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 includes money for one of its own clients. Vera’s a bookie and also a runner, and also to be apparent, Vera’s not her real name.
She’s a small-time bookie, or a bookmaker, a person who takes stakes and leaves commission off them. She books soccer tickets and collects them from pubs, theater stagehands, workers at job websites, and sometimes building supers. Printed on the tickets which are the size of a supermarket are spreads for college football and NFL games. At precisely the same time, she’s a”runner,” another slang term to describe somebody who delivers spread or cash numbers to a boss. Typically bookies are men, not women, and it’s as though she’s on the pursuit for new blood, looking for young gamblers to enlist. The newspaper world of soccer gambling has shrunk in the surface of the exceptionally popular, embattled daily fantasy sites like FanDuel or DraftKings.
“Business is down due to FanDuel, DraftKings,” Vera says. “Guy wager $32 and won 2 million. That is a load of shit. I wish to meet him.” There is a nostalgic feel to circling the amounts of a football spread. The tickets have what seem like traces of rust on the borders. The college season has finished, and she did not do so bad this year, Vera says. What’s left, however, are swimming pool bets for the Super Bowl.
Vera started running numbers back when she was two years old in 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 a charm of youthful defiance. The same was true when she bartended in the’80s. “Jimmy said in the beginning,’I’m going to use you. Just so you know,”’ she says, remembering a deceased boss. “`You go into the bar, bullshit together with the boys. You can talk soccer with a man, you can pull them in, and then they’re yours. ”’ Jimmy died of a brain hemorrhage. Her next boss died of cancer. Vera says she beat breast cancer herself, even though she smokes. She failed radioactive treatment and refused chemo.
Dead managers left behind customers to conduct and she would oversee them. Other runners loathed her in the beginning. They couldn’t understand why she would have more clientele . “And they’d say,’who the fuck is this donkey, coming here carrying my occupation? ”’ she states like the guys are throwing their dead weight about. On occasion the other runners tricked her, for example a runner we’ll call”Tommy” maintained winnings that he was supposed to hand off to her . “Tommy liked to put coke up his noseand play cards, and he enjoyed the women in Atlantic City. He would go and give Sam $7,000 and fuck off with another $3,000. He tells the boss,’Go tell the wide.’ And I says, ‘Fuck you. It’s like I am just a fucking broad to you. I really don’t count. ”’ It’s obviously forbidden for a runner to devote winnings or cash meant for clients on personal vices. But fellow runners and gaming 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 nearly 25 years.
When she pays customers, she exchanges in person, never secretly leaving envelopes of cash behind toilets or under sinks in tavern bathrooms. Over time, though, she’s lost around $25,000 from guys not paying their losses. “There is a lot of losers out there,” she said,”just brazen.” For the soccer tickets, she funds her own”bank” that is self-generated, nearly informally, by building her worth on the success of this school season’s first few weeks of stakes in the autumn.
“I ai not giving you no amounts,” Vera states and beverages from her black straw. Ice cubes turn the whiskey to some lighter tan. She reaches for her smokes 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 drink and pays the bartender. Her moves timber, as her ideas do. The favorability of the Panthers has shifted from three to four-and-a-half to five fast from the past week. She wants the Panthers to win six or seven to allow her wager to be a victory, and forecasts Cam Newton will lead them to some double-digit triumph over Peyton Manning.
External, she lights a cigarette before going to some other pub. Someone she didn’t want to see had sat down in the first one. She says there’s a guy there who will harass her. She proceeds farther north.
In the next bar, 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 win a Super Bowl box, in the conclusion of each quarter, the last digit of the groups’ scores need to match the amount of your chosen box in the grid. The bartender hands Vera the grid. The pub lights brighten. Vera traces her finger across its outline, explaining that when the score is Broncos, 24, and Panthers, 27, by the third quarter, that’s row 4 and column 7. Prize money varies each quarter, along with the pool just works properly if bar patrons purchase out all of the squares.
Vera recalls a pool in 1990, the Giants-Buffalo Super Bowl XXV. Buffalo lost 19 to 20 after missing a field goal from 47 yards. Each of the Bills knelt and prayed for this field goal. “Cops in the 20th Precinct won. It had been 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 year, spending it on lease, gas and cigarettes. Bettors had paid installments through the entire year for $500 boxes. Nobody got paid. There was a”contract in his life.”
The bartender stows a white envelope of money before attaching an apricot-honey mix for Jell-O shots. Vera rolls up a napkin and spins it in a beer that seems flat to provide it foam.
“For the first bookie I worked for, my name was’Ice,’ long until Ice-T,” she says, holding out her hands, 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 since she was”a cold-hearted bitch.”