New Rochelle Elk’s Club Busted for Illegal Gambling

New Rochelle Police officers from the Special Investigations Unit raided the Elk’s Club at 137 Lincoln Avenue in New Rochelle last month and made three arrests related to illegal gambling. On January 11th, New Rochelle police officers, acting on a complaint, executed a search warrant, confiscating gambling records and three video gambling machines.

Earl Bacon, 74, of 120 Remington Place in New Rochelle, NY was arrested and charged with two felonies, possession of gambling records in excess of $500 and promoting gambling, and a misdemeanor charge of possession of gambling devices.

Roland Hospie, 66, of 11 Park Avenue in Mount Vernon, NY and William Totten, 76, of 197 Drake Avenue in New Rochelle were both charged with two misdemeanor counts of promoting gambling and possession of gambling devices.

According to New Rochelle police, the Elk’s Club was being used to run a “policy play” gambling operation where betters wager on a daily number, typically based on parimutuel betting at local race tracks.

The three machines were confiscated and moved to City Hall where they are being stored until after the case is adjudicated. They are illegal to own in New York and will be destroyed after the case is resolved.

Numbers game, also known as a numbers racket, policy racket or Italian lottery, is an illegal lottery played mostly in poor neighborhoods in the United States, wherein a bettor attempts to pick three digits to match those that will be randomly drawn the following day. The gambler places his or her bet with a bookie at a tavern, or other semi-private place that acts as a betting parlor. A runner carries the money and betting slips between the betting parlors and the headquarters, called a numbers bank or policy bank. The name “policy” is from a similarity to cheap insurance, both seen as a gamble on the future…One of the problems of the early game was to find a way to draw a random number. Initially, winning numbers were set by the daily outcome of a random drawing of numbered balls, or by spinning a “policy wheel”, at the headquarters of the local numbers ring. The daily outcomes were publicized by being posted after the draw at the headquarters, and were often “fixed”. The existence of rigged games, used to cheat players and drive competitors out of business, later led to the use of the last three numbers in the published daily balance of the United States Treasury. The use of a central independently chosen number allowed for gamblers from a larger area to engage in the same game and it made possible larger wins. When the Treasury began rounding off the balance many bookies began to use the “mutuel” number. This consisted of the last dollar digit of the daily total handle of the Win, Place and Show bets at a local race track, read from top to bottom.