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There are two kinds of bookmakers in the U. S.: those who operate at race tracks and those who handle bets elsewhere for the convenience of their customers. Of the latter, there are about 10,000 in Chicago, 20,000 in New York, 100,000 scattered about the country, in cigar stores, poolrooms, newsstands, lunch rooms. Some are agents for big bookmaking establishments. The majority are independent. Since pari-mutuels—machine betting at race tracks through a general pool, in which the odds are determined by the amount bet on each horse and of which the state and track each get a share —have been legalized in 23 states, bookmaking has increased instead of declined. Big bettors and system bettors prefer to bet against bookmakers because their odds, unlike pari-mutuel odds, are stable and their bets untaxed. A list of major U. S. bookmakers would include, besides Shaw and Kearney, the names of at least a half dozen men who live handsomely on their bettors:
Kid Rags is Max Kalik, fiftyish, a suave, affluent bookmaker noted for his $200 suits, his good manners and his sporty English cashier, Sidney ("Sir Sid-ney") Gooch, who wears loud tweeds and speaks with a Cockney accent. A onetime Manhattan ragman, "Kid Rags" operates the biggest book at the smartest U. S. track, Belmont Park, finds most of his trade in Wall Street, specializes in bets from $1,000 to $10,000.
Cinema celebrities in Los Angeles and Hollywood, where Wallace Beery, Bing Crosby, Clark Gable and Al Jolson play the races even more assiduously than most of their profession, are likely to patronize Zeke Caress. He made future books this year on the Agua Caliente Derby and Santa Anita Handicap, readily takes bets of $25,000.
Frank Erickson, onetime waiter, is now the largest commissioner in the U. S. His business—derived mostly from agents in cigar stores, poolrooms and newsstands along the Eastern seaboard—is backed by about $4,000,000. When he goes to Belmont Park, he sits in the clubhouse among socialites who patronize the betting-shed bookmakers—of whom Frank Erickson finances four. Trusted implicitly by his enormous clientele, Bookmaker Erickson was reported to have lost $150,000 last summer, mostly at a Saratoga meeting which put many of his less substantial rivals out of business.
"High Odds" Hughes is the first important English bookmaker to invade the U. S. for a generation. He advertises his specialty by holding up his slate and jabbering: "I lay the 'igh odds. . . ."
Happy last week was Louisville's most famed bookmaker, taciturn Sam ("Dink") Dinklespiel, most of whose clients had bet on Edward Riley Bradley's Boxthorn. An amiable, round-paunched, ruddy-faced bachelor, Bookmaker Dinklespiel is the most phlegmatic member of his profession in the U. S. He says he cannot remember the biggest bets he has accepted because "those things make little impression on me."