Interference (56 page)

“It's like the stock market. The real money isn't being made by guys who are trying to pick stocks that are going up so much. It's being made by guys who can arbitrage, who can buy and sell at a profit, immediately. That's basically the way the game is here. I thought it would be great if you could sleep until noon, drink a few beers, pick a few games, and collect a few tickets. I think most people come to Vegas for that type of life-style, but it doesn't work that way. If you think it does work that way, well, there are some people who spend several years going broke and getting into money, and then going broke again—because they think that's the life-style. I just didn't think it was for me.”

Roxborough's mentor is Herb Lambeck, better known in Vegas as Herbie Hoops, because he was to basketball oddsmaking what Bob Martin was to the football weekly line. “I wanted to learn how to make a line, but no one ever wanted to work with me,” Roxborough says. “With Herb, it was a real close-knit thing. He listened to me. I used to try to do some work for him, so I
wasn't just a guy taking up his time. There was no remuneration for it. I did it to try to keep me on top of the game, so that I would learn more about it. The first time I was paid for making a line was when I started my own business in 1981.”

Although most people have been amazed at his rapid success, Roxborough is philosophical about it. “I think it was the type of thing where I was doing some work that was good. But, more important, I was in the right place at the right time. I think what happened was that I was providing a service that probably no one else was. In other words, I had made a business out of just line making. I had an office. I had a spot where you could actually reach me or somebody from six-thirty in the morning to seven at night. No one had ever thought of doing it that way.

“The [legal sports-gambling] business was exploding in Las Vegas, and there weren't a lot of managers to fill these new race and sports books. Because of that, people would call up who didn't have as much expertise as previous oddsmakers, and they needed people to help them. We had an office that was available that did that. And we were here and doing a pretty good job for the people we were servicing. And we got on a big wave.

“We provide services to licensed [casino] operators. What makes our service unique from others is that we are oddsmakers, so we are actually making the point spreads. We are not copying them from somebody else. The other thing that makes us unique is that we only deal with licensed operators. You have to be licensed by some governmental agency. We also do a place in the Caribbean and a place in England. So that makes us a little different too. In other words, we will not provide odds to private individuals. We will not go across state lines to other people.

“So we furnish casinos in Nevada with odds that they can post on betting events that we feel are going to get a good cross section of the betting public. We don't want to get too esoteric. I don't do something like a small-time fight or collegiate high-jumping contest. I deal with those sports that have broad public interest. And that is in the best interest of the casinos because they'll attract enough action to create a profit. The NFL has the broadest public interest by far.”

Contrasting his operation to that of Bobby Martin, Roxborough continues, “We do it a little differently. The man-to-man betting was a good way to do it when the circle was smaller. But I don't have good contacts among the bettors. I don't know who they are. I follow the way the line goes, but I don't follow the
people who are betting it. It doesn't make any difference to me whether Joe Blow makes the game move from three to four. I just know that it has moved from three to four. And that's my major concern. I really don't have contact with what's going on with the books and the people.

“In years past, when someone would make a line, like Bob Martin, who is the legendary oddsmaker, he would think about it, and then he would ask a couple of his associates what they thought of his line. And they would tell him by betting money into it—which is a great way to have an opinion. But times have changed.

“What I do now is have people working for me, and we all work independently of one another. When we create odds, my checks and balances are the people who work for me. And the idea is to get everybody to work independently, not sharing anybody else's work or power ratings. And that's how I come up with a diversified opinion—as opposed to the way Bob Martin did it. So, basically, the result is the same—we're getting different opinions. We're just going about it in different ways.”

Roxborough says that history has no impact on the odds he posts. “I can't remember what happened last week. The way I see it is that the bettors are completely different than they were ten, fifteen years ago. Right now, we have all these guys in a stock-marketlike atmosphere where it's sort of an efficient market. If the spread is six and goes to seven and a half, there's a pretty good chance it's not going to go higher. A lot of people who lay the six, they're going to take the seven and a half back [on the other team, thus trying to middle]. So we actually see these efficiency markets within the betting. I think that's the new wave bettor. If you go down there and take a look at the bettors and these operations with walkie-talkies and clipboards and beepers, they're all more into arbitraging than they are in selecting winners.”

Also, cutting against the traditional wisdom, player injuries don't receive much emphasis when Roxborough sets the line. “Injuries are generally overrated. I don't feel the need to go out and find this information. You can't have every injury. There're ninety-six college teams we follow. We're trying to get every injury we can. We're not going to have them all. Somebody may know someone in some region of the country who knows about an injury we don't know about.”

When I asked him about his own inside information, he replied
, “We don't talk to correspondents outside of town. We just talk to people here in town. One of the reasons I don't like to talk to people out of town is I don't know any gamblers outside of town. And unless a guy is a gambler, I don't think he really knows what we're interested in. A fan's scouting report is totally useless.”

Roxborough posts his weekly line at the Stardust. “The Stardust traditionally has done this. There is no prize for going first [being the first sports book to post the line]. So it's not financially advantageous to go first because there may be some flaws in the line. But the Stardust creates a lot of publicity for itself and has made a name for itself this way. I think that's one of the reasons why they continue to go first. But it is risky.”

When I asked Roxborough whether he or his oddsmaking operations have ever been influenced by the organized-crime gambling syndicate, he replied sharply, “No, and there are reasons. I don't see how, if you put out a bad line, it will help a team win or lose a game—if it's just a couple of points. Plus you have the public who is going to be betting into the line anyway. I think that since the hotel casinos have been involved in the sports-gambling business, there have been changes.”

