The high desert of Nevada, in July, scorching and persistent, reduces energetic strivers to partially melted zombies incapable of clear thought or decisive action. Algorithm Andy, however, isn’t one of those people. He seems immune to the searing sun and the Mojave-borne siroccos that make the great outdoors feel like an industrial hair dryer. It’s his first trip to Sin City, and he’s like a child at an amusement park, animated and awestruck, bursting with more energy than an adult man should be allowed to have.
“Are you on crystal meth?” I ask him.
“High on life,” he says, laughing way too loudly.
I’ve agreed to meet him for a Vegas weekend of harmless blackjack and baseball betting, which is my computer programmer’s newest recreation, an “intellectual challenge” that apparently stimulates him in ways that teaching MIT’s undergraduate Einsteins can’t match. “Baseball is all numbers, Michael,” he announces with a cocked eyebrow. “A cornucopia of statistics. Very beatable.”
“I’m sure it is. I mean, I know it is. The Poker Players kill baseball every summer.”
“So why not the Brain Trust? Or if they’re not interested, why not the Hollywood Boys?” Andy asks.
We’re at the MGM Grand, at the Wolfgang Puck Café, near the sportsbook. I put down my smoked-salmon and cream-cheese pizza and lean forward emphatically. “Because, Andy, a guy’s gotta have a life. There’s so much more to living than making money. I mean, even a man like Big Daddy Rick Matthews—even he needs a vacation from all this,” I say, gesturing broadly at the casino around us.
“I understand, Michael. On the other hand, if you were an academic and not a fabulously wealthy type, and there was a bunch of money lying in the street, and all you had to do was bend down to scoop it up, wouldn’t you?” He smiles crookedly and starts to laugh, a wheezy coughing sound, like someone hyperventilating. I haven’t seen Andy in person for almost twenty years; he looks just as I remember him from high school, albeit slightly better dressed and with a significantly smaller Jewish afro. I have great affection for the man, even if I’m incapable of comprehending the mathematical mysteries that swirl inside his brilliant mind. I don’t want to hurt him. But I can’t help him.
“Look, Andy, you’re more than welcome to take a crack at baseball on your own. I’ll lend you some money if you need a bankroll to get started. I’ll even advise you on how to get your money down safely. But I can’t be a sports bettor all year round. I’d slash my wrists. Seriously, I’m thinking of retiring this season. Not just taking a break. Quitting.”
“You’re kidding!” Andy says. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m just tired of…I don’t know. I just feel like I should be doing something more constructive with my life.”
“Like what? Writing the great American novel?” he says sarcastically.
“Even the mediocre one,” I joke. “Anything where I’m actually making something, doing something productive, not just piling up the money. Sports betting, gambling—I might as well be trading soybean futures.”
Andy nods thoughtfully. “I get it.”
We momentarily sit in silence. I feel like I’ve ruined Andy’s vacation. “You’re more than welcome to continue on your own, of course.”
He shrugs. “Knowing the right teams to bet on doesn’t do any good if you can’t actually make the bets. You know, Michael? Dealing with the bookmakers and the money transfers. All that.”
“I could always introduce you to people who know how to do that kind of stuff. And I’m sure they’d be delighted to know a guy as smart as you,” I say, grinning.
“You’re really retiring?” Andy asks. “I’m skeptical.”
“I haven’t decided. Maybe I just need to recharge my batteries, get some distance. Stay the hell out of casinos!”
We both chuckle. “Well, I guess this is sort of anticlimactic, then,” Algo Andy says, pulling a neatly folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket. “But I thought you’d like to look at it, anyway, even if you’re not interested whatsoever in sports gambling.” He starts his unbridled laughing again.
I unfold the quarto. Across the top, in block type, it says:
POSITIVE EXPECTATION TEASER BETS
Beneath the title, in uniform columns, I see rows of numbers and percentages, with all the minus figures in a regular font and all the plus figures in bold. I scan the calculations. The vast majority of the bets are negative expectation, returning less than 100 percent for every dollar wagered. A few of them, though, are positive. Double-digit positive.
I stifle the urge to scream and wonder if it’s too late: maybe someone has already seen what I’ve just seen. I stuff the paper into my pants. “Andy,” I whisper, “don’t say another word until we’re out of the casino.”
He smiles broadly. “I knew you wouldn’t be interested. It’s only the greatest discovery in the history of sports betting.”
