Jennie's gambling addiction is fatal to her family's finances

Jennie's gambling addiction is fatal to her family's finances
Now it's the Giants game she pins her hopes on
Jimmy Breslin


Her problem this time happened the one time when there was no way out, Jennie from 108th St ., Ozone Park, Queens, announced.

The airport here in Queens sends so many to the Middle East only to have them come back killed or maimed. Now planes stand on the edge of a runway as a silent announcement of dead young to mothers and sisters and brothers and fathers and uncles.

The Queens airport is on a street called Liberty Ave. It runs with three- and four-story buildings that are under the roof of an el with spaces in tracks that send oblongs of bright sunlight onto the sidewalks.

In front of Rocco’s restaurant, next to the Chinese restaurant on Liberty Ave., at this particular time stood a group — including John Gotti and Fat Andy. Jennie went past them without looking. At that time, she was putting house money regularly on a rider named Gonzales.

She did that one race too many, Gonzales lost one time too many.

They fix the races, she said. She couldn’t admit that she was plain losing. Then on Sundays, she shelved horses for a few hours and got killed betting football games with Big Fats, the bookmaker who could be found under the el tracks on Liberty Ave.

Jennie had two kids, both married and gone. Her husband made $500 a week, got paid every two. A real standup husband, he handed her the whole check. He went to work. She lost enough money, on horses who ran as fast as Jennie could walk to the store.

After one week with her husband’s paycheck, she only had enough for some of the bills.

Con Edison. Several notices reminded her. And now she decided that she had both luck and opinion on the Aqueduct races.

When that didn’t work, neither did the lights. She had to rush out to Liberty Ave., and at a store run by Pakistanis she bought big candles.

She fired them up in her house and thought up a story for the husband, Nicholas. When he got home from work, he was excited over his dark house.

Con Edison’s going to work on us all night, she said. They had a big failure.

Nicholas looked out at the street, lined with well-lighted houses, and
announced that he was not a sucker, and that they now were in marital trouble.

The next day, she ran up to Liberty Ave., went past Rocco, seeing nobody. She went inside Rocco’s and asked the waitress, Noreen, if these people were going to be around. Before she answered, John Gotti, in a double-breasted suit, came out of a car. Noreen was at the door pointing to Nicholas and testifying to Gotti for him. Gotti nodded at Nicholas and walked off. But his nod remained.

“Why do you want to be a murderer?” waitress Noreen said.

“I don’t want to do that,” Nicholas said. “I’ll tell you what. I need a job for my wife.”

Maybe right here, Noreen said. Give us a week and you got something.

Nicholas told his wife that he probably could forgive her, what with her working it off at Rocco’s.

Almost to the moment, Rocco came into the place and pinched a waitress. As usual, he was getting her into the back room, but here was his fiancée or close to it, Phyllis, walking in sweetly. And then seeing the new young waitress coming out of the back room, her mood changed to anger and beyond. She turned it into a riot that inside of two weeks had Rocco’s closed, and out of fear, Rocco had the place up for sale.

Leaving Jennie at least jobless. The woman who took on what once was the male disaster, losing at gambling, needs all the sense and steadiness of working to pay money owed — including the 3% percent a week, every week, whether you have a job or not. Three percent a week is 150% a year. Best pay fast.

Years later, the splash in newspapers and on television is the NFC Championship Game, and with the Niners a 3-point favorite. And even now, that had Jennie insane in the kitchen on Friday night, looking at her husband’s paycheck and telling herself that she could triple or quadruple this check just by the Giants in a few hours.



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