October 1, 2024 • 34 mins
Bill Bradley was already famous in college as the epitome of certain American virtues: integrity, honesty, and athleticism. As an NBA star, he took those virtues to the big leagues. As a US Senator, he had a chance to codify some of them into law and prevent the rise of sports betting. But at the same time, others in Bradley's state were making huge money on this illicit form of gambling.
For further reading:
John McPhee’s A Sense of Where You Are
American Bettors Voice, non-profit advocacy for sports bettors co-founded by Gadoon “Spanky” Kryollos.
Bill Bradley’s Values of the Game
Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/senate-bill/474
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
His first afternoon at Lawrenceville, he began by shooting fourteen
foot jump shots from the right side.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
That's John McPhee, now ninety three years old, the grand
Master of literary nonfiction. He's reading for us from the
first book he ever published, back in nineteen sixty five.
He called the book A Sense of Where You Are.
It was about a Princeton University basketball player named Bill Bradley.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
He got off to a bad start, and he kept
missing them six in a row, hit the back rim
of the basket and bounced out.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
The writer had talked the player into letting him watch
his private workout. It was just the two of them
alone in some high school gym that Bradley he had
never been in before.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
He stopped looking discomfited and seemed to be making an
adjustment in his mind. Then he went up for another
jump shot from the same spot and hit it cleanly.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I'm eleven years old when I read what John McPhee
wrote about Bill Bradley. But I don't care about John McPhee.
I only want to know more about Bill Bradley. At
this point, he's in the NBA and I've set up
a poop in my bedroom to create the upcoming nineteen
seventy two finals, which I care about only because Bradley
will be in them. I play out this entire two
(01:48):
hour game. I also serve as the play by play
announcer into a tape recorder I've set up on my desk.
Nicks down by one, five seconds left, Bradley in heavy traffic,
Bradley dribbles, left, Bradley shoots. It's good, Bradley got away
from McMillan jack. I'm a little man with a private obsession.
(02:11):
After each game, I sit down and listen to my
two hours of take to create box scores, to see
how well Bill Bradley did, even though I had just
done it. This is how I really begin as a
sports fan with emulation. I want to be like Bill Bradley,
which is why I bother to find a whole book
(02:32):
about him and read it.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Four more shots went in without a miss, and then
he paused and said, you want to know something, That
basket is about an inch and a half low.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
The main thing I learned from the book is that
if I want to be Bill Bradley, it won't just happen.
It won't be easy. When Bradley was himself eleven years old.
He shot baskets until his fingers bled. By the time
he got to Princeton, he'd shot so many different basketballs
on so many different hoops. Then when he missed, he
knew that the problem wasn't him, it was the hoop.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Some weeks later, I went back to Lawrenceville with a
steel tape, borrowed a step ladder, and measured the height
of the basket. It was nine feet ten and seven
eighths inches above the floor, or one and one eight
inches too low.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
Much later, I'd realize that all the time I thought
I was learning how to be Bill Bradley, I was
actually learning how to be John McPhee. But that's another story. Anyway,
eleven year old me would never believe what I'm about
to do. When you were a player, when did you
first have the sense that kids were looking at you
as an example of excellence?
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Thousands, literally thousands of fathers would bring their son or
mothers or daughter and father bring a daughter or whatever
to the game, and they'd always say, you know, you
want to be like Bradley. Well, I always disagreed with that.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
I'm talking with Bill Bradley for real.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
No, do you want to be like the father? You
don't want to be like Bradley, But do you want
to be like Bradley in terms of the values that
you see exemplified in the development of his game, Because
that's what you want to do in your life, to
develop your skills to their highest and best years.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
I'm Michael Lewis, and this is against the rules this season.
I'm looking at what's happening to the American fan and
in this episode, what happens when Bill Bradley's ideal of
the game collides with the way other people think of it.
Bill Bradley always seemed to have a plan Basketball was
(04:55):
just a piece of it before he got to Princeton.
During his senior year in high school, he actually signed
with Duke, but then the summer before college he went
on a trip to Europe.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
And on one of those days he toured Oxford and
I walked into christ Church Quad and looked around and
thought to myself, I got to figure some way to
get back here.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
When he got home, he looked into it, learned about
Rhodes scholars and that Princeton generated the most of them.
So he wrote to Duke and told them he wasn't coming.
Duke was pissed. Princeton scrambled to find him a bed.
Bradley then nearly flunked out of the college.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
I came from a small town high school in ninety six.
I had so called low college board scores, and I
certainly had no reference for French or biology.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
The two of that gave me problems.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Basketball had already taught him that the harder you work,
the better you get. He proceeded to spend so many
hours in the Princeton library that he would graduate with honors.
Midway through his senior year, he was offered the Rhodes Scholarship.
The New York Knicks then took him with the first
pick of the entire nineteen sixty five draft. Bradley thanked
(06:11):
them politely, then left for Oxford to study for years.
Even back then, people who didn't know Bill Bradley would
hear about him and say, oh, it must be an act.
But if it is an act, it's an act He's
going to play his entire life. He totally embodies the
values he talks about, sacrifice, discipline, selflessness, resilience. He's never
(06:35):
going to lose his Princeton advisor says about him, do
you know just how hard it is to defeat a
sixteenth century Puritan elate. In his second year as a
Rhodes scholar, Bill Bradley realizes how much he misses basketball,
and so he calls the Knicks and he tells them
that after he's done with his scholarship and a stint
(06:56):
in the Air Force, he's coming back to New York
to play, and Knicks fans go crazy. But his first
year on the team, he bombs he's really just no
good a price For those two years in an Oxford library,
for the first time in Bradley's life, the fans turn
on him. They bow him, they holler insults. One day
(07:19):
a fan actually spits on him, but because he's Bill Bradley,
he turns the other cheek, works his ass off, and improves.
Over the next six years, he helps the next win
two NBA championships, and the fans love him all over again,
now including me. When Bradley's done, they retire his jersey
(07:42):
and hang it from the rafters of Madison Square Garden.
Did fans in any way enter your imagination as a player,
They entered.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
Your imagination by the noise I love the roar of
the crowd, and it wasn't a fan, It was twenty
thousand fans when your team came together and did something
amazing and the garden roof almost came off. And so
(08:11):
the fans were instrumental in the experience for me as
a player, as a whole, not as individuals.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
The fans were the congregation recipients of a kind of
moral instruction which Bradley always honestly tried to supply. He
always carried himself with this superhuman dignity. Even at peak fame.
He refused to endorse products. And then there was the
sordid underbelly in sports, which he someone managed to avoid
(08:42):
really noticing until well into his pro career.