“I’m serious! Shut the fuck up. Especially,” I whisper, “when we’re around…” I tilt my head toward the sportsbook.
“You mean people would be interested in this information? You don’t say!”
“So how’s Terry? Everything good with the family?” I say, motioning to the waitress for the check.
Safely barricaded behind a dead-bolted door in my twenty-eighth-floor suite, after an elevator ride that I feared would involve grievous bodily harm at the hands of a large man demanding that I hand over the paper, I sit across from Andy in the living room. He giggles. “Are you hyperventilating?”
I catch my breath. “No,” I say with forced nonchalance. “I’m just, you know, sort of—oh my God! Tell me everything!” I yell.
Algo Andy nods emphatically. “Of course. But just promise me that my discovery won’t go to waste. I’ve got to have something to show for this.”
I look him in the eye. “Andy, listen to me. If this works, you’re going to be rich. Whether it’s me or Rick Matthews or someone else, you’re going to be taken care of. You have my word.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“All right, then,” he says, reaching for a notepad and pen beside the telephone on the coffee table. “Let me explain how I came up with these numbers.”
Listening to Andy go through the mathematics of positive expectation teaser bets—of which I comprehend maybe half the concepts, even with his laboriously dumbed-down explanations—I realize I’m having a life-changing moment. There are precious few times in life when any of us can say with certainty, “It was then that I saw my destiny unfold before me,” since so much of our existence is built on the gradual accretion of circumstances and relationships, not dramatic epiphanies and tragic (or glorious) occasions that suddenly shatter the constancy of our daily routine. I’m hearing Andy explain how and why certain highly particular teaser bets involving certain highly particular numbers can be beaten. But what I’m thinking has nothing to do with point spreads and underdogs being transformed into favorites. I’m thinking that if what he’s saying is true, I’m not going to be leaving the sports-betting world this football season. I’ll only be leaving the Brain Trust.
Contrary to the myths the media aims at viewers who aren’t here, when you live in L.A. you don’t see movie stars in the grocery store. You do see them in the park, walking their dogs. You don’t see them picking up their dry cleaning. You do see them in restaurants, attempting to enjoy a meal—if that’s possible to do while being stared at. You don’t see them at the video store. You do see them at movie screenings, opera performances, and live sporting events.
Especially live sporting events.
Especially live sporting events that people like to bet on.
One of the comforting clichés that get repeated by people who know celebrities to people who don’t know celebrities is “They’re just like any other normal person.” Common examples: They have families that they worry about. They’re insecure and anxious. Never mind that famous people are trailed by packs of photographers, and that their most uninteresting perambulations are reported upon with more thoroughness and gravity than Middle East peace negotiations. Deep down, they’re just like you and me. Only richer and more beautiful.
And some famous people like to gamble; they just play for higher stakes. I’ve personally witnessed both the World’s Greatest Basketball Player and the World’s Greatest Golfer playing blackjack, in public, on the main casino floor, for stakes that would stagger anyone for whom $5,000 doesn’t represent what the world’s top athletes earn per minute in endorsement deals.
The tabloids do a remarkably assiduous job of detailing the wagering proclivities of our culture’s court jesters and dancing girls, and I don’t intend to further invade the privacy of famous people who like to bet. Except to say that the hordes of celebrities who show up in Las Vegas for ringside seats at boxing matches, gala concerts, and culturally significant events like, say, the Super Bowl, March Madness, the World Series (of baseball and poker), the Stanley Cup, and the NBA Playoffs are not there to enjoy the ninety-nine-cent shrimp cocktails.
Many of these celebrities have large lines of credit established at various casinos along Las Vegas Boulevard. And many others, I discover in the summer of 2000, have large lines of credit established at casinos in Costa Rica, Jamaica, Curaçao, and everywhere else offshore bookmakers ply their trade.
The week after I return from my revelatory weekend with Algo Andy, my pal the Heartthrob invites me to be his guest at a Dodgers game. The studio that produces his hit television show and his hit movies has a private skybox available on Wednesday night, and he’s welcome to use it, along with a dozen or so of his closest friends. Apparently I’m one of them. We met two years ago at the Hollywood dog park, where the Heartthrob noted with some regret that his boy, Diddles, a rambunctious pit bull, did not behave as nicely as my mutt. He had taken the naughty pup to a school some of his celebrity friends had recommended, but higher education, it seems, didn’t appeal to his hound Diddles, who had gotten into a fracas with Renée Zellweger’s sheltie. He wanted to know what the secret was. “How do you make them just chill out?”
