And
Father's
Italian
Association
has known how to operate the numbers game for hudnreds of years. The payoff is 60% with 30 percent to grease the police and politicians and 10% for the Sopranos!
Family story. 1944 and I was a year old and we lived in Newark. Dad was in the Navy and Mom worked at the Control Tower at Newark Airport. A relative from Pittsburg was coming to town and my Mom was going to pick her up at the Newark train station and take her to visit relatives in New York. My Mom asked a neighbor to babysit me.
Mom had a dream that night about her father who had passed away 10 years earlier. He told her to remember a number. When Florence came to take care of me it was early and Mom couldn't hook up with the neighborhood connection, the local shoemaker. She asked Florence to put $5.00 on the number and left. All day she had that "itch" on the back of her head but didn't make a connection during her travels. When she got home that evening she came into the apartment and Florence was sitting at the kitchen table with the paper in front of her face. Mom asked how the day had gone and Florence dropped the paper and Mom saw that tears were streaming down her face. Mom said "What happened?" Florence said it was 1944 and $5.00 was too much to bet. Instead, she had taken me down town to Bamburgers and bought me a new pair of shoes with the $5.00.
The number had "hit" and to this day I still have those $3000 shoes which Mom had bronzed!!
I thought Tony Grosso paid 700 to 1. Oh well, the politicians of later years must have been easier to buy.