HAROLD’S NOTE: The following is a couple stories plucked from a book I’m working on in collaboration with my father. It’s a memoir of his life as a bookie. He did much of the book’s early chapters in collaboration with a journalist from Pittsburgh, Bill Steigerwald. When I was writing my forthcoming novel (FSG 2026), I was writing chapters in the voice of a former bookie named John Rodgers (my dad’s name is Jon Rogers). When I was finished with my first draft, he tells me he’s working on a book, too. Some of the chapters he wrote and some of the ones I wrote were nearly identical, septuagintly1. But other than the booking career, the John Rodgers in my book is extremely different from Jon Rogers, no bullshit. I don’t know what this book will become, but I envision a big novel that pushes past memoir and encompasses the history of online sports betting (of which Jon Rogers played a pivotal role) entitled WILLIAM J. CAESAR (which was his working pseudonym). Excerpted here are two brief stories. The first of his days running a bookie shop in the small town of Toronto, OH, in the 1980s. And the other, of one of his goofball friends.
THE NUMBERS RACKET
We didn’t write daily numbers mainly cause I didn’t know how that part of the bookie business worked.
I often played the daily number myself.
I knew if you bet a dollar and your number hit, you won $600. I also knew the odds of picking a randomly selected three-digit number are 999-1. So the odds are against you (no shit).
But I didn’t learn how the numbers racket worked, —or how lucrative it was, —until I asked a local guy I knew named Sonny who was writing numbers in Guy’s Bar.
The numbers game was an incredibly popular, extremely profitable and totally illegal gambling business. It had been operating in every ethnic neighborhood of big cities like Pittsburgh and New York and in small towns like Toronto and Steubenville since the 1920s. Bookies were largely left alone by local police and politicians who knew exactly what was going on and usually were paid handsomely to look the other way.
In the early 1980s, the random daily number that we and most bookies across the country used was generated at 4 p.m. by the day’s closing New York stock market activity. You’d take the last three digits from the advanced, declined and unchanged figures for the Dow Jones Industrial Index, which were published in the business sections of newspapers. On Saturdays the number came from the handle at a New York racetrack.
When state governments started their lotteries in the 1970s, they took business away from bookies at first. But the state only paid winners 500 to 1 instead of 600 to 1. Plus, you had to pay taxes on your winnings, so a lot of people stayed loyal to their local books.
Actually, in the long run the legal state lotteries helped bookies. They made betting on the daily number legit and made it more popular with the general public, especially when they began televising the daily drawings at dinner time.
Sonny was writing numbers in Toronto for an older bookie named Phil who owned a pawn shop in Steubenville. In the 1930s when the Buffalo mob sent a guy down to run the local gambling industry, Phil had been the guy’s muscle, at least that’s what they say.
Sonny said he owed Phil 3700 bucks. I said ok and I give him 3700 to pay him off.
One day I got a call from Phil and he asked me to stop down at his shop.
I walked into the shop and Phil was behind the counter. His 35 year old son who was retarded (excuse my language but that’s what we called them back then) was on the other side. Next thing I know Phil’s son had pulled out a pistol and was waving it around over his head. I turned around, I was about to get the fuck out of there, but Phil said, “Don’t worry. I don’t give him any bullets.”
Phil said he had heard a lot of good things about me. He liked the way I did things. It probably helped that my mother and her twin brother, who Phil knew, were raised in Steubenville on what my mother called “Italian Hill.”
Phil said, “I like the way you handled this. I am getting too old to keep chasing for my money all the time.”
Phil became a good friend and valuable source of information about the local bookie world. We used to play poker on Wednesday afternoons and he’d always keep me informed about what was going on. He even gave me the names of the customers he used to book. I would book them and we would split the profits.
Phil told me one day that Art Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers and a famous gambler, used to bet horses with him. After a month of getting his brain beat in by Rooney, Phil said he started betting the same horses he was booking for Rooney. He would book $500 across for Rooney and he’d bet $1,000 for himself. Some of these bets made it as far as New York City.
Phil’s sports customers lost eight out of every ten weeks. We split the profits 50-50. His brother- in-law Jack used to handle the money. He used to always pay us in $20 bills, in a wrapper of $500. But every stack only had $480.
I never said anything about it to Phil. I just considered it “Jack’s tax.”
Once I got the hang of the numbers game, it worked out great. I had the town covered. I had Sonny in the south end and another guy in a bar in the north end.
The business was growing fast. We invented a special deal for the customers. You play your numbers on Monday for all week and you get Saturday free. There was no Sunday number back then. We had customers coming from all around the area.
We had pencils made with our motto, “You play we pay!”
By far, most of my steady customers were good people, but some guys always try to get over on you. It’s human nature. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it backfired.
We used to put out professionally made parlay cards with perforated bottoms where you’d tear off the bottom and circle the number of the game you wanted.
We had one guy who came down from the Shippingport nuclear power plant every Tuesday night when our parlay cards came out. He was sneaky. We’d see him take 30 or 40 of the big pink parley cards that we had put out for customers. But when he came down on weekends, he only bet straight bets and two-team parlays.
So we wondered What the hell was he doing every week with all our parlay cards?
I asked some guys I knew who worked up at Shippingport about the guy. They said he was passing out our parlay cards and booking games himself, so I thought it was time for a teachable moment.
The next week we printed 200 of our pink parlay cards and deliberately inverted the point spreads on four of the college football games. They were intra-conference games, so it was easy. Kansas was playing Kansas State, Iowa versus Iowa State, Florida versus Florida State and Oklahoma against Oklahoma State. We flipped the point spreads.
