This Game of Ours, Chapter Six
published on 09/24/08 at 9:01 am
As the months gave way to years, I was earning a good living from the underground games in New York. I could turn in profitable sessions while losing enough pots here and there to maintain the longevity of the game. Even my mother, once so anti-poker, had come round to appreciating her son’s earning potential at the tables. The consistent and regular arrival of money on the kitchen table clearly allayed her gambling fears. She started wishing me luck on the way out of the door. In fact, I still look after my mother financially to this day and, whenever I say that I don’t have much in the way of spare cash, now she asks me, “Well, why are you sitting around? Why don’t you go and play some poker then?” I suppose I should be grateful she has such faith in my abilities!
Around this time, Atlantic City began to open up, which offered a whole new opportunity for profitable poker. The games in those early days were pretty limited, but compared to the grind of New York, the standard was ridiculously easy. The tables were populated to a large degree by folks happier to be dropping money at poker than in the casino games. I was only too happy to relieve these tourists of their bank roll.
Of course, the standard and style of play was a function, as ever, of the players’ motivation. A lot of people were only at the tables for the entertainment value. They wanted to stay in hands; they wanted to stay involved until the last card had been dealt. God bless them for that. I hope they found it entertaining, because they certainly didn’t find it profitable.
But just because the standard was lower didn’t mean I allowed myself to let my own approach slip. I always regarded a session in AC as a job, as work, and had the same disciplined ritual every time.
The best action at the tables came between 1am and 6am on Friday and Saturday nights, when the poker crowd would be joined by gamblers who had gone bust at craps or roulette and thought they could chase their losses better against their fellow players than against the house. A lot of them were either exhausted or dispirited before they sat down, and of course many of them were well on the way to advanced states of drunkenness.
Turning a profit at the tables wasn’t the issue – in all honesty it was the easiest money you could make without holding a gun to someone’s head. I turned in streaks of 30 winning sessions or more in AC. But the key was to keep a close eye on your hourly rate – to make sure your profit was outweighing the costs of the table charges, tips, dinners, rooms for overnight stays and travel to and from the casino. That’s a mistake a lot of people make when they consider themselves winning players – not adding up, or admitting to, all the costs they incur while sitting at the table.
For a trip to be worth it, I had to be sure my take from the table was not only a sizable profit, but that it was more than I could have earned by sitting in New York and avoiding the two-and-a- half-hour drive. To maximize my earning potential, I settled into a familiar routine. I would arrive in AC mid afternoon on Friday and get some rest in my room. Then I’d book the last available dinner reservation, so I could plan on wrapping up eating just before midnight – prime time to hit the tables. I could make good money until 6am or so, then return to the room to sleep, freshen up and repeat the whole trick on Saturday night.
You may not always have been able to take home quite as much money from the casinos, but of course you did know you were guaranteed safe passage for you and your money. The risk element was almost non-existent. And that wasn’t always the case back in the boroughs.
After a Queens’ education, I could see when people were going to get rolled on their way out of underground games. If a player from out-of-town was well up and getting cocky about taking the locals’ money, you’d be able to spot a couple of people planning to take it back away from the tables. Of course, the quickest way for them to be able to do that was to spin him up even further so he would leave sooner.
Suddenly a guy would see himself winning six or seven pots in a row when his ace-high bluffs saw everyone fold and think he was on the hottest streak of his life. If you weren’t local, you wouldn’t know you were being set up. Until you stepped outside the club and got relieved of all your winnings and the remainder of your bankroll, of course. The irony for me was how few of those people ever associated getting rolled with their surprising success at the table. Even afterwards, most of the victims walked away thinking, “I was having a great night right up until I stepped outside, then I was unlucky to be robbed.” They never realized that other people were clearing off their money to them quite deliberately.
I wouldn’t like to suggest that things like that happened all the time, but getting rolled was certainly an occupational hazard. Even the games in the suburbs got robbed from time to time. It wasn’t so much of a concern for me – I had grown up in the area and thanks to the crew of friends I had known since childhood, I was less likely to be a target. We knew how to behave ourselves and how to show respect to the right people. I rarely traveled alone and relied on my street smarts to keep me out of trouble.
The parochial nature of the games and the relative tightness of the poker community also provided a form of insurance for the regular players. Most of the guys at the table had played with each other for years and didn’t tend to migrate too far in search of a game.
I was still playing with the old crew from time to time. After moving out to the suburb, I didn’t need Joey in the way I once had. And he didn’t need me. I no longer needed his protection around town and I wasn’t any use to him as hired muscle. Now we spent time together when we chose to, whereas in the beginning, we had been thrown together by circumstance. Knowing Joey had kept me safe in my teens and opened doors for me. And I was pretty lucky, because he had way more potential Johns to choose from than I had Joeys. He was the local kid and I was the outsider.
While I was carving out a poker career to replace my father’s income, Joey progressed still further in organized crime. His uncle was nearing the top of the organization and Joey was pretty much running a neighborhood in Brooklyn.
That was good news for me, because it enabled me to get accepted as an insider in the high stakes games there. The deep involvement of many of my old crew meant I was “protected” to a certain extent and I was soon able to get on track with some big earning potential.
