The Last of the Bally Bingo Kings By David Samuels Photo courtesy of UPI/Corbis-Bettmann In the summer of 1941, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, affectionately known as "the Little Flower” to his constituents, took leave from his normal duties to declare all-out war on an evil that threatened his city. Before an assembled crush of photographers and reporters, La Guardia spoke for a few moments and then picked up a sledgehammer. His eyes popping nearly out of his head, he flexed his shoulders, hoisted the sledgehammer into the air, and brought it crashing down on the polished glass face of the enemy: a shiny, brand- new pinball machine. As strange as the mayor's behavior might seem today, in 1941 a war against pinball was no laughing matter. Pinball machines were devices for gambling. Behind the Ballyhoo, Paces Races, and Evans Winterbrooks, as well as various precursors and ancestors of the Brite Lites, Beach Clubs, Carnival Queens, Miss Americas, Cypress Gardens, Bally Broadways, Show Times, and Silver Sails, the mayor proclaimed, lurked an underworld cabal whose hold over prostitution, bookmaking, union organizing, strike breaking, protection, construction, trucking, hauling, entertainment, nightclubs, and politics made it unclear to many citizens of New York City where the law ended and "the rackets” began. Every nickel fed to the machines, La Guardia warned, was a contribution to the racketeers, to men like Frank Costello and Charles "Lucky” Luciano; Meyer Lansky and Benjamin "Bugsy” Siegel; Jacob "Gurrah” Shapiro and Louis "Lepke” Buchalter, who terrorized the garment district and ran Murder, Inc., the nationwide murder-for-hire syndicate; and Abner "Longy” Zwillman, who ran the territories across the Hudson River, from Newark all the way down to Cape May. New York would remain pinball-free for 35 years. But despite La Guardia's campaign against the rackets, illegal gambling machines did return to New York City. This was thanks in large part to Uncle Myron, a short, stocky man with an easy smile, a hip-rolling strut, and the excitable air of a kid in junior high with a stash of Playboys at the bottom of his locker. The machine that La Guardia smashed, Myron likes to recall, belonged to his father's partners. "We grew up remembering the legend of Mayor La Guardia banning pinballs in New York City, in 1941, and how the ban spread across the Hudson River to infect Newark several months later,” he says. "The stories of how the games were stored in warehouses while the heat was on, and the shipping of the games down to places like Baltimore, all became part of our legend and lore.” The great dream of Myron's life was to turn New York City into the world's largest slot-machine parlor. This enterprise, which began in the summer of 1977 and ended with Myron's incarceration in 1995, was an act of historical imagination and organizational skill involving hustlers and street operators from the city's ethnic enclaves--Cubans, Dominicans, Greeks, Russians, Israelis, and others. "I had a touch, I had an international flavor,” he says one afternoon as we drive through the ruined Weequahic section of Newark in a rented car, in search of the lot where the warehouse of the Runyon Sales Company, his father's old firm, was located. "You have to remember, I started in 1959 traveling the world, speaking seven, eight languages, and who's got my style? In all modesty, the answer is nobody. I was bringing in guys from all over the world. I brought The Greek from Greece. I brought Jack the Ripper, Adrian the Irishman, Jack Charles with the Big Red Nose from England. There was Peachy from Argentina. And the Hungarian Kid, who worked for the Cuban in Union City.” Local operators rented Bally Bingos, Quarterhorses, Lucky-8 Lines, and Cherry Master video-poker machines from Myron for $50 a week and put them in virtually every ethnic bar, club, coffeehouse, and bodega in the five boroughs--contributing greatly to the 200,000 machines in New York at the time. For a while, at least, everyone made out. That a bootlegger's son would make good on the past by transforming New York City into a giant casino--more than 35 years after Mayor La Guardia went after the family pinball table with a sledgehammer--suggests a rare degree of historical feeling in a man whom federal sentencing reports depict as a longtime associate of the Genovese crime family. But that is only part of the story. Myron was loyal to the world of his fathers, of the Jewish gambling machine operators, Jewish bookies, hustlers and thieves, strong-arm men and numbers bosses, all the way up to the boss of bosses of Newark, Abner "Longy” Zwillman. Known as Longy because of his height--he was over six feet tall--Zwillman, one of four Newark-born brothers (a movie projectionist, a shoestore owner, a gangster, and a communist), ran the numbers and the bookmakers and bars and handpicked the judges and councilmen. It was important to Longy that his associates have