Word: belmont
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Leaning against a clubhouse pillar, the bald little bookmaker in suede shoes chomped on a Corona and studied his manicured fingernails with ostentatious indifference. It was ten minutes before post time on the opening day of the brilliant $1,150,000 fall meeting at Belmont Park, New York State's biggest and handsomest track...
...most of his working life at the New York tracks but never places a bet, is boss of Pinkerton's New York Racing Service. Since April, when the racing season started, O'Grady and his 300-odd P-men have ejected, or warned, about 500 bookies at Belmont, Jamaica, Aqueduct and Saratoga. For this and other services, New York's racing associations pay the Pinkerton agency about $1,000,000 a year...
Clean Blotters. O'Grady likes to think of Belmont Park, with its 453 verdant acres, as a prosperous city-and of himself as the police commissioner. Says he: "No city of 20,000 has a police blotter with so few entries...
...blotter entries O'Grady especially likes to recall. When Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch lost $2,000 near the Belmont gate, before he had a chance to lose it at the windows, O'Grady recovered the roll with the rubber bands still intact. Another time, a temporarily well-to-do businessman suddenly decided to "invest" his savings of $80,000 in one glorious day at the races. Two special agents who spotted the man peeling off thousand-dollar bills at a pari-mutuel window put a purposely obvious "tail" on him, so that every footpad within miles would keep...
...worth their keep, to Showman Billy, were any of the Met's 38 directors: "Letting Belmont, Bliss, Colt, Dillon, Reed, Whitney, Winthrop et al. boss our most complicated entertainment venture is as daffy as letting Harpo Marx run U.S. Steel. In the old days . . . Otto Kahn and his contemporaries . . . were willing to pay for the privilege of making the Met their hobby . . . But today's directors have shown little facility with the fountain pen . . . they (should) hold one last meeting and fire themselves...