The Heartthrob and I ended up talking about dogs and walking home together—which was a strange and funny experience, since, even though he had a baseball cap pulled low over his much-photographed brow, members of the female sex, particularly those under the age of sixteen, seemed to recognize him with uncommon ease (and hysteria). Turned out he and I lived around the corner from each other, close enough that I could see the roof of his estate from my upstairs bathroom. Dog walks and moderately successful training sessions became a weekly custom, and soon I was the friend of someone whose face I’d often see on billboards, at bus stops, and almost every time I turned on the television.
At the Dodgers game, where I suspect I’m the only one in our group of spectators who hasn’t appeared in People magazine, the Heartthrob introduces me to a pretty young woman who smokes like a decrepit motor and swears like an Appalachian prison guard. She’s actually quite charming. I innocently ask her if, like all the other people in the skybox, she’s in the entertainment business.
She takes a drag, nods, and phlegmatically says, “Fuckin’A.”
“Oh,” I say politely, avoiding the cloud of fumes traveling toward my face. “Theater? Film?”
“I’m on a show on NBC,” she says, nodding.
“Oh, wow. Cool,” I say suavely. “Which one?”
She tells me the name of a hit prime-time program, which I’ve never watched. “Can’t say I’ve seen it,” I admit. “I don’t watch television very much. But I’ve heard of it. Very popular show. Do you have, like, a recurring role?”
She smiles, not sure if I’m putting her on. “I play the title character.”
Before the phrase “You look so different without makeup, when you’re not on the cover of Maxim” can escape my lips, the Heartthrob pulls me aside and says, “Dodgers win by at least three. Mark it down, Mikey. Dodgers by three.”
“You think so?” I ask innocently, knowing that the visitors, the Cardinals, are in fact a small favorite according to the linemakers.
“Money in the bank, my friend,” the Heartthrob insists, flashing his multimillion-dollar smile. “You wanna bet?”
“Sure,” I say, “although I don’t pretend to know anything about baseball. I’m more of a football man.”
“Football? Football? Don’t even get me started on football!” the Heartthrob says, turning on the charisma. “I’m only like America’s number-one fan,” he says. “I mean, I live football. You know, if I didn’t end up going into acting, I probably would have played in the NFL.”
The Heartthrob has the kind of physique that begs to be draped in couture suits, not shoulder pads. But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that he loves football.
“So tell me,” I ask him, “do you ever bet on the games?”
He laughs. “I’m only like the best handicapper in America. I probably picked, like, seventy-five percent winners last season. I’m serious! I love football, man. I’m a football freak!”
“You picked three out of four against the spread?”
“Oh, yeah! I’m telling you, Mikey, if you ever want the hot plays…” He nods suggestively.
I lead him to a corner of the skybox unoccupied by movie industry pulchritude. Murmuring softly, I ask him, “Do you have a bookie? Offshore?”
He grins. “Three of them.”
Big Daddy calls a summit meeting in Santa Barbara. Brother Herbie and I are invited to be his guests for thirty-six holes of golf, gambling, and, oh yeah, some discussion on our strategy for the 2000–2001 Brain Trust sports campaign. If we’re the Rat Pack, Big Daddy is Frank, Herbie is Dino, and I’m Sammy, the integral part of the team who nonetheless always feels like an outsider. I tell Big Rick that of course I’ll be there and that I’m looking forward to seeing him and the gambling monk. But the truth is I’m dreading being there, knowing that I’ll be forced to finally make up my mind. Once I overcome my Hamlet-like vacillations, I’ll be compelled to essentially tell my mentor, “Thank you for teaching me enough about sports betting that I no longer need you. Now I’m able to defect from your organization and lead my own crew.”
Driving up the 101, with the Pacific Ocean sparkling over my left shoulder, I lose and regain my nerve about forty-seven times. When I pull into the driveway at Santa Barbara Country Club, I’m still not sure what I’m going to say. Or if I’m going to say anything at all.
I meet the boys on the practice range, where the turf is finer than the belly fur on a Labrador puppy. “Gentlemen!” I call out. “Your pigeon has arrived.”
“Mr. 44, pleasure to see you,” Big Daddy exclaims warmly, patting me on the shoulder. Brother Herbie shakes my hand and commences to haggle. “You know, 44, Rick here tells me you’re playing pretty good lately. I’m not sure I should be gambling with a young buck like you, but, then again, I don’t want to be unsociable or nothing.”