Speaker 4 (08:46):
We were ahead by six points and there were just
seconds left, and I shot and hit the shot, and
some people in the crowd bowed, and I asked afterwards,
I asked the trainer.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Why were they buy?
Speaker 4 (09:05):
We won by eight points, not six points?
Speaker 1 (09:08):
That's good.
Speaker 4 (09:09):
Oh, well, those are people gambling on the game. And
I thought, oh, that's sick, because for me, the game
was always about values. The idea of gambling on sports
was always something that was counter to the values of
the sport.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Bill Bradley retires from basketball in nineteen seventy seven to
run for public office. He'd become one of New Jersey's
US Senators for almost two decades, and in that time
an argument would develop that no one really wanted to
have between Bradley's ideas about sports and American life and
what was actually going on in sports and American life.
(10:03):
When did you make your first sports bets?
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Oh, my first sports bet was made. They're probably eighth,
seventh or eighth grade and in through high school, you know,
just betting the parley cards. A buddy of mine used
to bring in these green parley sheets where you'd have
to pick a three for three, four for four, five
for five. You know, you bet five ten bucks.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
His real name is goadoon Kirollas, but he's always been
known as Spanky, after a character from the TV show
The Little Rascals, which his mom loved. Spanky grew up
in Jersey City, born the year before Bill Bradley became
the state senator.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
He'd have one kid in the class the night of
one and you know, he'd win, like, you know, fifty
sixty bucks whatever, but most people lost. And then I
sort of realized. I'm like, hey, can I get in
on this. The only thing I knew as a high
school kid is the house always won, So I knew
it was unfair because I never won.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Spanky maybe had an edge over some of the other
kids at school because at home he was basically raised
on games of chance, just a.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Part of life. Every holiday we'd get together Christmas, New Year's,
you know, we'd sell it. We'd have dinner and then
we'd whip out the cards.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
And we just play poker for actual money.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Oh yeah, for actual money.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
And so if you lost to your mom, she made
you pay up.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Oh yeah, I would just by this is my allowance
and everything. This is this is the real deal. There's
you know, my mom, and she taught me, you know,
a valuable lesson, don't gamble what you're not willing to lose.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Spanky gamble didn't Spanky lost until Spanky started to gamble
and win. By the time he entered high school, he
was effectively running an illegal book of NFL parlays, not
simple bets on which team wins and loses, but compound
bets that give you like twenty to one odds if
you say pick the winner of five different NFL games
(11:48):
and pay you nothing if you only get four, right, Parley,
they would have been illegal.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Yeah, when you're in high school, one hundred percent. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
And so there's an illegal bookie in Hoboken, absolutely yes.
And so he is using what like some high school
kid as a sort of a salesman as a runner exactly,
as a as a runner and these things is you're
getting distributed in your nobody, nobody stops it.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Nobody. Not only does nobody stopping it, you know, you know,
I'm not going to name names obviously, but you know
there will be teachers that will fill out all day
cards and handle it, you know, you know what I mean.
And it was a great school, big sports school, you know,
just a part of life gambling on sports, betting on sports,
the football games and stuff. So you know, that's what's
what we did.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
You're getting a different kind of education.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
And I absolutely from from from people that really weren't
supposed to be teachers and stuff. But it just it's
just part of it.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
We're laughing. But Spanky is learning something. He's learning why
bookies exist. They always win. The kids all want to
bet on the local teams and so the local bookies
shift the odds against them. Spanky sees the bookies exploiting
fan loyalty and decides he wants a piece of the action.
He takes the parlay cards from the bookie and gives
them to a barber. The barber passes them out to customers,
(13:07):
and the customers bet. Spanky then collects all the bets
from the barber, but instead of handing them all to
the bookie, he keeps some for himself, which is to
say that by high school Spanky was a bookie. He
wasn't stealing the bookies money. He was stealing their business.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
I won't want to wake up in the morning and
I can't wait to break the law today. But you know,
the money's the money I figured with gambling and with
book making, it's really not that bad. It's not like
I'm putting it under somebody's head and saying you got
a bet. You know, these are the ones that are
asking me, hey, you got the sheets in it? The
sheets ready this week? It was just, you know, like
you're selling cracks to a crack at it. It's just
(13:45):
it was just so easy.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
At the same time as Spanky's raking it in the
high school cafeteria. New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley is rising
to political prominence. He sponsored bills on healthcare and gun
control in the environment, but there was one issue he
hadn't really touched that was dear to his heart. What
got you interested in taking up gambling as an issue
(14:07):
when you were in the Senate.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
I'd never done anything on sports. In fact, I wouldn't
even talk about sports when I became a senator. You know,
I would never raise the issue of sports. Other senators
would want to talk sometimes about but I never raised
it because I wasn't trying to bring basketball into my
(14:30):
senate life and have it affect that.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
But at some point Bradley couldn't resist. That point came
when he decided to write a book about the moral
influence of sports, values of the game he'd call it.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
I thought about how gambling really didn't celebrate those values
to the contrary, and so I passed this little bill.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
It was not a big bill.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
It was a little bill that banned sports petting in
the states that didn't have it, and it was the
law of the land, and I felt good about it.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
At the time. A few states allowed better on sports,
but most didn't. Bradley's bill, the Professional and Amateur Sports
Protection Act, effectively banned it except in states where it
already existed, like Nevada. It was a weird law because
it didn't ban sports gambling directly. It banned states from
regulating it. But it accomplished what Bradley wanted to prevent
(15:31):
people from betting on sports. What were the values that
were kind of threatened or challenged by gambling.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
I didn't want players to be Roulette chips. I wanted
to protect the purity of the game, the values that
were important to me, and gambling polluted that in a
very fundamental way.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
How gambling did that was obvious to most of the Senate.
It encouraged athletes to throw games or rig them. It
encouraged fans to think about their bets rather than the game.
It introduced money where money really didn't belong in sports.
The Professional Amateur Sports Protection Act passes in nineteen ninety
two with hardly a peep of protest or anything else.
(16:15):
Once the Senators from Nevada are sure that they can
keep doing whatever they want to do inside their state,
opposition inside the US Senate totally vanishes. Outside of Nevada,
it's illegal to be a bookie. It's okay to place
a bet with a friend, but it's against the law
to run a sports book. And America appears to be
simply pleased to have Bill Bradley's values embedded in its laws.
Speaker 4 (16:38):
I thought this was very quiet. I mean, I thought, Okay,
I passed the law. It's now illegal. That's the law land.
A few New Jersey casino people were pissed, but there
are a couple people Nobody came up to me, ever,
I said, why did you pass that casino?
Speaker 5 (16:55):
Bill?
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Never, I want to pause for a moment to point
out how volatile our country is. No other culture on
the planet experiences the same violent swings between virtue and
between freedom and repression, between fear and greed. Sports gambling
is a good example of it.
