Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs Part 26

BOOKIE.

Robert G.

My father used to have a little card room. You know, he had a grocery store and everybody where I come from who had a store or a barber shop also had a little back room for gambling and maybe a little speakeasy, you know, where people could drink a little wine when they came home from work. This was in the 1940s. So I grew up with that. There was nothing wrong with it. Everybody did it. My father, he had his card room and he used to make his own wine and sell some weird stuff and that was my background.

This is a coal-mining area. When I was a boy, it was mostly all coal mining and there's still a lot of it here. And miners are, well, you know-there's a lot of us who are Italians, a lot of Irish, a lot of Polish-and we're all hard drinkers and hard gamblers. It's just our nature. You know what I mean? Everybody in this area gambles. Judges gamble. Doctors gamble. Lawyers. It's just something that everybody does and n.o.body cares that it's breaking the law.

I started out in 1959. I was nineteen years old, just out of high school. I went to college but I didn't like it. So I came back and I went into the business. First thing, I had to get the okay of the Organization. I'm referring to the Mafia. We're wise guys, although we don't like to use those words. We call it the Organization. And I had to get my okay from that end. Which I did. Then I had to learn the business. I started with my father and later I apprenticed with my cousin. It's not an easy business to learn. Everybody thinks it is, but most people who try it go broke the first year. My cousin and I did all right. We worked for a while with a card room and we played the horses, but in the end I realized that the money was in professional sports, so I went to work for somebody for a while as a sub-book.

That's the way it goes. You take bets for somebody and then, after a few years, if you're lucky and your bets go the right way and you make money, you can open your own book and go from there- take your own bets, have your own sub-books. After that, it's just like any other business, believe it or not-you have to take care of your customers, you have to be honest. If you're not honest then the honest people won't do business with you. That's something I can't overemphasize. You get a reputation for honesty. And then you do the other things. You dress well. You drive a big car. You live well. And everybody wants your money. And they want to beat you. And that's the way it really works.

I do, probably for the year, between twenty and twenty-five million dollars in action. And I make probably, in profit, on a good year, about two-and-a-half percent of that. On a bad year it's about one percent.

I have ten sub-books that work for me. I cover their bets, their lay-outs, what they don't want to cover. Because what they're going for is called balance, which means they have equal money on both sides of a game. So if the Sixers are playing the Pacers tonight, all my sub-books are gonna have the same amounts on both teams. They just keep it even. Because if you got a thousand bucks on both sides of the game, you make a hundred bucks on the vigorish, the interest. You know about vigorish? That's principle behind which I make all my money. Basically, what vigorish is, is your bookie gets ten cents every time you lose a dollar bet. That's the way it works. It's like the interest I take for accepting your bet. It's ten percent. So, for example, if you bet a hundred bucks and you win, I pay you a hundred bucks, but if you lose, you pay me a hundred and ten. That's the vigorish. The vig. That's how the money is made.

So, if you're a sub-book and you're smart and you balance, it doesn't matter who wins the game, because you booked both sides of the bet. You can't lose anything. You make your money on the vig no matter what happens. It's a good deal. You get ten percent of all your losers' bets from the vig. You pay a little up to me, the major book, you keep the rest. Your living is basically secure.

But that security is only for the sub-books, not me. I'm the major book. If one of my sub-books has twelve hundred on the Pacers and a thousand on the Sixers, he lays out the difference-the two hundred bucks-to me. I have to take what he gives me and actually, in a sense, I'm gambling. The sub-books are guaranteed to come out ahead, no matter what, as long as they balance. But I can lose a lot. Because, you know, I'm getting lay-outs from the sub-books and then I've got maybe thirty to fifty regulars who call in their bets directly to me. And I'm not always able to balance my book-I have to take what I get. So sometimes I have more on one side than the other. There's no place for me to go with it. I'm the end of the chain. I might have an overlay of as much as thirty thousand dollars on one side of a game. A single game. And that's a very exciting game when that happens. [Laughs] And I've had some big losses. I've also had some big wins. But if you do enough action, it all balances out. You win as many as you lose and the vigorish takes care of you. That's where the real profit is. I've made over a half a million dollars in my best years.

The whole thing is that if you bet on enough games, I come out ahead. You got some guy betting one game, you get rid of him. You need action. The minimum anybody can bet with us is fifty dollars. The maximum is five thousand. That's my range for one person. And five thousand is actually pretty high for bookmakers. Some take more. In cities like New York or Chicago, they'll take ten or fifteen thousand. Las Vegas, they'll take anything. But most bookmakers take less than me.

So anyway, I don't want your five-dollar bets and you have to lay out on five games or else I don't want your business at all. And that's every day. Las Vegas doesn't like one guy to come into the casino, make one bet and then walk out. The percentages are in his favor if he does that. They want you to stay there and gamble because then the odds catch up to you. I want the same thing. That's what makes us successful-the action, the juice. Come along with large numbers and I'll catch up with the gambler sooner or later.

