The Collector, Detroit, June 28, 2011
[dcs_p]I ran into a guy I haven’t seen in years, and we started reminiscing about the old days. My buddy started as a collector, and he tells me about going downtown on Friday afternoons. This was in the seventies and eighties, when bookmaking was a lucrative business. My friend always wore an overcoat and boots, and he’d hit the black neighborhoods first. “Never had any trouble,” he says. “The main man was there … with his muscle, and he’d just hand it over. Always polite and respectful. A real businessman.”[/dcs_p]
[dcs_p] He tells me about going into the upscale offices at the BUHL Building–one of Detroit’s toniest addresses. “A hundred dimes on a Friday, easy,” he says. “In fact, it was probably the low end.”[/dcs_p]
[dcs_p]The guy he was working for was under indictment–who wasn’t back then? Anyway, my buddy would stuff the money in his boots and the inside pockets of his overcoat. During peak season he’d be carrying two-hundred grand. One day he takes it to his boss’s house, and his boss is sitting there with a guy he’s been seeing all over town. “This man was in every bar and bowling alley and rib joint I went into,” he tells me. “I walk in with all this cash, start laying it out on the table. Turns out this man was a Fed. He never did any thing about it–never said a word–and I’m wondering if maybe he wasn’t on the take.”[/dcs_p]