Speaker 6 (17:17):
Gambling has always been a part of American history. George
Washington bet on cockfights.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
David Hill's a writer who grew up in Arkansas, like Spankey,
in a family of gamblers, so out of curiosity, he
set out to write a book about the country's long
relationship with this particular vice.
Speaker 6 (17:37):
Sports gambling really began with betting on foot races in
early America, and that evolved into betting on the fights,
you know, first bare knuckle fights and then more sort
of sanctioned boxing matches which were really put on just
so that people could gamble on them.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
We don't seem to have sports ever without gambling on sports,
and Americans have always been fanatical gamblers. At the same time,
Americans have always been extremely hostile to gambling. At the
turn of the last century, anti gambling forces got the
upper hand for a while.
Speaker 6 (18:12):
They shut down a lot of race tracks when they
passed these anti gambling laws, and without any horses to
bet on, the bookmakers who made their living booking bets
on the horses went to the ballpark.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
In other words, when Americans were told they couldn't bet
on horses anymore, they figured out a way to bet
on people. In horse racing, the odds aren't fixed until
the betting stops, and are driven by how much is
bet on any given horse. If everyone bet on the
same horse, they wouldn't bother to run the race. In
baseball or really any other sport, that clearly wouldn't work.
(18:47):
The book he needed a way to attract interest in
both teams before the game, even if one team was
obviously a lot better than the other. Enter an underrated
American genius named Charles McNeil.
Speaker 6 (19:02):
He created this idea of the points spread, where you
would give the favorite a certain number of points that
they would have delay to the underdog, so that the
proposition between these two teams is as close to an
even money proposition as possible. Right, you're spotting the worst
team a certain number of points. And McNeil was a
(19:24):
pretty bright guy.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Was he a Wall Street guy?
Speaker 1 (19:26):
He was?
Speaker 6 (19:27):
Yeah, he was a Wall Street guy and worked in
finance as it was back then, right, and he saw
sports and the ability to bet on sports is just
another market.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
Once Americans learned to bet on people instead of horses,
it wasn't long before people started to fix the games.
Various point shaving and game fixing scandals plagued college basketball
in the years before, enduring Bill Bradley's college career. They
obviously had an effect on Bradley. His law that prevented
states from legalizing sports gambling was to make just this
(20:00):
sort of thing a lot less likely to happen. But
one thing the law didn't accomplish to stop the betting,
To stop spanky or like anyone else in New Jersey
who operated any illegal markets.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
A bookmaker who needs to meet you on the corner
of forty sixth and seventh and hand you a bag
full of cash. And that's kind of what got my
wife nervous, want my mom nervous.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
And you know, so this this literally happened. You actually
got given.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Cash, oh, all the time, all the time, got given cash,
gave cash, received and gave cash all the time.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
More on that in just a moment. Spankey graduates from
high school, goes to Rutgers, graduates summa cum laude in
computer science and finance, all the while still betting on sports.
(21:00):
After college, he takes a job on Wall Street. It's
now two thousand and one, and he has computers and
the Internet and access to illegal bookies across the country.
He writes programs that allow him to in effect see
the entire national sports betting market. No one else is
doing this so far as he can tell. He alone
(21:20):
can see that the booky in Pittsburgh has different lines
on games than the bookie in South Florida, and that
neither one agrees with the booky and Hoboken. Spankey realizes
that he can exploit the different lines. Say, the New
York Giants are playing the San Francisco forty nine Ers,
and the Giants are favored, but the bookie in New
(21:40):
York has them as seven point favorites and the bookie
in San Francisco has them as four point favorites. Spanky
can bet on the forty nine ers in San Francisco
and bet on the Giants in New York. He's making
riskless bets. Whoever wins the game, Spanky will win at
least one of the bets. If the Giants win by
either five or six points, he wins them both. He
(22:03):
figures all this out while working on Wall Street. His
employer has no idea, and neither, it seems, do the bookies.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
This is one of these things you start learning that
there's a bias depending on the geographic region, and then
you start picking up on these things and saying, my god,
these discrepancies are real. Then you know it's just, you know,
just snowballs from there.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Which you're doing, in a funny way, is exploiting fan
emotion that you got the fans in LA you want
to bet on the Lakers, and the fans in New
York I want to bet on the knicks, and they
distort the odds.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Exactly exactly, and the book maker knows that the majority
of his customers are going to bet on that fan emotion,
and that's when I come in and I just scoop
up the value. On the other.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
Side, he's scooping up the values. And by two thousand
and three, he's asking himself a question, why am I
wasting my time on Wall Street? Why not just quit
and become a full time sports gambler.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
I had my mother in law, my mother, my brother,
and my wife's family all have individual conversations with me,
asking me if I was sure of this, or are
you sure about this? Nobody gamble for a living or
you out of your mind? Spanky knows that's not true.
People do gamble for a living, lots of people. They
just don't advertise it.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
But the Spanky's way of thinking, betting on sports isn't
any worse than working on Wall Street.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
This isn't something that I just took on a whim.
I'm a risk averse guy. I want to make sure
that it's going to work before I actually take that
step forward.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
You're not betting on the sports in the sense that
you're not depending on your superior knowledge of sports. You're
just arbitraging sports books.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
He's becoming Bill Bradley's worst nightmare. In Spanky's world, the
games themselves are beside the point. He's no longer even
watching the games, just the lines.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
No matter what sport it was, underlying asset didn't matter,
it was just great. It was just printing money. At
that time.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
He's no longer even doing anything illegal. There's no law
against placing a sports bet. The law simply forbids making
a book. It's the bookies he's using who are breaking
the law. And there's some differences between Spanky's new trading
business and his old job on Wall Street. What's the
largest amount of cash you got handed or you handed over?
(24:19):
And what's the scariest situation you found yourself in.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
The largest cash? You know? It was probably close to
a million bucks? If I'm not you know it was
it was probably a million bucks. I was thinking of
those are a few went form between, But several hundred
thousands was always the case? Was it? Always?
Speaker 3 (24:40):
What undred hundred dollar bills?
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Always? Yeah? Always, you know, I'll as somebody you don't
if the guy didn't like you, then he would give
you twenties and stuff and that would suck. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Then you know what's drug money too. That's another thing,
you know what I mean? You know, I remember picking
up a package I think it was seven hundred thousand,
and most of them was all twenties and tens, and
I was like, oh, this is custing, this is definitely
drug warning or whatever it was. But listen, I'm just
(25:03):
a gambler picking up my winnings.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
So what were they handed to you in like a briefcase.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Back, you know, in a bag it's a plastic bag,
or in a book bag or whatnot. I was dealing
with one guy and he goes, my boss wants to
see you first before he pays you. So I go
and meet him at this like you know, abandoned restaurant that,
you know whatever. And that's a scary.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
And then you know he's there in New Jersey.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
This is in Jersey and North Jersey and it's in
a restaurant this and the soprano is his airing, yeah,
you know exactly. And the guy I think ran a
tanning salon or something or whatever it was. I don't
even remember, but I went to this restaurant, and then
you know, he goes, why should I pay you this money?
