Sorry. It’s Amazon Prime rather than Netflix.
Season 2, episode 4.
And became a Bad News Bear
Lansky and some other mobsters were Jewish. Do you really think the claims are dubious? And Lucky Luciano helped against the Italian Fascists in the Italy campaign for some favors in return, capiche?
As well he should! Ah, Jill St John and her coin slot! Stopped this 17-yr-old’s heart, it did. Still does.
Whatever the “main reason” was, these were people who were into squeezing all the money they could out of everything.
For the most part, the types of enterprises that these people engaged in were not based on long term considerations of the type you describe. And as for gambling specifically, Dutch Schultz is known to have fixed the numbers games that he ran. Perhaps Lansky was different. But perhaps he wasn’t.
Extremely dubious.
These people were Jewish and were probably not big fans of the Nazis. But their lives were based on an unrelenting focus on themselves and their own personal interests, and not on sacrificing anything for the larger community. In later years, some of these guys were interested in rehabilitating their images a bit, and it helped for them to present themselves as having stood up for the Jewish community. I doubt it.
That’s different. He made a deal and got something for himself in exchange for his services.
In general, all casino games favor the house, so there is no need for the owners, mob or otherwise, to cheat the players.
The way to maximize money in the casino business is to maximize the number of players. Since players won’t go to a crooked casino, a crooked casino will make less money than an honest one. So dishonest people will run an honest casino if they have competition.
The numbers racket was illegal and thus a gangster could monopolize the racket through force. Thus the players had to play with Schultz or not play. Plus having a math genius do an amazing amount of quick math to rig the numbers so the fewest numbers won is an easy to conceal cheat.
We may know soon. there is evidence that the Sicilian mafia may return to running casinos in havana. As soon as wealthy Americans return to Cuba, the gambling business will come back.
That’s if you adopt a long-term strategic way of thinking, as opposed to a grab-as-much-money-as-you-can-as-fast-as-you-can approach. Most mobsters became mobsters to begin with because they had the latter mindset.
If you find yourself in Vegas anytime soon, the Mob Museum in downtown (it’s about a block away from Fremont, in the old federal building where the Kefauver hearings were held in the '50s) touches on how mob-run casinos worked back in the day.
As mentioned above, the casino games themselves were almost universally honest, since a reputation of having dishonest tables would cost the casinos business. The way the mob made their cut (and they didn’t always make much; Bugsy Siegel was supposedly whacked because the Flamingo was costing them too much) was by skimming off the top and funneling those tax-free profits into other enterprises, and by using the wire services out of Nevada to run illegal sports books in other parts of the country.
Homicide would only worsen the casino’s legal headaches.
How could they rig the numbers? It was a 3 number combo garnered from the tra k results and published in the newspaper aaik.
He would place a last minute bet that would alter the final odds, and hence the winning numbers. Berman’s genius was in being able to rapidly compute what the bet amount should be in order to produce the ideal odds for his purposes.
The technique of rigging numbers is shown in the movie Force of Evil. The numbers were the track handle that day, and evidently there were ways to calculate exactly how much to bet at the last second in order to get a desired result.
I think they eventually switched to the amount of shares traded on the NYSE, since that was even harder to game.
I am told (anecdotal) that Indian-run casinos have a very poor payout on slots and table games-are they free to change their payouts at whim?
I was curious, so I went poking around on google. What I found was that the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC) does not enforce any minimum payout. However, sometimes the agreements between the states and tribes will enforce a minimum payout. So it varies. But apparently many tribes are free to set their payouts however they like to maximize their profits.
I wonder if it’s different at a NA casino vs Vegas because the NA casino is the only game in town in its location. At Vegas, there’s plenty of competition so payouts need to be high enough to keep folks from flocking to another joint.
Not in California. The agreements with the state out here set minimum payback percentages on all slots. I can’t search for that material from work, but it was widely publicized when the casinos tried to expand operations a few years back.