Is there such a thing as an ex-gambler?
Chad Millman
ESPN INSIDER
I don't know many ex-gamblers. It's not the kind of gig that you can just decide you don't want to do anymore, like lawyering or doctoring or being a banker. And it's not the kind of career where you suddenly say one day that you're not going into the office. No one is giving you a gold watch (more likely you would get a pair of silver bracelets). People become gamblers because they don't want the 9-to-5 job; they don't want to work for anyone else. And because of that, it's hard for any of them to stop working at all. The feeling is innate.
That goes for bookmakers too, the suits of the sports-betting world. I know of only one guy who truly walked away from the sportsbook, and that was to go work at the Borgata. I'm not even sure that counts. Another bookmaker I know left the biz as the boss at one of the biggest books on the strip. He made some nice money, thought he could move his family away from Las Vegas and turn his back on it all. A few years later, he was back.
I've been thinking a lot about old-time gamblers and how they have no second acts the past couple of weeks. In mid-April, the Justice Department announced the arrests of several dozen people from Florida to New Hampshire for being a part of an illegal sports-betting operation that had earned more than $1 billion over 10 years. The list of aliases among those named in the bust reads like they were pulled from the best (or worst) mafia movies of all time: Gooch, Top Cat, Rico, Wild Bill, Fat Mikey, Limo, Big Dog, Big Lou. But it was one name at the top of the list of defendants that caught my eye. The Greek.
<OFFER>Spiro "The Greek" Athanas. In the betting world, he's known by his first name only. Even the guys who have never met him refer to him as Spiro, as if they had just shared a cup of grounds and a baklava. He was a full-on legend, loaded and smart and a survivor. He had started the offshore book known as The Greek, as well as BetJamaica, shops that catered to sharp players unafraid to gamble. Like Spiro. A few years ago, when the Department of Justice shut down Full Tilt Poker, Absolute and PokerStars and followed that up by seizing the domain names, essentially shutting down, of several sportsbooks, The Greek shocked the betting community by announcing he was closing his place too.
Apparently, he couldn't really walk away.
Tragically, I was reminded of this again earlier this week, when news broke that Steve Schillinger, one of the original offshore bookmakers, was found dead from a single gunshot to the head in his Antigua apartment. It was an apparent suicide. Schillinger, along with Jay Cohen and Hayden Ware, moved from the United States to the Islands in the late 1990s to open WSEX, the World Sports Exchange.
It wasn't long before they became the poster children for the beginning of what has become a nearly generation-long battle between the Justice Department and offshore sportsbook operators. All three were indicted for violating the 1961 Federal Wire Act. Cohen decided to come back to the United States and face the charges, a case he lost and eventually spent time in jail for. But Schillinger was defiant. I interviewed him for my book "The Odds" after Cohen had returned to the United States to ask Schillinger if he'd ever do the same. He sounded like a lot of gamblers I know in that he refused to live by rules he didn't agree with. These are guys who won't buckle their seat belt because they don't believe the government should tell them how to live. This is what I wrote about him then:
"Schillinger, in his early 40s, remains a zealot, nothing can diminish his enthusiasm: not the fact that his mother didn't tell him his father died until five days after it happened out of fear he would come home for the funeral and be arrested. Not the fact he can't kiss his wife, who is still living in San Francisco, or coach his 12-year-old daughter's basketball team and his 10-year-old son's baseball team. And certainly there are no regrets about the fact that he is a fugitive from justice. 'To be honest, I still would have done it,' he told me. 'In the end it will probably be a good career move and be very lucrative.'"
WSEX announced last week that it was shutting down due to "inadequate capital resources."
I wanted to know what it was like to be in this world and have it crumble around you yet not be able to walk away. So I called Alan Denkenson, better known as "Dink." To some, he is the best hockey bettor in Las Vegas. To others, he was the character in Beth Raymer's book "Lay the Favorite." Before Dink moved to Vegas nearly 20 years ago, he had spent most of his life on the other side of the counter, as a local bookie in Queens. On more than one occasion, he found himself getting pinched. The first two times, it wasn't too bad. "But the third one, that was the bad one when I went away for 11 months," he says.