There's no typical gambler. Everybody just likes to bet, you know? It's a variety of people. One time it used to be like a lowercla.s.s citizen, but not anymore, not for years. Especially with the way sporting events are now. The Super Bowl on forty million televisions or whatever. It's a macho thing to have a bet on a football game-anybody sitting in a sports bar trying to impress a girl has to have a bet on or he's not a real man. You know what I'm saying? We call it the Holy Trinity-gambling, sports, and television. They all work together. It really makes a lot of sense.

And if you're going to gamble, sports is the best thing you can do. Because everything else, you play outrageous vigorish odds. Any kind of other gambling. This is a fifty-fifty bet. It's like tossing a coin. I'll give you an example. We had a guy who was picking winners left and right. He was a chef in one of the restaurants that I had a partner in. He was winning, winning, winning, and we couldn't understand why. We actually thought we were getting cheated. It turned out the dishwasher was a little bit of a, uh, you can't call them mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded, he was mentally challenged, you know? And what the chef was doing was, he had like this NFL schedule that had everybody's helmet on these charts, and he used to show the charts to this dishwasher and he'd pick the nicest helmets out. And this guy would bet the helmet that the r.e.t.a.r.ded dishwasher was picking and he was burying us! So it just goes to show you, you don't have to know anything. Not like c.r.a.ps or blackjack where you'll get creamed if you don't know what you're doing. I mean, this chef really beat us for a lot of money. We thought we were getting robbed and here we were, the r.e.t.a.r.ded kid was picking helmets!

But I love this. I wouldn't do anything else. I love sports, especially football. I'm a football purist. Every game is exciting, every game is something that I can win on. It's great. And it's hard and you have to be tough, but it's not all that demanding. I mean, I only work probably two, three hours a day. Four maximum. It depends on the season. Like it's basketball season right now, so I work for one hour in the early evening before the games collecting the day's bets, dealing with my sub-books, and then like another hour after the games to check everything out and tally up the winners and losers. And that's really it. I have five guys directly on my payroll. They take the action, check the stuff out and do my collecting and paying out. I get the odds from Las Vegas, and then we adjust them as the day goes along according to how people are betting. If there's a lot of action on one side, then the line moves, half a point at a time. And that's all.

So it's simple, but there's a lot of excitement and we make a lot of money. And it's all strictly cash. It's probably the only business left that's really everything in cash. I mean we manipulate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in cash. It has to be cash, otherwise it's detectable. You know what I'm saying?

I pay taxes. Not on my real earnings, but on other things. I file what's called a miscellaneous tax, and as long as the government gets it, they usually don't give you any problems. So I file a few thousand dollars on like cigarette machines and poker machines, restaurant investments, stuff like that. It's really not the true tax, but it's a way of filing. Because after all, what we do is illegal. Not immoral, but illegal. And don't get me wrong-it's not risk-free. It's no game. If I'm caught in a raid, the IRS has a right to come in and charge me ten percent of every dollar they find being wagered. Which is really a lot.

Look at it this way-I run the only business that I know of where I could lose one hundred thousand bucks this week and go to jail for losing it! You understand that? I mean if I sell one hundred thousand worth of dope, I'd have to be a crackpot to lose money. If I rob a bank and lose money, there's something wrong with me. But my business, there's no guarantee. I could get arrested tomorrow for what I did yesterday, and lose one hundred thousand doing it. And that's a fact. You know, it's a really hard business that way.

I wish it was legal. It costs us a fortune to move around with cellular phones to avoid being wiretapped and stuff like that. I mean, I got all my people on cellular phones, it costs me maybe seven hundred bucks a week just to take the action. We have four apartments that we work from and every two weeks we move them. When things are hot, we change apartments every week. That's sixteen moves a month some months! It's a b.i.t.c.h. I'd much rather pay some more taxes.

The problem is, if they legalize it, then that opens up a can of worms for the people who play the sports. There'd probably be so much action it would be too attractive for them to fix games or things like that. I mean, it's hard enough with it in Las Vegas-every couple of years it crops up that there's something going on, that they're fixing games at some schools or something. So just imagine if bookmaking was legal in every state! It would be too much. That's really, I think, why the state doesn't make it legal. Besides the fact that there's not enough money. Two and a half percent-that's what I make-the state, they have better ways to make money-they hide the odds. The state lotteries, they pay you five hundred to one to pick three numbers. If you bet a dollar and you win, you get five hundred. But the true odds on that game are one thousand to one. That's what the odds are! They publish it in the fine print. It's a thousand-to-one shot. You should get a thousand bucks for a winner. But the state only gives you five hundred. That other five hundred is all vigorish to them. They put it in their pockets. That's the real way to gamble! In my business, out of every dollar wagered, we get two-and-a-half cents. Not fifty cents like the state does. That's another reason why they don't legalize it. But I think that eventually, you know, it will be legal. There's just too many people gambling. It's too American. The government is gonna have to say, "Hey, this is okay." But it's not gonna happen in my lifetime.

