Football is in mighty fine swing right now and people are starting to get excited about their teams – sorry if you’re a Saints or Cowboys fan! – I am, too. I’m a HUGE Texas A & M fan, and right now we’re ranked #5 nationally! So, it seemed like a good time to tell you about a lesser-known aspect of prison – the gambling culture, and more specifically, the football (and basketball) tickets operation. I have a lot of experience with this one, (and had a couple of DB writeups and did some dungeon time) and found myself in the middle of some dirty free folks’ politics and got transferred once.
Gambling makes up a HUGE subset of the prison culture, and everybody knows that where there’s a need there’s always going to be somebody willing to step up and fill that need (especially if there is the potential for financial reward). It is fairly simple to become a “ticket man” – the only thing that really matters is what degree of risk you are willing to assume. If you want to minimize the financial risk, you can easily bring in partners; if you want to hog all the profits (minus operating expenses, of course), you ride by yourself. Along with all of the profits, you also assume all of the risks.
And, BOTH can be huge, at least in terms of the prison economy. The risks are extreme because you’re offering great odds – you’re paying out MANY times what a prisoner is betting.
On a “lucky” bet, a $10.00 wager could easily (but rarely) cost you $1,000.00!
At the time I’m writing about, the price of a pack of Camel’s (primary brand in Angola, when smoking was still permitted) was $4.97 and two packs was rounded up to $10.00. Community coffee was also a good fit. Some ticket men would take almost any commissary items (soups, cookies, candy, stamps, etc.) and negotiate the value with the bettor. It would also probably be the first items paid out to a willing and hungry winner.
That practice of accepting almost anything on a bet carried its own risks as it required larger hiding spaces, more clever means of concealment and transportation from the bettor, storing it during the games, and delivering payoffs to a winner. But, as the old saying goes, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” and absolutely no one on earth has a stronger will than a convict trying to put his hustle down. So, means were found and hustlers were employed, guys that could move, that had common sense (or absolutely none and just relied on their balls!) or were just in the right places and positions.
Convicts that were needed to run a ticket:
Typists / copy makers
Runners
Bookkeepers
Vaults (temporarily held pick-ups, or bets)
Bankers (emergency loan sources for large “hits”)
Sample of a portion of a football ticket
A well-run ticket made money for everybody – all the employees, even the normal run of the mill population, and yes, even people in security. Everybody is looking for the “big hit,” the “score,” the easy win. And, basically, they’re chasing an elusive butterfly that’s just always a little bit out of reach. Even a guy who was lucky enough to have a subscription to a print newspaper – yes, they are still a real thing.
So, the way it worked was like this: the point spread for the week’s games comes out in the Tuesday newspaper (some guys had other sources for getting a “quick point spread”…over the phone to a trusted friend on the streets perhaps). The “Gold Sheet” out of Vegas was another source. The spread comes out, the ticket man makes his own spread with minor adjustments here and there, eliminates unavailable TV games, and writes it up. He gives the master ticket to the typist/copyist who immediately sets it up. A good typist has his typewriter preset with tabs and knows right off the bat how many tickets will fit on a standard page, and sets to work.
The typist must be extremely accurate, intelligent and not prone to errors. (A missed or dropped or altered number is literally a break-the-bank mistake that can cost hundreds.) When he’s completed his job, he returns it to the ticket man so it can be proofread and approved, then it goes to the copy man. The copy man is someone in an office or who has access to an office where a copy machine is located and has the opportunity to make multiple copies of the sheet. The ticket man knows how many tickets he’ll need for a given week and tells the copy man, he runs that many and returns it to the ticket man.
The ticket man cuts them up from the pages and gives a stack of tickets to his runners, and knows how many to give to each runner based on their popularity or access to the population (certain segments such as cellblocks have specific needs such as the ability to move freely). Now, the real work starts. The runners head out and start distributing the tickets, going first to their guaranteed customers, their hardcore bettors.
Then they do their real work – hustling new players. They never carry their full supply of tickets with them, just enough to work with and keep the rest stashed. The runner has quickly learned who the “looky-loos” are, the ones who just want to look and won’t bet a nickel; he doesn’t waste a ticket on these guys.
By now, it’s Thursday and the pick-up begins. The first pick-ups are usually smaller, one pack or the equivalent, normally 4 or 5 (team) picks for the early games. The ticket man can start to get a sense of how the bets are going, what teams are “hot,” and how the pickup will be. The runner passes his pickup to the vault and as soon as feasible goes in and makes a sheet listing all the bettors, the picks they made, and the amount bet. He then passes all of the stubs to the ticket man, who makes his own “master sheet,” listing all of the bettors, the picks they made, and the amount bet.
