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good read on a card cheat in new england

binö

Rob of Redford
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Farrell found a way to avoid beatings. Or, more accurately, the solution found him. It was the Mafia.

By the middle 1970s, he had a reputation as a top card and dice mechanic. That was bad. Everyone who was any kind of gambler in New England knew there was something wrong with the game if Farrell was playing.

Afflicted by fame, Farrell began working private, high-stakes card games. He paid agents to tip him to high-rollers who, more often that not, were running crooked games themselves. Farrell donned disguises and concocted phony personas. His agents got him seats at the table and he switched in stacked decks of cards called "coolers" — a move known in the argot of the hustle as "cold decking the sucker."

Many of his agents operated on the periphery of organized crime. The New England mob, more so than others around the country, knew the value of the con. A lot of old-line New England racket guys broke in as hustlers. Frank "Skyballs" Sciabelli, the former Genovese capo in Springfield, was a hustler. So was Pippy Guerrero in New Britain, Mickey Poole in Bridgeport and Henry Tameleo, right-hand man to former New England boss Raymond L.S. Patriarca.


The call that changed Farrell's life came from William "The Wild Guy" Grasso of New Haven, one of the most ruthless gangsters anywhere. A witness at a mob trial testified about how Grasso had to be restrained once from stuffing a soda jerk into a freezer after the kid put the wrong flavor on the gangster's ice cream cone.

Grasso had just finished a stretch as Patriarca's cellmate at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta when he called Farrell. Grasso entered prison as a strong arm and left groomed to become Patriarca's underboss, second in command of New England's dominant criminal organization. Back on the street, Grasso was exerting control over the Hartford and Springfield rackets for the Patriarca family. One of his first calls was to Farrell.

"I went to see him and that's when he gave me the proposition, or the ultimatum," Farrell said. "'Hey Jack,' he said. 'You're moving around pretty good. You're getting a pretty good reputation. Do the right thing. Or go get a lunch pail.'"

It was Grasso's way of telling Farrell he was now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Patriarca crime family. Farrell had three options: He could kick back part of everything he made in New England to Grasso. He could get a lunch pail and become a working stiff. Or he could keep hustling on his own and wait for Grasso to kill him.

"I wasn't really too hip about racket ways, you follow me?" Farrell said. "So I said, 'Of course I'm with you.' Well, that sealed my future."

Farrell got access to the money and muscle of a powerful criminal organization. The mob would feed him business and protect him. But for the rest of his life, whenever Farrell worked in New England, Grasso or some other gangster would have a hand in his pocket. Beyond Patriarca's New England turf, Farrell was on his own.

"If I was going to continue being a hustler, I couldn't avoid the mob," Farrell said. "But at that time, I didn't particularly care if I avoided them because I kind of liked their lifestyle, you follow me? So I made a decision that I would do business with them. Later on, I got away from them pretty good. I learned how to duck them. Because I knew the best that they could do was go in my pocket."

That became clear immediately.

Farrell had been experimenting with magnetism. He wanted to learn whether he could influence the roll of dice infused with magnetic carbide. The object was not to win every throw, but to increase the odds of making numbers over extended play.

After immersion in the science section at the public library, Farrell made an appointment with an electrical engineer at a New Jersey magnet manufacturer.

"I told him my brother-in-law was a big backgammon player and I wanted to play a trick on him," Farrell said.

The result was a concealed leather harness that held two heavy bar magnets at the front of Farrell's hips. The magnets hung vertically. When Farrell stood at a dice table, half the length of the bars extended above the surface of the table and half the length below.

The bars were cast from an alloy of rare metals that gave them a peculiar magnetic property. The north and south poles of common magnets are contained in their broad, flat surfaces. Farrell's specially manufactured magnets were polarized longitudinally. The north and south poles were contained in the ends of the bars.

When one end of the bars extended above the table's surface, it caused the dice to show only high numbers. The other end of the two bars resulted in low numbers. The magnetized dice cost about $300 apiece.Under even close inspection, the die appear clear as glass. But they react energetically when a magnet is passed over them.

The proving ground was to be an illegal casino in Meriden run by bookmaker Salvatore "Butch" D'Aquila. The man wearing the harness would commandeer a corner of a dice table. The other players in on the scam were instructed to switch in magnet dice and shoot within 18 inches of the harness.

"I couldn't go personally because I was known as a sharpshooter," Farrell said. "So, I got this group together. They were all steady players at this game. The first night, we win $15,000. In '76, that was big. And they're like, 'Holy Christ, Jack. You should have seen it.' Two nights later, they won $9,000."


