Comment
on this story

Track Marks
The scars of a gambling addiction

When James was playing the ponies, he'd stop what he was doing at work and tune in his radio for a race report every hour. Back then, James (not his real name) was living in Los Angeles, collecting a modest paycheck from his job in a warehouse and dreaming of "retiring on a cliff overlooking the ocean."

"That's the dream world of a compulsive gambler," says James, who retired to Knoxville and founded a now defunct chapter of Gambler's Anonymous.

"I'm glad I moved to Tennessee," says James, "I feel quite safe here."

Utah, Hawaii, and Tennessee are the only states that don't allow some form of legalized gambling. James says there was a time when he'd spend $600 a month on lottery tickets. He claims to still get a rush "just thinking about those casinos." And with sports betting, he recalls not being able to watch a game without a making a wager.

"I quit smoking, I quit popping pills, I quit drinking," says James. "But gambling was the hardest part. It's like 'Wow!' It tears your head off. It's better than drugs and alcohol. It's better than anything."

James wishes the local Gambler's Anonymous chapter, which disbanded about three years ago, would pick up again. He knows there's plenty of compulsive gamblers in need of group support. Some manage to free themselves from their addiction. Others wind up deep in debt.

Next to the fall-out from divorce, gambling is a leading cause of bankruptcy in Tennessee. One local attorney recalls a client who went $70,000 in the hole betting on sports. The client told the attorney, "Oh, it's going to get paid," implying that unpaid gambling debts often lead to painful consequences.

Gambling debts can also drive people to commit robbery or embezzle funds from their business or employer. As James puts it, "The prisons are filled with people who lost money gambling."

—David Madison

Knoxville proves that sports fanaticism and illegal sports gambling go together like orange and white.

by David Madison

It's fourth and three and I've got five bucks on the line. I'm sitting in a bar on the Strip, drinking cheap drafts and praying the Vols can get another first down. Since just past noon, I've been checking football scores like a broker watching stocks. My money's on five teams to win, and so far I'm four for four. One more win and my five bucks pays 20 to one. A crisp Franklin. Easy, illegal money.

Like most places, Knoxville has its share of sports gambling action. In some bars, placing a bet is as easy as ordering a beer. The last sports gambling bust went down six years ago when the FBI broke up a three-bookie network using informants and wiretaps. Since then, traditional bookies—the guys sports fans imagine chomping on cigars in some dimly lit back room—have begun to compete with online and 1-800 call-in services. Now "players" can bet with virtual bookies on the Internet and off-shore bookies who operate from islands in the Caribbean.

Anyone placing bets from their home in Knoxville is technically breaking the law. But on the legality scale of sports-oriented vices, gambling falls somewhere between steroid use by athletes and underage frat boys drinking on football Saturdays. Like Playboy's popular "Girls of the SEC" issue, sports betting is naughty, yet accepted. Like tailgate parties and "tastes great, less filling" ads for Miller Lite, it's imbedded in both college and professional sports.

Besides Volmania, nothing gets Knoxvillians chattering about sports as much as gambling. It helps drive the town's football fanaticism, keeping people attuned to every detail of every game. Bookies, gamblers, sports reporters, networks like ESPN and even the official athletic organizations such as the NCAA, all benefit—either casually or directly—from the heightened attention sports betting creates.

Gambling has a discernible voice in our ongoing conversation about sports. It's exciting, it's risky, and sometimes it's sad. It adds dollar signs to the thrill of victory and a debtor's regret to the agony of defeat.

It's almost midnight when Tennessee quarterback Tee Martin begins calling signals, fourth and three in Florida territory. The roar of the crowd kicks up an octave. All eyes are on the TV. There's the snap, the hand-off, and star running back Jamal Lewis carries my five spot head-on into a wall of Gator defenders. He doesn't make the first down. The Vols fall short for the first time in 14 games. Unable to get within field goal range in the closing minutes, Tennessee loses again in the Swamp. The mood in the bar sours.

One Vol fan picks up a bar stool, half-joking, half-enraged. He's pissed because he and his team have had a losing night. Since half-time, I've watched this guy—a heavy-set, unshaven thirtysomething with a thick yet high-pitched Southern drawl—go down $120 playing a Cherry Master slot machine.

