Gaming the Game Read online

  “In high school, I had two loving parents who thought I did as I pleased. My parents were working so much and trying to control me as much as possible because they knew I was never satisfied and that I always wanted more. I wanted to do things at my own pace, and had a problem with being told what to do. I think they knew they had trouble on the horizon with me. Meanwhile, my sisters were scholar-athletes. My older sister was MVP of the Catholic League for softball and basketball for O’Hara and my younger sister was a pretty good athlete, too.1 They were honor students, whereas I didn’t give a fuck. I didn’t want to apply myself. I just wanted to get by and enjoy life.” For Battista, part of “enjoying life” in those days occasionally included hitting a local taproom before classes began. The outrageous routine caused him to engage in a gambit that piqued his interest so much that it foreshadowed a long and prosperous career.

  “The first time I got into what you would call serious gambling was at a bar named Shields Tavern on Township Line Road in Drexel Hill, which we used to call Shieldsy’s,” Battista says. “My senior year in high school we would go in there before school and have a few beers and shots. There was this guy who challenged me to an arm wrestling match, and he told me I had to raise twenty-five hundred dollars to face him. My friends and I scrambled to get the money together, but couldn’t raise more than a few hundred bucks. We were teenagers, we didn’t have money. He still let me arm wrestle him, though, and I beat him. Just the process of trying to get the money to face him, knowing that I was going to take him and win the bet, really got me going.” Despite the rush of betting-related hustling, Battista didn’t bet anything more than football pools in high school, and says he never placed bets with bookies on sports at that point in his life.

  Up next was a brief foray in college. “I went to West Chester University and hated it,” Battista says. “I went to college because my parents wanted me to go, and I chose West Chester because I was seeing a hot chick from high school and she went there. To me, college was just another opportunity to drink and party more. My freshman year in college was the first time I experimented with hard drugs. I tried coke. I thought it was pretty good, because the longer I stayed up the more I could party. Back then, I could just use it socially. I’d have some for a weekend and that was it.” It was also during his freshman year that he became close friends with Tommy Martino, someone with whom Battista’s name would be inextricably linked in the years to come.

  “The first time I met Tommy was when I was five years old,” Battista says. “I was going to kindergarten at Westbrook Park Elementary School. We both lived in Westbrook Park; he lived on Springfield Road and I lived on Westbrook Drive. His brother, Johnny, and I were good friends. We were the same age and went to kindergarten together and we were actually baptized the same day at Holy Cross church, on March 28, 1965. Me and Johnny were friends right through elementary school, even though he stayed at Westbrook Park for elementary school and I went to Holy Cross grade school. Well, Johnny had an older brother, Chuck, and a younger brother, Tommy, and we would all play together in alleys and stuff like that. Westbrook Park Elementary ends at fifth grade, and the Martino boys then went to Holy Cross grade school for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, where I already was. We used to walk to school together on a daily basis. I’d walk down to the bottom of the hill, stop by their house, and call up to them, ‘Hey, you guys ready?’ and Mrs. Martino would yell back, ‘They’ll be right down.’ We did that for all three years. We had a great childhood together, and hung out a lot. We played organized football and basketball together, and hung in the streets doing things like playing hockey and stickball. We were a pretty athletic bunch, and were playing sports year-round. We fought if we had to, like other kids, but sports were our thing.

  “Me, Johnny and Tommy were altar boys together at Holy Cross Parish. Me and Johnny were best friends, and Tommy was always along with us. There were a few other friends that hung with us, but we were, like, the main core. Tommy was a year younger than Johnny, and Johnny and Tommy were great athletes. Johnny was the running back for our grade school team, and went on to play college football at Ursinus. From sixth grade through high school, Johnny and I were like salt and pepper, always together doing stuff with Tommy and a tight-knit group of guys from Westbrook Park. But, when Johnny went away to Ursinus, I was still at home and commuting to West Chester and started hanging out with just Tommy more during his senior year in high school. Tommy and I gelled pretty quickly because we both liked to party. We drank, smoked pot, did coke, and tried to get laid.