Already, before I can lace up my spikes, the negotiations have started. When one plays golf in this crowd, it’s not for $2. Brother Herbie wants to play a $500 Nassau, with two-down automatic presses and a $500 bonus for birdies and $1,000 for eagles. It’s a big game—one of the biggest I’ve played—but I think I’m a little better than ol’ Herb. And if Big Daddy has taught me anything, it’s to bet big when you have an edge and retreat when you don’t. “What the hell,” I say, shrugging, “I’ll give you a game. If I lose, I guess I’ll just have to go and pick some more hockey winners.”
Big Daddy had infamously lost his shirt on hockey the year before I joined the Brains. It’s the only topic I can tease him and Brother Herbie about.
“We’re officially out of the hockey business. I convinced this stubborn old donkey. ’Course, blowing two hundred thousand a day doesn’t make a man need much convincin’. Then again, knowing him,” Herbie says, pointing his thumb at Rick, “this may not be a final decision. Let’s just say the hockey is on probation.”
“We’ll see about the hockey, fellas,” Big Daddy says mischievously. “Come on, now. Let’s go play some golf. I wanna watch this match between the young lion and the sly old fox.” He winks at me conspiratorially, and, sotto voce, says, “You should destroy this guy, 44. I’d love a piece of your action.”
I want to win the Brother Herbie golf bet. But even more I want to show Big Daddy Rick I’ve got heart and courage and all those other intangible qualities that supposedly make a great gambler. I want to show him I’m not merely a responsible and trustworthy associate; I want him to see I’m a player.
After eighteen holes of countless laughs and smiles (and many superb golf shots), Big Daddy Rick proclaims wistfully, “We really should do this more often.”
I probably couldn’t afford to. On the eighteenth hole, I dunk my approach shot in the water and end up losing about $2,000 to the former man of the cloth, who can barely contain his smirk.
We instantly make plans to play again tomorrow.
After golf, we meet the wives at an oceanfront restaurant in Montecito. I’m traveling solo. Big Daddy drives his cherry red Mercedes roadster. Brother Herbie’s got a shiny new Cadillac. The girls’ caravan is a luxury SUV. The food is delicious. The wine is superb. The view is spectacular. The crowd is rich and beautiful. All this, I suppose, amounts to the spoils of war. The Good Life. It’s very seductive. Except that it all comes at a cost that extends beyond money. Another season is upon us, which, should I choose to continue with the Brains, means I must endure my least favorite part of being a sports bettor: setting up accounts, creating business relationships, lying. The dance is the same every year. These operations are like Hydra: each one that gets chopped off by sharp wiseguys grows back as two fresh bookmakers, eager to make his fortune off the mediocrity of the average sports gambler.
The wives excuse themselves to freshen up, leaving me with Rick and Herb. “How you doin’, pardsy-wardsy?” Big Daddy asks. “You ready for another great year?”
“Well, Big Daddy, it’s a tough business,” I say, not veiling my disenchantment.
“Well, 44, I’m hoping to make it easier,” he says. Then Rick Matthews shares a radical strategy he’s devised for camouflaging the Brain Trust’s supersharp play from the bookmakers, a plan he hopes to implement in the upcoming football season. “We’re done with the pros. No more NFL sides for us. They’re just too tough to beat. We’ll bet our usual college football, and college hoops, and maybe some NBA, too. Maybe a little dash of hockey here and there. And here’s the unique part. We’re going to make these bets in all sorts of combinations that only suckers do. Parlays and such.”
“Parlays?” I ask, skeptical. The vig on these wagers, in which the player has to win two or three or more games to score a giant payoff, is much higher than the typical one-result bet. “That’s giving up an awful lot of advantage,” I complain.
“Not as much as you think,” he corrects me. “We’re going to be concentrating on halftime bets, parlaying the first half of a game with the overall game. There’s a formula—and I’ll show it to you if you want—where we can make all these parlays and get the best of it. No more straight NFL sides for us, pardsy. Our future is in parlays.”
Rick thinks we have a big enough edge on our pure handicapping skills that we can overcome the inherently poor odds. And if we bombard them with sucker bets, the bookies, according to Big Daddy’s theory, won’t be able to tell the smart money from the square.
