Gaming the Game Read online

  The combination of Lambrusco’s experience, management style, go-getter service staff, and lively atmosphere would work well for the next few years. According to Battista, “Louis’ was the place to go in Delaware County. We’d have bookmakers, politicians, and all sorts of people coming in and we were cleaning up. You couldn’t get a table on a Friday or Saturday night. There was a bunch of guys my age who waitered at Louis’ and we all busted our asses, but we loved it.” “The place did a ton of business. It was the best restaurant Delaware County had ever seen,” Lump fondly recalls. “You’d walk in and see tableside flames, bottles of wine everywhere. The food was good, the prices weren’t out of line, and the service was excellent. I had six to ten young, good-looking guys in the dining room who were workers. We weren’t cheap, but from hanging your coat to pulling out your chair, the whole thing was just class all the way. People still tell me it was the best restaurant they were ever in.” Battista’s assessment is, shall we say, less technical. “We were known for our work ethic, and people thought Louis’ was a kick-ass restaurant. Our mentality was that you could come in, get a great dinner and a bottle of wine for a hundred dollars, and hopefully you were gonna get laid at the end of the night.”

  The outstanding service for which Louis’ was renowned stemmed from Lump’s nonstop pressure on the waitstaff, which served as an important lesson that Battista would exploit for many years to come. “You couldn’t come in and just order an entrée,” Lump says. “If one of the waiters came back to the kitchen with just an entrée on the order, they’d get their ass chewed out.” “He’d make us compete for head averages on who had the highest check,” explains Battista. “He’d be like, ‘What the fuck?! You had a four head count and you can’t get two hundred dollars, you couldn’t get fifty bucks a head?!’ He’d say to things like, ‘The entrée alone is seventeen dollars. Did you sell them a bottle of wine? Did you sell them a tableside salad?’ Battista sums up the broader significance of all this as follows: “He was constantly showing us discipline and the mind of a gambler, in essence, because what you learn is that it all adds up .”

  Battista was learning all sorts of lessons during his valued time with Lump and, according to Battista, not all of them were what most would consider the right ones. “My dad was real quiet, a good American citizen, and a great guy, where Lump was the epitome of what you didn’t want your kid to be. But I liked him. There was something about him. He was a hustler and a criminal. He had so many shady friends because of his early days of bookmaking and other things he did. The more I hung around with him, the more I learned. The state of Pennsylvania was moving liquor trucks of wine and stuff like that. Lump had these guys come to the restaurant and would get the guys drunk in the bar. They’d have a trailer full of wine and alcohol outside and we’d get bolt cutters, go in the back of their truck and just fucking pilfer everything we could. We would take like forty cases of wine, hide them, and then go sell them. We’d take, like, a six-dollar bottle of vodka and sell it for three bucks. So, my criminal activity continued—and escalated, because I liked this guy! Then we got into the betting. He was the first one who taught me how to book.

  “I was waitering throughout this time, and we used to do a lot of tableside cooking. We worked our asses off, had to look presentable, and had to know what you were talking about. But when you were done you partied your ass off—you drank, you drugged, and tried to get laid. One of the great lines Lump used in the morning when we came into work was, ‘Who brought home the newspaper and who had breakfast with somebody?’ He made such an impression on me. He was one of these guys who had some of the funniest sayings, and I learned so much from him. He used to say, ‘Baba, don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle.’ At first I looked at the guy like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ What he meant was, people are going to go to a steakhouse to buy the steak, so what you need to do is sell everything around it. Well, I applied those principles to my daily life.” Lump obviously had his way of expressing his view on life and the impressionable Sheep took it all in. One last and great example offered by Battista involved Lambrusco’s play on the popular Trix cereal commercial, featuring kids telling the product’s trademark character, “Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids!” “Lump would say, ‘Baba, every broad has a set of tits, but tits are for kids! Be an ‘ass man’ and you’ll get more out of life.’ His views on life and the things he said really set the precedent for a lot of the things I did.