Now Farrell had to pay Grasso. He tucked $2,000 into an envelope and met the underboss at the Wonderbar on the Berlin Turnpike.

"I says, 'Billy. By the way, here's a little something for you. You know that game, Butch D'Aquila's? We're beating it.'"

Grasso responded, characteristically, with an explosion of profanity.

"You Irish [expletive]," Grasso said. "That's my game."

D'Aquila, it turned out, was in the same situation as Farrell. He, too, had been told to pay up or get a lunch pail. He was under Grasso's protection. By stealing from D'Aquila, Farrell was robbing Grasso.

Fortunately, Grasso had something of a fluid business ethic. The underboss told Farrell to keep ripping at the game — as long as D'Aquila remained in the dark. But Farrell would have to double his payment to Grasso.

"Billy wanted two ends," Farrell said. "To me, it meant nothing. You stay at the game an extra half hour and hit three more numbers. That's what it meant to me all my life. You work a little extra harder for that extra $2,000."

Farrell made money off his bar magnets until drug gangs began taking over northeastern cities, and armed dealers, flush with cash, began appearing at dice games. That's what happened in Waterbury, at a dice game called barbute, popular with Albanians.

Figuring his reputation hadn't reached Albania, Farrell strapped on the harness personally and took over a corner of the table. When another player pushed in next to him, the gun in the player's coat pocket banged against one of Farrell's magnets.

"You carrying too?" Farrell asked.

The player was so consumed by the game that he paid no attention. Farrell slipped away. But it was time for a new plan.
 
Farrell's arrangement with the Patriarca mob cost him, but everyone was happy — at least initially. From his perspective, the envelopes to Grasso amounted to petty cash. The gangsters fed him business and made out themselves. When the New England gangsters became a headache, Farrell could leave New England for New York. And he was branching out even farther, to Philadelphia, Miami, wherever his spotters told him there was money.

He was in Queens a lot, partnering with local mobsters for contracts to run Las Vegas-style charity events. Confronted by deteriorating neighborhoods and dwindling congregations in the late 1970s and early '80s, priests and rabbis were looking for money and didn't notice when some of it stuck to the men running the games.

A lot of days, Farrell looked in at what was then Edward's Dice Co. at 34th Street and 8th Avenue in Manhattan, where he bought a lot of his crooked equipment.

"People would come in there," Farrell said. "Not hustlers. They would be stockbrokers looking for marked cards, loaded dice. You follow me? Gambling, cheating, paraphernalia. They have skulduggery in their hearts. So I knew I could connect up with the right guy there."


The visits paid off when two guys from Harlem showed up in search of a juiced craps table. Farrell happened to have a couple, wired with electromagnetic current and operated by remote control. The tables recharged overnight on household current.

The men from Harlem had space in an old supermarket at 138th and Broadway. They called it "the factory" because you could get anything there. It was an emporium of vice that filled late at night with hookers, pimps, drug dealers, numbers runners — and hustlers. The two men wanted to run a craps game. They made Farrell a partner, but were afraid a white guy would scare away trade.

The solution was a spy hole in the ceiling. Farrell lay on a mattress with the remote, peering down through holes drilled through the ceiling, waiting for the player with a "football" of cash.

"I had a long day," Farrell said. "But money motivates you. And in this business, you never know what you're going to win. I mean, I see a guy coming in with a football and start putting it down, I don't know if he's got eight more footballs in his trunk. You'd stay up there for three days if you had to. You would, I would, anybody would."

Farrell's end in Harlem was close to $70,000.

The more he took in, the more Farrell moved up the mob food chain in New England and New York, partnering with some big-time gangsters. He brought the brains, and the Mafia provided access and muscle.

"I'll be honest, as much as I hate to say it now, I was impressed with tough guys," Farrell said. "I was taken aback by it — until I found out how things laid in life. I always thought everybody was honorable and aboveboard. I found out that's not the way life is."

He learned the lesson from The Boss himself, Raymond L.S. Patriarca. Until his death in 1984, Patriarca was one of the country's most powerful crime bosses, a mob elder statesman and a man whose influence in New England was so complete that recording companies paid him to get air time for their artists on local radio.

Farrell was summoned to Patriarca's vending machine office on Federal Hill in Providence in the early 1980s. Such summonses were not unusual. He followed The Boss through back alleys to a private apartment. Patriarca told him, "A good friend of ours is in trouble. Do me a favor."