Anything that makes it easier to get a bet down I’m all for. But a world-class gambler like Big Daddy surely knows the huge expenses involved in betting exotics. Parlays can be twice as bad (in pure math terms) as straight wagers. A two-team parlay, for example, usually pays 13–5. The true price is 15–5. This means bettors are giving up 10 percent of every dollar they bet to the bookie. A classic straight wager—one team against another—should pay 10–10; but the bookies charge a standard 11 to win 10, which translates into a hefty 4.54 percent edge. That’s a lot of disadvantage to overcome, but not nearly as much as the double-digit imposts thrown up by exotics. Apparently, though, Rick’s got it all figured. If there’s an angle to be exploited, Big Daddy will be on it like a terrier on a rabbit hole. But I also know a strategy like this creates a vertiginous amount of fluctuation, the kind of up- and downswings that can give you ulcers.
“I guess it’ll work,” I say halfheartedly. My essential misgiving about Big Daddy’s new order is this: No matter how stupid you make yourself look, betting hockey and round-robins and three-team parlays, if you end up being a big winner in the long term, most bookmakers are going to chase you out of their shop anyway. I’ve already been booted from more than three dozen offshore casinos.
“Oh, it’ll work, 44,” Big Daddy says confidently. “Shit, you call up a bookmaker, I don’t care how suspicious he is, when the first words out of your mouth are ‘Hello, I wanna bet me a three-team teaser,’ I guarantee he’s gonna love you.”
My heart stops. “Teaser.”
“Yeah. Imagine that,” Big Daddy jeers.
“We’re going to betting teasers?”
“No, of course not, 44. I’m just giving an example. So long as I’m alive the Brain Trust ain’t gonna be betting no teasers,” Big Daddy says, rolling his eyes. “Every year some hotshot kid comes along thinking he’s got a system for beating teasers, and every year he goes broke before he figures out that they can’t be beat.”
“Not under any circumstances?”
He shakes his head. “No. Not in a million years. Which is why it’ll sound like sweet music to these bookmakers when we call up and say we want to bet parlays and teasers and all these sucker bets.”
“I get it,” I say. “But—and of course you know more about this than I do—but I’ve heard that if you catch the right numbers at the right price—”
“Listen, 44,” Big Daddy interrupts me. “The Brains ain’t betting teasers. The only people that do are too smart for their own good, college boys with math degrees. I’m sure there’s some kid at some prestigious university trying to work it out right now. And if he decides to put his money where his theories are he’s gonna get busted like everyone else.”
I feel short of breath and queasy. “Excuse me, gentlemen. I’m going to the restroom.”
Instead, I walk directly out the restaurant’s front door, onto the sidewalk, under a star-filled sky. And I call Algo Andy in Boston. When he answers, I demand, “Tell me the truth. Did you contact Rick Matthews about our teaser discovery?”
“What are you talking about?”
I tell him Rick’s grand plan for the upcoming season. “He said specifically that he knew someone was looking into NFL teasers,” I report, infuriated.
“It wasn’t me, my dear,” Andy assures me. “Scout’s honor.”
“So it’s just a weird and awful coincidence?”
“I’ve never talked to Rick Matthews in my life, Michael. But you promised to introduce me one day. Is he there? Say hello for me!”
“Andy, this is serious,” I remind him. “I’m not sure what’s the right thing to do. Should I just tell him about you? Should I just quit and not tell him about you? I don’t know.”
“Hmmmmm.” I can hear what sounds like Andy scratching his scalp, or possibly his beard. “It’s not like anyone owns the numbers, Michael. They’re born free, free as the wind blows.”
“Stop it.”
“My point is…hmmm. Well, my point is that it’s like in science. Everyone is chasing the same solutions, the same breakthroughs. You can patent drugs and chip designs and fungible things like that, but nobody owns the right to bet on football games, you know, at whatever point spread seems attractive. Right?”
“Andy, I can’t handle anything philosophical right now.”
“I’m just saying, Michael, it’s not a yes or no proposition.”
“Well, you don’t know Big Daddy. Everything is yes or no with him. Are you with him or against him?”
“How about a little of both? A ‘yo.’ Get it?” Andy, amused with himself, breaks into convulsive laughter. I tell him I’ll call back later and hang up.
