I just want you to listen to me, Christina, he'd said kindly, just listen to what I got to say before you answer. He stared at her, his jaw and bottom teeth pushed forward like the open drawer of a cash register. First of all, I know Rick is a fucking dope. I only keep him on because of his brother. We do a little business. But Rick ever bothers you, you let me know. If there's ever a problem, I want you to come to me. Okay? No? You don't know. All right, see, we like you. We think you could help us, could help us quite a bit. You don't look like you work for somebody like me. You look like somebody's girlfriend. Maybe that insults you, maybe it don't. That's not my problem. My problem is, I got a big operation to run. You with me so far? Now, as you know, I'm involved in a lot of different situations. Lot of-Wait, you want some iced tea? Get her some iced tea and some of those little cookies. The good ones. Okay, so Rick's older brother, Paul, does a little work for me, says he's met you, can tell you got special ability. Says you got a thing for numbers. Told me that trick you did on his boat. We need good people. We need smart people, not just goombahs who like to wear shiny shoes. We got plenty of those guys, big deal. I'm tired of those guys-they make mistakes it takes five years to fix. Also, lot of people talk too much. I notice you don't talk much. Like now. Okay, I want to explain a couple of our businesses. There's the tea, good. Get her a spoon. As you may know, we run a numbers operation. Betting. We compete with the lottery and casinos except we pay better odds. Instead of twenty million to one, maybe it's fifteen million. Also, you win with us, you get it in cash, don't have to tell nobody-the IRS, the husband, the church, heh, whatever. Casinos make you sign something. The basic deal in numbers betting is that a person bets on a three-digit number. This is a straight bet. Very simple. You can bet anywhere from a quarter to a dollar on up. Lot of people bet two, five, ten bucks. So that's a straight bet. You can also bet on one or two of the numbers. This is called single action and boleta.
The odds get a lot better with those simpler bets?
Yeah, it's really for the people who don't know anything. Think that seven is their lucky number, bet it every day. If they bet seven every day, then one out of every ten days, just about, they should win. But if they're putting in a dollar with every bet and getting only six back when they hit the number, then we're ahead four dollars. I mean, people are very stupid. They're born stupid and then they keep on living stupid. So you can also bet on all three numbers in any order. This is called the combination. The odds there are lower than the straight bet, too. Now then, we understand our profit margin as the difference between what we take in and what we pay out. We never pay true odds, would never make money that way. The other way we make money is, we will cut certain numbers. We lower the payoff on the numbers that everyone likes to bet. You get enough people betting, then you see large patterns, and for people in the numbers business, this is important. Let's say the Bulls are playing the Knicks, then we're going to get heavy betting on Michael Jordan's jersey number-that's number twenty-three-and if that number actually wins, then you're dead if you have to pay out. So we cut that number down. We got nervous about the number and so we cut it down. We limit the amount of a bet and the total wager. Over a certain amount, we just won't take the bet. Some guy wants to bet ten thousand bucks on number twenty-three, we won't take it, 'cause if he hits it, we're finished.
Now, we got two ways of betting. One is called New York, the other is called Brooklyn. The Brooklyn number is the last three digits, not including pennies, of the total handle of whichever thoroughbred racetrack is running that day. Aqueduct or Belmont. You get the handle from the newspaper. It's published the next day. If both tracks are closed, we use a Florida track. The New York number is more complicated. We have the New York number for people who want to get results the same day. They're addicted. They're used to casinos, the lottery, whatever, they want to know if they won. It's a sickness. They can't wait until the next day. So the New York number is for them. That number uses what we call the three-five-seven structure. It's really not very complicated. To get the first digit of the New York bet, you add all the win, place, and show payoffs for the first three races. The last digit, again forgetting about the pennies, is the first digit of the New York number. Get that? People will watch the television and see they got the first number on the New York right and then they go wild and start betting more. We used to close the betting before the first race, but now, with computers, we can keep the betting open until the end of the sixth race. So they see they got the first number right, they go wild. We murder them on the odds when they do that, too. Because the payoff goes up, so do the odds. So then we get the second digit by using the first five races. And then the third digit using the first seven races. People can follow that once they get used to it. They can listen to the radio and hear the numbers and add them up for themselves. They get to follow the action. They can also bet a single action or boleta on the New York number, too. We run these bets from a lot of places, grocery stores, pizza places, bodegas, hair parlors-we got a lot of spots. Even a hardware store in one case. We use a three-leaf slip of paper, so everyone has a copy. The guy who bets, the spot, and what we call a bank. It's just two guys in a little rented office with a computer and a secretary and a big basket of paper and a guard watching them both. We rotate the guards so nobody gets too friendly. All the paper is called the work. All the work comes to a bank. We run nine banks. Each is working maybe fifteen or twenty spots. We run a hundred and sixty-two spots, in fact. Maybe three thousand bucks a day from each spot. So the cash adds up fast. We're paying out about sixty-five percent of our handle. That leaves a very nice profit margin. We figure out the odds from all nine banks. We get good numbers that way. Some other operations, these fucking Russians maybe, run maybe one or two banks, but sooner or later they get creamed. Some guys hit them for a New York on a big number and they didn't have enough bets to keep the odds down. So we run nine banks. If we see a number is very heavily bet, we close betting on it. We used to edge off the bets to some of our friends in the business, see if they wanted to take the action away from us, but now we don't. It makes things too complicated, it puts you at their mercy. Maybe their office is fucking wired, maybe somebody figured the numbers out wrong, whatever. Little Gotti runs an operation, for example, always gets his numbers wrong. You used to be able to do it, but now you can't. Okay, so why's there a job open? We used to have a guy running the nine banks, but he had a little problem. His fingers got itchy and so they had to be cut off. I'm not joking. I don't joke about these things. I have children. I'm not going to go into it. We got all the money back, too, but it came out of his father's retirement. Fucking mongrel son. It's not my problem. We need someone smart enough to run the nine banks at the same time. Somebody who's got a feel for numbers, somebody who-
I'm not interested.
What?
I'm not interested.
You haven't heard the good part, how much it-
I really don't want it.
Bring her some more iced tea. Let me tell you about another job.
I doubt I'm interested in that, either.
Let me try it on you. For Christ's sake, we're talking opportunity here. See, we buy phone cards from the phone companies, using a little dummy company. We buy like nine million dollars' worth. That's what they will sell for. Maybe we pay eight million for them. Buy for eight, sell for nine. It's big money, and so we syndicate that across five or six investors. But selling the cards involves real costs. You got to advertise, you got to staff an office, all that. It's a competitive business. The actual profit margin is down around seven percent. Steady but not great. Takes a long time to make big money at seven percent. So we do that awhile, six, eight months, get our credit looking good with the phone company. Then we place a huge order for cards, maybe thirty million dollars' worth that we negotiate a price for. We negotiate hard, too. Let's say we agree we are going to pay twenty-five million for the cards. Okay, at the same time, we begin to advertise a special. We're going to sell those thirty million of cards for maybe twenty million. Sounds like we're going to lose money, I know. Word goes around that a certain card is a better deal. The customer is very price-sensitive. These are not wealthy people. You start the deal just a little bit early. You advertise, you get people excited. All those Cubans and Brazilians calling home. You have to build it up and then pop it at the right moment, usually maybe around Christmas, Thanksgiving, Mother's Day, sometime when everyone is calling. You try to collect in cash as much as possible. Then, just as demand is spiking up for the cheap cards, you take delivery of the big new order by the phone company. Your credit is good, they don't suspect anything. You get the thirty million worth of cards and you sell them fast for twenty million. At the same time you-