And then I go because I wanted fair and square
(25:48):
and if I would have lost, I would have paid you.
And then he just looked me in the eye, and
you know, it was at that moment where you're thinking,
you know, am I going to walk out of here alive?
Like what's happening here? Like what are they doing? And
then he just looked at me and he goes, I
believe you. And then he like motioned to the guy
at another guy at the table, and the guy handed
me the bag, and that what's happened.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Spanky's world maybe a little CD, but it has its
own values. They're just a bit different from Bradley's values,
like keep your word and your mouth shut, see when
the odds are off and exploit them, take the right
end of any stupid bet. Spanky's good at all of this.
He makes more money as a sports gambler than he
(26:35):
ever did on Wall Street. He's living his life in
the shadows and thinks that maybe no one will ever
notice him, but he's dealing with people who are breaking
the law, and the law is listening.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
So they got us on some of these wiretaps thicking.
Oh my god, we know these illegal bookmakers are operating illegally,
and then they're giving money to this guy Spanky. That
means Spanky must be this kingpin bookmaker. And they rounded
up everybody. I was accused of a crime. Ithentic command.
And that's the god's honest truth, whether anyone wants to
believe me or not. I wasn't a bookmaker. I was
(27:10):
just a better It didn't really matter what he was.
Spanky faced a nasty choice. He could defend himself in
court and risk years in prison, or he could cut
a deal and walk.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
How much did they get for me?
Speaker 1 (27:24):
They got I think about seven hundred and fifty thousand.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Yeah, yeah, they just took it. Yes, this took it.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
Yeah, they took seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You
plead guilty to a felony, and what are the consequences
of that? You don't spend any time in jail?
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Right? I spent I spent two nights in jail.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
And Spanky's now are convicted felon. But that party's kind
of okay with the felony.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Did nothing I couldn't coach my son's baseball team because
you know, they do background checks and then fall of
a sudden on my fist. So that was like the
big hit to me other than that, I can't vote,
which I've never voted anyway. I can't own a gun,
which I've never owned a gun anyway. And I can't
serve on a jury, which is actually a plus because
(28:09):
time I get calls for jury duty, I just tell
him I'm the felon and they go, oh sorry, and
that's it. It's over. So it really wasn't that bad.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Yes, there was this law to stop the spread of
sports gambling, and yes the Feds occasionally went and arrested people,
but even the cops who arrested Spanky didn't seem to
have their hearts in it.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
The pinch happens in October, so I have my attorney
calling up the DA's office saying, listen, my client needs
his computers backed. My clients needs his computers back. And
then eventually the ADA wind up calling my lawyer and
goes tell Spanky, we're gonna give him his fucking computers
back before football season starts, and lo and behold. In August,
(28:50):
I get a call from Queen's saying, your computer's already
to be packed up, and I went and I went
go pick up my computer. So like they know that
I'm going to continue betting.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
So Spanky gets his stuff back and he can get
his bets down on NFL games. Right after that, New
Jersey holds a referendum on sports gambling. This is in
twenty eleven. The referendum puts a simple question to a
popular vote, should sports betting be legal in New Jersey?
Two thirds of the voters say yes. The vote has
(29:24):
no practical effect. Bradley's law is federal law and overrides
the results of a state referendum. But the referendum tells
you something. Two thirds of the people Bill Bradley represented
don't like his ban on sports betting. They agree with Spanky,
and Spanky thinks time is now my friend. Many many
(29:52):
people who knew Bill Bradley as a basketball player just
sort of assumed that he would one day be president
of the United States. He was so obviously what was
best in America. But Bradley was always saying, it's not
the right time to run. But in the year tw
just as Spanky's really getting going as a sports gambler.
(30:13):
Bill Bradley finally ran for president. Michael Jordan endorsed him,
so did many of his former teammates and Senate colleagues.
Even though Bradley was running against a sitting incumbent Vice
President Al Gore, turned out it still wasn't the right time.
Speaker 5 (30:31):
Following the results on Tuesday night, I've decided to withdraw
from the Democratic grace for president.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
We have been defeated.
Speaker 5 (30:40):
But the cause for which I ran has not been
the cause of trying to create a new politics in
this country, the cause of trying to fulfill our special
promise as a nation that cannot be defeated by one
or one hundred defeats.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
What was it about Bill Bradley that failed to appeal
to his fellow citizens. He always exemplified these great values,
but I've always thought his values were the problem. When
push comes to shove, we want to live like Spanky,
not like Bill Bradley. Your view of the purity of
(31:24):
sport is you know, I share it, but it's old fashion.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
You know, I don't think it's old fashion at all. Nope, No,
you ever shoot five hundred shots in a row and
do a hundred push ups and run ten miles to
get into shape to be the best you could be.
Is that old fashion?
Speaker 3 (31:48):
Nope? I swear to God in that moment, I felt
eleven years old all over again.
Speaker 4 (31:54):
People don't do that so they can make a bet.
They do that because they want to be the best
at what they do. I don't think that's old fashion
at all. That's what kids need. They need to be
able to have parents that say, you know, look at
the way Steph Curry practices. That's what you want to
(32:16):
say to your kid. And if your kid isn't interested
in that, but always interested in is a parlay bet
with fifteen teams in a game on Saturday Night that said,
we are living in a different world and we've lost
something precious to all of us. And the problem is
a lot of people don't know they're about to lose.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
It, or people know they're about to lose it and
they don't care. There was always more than one New
Jersey and the other New Jersey. It wants a piece
of the action. Welcome to the Garden State, Baby That's Next.
(33:10):
Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael
Lewis and produced by Lydia Gen Kott, Catherine Gerardo, and
Ariela Markowitz. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our engineer is
Jake Korski. Our music was composed by Matthias Bossi and
John Evans of stell Wagon Sinfinett. Our fact checker is
Lauren Ves. Polly Against the Rules is a production of
(33:31):
Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts,
and if you'd like to listen to ad free and
learn about other exclusive offerings, don't forget to sign up
for a Pushkin Plus subscription at pushkin, dot fm, slash
Plus or on our Apple show page.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
You have to be able to differentiate between the mics.
Chinese Mic is my partner, but he's not even Chinese.
