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∙ GAMBLING is far and away the Mob's biggest illicit income producer, more than taking the place that bootleg liquor held during Prohibition. No one can more than guess how much money is bet illegally in the U.S. each year, but a conservative estimate is that about $20 billion is put down on horse racing, lotteries and sports events. Perhaps a third is pure profit for LCN and its affiliates.
In the slums, the bets are usually on "the numbers." The gambler picks the number that he thinks will come up in some agreed-upon tabulation—the total dollars bet at a race track, for example —and puts down as little as 250 or as much as $1. In some places $10 bets are allowed. The bet taker himself, called the policy writer, is too small—and too vulnerable—to be a formal member of La Cosa Nostra. He works instead under contract as a "sharecropper."
Bookmaking is next up the ladder from the numbers, and the bookmaker, who usually employs several solicitors, is a man of substance. When FBI agents seized Gil Beckley, the king of layoff men (a banker to smaller bookies), in Miami in January 1966, his records showed that on that day alone he had handled $250,000 in bets, for a profit, by his own reckoning, of $129,000. He is now appealing a ten-year prison sentence in the case.
An operator like Beckley is not necessarily a full member of LCN. Beckley has a kind of associate status, in which favors and profits flow back and forth. As in certain other areas, LCN is content to get a cut while leaving active management to a relative outsider. Another big layoff man, Sam DiPiazzo, once told of an attempt by Giancana's Chicago family to extort 50% of his six-figure take. As DiPiazzo related the story, he was forced to go before a committee in Chicago, where he haggled the bite down to a mere $35 a day. His big bargaining point was that he cooperated with "the Little Man," Louisiana Family Boss Carlos Marcello.
General affluence and increasing public interest in sports such as football and basketball hike the stakes and make the potential for corrupting athletes great. Even if he does not succeed in fixing a game, the Cosa Nostra agent finds information about a team's morale or physical condition priceless in helping him to set odds. On just such an information hunt, a scout for Chicago Handicapper Burton Wolcoff wangled his way into the clubhouse of the Los Angeles Dodgers a few years back. Learning that Sandy Koufax, who was scheduled to pitch that day, was having even more arm trouble than usual, the agent flashed the news to Wolcoff, who put down $30,000 against the Dodgers. Koufax gave up five runs in early innings and the Dodgers lost.
The National Football League has gone to considerable lengths to detect the fix, relying, ironically, on Gil Beckley. Apparently the league operated on the theory that it takes one to know one. "I want the games square," Beckley told league officials when he announced his proposition. "If I know that something's wrong, I'll give you the name of the club. But I won't give you names of the players." Tips from Beckley have touched off a number of secret investigations by the league.
Until the mid-'60s,