Like sports betting, these one-armed bandits can be found in bars all over town. From my bellied-up perch, I watch the bartender hand $10 and $20 bills over the bar. He's doling out credit, which the slot-playing Vols fan feeds into the Cherry Master. As the all-orange crowd grumbles into their post-game beers, the man continues to pull the Cherry Master's arm, blankly watching the spinning fruit.

No jackpots appear and the man drifts deeper into the red on the bartender's tally sheet. Tonight, it seems, the luck of the bar is holding tight. With a group of regulars, two bartenders have put money down on a "game board," a penciled grid of boxes and numbers. Players draw for placement on the board, and then at the end of each quarter, match the numbers in the score to boxes in the grid.

When the game ends, Tennessee 21, Florida 23, one of the bartenders happens to hold the winning box combination of one and three. He counts out cash from a kitty, folds the bills and puts them in his pocket before asking if I need a refill. As he's tapping my draft, I inquire about another popular pastime among local sports gamblers.

"You guys ever do these?" I ask, pulling out a "Sports Picks" parlay betting sheet.

"We don't do them," replies the middle-aged bartender. "But some times we get 'em. I like to play."

So does the crowd at the den-like sports bar in West Knoxville where I went to make my Sports Picks the night before. It's where self-taught football experts huddle in groups, swapping predictions and filling out parlays. Each parlay sheet lists the point spreads for upcoming pro and college games. After picking three or more teams they hope will cover the spread, the players then lay down their cash at the bar. A bartender notes the amount of the bet at the bottom of the sheet where the player has marked his or her picks. The bartender then tears off the bottom of the sheet, giving both the bar and the player a record of the wager.

If Tennessee had beaten Florida, my "five on five" parlay would have been a winner. I could have gone back to the sports pub in West Knoxville and collected $100 right there over the bar.

And man, I was close. All day, I watched as my wild picks came up winners. I called Auburn's early season spanking of LSU and the Alabama loss to Louisiana Tech, a defeat so unlikely and embarrassing it nearly got the 'Bama coach fired. Kentucky and East Carolina also came through for me earlier that day, so all I needed was a Vols victory to close the deal, to walk big, to claim bragging rights at the bar.

Until 1993, Comer's pool hall downtown was Knoxville's best place to play the odds and talk shop with other gamblers. Dick Fisher, the starting center on UT's basketball team in 1961, remembers the notorious watering hole. He says he never fell in with the local gambling scene. But that didn't stop Fisher from becoming tragically entwined in a gambling conspiracy News-Sentinel headlines remember as the "Big Scandal."

Today, Fisher sounds upbeat but cautious when he calls from his home in Milan, Tenn. He wants to talk about his participation in the point-shaving scheme that unraveled in the spring of '61. He just doesn't want to bring any shame to the university, which he says has forgiven him.

"It was a terrible time in my life," says Fisher, who along with former UT forward Eddie Test, wound up testifying against a New York-based game fixer named Aaron Wagman.

During the '60-'61 season, Wagman paid Fisher $1,000 to shave points in a game against Vanderbilt. Wagman's money was on Vandy to beat a spread that favored Tennessee by three. The Vols won by only two, 68-66, with the fix apparently in.

According to the findings of an investigation by the district attorney's office in New York City, Fisher was offered cash to pinch points in other games: match-ups against Duquesne, Holy Cross, Army, Georgia, Florida and Coach Adolph Rupp's power house squad at Kentucky. Test, a sophomore starter, became involved when Wagman called him at his dorm a couple of hours before the Kentucky game. The Chattanooga native never promised to shave points. But by failing to report his conversation with Wagman, Test allowed himself to become ensnared by the scandal.

Test and Fisher eventually received immunity from prosecution in exchange for their cooperation with a grand jury in New York City.

"It took New York underworld connections to pull this off," recalls Fisher, who was shadowed by a body guard during his two-week stay in Manhattan. He says the body guard "slept with a pistol under his pillow."

As the scandal unfolded, players at the University of North Carolina, Mississippi State, Connecticut and other schools were dragged into the mess. Fisher and Test were later allowed to complete their degrees at UT. Unlike other athletes found mingling with gamblers, neither were habitually caught up in betting on sports.

"My story is not one of gambling," says Fisher. "It's about a small town boy who gets approached by the alligators out of the city."