  “Around this time, Mr. and Mrs. Martino were going through a divorce, so we would party at Tommy’s house because there was so little supervision. Tommy’s father had a best friend named Mark who was an engineer for a helicopter company. The guy was brilliant but he had some mental problems and his wife left him. He was like a stray dog and he used to hang with us. We were nineteen and twenty years old, and he was in his mid- to late thirties. He had an apartment that we would use to smoke pot, do drugs, and he liked that we always had girls hanging around with us, hoping that he could get some of the scraps. It was also great because if we didn’t have money to buy drugs, he’d help us out. Tommy sold and smoked pot since early in high school. I smoked pot, but wasn’t a stoner like he was. I didn’t really like it because it put me to sleep. I was always on the go, and was always more into the speed and the coke. At that point, Tommy was selling weed just to put gas in his car and have some leftover for himself.”

  The lifestyle Battista so warmly and proudly recalls was not sustainable if he wanted to succeed in college. “I got kicked out of my dorm my freshman fall semester for partying so much,” Battista says, “so I had to commute back and forth to campus, which was a pain in the ass. Clifton Heights to West Chester was a good forty-five-minute drive. I did that for a year and a half, and was working part-time. I kept thinking, ‘This is getting old’—working late at night, waiting tables and stuff like that, and then getting up early to go to school. I didn’t like it. It just wasn’t for me. It also wasn’t fun dating the girl from high school any longer, so I dropped out and got a job at a place called City Shoes.

  “We were selling shoes for ‘nine ninety-nine.’ It was a great job to work because I got tons of women. Back then, I was fairly good-looking, in shape, and had long, curly hair. The place was like a fucking pussy factory! The owners loved me because women were coming in there and I was selling a lot of shoes for them. The people I worked for were so tight with bucks; they just wanted you to work like a slave, smile, and make that money, which I did. I also made my own money because I could move coke to other stores by putting it in the shoes. This is back in early 80s when drugs were pretty rampant. We had a way we took the silica salt out and put coke into the shoes. Silica was the salt packet in the shoes.2 I was playing with drugs a lot, and there were other guys I worked with in the shoe business who were involved, moving shoes back and forth between stores and the warehouse. I would put maybe two or three grams in each shoe in place of the silica salt. That’s how we sent the drugs. As much as I was using coke, I knew there was money in moving it. I never got hooked on the weed, but coke I knew people would pay for.”

  Battista’s employer ultimately realized that numerous pairs of shoes were somehow being lost or stolen, and confronted their sales superstar. “There came a point where I stole more product than I was selling,” Battista says. Fortunately for him, the owners had their own legal issues to address and didn’t want an employee like Battista upset enough to assist authorities. His employers thus spared him further harm, provided he stopped whatever hustle he had going. “They got in trouble for embezzlement, and then I stopped dealing,” Battista says. “I saw what kind of trouble was there if I didn’t stop.” He was soon rewarded for his decision, and especially for his loyalty. “They stayed with me because they didn’t want to get into more trouble. They had me start opening franchises out in Monroeville, which is near Pittsburgh, for about half a year. To
me, it was like their way of saying, ‘We’ll take care of you. Thank you for all the work you did.’ ”

  Battista’s adventure with City Shoes was about to come to a peaceful end, and was soon followed by another crude—and easily detectable—scam at his next place of employment. “When I got back from Pittsburgh,” Battista says, “I left City Shoes and took a job at a BEST department store in the Springfield Shopping Center. There again, with my sales ability, I was their number one catalog seller. Well, I devised a scheme after about three months where I got every employee’s social security number.” The BEST computer system required employees to log in using their social security number, to which each sale would be logged. “I was working the pickup desk,” Battista says. “I took everyone’s social security numbers when they weren’t working and plugged them in and ordered stuff so that I wouldn’t get caught. I would tell kids when to show up, and the products would actually go through the computer system like it was a real sale for some employee, but I would just take the money. I would sell kids stereo equipment, video equipment. If something cost three hundred dollars, I’d sell it for a hundred and fifty. That was my thing. This went on for about a year before some girl ratted me out because I used her social security number to move some merchandise and she found out. The cops came to BEST to arrest me while I was working and caught me in the act. There were other people in the store doing similar things, but I took it to the extreme, like everything else in my life. By the time I got caught, they were missing thousands of dollars in stereo equipment.

