Introduction

A Gambling Life

I discovered gambling over dessert one Thanksgiving. I was eleven.

I remember the moment distinctly. My family had made the annual trip from New Jersey to Massachusetts to celebrate the holiday. My brother and I sat next to my uncle on my grandmother’s couch watching college football—a tradition, and something that fed our passion for sports.

“Why are you rooting so hard for Notre Dame?” I asked my uncle. “Do you really like them or something?”

“I have one hundred dollars on them,” he said, pulling a gambling card from his pocket and explaining that he had multiple bets going on at once. “If they win—along with these three other teams—I win ten to one plus the profits from my original bet.”

My brother and I were mesmerized. Watching sports and winning money—what could be better?

“Here,” my uncle said. “I can give you one of these cards if you want to bet on tomorrow’s NFL games. If you give me ten dollars and you get all four games right, you’ll win one hundred dollars.”

Oh my God, I thought. I have to do this. One hundred dollars sounded like a fortune!

My brother, who was almost eight at the time, followed me over to where my father was in the kitchen. He was talking about his business with some of the other adults. I knew my father was more likely to give me money than my mother, who would have certainly questioned it.

“Dad, can I have ten dollars? We’re going to the store to get hoagies.” As soon as he handed over the money, my brother and I started deliberating on what teams we should circle for the next day. After about two hours, we made our selections and brought the card—and our bet—to my uncle.

We were glued to the television more than usual the following afternoon as we watched the football game and tracked our bets. We won the first three games, and the final one was in the evening. We defended the television in the living room fiercely. Anytime someone came in and wanted to change the channel, we wouldn’t let them. How could we? We were this close to winning one hundred dollars.

And we did. All four of our teams won that day, and we couldn’t have been more excited. Our uncle paid us. It was more money than I’d ever had at one time. There was something else, though, that excited me—something besides the hundred dollars burning a hole in my pocket. It was the adrenaline. The rush. The risk. And winning was an added benefit.

I gambled for the next twenty years straight.

The Evolution of an Addict

My father was an entrepreneur and owned an import-export business and a retail store in New Jersey, and when I was growing up, I worked for him regularly. So did my Little League baseball coach, who came in for shifts on weekends. The guys at the store talked gambling nonstop, and I was a good listener. I knew they usually went to the Meadowlands Racetrack after work to bet on horses.

“Hey,” I said to my coach one day. “I want to come with you to the track. Tell my dad you’re taking me home, and you can sneak me in.”

The racetrack was about half an hour from work—a straight shot down Route 17, except for a handful of tollbooths along the way. Back then, each toll was forty-five cents, and my coach taught me an ingenious way to find some more money on the trip to the track. At every tollbooth, my coach would open his door and grab all the change on the ground left behind by drivers who had missed the collection bucket.

“I just got two dollars! That’s two dollars more I can play on the horses!” he’d say. I did that same thing for the next fifteen years, scooping change off the ground just as he had. It was exhilarating in a strange way—like I’d won something. Back then, though, I just thought he was a little weird and crazy.

Once I got inside the racetrack, I’d ask my coach what horses he liked. I also looked for any interesting horse names that jumped out at me. As I glanced through all the names, there it was: “Magical Mike.” How could I not bet on a horse that had the same name as me? I mean, what better reason could there be? So, I gave my coach my money and had him place the bet. We’d sit in the stands together and watch with that feeling of exhilaration as the horses rounded the track. I did that for years. Nobody bothered us.

When we couldn’t make it to the track, the coach and I and some other friends would go to offtrack betting (OTB) in a neighboring town. There, in that dingy, depressing room with smoke hovering over us from all the cigarettes, the races were simulcast. We—along with mostly men in their fifties, sixties, and seventies—would spend entire days at OTB. It was always the same: find cool horses’ names or some other mostly illogical reason, bet, watch, repeat.

I continued to gamble as I got older, and I started dabbling in card games when I was twelve. My friends and I, including my brother, would play what we called acey-deucy—or high-low—trying to win whatever pot we could throw together. Two cards were dealt, and whoever’s turn it was would bet—as much as the size of the pot—if the third card would land between the first two. The pots were small at first, but they grew very quickly.

At sixteen, I got a job at a Travel Mart at a rest stop along the Garden State Parkway. Wearing my visor and name tag, I’d sell donuts, coffee, and newspapers to travelers and collect my weekly paycheck—a paycheck that I would promptly gamble at the weekly card game. All of it. And because I was one of the only ones in my group of friends old enough to have a job, I also had a bank account and a checkbook. I thought to myself, I am going to bring my checkbook to the card games and write checks to put in the pot. That felt so powerful. In a small high school with only eighty-nine students in my graduating class, everybody in my circle knew me as the guy with the checkbook. Throughout high school, I gambled on sports, horses, and cards. Still, I was an above-average student, an athlete, and president of the student council, but gambling was more important than all.

When it came time to choose a college, I wanted to attend a school that was far enough away from my parents so they couldn’t drop in unannounced yet still close enough so I could drive home when I wanted. After visiting several universities, I stepped foot onto the campus of the University of Maryland and immediately fell in love. It was the opposite of the small high school I was trying to escape, and I was in awe. I enrolled immediately and found a door-to-door sales job selling vinyl windows, roofing, siding, and decks to some of the most diverse, poverty-stricken areas in Washington, DC, and Maryland. I had a strong personality and was an excellent salesperson. I was driven and worked hard. Despite enduring dogs running through screens and biting me (true story) and having homeowners believe I was trying to swindle them into home improvements they didn’t need, I was successful and made good money. Going door to door is a true test of one’s ability to adapt to any situation thrown at them and really drives you to think on your feet! I didn’t know at the time, but it prepared me for so many other jobs I had in my life. Making good money here allowed me to continue my gambling ways.

My gambling escalated. My college roommate introduced me to his bookie from New Jersey. At the time, I didn’t understand most bookies were associated with the mafia and were not to be messed with. I was just a college kid with money to bet. I was naive and didn’t have a care in the world.

I gambled through entire paychecks and entire weekends with my roommate and any other gamblers who wanted to join. I experimented with different drugs, partied, and only attended class when it was convenient for me. Instead of going to most lectures, I’d skip them and buy TerpNotes—a nod to the Maryland Terrapins—from students who actually went to class and took scrupulous notes. They then sold those notes at the student union. I was one of their biggest customers. Then, when it was time for an exam, I’d pop as many Ritalin as needed and would stay up for days studying my precious TerpNotes.

As I partied more, I saw an opportunity to make more money to feed my gambling and party habits. So I started dealing drugs. I hadn’t even touched a drug until smoking marijuana my senior year of high school, and only a few years later, I was dealing them. It took my entrepreneurial desires to another level. One year, I asked my father to borrow his Lincoln Continental, and on spring break, I drove it from the University of Maryland to the University of New Mexico, where one of my friends was attending school. Back then, a pound of marijuana could be sold for about $1,000 in Maryland, and it could be purchased for approximately $300 in New Mexico. I saw an opportunity and took advantage.

On that trip I transported more than twenty pounds and delivered it to the purchaser. I made approximately $14,000. It was money I had never dreamed of at...