CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He was absolutely the Babe Ruth of bookmakers.
—Mike Barnicle, describing “Doc” Sagansky
On July 29, 1932, a group of Boston police officers huddled quietly in a room on the fifteenth floor of the Hotel Manger, anxiously awaiting the arrival of a group of gangsters who were expected to hold a meeting in the large suite next door. The hotel was located at 76 Causeway Street near North Station, and the detectives had been tipped off that racketeers would be meeting there to discuss how to control the pool and lottery rackets in the city.
The intelligence they received turned out to be correct: One by one, the gangsters arrived at the hotel and walked into the suite for what was supposed to be a secret, closed-door meeting. As soon as they were assembled, Sergeant James V. Crowley burst into the room, followed by the other officers. A hoodlum who was serving as a lookout at the door threw his pistol down on the floor when an officer grabbed him. Other men in the conference room put their hands in the air, as the police ordered. Four patrol wagons had to be called to take more than two dozen suspects into custody. Among those arrested were North End crime bosses Joseph Lombardo, Phil Bruccola, Frank Cuccharia, and legendary book-maker Harry “Doc” Sagansky.
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Born in 1898 and raised in Boston’s West End, Sagansky graduated from Tufts College Dental School in 1918 and practiced dentistry for a while in Scollay Square. But he eventually found his calling in bookmaking, and that’s how he made a fortune. (He amassed enough wealth that in 1963 he established the Dr. Harry Sagansky Fellowship Trust to subsidize tuition for graduate students at Brandeis University.)
Sagansky also ran a loan agency. In 1943 Congressman James Michael Curley was revealed to be among his clients. This came to light after police raided Sagansky’s home in Brookline and found a life insurance policy belonging to Curley with Sagansky named as beneficiary. It turned out that Curley had borrowed $8,500 from Sagansky and used the policy as security for the loan.
Sagansky resided at 168 Gardner Road in Brookline, an affluent town bordering Boston. He was a dentist by training, a bookmaker by profession, but his occupation was listed as “proprietor” in the town records. And there was some truth to that: Sagansky was part owner of two nightclubs in Boston, Club Mayfair and the Latin Quarter. (Both clubs were operated by Sumner Redstone’s father, Mickey.)
In the 1950s, an investigatory committee led by US Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee listed Sagansky among the top bookies in the country.
Acclaimed news photographer Stanley Forman once recalled getting sent to cover a raid at the 411 Lounge on Columbus Avenue in the South End. Afterward he went to the federal courthouse in Post Office Square and got into an elevator with Doc Sagansky.
Recalling his encounter with Sagansky, Forman said:
“He was smoking a cigar and he turned to me, flicking his ashes and said, ‘If you take my picture I will burn your eyes out.’ I still have my eyes, so you know what I did not do that day.”
Sagansky’s daughter, the late Marilyn Riseman, a well-known socialite in Boston, got to see a different side of him. In an interview with Boston Globe reporter Christopher Muther, she expressed her disdain for the term “bookie.”
“I hate that expression,” she said. “Bookie to me is a cheeseball.”
According to Riseman, Sagansky never let his children gamble. “He always had tremendous principles,” she said. “I always felt like he was more principled than the men who were in legitimate business.”
Indeed, Sagansky was a man of principle. When he was ninety-one years old he was sent to prison for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury.