LAS VEGAS ? Talk about basic training: Jimmy Vaccaro hit the ground running. Trafford, was a small Pennsylvania mill town with all the blue-collar distractions. Jimmy Vaccaro shot pool for money. He played the numbers at 50 cents and a dollar a shot daily. So did everyone else on his block.
”I was young. I wasn’t married, ” he says. ”So I chased the big scores, and each time I tapped out, I went home and moved back with mom. Then I moved to Youngstown and that was a wide-open town. You hustled, and you and your friends chased the same dreams. I was a kid and I loved it.”
And this is the story of how Vaccaro became one of the most reknowned oddsmakers in the country and one of the guys setting the number on the most lucrative fight in history, between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao.
In 1966, Vaccaro piled four of his friends into his old car and drove through the night to Las Vegas. They were young and might as well have had a sign on their backs that said, “Please card these underage youngsters.” They got thrown out of three casinos.
But Mrs. Vaccaro didn’t raise a quitter. Nine years later, he was back in Vegas to stay. No bankroll. No marketable skill. No job. All he had was a name given him by a gambling buddy and the conviction to stay in Vegas.
”You know,” he says, ”I never even had a bank account back then. When I got my first pay check from the casino, I had to ask somebody how to open one.”
On the first day, he came charging into Michael Gaughan’s office at the Royal Inn Casino.
”I was told to look you up, ” he said. ”I want to be a dealer. Can you help me?”
MOVING THE LINE: Why Vegas is watching this bettor from NJ
Recalls Vaccaro: ”He picked up the phone and called a dealers school downtown and told the guy he was gonna send a kid over to learn and that after the guy got a job he’d make sure the school got paid.
“He hired me to deal black jack and about a year later he calls me into his office and asks me if I know to run a sports book. I told him no and he says, ‘Well, neither do I so we’ll start one together.’ And he turned his new sports book over to me and I’ve been making lines ever since.”
He made them downtown at the Golden Nugget and on The Strip for Steve Wynn at the Mirage. He opened the Barbary Coast, ran William Hill’s U.S. operation and finally came full circle by reuniting with Gaughan at South Point.
Vaccaro isn’t just a line-maker. He’s a Las Vegas brand with 40 years as a bookmaker in this town.
So he’s been a part of the best of Vegas — before the Federal Banking Security Act beached a lot of high-rolling whales (big bettors) because of IRS regulations the casino must enforce with personal questions some bettors prefer not to answer.
”It makes it tough,” Vaccaro said, “but if they don’t comply, I can tell you they will not get a bet down. Before the currency restrictions it was terrific. Guys threw money at us. One night at the Barbary Coast, a guy with a red hat and high heel shoes and four tons of chains around his neck asks me if I’ll take a $35,000 bet on Tommy Hearns against Marvin Hagler. I told him, of course. Then he reaches down and pulls up a huge bag and he’s got his 35 grand inside it in 10s and 20s.
“We had to count all that and write a ticket by hand and it took so long I didn’t know if we’d finish before the fight. I wanted to kill him. But not badly enough not to take his money. Today we’d have to ask for his name, phone, business and where he got the money. Trust me. He’d be out the door.”
And then there was the absolute worst day in the history of Vegas sports betting? Super Bowl XIII in 1979, the Cowboys and the Steelers, when bettors caught the middle. You don’t forget that kind of Black Sunday.
”We opened with the Steelers plus 2 ? and they closed at plus 5. It still gives me nightmares. I can close my eyes and see Jackie Smith drop that pass in the end zone. The final score was 34-31 Pittsburgh. We had to pay everybody on both sides of the bet. The big hotels all got killed. We were lucky the Royal Inn Casino was small.”
Gaughan was on his boat and he called me asked how bad it was. I told him I had good news and bad news. The bad news was that we lost $125,000. The good news was that it wasn’t more. I shudder to think how bad the big boys got hit.”
But that’s why they call it gambling and nobody knows that better than Vaccaro, who now waits to see how the final hours of Mayweather-Pacquiao money will be bet.
”This fight,” he said, ”pointing at the big board in the sports book at South Point, ”had it happened when it should have, we would have pegged it differently. Five years ago, we posted it on our board because we thought it was going to happen and it would have opened a lot tighter.
“But it didn’t happen, and then Pacquiao got whacked by [Juan Manuel] Marquez and that changed everything. So around town, when it finally did open, Mayweather was close to a 2-1 pick, but we immediately got a rush of Pacquiao money. We expected it, because those are basically the $300 bettors.
“Right now the board reads Mayweather minus 180. Some places had it Mayweather minus 170 but they’ve gone back up.”
What they don’t know is how much favorite money will come in on fight weekend, and if that money moves the line a certain way, making the fight unattractive to the “smart money,” it could affect the take. But Vaccaro isn’t worried.
”We’ve got a hook nobody talks about,” he said. “The Kentucky Derby. They will be sitting in the sports book at 6:30, half of them freakin’ drunk and they are going to be running around in a festive mood, and they are going to bet the Derby just to have something to do until the fight. I would bet we might just set a Derby record.”
Only in Vegas.
