GAMBLING: How to Win from a Bookie

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In their zeal to dredge up the facts about bookmaking in Florida, the Senate's committee investigating gambling last week chatted with J. Myer Schine, a stolid, sharply dressed man of affairs, whose necklace of eight hotels and about 135 movie theaters includes a beach-front palace in Atlantic City, and the cheaply expensive Roney Plaza in Miami Beach.

Soon after he bought the Roney Plaza in 1943, Owner Schine discovered that the place was creeping with "sneak bookies," who hung around picking up bets where they could find them. As the orderly owner of a real classy hotel, he knew this was a situation which should be corrected—what the Roney Plaza needed was a reliable, responsible bookie, not a bunch of fly-by-nights. So Myer Schine eventually made a deal with Frank Erickson, the Mr. Big of U.S. bookmaking, who went to jail after a Senate subcommittee got through with him (TIME, July 3). Schine gave the Roney Plaza bookmaking concession to Erickson for $45,000.

Before the deal went through, Schine told the committee, a Miami Beach detective dropped in and advised Schine: "I would say you should not let the concession go to Erickson ... We would rather you would give it to the local syndicate." This suggestion, said Schine, made him indignant. He told the detective that he had no right to tell him what bookie to install in his hotel. After all, as the detective well knew, bookmaking is illegal in Florida.

But two or three weeks later, Schine continued, the Miami Beach police put Erickson's bookies out of business, and the Roney Plaza naturally had to take a bookie from the local syndicate. In that case, reporters wanted to know later, did Hotelman Schine keep Erickson's $45,000? Why, of course, replied Schine.