Are you a gambling man?” Vera asks me. She hands on an envelope to a bartender in the Meatpacking District because she sips on a whiskey and ginger ale. The envelope includes money for one. Vera’s a bookie and a runner, and also to be clear, Vera’s not her name.
She is a small-time bookie, or even a bookmaker, one who takes bets and leaves commission off them. She publications soccer tickets and collects them from pubs, theater stagehands, employees at job websites, and at times building supers. Printed on the tickets which are the size of a grocery receipt are spreads for college football and NFL games. At precisely the same time, she’s a”runner,” another slang term to describe someone who delivers cash or spread numbers to some boss. Typically bookies are men, not women, and it is as though she’s on the chase for new blood, looking for young gamblers to enlist. The newspaper world of soccer gambling has shrunk in the surface of the wildly popular, embattled daily dream sites like FanDuel or DraftKings.
“Business is down because of FanDuel, DraftKings,” Vera says. “Guy wager $32 and won 2 million. That is a load of shit. I want to meet him.” There is a nostalgic sense to circling the numbers of a soccer spread. The tickets have what look like hints of rust on the edges. The college season has ended, and she did not do that bad this year, Vera says. What’s left, though, are swimming pool stakes for the Super Bowl.
Vera began running back numbers when she was fourteen years old in a snack bar where she worked as a waitress. The chef called in on a telephone in the hallway and she would deliver his stakes to bookies for horse races. It leant an allure of young defiance. The same was true when she bartended in the’80s. “Jimmy said at the beginning,’I will use you. Just so you know,”’ she says, remembering a deceased supervisor. “`You go into the pub, bullshit with the boys. You’re able to talk soccer with a guy, you are able to pull them , and then they’re yours. ”’ Jimmy died of a brain hemorrhage. Her second boss died of brain cancer. Vera says she beat breast cancer , although she smokes. She failed radioactive treatment and refused chemo.
Dead bosses left behind customers to conduct and she would oversee them. Other runners despised her in the beginning. They could not understand why she would have more clientele . “And they’d say,’who the fuck is this donkey, coming here taking my job? ”’ she states just like the guys are throwing their dead weight about. On occasion the other runners duped her, for example a runner we will call”Tommy” kept winnings he was supposed to hand off to her for himself. “Tommy liked to place coke up his nose, and play cards, and he enjoyed the women in Atlantic City. He would go and provide Sam $7,000 and fuck off with another $3,000. He tells the supervisor,’Go tell the broad.’ And I says, ‘Fuck you. It’s like I’m just a fucking broad to you. I don’t count. ”’ It’s obviously prohibited to get a runner to devote winnings or cash meant for clients on private vices. But fellow runners and gambling policemen trust her. She speaks bad about them, their characters, winnings, or titles. She never whines if she doesn’t make commission. She says she can”keep her mouth shut” which is why she is a runner for almost 25 decades.
When she pays clients, she exchanges in person, never secretly leaving envelopes of cash behind bathrooms or under sinks in tavern bathrooms. Through the years, though, she’s lost around $25,000 from men not paying their losses. “There is a great deal of losers out there,” she explained,”just brazen.” For the football tickets, she funds her very own”bank” that’s self-generated, almost informally, by establishing her value on the success of the college season’s first couple of weeks of stakes in the fall.
“I ai not giving you no figures,” Vera states and drinks from her black straw. Ice cubes turn the whiskey into a lighter tan. She reaches her cigarettes and zips her coat. She questions the current alterations in the spread with the weekend’s Super Bowl between the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos and squints in her beverage and overlooks the bartender. Her moves timber, as her ideas do. The favorability of the Panthers has changed from three to four four-and-a-half to five quickly in the last week. She needs the Panthers to win six or seven to allow her wager to be a victory, and predicts Cam Newton will lead them to a double-digit win over Peyton Manning.
External, she lights a cigarette before going to a new pub. Someone she did not need to see had sat in the initial one. She says there’s a man there who tends to harass her. She continues further north.
In the second bar, a poster tacked to the wall beyond the counter shows a 100-square Super Bowl grid “boxes.” “Have you been running any Super Bowls?” Vera asks.
To win a Super Bowl box, in the end of each quarter, the final digit of the teams’ scores will need to match the amount of your chosen box in the grid. The bartender hands Vera the grid. The pub lights brighten. Vera traces her finger throughout its own outline, explaining that when the score is Broncos, 24, and Panthers, 27, by the third quarter, that’s row 4 and column 7. Prize money changes each quarter, along with the pool just works properly if bar patrons buy out all of the squares.
Vera recalls a pool in 1990, the Giants-Buffalo Super Bowl XXV. Buffalo dropped 19 to 20 after missing a field goal from 47 yards. All the Bills knelt and prayed for that area goal. “Cops from the 20th Precinct won. It was 0 9,” she says, describing the box amounts that matched 0 and 9. But her deceased boss squandered the $50,000 pool over the course of the year, spending it on lease, gas and smokes. Bettors had paid installments through the year for $500 boxes. Nobody got paid. There was a”contract in his life.”
The bartender stows a white envelope of cash before attaching an apricot-honey mixture for Jell-O shots. Vera rolls up a napkin and spins it into a beer that seems flat to provide it foam.
“For the very first bookie I worked , my name was’Ice,’ long before Ice-T,” she says, holding out her hand, rubbing where the ring with her codename would fit. “He got me a ring, which I dropped. Twenty-one diamonds, made’ICE. ”’ The bookie told her he had it inscribed ICE since she was”a cold-hearted bitch.”

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