Following the fixing scandal of '61, money continued to pass among sports gamblers at Comer's, in dorm rooms on campus, and among golf buddies at the country club. Comer's would remain a sports betting hub until December, 1993, when an FBI sting broke up an entrenched, three-bookie network.

The ring worked like this: bets would be taken over the phone and over the bar at Comer's and another bar called The Office in Homberg Place. The three bookies behind the operation would "lay off" bets, shuffling wagers between themselves and several other bookies as they tried to place an even number of bettors on either side of every game. This is always a bookie's goal. They use the losing side's money to pay the winners and make a profit by adding a 10 percent "juice" to the total of every lost bet.

During college basketball March Madness in '93, an FBI wire tap monitored $722,000 of action flowing into Comer's and The Office between March 17 and April 5. A third bookie was wiretapped as he generated $408,000 in wagers between May 21-31. The multi-agency investigation began in 1992, with agents tailing the bookies as they made their rounds every Tuesday. The bookmakers would pay and collect from players in parking lots and restaurants like Shoney's, discretely exchanging white envelopes filled with cash.

Around the same time, another bookie who worked out of his apartment on Walker Springs Road was also taken down. While authorities were serving a warrant at the apartment, one of the bookie's clients called and placed a bet with an officer on the scene.

None of the bookies busted in '93 saw jail time. But seized property and fines were estimated to approach $1 million, and each was put on probation.

Book-making alone is classified as a misdemeanor. Before it becomes a federal crime, says the U.S. attorney's office in Knoxville, a book-making operation must involve five or more people, generate $2,000 in bets per day and remain in operation for at least 30 days.

Of course, most bookies don't get busted. As John Gill, special counsel to the Knox County Attorney General's office puts it, "The people who know about it are the ones involved."

Besides, adds Gill, "Most people would rather have a burglar prosecuted than a bookie."

I spend two weeks searching for my bookie. At first, I try to hook up with a friend of a friend's bookie, who serves a young crowd of UT students and recent graduates. I also drop by the business of another known bookie, but no luck there, either.

Then I get the call. It's my bookie-to-be. His voice isn't graveled by cigar smoke, but instead oddly innocent. He agrees to meet for a chat, then carefully chooses a location. My bookie would rather talk outside, alone somewhere, but it's raining. So we sit parked in front of a strip mall where I listen to his story.

For as long as he can remember, my bookie has been around action. He began taking bets while in his 20s, saying "If I didn't, I'd be on the other end of the phone, and that's the bad end."

These days, he handles about 20 clients who generally wager anywhere between $50 and $1,000 a game during football and basketball season, though he says, "golf is coming on" as a betting sport. He usually sets a limit with each client up front so there's no "hoo doo" down the road.

"One of my jobs as a bookie is to keep people under control," he says. "You don't want a compulsive gambler. You don't want a guy who pays off with his paycheck. That's not good for anybody."

It's obviously not good for the gambler, but it's also dicey for a bookmaker to deal with broke clients. These people have husbands and wives who might rat out a bookie because they're tired of seeing their spouse's empty pockets.

For more than 10 years, my bookie says he's fielded phone calls from adequately stacked players. Their calls begin to come in an hour or so before kick-off during football season. He says the smart ones call early. They've been thinking about their picks all week and choose with confidence. Some are contrarian, always betting on the least popular side of the line. If everybody likes one team, they'll routinely take the underdog. In bookie lingo, this makes them a "dog player."

"Then there are the guys who call at kick-off because they've been listening to [NFL commentator] Terry Bradshaw," says my bookie with a laugh. "That's who you make your juice off."

For most bookies, profits are determined by what's known as a hold percentage. The money comes out of the 10 percent juice fee tacked on to all losing bets. Throughout football and basketball season, bookies try to manage their books so there are at least as many losers as winners. When the bets start pouring in on one side of the point spread, bookies will "move the line," so clients will bet the other way and help balance out the book.

Over the course of a year, a successful bookie will collect a 10 percent juice fee on at least 50 percent of all the bets he takes in. In other words, he should net 5 percent of his total action. After writing off losses to clients who don't pay and the minor expenses that keep his operation running, my bookie's hold percentage sits at about 3 percent. So over the course of a year, he pockets $3 of every $100 he books.