When The Boss said "friend of ours," he meant a fellow member of the Mafia. The friend in question was a button man from Brooklyn called Shorty. Shorty had a bar where he ran one of the best craps games in New York. It opened at 2 in the afternoon, seven days a week. Shorty's problem was that he was getting beat at his own game. He was up to his eyes in loan sharks and owed his players $40,000.

"When I talked to Raymond, he said, 'Jack. Do me a favor,'" Farrell said. "I know what 'do me a favor' means. It means, 'don't take any money.'"

There were a couple of things Patriarca didn't mention. Shorty's players amounted to a who's who among New York wiseguys. To discourage mechanics like Farrell, they played in a room with no windows and one door. The door was locked and guarded when the game began. Farrell would take all the chances, steal all the money and give everything to Shorty. If things fell apart, Shorty would say he had no idea who Farrell was.

There were plenty of problems, but Farrell had to solve one right away. A lot of Italian gangsters are convinced all Irishmen are FBI agents. Farrell decided to bring along a partner for cover, a Patriarca button man from East Hartford named Louis Failla.

"I'm going into an Italian section," Farrell said. "This called for Louie."

Failla, who later would be convicted of, among other things, conspiring to kill his son-in-law, took a lot of pride in looking sharp. Black suits. Black shirts with long, pointed collars. White ties. He died of natural causes in 1999.

If asked, Farrell would say he was from Queens, a place he knew well from running Las Vegas nights. If pressed, he would say he met Failla in New England, that he had just completed a New Hampshire prison sentence for selling cocaine.


The two played legitimately at first. They studied the layout in Shorty's back room. Shorty told him what kind of dice he used. Farrell bought a load of crooked dice that matched the legits that Shorty used.

The first two days he switched dice, Farrell made $17,000.

The third day was a scorcher — it was July — and the air conditioner broke. Farrell couldn't remove his sports jacket. It was tailored with secret pockets that held his assortment of crooked dice.

"So, I'm playing and the sweat's coming down, I mean coming down," Farrell said. "Everybody's got their shirts off, bareback they're playing. So, the guy next to me says, 'Hey kid, why don't you take your coat off?'"


Malaria, Farrell said. Vietnam. Never feel the heat.

"When you get right down to it, crap shooters could care less," Farrell said. "You could wear a fur coat, long as you got money."

Day four, the air is back. A tall, good-looking guy in a $2,000 suit walks in. He takes a position next to Failla at the table. Failla has the dice and he needs to hit an eight. Farrell is across the table, picking up the dice for Failla, then passing them to the stickman. Farrell switches in his tops, his crooked dice, to help Failla's eight.

The tall guy is betting $240 on every roll. Failla requires 10 rolls to make his eight. The tall guy is out $2,400.

Farrell picks up the tops with his right hand, in which he has cupped the two legitimate dice, known as levels. Using only his right hand, he is going to pass the levels to the stickman and return the tops to his labyrinth of pockets. But before Farrell can make his move, the tall guy leans in. He wants to see the dice.

"Now I got four dice in my hand," Farrell said. "So I go, 'Here,' and I put the two levels in his hand and I come back to the railing with the two tops. I put my hand on the railing — I'm still palming the tops — and I freeze. I just kept my hand there. This guy looks at the levels and hands them to the stickman. I was OK."

OK. But near enough. Farrell came to know the tall guy in the good-looking suit only as Joe Black, a guy who would become a suspect in three mob hits.

"Afterward, I meet with this Shorty. I says, 'If I get a beef here, if I get nailed, we have to have a plan, I'm going to get out of the joint. Now, what do we do?'

"He said, 'Jack, don't worry about it.' He says, 'If you get a beef, I'll slap you around in front of everybody. Then I'll take you in the cellar and I'll fire a couple shots and then you go out the back door, get in your car and go back to New England.' It was never back to Connecticut. It was always, 'Back to New England.'"

After another week or so, Farrell decided his luck couldn't hold forever. He bailed out. He had given Shorty $100,000.

The following year, he was back in Brooklyn, dining with a Colombo crime family associate named Hugh "Apples" McIntosh. Shorty had vanished under mysterious circumstances. Joe Black was a suspect in three new murders. Farrell told McIntosh the story about the craps game and Shorty's escape plan.

"Mac says to me, he says, 'Jack. Are you kidding? Let me tell you what would have happened to you. If you got nailed in that game, Shorty would have had to kill you, right there, on the spot, to save face. Everybody in that joint was a button guy. For Shorty to prove that he's not in with the play, not in with you, he'd have to kill you right in front of them guys."
 
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