I've had six arrests. I've been convicted six times. Two of those were federal convictions but I only went to jail once-for a year. The others were statewide convictions, where gambling is a misdemeanor. It's really just a slap on the wrist. Except if you get enough arrests, then it becomes something major. I'm nearing that.

They keep looking to you. You get to be bigger and bigger and you become the guy that they're going to look for. Every time that there's some kind of raid going on, they want to know who's getting the lay-outs. And the last guy on the journey from phone to phone that gets the lay-outs, that's the player, that's the major guy. He's usually the guy, that if anything happens, he's the guy who wins all the money, or who goes to jail. You know what I mean? That's the sacrifice to it. You understand how it works? They'll arrest some minor sub-book in a wire-tap or something and they'll make a deal with him. They'll release him to testify against you and that's the way it goes.

But luckily, they usually don't bother just the bookmakers. I'm talking about the federal government, the FBI. They usually look for other things. Like maybe dope and bookmaking, or maybe loansharking or graft and bookmaking, maybe extortion-you're hurting people to collect your money-those kind of things. They don't look for just bookmaking. They have too much reputation as law enforcement people just to go after bookmakers because it's like I said before, it's an amenity in this country. They just go after bookmakers that are doing something else.

I'll give you an example. A guy was placing bets with a bookmaker I know. He was doing it for maybe seven months and he was winning, then he started losing. The bookmaker had maybe three thousand coming to him and he couldn't collect it. The guy had won like eight grand off him before he started losing and he had three grand coming back to him and the guy wouldn't give it to him. So he threatened the guy. Well, the guy went to the FBI and they wired him. And they picked up a conversation where the bookmaker said he was going to kill him. And that's all he did-he said he was going to kill him-he never touched him, never put his hand on him; in fact, never even met the guy personally. But he said it over the phone, and the guy was wired. That bookmaker got almost four years because that was bookmaking and extortion. On top of that, they offered the bookmaker a deal. They said he could walk if he testified that I sent him out. And I had absolutely nothing to do with that crime! And that is a Gospel fact that I had nothing to do with it. So the guy said to them, "You want me to lie and say that he sent me out?" They said, "We don't care. We want him. If you have to lie, then lie. Because it's poetic justice. If we don't get him for what he's doing, we'll get him for something else." That's the way they figure it. So what I'm saying is if they want you, they have nothing but time and money. The laws are written for them now to convict. And you just can't escape. If they want you, you just can't escape.

I went to jail because one of the sub-books that was laying off to me was cashing federal food stamps illegally. I had no knowledge that it was even going on, but I eventually got a graft charge. Because he was laying off to me. But that's exactly how you get trapped. I was the last guy arrested in a three-year investigation, so I went to jail. That's how it works.

I spent a year in jail. It was bad, but not too bad. I mean, I'm a wise guy. When you go to jail, it's best if you go to jail as a wise guy because everybody stays away from you. There are only a few of us there and n.o.body bothers with us. We had the best of what there was. I mean we had Italian people in the kitchen-we got the best food. We had people in different places that ran the amus.e.m.e.nts, so we could play pool, or cards, or whatever. You get the best of everything. Still, the wise guy don't run things-it's still prison. You know?

But I have a story for you. First of all, I went to jail for something that isn't a sin in my religion. It isn't even a sin to gamble. In my religion, it's not a sin. So I went to jail for something that is not even a sin. There's something bizarre about that. Second of all, the only bookmaker or gambling man who I know that's been in business longer than me is my priest-he's been running the bingo game for forty-five years! His reward is heaven, my reward is jail. It doesn't even make sense! You understand what I'm saying? There's something wrong with that type of thinking.

We just do an honest business. That's the way I figure it, it's part of entertainment. It really is. I don't hurt people. I mean, we have people who get really into debt, we do, but we try to work something out. We try to do something like make a payment plan for them. We can't let them go stark free because then they'll only go someplace else and do the same thing. But we give reasonable terms-we make it easy for them. And also, we try to cut people off before it gets too bad. So it never even gets to that. What we do is we let a person double his bet. If a guy's running bad, let's say he's a hundred-dollar bettor, he might be down maybe four thousand dollars. We notice, you know? I mean we're looking at these books every night, so we notice. So he's in trouble. Well, we won't let him bet four grand and try and cover his losses. All we let him do is he can double his biggest bet for the week. So if he bet four hundred, he can go to eight hundred, but that's it. And if he loses much more, he's cut off until he pays. So we're protecting him and we're protecting ourselves. Those are all the little things that are a part of the business that the outside never sees.

