By Richard Leck with Karen Lillis
"Jersey City Annie
She's not that pretty
She rides the No. 5
to Jersey City"
The Number Five was a bus that went back and forth from Jersey City to the Port Authority station near Times Square. The Number Five carried people to Manhattan for a lot of reasons, or course. But a disproportionate number of riders were going over to bet at the OTB—in the thirties it was Manhattanites coming to Hudson County to see the burlesques, but in the seventies the tide was in the other direction. See, New Jersey didn't have Off-Track Betting, but New York did. And New York wasn't blind to this fact—inside Port Authority, there was not one but two OTBs—one on the upper level and one on the street level. They knew how to grab the Jerseyites as they were coming through—including my father.
All the diners in Jersey were owned by Greeks, who were inveterate gamblers. The diner closest to my house was owned by three Greek brothers. Two of them would close the diner at night and go straight to Manhattan and lose their nights’ money at OTB.
There was one gaming table in Atlantic City, a craps table, that was just Greek and Chinese—not a word of English was spoken at the table. For the Greeks—in New Jersey, anyway—gambling was a hobby the way bowling might have been for Americans. We bowled, they gambled. With us, gambling might come third or forth.
At another table in Atlantic City, I once watched a couple slowly push the chips of their neighbor into their own pile of chips—a few at a time. The most cowardly take-over plot I ever saw. The plan hinged on having the glass ashtray right next to their chips; that made it easier to mask what they were doing. So, I kept moving the ashtray to another corner of the table, as if I was doing it absent-mindedly. They were very surprised that their ashtray kept migrating—they finally got upset and left the table. Me, I never smoked a day in my life.
There's an old joke, "I knew a man who was extremely lucky in Atlantic City. He went down in a $10,000 car and came back on a $100,000 bus!" I took the bus down to begin with.
* * * *
In 1975, I was living alone in the family house in Jersey City. That cold winter I got put on jury duty, and whaddya know, the defendant was charged with taking illegal bets on the numbers.
The jury was against him when we first went into private deliberations—which is to say, they thought we had to convict him, based on the evidence. But I didn't think we had anything more than coincidence. If a coincidence can go one way, it can go the other: The cops had overheard him saying in a phone call, "What have you got for me?" Well, he could have borrowed money, and wanted it back. They found betting slips folded in a newspaper in his house. So, they could be someone else's slips in a newspaper he bought. Not to mention, everyone in the city was involved with the numbers. I asked one older woman on the jury, "Mrs. McGuire, do you bet on the numbers?" "Yes, I do." "Case closed!" I said. I turned the jury around, and we sent the fellow home a free man.
The defending attorney, who looked like Groucho Marx in his bow tie and moustache, went around with a bewildered smile and shook our hands. At first he didn't even understand that he won, and when he did, he couldn't believe it.
The End.
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