Dink's journey from bust to sentencing was the slow and painful kind. He was arrested in the winter of 1988, in the middle of an NFL playoff Sunday. He knew the cops were coming; another bookmaker had tipped him off that folks around town had been busted just a few minutes earlier.
"I worked on the bottom floor of a two-family home, and they handcuffed me in my office," Dink says. "It wasn't the first time I wore handcuffs. I do remember that, when I got busted once before, the girl who worked with me was so thin the cuff nearly slid off of her wrists."
The police interviewed Dink for two hours that day. "And then they let me go," he says. "That was actually worse. It made me feel like something bad was going to happen. They were just waiting."
He was right. Dink was part of a larger sting that extended to Detroit. And it wasn't until 1993 that he was eventually sentenced. "It was to a halfway house in San Diego, because I had moved there after getting arrested," Dink says. "There was a priest in there who was running a scam, and there was a guy who was going through a sex change operation. I ran into swindlers and hustlers, guys on drugs or guys dealing drugs."
Dink wasn't doing hard time. Every morning he got up, drove an hour to work in a friend's deli and drove back to the halfway house. Some days he stopped by the house he once shared with another buddy, who had rented out Dink's room to a woman he knew. "I got to know her whenever I stopped in to shower," he says. "Eventually, after I got out of the halfway house, we moved in together and got married. We're still together."
But it was something else Dink told me about his trips away from the halfway house that made me think: Just when he thought he was out, they pulled him back in. When Dink got to work at the deli every day, along with taking orders for sandwiches, he made the transition from bookmaker to gambler. "I spent that whole year I was in the halfway house working on baseball," he says.
A year later, Dink moved to Las Vegas. He's been there ever since.
</OFFER>
Chad Millman
ESPN INSIDER
I don't know many ex-gamblers. It's not the kind of gig that you can just decide you don't want to do anymore, like lawyering or doctoring or being a banker. And it's not the kind of career where you suddenly say one day that you're not going into the office. No one is giving you a gold watch (more likely you would get a pair of silver bracelets). People become gamblers because they don't want the 9-to-5 job; they don't want to work for anyone else. And because of that, it's hard for any of them to stop working at all. The feeling is innate.
That goes for bookmakers too, the suits of the sports-betting world. I know of only one guy who truly walked away from the sportsbook, and that was to go work at the Borgata. I'm not even sure that counts. Another bookmaker I know left the biz as the boss at one of the biggest books on the strip. He made some nice money, thought he could move his family away from Las Vegas and turn his back on it all. A few years later, he was back.
I've been thinking a lot about old-time gamblers and how they have no second acts the past couple of weeks. In mid-April, the Justice Department announced the arrests of several dozen people from Florida to New Hampshire for being a part of an illegal sports-betting operation that had earned more than $1 billion over 10 years. The list of aliases among those named in the bust reads like they were pulled from the best (or worst) mafia movies of all time: Gooch, Top Cat, Rico, Wild Bill, Fat Mikey, Limo, Big Dog, Big Lou. But it was one name at the top of the list of defendants that caught my eye. The Greek.
<OFFER>Spiro "The Greek" Athanas. In the betting world, he's known by his first name only. Even the guys who have never met him refer to him as Spiro, as if they had just shared a cup of grounds and a baklava. He was a full-on legend, loaded and smart and a survivor. He had started the offshore book known as The Greek, as well as BetJamaica, shops that catered to sharp players unafraid to gamble. Like Spiro. A few years ago, when the Department of Justice shut down Full Tilt Poker, Absolute and PokerStars and followed that up by seizing the domain names, essentially shutting down, of several sportsbooks, The Greek shocked the betting community by announcing he was closing his place too.
