MaDD Blogger

Numb3rs

A while ago I went back to my old hood to see how things had changed. The old house had been completely demolished. No surprise there as we had been quite poor at the time and the last few years we were there when you'd walk in the kitchen you look up and there was this HUGE fucking hole in the ceiling. We had a bad roof leak a few years back and our slumlord kind of jimmy rigged the roof as a patch job. He was too cheap to hire a pro so him and his son would go on the roof and patch it. By the third patch job the water damage was so extensive that the tile warped and started caving in. A piece actually fell and hit me in the head and then we called the man and he sawed this big hole in the ceiling about the size of a football field and removed the tiles. He was supposed to replace them but he never did. What were we going to do complain? We were broke and weren't going to find a better house in a price range that we could afford.

Around this time I got a third shift job working at Exxon. I was only 20 and since it was right there by one of the worst parts of town I got a lot of prostitutes, crackheads, homeless and dope dealers. One of my favorite customers was this guy William. He actually lived up the street from me but I didn't meet him until I started at Exxon. He was an older guy in his late 40s and from talking to him you could tell he'd been around the block a time or too. It was from William that I learned the numbers.

Like a lot of people in the hood William didn't have a job but he always had money and gas in his car and smokes in his pocket. He was on the grind and made his money by hustling. He didn't deal dope which I liked and instead made his living by making book, running numbers and bootlegging.

For those of you who are square making book is what a bookie does. William would take bets on games but his daily money came from running numbers which was very lucrative since Tennessee wouldn't have a legal lottery for another decade. He explained the line to me, point spreads and payouts. The line is the odds that the bookie gives before you place your bet and it consists of the over and under. I'll use football for a better example.

Let's say the Tennessee Titans and the Indianapolis Colts were about to play this Sunday. The Titans have been averaging 28 points against the rest of the league but in there last 3 matches against the Colts they average 17.5 and the Colts who average 38 points on average against the league manage to average 21.5 in the last three Titans matchups. Me acting as a bookie would set the line at a 35 to 40 point range. I'll settle on a line of 38 and then ask if you think the game scoring would he over or under 38. This is a very popular form of betting because you don't really have to root for either team and only have to guess if the teams will score more or less than the line. If they tie the line and score 38 you lose but if they score 39 or more you would win if you took the over. If you instead bet the under and they score 37 or less you would win.

You could also bet the spread. Let's say your favorite team is favored by 15. While you still think your team will win you don't think that it will be by 15. The smart bet would be to bet on the other team breaking the spread. You bet on the other team breaking the spread and sure enough your home team wins like you thought but only by 6. Even though you bet on the losing team you would still get paid because you didn't bet that the other team would win you only bet that they would break the spread and they did by 9.

The numbers book is the easiest to explain because so many states have lotteries with pick 3 and pick 4 games. William ran numbers using the Illinois lottery because they announced the numbers every day on Chicago superstation WGN 9 which can be seen all over the country on cable. I thought that was pretty clean because they used an established lottery which meant no fraud and it was cheap too. If you bet a dime on pick 4 it would pay out $100 dollars or a nickel would pay $50. If you put a dollar it would pay out $1000 dollars on pick 4 played straight. The payout was $5 for a nickel $10 for a dime and $100 for a dollar on pick 3 if you bet straight. Box and combo plays would lessen the payout on both games.

Once the lottery became legal it put these people out of business at least around here. Why bet numbers with a bookie when you can legally buy a ticket at the corner market. William knew everybody in the hood as he made his daily rounds to collect his numbers and of course the cash which had to be turned into the book house before the drawing every day. He'd always stopped in to get a cup of coffee and some cigs and we'd talk about everything. He was schooling me, giving me a taste for the business and I was fascinated. I even started betting with him. I can't tell you how many times my numbers fell one digit short and then William would stop in and we would laugh about it.

Bootlegging was something I never really understood but just about every hood I've ever been to or lived in has a bootleg house, some more than one. How it works is the bootlegger would go to the store and buy a shitload of beer, mostly 16s, 24s and deuce deuces which is the 22 ounce. The cost would be around .99 cents to 1.50 depending on the size and brand and then they would in turn jack the price up to $2 or $3 dollars. Some bootleggers bought 40's but most didn't because of the glass bottles and you need to be able to store as much beer in your fridge as possible so most times they would buy the beer in cans. Empty glass bottles are a pain in the ass to haul to the recycler or trash and god forbid they break but you can take busloads of empty cans, crush them and haul them down to the recycler and make even more cash fairly easily. It was a pretty efficient system.

All the bootleg houses I've been too looked about the same, typical ghetto household setup about 4 or 5 people living under one roof and 2 refrigerators in the house. One is to keep all the beer in plus you'll find a room in the house set aside for "company". It's like an old fashioned speak easy set up. The bootlegger doesn't want to get you in and out like the dope dealer does. Instead he wants you to sit back and relax, watch the game, play some spades or poker, and listen to music because they know that much like in bars drinking is a social thing so if you're having a good time with friends you will continue to drink and they will clean up.

You can easily take $200 or $300 bucks worth of beer and flip it into $1500 to $2000 on Fridays and Saturdays and if it's a holiday when the stores are closed you can double that. Some bootleggers sold weed on the side as well but most would be drug free. Dope fiends attract attention and attention attracts the police who for the most part will overlook bootlegging because they are too busy trying to bust drug dealers instead. I know people who have bootlegged for years in fact one of the best houses I went to was back in Alabama run by this dude Shorty.

Shorty had been bootlegging since I was in diapers. One of the smartest hustlers I've ever met and he was into everything guns, dope, you name it but he downplayed everything and upon first inspection he just looked like a poor brother living in the hood raising his family. If you had told me the truth about him I wouldn't have believed it but I've been in his house several times and saw his genius with my own two eyes. He only dabbled in the other areas I mentioned before and never dealt to people he didn't know but bootlegging was a different story.

Shorty knocked a hole in his garage and made an entertainment room in the house. He put a pool table in there and a soda vending machine and coin operated video games. His older kids helped him run things. They even sold hamburgers and fries and candy bars and had spare change in the back to break bills and that was back in 1982 on one of my summer visits to my aunt's house. When I was 15 my dad died and we went back home to bury him...Shorty was still in business. I have yet to see a bootlegger in Tennessee that was as smart as that man and I've seen a lot of them. If you think 10 steps ahead then he thinks 50 and as I got older I would often wonder why he didn't apply that knowledge into legitimate business. He could have been a millionaire with his business sense but then again he probably already is.

Cool Story!

{ 7:11 AM, July 12, 2005 } { Posted by Dorothy }

Is that where you learned your business sense? You seem pretty smart to me.

Hi Dorothy

{ 12:44 PM, July 12, 2005 } { Posted by maddhatt }

I'd certainly say it taught me to be unorthodox in the way I did things. When I started MaDD HaTT Entertainment I didn't even own a computer. I couldn't afford one let alone pay for web hosting so I had to figure out a way around it.

That's one of the main reasons that bootlegging confused me for the most part. Prohibition has been lifted in this country for about 70 years or so and obviously that has an effect on how much money you could make selling alcohol but the places I know that still do this in the city barely make any profit doing it while others make a killing doing it just like any other business.

I made a lot of friends when I first got into this business and quite a few of them went belly up when the dotcom crash happened a few years back and surprisingly I'm still here so maybe I did learn a few things.

Hiya....

{ 9:36 AM, July 14, 2005 } { Posted by mommyrn }

Thank you for the welcome. I have been enjoying your take on life also. Carry on.