The Vapors by David Hill

Author:David Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Owney

JANUARY 1959

“Madam, this has never been a city. It will always be a town.”

A pickup truck pulled up alongside the Ritter Hotel on Exchange Street, just behind the jewelry store and the Esskay auction house downtown on Central Avenue. Walter Metzer got out of the truck, walked around back, and hoisted a large coil of wire up on his shoulder from out of the truck bed. He humped the coil up the stairs and into the Ritter Hotel, where he was greeted by a thin old man in a linen suit and driving cap.

Owney led Walter Metzer up to the fifth floor, where he installed two white ceramic insulators to the wall of an office, and then to the roof, where he left the large coil of wire. Before the day was over, Metzer would run the wire from the roof of the hotel to nearly every casino and handbook in Hot Springs, a web of wires as intricate as the Southwestern Bell phone lines themselves.

State Senator Q. Byrum Hurst had put Owney together with Jerry Poe, the traffic manager for Southwestern Bell Telephone, shortly after the election so that Poe could share with Owney some of his ideas about how the wire service could better operate. According to Poe, running the wires directly from the telephone company into the wire room, then out of the wire room across the city on dedicated wires, would not only save whoever was running the wire service a pile of money, it would also be easier to control. But it wouldn’t be cheap to operate. Poe wanted one hundred dollars per line per month.

In addition to the extra cost of paying Poe, Owney needed to purchase the Ritter Hotel, which was next door to Southwestern Bell’s offices. Owney fronted Hurst the money to purchase the Ritter Hotel to keep it out of his name. Then Owney put the phone lines in the name of Walter Metzer, Poe’s best line installation man, who would work on the side for Owney.

After running wires out of the Ritter Hotel, over trees, and across the tops of buildings to bookie joints all over town, Metzer installed a totalizator machine in room 207, the same room where the lines all were connected. The totalizator machine calculated odds based on the money that was taken in on various betting propositions so that the bookmaker could offer accurate lines to customers and avoid getting taken for a ride by sharp players. It was a technological innovation used only by large bookmakers and the racetracks themselves.

Now that Babe Huff was out of the picture, Owney could have gone back to being the broker for the syndicate’s wire coming out of New Orleans, and charging the local bookies the regular fee. But he clearly had bigger plans. There in the Ritter Hotel, Owney had built his very own wire service. His service could deliver results instantly, on dedicated wires that ran from room 207 directly into the handbooks, as well as provide bookies with access to his totalizator odds and his syndicate-run layoff rooms.

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