We try not to strong-arm people now because that's something that the law won't tolerate anymore. In the big cities they make people disappear, but in the small cities you can't do that. Somebody would notice. In the big cities, you can always get somebody that'll keep his mouth shut. You send him out, and he'll go do everything he can to collect the money for his percentage. But in small towns and small areas like here, if you start sending people out and hurting people, then the word is out. And then it's not only bookmaking anymore, now it's extortion and different crimes.

So what I do is, I have a guy. He's probably five-foot-nine inches tall and he's like a hundred and sixty pounds. You wouldn't look at him twice, but he usually collects the money. You know why he does that? Because he hounds people. One time this guy owed us money, and he hounded him on the phone for weeks-nothing. So my guy goes to his house and he knocks on the door. There's no answer. He goes in the house, and the guy was in the shower. And he went in the shower and he shut the water off and he said, "You know, it's time to pay me now. You're dodging me." And the guy still didn't pay him! He said he didn't have the money in the house. You know, basic bulls.h.i.t. But my guy didn't hurt him, he didn't threaten him, he just said, "You have to pay me." The next morning, when the guy woke up, this guy was sitting there having coffee with his wife. "You're going to have to pay me! Sooner or later, you're going to have to pay me!" So he hounded the guy so much, he paid him!

And that's the best collectors, they're hounds. They hound you, they hound you. You'll be in the diner, in front of thirty people, and he'll say, "Hey, you owe me money. It's time to pay me." It's embarra.s.sing. And sooner or later, before you know it, the guy pays you. That's the right way to do it. You don't have to do that old style thing of breaking people's legs. You don't have to do that anymore. You just got to have hounders. And you know, the guy can't go to the Better Business Bureau and say these people are hounding me, or he's driving me crazy on the telephone. I mean, it's an illegal business, who's going to listen to you? You shouldn't have bet with them if they're hounding you. You call the FBI, they'll say, "Are they hurting you? Are they going to break your legs?" "No, they're just driving me crazy!" "Well, that's your problem." They hang up on you.

It's hard to have a lot of sympathy for guys who don't pay their debts. And I've seen a lot of that. I've probably seen the worst side of man. I mean, when the human being is a winner, he's the happiest creature in the world. But when he's a loser, he's the most miserable creature that ever lived. He's the worst a man can be. And I'm talking about not only gamblers but just everybody is that way. But I guess especially gamblers. I mean, I could tell you stories about people that tried to give me reasons why they can't pay that are astounding. I've heard excuses that their house has burned down when it didn't. Or one of their kids were kidnapped, and, you know, when they weren't. People will use any excuse when they're trying not to pay. When they lose. And when they win, they'll be right banging at your doors. Five minutes after they win they want their money. And five years after they lose, they're still making arrangements to pay you. That's part of the human experience, I guess. People are kind of ugly, you know?

But in the end most guys pay me. The overwhelming majority pay up. I've made a lot of money in this business. I've taken a lot of raps. I've had some bad times when things went bad, but it's like anything else. Life can be bad, but, geez, it's nice to have a big bank account-it helps everything! I mean, I'm going to retire soon and do some traveling and it's nice to have a pile of money in the bank. I know some guys that worked all their lives, they're bankers, teachers, a couple of judges, and they're going to be all right, they get a nice pension. But I got a lot more money than they do socked away! And they had to go get up in the morning every day and go to work. I've been to jail, and I've been screaming all night about I lost some money and all that, but you know, I drive a nice car. I take care of myself and my family. I wear nice clothes. I live in an eleven-room house. People want those things. I get up at ten-thirty in the morning and I go take a dip in my pool and say, "Well, you know what? This is better than going to work with the lunch pail." And it really is. Even though it's a bad beat.

There's tape rolling all the time.

CASINO SURVEILLANCE OFFICER.

Kim K.

I'm a surveillance officer at a large casino. My job is I sit in a dark room watching video monitors with about twenty other people. We call up different camera angles, look for any irregularities in procedure, look for any criminal activity, wait for phone calls from the pits-people wanting reviews of things that have taken place on the floor. There's tape rolling all the time. So if somebody raises a stink about anything, we can review it very quickly. And if something's wrong, surveillance can watch closely without the person knowing, and we can record the evidence.

There are nine hundred cameras in this casino. On my keyboard, there's a number pad, and you memorize the number of every camera, so when you want a specific view, you call it up on your monitor. The whole system is state of the art, totally. These cameras- we can zoom in on anything. I mean, the chips, your fingernails, anything. We can see it all in sharp focus.

