On the Coat Tales of a Gambler
Sailor fills us in with a mix of details of gambling and ends with a story in his teens.
I wonder if the Dice Coach has ever heard of Scarpone Ladrón. Michael, maybe you could ask him. I don’t even remember his first name. Hell, nor do I remember the names of any of the other guys. I mean it was real redneck country everyone had a nickname.
I was like “Alias”, the character Bob Dylan played in the movie, “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid”, quiet, not many lines, in the background, in and out of the scenes. To some of the guys, I was too mysterious. For one thing, I did not gamble with them. Their money game was out of my league. A couple of them did not like me hanging around because they thought I was a cop.
Besides Bennie, I can tell you about two guys who were close to Scarpone, he really didn’t have acquaintances that could be considered as friends. I mean he knew a lot of guys, but not real friends. Scarpone mostly kept to himself. One of the guys that was close to him and gambled with was Woody. He was a friend to me who I used to work with at the firehouse, Woodrow Jamison, a.k.a. Woody. Woody was five years younger than me. He was my connection to Scarpone. There was a third guy whose name I never knew, Scarpone always called him Driver. He was Scarpone’s main driver and long before I came along. I was like an on-call substitute driver, otherwise, I was like “Alias”, as described above. I will let you know other nicknames if I recall them. I was like Scarpone’s in town driver sometimes. He’d let me know when he needed me to drive him out to the 518 bypass, where most of the illegal games were located, fifteen miles or so out of town. I’d hang out, watching him gamble, then drive him back. A couple of joints which I can remember are the Greenwood Pub and Lucky Beaver. The main place was just known as the farmhouse.
After I quit the fire department, I was free like a bum, maybe six months, before I left for the navy. My wife left for Florida with the kids. I had a lot more time to hang out with Scarpone and the others, that included the road trips. Before I left to see the world, I got to see more of the South.
Those guys would drive hundreds of miles if they thought they could find a sucker for a game. Three or four of them would arrive in a town at the same time and separately act as if they did not know each other. They’d line up a sucker or two and get a game going in a motel room. They would give the marks the second-best hand there ever could be in poker and one of the pros would have the best poker hand there could be a royal flush. Many of those guys, like Scarpone, knew how to cheat with the cards, and he was even better with the dice.
A lot of the time they just had to gamble among themselves though. There were probably 100 of those pros who passed through town. Most did not want me around, but Scarpone seemed to be the biggest of the big and he would just tell them I was his driver. He vouched for me, and he would say he’s with me and I say he’s okay.
I remember once, he got in a big argument with a guy about me being there and I thought they were going to have a fight about it. For sure, there were two or three of those guys who always suspected me of being a cop undercover. Back then, I was clean shaven, and I dressed well, no jeans, etcetera. I was 27 maybe 28 at the time. My birthday is in April.
The thing is those guys wanted no one hanging around who was not a player. Eventually, I was accepted by most, except for those two or three guys who always complained when I was around. But no one ever said anything directly to me. I just did what Scarpone told me, just keep my mouth shut and he’d handle things. He hated driving, he trusted me, and he liked me. I only knew of him for about three years from Woody’s stories. I met Scarpone through Woody, like a told you, while working at the firehouse, before I joined the navy. (Fall of 1969 to August of 1970.) I left that town and never saw any of those guys again.
Scarpone lived in Montgomery, but he came to Robstown often as he did not gamble in his hometown. He would take a room at a boardinghouse. He needed to protect his reputation as a respectable guy. Plus, Montgomery was kind of tight whereas Robstown was wide open with cops paid off. Getting into the Montgomery crowd, a guy had to have political connection. Scarpone was not cut from that cloth, you know.
As little as ten years ago, I was back, visiting someone I used to know there, and two or three guys were talking about Scarpone. These guys didn’t know that I used to be Scarpone’s driver and that I used tag along with him. I was kind of like a fly on the wall. They were talking big, but since I did know Scarpone, I could tell that they didn’t really know what they were saying.