  “Even though I was a waiter, he taught me how to cook. I was joined at his side because me and him connected so well. He lived to teach kids his way of doing things. He was always against doing hard drugs, but he didn’t mind drinking, smoking a little pot, and getting laid as much as possible. He thought they were the greatest things. He got hit with trip sevens on a St. Patty’s Day. It was the last action he took. He covered the bets but got wiped out. He covered something like two hundred and fifty grand. He was always a man of his word. He was the one who always told me, ‘If you take a bet, you better pay. If it takes you a while, you pay that bet off.’ That stuck in my mind, like this is the way you have to be. Lump was everything I wanted to be. I wanted to own a restaurant, I wanted to be Mr. Nightlife, I wanted to stay out all night and go to work the next morning. I mean, Lump turned an after-hours place into a fine dining Italian restaurant with the mentality of drinking, numbers, gambling and everything else. A lot of people knew what was going on with the restaurant. One of [Philly mob boss] Angelo Bruno’s good friends, who was a numbers man for the boys downtown, used to hang there. Other mob guys hung there, too, because the booze was good and the pussy was good. It was a place to settle scores and stuff like that.”

  As can be sensed by now, Lambrusco made quite an impact on the twenty-something Black Sheep. “Besides my father, Lump was the guy who kind of raised me. Now, it wasn’t the right way to be raised, but he schooled me in everything. This guy was old school Italian, and people either loved him or hated him. Some people didn’t like him because when he got drunk he told you if you were a fucking asshole, whatever. Back in the day, Louie the Lump was a fun-loving guy and an intriguing individual.”

  * * *

  The introduction to the hyper-nightlife scene made possible by his relationship with Louie the Lump was the best and worst thing that could have happened to someone like Battista, who already had a fondness for forbidden fruits. “Soon after I started working at Louis’ Restaurant my drinking and drugging escalated,” Battista says. “I hooked up with this girl named Nina. I was about twenty-one, and she was twenty-eight and very attractive. When she came into the restaurant, she was always dressed to the hilt and everyone would look at her. She used to go out with the head of the Irish mob in Philly before he went to jail for life. Wherever she went, people stayed away from her because they feared who she was. When I moved in with her, I was in heaven. I was getting laid every night, and she was the hottest piece of ass walking around the neighborhood. We were into the drugs pretty heavy, though, because wherever we went people were throwing bags of coke at us and we didn’t have to pay for any of it. Wherever we went, people were like, ‘Nina is here, Nina is here!’ and they took care of her. People were buying me bottles of Dom Perignon when I was twenty-one years old because I was with her. I was still working as a waiter at the restaurant and booking and betting, and Nina and I were out clubbing all the time. This went on for about eight months until we got into a fight one night when I was all fucked up. I went home to stay with my parents that night, and was so messed up I missed work the next morning. I had never missed work before. My mom came into my room to check on me and saw some coke I had. She called the local priest, Father Cassatas, and I went to a detox center at Delaware County Memorial Hospital.

  “I knew I had a problem, and that I had to slow down, but I was just so into the nightlife. I got cleared up for two days in the hospital, and then went to Mirmont Treatment Center for twenty-eight days. I came out of rehab and went right back to work at the restau
rant. Lump stuck with me when I was in rehab and made sure I got my act together. Even though I was just a waiter for him, he paid for my health insurance, which was great. I stayed clean for about three months, and then started drinking a lot of wine.” Though things settled down for the moment, Battista’s battle with addiction would be a recurring theme for the next twenty years.