He's actually Vietnamese, but we call him Chinese Fike because
it's just shorter.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
I want you to give me my nickname if I'm
gonna come, if I ever come to join you as
a partner. I can't be Mike anymore.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
I could be something Mike if you I think that's
you know that word.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
All right? I think I would got my moneyball Mike
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
His first afternoon at Lawrenceville, he began by shooting fourteen
foot jump shots from the right side.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
That's John McPhee, now ninety three years old, the grand
Master of literary nonfiction. He's reading for us from the
first book he ever published, back in nineteen sixty five.
He called the book A Sense of Where You Are.
It was about a Princeton University basketball player named Bill Bradley.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
He got off to a bad start, and he kept
missing them six in a row, hit the back rim
of the basket and bounced out.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
The writer had talked the player into letting him watch
his private workout. It was just the two of them
alone in some high school gym that Bradley he had
never been in before.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
He stopped looking discomfited and seemed to be making an
adjustment in his mind. Then he went up for another
jump shot from the same spot and hit it cleanly.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I'm eleven years old when I read what John McPhee
wrote about Bill Bradley. But I don't care about John McPhee.
I only want to know more about Bill Bradley. At
this point, he's in the NBA and I've set up
a poop in my bedroom to create the upcoming nineteen
seventy two finals, which I care about only because Bradley
will be in them. I play out this entire two
(01:48):
hour game. I also serve as the play by play
announcer into a tape recorder I've set up on my desk.
Nicks down by one, five seconds left, Bradley in heavy traffic,
Bradley dribbles, left, Bradley shoots. It's good, Bradley got away
from McMillan jack. I'm a little man with a private obsession.
(02:11):
After each game, I sit down and listen to my
two hours of take to create box scores, to see
how well Bill Bradley did, even though I had just
done it. This is how I really begin as a
sports fan with emulation. I want to be like Bill Bradley,
which is why I bother to find a whole book
(02:32):
about him and read it.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Four more shots went in without a miss, and then
he paused and said, you want to know something, That
basket is about an inch and a half low.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
The main thing I learned from the book is that
if I want to be Bill Bradley, it won't just happen.
It won't be easy. When Bradley was himself eleven years old.
He shot baskets until his fingers bled. By the time
he got to Princeton, he'd shot so many different basketballs
on so many different hoops. Then when he missed, he
knew that the problem wasn't him, it was the hoop.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Some weeks later, I went back to Lawrenceville with a
steel tape, borrowed a step ladder, and measured the height
of the basket. It was nine feet ten and seven
eighths inches above the floor, or one and one eight
inches too low.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
Much later, I'd realize that all the time I thought
I was learning how to be Bill Bradley, I was
actually learning how to be John McPhee. But that's another story. Anyway,
eleven year old me would never believe what I'm about
to do. When you were a player, when did you
first have the sense that kids were looking at you
as an example of excellence?
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Thousands, literally thousands of fathers would bring their son or
mothers or daughter and father bring a daughter or whatever
to the game, and they'd always say, you know, you
want to be like Bradley. Well, I always disagreed with that.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
I'm talking with Bill Bradley for real.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
No, do you want to be like the father? You
don't want to be like Bradley, But do you want
to be like Bradley in terms of the values that
you see exemplified in the development of his game, Because
that's what you want to do in your life, to
develop your skills to their highest and best years.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
I'm Michael Lewis, and this is against the rules this season.
I'm looking at what's happening to the American fan and
in this episode, what happens when Bill Bradley's ideal of
the game collides with the way other people think of it.
Bill Bradley always seemed to have a plan Basketball was
(04:55):
just a piece of it before he got to Princeton.
During his senior year in high school, he actually signed
with Duke, but then the summer before college he went
on a trip to Europe.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
And on one of those days he toured Oxford and
I walked into christ Church Quad and looked around and
thought to myself, I got to figure some way to
get back here.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
When he got home, he looked into it, learned about
Rhodes scholars and that Princeton generated the most of them.
So he wrote to Duke and told them he wasn't coming.
Duke was pissed. Princeton scrambled to find him a bed.
Bradley then nearly flunked out of the college.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
I came from a small town high school in ninety six.
I had so called low college board scores, and I
certainly had no reference for French or biology.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
The two of that gave me problems.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Basketball had already taught him that the harder you work,
the better you get. He proceeded to spend so many
hours in the Princeton library that he would graduate with honors.
Midway through his senior year, he was offered the Rhodes Scholarship.
The New York Knicks then took him with the first
pick of the entire nineteen sixty five draft. Bradley thanked
(06:11):
them politely, then left for Oxford to study for years.
Even back then, people who didn't know Bill Bradley would
hear about him and say, oh, it must be an act.
But if it is an act, it's an act He's
going to play his entire life. He totally embodies the
values he talks about, sacrifice, discipline, selflessness, resilience. He's never
(06:35):
going to lose his Princeton advisor says about him, do
you know just how hard it is to defeat a
sixteenth century Puritan elate. In his second year as a
Rhodes scholar, Bill Bradley realizes how much he misses basketball,
and so he calls the Knicks and he tells them
that after he's done with his scholarship and a stint
(06:56):
in the Air Force, he's coming back to New York
to play, and Knicks fans go crazy. But his first
year on the team, he bombs he's really just no
good a price For those two years in an Oxford library,
for the first time in Bradley's life, the fans turn
on him. They bow him, they holler insults. One day
(07:19):
a fan actually spits on him, but because he's Bill Bradley,
he turns the other cheek, works his ass off, and improves.
Over the next six years, he helps the next win
two NBA championships, and the fans love him all over again,
now including me. When Bradley's done, they retire his jersey
(07:42):
and hang it from the rafters of Madison Square Garden.
Did fans in any way enter your imagination as a player,
They entered.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
Your imagination by the noise I love the roar of
the crowd, and it wasn't a fan, It was twenty
thousand fans when your team came together and did something
amazing and the garden roof almost came off. And so
(08:11):
the fans were instrumental in the experience for me as
a player, as a whole, not as individuals.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
The fans were the congregation recipients of a kind of
moral instruction which Bradley always honestly tried to supply. He
always carried himself with this superhuman dignity. Even at peak fame.
He refused to endorse products. And then there was the
sordid underbelly in sports, which he someone managed to avoid
(08:42):
really noticing until well into his pro career.
Speaker 4 (08:46):
We were ahead by six points and there were just
seconds left, and I shot and hit the shot, and
some people in the crowd bowed, and I asked afterwards,
I asked the trainer.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Why were they buy?
Speaker 4 (09:05):
We won by eight points, not six points?
Speaker 1 (09:08):
That's good.
