Gaming the Game Read online

  “Some of the sharp guys like The Computer would send an old lady into a casino and have them bet good money, hoping the sportsbook would think she was a square and take her bet. Guys were always looking for people to go in and place bets for them. The sharps would set people up for a weekend in a hotel, and tell them to go play blackjack or whatever—like every other square—and then have them place three football bets for them on Sunday. They had it all set up, and that happened all the time. There was an art to that. Some of the stuff was so staged it was incredible. They’d send a guy in who looks like he’s a drunk who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, and meanwhile his bets were going to help set the lines around the world. Anytime a new sportsbook manager took over, he didn’t know how or when he was going to get it in the ass, but it was coming.

  “I did the Vegas stuff for more than a year. I was Mike’s main man that went back and forth from Philly to the desert. In the meantime, I had become manager of September’s. Mike’s philosophy was, ‘Work, work, work, work, work!’ and that’s what I did, which caused my girlfriend to break up with me. I worked so much that if my family wanted to see me, they had to come see me at work. I never had time for my mom, my dad, or my sisters because it was all work, gamble, work, gamble. That was the ethics I was taught. I had learned all this stuff from Lump, and Mike just brought it to another level—you know, put a shirt and tie on and you can do this on a daily basis. I said to myself, ‘I like this guy,’ because he was a maniac. He was nonstop, even more than Lump, and he was brilliant . He had supermarkets, he had restaurants, he had nightclubs, but it was never enough. He also had one of the biggest books in Delaware County.”

  Mike Rinnier was, indeed, an influential figure in the area, and Battista had heard numerous stories of Rinnier taking after people he deemed adversaries. The Sheep’s personal and professional lives intersected at one point, and the result was an up-close view of Rinnier’s ire. “The wife of Mike’s business partner, Matt Brophy,” Battista says, “had a sister named Mara who was divorced. We wound up dating for about a year and a half, and I got really close to Mara’s little girl, Lori, who was about two years old. As this was going on, I moved back in with my parents for seven or eight months. They saw I was straightening my act out a little bit, trying to establish myself. I had just gotten engaged and was trying to turn my life around. My parents didn’t know I was into the gambling, though; they just thought I made my money at the restaurant. This was 1989, things were going pretty good, and I got married to Mara that summer. I was twenty-five at the time, and we got an apartment in Drexel Hill. I was still managing the restaurant, but I couldn’t gamble as much because now I had the responsibility of a stepdaughter and a wife and I wanted to keep everybody happy. She knew all about my gambling, though, because her brother-in-law was Mike’s partner. Mara also loved the limelight and going out to Vegas. She liked going out and having fun.

  “Well, at the time, Mike was being investigated for coupon fraud and bookmaking. He used to pay people to sit in an office above one of his supermarkets and clip out coupons, and he was somehow scamming with the coupons.2 It was a Wednesday night, and Mike wanted us to go to one of his supermarkets when the bar closed and run all the files out because he was fucking nervous the feds were following us everywhere we went. Well, my old girlfriend from high school was a Miller Lite girl who was working a charity event that night at September’s. It was like quarter of two in the morning, and we’re all meeting to go do this for Mike, but she was hammered drunk. She got all fucked up and I wanted to make sure she got home safe—I had to choose between driving her home or going to get rid of all the files. I remember them saying to me, ‘Mike is going to be mad if you don’t show up,’ but I couldn’t just leave her there at September’s Place all fucked up after we worked a benefit. I drove her home and dropped her off, and didn’t go to help them with the files. Mike was pissed at me for such a long time; he couldn’t believe that I chose to help a girl over him. I wasn’t manager of the restaurant after that for like six months; that was my punishment.