  * * *

  Battista started getting interested in bookmaking soon after being hired at Spanky’s (soon to be Louis’) and seeing the lifestyle: sports, money, partying, women, and people constantly looking for—and being indebted to—you. “Because he knew how my father was, Lump wouldn’t show me how things really worked and wouldn’t allow me to get involved with his booking. Just seeing all the people come in asking for Lump and picking up on things really got me interested. I knew I wanted to do that, so I started booking for my friends.” The miniscule, independent Battista gambling operation lasted throughout his years at Louis,’ as he picked up pointers by watching Lump all the while. As he would for many years to come, Battista’s close friend Tommy Martino remained on the periphery of the Sheep’s operation. “Tommy wasn’t into gambling, but he knew people who were and he would bring them to me. He was into selling weed, and I was into booking and betting with Lump. He would come into the restaurant with his girlfriends, but when it came to our own ‘businesses,’ we went our separate ways.”

  Battista’s fascination with Louie the Lump’s lifestyle was matched only by his curiosity regarding one of Lump’s booking and betting pals. “There was a guy named Mike Rinnier who used to come into Louis’ all the time, and was a big spender,” says Battista. “He’d be drinking Dom; his table would have a bill of five hundred dollars like nothing.” At the time, Battista didn’t know much about Rinnier, but his boss surely did. “I met Mike back when I was selling bar supplies and I went into one of his places,” Lambrusco explains. “It was just coincidence that he and I were both into booking and betting. He only went into booking because he lost so much money betting, and figured it would be smarter to book himself.”

  Mike Rinnier recruited Lambrusco to help open a restaurant called September’s at some point in the late 1980s. The timing could not have been more fortuitous for Lump, who was having a falling out with his partners in Louis.’ “Mike offered me a great deal,” Lambrusco says, and within a few months the entire waiting crew, including and especially the burgeoning Sheep, left Louis’ for September’s to follow the now legendary Lump.

  For the other waiters joining Lambrusco at September’s, this was nothing more than a change of scenery. For Jimmy “Baba” Battista, it would be a life-changing event.

  The Gambling Grocer

  LOUIE THE LUMP and his cast of characters made the leap to join Mike Rinnier, fascinated by the prospects of Rinnier’s next venture. “The Alpine Inn was supposedly run by a bunch of mob figures,” Battista says, “and Mike Rinnier wanted Lump and me to come up and help him turn the Inn’s restaurant into a place called September’s. It was going to be a restaurant, nightclub, and banquet facility. So, I came up to work for Mike and his partner, Matt Brophy. Lump was at September’s cooking, and I was there waiting on tables. I was also a small-time bookmaker, just with my friends. Well, Mike Rinnier was a bookmaker, and Lump did business with him in the early 80s.” “Mike Rinnier was a ruthless, money-hungry motherfucker,” Lambrusco says. “The dollar meant so fucking much to him. He was a good guy if he liked you. He liked Baba and he loved me. Mike took good care of me. But, I saw him chew people’s asses out in front of other people, and if he had ever done something like that to me I would have punched him.”1

  “Mike owned a few supermarkets and he was great with numbers and money,” Battista says. “In my eyes, he was the greatest thing that came along since Lump. His work ethic was, ‘You work hard every day, you party at nighttime,’ but you had to clean up your act a little bit. He wanted you to wear a suit and be presentable. He was known as The Rug. He was afraid people wouldn’t respect him in business because he was bald, so he wore a wig that was the worst you ever saw. In no time, I started to realize what a fucking monster Mike Rinnier was. He was heavy into booking and all sorts of people were turning their action into him.” Battista was initially offended at the way Rinnier presented himself in common society. “At the time,” he says, “I was thinking, ‘Here he is, coming across as this restaurateur, Mr. Supermarket guy, always wearing suits, and meanwhile, he is a fucking bookmaker and bettor!’

