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From the
NY Times:
It took OTB a long time to be born. And it is taking a long time to die.
Make no mistake: the 50 or so Off-Track Betting Corporation parlors across the city have been closed since December. But very few of the spaces have found new tenants — not in this economy, and not in their condition. So OTB lives on in ghostly apparition.
The corner parlor at Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills still wears its 1971 livery, the original OTB logo, like strands of spaghetti on a Kelly green platter. A field of blue ponies still thunders across the facade of the parlor and teletheater on Avenue U in Marine Park, Brooklyn. At Seventh Avenue and 38th Street in Manhattan, a red neon sign still blazes “Off-Tra,” as if noir set designers had been through. And stacks of fresh betting slips still sit in the window of the parlor at 7206 13th Avenue in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn.
But the bettors have dispersed, and with them so has another small “d” democratic New York community — or communities, really, since the parlors were distinctly local. Puerto Rican on Westchester Avenue in the Bronx; Chinese on Chatham Square in Manhattan; Caribbean on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. All vanished.
From the
NY Post:
Talk about bad luck.
Dimwitted thieves who cut holes in the rooftop of a Flushing OTB to get inside left empty-handed after they were unable to open the safe, police sources said.
The crooks cut three holes in the roof of the building on Roosevelt Avenue near Union Street at 3:50 a.m. Sunday and roped down, the sources said.
They snipped the alarm and phone lines, but apparently couldn't open the safe containing $50,000.
Police recovered a crowbar and ladder at the scene, and are hunting the suspects.
*
That's a lot of dough.
Cops are looking for the creeps who stole more than $7,100 from an Ozone Park pizza shop after climbing into the store through a rear exhaust vent, police sources said.
The owner of Pizza Port at Lefferts Boulevard and 135th Avenue discovered the money missing at 11 a.m. Sunday. It's unclear when the heist took place.
The crooks snatched more than $100 from the register and swiped another $7,000 from the safe in the basement, the sources said.
Cops are hunting the suspects.
From
Fox 5:
Without placing a single bet, a man in New York City has made a decent living on off-track-betting. Jesus Leonardo collects discarded betting slips (many of them) and finds winners that others have tossed, according to The New York Times.
"It is literally found money," he said to the paper. Leonardo spends more than 10 hours a day feeding the found slips through a ticket scanner. He said he has been doing this for the last 10 years and figures that he has won about half a million dollars on thoroughbred races across the country.
Off-track betting, or OTB, refers to sanctioned gambling on horse racing outside a race track.
Leonardo is a "stooper" -- a person who hangs around racetracks and betting parlors picking up tickets thrown away by others. Stoopers have been part of racing since the 1930s; they are tolerated as long as they do not harass customers.
He collects thousands of tickets each day. He even hired two others to collects tickets at other betting parlors. He takes the trash home and organizes the tickets into stacks of 300, then returns the next day and feeds them through the ticket scanner. The work is intense enough that he takes a lunch break.
According to The Times, Leonardo, who has a wife and two teenage boys, fell into his career in 1999 after tossing a $900 winning ticket and then frantically searching for it. He collected tossed tickets, but never found his winner, instead he found two other winners worth $2000. He has been doing it ever since.
His winnings are all filed with the IRS.
From the NY Times:
