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118 “Something That everybody had in Awe” 188th Street owned by his friend Max Rosenheim. At the same intersection stood a modest establishment with an even more colorful reputation. Although the Bickford Cafeteria offered little in the way of ambiance or architectural flair, this branch of the popular chain had the distinction of being the favored hangout of Joey Hacken, the neighborhood’s popular bookie. A stocky, pudgy-faced man with a perpetual five o’clock shadow, Hacken seemed to have arrived at Bickford’s by way of central casting. Though the son of Jewish immigrants, his dark hair and swarthy features gave him a vaguely Italian look, and his workday uniform consisted of a sports shirt and a shabby overcoat, a bundle of newspapers tucked messily under one arm. Friends called him Joe Jalop, a reference to the wreck of a car he drove. Most days, Hacken could be found just inside the cafeteria’s entrance, stationed at the first table on the left and surrounded by a knot of boys from the neighborhood drawn by the promise of action: Who was the favorite for the game that night? Who looked good for the fight? Hacken bought his young acolytes pie and sodas, and they in turn listened avidly as he taught them, largely by example, how to navigate the underside of sports. By 1943, the crowd included a skinny kid not yet in his teens who introduced himself as Jack Molinas. Jacob Louis Molinas had been born in 1932, the child of a Sephardic Jewish father from Turkey and a mother of Turkish stock. The family lived at 2525 Grand Concourse, a block north of Fordham Road. Upon the arrival of the couple’s firstborn son, gold coins were sprinkled into his crib, a traditional gesture intended to ensure a life of good fortune, and the hoped-for blessings were apparent long before the child was out of short pants. A beautiful boy with glossy hair, a radiant smile, and a remarkable brain, he learned to read at the age of three, and his IQ was said to be a genius-level 175. By the time he was twelve, he was five foot ten—in a few years he shot up to six-six—and starting to do amazing things with a basketball in the playground of Creston Junior High School, not far from his apartment. After the games, Molinas headed over to Hacken’s table at Bickford’s, there to be tutored about odds, point spreads, and the myriad ways to turn a quick and illegal buck on the backs of unsuspecting ballplayers. The lessons continued at the mob-controlled restaurant Molinas’s father owned on Coney Island, a popular racketeers’ hangout where the boy’s teachers included Izzy the Bug, Frankie the Wop, Shpitz the Galitz, and Shpitz’s sidekick, Pork Chop. The owner’s son proved an exceptionally apt pupil. “Something That everybody had in Awe” 119 First in high school, then in college, Molinas continued to play brilliant basketball. By his junior year at the city’s highly competitive Stuyvesant High School, he was being touted as a future college All-American, and scouts were describing him as the best high school player in the country. As a senior at Columbia University, he was captain and top scorer of the 1952–53 team that won the Ivy League championship that year, an AllAmerican forward named the most outstanding athlete in his graduating class; not until Bill Bradley came along a decade later did the Ivy League produce another such virtuoso in the sport. But Molinas’s real passion was reserved for those activities that took place off the court, activities of which few people were aware. Through all those years, working with his mob-controlled bookie, he threw game after game. He bet regularly against his own team and not only fixed games himself but more insidiously persuaded others to do the same. In Molinas’s senior year of college, the Fort Wayne Pistons came calling , and Molinas, their number-one draft pick, was for a time a National Basketball Association All-Star. Only briefly, however. His criminal past caught up with him midway through his first season with the Indiana team. Molinas was ignominiously led away in handcuffs and in short order banned from the league for life for betting on games illegally. Yet his banishment from the NBA seemed to feed his fever. A major player in the point-shaving scandals that...

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