Apparently, he couldn't really walk away.
Tragically, I was reminded of this again earlier this week, when news broke that Steve Schillinger, one of the original offshore bookmakers, was found dead from a single gunshot to the head in his Antigua apartment. It was an apparent suicide. Schillinger, along with Jay Cohen and Hayden Ware, moved from the United States to the Islands in the late 1990s to open WSEX, the World Sports Exchange.
It wasn't long before they became the poster children for the beginning of what has become a nearly generation-long battle between the Justice Department and offshore sportsbook operators. All three were indicted for violating the 1961 Federal Wire Act. Cohen decided to come back to the United States and face the charges, a case he lost and eventually spent time in jail for. But Schillinger was defiant. I interviewed him for my book "The Odds" after Cohen had returned to the United States to ask Schillinger if he'd ever do the same. He sounded like a lot of gamblers I know in that he refused to live by rules he didn't agree with. These are guys who won't buckle their seat belt because they don't believe the government should tell them how to live. This is what I wrote about him then:
"Schillinger, in his early 40s, remains a zealot, nothing can diminish his enthusiasm: not the fact that his mother didn't tell him his father died until five days after it happened out of fear he would come home for the funeral and be arrested. Not the fact he can't kiss his wife, who is still living in San Francisco, or coach his 12-year-old daughter's basketball team and his 10-year-old son's baseball team. And certainly there are no regrets about the fact that he is a fugitive from justice. 'To be honest, I still would have done it,' he told me. 'In the end it will probably be a good career move and be very lucrative.'"
WSEX announced last week that it was shutting down due to "inadequate capital resources."
I wanted to know what it was like to be in this world and have it crumble around you yet not be able to walk away. So I called Alan Denkenson, better known as "Dink." To some, he is the best hockey bettor in Las Vegas. To others, he was the character in Beth Raymer's book "Lay the Favorite." Before Dink moved to Vegas nearly 20 years ago, he had spent most of his life on the other side of the counter, as a local bookie in Queens. On more than one occasion, he found himself getting pinched. The first two times, it wasn't too bad. "But the third one, that was the bad one when I went away for 11 months," he says.
Dink's journey from bust to sentencing was the slow and painful kind. He was arrested in the winter of 1988, in the middle of an NFL playoff Sunday. He knew the cops were coming; another bookmaker had tipped him off that folks around town had been busted just a few minutes earlier.
"I worked on the bottom floor of a two-family home, and they handcuffed me in my office," Dink says. "It wasn't the first time I wore handcuffs. I do remember that, when I got busted once before, the girl who worked with me was so thin the cuff nearly slid off of her wrists."
The police interviewed Dink for two hours that day. "And then they let me go," he says. "That was actually worse. It made me feel like something bad was going to happen. They were just waiting."
He was right. Dink was part of a larger sting that extended to Detroit. And it wasn't until 1993 that he was eventually sentenced. "It was to a halfway house in San Diego, because I had moved there after getting arrested," Dink says. "There was a priest in there who was running a scam, and there was a guy who was going through a sex change operation. I ran into swindlers and hustlers, guys on drugs or guys dealing drugs."
Dink wasn't doing hard time. Every morning he got up, drove an hour to work in a friend's deli and drove back to the halfway house. Some days he stopped by the house he once shared with another buddy, who had rented out Dink's room to a woman he knew. "I got to know her whenever I stopped in to shower," he says. "Eventually, after I got out of the halfway house, we moved in together and got married. We're still together."
But it was something else Dink told me about his trips away from the halfway house that made me think: Just when he thought he was out, they pulled him back in. When Dink got to work at the deli every day, along with taking orders for sandwiches, he made the transition from bookmaker to gambler. "I spent that whole year I was in the halfway house working on baseball," he says.
A year later, Dink moved to Las Vegas. He's been there ever since.
</OFFER>