The pickup increases as time goes on, and although many of the bets are still 1 or 2 packs, the amount wagered gets bigger. By the time Saturday breaks dawn, things get really hectic. The runners are besieged with late and last-minute bets, some larger 4-picks…well thought-out 5 or 6 picks, here and there some 10-picks. Every single one is picked up, dutifully logged in and given to the ticket man. There is no room for error. When gametime arrives, it’s “sweat time,” meaning that everyone is sweating the games they bet, and the ticket man is sweating a pivotal game he changed the point spread on by one or two points, maybe even flipped the favored team.
By halftime, everybody has a good idea of how they’re going to fare – the bettors know the one team they really counted on is losing or won’t cover the point spread and the ticket man can tell whether someone’s going to hit. If cigarettes need to be moved they get moved – well in advance of the final scores. It’s vitally important to be extremely prompt in paying a winner. The losing bettors are already turning in another ticket for the late games or for the Sunday games in hopes of another chance of winning their money back.
If you now have at least a rudimentary understanding of how the tickets work it is perhaps time to tell you about some of my own experiences as a ticket man – and I’ve had the whole run: typist, runner, bookkeeper, vault, and banker. It is kind of like the job market in the free world – you usually have to start at the bottom and work your way up to the top. A word of caution here: the only thing a convict has in prison is his word. If you’ve ever had a bad debt, if you’ve ever failed to honor an obligation, your future as a ticket man is doomed from the start. Don’t think that your reputation does not quickly spread – in a prison housing over 5,000 men – you are mistaken.
My start in the ticket world began as a typist when I was a clerk on the Industrial Compound. I typed (and copied) for a guy on the East Yard at Main Prison. I handled it for the return of a mere 5 packs of Camels a week (roughly $20.00). Then I became a runner for the same guy – instant boost! – I jumped up to roughly $50.00 per week. sometimes less sometimes more, or 10% of what I picked up. During the heat of the season, like “Rivalry Week,” I might pick up $1,000, leaving me with a cool$100.00 a week. In prison, 100 x 4 = $400.00 a month which is a great standard of living, but especially in the 70’s and 80’s when I was doing this and it was my primary means of support.
So, I was a runner for a couple of years and just like with any budding entrepreneur, I set aside a little something every weekend of every season. When I found myself in the right situation I took the plunge and decided to put out my own ticket. I called it “SportsLine,” and ran it like a business. I was even more rigorous than normal because I didn’t hire any typists or runners my first year, keeping expenses to the absolute bare minimum. The first year I was scared 24/7 – worried about all the risks. What are the risks?
EVERYTHING is a risk. EVERYONE involved with the ticket is taking risks every minute of every day. The typist runs a risk every time he sets his typewriter up, and the copy man every time he turns the copier on. The runner runs the risk every time he walks out of his dorm with a pocket full of tickets, every time he sits down and writes his sheet, every time he delivers the stubs to the ticket man. The vault runs a risk every time the shakedown crew enters his dorm – sometime many years ago DOC set out a new policy that said that no inmate “shall have in his possession or control more than 5 cartons of cigarettes or Bugler tobacco at any time.”
This was for a variety of reasons, but more than anything else it was to try to eliminate the gambling and ticket operations. It obviously didn’t work, because every vault I ever knew had multiple people holding cigarettes for him. At the height of my ticket operations, I had about 8 vaults and each of them had 4-5 people holding cigarettes for him. Of course, there was also the case of “GP,” who was busted when the shakedown crew found a couple hundred cartons of cigarettes hidden in the ceiling of the Camp C Law Library. GP was like me, and didn’t like paying people for taking risks when he could take them himself for free!
My biggest and worst situation I found myself in was when I found myself at the intersection of convicts, politics and free people. You usually stay out of their business and for non-security issues they pretty much stay out of yours. There are usually pretty strict and straight lines separating convicts and free people, but when you work for a long time in close proximity to them that line tends to blur a bit.
I had been a clerk at Camp F for a number of years when this happened, and had been running SportsLine for about 4 years {seasons} when this happened. My boss (who I had a good understanding with), “Major X,” was suddenly suspended without pay and transferred to being a supervisor over the Farm Lines. This was because a convict running the CPR Club at Camp F was caught in possession of more than $3,000 cash (green money) and vending machines under his control were found to have been compromised.
Now, let’s be clear here – Major X had never done anything with any club at Camp F that Colonel Y didn’t tell him to do. Colonel Y was – plain and simple – an asshole. About 40, tall, a big man with a big attitude. When he entered a room, he commanded everyone’s attention. I won’t deny him his credit. It seemed as though he had earned his rank. Once he had attained a certain amount of power, however, he began to use it in surprising ways, both to shield his “pets” and to attack others. I was obviously not a pet.