class. They wore alligator-suede shoes, cashmere suits, white-on- white shirts with their initials monogrammed on the pockets, and wide- brim hats, their hair slicked back underneath. They bought Cadillacs for their wives. On Saturday nights they took their families out to top-of- the-line spots like Myron Hoffman's Treat Restaurant and Bar, or Ming's Chinese. On Sunday afternoons they watched baseball on TV and played cards in the parlor rooms of their new suburban homes in Maplewood or West Orange, where Longy installed his society bride, Mary Mendels Steinbach, in a modern mansion that made her the envy of racketeers' wives for miles around. In the world that Longy and his associates created, Judaism and the rackets were intertwined in often untraditional ways. The Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year, for example, invariably fell during the World Series, the event with the biggest sports-betting handle on the American calendar. The solution the bookmakers found was a special prayer service known as "the Bookmaker's Yizkor.” At a predetermined time during the service, a line of cars would pull up to the synagogue and two dozen Jewish bookmakers would emerge, go down to the basement, and wait for the rabbi. The rabbi would excuse himself from his congregation in order to recite the Yizkor, the traditional prayer for the dead, and would then return to his congregation. The bookmakers of Newark would return to their bets. The next day, a package of hundred-dollar bills would be delivered to the synagogue. During the Depression Longy's boys beat up on the local Nazis. On Passover they distributed matzos to the poor. In the early 1950s, Longy displayed his powers to an even greater effect by choosing an otherwise unremarkable dentist named Meyer Ellenstein to be Newark's first-ever Jewish mayor. < P> The Runyon Sales Company, which Myron's father Sugie founded in 1936, distributed jukeboxes, amusements, slots, and other coin-operated machines. The machine business was a natural for Sugie and his partners: It required muscle, and it allowed for the presence of large sums of cash. It is also a useful model of the way in which the Jewish racketeers mixed legal and illegal businesses with interethnic partnerships--a practice that began during Prohibition, with the alliance between Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello, and was solidified in 1931, when Lansky provided Jewish gunmen to Luciano in order to eliminate the old-time Sicilian bosses "Joe the Boss” Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. The killings of the "Mustache Petes” cleared the way for the National Crime Syndicate, organized by Lansky and headed by Luciano. The syndicate was formally brought into being in the spring of 1934, a few months after the end of Prohibition. For the old-time racket guys, Jews and Italians alike, who grew up running booze and making book, and who moved their families up out of the slums to modern houses with lush green lawns in the suburbs of New Jersey, the machine business was a portion of the American dream. It was a business they could pass on to their children. On weekends, Myron would polish the old AMI jukeboxes in the Runyon warehouse. When he was 15, he made collections from the jukeboxes, or "piccolos,” in the black bars and clubs on Springfield Avenue, and installed wall boxes in diners at 3 a.m., when traffic was slowest. He would finish by 6, take the bus home, and fall into bed. Myron's formal initiation into the machine business took place when he was 21. The year was 1959, and Myron had recently graduated from college. "My father took me here to the warehouse,” he says, pointing over the dashboard to the boarded-up one-story brick building that housed Runyon Sales, "which was stuffed top to bottom with machines, with the AMIs and Bally Jumbos, with Turf Kings and Champions and Lexingtons, United Shuffle Alleys, Flashes, Fireballs, Triple Strikes, and Ball Bowlers, which were these fourteen- and eighteen-foot miniature bowling alleys that used to do big business in the bars. My idea was to open up the market in Europe, which was something that our cousin in Brooklyn had tried but failed about ten years earlier. So my father bought me a ticket, put me on a plane at Idlewild Airport, which is now JFK, and handed me an envelope with $3,000 in American Express traveler's checks. He said to go make an export business, and not to bother coming back home until the warehouse was empty.” Myron landed in Lisbon the next day and spent three months traveling through Portugal and Spain, to Zurich, to Hamburg, and to Antwerp, Belgium, which was a free port and the center of all business in Europe. By the time he was done, he had sold the warehouse several times over. Yet if 1959 was the beginning of Myron's career in the machine business, it also marked the end of the life that his father and his associates had known. On February 27 of that year, Longy Zwillman was found dead in a