The Good Old Days of Sports Gambling
Billy Walters, the author of another recent insider’s account, “Gambler,” didn’t need any pushing. As a self-described “former degenerate gambler,” he never met a massive bet that he wasn’t willing to take—provided, of course, that he could convince himself the odds were on his side. Walters once wagered on which direction a robin would fly when it departed a phone line it was sitting on; as a young man, he made a bet on his own life expectancy. (The over-under was thirty-five, and he won.) Casinos would seem to depend on men like him. When Manteris writes, then, that “the rich history of Las Vegas is not written by the likes of Billy Walters,” it’s easy to object, not least because “Gambler” includes a rich history of Las Vegas. Intriguingly, it mentions Manteris not once.
Maybe that’s because Manteris was exactly the kind of bookie that Walters couldn’t stand: one who wasn’t interested in his business. Sports betting, for Walters, amounts to “psychological warfare between bettor and bookmaker—cat and mouse, hunter and prey. The posted line is just a way to trigger the game.” The best bookies relish that fight, no matter how dirty it may become or what sort of arms race it compels. He laments “the unwritten code of casino misconduct: beat us, and we’ll ban you.” When, in 1997, the Nevada Gaming Control Board tightened its regulations against “messenger” betting—professional networks of runners like those that Walters relied on—he felt that it was the work of “shortsighted sportsbook operators who were trying to put pro handicappers like me out of business.”
Walters had a hardscrabble upbringing in Munfordville, Kentucky. He moved to Louisville, where, by age thirty, he’d had three marriages, three kids, and a vasectomy, which he paid for with a set of used golf clubs. Though he’d found employment as a foundry worker, a custodian at a tobacco factory, and a car salesman, his penchant for drink and dice kept him in the red. In 1982, after state police broke up his illegal bookmaking operation, he moved to Vegas, where he crossed paths with the same sordid mobsters and two-bit hustlers that Manteris did. (Walters, too, shed nary a tear when Spilotro’s body turned up in that cornfield.)
Linking up with the Computer Group taught Walters that, if he stayed sober and disciplined, he could turn the boom-and-bust cycle of his addiction into a profession. At this point, he ceased to resemble the recreational gambler as we know him. An ordinary bettor may be guided by team loyalty, intuition, or emotion—Walters was governed by dispassionate information. An ordinary bettor might lay down money just to increase the pleasure of watching a big game—Walters was betting so much, so frequently, that spectatorship only reminded him of potential insolvency.
He didn’t mind: losing, according to an old adage he cites, is the second-greatest thrill in gambling. Plus, Walters had defanged chance by acquiring something close to sports omniscience. He spent his days immersed in the minutiae of games. A deal with cleaning crews at McCarran International allowed him to collect the crumpled newspapers that passengers left on airplanes, granting him access to sports pages from around the world. These, along with handicapping newsletters like GoldSheet and his intelligence from the Computer Group, gave him a competitive edge on bookies. Considering “S-factors (special situations), W-factors (weather), and E-factors (emotional),” he made careful calculations for home-field advantages, the amount of rest a team had had, the number of days they’d been on the road, the number of time zones they’d changed, dramatic shifts in climate or temperature, and “motivational factors such as revenge.” More than a gambler, he was a kind of athletic actuary.
Were his efforts strictly on the up and up? Manteris has his doubts: “Until the day I die,” he writes, “I will probably question how Walters had important player injury information first.” Bookies weren’t the only ones who wondered. The Computer Group was twice raided by the F.B.I., though agents never turned up enough evidence to make a winning case. In 1992, a federal jury acquitted Walters and his associates of charges of conspiracy and the illegal transmission of wagering information. His next company, Sierra Sports Consulting, faced allegations of money laundering following a raid by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department; a judge later dismissed the charges. On the advice of his lawyers, Walters moved his operation to Panama, where his office had “the look of a CIA operation,” with legions of employees placing bets from afar using “two-ton Vonage boxes” to disguise their locations. They could bring in millions of dollars on one football game alone.
