Ray Barnett, my detective partner at the time, and I had a problem. A merchant on 5th Ave South was boosting profits with a bookie operation. Generally, since it wasn't a crime of violence, we put moral crimes low on the priority list. But, this guy was operating so blatantly, he was probably going to take out an ad in the Yellow Pages next. So, since he was uncool about it, we decided to ice him down. And that presented a problem.
The hurdle was that much of these operations are by phone and we had no bugging equipment. Stuff like that was out of our budget range. So we improvised, and rigged a common portable voice-activated tape recorder to tap the store's telephone lines, hiding the recorder in the store's overhead, drop ceiling. (Don't ask how we got in the store to do it)
Since there was no way to monitor the recorder, we'd go back each night and see what'd been captured on the tapes. One evening we listened to an interesting conversation between the owner and his wife. It went like this:
Wife: "I'm worried about the gambling thing, taking bets. We could get caught, put in jail."
Bookie: "I tol' you not to worry, the cops ain't gonna bother us."
Wife: "Why not? It's against the law."
Bookie: "True, but the cops know you can't stop people from gambling, and whoring, and takin' dope. So it's low priority. Besides, if we don't do it the Mafia will. Don't you think they'd rather have decent folks like us be the bookies, than some crooked Mafia thugs?"
Ray and I laughed, then looked at each other, realizing he was absolutely right.
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