Max the Bookie Won’t Stop, and That’s a Sure Thing

He takes bets as naturally as he breathes. At 75, he has been a bookie for most of his life--a persistence that has made Max Weisberg the Twin Cities’ most unlikely and undaunted of outlaws.

His old alias is duly noted in his police file: Maxie Flowers. The sharpies on 7th Street, where he once sold bouquets of roses to bar patrons heading home to impatient wives, wielded the nickname with derision. “Kid Maxie,” they laughed at the pear-shaped oddsmaker. Now they are dead and gone, and he is just known as Max.

Police have seized nearly $700,000 from Max’s house and bank accounts during a decade of repeated raids--a sure indication of his prowess as an oddsmaker. The most recent haul came in February, when state agents took $127,000. Appropriating his cash is the only satisfaction authorities can take in their long battle to shut down the one-man gambling syndicate.

Max has prevailed using a most unusual weapon: He is mentally retarded, an internal flaw counterbalanced only by his savant-like ability to channel a prodigious memory for numbers into his knack for taking bets.

“This isn’t a bookmaking business,” he says. “It’s just something for me to do.”

Court-appointed psychologists, a jury and a state judge all have concluded in recent years that Max’s disability renders him incapable of understanding the nature of his criminal acts. Their determination, in effect, bars Minnesota from successfully prosecuting him. “Until the courts rule otherwise,” says his lawyer, Ronald I. Meshbesher, “Max essentially has a license to make book.”

In a society where Americans with cognitive disabilities remain an invisible population, Max is glaringly exposed, a nuisance who has foiled the criminal justice system with his genetic shortcomings. Yet even the experts who have examined Max can only guess at how fully he comprehends the legal and moral implications of his actions.

Is Max an “uneducated” felon who plays at being a simpleton, as prosecutor Mark Lystig scoffs? Or is he, as forensic psychologist Kenneth A. Perkins believes, a permanently disabled man who “might know he is breaking the law but doesn’t understand that what he is doing is truly wrong”?

“Beats me,” is Max’s answer.

Grunting Daily Odds Over the Telephone

His internal gift is evident as he grunts his daily odds over the phone. The calls come late in the afternoon from clients who have bet on sports with Max for as long as 40 years.

In each terse conversation, Max synthesizes in a few seconds a stew of information: the daily betting odds from Las Vegas, each team’s recent wins and losses, players’ performances, the amount already bet by his clients that day, how much the bettor has won or lost in recent wagers and all of the money Max himself has raked in or doled out in his latest series of bets.

Then he delivers his odds in a lightning round of mental calculations that only the shrewdest bookies can handle without pencil, paper and spare time--this from a man who has trouble dressing himself and is stumped by the figures on his monthly water bill.

He has been arrested so many times he has lost count. Police raids are such an occupational hazard at his house, a museum of thrift shop furniture and broken appliances in a tough section of south St. Paul, that he now keeps his clothes in garbage bags for easy inspection. His gambling take is spread around on drawers and in closets, $20 and $50 bills peeking from torn bags on tabletops.

His shirts are palettes of the meals he gobbles. Splayed over the table where he takes his telephoned bets, Max offers only the stale mantra that his illegal livelihood is no worse than the state lottery.

“What’s the difference?” he asks.

It is an old gambler’s dodge. But Max is bereft of the ethical grounding that most people are wired with from childhood, Perkins and other psychologists have concluded, unable to grasp the abstract difference between right and wrong.

Unbudging in his childlike reasoning, Max intends to go on taking bets “until I’m dead.”

He takes few of the precautions that even the dimmest criminal mind recognizes as necessity. Max takes bets over the phone despite having had hours of conversations taped by the FBI. He leaves betting slips and ledgers out in the open--even on the recent night he frantically summoned a St. Paul policewoman to help him dislodge a battery from a shrieking smoke detector.

After every arrest, he informs police and court officials of his plans to return to the action as soon as he finds a phone.

Hours after agents from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety waded through the detritus of Max’s house Feb. 9 in search of gambling profits and betting records, the bookie got a call from an old friend. It was Jim Pignato, 61, a metal punch press operator who has bet with Max for about 40 years.

“I figured I’d give him some moral support,” Pignato recalled. “So Max says: ‘Who do you want?’ He was booking the same day they raided him!”