When I return to the dining table, the ladies have rejoined their gents. Everyone seems to be in high spirits, smiling and drinking and howling at one of Herb’s stories. To the other patrons in this sublime restaurant, our group of revelers probably looks like a trio of successful real estate brokers, respectable businessmen and their pampered wives out for an evening of bonhomie. The other diners would never guess that the tropical-weight cashmere sweaters and silk scarves and glittering diamonds, the $200 bottles of wine, the freshly caught halibut, and the fantastic bounty that radiates from this table are the result of knowing that the Eagles should be giving 6½ points to the Bengals, not 9.
I feel tears welling, my breath quickening. “Excuse me, everyone,” I say, forcing a smile. “I have something I have to tell you.”
“He’s super cool,” the Heartthrob assures me. “Totally sweet guy. Very down-to-earth. Very easy to talk with. You’ll love him.”
We’re in the Heartthrob’s Porsche convertible, winding through the hills of Bel Air, on our way to meet one of the biggest movie stars in the world, someone I’ve seen in numerous films, someone, therefore, whom I feel I already know, if only through repeated exposure to his unmistakable face. The Heartthrob, though, really does know Captain Beefcake. They’re friends.
Seems Captain Beefcake, like my pal the Heartthrob, is a football fan. A big football fan. A bets-up-to-$250,000-a-game football fan.
When the Heartthrob revealed to me at Dodger Stadium that he had a trio of bookmaking shops he played with regularly, I was thrilled at the possibilities. Here was a young man with more money than common sense, a maniacal sports fan who gambled on every televised football game, no matter what the point spread was. I assumed the bookmakers had to be accustomed to his firing huge wagers, and, despite the Heartthrob’s claim of handicapping supremacy, none of the bet-takers could be scared of a genuine Hollywood dude whose only association with wiseguys was sharing a business manager with the star of The Sopranos. Here was the perfect beard: a monster bettor with a proven pedigree.
Then I found out the Heartthrob’s usual wager was a thousand dollars a game.
“I thought you make, like, five million per movie,” I said, perplexed. “And the TV show—I was under the impression you had more money than you could ever spend.”
“Right. But I’m not stupid, Mikey,” he replied. “I don’t have a gambling problem, like some people I know.”
I explained to the Heartthrob that, strange as it sounded, I was more interested in his friends with gambling problems than the clever ones like him who knew how to manage their money. “Let’s say, theoretically, we’re playing with a ten percent advantage over the bookies. Betting a grand a game is going to net us a hundred-dollar profit. We couldn’t bet enough games to make it worth our while. Now, if we’re betting fifty, a hundred thousand a pop—well, that starts to add up.”
The Heartthrob told me he knew three Hollywood stars who bet big, really big. One of them, Mr. Sick, whose gambling exploits, according to the gossip sheets, were allegedly compromising his financial future, wasn’t exactly a friend. “But we have the same publicist. I could have her set up a meeting, no problem.” The other two were intimate acquaintances. Boy Wonder, whose youthful beauty belies his artistic maturity, is a frequent visitor at the Heartthrob’s pool parties, pickup basketball games, and Sunday football extravaganzas, where a collection of movie industry heavyweights (and their lingerie-model girlfriends) congregate on the Heartthrob’s U-shaped couch and scream at the ninety-
seven-inch TV screen together.
And then there was Captain Beefcake.
“Great guy, Mikey,” the Heartthrob remarked. “But totally out of control. He’s probably lost, like, I don’t know, ten million in the last two years betting on football.”
“You’ve got to have a complete disregard for money to blow that much with bookies. Then again, at a quarter-mill a throw, it doesn’t take much to get bruised,” I commented. “It almost sounds like Beefcake doesn’t care if he wins or loses. He just wants the action.”
“You know what, Mikey? I don’t care how much money you’ve got, nobody likes to lose. You know what I mean? Even if it’s not about the money, nobody likes to be known as a loser, especially someone who’s used to having his ass kissed. You know what I’m saying?”
“Do you think Beefcake would mind having someone tell him which teams to bet on? Or is there too much ego involved?”
The Heartthrob smiled. “Fuck the ego. I don’t care if you’re making twenty million a picture. You don’t like sending those fucking bookies money every month. You want to beat them.”
The Heartthrob warned me, though: Everyone is always trying to get a piece of Beefcake. His time, his money, his influence—everyone in Hollywood wants to bask in his glow, if not outright rob him. He has finely developed scammer radar. “I don’t care if you promise him your left nut,” my pal the movie star joked, “he’s still going to be, you know, a little skeptical.”