Roxborough says that he doesn't stay in touch with Warren Welsh of NFL Security directly. “Warren Welsh has a contact in Las Vegas, who is here full-time. I know him. His job is to inform Warren if there are any unusual line movements. I work with this guy.”
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The oddsmaker added that he has taken NFL games off the boards—but has always put them back up by game time. “I didn't take them off because of injuries, unless it was a key player. I didn't take them off because of too much one-sided betting. Let's say Dan Marino [the star quarterback for the Miami Dolphins] hurts his elbow. And there was a fifty-fifty chance that he would play or not play. We don't know what to do. Between his playing and not playing might make a four-point difference in the line. If he's out, fine, we know what to do. If he's going to play, that's fine, we know what to do. But if we don't know whether he's going to play or not, that's a problem. And we might take the game off the boards until we get a further medical report.”

Citing a specific incident that caused him to take an NFL game off the board, Roxborough remembers, “Somebody thought that Dan Marino [who was getting ready to play New
England in 1985] had been arrested for drunk driving the night before. The story was so unbelievable that I didn't want to give it any credence—except the number [the point spread] was moving all over town. So we ended up having to scratch the game.

“We hated to take it off, but it was Sunday morning, and we just didn't know what to do. So we started taking some bets on it, and it kept moving and moving. And it turned out that the rumor was totally unfounded, and the game went right back to the number it should have been. That was the craziest rumor I'd ever heard. I still don't know how it got started.”

48 “I'm so fucking glad I'm out”

BY MID-1984, AFTER suffering two heart attacks in the past three years, San Diego Chargers owner Gene Klein was increasingly becoming involved in thoroughbred racing—and later built Del Rayo Stables in Rancho Santa Fe, just north of San Diego near the Del Mar racetrack.
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Klein told me that his wife, Joyce, was responsible for getting him interested in the business. “I went to the track, and I ran into [former Chicago Bears star linebacker] Dick Butkus, who owned a few horses. He said a guy named Wayne Lukas was his trainer. So one day, I said, ‘Maybe I'll buy a racehorse.' So I called Wayne Lukas, and I said, ‘Wayne, if you ever find a horse that you think is a decent racehorse, give me a call.'

“A couple of weeks later, he said he had a filly who had never run but he thought she'd be a winner. I told him to buy her. The first time out, she ran fifth. I thought, ‘Oh shit.' He says, ‘Whoa, whoa, this is just a break-in race.' The next time she won. I told him if he found any more to call me. One day, I saw him at the track. He was very down and I asked him what was wrong. He said one of his favorite clients had just died, and her kids wanted him to sell her stable of horses right away. I asked him for the number. He gave it to me, and I bought them. I started with two hundred horses.”

Describing the difference between horse racing and the NFL, Klein said, “You've got stars and superstars in horse racing just as you do in football. I don't think the fans understand how
hard you work to build a football team. You draft, you have training camp. It's a whole year's preparation. You blow one important game, and it's over. In horse racing, if you lose a big race, you have two more next week.

“But then only one of twenty-eight teams will win the Super Bowl every year. That's a lock. There are fifty thousand thoroughbreds born every year. Only twenty can run in the Derby and only one can win it. And you get one shot at it. I mean, what are the odds of winning the Kentucky Derby?”
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Weary of the headaches of professional football, Klein sold his interest in the Chargers to multimillionaire Alex G. Spanos in August 1984. Klein says that he doesn't miss football at all. “I am so fucking glad I'm out,” he sighs with genuine relief and a broad smile. “I pick up the sports page every day, and there're two more guys getting suspended for cocaine use. Some of these players are assholes …

“It was a complicated deal with Alex. It was for somewhere between eighty million and eighty-five million dollars, based on a hundred percent of the club.”

Spanos is the son of a Greek immigrant who came to this country and opened a bakery. Baking bread wasn't enough for young Spanos, so he set out on his own, building an empire worth nearly half a billion dollars.

Also a horse-racing enthusiast, Spanos is the owner of A. G. Spanos Construction—one of the largest construction firms in the United States with corporate headquarters in Stockton, California, and Las Vegas, where he owns a string of office buildings and apartment complexes. His company is the largest builder of federally subsidized housing in the country.

Claiming to travel an average of six thousand miles a week, Spanos flies around the United States in his nine-passenger Lockheed Jetstar, watching over his investments that stretch from Stockton to Tampa, Florida.
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In whatever free time he has left, he plays golf with Bob Hope, Gerald Ford, and Telly Savalas.

Spanos and entertainer Pat Boone attempted but failed to purchase the Oakland franchise in the American Basketball Association in 1967. Earlier, Spanos was jilted in his effort to buy a minor-league baseball team. In 1974, he bid for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers but was outbid by Tom McCloskey and then Hugh Culverhouse, after McCloskey could not come up with the franchise fee. In 1977, Spanos made a strong push for the San Francisco
49ers but was outbid again by Culverhouse's business associate Edward J. DeBartolo.

Five years later, after considering the purchase of a USFL franchise, Spanos purchased 10 percent of the Chargers from Barron Hilton. Klein sold his controlling interest to Spanos two years later. Hilton still maintained a 10 percent interest in the San Diego team.

Meantime—despite his control of two major casinos in Las Vegas, the Las Vegas Hilton and the Flamingo Hilton—Barron Hilton was having troubles on the East Coast. In the midst of negotiations for the sale of a portion of his stock in the Chargers, Hilton had been making plans to build a $270 million hotel/ casino in Atlantic City. While filing his application to the New Jersey Casino Control Commission for his casino license, state investigators discovered Hilton's links to labor lawyer Sidney Korshak, who had been identified as an organized-crime figure in 1978 by the California attorney general's office.
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“It is quite evident that over the years [Korshak] has made good contacts with very powerful politicians …” according to a commission staff report. “Korshak's list of past and present associates reads like a who's who of prominent Southern Californians.”