Legalized Gambling Will Destroy College and Professional Sports, Part 5
Bobby Martin and The Outlaw Line
In this chapter, I feature oddsmaker/bookmaker Bobby Martin and The Outlaw Line, based on my interviews with Martin and several former directors of NFL Security.
This is an excerpt from my 1989 book, Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football (pp. 191-193)
Warren Welsh, a director of NFL Security, told me that the betting line is still one of the biggest problems that faces the NFL today. “The thing that really hurts us,” he says, “is that you go to a game, and you have a thrilling contest, and the final score is twenty-one to twenty in favor of the home team. And you have people who are really angry when they leave the stadium [because the home team didn’t cover the spread]. It’s very unhealthy.”
Most sports reporters and all professional bookmakers know that, for years, the official betting line was set by Robert “Bobby” Martin, who has been the most influential sports oddsmaker in the United States since the early 1950s. Martin is considered to be something of a genius at his trade. And, like Beckley, he cooperated with the NFL in the mid-1960s. “When Bill Hundley was the head of NFL Security,” Martin recalls, “he asked me to give him the opening line, the line in the middle of the week, and how it would close. And then maybe he’d ask for a reason why the line would close as it did.”
Born in Brooklyn in 1918, Martin was gambling by the time he was twelve years old. After earning his degree in journalism from New York University and serving in France during World War II, he became a professional gambler, hustling at Fiftieth Street and Broadway in midtown Manhattan. He moved to Washington, D.C., in 1952, after betting on the wrong teams during the 1951 college-basketball point-shaving scandal. Consequently, he was financially wiped out.
“I was brought to Washington by Julius Silverman,” Martin recalls. “He had heard that I was good at making prices and predicting winners of fights. I was dead broke, and Julius wanted me to help set the odds-on fights and to pick winners. We became the number one fight bookmakers in the United States. Everyone was afraid of fights, because they thought they were fixed. But we were trusted. We had everyone betting with us on the fights.”
In 1959, Martin, Silverman, and another associate Meyer “Nutsy” Schwartz were convicted of illegal gambling activities while operating from their office in a Foggy Bottom row house near the State Department. They were fined and sentenced to five years in prison. But the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark Silverman v. United States overturned their convictions because the surveillance method that had been used to gather evidence against them was deemed to be illegal—and it was a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.[1] Edward Bennett Williams was their attorney. After the Justice Department renewed the government’s case, this time without the surveillance records, all three pleaded guilty to lesser charges. They were fined $5,000 each but were not sentenced to prison.
Martin, who also worked with Gil Beckley, moved to Miami in 1961 but returned to Washington the following year. In 1963, the heat that was being put on gamblers by the Kennedy Justice Department caused him to move to Las Vegas, where he began to set and distribute line information legally. In 1967, he became the chief oddsmaker of the Churchill Downs Sports Book and became the premier oddsmaker in the country.
Here’s how Martin created the weekly line on NFL games: “On Sunday night I’d make my own pro line. I’d tell what line I thought the games should be, then I’d consult with a few people. I’d say, ‘What do you think of such-and-such game?’ And some guys would say, ‘Well, I think you’re wrong here.’ And we would make what we call ‘man-to-man’ bets.[2] So it’s getting a few opinions from people I call professionals, whose opinions I respect. The next morning we’d get a number of opinions, make some wagers, and then make some adjustments in the line [based on the betting].”[3]
Martin calls the end of the process “the opening line.” The FBI calls it “the outlaw line.”
After Martin created the line, it was posted in the Las Vegas casinos and then received widespread dissemination around the country. Bookmakers would base most of their action on his numbers, hoping they would attract an equal division of betting. The amount and trend of the money wagered, as well as injuries and inside information, caused adjustments in the line throughout the week.
Former NFL Security chief Jack Danahy told me that the NFL regularly monitors the line. “Our security representatives would start calling in, originally on Monday. And after Monday Night Football started, the line moved back to Tuesday. They would start calling us on Tuesday and give us the line in their particular city. And we would chart and monitor it. If there was any significant change during the course of the week, they would call it in to us, and we would seek an explanation for it. In most instances, there was an obvious explanation. Say, a key player had been injured the previous week or in practice, and the problem was more serious than originally thought. He would not be available. So, we followed the line right up to game time.”
ENDNOTES
[1] The illegal device was a so-called spike mike, a microphone that contains a special crystal which, when slightly compressed, produces an electrical signal. In this particular case, the spike mike was placed on an eleven-inch rod drilled from the next-door row house and through the common wall between the two houses. The crystal was compressed against an air duct in the wall, which immediately turned into a huge receiver that monitored everything discussed in that room.
[2] “Man-to-man” betting is straight up—with no 11-10 skim for the person booking the bet.
[3] Handicappers, like Mort Olshan, who owns The Gold Sheet, have a different job than Martin does but do use his numbers. Olshan told me, “Bobby and I are really adversaries in this business. He puts up the line to attract public betting, and then I try to find the soft spots in his line.” Personally, Martin and Olshan are close friends, according to both men.