Lay the Favorite Read Online Free PDF Page A

as the shooter diddled with the dice. In the storage area, aisles awayfrom the noise and commotion, poker players sat around a wooden table, their faces barely distinguishable under the halo of the room’s fluorescent lights.
    In less than a year, the police shut the doors of Bohack after they discovered Rabbi Schwartz had a prior arrest for impersonating a priest. Dink and the rest of the congregation regrouped at a Mafia-run gambling parlor near Austin Street.
    Dink came out ahead as a bookmaker because his customers were all
schmendericks:
good-natured suckers, they bet on the Knicks, the Jets, and the Mets every time they played.
    Trouble started with the wiseguys.
    In the bookmaking business, the term “wiseguy” isn’t used to describe someone involved in the Mafia. It’s used to describe a shrewd, successful sports gambler. And, seemingly overnight, Dink’s office was crawling with them.
    They got in through an agent. Just as Dink was offered a kickback if he encouraged his friends to place bets with the gay bookie, professional gamblers offered agents a return if they found bookmakers who were willing to take their action. In terms of marketing strategy, gamblers resemble Mary Kay saleswomen.
    “Dinky, want some more customers?” an agent asked.
    “Sure,” Dink said. “Give ’em my number.”
    Dink continued with his usual routine. He opened his office at five p.m., called a fellow bookmaker, and asked what point spread, or what
line
, he was using. If his colleague dealt the Pistons minus seven, Dink dealt the Pistons minus seven. If he dealt the Packers minus three, Dink dealt the Packers minus three. Each Monday, Dink settled his accounts with his customers. He met them at the track or inside the Queens College cafeteria, and either paid them what they had won, or, more commonly, they paid Dink what they had lost. The only thing that changed in Dink’s workday was the amount of time he spent alone at the kitchen table, hunched over a calculator and yellow legal pad, trying to figure out how the hellhis old customers, his friends, never won, and the new guys, who were so friendly on the phone and bet obscure teams like Western Michigan and Troy State, never lost.
    What Dink didn’t know was that at eight a.m., while he was sound asleep, his new customers had already started their workday. Their pencils were sharpened and they were looking over their charts, considering the matchups. At JFK Airport, their associates lingered at the arrival gates of major cities that had sports teams, waiting for planes to empty so they could collect the discarded hometown newspapers and bring them to their boss.
    At noon, while Dink ate a bowl of cereal and prepared to watch
Ryan’s Hope
, another set of associates was out gathering information. At the Union Plaza Hotel in downtown Las Vegas, the sports book manager held his stogie while scribbling the day’s odds on a chalkboard. The messengers, known as beards or runners, copied the odds onto their clipboards and sprinted to the nearest pay phone and reported to the boss. The boss compared the Las Vegas line,
the
line, to the lines of all the other bookmakers with whom he did business, searching for the odds that were the weakest.
    At four p.m., while Dink moseyed home after the afternoon races at Aquaduct, his wiseguy customers were still working. They had thoroughly read the sports and weather pages of the
Chicago Tribune
, the
Milwaukee Journal
, and the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
, among others. Laboring over their own calculators and legal pads, they jotted down the facts they found most useful: injuries, suspensions, precipitation levels, wind directions, team morale, referee schedules, and distinctive home-field advantages. They analyzed the information and determined the games where the point spread gave them a thorough advantage.
    And at five p.m., they dialed the number of the new fish. That kid in Queens, Dinky. The one who never adjusted his lines. Who never