  “If people didn’t do what Mike wanted, he would fuck with them, and that’s the way he ran his businesses. He was such a control monger. He’d control your work and your personal life. It was just like the movie The Firm except he didn’t kill anybody. He’d move you to another store or give you another job that wasn’t as much money. He was so convincing in the way he did it, too; he made you feel like a piece of shit. Mike told his partner, Matt, and my wife Mara (Matt’s sister-in-law) that I was more concerned about other things than the ‘Rinnier way of living’ and questioned my work ethic. Mara and I got married on July 6, 1989, and six months later to the day, she walked out on me and handed me divorce papers. I was heartbroken because even though I loved Mara, I had gotten really attached to her daughter. I had been trying to change my life around, and I thought I was a great father figure in her life. Her real father was still around, but me and Lori became really close. I took her to school, and did other things like that with her. Other than that, the thing that made me mad the most was the way they portrayed me, like I was the bad seed in the whole thing. But, even with my personal situation, Mike couldn’t get rid of me because we had the gambling together.

  “As I was going through my divorce, the boys downtown— the Philly mob—were shaking down all the bookmakers in the Philadelphia area. Well, this was right around the time we got hooked up with a bookmaker downtown and were beating him for a lot of money. The boys downtown got wind of it, and we were told they were seeking me out. I left the restaurant so I was out of the limelight, and worked at the seafood department of one of Mike’s supermarkets. The mob was after Mike’s operation because we were taking so much money out of the market. They wanted to get to Mike and they figured the way to get to Mike was to come after me, for some reason—maybe because I was the one out there traveling all the time. It might also have been because I worked a lot on the phones dealing with bookmakers for Mike. So, now, I didn’t have my wife, I was working in the fucking seafood department, and I was left gambling just at nighttime. I’d work all day, come home, take a shower, go to the gambling office and work the five o’clock session until about eight-thirty at night.

  “Around that time, Mike recruited a guy named Tiger, who was an up and coming bookmaker, to be partners. Mike knew Tiger was sharp and a much better handicapper than he was. His nickname was Tiger because he was always on the hunt! He was so fucking aggressive as a bettor and as a businessman.”

  “I had been bookmaking for a couple of years before Mike Rinnier had one of his people start betting me,” Tiger says. “I heard Mike was a big businessman, owned supermarkets, and that he was a genius. Everybody who worked with him or for him knew he was a huge gambler and bookmaker. I was a young, independent bookmaker and Mike probably thought I didn’t know what I was doing and that he could make good money betting me. He was wrong, of course, and he found that out in time. When I was young and just starting out, I used to do studies on how often games would fall on certain numbers, on certain point spreads. I’d calculate those percentages and then assess the value of certain line moves, and how certain moves would increase your chances of winning. Very few people were doing that back then, and nobody in the Philadelphia area that I knew of was. Being young and raw in the business was my biggest asset, because I didn’t accept any of the old norms of the bookmakers in the neighborhoods. Everything they learned their whole lives was working against them because they were all told that bettors couldn’t win, that everybody was a sucker. I knew that wasn’t true . Mike Rinnier ended up getting all their money, but he didn’t get any of my money.

  “So, Mike and I started dealing a little with each other, and we’d help each other in different ways, until he heard I was putting people in Vegas. When he realized I was going to have my own crew of runners out there, and that I would be getting the best numbers out there and having them sent back East, he asked me to go full partners with him, fifty-f
ifty. It was a great deal for me because Mike was betting in such volume compared to me, but he wasn’t as sharp. Mike and his people weren’t real good handicappers, and they were just getting information from other bettors.

  “When I took over the office, there were guys betting their own stuff with the office’s money, and there were guys who were so fucking slow adapting to the changes in betting lines. I changed all of that and we started crushing pretty soon after I got involved. There were some serious problems, though, because when I started with Mike, I started at the top. I was in my early twenties and pretty much everyone was older than me, and here I was ordering them around. Mike had recruited me to run the betting side of the office because the last two or three guys didn’t work out. Well, when I was betting, I didn’t fuck around. When it came to running a betting office, I was a little bit of a tyrant. If I told somebody to go get ‘minus two-and-a-half ’ and they came back with a card—a betting slip—that said ‘minus three,’ I would be furious and they’d know about it. I don’t think Mike had any of the guys in the office ready for somebody like me, so it was not an easy transition for any of us.