We're watching the employees and the patrons. I couldn't say which is more likely to do something. It's pretty much fifty-fifty. We've caught tons of patrons engaged in their scams, some hardened criminals, some grandma-types. We've caught dealers doing all kinds of things. There was this young woman recently, a baccarat dealer, she'd taken one of the pockets of her tux jacket-which are normally sewn shut by the wardrobe department-and she'd opened it up. And the top of the pocket came right up to the top of the table. So she was like real suddenly flipping these chips, these hundred-dollar chips, into her pocket. And we caught her.

Our role is to observe, report, and record. That's all we're ever supposed to do. See what's on the tape, relay it to security if that's appropriate, then record it in the log. Not form an opinion.

It's an okay job. I got into it because I was a blackjack dealer here and I wanted to get off the gaming floor. That job was seriously b.u.mming me out. I'd been dealing for I don't know how long-eighteen years, I think-at different places. And I'd just had it. As a dealer, you have to suppress yourself, your feelings. You have to be very, very congenial all the time so the patrons are enjoying themselves. The casino wants dealers who keep the patrons happy, keep them coming back to the tables.

But it's hard to just be congenial all the time. Especially where there's so many people here in trouble-angry people, crazy people- you know, people who can't control themselves in terms of their gambling habit. I mean, you never really know the whole story. You're not at the table with them and then in their bank account with them, and knowing the entire thing. But you can bet that if it's Tuesday night at three A.M., the people at the table have some issues that they're escaping.

You can only kid yourself for so long-it's not helping people. The chances of it bringing them down are much greater. The odds of them losing are really high. Because even if they win, most of these gamblers, because they've got troubles, they're not going to leave the casino while they're up. They want to keep going more and more, so they don't leave until they've lost everything. One of the most common lies about casinos is that we win half the time and lose half the time. That's totally untrue. Because every game has its own odds, and odds are always slightly in favor of the house. Always. Every game at the casino is designed to take your money. And if you play enough, we'll take everything you've got.

There are people who come to this casino-and to every casino- and lose money, and then go straight off and kill themselves. People have killed themselves in the bathroom here. Just this past couple of months, there was a woman who jumped off the bridge near the highway, and a guy who killed himself in the parking lot. Both of them had lost big time. This was driving me-you know, it was really eating at me.

So I went and asked the director of surveillance if there were any possibilities for me in his department. Because I knew what surveillance was all about. I knew I could just basically be alone with the monitors and just be myself. And when the director found out that I had years of gaming knowledge, he got me a job in here pretty quickly.

It's much better than dealing. It's a higher-paying position, I can dress any way I want, joke around, don't have to wear a name tag. Don't have to stand up on my feet all night. And, as a surveillance officer, I work to protect the casino's interests, but I'm not taking anybody's money. I'm even, sometimes, able to give money back to patrons that was mistakenly taken from them. So it just feels a lot better.

And I think I'm pretty good at it. I get good reviews. I'm a truth seeker by nature, so that really helps. I want to know the truth about things. When I look at tape, I'll watch it over and over and over till I am sure I understand what transacted.

Like I just caught some guys cheating on the slot machines. There's been a whole ring of them going around. They're Russians, and we've known they were active, but we couldn't catch them. I found them on the floor and I got all their actions on tape and they were arrested. It was very complicated because they were using shaved coins on the slot machines. And that's a felony, but, well, it's kind of a complicated process to describe-the cheating and how that works-and I'd prefer not to. [Laughs] I think there's probably places on the Internet where you can go and research that on your own. But, they were putting in shaved coins-which are coins that are shaved down so that the slot machine isn't actually registering them-and so they were getting out more than they were putting in. Getting out money without risking anything.

Now, shaved coins come up all the time in slot machines. They're very common. But the object is to actually see a person using them and get security and the police to them while they're on that machine. Catch them in the act. That's pretty tough to coordinate. I was just looking around the casino, because we knew that they were active in Atlantic City and Connecticut. And I ended up watching this particular pair of gentlemen and I saw this behavior that we're told to look for-which is sorting the shaved coins in their hands. That's a telltale giveaway of what they're up to. They take the shaved coins out of the real winnings.

So I noticed it, and then, with something like that, everybody in the room gets involved. Everybody starts following these guys. We all pull up different cameras to make sure we have coverage. I kept the lead cameras on the guys, got in tight and watched them sorting out their coins, while other people got wide shots and followed them from machine to machine. Then, at the same time, my supervisor alerted security and the state police and the gaming commission to what's going on. Because they have to review tape before any action is taken to be absolutely sure. Sometimes it takes too long and we lose people-they've already left-and maybe we get them later, maybe not. The thrill is getting the person arrested on the floor in front of everyone. And with these guys, we did that, we nailed them.