It was early on a Saturday morning and Colonel Y had weekend duty. I was in the office typing up the week’s accreditation summaries and preparing for the coming week when he came in. The 2 female officers working the front desk each bought Community coffee every week, and I would make them a pot as soon as I got to work and it was the only pot made unless they specifically asked for it. The pot was empty when he came in, and he looked at it disgustedly.
“You gonna’ make some coffee or what?” he snarled.
“No, sir,” I responded, not looking at him.
“Why the hell not?” shock and surprise crossing his face.
“Well, sir, the ladies up front buy that coffee and I make them one pot a day, and that’s what they want.”
“They’re sergeants and I’m a Colonel. What part of that don’t you understand?!”
Now, I’d had it with his attitude, and I turned around and faced him.
“The part I don’t understand is the part where you wrote the report on Major X and recommended his suspension and transfer. He never did a damned thing with that club unless you or Warden Z told him to. That stuff happened with CPR and now he’s riding a damned mule in the fields. It’s that part,” and I turned back around.
I guess that in some circles it would be said that I had “let my alligator mouth overload my hummingbird ass,” but I just didn’t care. This guy needed to be told that he had messed over a good man and had done it wrongly to protect himself from blowback for the loose supervision over the club.
The repercussions were instant and though it was expected, I didn’t realize it yet. As a ticket man I had to hold all the stubs from the pickup until Tuesday so that I had incontrovertible proof of a bettors picks. Everybody of consequence at Camp F knew I ran SportsLine. EVERYBODY. An unnamed Warden once (several times, actually) played one of my tickets – pulled the cash money from his wallet and handed me the ticket with his picks under an alias. Nothing about it was secret.
That was Saturday morning. Tuesday morning I was startled when the head of the Shakedown Crew appeared at my door and ordered me to stand up and get away from the desk. The very same man had a standing bet with me every LSU game – if he won, he paid me in cigarettes, and if I won I paid him with a pizza. I thought he was joking when he said it, and grinned and told him, “Come on, man. You just lost a pack!” He looked me in the eyes and said, “I don’t have a choice,” very clearly implying that he had been ordered to do this.
To make this shorter, he and the crew shook me down and found the bag with my stubs, and curiously, confiscated from me a printed DOC policy regarding polygraph exams and the process for administering them. DOC policies are easily discoverable in the Law Library. They wrote me up for Gambling and Contraband. The stubs were definitely contraband, but the policy? Hmmm……
While this was going on, Colonel Y and Warden Z came in and told me to come to the lobby and have a seat. They both sat down and started trying to interrogate me, asking about the shift Lieutenant and a couple of other officers. I just looked at them and said,
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, besides that, ratting on a convict is bad enough but ratting on a free man? There’s no win in that. I got nothing to say.” Of the 7 people in the building at that moment, 4 of them were on the take from my ticket. It was kind of quiet but I could swear I heard a sigh of collective relief emanating from them all.
An hour later I was stepping down from a van, shackled at the ankles and waist and led down a hall and placed in the Camp C Tiger dungeon in solitary. Four days later, I was fortunate to go to DB Court in front of a Colonel whom I had known for many years and was cool with.
As soon as we had gone through the formalities, he switched off the recorder and said, “I got a phone call early this morning telling me to send you to a working cellblock. But that call came from a Colonel, and I’m a Colonel, too. So, I reckon that means I can do it or not do it.”
I let out a huge sigh of relief – salvation in sight! He turned the tape back on and I gave my statement, and questioned the confiscation of the polygraph policy as we are allowed to have them. He turned the tape off again and told me, “Kissinger, you gotta’ understand – they’re trying to throw the book at you. Just plead guilty and I’m not gonna’ send you to the blocks.”
Ten minutes later he sentenced me to a quarters change to the Main Prison and job change to the Farm Line. A week later, Major X drove out to where we were working and told the free man working the line to call me to the headland. When I got there and saw him, I broke out into a huge smile. He greeted me and told me that he had heard about the whole thing, and said that he appreciated the fact that I had “held my water.” He then told the free man line pusher (who was notorious for being a hardass on White boys) to take it easy on me, and that he would be checking in on me from time to time. Two weeks later, I had a job as a clerk at the Tag Plant. The next season, I was back at Camp F, and SportsLine was more popular than ever before.
Thank you for reading! Hope you enjoyed it, and come back for more true tales from the bayou! See you again soon!
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