I recall the Heartthrob’s prediction when we arrive at Beefcake’s estate, a ridiculously magnificent slice of English countryside transplanted to the arboreal moraines above Sunset Boulevard. The man himself, dressed in white pajamas and a black silk robe (it’s 2:00 p.m.), answers the door. “Hey, brother,” he says, giving the Heartthrob one of those intimate handshakes that morph into a back-patting man hug.
“This is my friend, Michael.”
“Hey,” Beefcake says, extending his hand. “Pleasure. Come in, come in.”
We walk down a long marble corridor that leads to a living room that looks out on what normal people would call a backyard. Beefcake’s version has an Olympic swimming pool, multiple tennis courts, and a well-bunkered putting green. “Sit down, make yourself comfortable,” he urges, motioning to a leather sofa. “Smoke?” he offers.
I decline. The Heartthrob joins Beefcake in defiling their heavily insured lungs. They talk about family and travels and movie industry developments while I try to look around Beefcake’s home without appearing to gawk. He has a vibrantly green and yellow Matisse hanging above the fireplace, and in the corner, near the bar, a concert grand piano of the type one typically sees on the stage of Carnegie Hall.
“So, Mike,” Beefcake says, flashing the smile I’ve seen countless times on celluloid, “they tell me you’re the football genius.”
“I don’t know about that,” I say nervously. “But this much I can tell you: I have a hard time getting any bookmaker to take my bets.”
“You’re kidding,” Beefcake says, snorting. “That’s outrageous.”
I start to explain to him how a group like the Brain Trust works. Before I can make my pitch, Beefcake interrupts me. “You’re part of the Brains? No shit?”
“You’ve heard of the Brains?”
He shoots me a look that conveys What do you take me for, an idiot? “Of course. Rick, Ricky. You know, what’s his name? Sure. So you’re tied up with that group?”
“Confidentially, yes. I mean, I was. I was and I sort of still am. But I run my own group, the, um—well, actually, we’re known as the Hollywood Boys.”
Captain Beefcake smirks. “Cute.”
“And here’s our problem.” I explain to Captain Beefcake that we don’t have any trouble picking winners, it’s finding bookmakers to take our bets that’s the challenge. I propose to the movie star that he can go on betting just as always, but I’d like him to make bets on my behalf, too. If I lose, I’ll pay immediately. If I win—and I’m going to—I collect. “I’m not asking for a loan. I’m not asking for an investor, none of the bullshit I’m sure you’re used to dealing with. I’m just hoping to capitalize on your…” I search for the right word.
“Relationship?” Beefcake proposes.
I was thinking “reputation.” But “relationship” is better. “Yes. That’s right,” I agree. “Your relationship. Your bookmakers, I assume they’re very comfortable with you.”
“They should be,” Beefcake cracks. “I’ve donated a shitload of money over the years.”
“Like, what? A million?” I ask innocently.
He takes a long drag on his cigarette. “I wish. More like twelve.”
I catch the Heartthrob’s eye. He nods.
I address Captain Beefcake directly. “Well, I’m not saying you’re going to get it all back at once. But if you follow my advice—and, I’ll be honest, you’re not always going to want to—you’ll finish the season a winner.”
Beefcake smirks, and in a hoarse whisper, says, “So what’s the catch?”
I shrug. “I can’t think of one.”
The Heartthrob jumps in. “I’m doing it.” He adds that Boy Wonder is, too. “I mean, if you’re already losing, it’s not like Mike is going to make you lose more than you already are. And if he’s as good as he says he is, you’re going win like you never did before.”
“Right. And, again, I’m not asking you to advance me any money. I’m only asking you to make my bets at the numbers I’m looking for, and when I win, you make sure I get paid.” I hold Beefcake’s gaze, letting him assess me.
He squeezes his nose and scratches his ear. Then he stifles a yawn. “All right.”
“Do you mind telling me who you’re playing with?” I ask.
“They call themselves Nautica,” Captain Beefcake says.
I howl. “Oh! Larry Houston? In Costa Rica? That Nautica?”
“That’s them,” he says. “You know them?”
I tell the movie star I’ve been booted out of the joint three times.
Beefcake can’t believe it. “They seem like the nicest guys in the world. I can’t imagine.”
“Let’s see if they’re still so nice after you kick their asses. See what they’re like when they have to send the money.”
Beefcake smiles. The Heartthrob smiles. I smile. “That would be a change,” Beefcake says. “What the hell, chief. Let’s have some fun.”