It was very exciting. Definitely. But it was a rarity. There are nights you don't see anything. Lots of times, we just sit there and laugh at the fat people, the bad hairdos, the weirdo stuff. People are pretty funny when they don't know they're being watched. And if we catch something really funny, we'll rewind the tape and watch it over and over. It gets funnier sometimes.

I've seen all kinds of things-patrons stealing from each other, grabbing handfuls of five-dollar tokens from their neighbors. I've seen men peeing in gla.s.ses at the c.r.a.ps tables. They can't, like, leave the game, so they just pee in their beer gla.s.s at the table. And it gets weirder-I've seen men playing with themselves at tables. Seen women playing their men at slot machines. Saw men playing with their women's b.r.e.a.s.t.s at blackjack tables. Saw two employees having s.e.x in one of the restaurant areas. Seen tons of people fighting, Jerry Springer-like brawls. Like between two women and a guy. Like outof-control kinds of stuff.

Gamblers are just weird, you know? And some of them are beyond weird. There was a guy last Christmas-I'll never forget this- who we thought might have been a pickpocket but who turned out to be cutting women's hair at the slot machines. It was a very busy night and he was wandering in and out between the aisles. And that's suspicious behavior, so the police on the floor noticed it and called us, so we started watching him and we thought he was pickpocketing. But then the officer who was the lead on this particular watch all of sudden went, "Oh my G.o.d! He's not pickpocketing. Look!" And we zoomed in and saw these tiny scissors that he had cupped in his hand. And he's walking up behind these women with long hair and snipping away while they're playing the machines. And he's not saving the hair at all. Just letting it fall. Then he'd walk away and try and find somebody else.

That actually really scared me. Because it was so creepy and he was, like, coming up to these women and we knew he was there. We're screaming at the monitors-obviously these women were never going to hear us. But we kept saying like, "Turn around! Turn around!" And they were far away in another part of the building. But we were screaming and screaming. I was really freaked out. Just because of the creep factor.

The guy, he was arrested and cuffed on the floor and they brought him back to the police and they fingerprinted him and booked him. I don't remember what he was charged with, actually. [Laughs] But he was a high roller. He had like thousand-dollar chips in his pocket, and was wearing a wig and was in disguise because he didn't want anybody to notice him.

After the state police brought him in, they were taking him down to wash the fingerprint ink off his hands. And this is weird, but I was like, all of a sudden, I was like, "I gotta have a real look at him." So I walked out into the hallway and I looked straight at him. It was a very weird moment. You know, it was kind of like, "I know what you just did" kind of thing. But I couldn't really professionally say anything, and I didn't quite know how to look at him. So it was kind of meaningless, but then when I got back into the surveillance room-we have a tape running and a camera running constantly outside that hallway-and I got in the room and rewound the tape and watched the transaction between me and this guy on tape. Just to see myself and-I don't know. I don't know why I did that. Just it was creepy, I guess.

I've been in surveillance for the last three years. I'm starting to feel a little burned out. It's much better than being a dealer, but it's still the thing, you know? The world. I just don't feel very good about these people, the gamblers. You're seeing human beings at their worst. You're not seeing anything uplifting throughout the day, you know? Very few acts of kindness.

It's just not a good place for me. I don't like casinos. I guess I should just admit that to myself and move on. I never, ever go into a casino when I'm not working. I never gamble. I never have gambled, never will gamble. I got into the business when I was very young. I wasn't even of age to gamble when I started working, so I didn't, and I've just stayed away. That was the smartest decision I ever made. It's a sickness, that's all it is.

I wish I'd done something else with my life. I would have preferred to be in another business, almost any other business, but I've been doing this for so long. I'm almost forty. I don't see how I can change now. [Laughs] I don't know. Maybe I just need a vacation, you know, get out on the beach. See some daylight.

To go without s.e.x is unhealthy.

ESCORT.

Simone.

I'm an escort. Okay? That's a hooker, a ho, you know? I'm eighteen. Living in Wichita, Kansas. I've been doing this since the day after I graduated from high school. [Laughs] That would make it about a month this Monday.

I go by the name of Simone. One of the other girls picked that one out for me. I wanted Sam, but they're, like, "Oh no, no, no." Sam was too masculine.

So far I've cleared two grand, which really isn't bad. I would have made more, but it's been slow. We just had Memorial Day, and at the beginning of the summer, I think people want to go out and go boating. They want to go out and spend time in the sun and are less interested in, you know-the business. [Laughs]

What made me decide to do this? Oh, small-town rebellion. [Laughs] Seriously, I don't know. My upbringing was the typical slum story. Grew up in a drug house. A lot of drugs being sold in and around me by my parents-my mom and my second stepfather. I've had three stepfathers. My mom had me a month after she turned eighteen. And as long as I can remember, she would drink a lot of alcohol, and do some cocaine. And then she used to take pills, I guess.

