Until Proven Innocent by Gene Grossman Read Free Book Online

I’m a conservative businessman. This is a plan that’s got real math to back it up.”
    “ Stuart, please spare me the details. You’d be better off trying to invent some perpetual motion machine. Come to think of it, you may have, because planning on winning by gambling is a perpetual loss machine.”
    “ All right, that’s enough tearing me apart. Listen, here’s the plan, and when you hear it, you’ll realize how simple it is.
    “ Last week I flew up to New Jersey to meet with my car supplier, you know, Billy Z. Well, before I left, I told Vinnie to try and get me down for five hundred on the Dodgers-Mets game. I never heard from Vinnie, so when I got to Billy’s office, I told him I wanted to bet on the game. He vouched for me and turned me on to his New York connection. This guy told me that if I wanted to bet on the Dodgers, he could give me seven-to-five odds. I took it, and bet five hundred on the Blue Team.
    “ The next day, I finally got hold of Vinnie. As usual, he and Olive screwed up my instructions completely, and they bet five hundred of my money out here in California on the Mets. But here’s the good part: strangely enough, the odds were the same – but the other way. They got seven to five too.
    “ Now you know that normal baseball games can’t end in a tie, so stop for a second and look at the arithmetic of what happened. I can’t win on both bets, so that means I’ve gotta lose five hundred bucks on one of the bets. But, by the same token, I’m also guaranteed to win seven hundred bucks on the other bet. That means I’m guaranteed a winning spread of two hundred, no matter who wins.”
    Something is wrong here. Not only am I actually understanding what Stuart is telling me, but it sounds logical.
    “ Wait a minute, Stu, you mean to say that the bookies know that the odds are different on each coast, but they each take your bets anyway?”
    “ Sure they do. In fact, they probably lay off money between each other in the same way. Bettors act on emotion. Bookies act on business. When teams are evenly matched, you can almost always get odds against your home team’s victory by placing your bet on them in the other team’s town. That’s because home teams are such favorites with the local fans. All you have to do is find out what the spread is, and establish a line of credit with the bookies. Billy Z took care of my New York connection, and I’ve got a woman’s clothing salesman out here that makes book in the merchandise mart. The only down side is that I’m limited to a thousand dollars a game, so all I can make is an average of about one or two hundred on each. But there are so many hundreds of games going on a year, I can probably pull in over a hundred and fifty grand each season.”
    “ That’s nice Stu, but what are you going to do about the income tax?”
    “ Ah, I knew you were going to ask that. I asked each of the bookies to pay me by money order, so every cent that comes in will be reported on my return.”
    “ What about the payments?”
    “ Even better. The clothing salesman will accept my check and Billy Z will pay the New York bookie. He’ll let me reimburse him by adding the extra amounts onto the car purchases I make from him.
    “ Every penny that comes in and goes out will be reported to the IRS, and they can audit me any time they want to.”
    He did it again. Stuart is absolutely the most amazing person I’ve ever met when it comes to figuring out ways to make money. I only can see one hole in his entire plan. If he gets called in for an audit by the IRS, as I’m sure he will when they see ‘gambling’ as a listed source of income on his return, he’ll have to name his betting connections, which will no doubt lead to audits of the California guy, Billy Zee, and the New York bookie.
    I’ve never been involved with the gambling community, but I have a strong feeling that they won’t like getting arrested, audited, and sent to prison for illegal