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“Sorry to go off on a tirade,” he said. “There’s corruption everywhere. One hand washes the other. And I didn’t mean to imply anything about you. You were always very fair with Chinese people.”
I waved it away. “I have plenty of tirades in me, too. And just so you know, I left the police department last year.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’ve got better jokes than that,” I said, and explained my new private eye business without hanging out the dirty laundry that had caused me to lose my badge.
&nbs
p; “I like the freedom of being on my own,” I lied. It was time to change the subject. “You have a new store?”
“The Golden Gate Grocery, Eleventh Street and Van Buren. Come by.”
I promised him that I would. He was about to leave when I said, “Speaking of gambling, have you ever heard of a man named Gus Greenbaum?”
Six
The locomotive huffed away to the east, to the SP yard to find fuel oil and water, blowing its whistle as it crossed Third Avenue. Beyond the yard was the dumping ground of my cut-up blonde. I liked blondes who were cutups, but not this way. The silence was so pronounced we could hear songbirds from the tall oleander hedges to the north, separating Union Station from the Warehouse District.
“If you go to Chinatown or the places on the east side, you can gamble,” Ong said. “But it’s small stuff. Craps, poker, slot machines. Sic bo or dominoes in Chinatown. Or you can go in the back room of a cigar store or a poolroom or a bar and place a bet with a white or colored bookie. Again, small-time and local compared to what Gus Greenbaum has going. I’m surprised you don’t know about him.”
I explained that my time handling vice cases was mostly over by ’28, when Greenbaum arrived.
“Just as well,” he said. “Gus is Chicago mob, sent to oversee the Southwest branch of their national wire network, the Trans-America News Service. Don’t be fooled by the name. It’s the latest thing and is going to put the old operations out of business. The idea is to use Western Union to get an edge, so the network instantly transmits the results of horse races around the country. It gives the gangsters a monopoly. It’s a vertically integrated business, same as General Motors. At the bottom is the average bookie, who once worked for himself or was part of local organized crime. They depended on the newspaper or radio for results on a race, a game, or a prizefight.”
“Now they work for the Outfit.”
“Indeed.”
“What if the local bookie doesn’t want to?”
“They pay him a friendly visit and tell him he can make more money as part of the national syndicate. If he refuses, the next visit isn’t so friendly. Broken arm. Burned-down shop. Stuck in a mine shaft out by Squaw Peak with a bullet in his head as an incentive for his compadres to understand things have changed.”
“Nice people.” I smashed my cigarette butt in the ashtray beside the bench.
Ong offered his shiny wide smile, like a sunny Phoenix day. It didn’t last. He shook his head. “On the other hand, the bookie who goes along gets protection from shakedowns.”
“How does Greenbaum’s racket work?”
“Trans-America News Service. Sounds like the Associated Press, right? Officially, it transmits sporting news by telegraph. Except the only news it actually carries is racing, especially the results. It doesn’t deal directly with the bookmakers but uses a distribution network. Trans-America’s news is the complete information on every race: the horses set to run that day, the jockey, weight of the horse, odds, all of it. The morning of the race, it wires out the track conditions and if anything in the lineup has changed. Have the odds changed? Has a horse been scratched? It wires the positions of the horses once the race starts, at the quarter and in the final stretch, then the finish.”
“The sport of kings,” I said.
“And the vice of commoners,” he said. “Now, the basic race information is available to the AP, United Press, and International News Service—they’ll send it to the Republic and the Gazette, the radio stations. But Trans-America is faster. At a lot of tracks, maybe half, it pays for the exclusive rights to use a direct wire from the press box. Other tracks, they have a spotter with a telescope or a wigwag artist who can signal the racing results to someone on a telephone. Whatever way they get it, Trans-America has exclusive Western Union circuits leased. The distributors are given what they call a drop—a receiving station with a high-speed ticker. The radio might carry an individual race. The syndicate covers them all, coast to coast, two dozen major tracks.”
“I get the speed,” I said. “But where’s the money made, aside from the truth that the house always wins?”
Ong leaned in. “For one thing, it lets a bookmaker keep taking bets as if he doesn’t know the race results. The AP hasn’t reported them yet, follow me? So when the bookie already knows a horse has lost, he’ll take the bets anyway. Or say it’s too late to bet if the customer wants to wager on the winner. Before the hour of the races, when customers line up, the early bettors don’t get the full information that the bookmaker has—so they don’t know, say, track conditions, things like that, and the bookie sure isn’t going to tell them. Easy money, even though most of it flows up to the syndicate. Local bookies have to pay a percentage of net daily receipts, plus a fixed weekly fee to receive the results.”
“You know a lot about this.”
“I’ve learned it. This is having a big effect on the older Chinese community, the one that depended on gambling. And I intend to become a lawyer.”
“You’ll make a good one.”
I asked why the cops couldn’t stop the operation, knowing it was a naive inquiry.
“This is technically illegal in most states,” Ong said. “But so what? The police are bribed. No offense, Gene. And the syndicate contributes to politicians. It’s hard to find the big racing rooms anyway. It’s not illegal to sell the telephone and telegraph equipment. Western Union has fought every effort to shut the big gambling wire services down.”
