The Numbers

I love this stuff.

The basic structure of the games has been the same for generations. A player picks a number, usually three digits, and bets anywhere from a fistful of coins to $30 that the number will hit, meaning that it will be chosen as a winning number of the day.

The chances of winning with a three-digit number are 1,000 to 1, and the payoff is usually 600 to 1, sometimes less. New York Numbers, the state-sponsored game, pays 500 to 1.

Methods for determining the winning numbers in the street game vary. Court and other records show that the Brooklyn Handle game gets its winning number from the total sum of money - the handle - bet during the day on all the races at a given horse track, with the last three digits of the handle being the hit. The game known as the 3-5-7 Old Way gets its first digit from the last digit of the total paid by the track on $2 bets to win, place and show for the day's first three races, its second digit from repeating the formula using the first five races and the last digit using the first seven races.

The day's track is chosen by a service run by Italian organized crime families, whose first involvement in numbers rackets decades ago involved protection money, said Detective Terrence Donnelly of Vice Enforcement. "If it was snowing, they might pick a track in Florida, or run dogs," he said. "They determine where the number's coming from, so they're pretty important."

I forget the context, but I recall back in the early 1980s researching the resiliency of Numbers in the face of legalized lotteries. The numbers games stayed popular because the cost to play was light and although the winning number resulted in a much smaller take than in the state lotteries, the chance of winning was much higher. Players figured that winning a night on the town is better than the improbable chance of winning a million. Furthermore, the mob-run numbers rackets were trusted more than the state government, since they knew their numbers runner. Not to mention that winning the Numbers is tax-free.