storage closet in the basement of his home in West Orange, a 40- foot length of electrical cord wrapped around his neck. The death was ruled a suicide, a verdict that surprised some observers, who pointed out that Zwillman, whose hands had been tied behind his back with wire, would have had to throw the cord over the overhead ceiling beam and hold it tight until he strangled. The buzz in the underworld was that Zwillman, who owed perhaps as much as $700,000 in back taxes, had been acting strange, directing his chauffeur to take late-night drives to unfamiliar places, and that he might have been preparing to roll over for the feds. The man who assumed Zwillman's place as master of the New Jersey underworld was an Italian, Gerry Catena. For the Jews in the rackets, the message was clear: It was time to get out. In 1962, Myron's father Sugie was approached by Bill O'Donnell, the president of Bally's, which manufactured the machines that Runyon distributed. Ray Maloney, the founder and owner of Bally's, had died, and his family wanted to sell. The deal Sugie put together was the perfect exit to a lifetime on the dangerous margin that separated the rackets from the legitimate world. The Runyon partners would buy Bally's from Maloney's family, take the company public, sell his stock, and retire. In 1964, just as the deal was about to go through, Sugie suffered a heart attack and died. His partners made fortunes and retired to Florida like other successful businessmen the world over. Sugie's wife was provided for. Uncle Myron was left with the machines. Families of the Italian Mafia, with soldiers and buttons and made guys pledging their lives to bosses, had more in common with the feudal Sicilian past than they did with the free-floating bottom-line alliances favored by the Jewish racketeers of the 1940s. And as federal pressure on the underworld increased, the lines between legal and illegal business became ever more sharply drawn. In 1951, the Johnson Act banned the interstate shipment of slots. In 1963, the Eastland Act extended the original ban to include bingo machines, a move prompted by the Gottleib Machine Company, the Chicago-based pinball-machine manufacturer, which hoped to eliminate a market dominated by Bally's. In a world dominated by strong national governments and multi-national corporations, there seemed to be little room for a small, independent machine operator like Myron. When bingo machines were banned from Kentucky in 1966, Myron bought up all the machines he could find and sold them to Cyril Stein of Phonographic Equipment in London. (Stein was later the head of Ladbroke's, the largest legal bookmaking operation in the world.) Myron sold machines to Japan and ran operations in Colombia, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil. In 1969, when bingo machines were declared illegal in Japan, Myron took a job running casinos in Nigeria for his father's old partners at Bally's, who were happy to reach out to Sugie's younger son. It was when he was driving home from one of his overseas trips, on the road from Kennedy Airport through Queens and Manhattan, that Myron had the idea that would consume the next two decades of his life. "I saw New York in the same light that I saw the rest of the world where I was doing business,” he explains with a smile. "It was the biggest third- world nation on earth, except that you had all the different communities together in one place.” Myron contacted two old-time machine operators in the Bronx, a Jew named Sam and an Italian named Whitey--"dese and dose guys, maybe seventy-five years old, who talked out of the sides of their mouths with three-day growths of stubble.” He also hired Angelo Pinball, a street operator, to set up the machines. Their first customer was the Gotti/Gambino boss in the Bronx, who wanted machines for a mob- run gambling club on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx; the boss paid for the machines in part, Myron remembers, with counterfeit money. As the business took off, Myron bought a truckload of old-fashioned Bally Bingos--the same machines his father used to sell--from a Jewish operator in Montreal and placed them in Dominican neighborhoods in Washington Heights, where bingo was still a part of the local culture. His new warehouse, in Hillside, New Jersey, was barely a stone's throw from the Runyon warehouse where his father started him in the business two decades before. New York City's appetite for gambling machines, unslaked since the days of La Guardia, was bigger than Myron had ever dreamed. "We brought a trailer in here one time with slots,” he remembers, pointing out the garage door of a two-story warehouse that once supplied gambling machines to New York and now supplies solace of a more spiritual order via the offices of the Logos Love Christian Center. "It was loaded so high that it was lifting the building off its foundation. And it was pouring rain, so we had to let the air out of the tires as we unloaded