There are many cheating private flats and remodeled homes, especially on Charles St., where chumps are steered from the Club Charles and the Chanticleer, for girls, booze and stud poker.
Bell-boys and hackies can steer you to anything. Baltimore cab-drivers have to scrabble for a living. The legal rates are about the lowest in the country. You can go almost anywhere in town for a quarter and tips are meagre.
Gambling is plentiful and easy of access. There are horserooms on Eutaw Street, across from the Public Market. Most of the rooms, however, are in the outlying sections of South Baltimore and Northeast Baltimore. We found three running in the 1900 block of Greenmount Avenue and others in the 2400 block, the 2500, 2700, 2800, and 3300 blocks of Greenmount Ave. There was wide open gambling in the 1800 block, the 2000, 4300, and 5500 blocks of Hartford Road, as well as the 5200 block of Bel Air Road.
Casinos and horserooms run openly across the County line in Anne Arundel, and a regular scheduled limousine service is maintained to transport suckers.
The cars leave at frequent intervals from Redwood and South Sts., and the Biltmore Hotel, Fayette and Paca.
Some of these suburban gaming hells are guarded by armed men stationed in pill boxes commanding the gates.
There are thousands of one-armed bandits and gambling devices in the city, where they are illegal even by local option. At this writing, the city itself was in the gambling business with a game room in the new Friendship International Airport, eight miles south of the city, in Anne Arundel County, where slot-machines are tolerated by illegal local option. But the airport is owned by the City of Baltimore, which is officially on record against slot-machines.
Into the game-room of the airport came something new in the way of trying your luck. It is a combination cigaret-vender and slot-machine. You can buy cigarets at the usual price, 20 cents. But if you want “action” you put in a nickel instead of the 20 cents, and hope to get up to 20 packages of your favorite brand—or nothing. The Frank Costello enterprises are giving the machine its first tryout under this blessing of legality.
The gambling payoff in Baltimore is made through the police. North Side cops get $10 a week for their services, those on the South Side only $7.50.