalo Super Bowl XXV. Buffalo lost 19 to 20 after missing a field goal from 47 yards. All the Bills knelt and prayed for this field goal. “Cops in the 20th Precinct won. It was 0 9,” she says, describing the box numbers that matched 0 and 9. But her deceased boss squandered the $50,000 pool over the course of this entire year, spending it on lease, gas and cigarettes. Bettors had paid payments throughout the entire year for $500 boxes. Nobody got paid. There was a”contract in his own life.”
The bartender stows a white envelope of money before pouring an apricot-honey mixture for Jell-O shots. Vera rolls up a napkin and spins it into a beer which looks flat to give it foam.
“For the first bookie I worked , my name was’Ice,’ long before Ice-T,” she says, holding out her hand, rubbing at which the ring along with her codename would match. “He got me a ring, which I dropped. Twenty-one diamonds, created’ICE. ”’ The bookie told her he had it inscribed ICE because she had been”a cold-hearted bitch.”

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