The nation . e New Yorkprobe. When Eliot H. Lumbard,chief counsel of the New York com-mission, and Bill Walsh, his topassistant, began to map their driveagainst upstate New York bookies,it occurred to them that the quickestand best way to get on the spoorof their quarry would be to checkthe Minneapolis clearing house ofthe line, where most of the con-tacts inevitably would have to , a chunky twenty-nine-year-old prosecutor who formerly servedas an Assistant Attorney andhelped to prepare the federal nar-cotics case against Vito Genovese,decided to take a detective with himand pay
The nation . e New Yorkprobe. When Eliot H. Lumbard,chief counsel of the New York com-mission, and Bill Walsh, his topassistant, began to map their driveagainst upstate New York bookies,it occurred to them that the quickestand best way to get on the spoorof their quarry would be to checkthe Minneapolis clearing house ofthe line, where most of the con-tacts inevitably would have to , a chunky twenty-nine-year-old prosecutor who formerly servedas an Assistant Attorney andhelped to prepare the federal nar-cotics case against Vito Genovese,decided to take a detective with himand pay a surprise visit on Hirsh-field. The two New Yorkers walked inunheralded in mid-afternoon of aweekday during the basketball sea-son. Basketball play is considerably lighter than football, and Hirshfieldmails out only about 15,000 basket-ball line schedules eompared to the25,000-30,000 he ships each week inFootball season. Walsh ami his de-tective, then, called at one «l tin-slowest times of the and at. one of the slowest times of day andweek; but, even so, the Hirshfieldoffice was buzzing. The phones kept shrilling; Walshcounted twenty-three calls in fifteenminutes. Hirshfield employees an-swered the calls, checked off thecode numbers on their lists, ranswiftly through the latest line. Walsh noted and was intriguedby one procedure. When Hirshfieldshandicappers sniff the reek of a fix,as they did in the college basketballscandals in the early 1950s, for ex-ample, they warn their customersby putting the point spread theyquote in a box Thus, while we were told the New York commis-sion, we heard one game whichwas called five, in a box. He add-ed that anyone studying the linein 1949-50 would have known of thecollege basketball fix at once — andwell in advance of official action — because he would have noticed re-peat edlv . . all New York games were in a New York ir anxious to find out how Hirshfieldarrives at his line, how he de-termines whether figu
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1860, bookidnation191jul, bookyear1865