The state gambling agents knew Max well enough to paw over everything in his ramshackle house. They riffled through mounds of clothes. One pocket of an ancient shirt contained $5,000. The other held a dead mouse.

“Why don’t you just shoot me?” the bookie moaned as police counted cash for five hours. A suitcase bulging with $80,000 was wedged into a hall closet.

When they picked up the last bills strewn among skittering roaches, the agents asked Max to guess their take. “Twelve thousand dollars, maybe $13,000,” he said.

“Try $127,000,” countered state special agent Bob O’Brien.

“I know he was back taking bets the next day,” says O’Brien, who staked out Max for 120 hours over six months last year. He followed the portly bookmaker on city buses and into bars, barbershops and carwashes, where he allegedly took bets and settled accounts. “You’re just not going to stop him.”

Yet soon after Max’s house was raided, Ramsey County Atty. Susan Gaertner decided not to prosecute. “It is clear,” she says, “that it would be an uphill struggle . . . to prove that Max Weisberg has the mental capacity to be convicted of a crime.”

St. Paul a Beehive of Illegal Bookmaking

Max came of age in a town that has long been a beehive of illegal bookmaking. A decade before Las Vegas became organized crime’s center for the daily betting line in the late 1940s, St. Paul bookies like Isadore Blumenfeld--alias “Kid Can”--rivaled illegal oddsmakers elsewhere in the nation.

While sport betting is now the main illegal game in town in St. Paul, its popularity also has soared across the nation in recent years. According to estimates by the Council on Compulsive Gambling, Americans are betting more than $100 billion annually on sports games.

Bettors can place wagers with legitimate oddsmakers in Nevada or take their chances with hundreds of legally questionable online betting services.

But the oldest, most available and patently illegal way to play has always been to bet with bookies like Max. Bookmakers provide their bettors with daily point spreads, a numeric advantage given to weaker teams expected to lose. In a hypothetical game between two teams, if one is given a 10 1/2-point spread over another, a bettor can win on the stronger team if it outscores the other team by 11 points, or win on the weaker team if it comes within 10 points. Otherwise, the bookmaker, who charges a 10% fee off the top on every bet, wins.

Bookies twist this deceptively simple system into dozens of permutations to challenge bettors, from “parlays” that make wagers contingent on the results of two or even more games in a single day to “over/under” bets that use the total added scores of each game to alter the wager. Each variation forces bookies and bettors to juggle increasingly exotic combinations of numbers to win.

Max’s mastery of these oddities was so complete by the 1970s that St. Paul’s top bookies often used him in their operations. “They’d pick his brain all the time,” said Ray Hessler, a check machine salesman who drove Max around town for more than a decade.

The city’s big-time bookies were a flamboyant lot, eager for big bets when Max was content to win small. They drove Cadillacs. Max, who never got a driver’s license, rode the bus. They consorted with bankers and country club toffs. Max’s bettors were factory workers and small businessmen.

In private, the other bookies scorned him. Aware Max wadded thousands of dollars inside his pants, several oddsmakers were caught on a federal wiretap boasting about having unleashed a German shepherd on him, said retired FBI agent Dag Sohlberg. As the dog mauled Max, cash cascaded out of his pants “like a pinata,” one of them cackled.

Federal probes snared most of the town’s older generation of bookies in the 1970s. Max spent 4 1/2 months in Sandstone Federal Penitentiary in 1973, working in the prison kitchen and taking exercise yard bets on insect races.

Time disposed of most of his rivals. Younger oddsmakers replaced them, leaving only Max, unrepentant and easily busted.

When Meshbesher, a cheerfully scatological man with a bristly shock of white hair, hired on as Max’s defense lawyer in the summer of 1990, he noticed a small detail in a 1971 federal probation report on Max. It showed that from 1939 to 1941, Max had been committed for “mental deficiency” to the State School at Faribault.

Faribault, 50 miles south of St. Paul, is where mentally retarded youths had been taken for years to get treatment and remedial training. Meshbesher knew Max was slow, but the possibility that he was retarded might be grounds for overturning the conviction.

Delving into Max’s records, Meshbesher learned that in 1939, Max was adjudged “feeble-minded” by the state--the harsh appellation authorities once used for the retarded. His diagnosis, according to a Faribault official quoted in a 1967 probation report, “was mental deficiency: moron, cause undiagnosed.”

