Dreams, Hunches and 600-to-1 Keep the Numbers Game Going
By MICHAEL BRICK

Published: April 25, 2005

New York City, so famous for tearing down and plastering over, has made a pastime of lamenting lost folkways. But where the Automat, trolleys and Ebbets Field disappeared, the numbers games remain.

Twenty-five years after New York State started a legal version of these small-time tests of chance, the underground games survive, a pounding ventricle of New York neighborhood life run on a heady concoction of numerology and poverty, superstition and fate.

The games' endurance, particularly in big East Coast cities, is no great mystery. The street pays better odds than the state, tax-free, and money speaks every language in the city.

There is a woman in Upper Manhattan who takes bets in the back of a dive, a union man in the elevator of a newspaper office. Countless young men keep the books by memory, moving money from bodegas to banks, pleasing their mothers with a job safer than running drugs. The music of the dance is the promise of a tiny windfall, enough to change life a bit for a short while, for the price of a lucky number.

"It flourishes," Daniel Castleman, chief of investigations in the Manhattan district attorney's office, said of the illegal numbers game. "It gets ingrained in people who aren't looking for mega-millions. It's mostly a street game, and the numbers in aggregate can be fairly significant." While the big multistate games like Mega Millions, in which a Michigan ticket won $205 million on Friday, get most of the publicity, the illegal numbers quietly persist.