Bookies and Gamers
“I realize that Cliff has again broken the law. I realize that this probably won’t be the last time unless every sport, including turtle racing, is outlawed.”
Nghia Dung Luu liked to tell strangers he sewed garments in Tukwila. And apparently did quite well at it. So well, in fact, that his associates and federal agents bestowed the title of “Ong Chu” on him, Vietnamese for “Mr. Boss.” He earned it not for his success with the sewing machine, but his day spent on the telephone. In 1999 he became what the feds said was Seattle’s all-time bookmaking kingpin, running a $300,000-a-month college and professional sports betting operation out of the phone rooms at his Bellevue home and his brother-in-law’s apartment in Renton.
The short, slight forty-nine-year-old immigrated to the United States and Seattle in the eighties. Within a decade he was a great success at taking, and winning, bets. He amassed more than $2 million in property bought with his profits—all of which he signed over to the government in a plea bargain. It included the house in Bellevue, some of its furniture, and most of its home entertainment electronics; a nineteen-unit apartment building in Seattle’s Rainier Valley; two cars and a pickup truck; $138,310 in cash, $231,045 in stock accounts, and $7,301 in bank accounts; and two dozen gold and diamond jewelry items, including three eye-candy bracelets: one with 27 diamonds, another with 147 diamonds, and a third with 159 diamonds.
Ong Chu had been on the cops’ radar since the early nineties, when he was already flush—worth perhaps $1 million, but, as part of his cover, living in subsidized housing. He was arrested several times early on—once after vice cops placed at least $18,000 in undercover bets and lost most of it—but he was not prosecuted at the time. Though a bust is usually enough of a hint to find another line of work, the confident boss went on booking and talking: an FBI wiretap in 1998 picked up 974 calls in nine days. Translators listened to Luu take his agents’ action and argue in Vietnamese over money: “You owe $10,920. You don’t rip me off!”
No one is certain how much the operation won, paid out, or earned in vigorish—the cost, usually 10 percent, a bookie charges for taking bets. But, by another measure of his wealth, Ong Chu seemed as successful as a Microsoft manager: his personal tax return for 1997 showed $36.2 million in stock trades—buying and selling at a rate of $3 million a month.
Other Seattle bookies say they were impressed. But “he broke two rules,” said Tommy Ryan, who had successfully dabbled in betting for almost twenty-five years. “Never get greedy, and never think they’re not after you.”
Cliff Winkler Jr., who was one of Ong Chu’s predecessors, seconded that. “They” were always after Winkler, and getting caught had left him with a $1 million IRS tab, he said. He also endured enough stress to require open-heart surgery in the eighties.
Winkler, unlike Ong Chu, was more of a traditionalist and considered bookmaking an irresistible art form. He worked the phone hard between jaunts to pay winners and hunt down losers, and tried not to be greedy about it. He banked thousands of dollars weekly by expertly balancing his books—handing off some bets to other bookies so the wagering didn’t weigh too heavily on the outcome of just one game. A balanced book that pays off winners and losers equally guarantees the bookmaker a profit from the vigorish.
“I’m sure,” said Winkler’s attorney Murray Guterson after his client was hauled before a federal judge in Seattle, “if Damon Runyon were telling you about Cliff Winkler, he would assure you that, just like Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, his marker is always good. No less than Benny Southstreet or Nicely-Nicely Johnson should Cliff Winkler be a part of the Broadway of the 1930s.” Federal prosecutor Ron Neubauer thought Winkler was incorrigible, though he seemed to say so with grudging admiration. “I realize that Cliff has again broken the law. I realize that this probably won’t be the last time unless every sport, including turtle racing, is outlawed.”
The bookmaking approaches used by Winkler and Ong Chu have been replaced by progress—in particular, online betting. It is done both legally and illegally, and attracts millions with a computer and credit card. With fewer traditional practitioners, though, that likely leaves the old-timers’ records forever intact.
That could be said as well for a onetime bartender at the exclusive Harbor Club in downtown Seattle who may have won, in absentia, Seattle’s biggest illegal bet ever.
A club member says it went down thusly:
In the late eighties, the private dining and social club initiated a betting board for a Super Bowl game, offering squares to members for $1,000 each. Like the legal one-hundred-square dollar boards you see in bars, the winner is determined by matching two numbers to team scores at the end of each quarter. But this board was considerably different. For high rollers only, it would pay $25,000 a quarter—$100,000 overall.
The day before the game, all the squares were filled in, the numbers drawn, and the money and the board then seemingly locked away. The bartender turned off the lights and went home.
After, that is, he opened the safe and took the $100,000 with him.
The club was closed on Super Bowl day. But the winners—three of them, one winning two quarters—showed up the next day to collect.
No money. No bartender. No answer at his home.
He was gone, never to be found.
Police said they’d heard this story but never bothered to try to confirm it. For one thing, no one had lodged an official complaint.
“What can they say?” a vice detective asked. “‘This guy has $100,000 that we bet illegally? Arrest him so you can take us to jail?’”
In his book, said the cop, “It was the perfect crime.”
That’s something another career criminal named Smooth is never likely to hear.