Speaker 4 (09:09):
Oh, well, those are people gambling on the game. And
I thought, oh, that's sick, because for me, the game
was always about values. The idea of gambling on sports
was always something that was counter to the values of
the sport.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Bill Bradley retires from basketball in nineteen seventy seven to
run for public office. He'd become one of New Jersey's
US Senators for almost two decades, and in that time
an argument would develop that no one really wanted to
have between Bradley's ideas about sports and American life and
what was actually going on in sports and American life.
(10:03):
When did you make your first sports bets?
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Oh, my first sports bet was made. They're probably eighth,
seventh or eighth grade and in through high school, you know,
just betting the parley cards. A buddy of mine used
to bring in these green parley sheets where you'd have
to pick a three for three, four for four, five
for five. You know, you bet five ten bucks.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
His real name is goadoon Kirollas, but he's always been
known as Spanky, after a character from the TV show
The Little Rascals, which his mom loved. Spanky grew up
in Jersey City, born the year before Bill Bradley became
the state senator.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
He'd have one kid in the class the night of
one and you know, he'd win, like, you know, fifty
sixty bucks whatever, but most people lost. And then I
sort of realized. I'm like, hey, can I get in
on this. The only thing I knew as a high
school kid is the house always won, So I knew
it was unfair because I never won.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Spanky maybe had an edge over some of the other
kids at school because at home he was basically raised
on games of chance, just a.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Part of life. Every holiday we'd get together Christmas, New Year's,
you know, we'd sell it. We'd have dinner and then
we'd whip out the cards.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
And we just play poker for actual money.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Oh yeah, for actual money.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
And so if you lost to your mom, she made
you pay up.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Oh yeah, I would just by this is my allowance
and everything. This is this is the real deal. There's
you know, my mom, and she taught me, you know,
a valuable lesson, don't gamble what you're not willing to lose.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Spanky gamble didn't Spanky lost until Spanky started to gamble
and win. By the time he entered high school, he
was effectively running an illegal book of NFL parlays, not
simple bets on which team wins and loses, but compound
bets that give you like twenty to one odds if
you say pick the winner of five different NFL games
(11:48):
and pay you nothing if you only get four, right, Parley,
they would have been illegal.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
Yeah, when you're in high school, one hundred percent. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
And so there's an illegal bookie in Hoboken, absolutely yes.
And so he is using what like some high school
kid as a sort of a salesman as a runner exactly,
as a as a runner and these things is you're
getting distributed in your nobody, nobody stops it.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
Nobody. Not only does nobody stopping it, you know, you know,
I'm not going to name names obviously, but you know
there will be teachers that will fill out all day
cards and handle it, you know, you know what I mean.
And it was a great school, big sports school, you know,
just a part of life gambling on sports, betting on sports,
the football games and stuff. So you know, that's what's
what we did.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
You're getting a different kind of education.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
And I absolutely from from from people that really weren't
supposed to be teachers and stuff. But it just it's
just part of it.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
We're laughing. But Spanky is learning something. He's learning why
bookies exist. They always win. The kids all want to
bet on the local teams and so the local bookies
shift the odds against them. Spanky sees the bookies exploiting
fan loyalty and decides he wants a piece of the action.
He takes the parlay cards from the bookie and gives
them to a barber. The barber passes them out to customers,
(13:07):
and the customers bet. Spanky then collects all the bets
from the barber, but instead of handing them all to
the bookie, he keeps some for himself, which is to
say that by high school Spanky was a bookie. He
wasn't stealing the bookies money. He was stealing their business.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
I won't want to wake up in the morning and
I can't wait to break the law today. But you know,
the money's the money I figured with gambling and with
book making, it's really not that bad. It's not like
I'm putting it under somebody's head and saying you got
a bet. You know, these are the ones that are
asking me, hey, you got the sheets in it? The
sheets ready this week? It was just, you know, like
you're selling cracks to a crack at it. It's just
(13:45):
it was just so easy.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
At the same time as Spanky's raking it in the
high school cafeteria. New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley is rising
to political prominence. He sponsored bills on healthcare and gun
control in the environment, but there was one issue he
hadn't really touched that was dear to his heart. What
got you interested in taking up gambling as an issue
(14:07):
when you were in the Senate.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
I'd never done anything on sports. In fact, I wouldn't
even talk about sports when I became a senator. You know,
I would never raise the issue of sports. Other senators
would want to talk sometimes about but I never raised
it because I wasn't trying to bring basketball into my
(14:30):
senate life and have it affect that.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
But at some point Bradley couldn't resist. That point came
when he decided to write a book about the moral
influence of sports, values of the game he'd call it.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
I thought about how gambling really didn't celebrate those values
to the contrary, and so I passed this little bill.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
It was not a big bill.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
It was a little bill that banned sports petting in
the states that didn't have it, and it was the
law of the land, and I felt good about it.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
At the time. A few states allowed better on sports,
but most didn't. Bradley's bill, the Professional and Amateur Sports
Protection Act, effectively banned it except in states where it
already existed, like Nevada. It was a weird law because
it didn't ban sports gambling directly. It banned states from
regulating it. But it accomplished what Bradley wanted to prevent
(15:31):
people from betting on sports. What were the values that
were kind of threatened or challenged by gambling.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
I didn't want players to be Roulette chips. I wanted
to protect the purity of the game, the values that
were important to me, and gambling polluted that in a
very fundamental way.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
How gambling did that was obvious to most of the Senate.
It encouraged athletes to throw games or rig them. It
encouraged fans to think about their bets rather than the game.
It introduced money where money really didn't belong in sports.
The Professional Amateur Sports Protection Act passes in nineteen ninety
two with hardly a peep of protest or anything else.
(16:15):
Once the Senators from Nevada are sure that they can
keep doing whatever they want to do inside their state,
opposition inside the US Senate totally vanishes. Outside of Nevada,
it's illegal to be a bookie. It's okay to place
a bet with a friend, but it's against the law
to run a sports book. And America appears to be
simply pleased to have Bill Bradley's values embedded in its laws.
Speaker 4 (16:38):
I thought this was very quiet. I mean, I thought, Okay,
I passed the law. It's now illegal. That's the law land.
A few New Jersey casino people were pissed, but there
are a couple people Nobody came up to me, ever,
I said, why did you pass that casino?
Speaker 5 (16:55):
Bill?
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Never, I want to pause for a moment to point
out how volatile our country is. No other culture on
the planet experiences the same violent swings between virtue and
between freedom and repression, between fear and greed. Sports gambling
is a good example of it.
Speaker 6 (17:17):
Gambling has always been a part of American history. George
Washington bet on cockfights.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
David Hill's a writer who grew up in Arkansas, like Spankey,
in a family of gamblers, so out of curiosity, he
set out to write a book about the country's long
relationship with this particular vice.