  “Around this time, I stopped playing with the coke, but I was drinking more. One night I got really fucked up and I was driving on the wrong side of Lansdowne Avenue in front of Monsignor Bonner High School coming home from one of the clubs downtown. When they pulled me over they got my license, which was fake. Back in high school, I dated this girl who worked at a photography store and I falsified a lot of licenses for teenagers and would make them twenty-one. They cost us like fifteen or twenty cents to make, and we would charge kids twenty bucks apiece. We probably did three hundred licenses at fifteen to twenty bucks apiece, which was good money. It was one of my first good hustles. She had all the equipment, and we typeset them, printed them, and laminated them. We had it down to a science. You couldn’t scratch them or nothing. They were great. In fact, after I got locked up, they hung up my license in the Upper Darby police station. That’s the way I was, though. I was always looking for an angle. I wasn’t book smart but if I looked at something and studied it, I would find out a way to make a dollar off of it.

  “Well, like a week later, I got caught underage drinking. I couldn’t call my father to come pick me up because at that point my parents were pretty mad at me. I called Tommy Martino’s dad and he bailed me out of jail. I’ll never forget; it cost him sixty-seven dollars to get me out. He told me, ‘You better wise up or you’re going to get yourself into serious trouble.’ So now, I had two drinking things lurking and the thing at BEST department store, which hadn’t gone to court yet. I was facing charges of DUI, falsification of documents for the driver’s licenses, taking BEST to the hilt, and under-age drinking. This was almost all at the same time. When we got to court, after they read all the things I had pending, the judge just looked at me and said, ‘What is going on here?!’

  “I’ll never forget, BEST had, like, four lawyers. I had no money so I had a public defender. I made up a story that I owed somebody money and that he was threatening me and that was what made me steal and sell the stereo equipment. The judge bought it, and I’ll never forget that since I was facing jail time because of how much I stole. He let me plead to criminal mischief. With the other stuff I was charged with, the judge accepted that, although I had a good upbringing, I had just gone hog wild. I lost my license for six years. They dropped the charge of falsification of documents, and I got ARD.3 I got no jail time, but had to do a lot of community service. I took that as a win. The Lord, Jesus Christ, was looking down on me! I got lucky.”

  Having been granted a remarkable reprieve, Battista was left to make something of himself at this crucial juncture of his life. The question as to whether he would ultimately revert back to his parents’ beloved James Battista or continue on as the slick Baba Black Sheep would be answered all too quickly.

  Footnotes

  Battista’s sisters each went on to graduate from Neumann College, after which they have had rather productive lives. Jimmy considers his sisters’ accomplishments as further evidence of his parents’ profound influence. His older sister still ranks among the career leaders in assists for Neumann College basketball, and according to Jimmy is now a commander in the U.S. Navy. His younger sister is a registered nurse who also happens to be married to a doctor.

  More commonly known as silica gel, these packets are often placed in shoes and other products to absorb moisture.

  ARD is short for Pennsylvania’s Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition, a one-time alternative to a trial, conviction, and possible jail sentence for first offenders. ARD is most commonly used in DUI cases. If an offender does not comply with the conditions set forth by the prosecutor (e.g., fines, community service, substance abuse counseling, etc.), charges are likely to follow. Successful completion of the ARD program results in the charges being dismissed and allows for the underlying record to be expunged.

  Taking His Lumps

  “IWAS STAYING WITH a friend of mine at his apartment and didn’t want to go back home because my parents were furious with me,” Jimmy Battista says. “I just got through this trouble and had to see my probation officer every so often. I had to get a job that I could walk to close to me ’cause I lost my license. My dad told me to go down to a restaurant called Spanky’s and see the owner, Lou Lambrusco, who he knew from high school. So, I walked down from Westbrook Park to Spanky’s to see if I could get a job as a waiter or a busboy. I said, ‘Mr. Lambrusco, my name is James Battista,’ and he said, ‘You’re Squarehead’s kid! The only reason I am going to hire you is because you’re Squarehead’s kid.’ ” As Lambrusco says many years later, “His father was as straight as could be. I knew him from high school. We weren’t friends, really, we just knew each other. People called him Squarehead because he was such a straight arrow and because he had a square head. When Baba came in that day, I hadn’t seen his father in years.” Battista was hired on the spot, and quickly discovered there was more to “Mr. Lambrusco” than met the eye. “I soon found out that he was a bookmaker who went by the name ‘Louie the Lump,’” says Battista. “Most people only knew him as the owner of the restaurant. In no time, I got hooked into booking, betting, drinking, and drugging.”

