Re: Las Vegas before.....
Wow, thanks for the memories Viejo. I didn't know FM's kid was the one who shot Donna The Duck. Jaspers J&J Line Service office was like a kids clubhouse.
My very first job in Las Vegas was driving a beer truck for the Miller Company (Bonanze Beverage)...there was no interstate that surrounded the town and the main streets were Sahara, Flamingo, Charleston, and Tropicana...you could get from one end of town to the other in 15 minutes...the quicker I got done my route for the day, the more time I could spend in places like the Rose Bowl, Gary Austins, or Palace Station...or any of the local joints, bars, or sportsbooks....
One of my stops on the route was a little place called Gallos on Paradice off Flamingo...I walked in and gave the invoice to a man who looked exactly like Willie Nelson...He was on the phone and talking point spreads with the guy on the other end...also in the joint was a guy named Jack Moore and a guy named Hershey...Hershy was also on a phone and talking point spreads...I put two plus two together and knew this was the place to be...
So I decided to spend my lunch hour there and shoot the shit with these guys...in the hour I was there, 6 or 7 guys came in but never ordered lunch or a drink, but instead exchanged brown paper bags with each other...
For some reason Frankie Masterana took a liking to me and we talked sports and gambling all the time...even invited me to his house a few times on Ottawa Drive, right on the Sahara Country Club...his wife Stella was a very gracious lady and I enjoyed their company...his kid, Frankie Jr. was not really the perfect son and soon after I met him, Jr. made the mistake of putting an arrow through Donna the Duck on the golf course...this outraged the Las Vegas community and he was bought up on charges...soon after, Frankie was paralyzed from the waist down after a cliff diving session in Mexico...a lot of people said it was justice for shooting Donna the Duck....(I didn't buy that)
After that Frankie (who was in the black book) asked me to help him on the weekends in his office on Spring Mt. called "Right Side Sports"...located between the Don Best office run by Al Corbo and Jasper's line service office...Frankie had customers who I would give nothing but rundowns on the spreads for the weekend games...I sometimes had 3 guys at the same time giving rundowns to and then I would transfer them to Frankie if I was asked to...didn't take me long to figure out he was taking action and laying off action...and you should have seen the traffic coming in and out of his office back then.....met a lot of the name gamblers back then, guys like Buzzy White, Dickie Stevens, Doc Stevens, the Spilotro Brothers, Jasper, The Swamper, Speedy Newmann, and a host of others...
This was where I got my first offshore job...The Cigar walked in one day and saw me giving lines out on the phone...He immediately asked me if I wanted to work for him in the Dominican Republic and could I be ready to leave in two weeks...I was going through a divorce at the time and said sure...I knew that the DR was in the Carribean but didn't know exactly where...so I packed my bags and that was my introduction to Offshore....(and to Steak TarTar who was the Lines manager down there)
More about Frankie M. later....
Wow, thanks for the memories Viejo. I didn't know FM's kid was the one who shot Donna The Duck. Jaspers J&J Line Service office was like a kids clubhouse.