Character Study
Not Betting a Dime, He Cleans Up at the Slots
Julie Glassberg for The New York Times
VOUCHER VULTURE Gary Bemsel on the job at the Aqueduct racino.
By COREY KILGANNON
Published: February 10, 2012
LIKE a bird of prey, Gary Bemsel swept past thousands of video slot machines, swiftly scanning them, looking for little jackpots — winnings left by bettors at the vast Resorts World Casino at the Aqueduct racetrack in South Ozone Park, Queens.
THE PARTICULARS
NAME Gary Bemsel
AGE 55
WHERE HE’S FROM Metuchen, N.J.
WHAT HE IS A casino gleaner who pulls unclaimed payout tickets from slot machines
TELLING DETAIL Friday and Saturday nights are best because more winnings tend to be forgotten in the machines by drunk or novice bettors.
NAME Gary Bemsel
AGE 55
WHERE HE’S FROM Metuchen, N.J.
WHAT HE IS A casino gleaner who pulls unclaimed payout tickets from slot machines
TELLING DETAIL Friday and Saturday nights are best because more winnings tend to be forgotten in the machines by drunk or novice bettors.
Related
Julie Glassberg for The New York Times
Some of the winning vouchers Mr. Bemsel found in the machines.
Every minute or two, he spied a terminal with unclaimed credits, its redeem button lighted and its seat empty. He swooped in, punched the button and snatched the cash voucher. He hit for 11 cents, then 22, and later a 50-cent jackpot.
“They add up,” said Mr. Bemsel, who is tall, slim, single and youthful for his 55 years. “It’s like a big bank — you’re finding money all the time.”
He can scan hundreds of video slots a minute, with an eagle eye honed by the past 15 years making his living as a racetrack stooper — someone who bends down to gather betting slips off the track floor in the hope of finding a mistakenly discarded winner.
Mr. Bemsel has been a fixture at the Aqueduct and Belmont racetracks, making the daily two-train, two-hour trip from Metuchen, N.J., where he grew up and still lives in his sister’s house. But pickings at the tracks got slimmer after the closing of New York City’s Off-Track Betting parlors just over a year ago prompted many OTB parlor stoopers to flood Aqueduct.
Shortly after the so-called racino opened next to the track’s betting area in late October, Mr. Bemsel heard from a stooper colleague that one could pick up small winnings on the casino floor without betting a dime on the slots. Soon, Mr. Bemsel was using unclaimed racino winnings to make ends meet and to fuel his horse-playing habit.
“It’s a legitimate living — the money’s been left behind,” he said on Wednesday. “It’s surer money than stooping; it’s steadier, and it’s cleaner — you don’t have to fish through garbage cans.”
Mr. Bemsel has not given up stooping. After a loop through the racino, he has enough cash to hit the betting window in the track and then scour the floor and trash for winning tickets. Slipping deftly through crowds of cheering and swearing horseplayers, he can read slips on the ground and tell immediately if they are winners. For face-down slips, he has developed a nimble, soccer-style flip move using both feet — so he barely has to stoop at all.
In the racino, Mr. Bemsel is just one of perhaps 20 regular voucher vultures. Each has his own blend-in technique. The savvy ones pose as gamblers by pinning a betting debit card to their shirt, or clutching a handful of dollar bills. One regular wears a second-hand “Security” jacket and marches around authoritatively. Another constantly keeps a cellphone to his ear.
Mr. Bemsel goes with the high-roller look, dressing nicely in loafers, slacks and dress shirt, and moves quickly through the crowd, as if headed for the High Limits section.
“The first few weeks you could hit the A.T.M. machines for stray $20 bills lodged up in the dispenser,” Mr. Bemsel said. “But certain guys caught onto it, and now they stake out a machine all day, snatching them up.”
A spokesman for the casino said that there was no specific rule against voucher-gathering, but that it was discouraged. When a bettor leaves a ticket behind, the spokesman added, “we work with him or her to recover those lost tickets.”
Mr. Bemsel has been a devoted horseplayer since getting hooked at Monmouth Park on the Jersey Shore at age 16. After high school, he worked in a warehouse until he was 40, when he saw a man at Freehold Raceway in New Jersey pulling betting slips out of the trash. He became a top stooper, and he still never misses the huge stooping jackpots: the Kentucky Derby, and August in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where he and three other stoopers rent a house to work the racing session.
On Wednesday, he strode quickly through the two huge casino levels, checking several thousand video terminals — with optimistic names like Instant Winner, Stinkin’ Rich and Wall Street Winner — and accumulating a fistful of vouchers, to be redeemed at a nearby window.
He works 12-hour days and finds $600 to $1,200 a week, Mr. Bemsel said, but winds up blowing most of it on bad horse picks. “The whole reason I do this is to feed my gambling addiction,” he said. “It’s an illness.”
The racino has been a godsend, he said, because “the golden years of stooping are over.”
In those days, he said, he could make $1,000 a day, and he stayed regularly in Las Vegas and Atlantic City suites.
He paused during his racino rounds on Wednesday and said, “I’ll hit a big one, one of these days, and be back on top.”
No comments:
Post a Comment