  “Out of nowhere, on a Friday afternoon, he said to me, ‘I need a favor. I need you to go out to Vegas and bring out a package.’ I asked him what he was talking about and he said, ‘I need you to bring fifty grand out to Vegas.’ I said, ‘Sure!’ Of course, I knew he was betting, but he never personally brought it to my attention. I think he was waiting to see how I was going to be with him. My thing was to just drop off the package, take my girlfriend out with me, and get the red-eye back on Sunday night to be back at work at the restaurant on Monday morning. Well, the kid I was supposed to meet out there was so fucked up that he made some wrong bets, and Mike said to me, ‘Why don’t you run around and pick up some of these numbers?’ I said, ‘Yeah. This is fun!’ I was staying in a suite at Caesar’s Palace [where Rinnier had predictably been comped] and I was eating and boozing like a king. He only had me do a little bit, but I got paid five hundred bucks on top of being set up with airfare, the hotel suite, and being taken care of everywhere my girlfriend and I went throughout the weekend. I was in hog heaven, and I liked being a runner.”

  It became a weekend ritual for Battista, and Rinnier’s trust in his understudy continued to grow. Rinnier could “get down” bigger denominations in Las Vegas than in the Greater Philadelphia betting market. “I was tying or taping anywhere from fifty to a hundred grand to my body,” Battista says, “flying out to the desert. The desert was always dry for money, and I became the money man. I was still getting paid five hundred a weekend, and me and my girl would get comped for everything; we got to see the best shows and sporting events. It was so much fun for me because I was in my natural habitat,” Battista says. “Back home, I was working pay phones, getting and giving people numbers. This was before the gambling industry got computerized. It was like a sin because we knew the right numbers for the games from our connections in Las Vegas, where the sharp money was already altering the lines. It was like stealing money. The bookmakers in Philadelphia didn’t know what they were doing. It was just us against the bookmakers, and they didn’t have a chance.

  “Mike had just gotten hooked up with some of the sharpest guys in the betting world. We knew he was getting great information because he was crushing bookmakers. At that point it was me and two other waiters who were turning in our books, our customers, to Mike. So, we were waiters in the restaurant, Mike and his operation were taking care of our customers—we couldn’t go to the payphones while we were working, anyway—and we were betting on the games Mike was getting from the sharps. I was still working the restaurant, but I started going out to Vegas more often for him because he liked the job I was doing.

  “Out in Vegas, I worked for a guy named Domino, who was from Havertown and ran Mike’s operation out there. He had, like, seven runners who, depending on how trustworthy they were, would have between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars, and we’d run from casino to casino placing whatever bets Mike sent through Domino. We worked all day long, starting around five o’clock in the morning. You’d sit in a casino sportsbook, eat hot dogs or whatever you did, and bet all day. I’d watch sports all day long. I didn’t just bet at one casino; I’d bet at six or seven. I’d carry a bag of money and chips and run from casino to casino. I was in heaven! I loved it because you could go out at nighttime and you gambled all day. We used to bet at Little Caesar’s Palace a lot back then. That place was only as big as my house, but they would take a hundred grand a game, when the bigger casinos would only take big bets from squares, and even then they would only take, like twenty-five th
ousand. The owner of Little Caesar’s was sharp. He would let us bet up to a hundred grand if we took the first number, the opening line of a bet. That way, he could factor it into what he was doing.”

  It was during his time as a runner for Mike Rinnier that Battista got his first taste of the grandest sports bettor of them all. If he was impressed by Rinnier’s betting success, he was simply awed by the man everyone called The Computer, who was the first pro gambler to exploit the burgeoning technology’s impact on sports betting. It would be years before Battista hooked up with The Computer, himself, but he immediately grasped his significance. “One of my jobs was to hang out in the Horseshoe Casino and follow The Computer’s runners,” Battista says. “I got such an education on The Computer doing this. When the runner would place a bet, I would give him a hundred bucks for The Computer’s pick. I had made friends with his runners just so I could get this information. Well, I had this big-ass cell phone, the early kind of mobile phones, and I would call back East with the information. This is before there were online services tracking betting lines in real time, and our guys would take this information and whoosh! They were off to the races back home. We’d take the game off of our book’s board so that no one could bet us. Then we’d spring into action getting as much down as possible on the right side with the right number, all before anyone knew what was going on.