the slots in order to let the building down. Outside, we would have fifteen guys parked around the corner waiting to take machines out--so when two hundred slots came in, twenty-five minutes later two hundred slots would go out. And guys would be waiting for their machines, and whenever there was a shortage of product, fistfights would break out. It was absolutely brazen. At the height of the business we were taking in about $80,000 a week.” On Mondays, every operator from the five boroughs and from the industrial cities of northern New Jersey would come to Myron's Hillside office with bags of money to settle political beefs: Who insulted who? Who dissed who? Who decked who? Who jumped whose locations? For the operators in ethnic neighborhoods, the machine business functioned much the same way that it had in Myron's father's time, as a way for tough guys with a risk-taking streak to set up a business without papers, leases, or access to the training and capital available to the English- speaking majority. Myron's success was also a bonanza for the broken-down Jewish gangsters of New Jersey, many of whom were now in their seventies and eighties and had been looking for work in the rackets since Longy Zwillman died. The president of Myron's company was an 80-year-old gangster named Max "Puddy” Hinkes--"not somebody very appreciated by anybody,” Myron recalls. Hinkes ran the numbers in Newark when Myron was a child. "Sid, an old-timer, came to me and used a very effective line,” Myron says. "He said, ‘Myron, help out Puddy, even though he is no f---ing good and nobody has a good word to say about him--we have to help him out, because it is a disgrace for the Jews that we don't help out one of our own. So see if you can give him a job.'” For his services as president of Myron's company--Western Hemisphere Amusements, Atlantic and Pacific, American Israeli Electronics; the name changed every time the warehouse was raided--Puddy Hinkes was paid $10,000 a year, a sum he earned in full by his performance before a federal judge in 1989. When asked by a suspicious prosecutor to describe his presidential duties, Puddy replied that he answered the phone, he sometimes went to the post office, he read the newspapers, and then, when he felt tired, he went to sleep. The prosecutor then asked, with a sarcastic tone, "Then in fact, Mr. Hinkes, you do very little as president of the company?” Puddy, Myron recalls, replied in the form of a question: "Mr. Prosecutor, for $10,000 a year, what would you do?” Throughout the 1980s, as the Bally Bingos gave way to Quarterhorse racing machines, Lucky-8 Lines, and Cherry Master video-poker slots, Myron's business prospered. By the late '80s, however, the unwritten law of the underworld had begun to catch up with the man who was known throughout New York as "the Jew from Jersey.” The demands of his street bosses increased. There were unmarked cars outside the Hillside warehouse, and men in suits wrote down license plates of every car and truck that stopped nearby. The warehouse was bugged. Paranoia set in. As raids by state and local police gave way to a federal effort to eliminate the illegal gambling business, it was only a matter of time until Myron was convicted and sent to jail. "What's left for a wiseguy to do?” he asks with a sad smile as we drive through the ruined city of Newark. "History caught up with all of us. The Jews went first. The Italians perpetrated it for another generation through nepotism. And now it's all drugs and money, and there's no need for our kind of history anymore.” He pauses for breath, and puts his hand on my knee and gives it a squeeze--me, the nice Jewish boy who likes to hear Uncle Myron's stories about what the family was like before college educations, better opportunities, and houses in the suburbs made us good Americans like everyone else. "Maybe tonight I'll stop off at the Calabria Restaurant in town where the old-timers my age from Newark like to go,” he says. "It's another world--‘Hey, how ya doin'?' And we knew their mothers, and we knew their fathers, we all grew up together. God, it was such a terrific feeling.” We sit in the car for a moment outside Newark's Penn Station, an elegant gray-stone monument to the vanished past of a vanquished city, where hungry panhandlers stand in the dark eyeing the uniformed policemen who guard the brightly lit brass doors for the harried commuters hurrying back to New York. "What I created was the last piece of moral possibility in our business,” Myron says. "I saw in the paper the other day that Mayor Giuliani was going to turn Governor's Island into what? A top-of-the-line casino. A gambling joint. Now you tell me: How is that any different from what I was doing? The truth is that it's all the same, and it was ultimately too big, too vast, for the government to allow the guys like me to have it.” Current Issue | What's New? | Subscribe | Search | Contact © Copyright 1998, Civilization Magazine All rights reserved.