I was used to being the parent, both to my mother and my two brothers at the time-changing the diapers and cooking supper and cleaning up after my mom when she was sick and all that kinda c.r.a.p. She actually got clean there for a few years, around the time I was nine, and that was really great, but then my little sister was born, and things started going bad at her job. She was the head of this kitchen at a retirement home. It was a really nice place, good money. We were all living good. And I don't know, one day she-I guess when she got clean she wasn't ready to be clean for good. So she went back to alcohol, started partying late, cheated on her husband. Came up with a lung disease, had part of her lungs removed. That didn't slow her down much, though.

So, like, I've always been kind of interested in doing the things that you're not supposed to do. I don't like fighting and I don't like driving too fast-but, I mean, I smoke and I drink and, you know, do some of the other things. And, well, I had s.e.x at an early age and-I mean all in all I think for the way I was brought up I've turned out all right, you know? A lot of people would disagree with me for the simple fact that I'm in the profession that I'm in, but believe it or not this is actually going to pay for my college. So I figured-all I was thinkin' was easy money fast. And I thought-I'm a chick, I got a body, I can make money-so, there you go.

The company I work for is called-well, it's got this French name, but I shouldn't say it. [Laughs] You know why. It's just a place in town. Adult entertainment.

To get the job, I just called them up and I said, "Are you hiring? And what do I need to do to get hired?" And they said, "Well, you need a license, an escort license. Twenty-five dollars down at the county hall."

So I got that, and then I had to get a city license for another twenty-five bucks. And I went in, and they gave me an application. And they looked it over. Checked my IDs. Said, "Okay, you start Monday." But this is the week before I graduated. So I was kind of like, "Gotta finish school first. Can you give me a week?" [Laughs] So they're like, "Oh, okay, the next Monday." Because they don't want you to be startin' in the middle of the week. They want you to start on a slow day-and Monday is usually the slowest of the week- so that you can get comfortable with your surroundings, comfortable with what you're doing.

The way it works is like this-a guy walks in the door and the girls do a line-up around the table. And we give 'em the official lowdown: "We provide adult nude entertainment, et cetera, et cetera." And what the guy actually pays for right out is the dancing. Say he wants ten minutes of dancing. Well, that's thirty bucks. And the house gets that money. We don't get anything except but what the guys give to us. We work completely off tips.

So the guy picks a lady, picks an amount of time, pays the manager, and then follows the girl to one of the rooms. Then they have to pay a two-dollar room fee. Fill out a paper. You know, with their name-usually it's a fake name. Then you bring 'em into the room and tell 'em to go ahead and get nude and you'll be back in a minute. Then you close the door behind 'em, give the paperwork to the manager, check what time it is and go back in there. If they've gotten completely nude when you come back, well, that's the way we know they're not a cop. Because, see, Kansas doesn't have entrapment laws. If we had an entrapment law then we could come straight out and ask everybody, "Are you affiliated with any sort of law enforcement?" You know? And they wouldn't be able to lie. But we don't have those laws. So the best we can do is to say, "Get completely nude first." 'Cause usually a cop won't. They'll keep their underwear on. 'Cause they're like, uncomfortable, I guess. That's the way they are.

So we ask everybody to get completely nude. And we tell them it's for our safety. And then when they're completely nude, then you say, "Okay, are you interested in anything other than dancing?" And if they say yeah, it's like, "Okay, let me give you some prices." It's usually one hundred, two hundred, and three hundred bucks. That's what we start out at. One hundred for a hand job, two for a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b, three hundred for s.e.x. If they don't have that we'll work with them. I mean like I've done a hand job for forty dollars because I needed the money, and that's all they had.

I don't have a problem with the s.e.x part of it. I just don't. Even like, the first time I actually had s.e.x with a customer-even that was very easy. [Laughs] I got two hundred and twenty-five dollars and-it was like-this is really crude-three thrusts, and he was done, you know. I was like, "That's the easiest money I've ever made." [Laughs]

He was overweight. A lot of guys that come in are overweight or not physically pleasing to the eye. You know, they obviously can't get dates real easy. Or most of the guys that come in are older guys whose wives just aren't interested in s.e.x anymore and they are, and they just need a quiet way of taking care of it. And to be completely honest with you, to go without s.e.x is unhealthy. It just is. I mean- some people can handle it, and some people can't. I couldn't.