  By the mid-1980s, Louie “The Lump” Lambrusco had already lived quite a life. Now in his late forties, the physically imposing Lump’s days of football stardom were long gone but the tough reputation remained. Lump played football in high school, listed at six-three and two hundred and forty pounds, went on to play for the Marines at Parris Island, and even had a stint with semi-pro ball. A hard worker who liked to play just as hard, Lambrusco had become known throughout the area for his involvement with bars and restaurants. Though very much into the nightlife scene, Lambrusco never really did drugs. “I smoked pot a few times and tried to do coke once,” he says, “but I couldn’t snort because my nose had been broken so many times.” He was also by now a fairly consequential bookmaker, taking in approximately ninety thousand dollars per week in betting action. He began booking back in his twenties when he was a bartender. “There was so many people coming in and betting,” he explains. “They’d give me the action, and I was turning it in to somebody. I decided, ‘Fuck it. I might as well take it.’ I also used to do a lot of pools when I was younger.”

  Unlike many bookmakers, Lambrusco was not mentored into the profession. Rather, he figured out how to book just by personal, trial and error, experience. As he heartily says, “When you get beat up, you learn!” Lump had no “employees” in the beginning, and simply took the action
himself. Over time, his clientele grew and he developed runners—who were responsible for collecting bets, debts, etc.—throughout Delaware County. Incredibly, Louie the Lump says he never took a pinch for gambling or bookmaking. As for the other possible risk to his operation, Lambrusco was never visited, much less threatened, by “the boys downtown” (i.e., Philadelphia’s Italian-American crime “family”). It may have been that his book wasn’t consequential enough to merit their attention, or that Delco bookies in general weren’t mob extortion targets during the 70s and early 80s.

  * * *

  Lou Lambrusco had owned other establishments prior to the current effort with Spanky’s, though none had earned him the acclaim and notoriety the new restaurant would. Just as Jimmy Battista was being hired as a waiter, Spanky’s was undergoing a restoration and soon opened as Louis’ Restaurant, with Lambrusco’s hands-on management dictating things. Battista’s introduction to Lambrusco’s work ethic was immediate and made quite an impression. “He’d be working during the day renovating the restaurant,” Battista says, “and by four o’clock he’d be back there ‘behind the line,’ as we called it, cooking. When I was a waiter trainee, he’d make us take classes. You’d say, ‘Good evening. Welcome to Louis’ Restaurant, my name is James and I’ll be your waiter,’ and Lou would sit there watching. If you reached across a table the wrong way, he would slap your hand and say, ‘Don’t do that! Serve from the left, take away from the right,’ and stuff like that. He was dead fucking serious.” As Lump puts it, “All the kids who worked for me knew if they didn’t show up on time and work hard, I’d fucking kill them. If my own son ever showed up late, I’d punch him right in the fucking mouth.”

  Lump’s manner of doing business was a hit with his twenty-something male waitstaff, who idolized their in-your-face boss. This was due in large part to his drinking exploits and his appreciation, so to speak, of women. Lump was a renowned drinker and was often the life of the party when the restaurant was about to close each evening. “For the waiters, when we would hang and drink in the restaurant after a night’s work, watching Lump drink was a fucking show,” Battista says. “I’d get my work done, go sit at the bar, and I’d get it moving,” says Lambrusco. “If I bought six drinks, they might be a quarter a piece. If a customer bought six drinks, it might be thirteen dollars. That was the idea of getting everything moving. I’d sit and drink a bottle of scotch after work every night.” Though Lump was approving—if not encouraging—when it came to drinking among his staff, he says, “I used to always tell the guys not to get into [hard] drugs. To me, it was such a waste of a person.”