Yeah, that's the guy...."Patty"
His game was on the north side of 86th St, just east of Bay Parkway, above a storefront. A laundromat, maybe?
I even remember the name of one of his dealers - "Debart" or something like that, and a fat old Jewish lady whose name I don't remember (Miriam, perhaps?) who was the kitchen girl.
Small world, huh? But how could you know about Patty's? I'm talking 1972 or so. You were barely out of diapers then.
As far as the game in the Slope goes, that was a few years later, around 1977-78. And now I'm thinking the guy used to be called "Blackout", not "Blackie". His "helper" was a younger guy - kinda skeevy and clearly not Italian - with blonde hair, who was naturally called "Whitey."
Another guy who used to play in Blackout's game was the guy who owned the pizza joint right across the street, just off the corner of 7th Avenue and 9th Street, so he was called "Joe Pizza."
He was an absolutely
terrible player - he had no clue - and I always wanted to play him head-to-head. He always said he would, and finally early one morning the game broke up and he and I were the only ones left, so he agreed to a "freeze-out" game between just the two of us.
It's like when you get down to the final two players in a tournament on TV. We each put up $100 or $200 (big money in those days) - I don't remember for sure - and agreed to play until one of us lost the whole amount.
I cleaned him out like 1-2-3. The guy never folded a hand and I had a hot streak right from the start, and it was all over in about half an hour maybe, which, in retrospect, was probably a mistake on my part.
He immediately got up, saying something like "You're too good for me, I've had it."
Had I let him win a few pots and given him the idea that he had a chance to beat me, I might be in the pizza business today.
Another thing I remember about Blackout was that he also occasionally quoted someone a line on some game or another.
So one Saturday morning (we'd been playing since the night before) there was a college game I liked for some reason (Strange what you remember. I'm pretty sure that one of the teams was Arizona or Arizona State, and that they were favored. Don't remember the other team, though). I didn't bet on college games very often, and I guess I'd never been playing there that late on a Saturday morning, so asking Blackout what line
he could get on a game had never come up.
I called my regular bookie, and he quoted me a line of like 13 points or so on the favorite, which I thought was kind of high, since that's who I wanted to bet on.
I figured maybe I could do a half a point or a point better with Blackout, so I asked him what line
he could get on the game.
He makes a phone call, and comes back and tells me that the
other team is favored by the same 12 or 13 points.
So I now have what Puzo called in the scene describing Carlo's bookmaking operation, "that dream of all gamblers, a 'middle'." And a
huge one, besides. Gamblers go their whole lives, sometimes, and never even
see a middle at all, much less one of about 24 points.
Now I was no big bettor in those days, $25 or $50 on a game maybe, but I immediately called my regular bookie and bet $500 on the underdog, and then bet another $500 with Blackout on the Arizona team, who he
should have had as the favorite.
So if the Arizona wins the game by less than the spread, or loses the game by less than what they should have been favored by, I win $1000. The worst I can do I lose the $50 vig.
So, as I said, the spread was like 13 or so, and the game was on TV from the West Coast, starting at around 4:00 PM.
I go home to watch the game and - I'll never forget this - Arizona is winning the whole way by a touchdown or so, and in the last couple of minutes the other team is driving.
I'm figuring on how I'm gonna spend the $1000, when Arizona intercepts a pass around their own twenty, and the sonuvabitch runs it back for a TD, the Arizona team wins by 14, and my $1000 win becomes a $50 loss.
The only saving grace was that the way I worked with my regular guy was that we had a settlement figure of $500, meaning that we didn't pay each other unless one of us owed the other $500 or more.
Sometimes we never saw each other for weeks or months at a time.
At the time, I was a few hundred ahead of my regular guy, so the $550 loss put me a few hundred behind, but I didn't have to pay him anything yet, and meanwhile, I collected the $500 from Blackout the following Tuesday.
And the best part is that he didn't even know he'd been middled. Or, if he did, he never said anything to me.
That's how dumb the guy was. He must've booked my bet himself and not even realized that he had quoted me the line backwards.