BOLITA

  Back before Florida took all the sin out of gambling by going into the business full time itself, there were two popular lottery type games. One, was The Numbers, run by organized crime. The other was Bolita, run by homegrown entrepreneurs. The Numbers game became the Florida Lottery's Cash Three entry. 
Bolita came to Tampa from Cuba in the 1880's and migrated statewide.  To play, 100 numbered balls were placed in a paper bag and bets were taken on the number to be selected at the drawing on Saturday night. Traditionally, a woman grabbed the bag, pinching one ball, then tearing it out of the bag. Usually, someone just reached in.

Bolita was notoriously crooked. Sometimes popular number balls weren't put in the bag. Some popular balls had lead inside to make them sink to the bottom. Some were frozen, to make them easy to identify.

You are never going to legislate morality, so why waste the time? However, when the games got too crooked we moved in. One Saturday we were informed that a lady named Catherine was the bag man--lady in this case--for Naples. She would collect all the bets from Naples and deliver them to Ft Myers, where the operation was run. We put a tail on Catherine and, when she made her pickup and headed for Ft Myers, arrested her.

Now, it was alleged that the bolita operation had been run for years by the then sheriff of Lee County, Flanders Snag Thompson. We told Catherine that we weren't interested in her and if she'd tell us who she was delivering the money to, we'd cut her a deal. She refused, obviously terrified.

We kept at her and she adamantly refused to reveal the boss. Seeing this wasn't going to work, we tried another carrot. We told her if she'd just give her boss' name--never hoping to get the top man--we'd work with her.

Finally, she blurted out, "Lord, no. If Mistah Snag found out I even do that, he'd be killin' me."

Catherine got probation. We turned the information on Mistah Snag over the the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Although Snag was never convicted of running the bolita operation, shortly thereafter he was removed from office by Governor Claudius Maximus Kirk for a truckload of things a sheriff wasn't supposed to be doing.