Being Oscar by Oscar Goodman Read Free Book Online Page B

mother, Hazel Seligman Goldmark, was from New York as well. She came from a cultured family. Her father, Carolyn’s grandfather, was a full professor at Columbia and a noted scholar in the field of economics and taxation. Hazel kind of liked me. Carl, not so much.
    We were walking on 75th Street when he asked me how I intended to support his daughter. I said at first I didn’t intend to. The plan was for me to go to law school while Carolyn worked.
    “You’d better support her in the style to which she’s become accustomed,” her father told me, “or I’ll kick your ass from here to 76th Street.”
    “If you’re big enough,” I said.
    It was a rocky start, but we got past it. I spent the summer in New York after graduating from Haverford. I stayed in the Goldmarks’ home and got a job working as a janitor in a community center in Harlem. Carolyn had a job there, too, working the telephone switchboard.
    I got to know her family and they got to know me. Dr. Goldmark had asked us to wait a year before we got married, so we weren’t wed until the following summer, after I had finished my first year at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
    Our anniversary is June 6, 1962. Most people of my generation know June 6 as D-Day, the day Allied troops invaded France and the tide began to turn in World War II. But for me, June 6 has a different meaning. I look at it as the best day of my life.
    Carolyn is not only my wife, but the person I most admire and trust in the world. She’s the only one whose advice I will always listen to. She cuts through the bull. She tells me what she thinks and why. She also knows me better than anyone. And despite that, she apparently loves me.
    When the kids were young, we took a trip to Disneyland. Carolyn drove. When we got there, she left me with the four of them while she parked the car. As we stood in line, I suddenly felt petrified that one of them might take off. I spent days dealing with important criminal issues and fighting big legal battles, but I’d never experienced that kind of fear or anxiety.
    We were waiting in line. Nothing was happening. Then Carolyn came strolling up after parking the car and said, “What are you doing?”
    “Waiting in line,” I said.
    She looked at me and shook her head.
    “Oscar,” she said. “This is a bus stop.”
    Then she pointed in the opposite direction to a sign that said Disneyland.
    “The entrance is over there,” she said, taking the kids by the hands and leading the way.
    Like I said, she loves me.

    I was much more adept in court. And the more I worked at it, the better I became.
    One day I got a call from John DePasquale, a bartender at the Golden Nugget in downtown Las Vegas. He had been indicted ina big federal bookmaking case out of Miami. It was the first national case built around the use of the new wiretap laws, part of the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1968. DePasquale was a minor player, but he had been picked up on some wires and got charged along with some fairly significant bookmakers from other parts of the country.
    John was accused of using the phones to provide bookmakers information about the morning betting line. One of the big targets was Little Marty Sklaroff and his father, Jesse, a bar owner in Miami, who had been a major figure in sports betting, too. The feds were very familiar with them. The FBI had put a tap on a public pay phone at the Miami airport that Little Marty used.
    Marty, a dapper, well-dressed fella with a huge pompadour, was an associate of Gil “The Brain” Beckley, who at the time was considered the number one bookmaker in the country. Beckley was based in New York City. I visited him there once. He lived in a circular-shaped apartment building on Central Park, and I was struck by the fact that every apartment unit on his floor had a pay phone. Whether each unit was part of his gambling operation was something I didn’t bother asking about. There are things that a lawyer doesn’t need—or