Word: rios
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Death & the Elephant. Based on a 19th century lottery to boost attendance at the Rio zoo, the animal game is no ordinary numbers racket. It starts off with 25 animals, each of which is assigned four consecutive numbers (from 01-04 for the ostrich to 97-00 for the cow). Odds for a straight animal bet are 20 to 1, but few bettors stop there. They can get 70 to 1 for guessing the last two figures of the winning number, 700 to 1 for the last three figures, 6,000 to 1 for getting all four figures right. They...
...number of symbolic events. The elephant has come to be associated with death, and whenever there is a fatal traffic accident involving a car with one of the elephant's numbers (45-48) on its license plates, the betting is unusually heavy. A few years ago, when the Rio papers published the picture of a derailed locomotive, so many bet on the last four figures of its registration number that the bicheiros were forced to warn that they could not pay off at the usual odds if it won. To the surprise of practically everybody, it didn...
There is never any question of being cheated. "We have to be honest with our customers," says a veteran Rio animal man. "If a bicheiro tried anything funny, word would get around and he'd be out of business." Bicho men, in fact, are often local heroes. Their odds are reasonable, they set neither maximum nor minimum limits on bets and they invariably come to the aid of needy families unable to pay for hospital bills or buy food. Besides, says Sociologist Renato Carneiro Campos, "playing the bicho is about the only hope the worker has of trying...
Wall Street's tremors reverberated last week through Rome's Via Parigi, Rio's Avenida Rio Branco and Hong Kong's Queen's Road Central. With tens of thousands of non-American investors holding stakes in the U.S. stock market, foreign trading on the New York Stock Exchange rose from $5.8 billion in 1961 to $7.8 billion last year, when it accounted for more than 5% of all Big Board transactions. One reason for the market's weakness is that the foreigners have been selling. Last year they sold $409 million more than they...
...metropolis even approaches the appalling anarchy of far-off cities such as Calcutta, Hong Kong, Rio or Tokyo, the worst areas of urban America have in varying degrees almost every ill to which the industrial society has fallen heir: unemployment, disease, crime, drug addiction, poor education, family disintegration-and slums. The middle class, the bulwark of good government in any community, continues as a result to migrate to the suburbs, helping to create the problem of proliferating racial ghettos. Almost every major U.S. city must fight advancing physical decay and increasing squalor, particularly for Negro populations, which within 15 years...