We Get Taken: 1978

It's 1978, I'm a partner with Paul in a Company called Leonard Paper, we supply mainly wholesale bagel bakeries with the bags they need to deliver the bagels in. The first thing we did was building ourselves a nice office in this old run down building on McDonald Ave. We hired a driver and warehouse man, there wasn't enough money being made to pay them, so we went to the track everyday and ran a poker game on Friday nights to support the business, which made us feel legitimate.

We actually did pretty well at the track, once we stopped following the touts and inside information. When we were getting word from the jockeys, trainers etc, we were constantly running like chickens without heads to Monmouth, Garden State, Penn National, even the Trotters. It rarely worked out, but was a lot of fun. We did much better doing the handicapping ourselves. Paul was actually a very good handicapper and I was the systems guy handling the betting. We would stay in the Man Of War room; in those days it was a fancy restaurant. Our bookie Miltie would stop by before each race and take our bets, no cash up front. We were betting about a grand a race. If we won he'd pay us at the end of the day, if we lost, we didn't have to pay until the next time we saw him, he also picked up our check each day and gave us club house passes.

The card game was a real winner for us, we'd spent about 200 catering it, paid a hundred for the use of some ones apartment for the night, and cut on the average about 1500 hundred for about 12 hours of work. The real money came when we sat in because the game because of a shortage of players. Our main customers were the Greek Diner owners, they had lots of cash and loved to bluff, it made for big pots. We had one fish I brought into the game, Howie, an insurance agent, A Jew from Staten Island, 5ft 8in, about 150 lbs and wore lots of gold, had a mustache, and always wore sunglasses, he thought he was the swiftest, coolest, brightest, con job on the face of the earth, a total creep and scum bag, he was easy pickings, lost every week and couldn't figure out why, he kept coming back for more. One night we had some heavy hitter mafia types from down town Brooklyn, one of them pulled a gun on Howie and accused him of dealing seconds, Paul saved his ass that night and smoothed everything over, they never came back to the game. Howie denied everything, said they were nuts, we believed him, we were wrong. Paul got even with Howie a year later when the game broke up. Howie got Paul a five thousand dollar loan through connections he had, the loan was approved without being checked out. Paul was suppose to kick back fifteen hundred, a grand for Howie and five hundred for the inside man, instead of giving Howie the money when he came to the warehouse to collect it, Paul pulled down the big iron gate and gave Howie a beating. He still had the balls to ask for his cut, Paul hit him again.

One day while eating at a seafood restaurant on Nostrand Ave, the owner of the place, Jake, asked if we wanted some fresh blood for the game, he played with us every week and almost always lost. He said he had some pigeons that were customers of his and looking for action, we said fine. Turns out they were all professional card cheats, (mechanics). The first two who came into the game that weekend was Teddy and Mel, Teddy was one of, if not the best card and dice mechanic in the country, Mel was very good also, but still in training, the following week they brought in two catchers, a woman and man in there sixties, the woman dressed very expensively and was suppose to own a jewelry business, the man with the cowboy hat was suppose to be a rich Texan. They got paid a salary for being fed the winning hands, that's why they're called catchers.

A few weeks later crazy Ed started to play in the game, Ed was an ex special forces maniac that owned 2 stores. One day his Ave X store was held up while he was there, he crabbed his gun and went running after them, commandeered a passing car and made the women driver chase after the other car racing down Ave. X while he was shooting at it. When he first came to our game, he tried to put his gun on the table; we had to explain that wasn't allowed.

After the third week we started getting suspicious, there were just to many pots with multiple good hands, the same people seemed to win all the really big pots. These two old folks were winning unusually high amounts of money each week. Teddy was a real character, he started off with a full bottle of liquor in front of him and slowly got very drunk, or so he wanted us to believe. The liquor was for real, but he still did his thing, he was extremely intelligent, tall, thin, a full head of hair, bulging eyes, very large hands, a tremendous asset for his trade. His one big problem was that he was so good at what he did; he would always throw hints at what was happening as a challenge to catch him. This made his partners very nervous. A lot of people in the trade wouldn't work with him for that reason; the consensus was that he was nuts.

One-day years later I saw him at the Taj in A.C., he parlayed 2 hard eights, the original bet was 400 into 40 thousand, I made eighteen hundred, two one hundred bets, I didn't parlay my second bet.

Back to my game, as much as we watched very closely we couldn't spot what was happening, he was that good with cards. One night after the card game was over, the usual crap game began on the floor against a foam pillow. As usual Teddy was throwing hard ways at will. I watched real closely when Boris had the dice, what I spotted was that he really wasn't shaking them up in his hand, and when he threw them they never touched each other as they rolled off the foam pillow. I took a shot, I called Mel into the bathroom and simply said, and I we know what's going on, end the crap game and let's talk. The response I got totally floored me, he looked me square in the eyes and said, ya got us.

After everybody left, Teddy and Mel stayed behind and told all. For the next three hours, Teddy showed us how good he was with a deck of cards and dice, he could go both ways, stack the deck as he picked it up, the most amazing thing I ever saw, he set up 3 pat hands in a matter of seconds. He also showed us how he just switched the whole deck when he cut the cards. The new deck called a cooler had already been pre set up when he went to the bathroom. With dice it was the same thing, he could switch them for a loaded pair at will, or what really amazed me was the way he could manipulate legit dice, like I saw him do years later at the Taj. He also told us that Howie was dealing seconds and still loosing, they never called him on it, no reason to. They said he also brought loaded dice into the game. That's why Paul took care of him the way he did. We broke up the game after that, Teddy went on to completely breaking crazy Ed, he lost both stores, lost his house, lost his wife who he beat on a regular basis, and became a truck driver. I haven't seen Teddy since the Taj in 89... butch