Despite my “connections”, I was still rolled for the first time after a big win in Brooklyn. We’d taken the game for more than $21,000, a good night’s work in those days, and headed off before deciding to stop at a diner for breakfast on the way home. But we never made it that far. At the first traffic light two very nervous (and clearly high) individuals waved a gun in our faces and demanded the car keys, our money and our jackets. I never got the jacket part, and was especially annoyed by it as four days previously I had laid out a over a grand to treat myself to a custom leather jacket with hand-stitched
embroidery – a one-of-a-kind impulse purchase.
But there was no sense in arguing with two junkies with a gun, so we handed over the keys, money and jackets as requested and watched them drive off in my car. We continued to the diner on foot and I called Joey, whose room we had been playing in. He told us to stay put and wait for him. Two hours later he pulled up in his car, which was closely followed by my Caddy. At the wheel was another guy who apparently worked for Joey as “security”. They joined us for breakfast, sliding our money back to us across the table and handing over my car keys. I asked whether or not they’d been able to get my jacket back as well. Joey told me I probably didn’t want it any more as it had holes in it, which I took as a clue not to ask further questions.
To understand the severity, and speed, of Joey’s reaction, you have to understand the way the mob really worked back then. It wasn’t like the movies. The mob controlled the streets because people knew to obey their rules – that meant respect for those rules was their primary concern. When the mob protected establishments, that wasn’t about money, which was about respect.
For example, if a kid held up the wrong store and picked a store that was mob-protected, he wasn’t in trouble for the money he had taken, he was in trouble for the disrespect he had shown. If he took the money back to the store, apologized for the damage and offered to pay for it, then he’d be ok, because those actions not only showed his respect for the mob, they also set an example for other people thinking about hitting stores like that. If he didn’t take that action, he’d be dead by sundown.
As long as you weren’t stupid, you had nothing to fear on the streets. There was very little random violence – there was always a reason why someone would be punished or hit. If you acted in ignorance, you needed to find out who you had offended and why, so you could apologize pretty quick. And if you did that, you would be fine most of the time. Most everyone is entitled to one free pass.
And the way the mob protected places has often been misunderstood as well. Every street had businesses the mob looked after – that was how they kept the neighborhood under their control. But they didn’t take that money to run places down, they didn’t go in and smash places up like you see in
films – their system was much more conservative than that, It was a two-way street from which both parties profited.
My uncle was approached by the mob because he had a restaurant in Queens. They had a mobster who had just been released from jail on probation. His terms of probation were that he wasn’t to consort with any known criminals and he had to maintain a proven legal source of income. So my uncle was told he would be hiring this guy for $400 a week. Now that guy never set foot in the kitchen – he just showed up every Friday to collect his paycheck.
That job gave the mob the legitimacy they needed for their man. In return, my uncle enjoyed their protection and patronage. A couple of times a week the boys would frequent the place, running up bills of a couple of grand a week. My uncle benefited from that, and the waitresses got the biggest
tips they ever saw.
If there was ever any trouble in the place after that, my uncle didn’t call the police. He didn’t need to. Instead of waiting hours for a patrol car to show up, he could make one phone call and three Cadillacs would pull up outside within 15 minutes. He had a problem once with a chef who was stealing food from him out the back door after closing. After my uncle made one phone call to his new associates, the chef came in the next day, apologized, reimbursed him and was never any trouble again. Not only did he recover all of his losses but he was able to rectify the situation without losing his skilled worker and without any further worry that there was a potential thief working in the place.
So while they did take some money for this “protection” from my uncle and all their other concerns, the amount people paid was very carefully chosen. They didn’t want it to be a burden on businesses. They had no interest in making profitable places run at a loss. In return, my uncle got increased revenue, a guarantee not to get rolled over and good behavior from his employees even behind his back.
But that whole system, which was the way the mob used to make its money and keep control of its territory, relies on respect. If people see supposedly protected places getting knocked over, then that respect is eroded. Joey had to react after two guys were rolled coming out of one of his clubs, because otherwise people might start going to spend their money elsewhere. He may have been a long-standing close friend, but he didn’t get my money back that night because of our friendship. He did it because it would have been bad for business not to.
While I was earning a better and better living at the Brooklyn tables, Joey was securing his hold on that part of town. Although the area was completely drug-infested, Joey insisted he would never get involved in narcotics. His primary operation was protection and security. Alongside the other premises he protected, he covered over 90 “holes in the wall”. These were apartments with eye pieces and mail slots on the door, which were run by two-man teams. One would work the scales and slide the drugs through the slot to the waiting buyer, while the other handled the money and kept the shotgun ready. Each of those 90 “holes” paid Joey $2,000 a week for his protection. A lot of that money certainly got funneled up the chain of command, but by anyone standards Joey was doing pretty well for himself in his chosen career.
And his success and high profile had a big impact on my life. First up, it was thanks to Joey that I enjoyed my first trip to the biggest poker room on the planet: Las Vegas.
John “The Greek” Leontakianakos is a professional poker player with 27 years of experience. He runs his own website called JohnTheGreekPoker.
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