  “They also didn’t know anybody who handicapped like me, meaning using probabilities, value-based decision making, arbitrage, all that sort of stuff.3 I think they were mostly used to old-school bookmaking and betting, relying more on trends and instincts which said that nobody can bet and win in the long run. I knew already, at that age, that you could absolutely win in the long run as long as you took it seriously and didn’t get caught up into it emotionally. The beauty of the situation was that most bookmakers and sportsbooks at the time still held the same belief—that you couldn’t win consistently over time. Well, that was great for me because I was going to fucking crush them one by one.”

  Footnotes

  Within the first year of operation, Louie the Lump had a falling out with Rinnier’s partner, Matt Brophy. According to Lambrusco, “It was a Saturday night and we were fucking busy working behind the line [in the kitchen], and [Brophy] came in and said, ‘I got a complaint on a baked potato. It’s not cooked.’ I said, ‘Are you fucking crazy. There ain’t nothing wrong with that potato.’ He said something back to me, and I handed him the tongs and said, ‘Here, you fucking cook it. I quit.’ He said, ‘You can’t quit,’ and I said, ‘Can’t I? Watch me.’ I went back to Louis’ and bought out my old partners, but couldn’t ever get the place back to where it was. The food was okay, but you couldn’t replace the dining room help.” Despite no longer working together, Lambrusco remained a friend and mentor to Jimmy Battista for decades to follow.

  According to Battista, Rinnier had any number of hustles going on simultaneously. For instance, Battista says, “He was such a fucking unscrupulous businessman. Mike stiffed half the purveyors he had. His thing was to work up bills in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and then approach the person he owed and say, ‘So, I owe you four hundred thousand dollars. I’ll pay you fifty cents on the dollar in three installment payments over the next six months.’ And he would just drag people along.”

  This area is remarkably complex, involving sophisticated mathematical calculations and statistical probabilities. I have opted not to get into this analysis and discussion here as to not distract from the focus on Jimmy Battista’s career, but will almost certainly be revisiting the art and science of high-end sports gambling and will present my findings in a suitable forum. In the meantime, interested parties may wish to consult the source notes for suggested readings.

  Eye of the Tiger

  “IWAS IN MIKE’S office when I first met Jimmy,” Tiger says. “I heard people talking about Baba or Sheep before I joined with Mike, but nothing more than that, really. I just knew Jimmy was a clerk and that Mike liked him. Well, three weeks into me working with Mike we had a really good week, so he and I went out with our wives to September’s for dinner. Well, Baba came over as our waiter, and said, “Good evening, my name is James and I’ll be your waiter . . . ” and I was thinking, ‘What the fuck is this?! This is the guy who sits across from me every day in the betting office, and he’s not going to say, “Hey, what’s up Tiger?” “How’s it going guys?” or something informal like that?’ Meanwhile, my wife could see that I was freaked out and she asked me what was wrong after Jimmy took our drink order and I told her, and Mike just said, ‘Yeah, that’s Baba. He pretty much stays on routine.’ That was what Mike loved about Jimmy; he did what he was told and he did it well, no matter what it was.”

  “Pretty soon after he joined us, Tiger and I really started to hit it off,” Battista says. “He was a very hard worker, and he knew I was the ‘time to make the doughnuts’ guy—I’d get up by eight o’clock, go to work, stay all day, and show up the next day. I knew there was money to be made, and he knew he could count on me.” “When Jimmy started working with me,” Tiger says, “it was a rough marriage at first because Jimmy didn’t understand what I was trying to do. I would be yelling at him, ‘I want you to say this exactly this way’ and stuff like that. And yet, within a short time, it was like he knew what I was thinking. We used to fight a lot at the start, but it wound up like he could read my mind and he was fast and sharp. He became so instinctive that it was extremely valuable to me that he was working with me.”