Sharp bettors familiar with college football would have picked up the “mistake” right away.
So after the guy from Shippingport comes in on Tuesday and leaves with his 40 incorrect pink parlay cards, we threw the rest of them away and put out a stack of new blue cards with the right point spreads. First thing Saturday morning, the guy shows up in the shop with $2,500 worth of pink parlay cards he wanted to play.
(HAROLD’S NOTE: There’s nothing more important than a good number when you’re betting sports. No matter what kinda fucking horsesense you got for picking winners. So the numbnuts from the power plant booked a bunch of bad numbers and realized it afterwards and tried to slough it off back on William J.)
He must have realized he was screwed.
We told him the printer had called us and said he had made mistakes on the pink cards, so we had to throw them all away and replace them with blue corrected ones. We told the guy we thought we had caught all the bad cards, but we didn’t and, sorry, we couldn’t do anything about it.
We taught that guy a nice lesson. I didn’t feel sorry for him. He had been booking for a whole year with my parlay cards and my betting lines. That was my intellectual property. Thanks to my little lesson, we didn’t have to worry about him stealing our parlay cards anymore.
I had Adam working the shop for me from 8 to 11AM.
He was a retired butcher and longtime numbers player. We called him The Psychic Prognosticator.
Monday was a busy day, so I’d try to keep him out of there by giving him the day off. He’d see all that money coming in and he say, “You better take good care of me, you big bastard!”
Adam was a little nuts. One morning before he left the shop at 11AM. I asked him to give me a hot number just to appease his ego.
It was 758 and so I wrote 758 20 OH on the layoff sheet.
Anytime we had over 10 straight on a particular number, we would bet it with a bookie in Pittsburgh. The idea was you never wanted to lose more on one number than the total money booked that day.
At 7:32 that evening, less than a minute after the Ohio daily number was picked on TV, my phone rang. “You better take care of me, you big bastard!”
It was Adam. The number 758 hit straight. I had 20 $1 tickets on the winner. A grand total of $10,000 thanks to him.
What I didn’t realize until the next morning was that a bunch of my customers also had the number 758. Adam had given it to them too.
We paid out just under $30,000 to my customers. Counting the $10,000 I won from the layoff guy, we had a net loss of about $20,000.
I’ll never forget that Adam wanted me to give him a $2,000 tip for giving me the winning number. I told him, “Why don’t you hit up the other winners for tips? You gave them the winning number too.”
The Psychic Prognosticator’s big hit was the talk of town for a week. It was worth taking a large loss in the long run because his win was a great advertisement for my business.
But Adam drove me so crazy about giving him a $2,000 tip, I ended up giving it to him just to shut him up.
When Adam opened the shop up every morning, old George Peckins was always there to sweep the floor and clean up the place. I also gave George the duty of emptying the money from the poker machines to restart the day.
One day I casually asked him, “George, do you steal from me?”
George’s reply I will never forget. “Yeah boss. If anyone in town can afford it, it’s you.”
I had a great team working for me.
JOE Q & HIS BROTHER
My buddy Joe Q was a character.
He liked to drink a little bit, and he was gonna propose to his girlfriend, right?
But he was a gentleman so he wanted to ask her father for his blessing first. He never even met the guy before. Her dad worked a lot and was hard to catch. His girlfriend mentioned once that her dad golfed every Sunday morning at 7AM.
So Saturday night Joe thought he would go out and have a couple drinks and then go home, get some sleep, and wake up early to go catch her dad before golf.
Well Joe got over-served and drove right to her house after the bar. It was one in the morning so all the lights were off. He figured he would just wait until morning.
At 6:30AM the father comes out of his house and sees a car parked in his fucking yard.
Joe was sound asleep with the windows down. The dad comes over and sees Joe with fucking morning dew on his face.
He says, “Hey, what the hell are you doing?”
He said, “nice to meet you sir, I’d like to marry your daughter.”
They got married and believe it or not, it didn’t go that well.
They were in the midst of a divorce and Joe Q was drunk driving up University Blvd. in Steubenville. And there’s a sharp curve that’s tough to pull off if you’re wasted. He missed the turn going fast, hit the curb, and his car flew up and landed on top of a car at the car dealership.
Luckily, the person in the car right behind him pulled over and went to check on him.
But unfortunately it turned out it was his wife’s divorce attorney.
She graciously offered him a ride home. But you know, Joe Q was still a little drunk, and at a red light, he leaned over and tried to plant a smooch on her. Believe it or not, she didn’t kiss him back.
The next morning when the cops came by asking questions, Joe’s mom said that he was home all yesterday, sober as an angel.
Joe Q was better than his brother though. His brother Mike was the most dangerous guy in Steubenville. I was fucking scared to death of him. One New Year’s Eve Mike pistol-whipped Joe, just cause he was being annoying.
So you can imagine what happened when Mike Q’s next door neighbor let his dog piss in Mike’s yard.
Mike Q pulled out of his drive way, pulled out his pistol and let bullets fly right into his neighbor’s house. Then he circled the block and pulled right back into his own driveway.
Luckily nobody was hurt. But I don’t think Mike Q gave a shit either way.
I would say I hope those guys are Resting in Peace, but I think they’ll find trouble wherever they end up.
Septuagintly: my coinage. Legend goes that the first translators of the bible from Hebrew into Greek were holed up in 70 separate rooms in the library of Alexandria; when they were done and compared their translations they were identical. Me & my pops were in divine concord like them boys.
Great stuff, I want more. What do you mean by "Some of these bets made it as far as New York City." Is it that Phil was placing these bets in NY or he was telling other people to play them in NY I don't get it. Ta.