THE HANDBOOK PROFIT AND GRAFT.
Sixty thousand “pikers” in Chicago feeding the gambling goddess through her handbook mouth daily!
Is that figure something to startle you? It is true.
The “piker” plays in small spurts from fifty cents to three dollars a day. Then the bets soar up the ladder until you reach the rich sucker who shovels out as much as $500 a day on an average. Bets are paid as high as $10,000 in one day on downtown handbooks.
One man in State street has maintained a $25,000 a day business for ten years on an average. This has been actually proven.
There are twenty places downtown where handbooks are maintained that do an average business of $5,000 a day year in and year out, with men who dream and plan to beat the unconquerable combine.
Police officials who have consented to talk because they have been disowned by political masters and a former partner of the present gambling head declare that $300 is a fair and conservative estimate of the income from a horde of suckers of each of the 1,000 handbook establishments daily.
This means $300,000 per day changes hands in the race of men to exercise their gambling interests.
The betting combinations are so arranged, according to experts, that the one sucker is pitted against his brother and not against the house.
The placement of money on horse flesh is so arranged that no matter how the horses run, a profit of at least ten per cent accrues to the bookmaker. He is never the big loser. In cold cash that means $30,000 a day to the handbook men of the city.
Few of the races or the racing tips are “on the square.” The sucker plays and attempts to defeat a system which is nothing more than one crooked scheme within another.
Fifty per cent of that is needed by the handbook men to operate their places. It is used in the payment of salaries to hirelings, wire service, rent, telephone service, printing and miscellaneous financial obligations.
The balance or $15,000 is split between two mighty factors. Seven thousand five hundred dollars are kept by the poolroom combination and an equal sum is paid, through members of the police force, or other collectors, as protection money to the great powers of the Vice Trust.