  “I was one of the better clerks in the office because I was always fast and furious,” Battista says. “I would always get the right numbers, and I wouldn’t mess anything up. This is before the Internet, back when you had to get ‘rundowns.’ My specialty was being able to call our network of books—sports-books and bookmakers—and get the day’s games and lines read to me—a rundown of the lines, and relay that information quickly to Tiger, who would tell me and everybody else what numbers to get, what to bet. People—our outs—knew me and liked me, and would get me that info fast. I developed such a good relationship with our outs that a lot of times when I would call for a rundown, they would just give me the latest changes, which is all I was calling for anyway.

  “So, the way we had everything set up, to us, was like stealing money, because we were always getting the best numbers. A lot of times we weren’t really handicapping; we were just picking the information [betting line moves] from all of our outs. We were like a human version of what some online services were years later. I’d call a bunch of bookmakers, including some out in Vegas and a lot of guys up in New York. New York was the big spot other than Las Vegas, and they had sharp guys and guys who were piped into sharps out in Vegas. During November, we had three sports going on at the same time: pro basketball, and college and pro football, so I was managing a shitload of numbers over and over again. We had these sheets that listed all the day’s games and we would constantly update the lines with each rundown. If me or Tiger heard a line on a rundown that was a move or that was a line Tiger had said to look out for, we’d click our fingers up in the air which meant all the movers in the office had to pick up their phones and get ready for Tiger’s orders on what numbers to get. The guys in our office had outs in the local area—Montgomery, Bucks, and Delaware counties, Allentown, the outskirts of New York, in Vegas, and all the way down to Florida.”

  “Jimmy was so fucking good at rundowns,” Tiger says. “He’d be on the phones nonstop for three hours every night during the week. He’d be getting the rundown and yelling to me what the numbers were and I’d be checking them against the last rundown for any changes. Depending on what had changed and what I wanted, I’d be yelling to all the movers in the office to go to their outs and get X number on Y game. Each and every time the movers would get money down with their local bookmakers, we’d have to update the chart with what action we had. As that was going on, Baba would be rattling off the next rundown. It was fucking frantic in that office, and we were on top of the line moves because of all the rundowns. This was all before computers and services that could track all of this stuff for you, and we were ahead of a lot of people with this system.”

  In addition to the actual handicapping a
nd mathematical analyses he performed, Tiger also excelled at exploiting his knowledge of the sports betting market. “Baba was key because he was so fast with the phones,” Tiger says. “If I would ask him for a rundown after we had already heard the lines from before so I knew the last lines, he’d be ticking off the lines—by book, ‘four-and-a-half, six, seven,’ and I’d be like, ‘Wait! Seven, with Junior?! Holy shit, that line was five-and-a-half with Junior last time.’ I’d click my fingers in the air and yell right then, ‘Everybody go lay six-and-a-half and five-and-a-half over the Spurs’ because I knew Junior took big bets and I knew The Computer was betting him and that’s why Junior moved his lines. I didn’t need to know who the teams involved were, or anything like that. It was just a matter of getting constant rundowns and knowing who bet where and why.

  “A professional gambler—whether you’re a bookmaker or a bettor—has to have the ability to look at a lot of different things all at the same time. You have to watch a lot of different numbers, watch them move, and know what it all means. If you have football and baseball, or football and basketball, going on at the same time, you have to have two pages up at the same time. As you’re watching all the numbers move and trying to process what all that means, people are giving you orders for specific games and you have to go bet them and turn in the orders, change the chart that tracks how much money we have and where our bets are placed: ‘Oh, we’ve got this bet minus six for ten grand and the line is up to seven-and-a-half, that’s a good thing, but we’ve got another bet at minus six for twenty-five grand and the line is down to six, fuck, maybe we followed a phony bet and we should take some seven-and-a-half and get off this game.’ You were always jockeying for position based on which way the lines were moving.