Take one dime. A lady goes into a magazine store and tells the man at the counter she wants to put ten cents on 734. If 734 hits she wins sixty dollars. The odds are 999 to one, but the pay-off is 600 to one. The magazine store owner writes 734, and 10c under it on two slips of paper. He gives the woman one slip; he puts the dime into the cash register, but he rings No Sale. At three o’clock, his wife takes over the counter while he takes the cigar box in back and adds up the amounts on all the slips. The amount is $18.60. He puts all the slips in an envelope and goes out to the cash register and from it he takes a ten dollar bill, a five, three ones, two quarters, and the dime. He puts this cash in the envelope with the slips. He places the envelope inside a science fiction magazine on Wednesdays, it’s a science fiction magazine and puts the magazine under the counter.
At three-thirty the collector comes. The collector is a plump young man with a smiling face, a struggling writer making a few dollars while waiting to be discovered by Darryl Zanuck or Bennett Cerf. He drives up in a seven- year-old Plymouth that belongs to the local numbers organization and which he is allowed to drive only while making collections. He parks in front of the magazine store, goes inside, and asks for a copy of a particular science fiction magazine. The owner gives him the magazine and tells him that will be $1.86. No science fiction magazine in the world costs $1.86, but that’s what the young man hands over with no protest.
The young man then carries the magazine out to the car. He sits behind the wheel, takes the envelope from the magazine, put it in a briefcase which is on the seat beside him. He tosses the magazine on to the back seat with seven other discarded magazines and takes a small notebook from his breast pocket, he writes in it after several other entries: “MPL 1.86.” Then he puts the notebook and pencil away and drives on to his next stop.
All in all, he buys fifteen magazines, then drives on to the Kenilworth Building and leaves the car in the lot next door. He carries the briefcase up to the seventh floor and enters the offices of the Novelty Amusement Corporation. He smiles at the receptionist, who never gives him a tumble, and goes into the second door on the right, where a sallow man with a cigarette dangling from his lips nods bleakly. The young man puts briefcase and notebook on the desk, and sits down to wait.
The sallow man has an adding machine on his desk. He opens the notebook and adds the figures for the day, coming up with $32.31, which should be ten per cent of the day’s take. He then adds up the prices on the policy slips, and gets $323.10, which checks out. He finally adds together the actual money from all the envelopes, once again arrives at $323.10, and is satisfied. Out of the money, he gives the young man $32.31, which is what the young man paid for the magazines. In addition, he gives him $16.15, which is one-half per cent of the day’s take from his area his cut for making the collections. He averages $15 a day, for an hour’s work a day. Well pleased, the young man goes home to his cold typewriter.
The sallow man now takes out a ledger and enters in it the amount of, and the number of, each bet according to the exact location where each bet was made. He adds his figures again to check his work and gets the correct total. By then, another collector has come in. The sallow man is one of six men at Novelty Amusement who each take in the receipts from five collectors. They work at this approximately from four until six o’clock. Each of them clears about $1,500 a day resulting in a grand total of about $9,000 a day for the entire operation.
Ten-and-a-half per cent of this money has already been paid out. The receivers each get 1 per cent. Additional office salaries, rent, utilities, and so on eat up about 3? per cent more. When the sallow man stuffs the day’s proceeds into a canvas sack and carries it back to the room marked “Bookkeeping”, there’s about 85 per cent of it left. On an average day, this leaves about $7,700. Ten per cent more is deducted almost immediately and put into envelopes which are delivered to law officers and other loal authorities. Twenty-five per cent is retained by the local organization and split among its chief personnel; the remaining 50 per cent is shipped weekly to Chicago the national organization’s piece of the pie. In an average six-day week, this half of the pie comes to better than $25,000. Each day’s cut is put in the safe in the bookkeeping room, and, on Saturday nights, two armed men carry the cash in a briefcase to Chicago by plane. For security, one of the armed men is from the local organization and one is from the national organization.
On this Saturday, there was $27,549, earmarked for Chicago, in the safe. In addition there was the $20,000 kept as a cash reserve on the unlikely chance that, someday, there might be a run on a winning number, or for additional greasing when and if necessary, or for whatever unforeseeable emergency might arise. And further, there was $13,774.50, in the safe, which represents the week’s 25 per cent cut for the local organization to be split on Monday. The total in the safe was $61,323.50. Including the dime.
At six-fifteen on this Saturday, a late mailman with a bulging bag walked into the Kenilworth Building, chatted with the elevator operator about special-delivery packages, and rode up to the ninth floor. He then took the fire stairs down to the seventh floor. A couple of minutes after he entered the building, two well-dressed men with briefcases, looking like insurance salesmen, walked into the building and rode up to the sixth floor. The elevator operator was a bit puzzled it was Saturday and after six o’clock that there was so much activity going on, but he shrugged his suspicions off. When he brought the elevator back to the first floor, he found two bearded young men with trombone cases waiting for him. One of them said, “Hey, Pops. What floor’s Associated Talent?”
“Tenth floor, but I think they all went home.”
“They better not had, man. They called us over special Weekend gig, man.”
The elevator operator carried them up to the tenth floor.
On the seventh floor, down the hall from Novelty Amusement, the mailman was talking to the two apparent insurance agents about people who address their mail incorrectly. A few minutes later, the two trombone players emerged from the stair well on to the seventh floor, joined the other three men, and the mailman looked at his watch. “We’ve got fifteen minutes,” he said.
They all reached into the mailbag and came up with white handkerchiefs, which they tied over their faces like bandits. Then, from the sack, they pulled two stubby shotguns with barrels sawn off back nearly to the stocks. The trombone players opened their trombone cases and produced partially assembled Schmeissers burp guns with folding stocks. They put these together rapidly and snapped in clips.
The mailman said, “All right. Give me one minute.”
He opened the door to Novelty Amusement and went inside. The other four men waited outside, one of the trombone players studying his watch intently. All the other offices on the floor were closed at that time. The collectors had all been and gone at Novelty Amusement, and the couriers weren’t due for half an hour yet, so it was unlikely that the party would be interrupted.
The mailman walked into Novelty Amusement looking mild and baffled. He had a thick moustache, black edged with grey, and very thick glasses. He went over to the receptionist’s desk, “I’m sorry, Miss, but I can’t find this company. Do you know where Associated Removals is?”
The receptionist shook her head. “I never heard of it.”
“Well, maybe that isn’t it. The writing on the package label is terrible. Here, you take a look at it” He came wandering around the desk. ” maybe it says something else and I’m reading it wrong.”
The receptionist knew that no one was supposed to come behind the desk. If anyone tried to without