Speaker 6 (17:37):
Sports gambling really began with betting on foot races in
early America, and that evolved into betting on the fights,
you know, first bare knuckle fights and then more sort
of sanctioned boxing matches which were really put on just
so that people could gamble on them.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
We don't seem to have sports ever without gambling on sports,
and Americans have always been fanatical gamblers. At the same time,
Americans have always been extremely hostile to gambling. At the
turn of the last century, anti gambling forces got the
upper hand for a while.
Speaker 6 (18:12):
They shut down a lot of race tracks when they
passed these anti gambling laws, and without any horses to
bet on, the bookmakers who made their living booking bets
on the horses went to the ballpark.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
In other words, when Americans were told they couldn't bet
on horses anymore, they figured out a way to bet
on people. In horse racing, the odds aren't fixed until
the betting stops, and are driven by how much is
bet on any given horse. If everyone bet on the
same horse, they wouldn't bother to run the race. In
baseball or really any other sport, that clearly wouldn't work.
(18:47):
The book he needed a way to attract interest in
both teams before the game, even if one team was
obviously a lot better than the other. Enter an underrated
American genius named Charles McNeil.
Speaker 6 (19:02):
He created this idea of the points spread, where you
would give the favorite a certain number of points that
they would have delay to the underdog, so that the
proposition between these two teams is as close to an
even money proposition as possible. Right, you're spotting the worst
team a certain number of points. And McNeil was a
(19:24):
pretty bright guy.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Was he a Wall Street guy?
Speaker 1 (19:26):
He was?
Speaker 6 (19:27):
Yeah, he was a Wall Street guy and worked in
finance as it was back then, right, and he saw
sports and the ability to bet on sports is just
another market.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
Once Americans learned to bet on people instead of horses,
it wasn't long before people started to fix the games.
Various point shaving and game fixing scandals plagued college basketball
in the years before, enduring Bill Bradley's college career. They
obviously had an effect on Bradley. His law that prevented
states from legalizing sports gambling was to make just this
(20:00):
sort of thing a lot less likely to happen. But
one thing the law didn't accomplish to stop the betting,
To stop spanky or like anyone else in New Jersey
who operated any illegal markets.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
A bookmaker who needs to meet you on the corner
of forty sixth and seventh and hand you a bag
full of cash. And that's kind of what got my
wife nervous, want my mom nervous.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
And you know, so this this literally happened. You actually
got given.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Cash, oh, all the time, all the time, got given cash,
gave cash, received and gave cash all the time.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
More on that in just a moment. Spankey graduates from
high school, goes to Rutgers, graduates summa cum laude in
computer science and finance, all the while still betting on sports.
(21:00):
After college, he takes a job on Wall Street. It's
now two thousand and one, and he has computers and
the Internet and access to illegal bookies across the country.
He writes programs that allow him to in effect see
the entire national sports betting market. No one else is
doing this so far as he can tell. He alone
(21:20):
can see that the booky in Pittsburgh has different lines
on games than the bookie in South Florida, and that
neither one agrees with the booky and Hoboken. Spankey realizes
that he can exploit the different lines. Say, the New
York Giants are playing the San Francisco forty nine Ers,
and the Giants are favored, but the bookie in New
(21:40):
York has them as seven point favorites and the bookie
in San Francisco has them as four point favorites. Spanky
can bet on the forty nine ers in San Francisco
and bet on the Giants in New York. He's making
riskless bets. Whoever wins the game, Spanky will win at
least one of the bets. If the Giants win by
either five or six points, he wins them both. He
(22:03):
figures all this out while working on Wall Street. His
employer has no idea, and neither, it seems, do the bookies.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
This is one of these things you start learning that
there's a bias depending on the geographic region, and then
you start picking up on these things and saying, my god,
these discrepancies are real. Then you know it's just, you know,
just snowballs from there.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Which you're doing, in a funny way, is exploiting fan
emotion that you got the fans in LA you want
to bet on the Lakers, and the fans in New
York I want to bet on the knicks, and they
distort the odds.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Exactly exactly, and the book maker knows that the majority
of his customers are going to bet on that fan emotion,
and that's when I come in and I just scoop
up the value. On the other.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
Side, he's scooping up the values. And by two thousand
and three, he's asking himself a question, why am I
wasting my time on Wall Street? Why not just quit
and become a full time sports gambler.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
I had my mother in law, my mother, my brother,
and my wife's family all have individual conversations with me,
asking me if I was sure of this, or are
you sure about this? Nobody gamble for a living or
you out of your mind? Spanky knows that's not true.
People do gamble for a living, lots of people. They
just don't advertise it.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
But the Spanky's way of thinking, betting on sports isn't
any worse than working on Wall Street.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
This isn't something that I just took on a whim.
I'm a risk averse guy. I want to make sure
that it's going to work before I actually take that
step forward.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
You're not betting on the sports in the sense that
you're not depending on your superior knowledge of sports. You're
just arbitraging sports books.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
He's becoming Bill Bradley's worst nightmare. In Spanky's world, the
games themselves are beside the point. He's no longer even
watching the games, just the lines.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
No matter what sport it was, underlying asset didn't matter,
it was just great. It was just printing money. At
that time.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
He's no longer even doing anything illegal. There's no law
against placing a sports bet. The law simply forbids making
a book. It's the bookies he's using who are breaking
the law. And there's some differences between Spanky's new trading
business and his old job on Wall Street. What's the
largest amount of cash you got handed or you handed over?
(24:19):
And what's the scariest situation you found yourself in.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
The largest cash? You know? It was probably close to
a million bucks? If I'm not you know it was
it was probably a million bucks. I was thinking of
those are a few went form between, But several hundred
thousands was always the case? Was it? Always?
Speaker 3 (24:40):
What undred hundred dollar bills?
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Always? Yeah? Always, you know, I'll as somebody you don't
if the guy didn't like you, then he would give
you twenties and stuff and that would suck. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Then you know what's drug money too. That's another thing,
you know what I mean? You know, I remember picking
up a package I think it was seven hundred thousand,
and most of them was all twenties and tens, and
I was like, oh, this is custing, this is definitely
drug warning or whatever it was. But listen, I'm just
(25:03):
a gambler picking up my winnings.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
So what were they handed to you in like a briefcase.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Back, you know, in a bag it's a plastic bag,
or in a book bag or whatnot. I was dealing
with one guy and he goes, my boss wants to
see you first before he pays you. So I go
and meet him at this like you know, abandoned restaurant that,
you know whatever. And that's a scary.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
And then you know he's there in New Jersey.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
This is in Jersey and North Jersey and it's in
a restaurant this and the soprano is his airing, yeah,
you know exactly. And the guy I think ran a
tanning salon or something or whatever it was. I don't
even remember, but I went to this restaurant, and then
you know, he goes, why should I pay you this money?