Next Email
In those days the high rollers played nothing but five or seven-card stud… mostly five-card is what the pro-cheaters liked, quicker games… get it over and done with… next pigeon or better, get out of Dodge before anyone got the wiser. Once in a while they would play low-ball if a sucker wanted to play that game. These guys were shrewd, smart card mechanics, if not on the edge of being reckless. The trick was to play poker or dice games that were a set-up for some poor slob. Sometimes, it would work out to have several pigeons in the same game. For this kind of a set-up, Scarpone would hand pick shills for his team. On the edge of recklessness maybe, but not stupid.
In Robstown, we cheaper players played mostly seven card stud and sometimes five-card stud or five card draw. Sometimes we would have one duce as a wild card. It was at the fire department, that’s where I really learned to play poker and that is where I played most of my poker. The firehouse games were friendly. It was mostly a game of five, ten, and the top bet of twenty-five cents. However, if seven guys were around the table, you could, at times, have a good pot. Five bucks was a lot of money those days. Hell, gasoline was 25 cents a gallon, a pair shoes could be had for ten bucks. My weekly wage was around $85, if I remember.
We passed the deal at the fire department taking turns with the cards. We were friends, and cheating was never a concern. In those gambling joints, they had a one dealer, usually the owner would be on a high limit table. The owner would deal all night until he was too tired to deal any more cause they raked a lot of money. More rakes on average than today’s casino games. (editor’s note: a rake is a percentage taken from every pot by the host of the game) Of course they would always justify the large rake. They said they had to rake a lot cause it was an illegal game and they could get busted… plus they had to pay the cops etc.
Sometimes Scarpone or some other guys would just rent a motel room and hold the game right there. The motel rooms were kind of scary to me cause there was just the one door. You’d never know who might come knocking.
Overall, the most popular place in Robstown was that farmhouse with the five rooms out in the country, off the bypass. There was a table in each room. It was about fifteen miles out of town on the way to Greer. The house was well hidden. First, the was no name for the road because it was not a road. It was an obscure, long driveway, shared with two other houses, like an easement. Just before that driveway, there was a named road taking off to the left. About a quarter of mile after that road, there was a house, right on the highway, with a sculpture of a welded horse, made of scrap metal. The way it appeared, it looked like the driveway was for that house, and ended there. However, the driveway continued, behind a barn. There was another house, a small one, a bit further, and it was blocked from sight by the barn and trees. After that, the driveway headed down a holler to the gambling house. The guy living there cut an illegal road to meet up with the aforementioned named highway. (518 bypass) It was like an emergency escape route. But in the south, it was accepted access for farmers to be able to get to their fields off a main road. Because of that obscure road, the farmhouse was considered the safest game… if you could find it in the dark. It never had anything except poker games for high rollers. Most of the players who played there were rich dudes. Some from out of state. It was a mix of personal. Some of them came by their money legitimately and others were crooks… lot of them, most of them, on the shady side of the street if you know what I mean.
You’re not going to believe this. Right downtown, three blocks from the police station and a half block off West Main Street, there was the Amvets Club with a poker room, a blackjack room, a craps room, and women almost naked swinging over the bar on swings. Yeah, no kidding! They had Go-Go dancers on stage and a live band sometimes. Then, upstairs there were prostitutes with four or five bedrooms. Most of the whores just lived up there… and the prostitutes in that town were mostly all young, in their twenties, and pretty.
I remember when I was thirteen and going to a dance hall with my older buddies and buying beer and dancing with grown women. Sometimes, after school, we would stop at the Savoy for a beer on the way home. At the age of thirteen and fourteen, no one ever asked me for an ID card back there. My first piece of ass was five bucks at age thirteen. It was at a downtown hotel. My buddies took me there…sorry to get off gambling. Just reminiscing of the good old days. Hey, it helps set the scene for the way things were in Robstown. The vice was in plain sight, in the heart of bible country, and ignored by the law cause the law was in on it.
I’ll be sending more stories as I recall them. Bye for now, Sailor.
On the Coat Tales of a Gambler continues in Episode 4 – The Getaway