In the 1980s, the Boulevard Social and Athletic Club, at Bustleton Avenue and the Roosevelt Boulevard in Philadelphia, was the hottest poolroom in Philadelphia and probably the hottest on the East Coast. All the biggest names showed up there---Efren Reyes, Mike Sigel, Spanish Mike, Jimmy Fusco, Pittsburgh Johnny, Trenton Marty, Stevie Wonder, Petey Fusco. (There were plenty of other cool names as well---Pooh, Peter Rabbit, Muscle John. It was a lot like the waterfront---you could know a guy for years and never learn his real name.)
The big players showed up for the big money games, which typically began around 2 AM. I was a very bad pool player at the time but I loved the ambiance.
Among the grifters and degenerates I met there was a sports bookie who I will call Joe Decker (many names in this story have been changed). Aside from an occasional $5 wager with friends on a big football game, I was not a sports bettor and had never dealt with a bookmaker before. I had never even met a bookmaker before.
Decker was about 5’6”, 120 pounds---a ratty little man who never had a beard or mustache but who never seemed to have shaved recently either. He worked in circulation for the Philadelphia Inquirer and spent a lot of time driving around the city. He knew a lot of people and was always meeting more of them, so there were always potential new customers.
At the time, I was young, had a decent job, and normally had some money to throw around. It was inevitable I would start betting on sports with Decker, and I did. I was not a huge player, but I was reliable so he liked me. If I lost, I paid him. If I won, he paid me. Friday at the Boulevard was our day to settle up.
One night he asked me if I wanted to get more involved in the game, as his silent partner. He would do all the work and take all the phone calls, but he would call me every day with the action, and I would be responsible for half of it. I said yes.
And thus began my life of crime.
For Joe, this arrangement had many advantages. He was a small-time guy with small-time players and no real bankroll, so my partnership allowed him to take on more action. He had always had the option of “laying off” bets with a mob-connected bookmaker in South Philly. For example, if he had a thousand dollars bet on the Eagles and didn’t want to carry that risk, he could always bet some of it in South Philly to reduce his exposure. The problem was that if he lost bets to South Philly, they had to be paid, and on time. If Joe’s dirtball clients were slow in paying him, he could wind up being squeezed. Then he would have to tap a loan shark for the money to pay South Philly. With me in the picture, Joe had a bit more flexibility. For example, if Joe needed an extra week to pay me, I might bitch about it, but I wasn’t going to send some guy to alter his kneecaps.
Immediately, I went from having a hundred or two at stake to having five or ten thousand a week on the line. Now I really cared about sports, including sports I had previously paid no attention to, like hockey. I was obsessed. Every evening, from 7:30 until the last games finished on the West Coast, I was tracking scores, and on weekends, I followed the ebb and flow from noon to midnight. Of course, I had to conceal my frenzy because what I was doing was illegal. If my law firm had found out, I would certainly have been fired, and I might have lost my license. The adrenaline rush was constant and addictive, and it kept me going, but becoming Decker’s partner was not the very smartest thing I ever did with my life.
In addition to sweating the scores, I also had to sweat the ordeal of getting paid. There were times the business ran smoothly, and the times when Joe would shove an envelope full of twenties in my pocket were delightful, but most of the time, the money was late, or a little short, and I would have to listen to his stories about why the money was a little late or a little short, and he was such a bullshitter under normal circumstances that I would always wonder what the real story might be. I knew I was way down on the list of guys to get paid---that was our deal. He had to pay winners and he had to pay South Philly, and then there were deadbeats who would drop five hundred and then disappear. That was reality, and I had to cut him some slack. Nobody wants to be played for a sucker, however, and I had no way to verify Joe’s stories, which changed frequently.
But of course, I was making money, and it was cash, and since I couldn’t put it in the bank or do something useful with it, it paid for meals in nice restaurants and bar tabs and presents, and that was wonderful. Today, in 2023, I wonder about the totalitarians in our government and elsewhere who want to eliminate cash and replace it with “digital dollars.” I hate them, of course---the freedom-haters are dangerous people. But I also pity them because they never had the experience (or have forgotten it), of being on the loose in a city with a few bucks in your pocket and nothing but fun on your mind.
My arrangement with Joe lasted for about three years, and while we both benefitted from it, we never became friends, and we eventually broke up the partnership because we just got sick of it. I remember our relationship mostly as a constant stream of arguments about money, about whether he should cut a customer off because he was more trouble than he was worth, and so on. Also, Sandy never could stand him, and would make sure she was never around when he would show up at the house. Tex had come into being as well, and I didn’t want Decker around because he kept using the word “nigger” no matter how often I told him not to. “It’s just a word,” Decker would say. “Yeah, Joe,” I tried to explain, “but I don’t want my kid hearing it until he’s old enough to understand what it means.”
The one souvenir of my life as a bookie is a very nice pool cue made by Richard Helmstetter, a craftsman of fine cuesticks. It was taken as collateral on some losing bets made by Johnny Falcon, once the best pool player in Philly, and I agreed to accept it in lieu of $400 I was owed. I don’t play pool much anymore but I do take it out of its tooled leather case occasionally, screw it together and admire it. It’s a beautiful item, and a perfect artifact of my ridiculous career as a bookie. Plus, as Damon Runyon would say, “There’s a story that goes with it.”
Copyright2023Michael Kubacki
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