To protect himself from the Internal Revenue Service, my bookie stirs these profits into his legal income and pays taxes on them. He also keeps his operation small, refusing to network with other bookies or expand his business. This should keep him off the FBI's radar, but he admits, "If someone in law enforcement wanted to bust me they could. If they decided they wanted me, I'm meat."

For years, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has repeated its plea for a crackdown on sports gambling. A policy adopted in 1978 remains in effect, threatening members of the sports media who run ads for betting services. The NCAA has even considered revoking USA Today's press credentials to the national college basketball tournament because it refused to stop running ads from college sports betting handicappers

Many newspapers refuse to run ads hyping online and call-in betting services, but continue to publish the Las Vegas odds. Meanwhile, the NCAA continues to push for an outright ban on all college sports betting, even if that means losing a lot of the fans who watch only because there's money on the line.

"I would argue that if you could trade some fans for an absolute guarantee that some third party is not trying to determine the outcome of games, you'd take the guarantee," says Malcolm McInnis, associate athletic director at UT in charge of NCAA compliance. "I think you'd trade that in a minute."

If it were possible, maybe. But as McInnis acknowledges, it's not like gamblers have to hide out in "some speakeasy down on the river." Gambling thrives on most college campuses and it's changing what McInnis describes as the "vocabulary of sports."

Tune into any sports talk radio show and you'll hear what he means. While listening one evening, I'm accosted by the voice of nationally syndicated sports DJ Arnie "The Stinking Genius" Spanier on 1240 AM. He sounds like a strung-out cross between Archie Bunker and Wolfman Jack and seems interested in one thing only: gambling. He brags about his winning bets from the week before and taunts callers, wheezing over the air, "Does five for six pay the bills? I'm asking you, does five for six pay the bills?"

Sports Talk (990 AM) radio host and former News-Sentinel sports reporter Jimmy Hyams says gamblers are never shy about calling his show.

"One guy, he opened the show by calling me a jerk," says Hyams. "He was mad because I said a team wouldn't cover the spread. For someone to call me a jerk, that's incredible."

It's also hard to believe the bad rap given former Vols Coach Johnny Majors. Coach Phil Fulmer's predecessor evidently earned a spiteful reputation for not covering the spread. He'd give Vols fans a win, but incite their ire by not pulling the line.

"No matter how well the team played," says Hyams. "He still got booed."

Lucky for sports-betting Vols fans, Tennessee did cover the point spread in a 1970 match-up against UCLA. On his show recently, Hyams recounted a story passed along to him by former UT quarterback Bobby Scott. The Vols were up by four, but needed a touchdown to cover the spread. Huddling with the offense near UCLA's one yard line with seconds left, Scott asked his teammates if they should go for another score. One said, "Well, it would probably make a lot of fans happy." Then another insisted they go for it because his brother had $250 riding on Tennessee to cover... which they did.

This year, in the season opener against Wyoming, UT was in danger of not covering its 24 point spread as the clock wound down to the final ticks. Comments left on a website called wagertalk.com report what Tennessee did next, "They score another touchdown with 20 seconds left? Call me crazy, but covering by one with a final play seems a little odd."

Officially, UT was simply protecting its standings in the Bowl Championship Series with its last-second score. The BCS computerized system takes margin of victory into account when it crunches numbers and produces ratings. These rankings can influence which teams get to play for the national championship at the end of the season. A surprisingly narrow victory, like UT's nail-biter against Memphis, can hurt a team's BCS standings.

The computer ranking system has plenty of critics, including my bookie. He says the NCAA sends a mixed message when it uses a ranking system closely akin to the point spreads set by Las Vegas casinos.

"They say they want sportsmanship, but then they say score totals matter," remarks my bookie, who wouldn't mind taking bets on pro sports alone. "I'd love to see them pull out sports betting on college games. That'd be great."

Then my bookie starts to get nostalgic. He says it was a lot more fun pulling for the Vols when "there were just kids from small towns in Tennessee out there" and college sports had yet to become a big money game.

Later, as I'm winding up the interview, my bookie turns to me and says, "Well, you seem like a nice guy. Just give me a call if you ever want to get down."

It's not long before I place in my first $50 bet.

"So you want a half on Mississippi State minus three," says my bookie when I call, translating my bet into bookie-speak.

"Yeah, $50 on Mississippi State to beat Auburn by more than three," I say.

Final score: Mississippi State 18, Auburn 16. I lose... again.