And then I go because I wanted fair and square
(25:48):
and if I would have lost, I would have paid you.
And then he just looked me in the eye, and
you know, it was at that moment where you're thinking,
you know, am I going to walk out of here alive?
Like what's happening here? Like what are they doing? And
then he just looked at me and he goes, I
believe you. And then he like motioned to the guy
at another guy at the table, and the guy handed
me the bag, and that what's happened.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Spanky's world maybe a little CD, but it has its
own values. They're just a bit different from Bradley's values,
like keep your word and your mouth shut, see when
the odds are off and exploit them, take the right
end of any stupid bet. Spanky's good at all of this.
He makes more money as a sports gambler than he
(26:35):
ever did on Wall Street. He's living his life in
the shadows and thinks that maybe no one will ever
notice him, but he's dealing with people who are breaking
the law, and the law is listening.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
So they got us on some of these wiretaps thicking.
Oh my god, we know these illegal bookmakers are operating illegally,
and then they're giving money to this guy Spanky. That
means Spanky must be this kingpin bookmaker. And they rounded
up everybody. I was accused of a crime. Ithentic command.
And that's the god's honest truth, whether anyone wants to
believe me or not. I wasn't a bookmaker. I was
(27:10):
just a better It didn't really matter what he was.
Spanky faced a nasty choice. He could defend himself in
court and risk years in prison, or he could cut
a deal and walk.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
How much did they get for me?
Speaker 1 (27:24):
They got I think about seven hundred and fifty thousand.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Yeah, yeah, they just took it. Yes, this took it.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
Yeah, they took seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You
plead guilty to a felony, and what are the consequences
of that? You don't spend any time in jail?
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Right? I spent I spent two nights in jail.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
And Spanky's now are convicted felon. But that party's kind
of okay with the felony.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Did nothing I couldn't coach my son's baseball team because
you know, they do background checks and then fall of
a sudden on my fist. So that was like the
big hit to me other than that, I can't vote,
which I've never voted anyway. I can't own a gun,
which I've never owned a gun anyway. And I can't
serve on a jury, which is actually a plus because
(28:09):
time I get calls for jury duty, I just tell
him I'm the felon and they go, oh sorry, and
that's it. It's over. So it really wasn't that bad.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Yes, there was this law to stop the spread of
sports gambling, and yes the Feds occasionally went and arrested people,
but even the cops who arrested Spanky didn't seem to
have their hearts in it.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
The pinch happens in October, so I have my attorney
calling up the DA's office saying, listen, my client needs
his computers backed. My clients needs his computers back. And
then eventually the ADA wind up calling my lawyer and
goes tell Spanky, we're gonna give him his fucking computers
back before football season starts, and lo and behold. In August,
(28:50):
I get a call from Queen's saying, your computer's already
to be packed up, and I went and I went
go pick up my computer. So like they know that
I'm going to continue betting.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
So Spanky gets his stuff back and he can get
his bets down on NFL games. Right after that, New
Jersey holds a referendum on sports gambling. This is in
twenty eleven. The referendum puts a simple question to a
popular vote, should sports betting be legal in New Jersey?
Two thirds of the voters say yes. The vote has
(29:24):
no practical effect. Bradley's law is federal law and overrides
the results of a state referendum. But the referendum tells
you something. Two thirds of the people Bill Bradley represented
don't like his ban on sports betting. They agree with Spanky,
and Spanky thinks time is now my friend. Many many
(29:52):
people who knew Bill Bradley as a basketball player just
sort of assumed that he would one day be president
of the United States. He was so obviously what was
best in America. But Bradley was always saying, it's not
the right time to run. But in the year tw
just as Spanky's really getting going as a sports gambler.
(30:13):
Bill Bradley finally ran for president. Michael Jordan endorsed him,
so did many of his former teammates and Senate colleagues.
Even though Bradley was running against a sitting incumbent Vice
President Al Gore, turned out it still wasn't the right time.
Speaker 5 (30:31):
Following the results on Tuesday night, I've decided to withdraw
from the Democratic grace for president.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
We have been defeated.
Speaker 5 (30:40):
But the cause for which I ran has not been
the cause of trying to create a new politics in
this country, the cause of trying to fulfill our special
promise as a nation that cannot be defeated by one
or one hundred defeats.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
What was it about Bill Bradley that failed to appeal
to his fellow citizens. He always exemplified these great values,
but I've always thought his values were the problem. When
push comes to shove, we want to live like Spanky,
not like Bill Bradley. Your view of the purity of
(31:24):
sport is you know, I share it, but it's old fashion.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
You know, I don't think it's old fashion at all. Nope, No,
you ever shoot five hundred shots in a row and
do a hundred push ups and run ten miles to
get into shape to be the best you could be.
Is that old fashion?
Speaker 3 (31:48):
Nope? I swear to God in that moment, I felt
eleven years old all over again.
Speaker 4 (31:54):
People don't do that so they can make a bet.
They do that because they want to be the best
at what they do. I don't think that's old fashion
at all. That's what kids need. They need to be
able to have parents that say, you know, look at
the way Steph Curry practices. That's what you want to
(32:16):
say to your kid. And if your kid isn't interested
in that, but always interested in is a parlay bet
with fifteen teams in a game on Saturday Night that said,
we are living in a different world and we've lost
something precious to all of us. And the problem is
a lot of people don't know they're about to lose.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
It, or people know they're about to lose it and
they don't care. There was always more than one New
Jersey and the other New Jersey. It wants a piece
of the action. Welcome to the Garden State, Baby That's Next.
(33:10):
Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael
Lewis and produced by Lydia Gen Kott, Catherine Gerardo, and
Ariela Markowitz. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our engineer is
Jake Korski. Our music was composed by Matthias Bossi and
John Evans of stell Wagon Sinfinett. Our fact checker is
Lauren Ves. Polly Against the Rules is a production of
(33:31):
Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts,
and if you'd like to listen to ad free and
learn about other exclusive offerings, don't forget to sign up
for a Pushkin Plus subscription at pushkin, dot fm, slash
Plus or on our Apple show page.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
You have to be able to differentiate between the mics.
Chinese Mic is my partner, but he's not even Chinese.
He's actually Vietnamese, but we call him Chinese Fike because
it's just shorter.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
I want you to give me my nickname if I'm
gonna come, if I ever come to join you as
a partner. I can't be Mike anymore.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
I could be something Mike if you I think that's
you know that word.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
All right? I think I would got my moneyball Mike
Host
Michael Lewis
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