It surprises me when I see a attractive guy come in. I'm like, "You don't need to come into a place like this." In a lot of those cases, though, they don't have a lot of time to meet people. They work long hours, for instance. They have the money, just not any time to meet somebody. Or maybe they're kinky. There's another girl here, Alicia, she got paid five hundred bucks to do this guy, like, he laid down on the floor and had her completely cover him from head to toe with newspaper except for a hole for his d.i.c.k, right? And then he jerked off while she called him all these dirty names. And the sick part of it is that when he was seven years old his sister did that to her boyfriend and made him watch. [Laughs] When I heard about that I was like-ooh, that's just nasty! Too young. It's wrong. You know, first of all that's just f.u.c.ked up, but to have a kid involved, no. That's not even-no, that's not kosher.

I haven't had a lot of kinky customers, though. Not like that. Just ones that want to talk dirty. They say stuff like, "Your hand feels like a p.u.s.s.y." Or-I don't know. I'm just like, "Uh-huh, that's nice. Okay." I try not to pay too much attention to 'em. I've read a lot of dirty books, too. [Laughs] So I haven't been really surprised about anything I've had to do yet.

And, actually, I think there are some nice things about it. Like when you get the comments that you do in this kind of business [laughs] it definitely boosts the ego. It really does. "Oh, you're so beautiful. You got a great blah, blah, blah." [Laughs] "You got this and that. You got great t.i.ts." You know, and-okay, if I get paid to be told how great I am, that's good. That's good.

Then there are women that call in for women, and, like, my first time with a girl was when I was fourteen. It was a friend of mine. Didn't happen again. She didn't like it. But I was like, "Well, that was interesting." I was the aggressor. And then about last January, I wanted to try it again, so I started corresponding with people over the Internet. Browsed the personals. I didn't end up meeting any women. But I met couples. I met a married couple. We made an ice cream sundae out of her husband. [Laughs] I like chocolate. [Laughs] And now, every so often I get women. And I definitely like it. I mean, for the most part, women know women. And I would imagine the same thing is true for gay males who do this. Because you just know your own body so well and you know what pleasures you, and for the most part it's probably gonna pleasure somebody else. You know, you just know it better.

When I started this, I was planning to do it just for the summer. But now I may keep it going all through college to completely pay for my tuition. And I think that could happen. The only thing is, you know, I know what I'm doing right now is not generally considered very respectable by society. So I really try to keep it personal and private. And it's not always so easy. Like, my first week of work, this older man that lives in my same town near here and knows me-he came in. And I went to school with his kids. He would see me at all the functions. The theater, the plays, the trips. And every time he saw me he'd say, "Oh, hi, how are you?"

So he walked in here one day, and we did the line-up, and I looked at the door and I was like, "Wait a minute, what's he doing here? What does he think I'm doing here?" [Laughs] And he just looked at me, and he said my name. And he goes, "I think I'll pa.s.s for today." And I haven't seen him again. He hasn't been back. I guess he was a regular. Once a week. But he hasn't been back since.

And he's not gonna say anything because he's the upstanding member of society, you know? He's like a prominent-I wouldn't say prominent but, you know, known in circles and the social functions and-the social stature is there. And this guy is someone I know's dad. Which is weird. So, you know, that's a close call. But it's not gonna be a problem. But-I just don't want the whole world to know I'm doing this. [Laughs] I'm like, I want to be somebody else some day, you know? I'm a good girl. [Laughs] I was originally planning on teaching, and maybe one day, I'll get to that. However, if they ever hear about this, I might not get hired for a teaching job. So it's like, I think I'm handling it very well. I still know my manners. I know when to mention what I'm doing and when not to mention it. And more often than not, it's not [laughs] to mention it.

I think my dad and my mom-they know what I'm doing. At first, I just I told them where I worked and said I was dancing here. I figured if there was an emergency they should know where to find me. They just don't have to know what exactly I do. But eventually, I was like, "Well to be honest with you I have been doing a little escorting to bring in extra money because-you know?" And my dad's like, "Oh, well, okay. That's cool." And I was like, "Oh, thank G.o.d!"

And Mom, surprisingly-I figured Dad would have the problem with it and Mom would have been like, "Oh, I did that too when I was your age!" [Laughs] But I don't think she likes what I'm doing right now. When I talked to her about it, she just didn't seem happy. I was like, "Well, it's better than me going out and smokin' crack." And she goes, "Ahh-well, yeah." [Laughs]

But I'm supporting myself. And as you can imagine, my mom is not exactly someone who can call me on certain choices I've made. And sometimes I kind of let her know that. Every once in a while I needle my mom a little bit, you know. Like when I graduated, I got a bunch of ta.s.sels, and I gave one to my grandma and said, "Mail that to my mom." 'Cause we weren't speaking at the time. And I thought, Mom will see this as a peace offering. But at the same time I was pointing out to her that I had done something that she had never been able to do-graduate from high school. She just got her G.E.D. So right there, I guess I was needling her a bit. Letting her know that when it comes down to it, I can do whatever I want. You know? Do whatever I want to do, and do it on my own.

f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k, f.u.c.k, ice, ice, ice.