Max’s intelligence was tested three times during his stay at Faribault. Each interview found his IQ hovering in the mid-50s, well within the retarded category.

“This changed everything,” Meshbesher recalls. “It raised the real possibility that he didn’t understand the consequences of his actions.”

‘Max Was a Wild Boy’

Max had been trouble since childhood. He was the second of four children born to Russian immigrants. His father, Samuel Weisberg, was a street peddler who found a sinecure late in life as a post office janitor. His mother, Alice, stayed at home with Max, his older brother, Solly, and two younger sisters, Helen and Alice.

“Max was a wild boy,” recalls Helen Finesilver, 71, who now lives in Artesia, Calif. “He ran away from home a lot. He would ride the freight trains until somebody caught him.”

“I had these thoughts swirling around in my head,” Max says now. “Maybe I could make some money, I could help out my family. But I never could get work.”

Max began loitering near 7th Street’s cigar stores and bars, where sports wire tickers clacked away in back rooms. He shadowed the bookies who carved up the local action, joining regulars with names like Jack the Rat, Dave Bones and Hook and Crook, watching how they tallied their odds and covered bets on both sides of a game to protect themselves.

He was a fast learner. Max’s coterie of bettors say he was aided by a camera-like memory, which gives him an edge as he prepares the day’s odds and a defense against spurious complaints.

“Here was this feeble-minded guy who could do stuff even the big-time books couldn’t do,” said Jim Pignato’s brother, Jerry, who argues constantly with Max over old bets--and usually gives in. “He may be an idiot, but he’s got an elephant’s memory.”

The knack means little to Max. “The numbers just come up in my mind,” he says.

But Max’s gift fascinated Perkins, who interviewed him in October 1990 at Meshbesher’s request. Max had just been arrested again with $3,000 wadded in his pockets.

The gambler and the psychologist met in Perkins’ office. Max sat slumped in a chair, fidgeting.

Perkins’ first simple questions stumped him. Max knew the colors of the American flag. But he was unable to say which direction the sun set. He had no idea who wrote “Hamlet” or who Louis Armstrong was.

But when Perkins turned to numbers, Max brightened. Perkins gave Max two- and three-digit combinations and asked him to repeat them. The psychologist soon toughened the sequences up to eight figures at a time, prodding Max for immediate answers. Max complied effortlessly. Any normal person with a steely concentration and a well-trained memory could repeat the feat, Perkins says, “but for someone whose other intelligence assessments are so substandard, this was a remarkable capacity for numbers. He’d spit them right back.”

Perkins later would report to the court that Max’s abilities had a “savant-like quality.” He was not in the range of “super savants”--known to exercise prodigious powers of memory, such as the fictional autistic math whiz played by Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man.”

Darold A. Treffert, a Wisconsin psychologist who is America’s foremost analyst of savants, suggests Max is more of a “talented savant.” About one in 2,000 mentally retarded people show abilities similar to Max’s. They are impaired, Treffert says, “but also have a single skill that is rather conspicuous in relation to their handicap.”

As Perkins began asking Max about his understanding of the criminal nature of gambling, Max tensed up, sucking his fingers.

Yet Max seemed stumped by the notion that gambling was morally wrong. “I’m not hurting nobody,” he kept saying. “I’m minding my own business.”

Max appeared to understand in a concrete way that arrest meant loss of money and maybe jail time. That explained his wariness before police and strangers like Perkins. But his dim, pained answers to the psychologist’s questions about the morality of his acts, Perkins concluded, showed Max had no clue that his offenses “were anything more than technical violations.”

“He recognizes from experience that the law regards his activities as illegal,” the psychologist wrote to the court. “But he does not see it as applying to himself.”

Ramsey County prosecutors derided Perkins’ report as a ploy. “He’s not retarded,” said Lystig, the prosecutor who took the case.

‘Greatest Gambling Mind in the World’

Max’s trial was split into two phases. In the first, which ended quickly on Nov. 8, 1990, a county district court jury found Max guilty of bookmaking. The next day, the jury again convened to determine whether Max understood whether he knew he was committing a crime.

Testimony was brief. Perkins explained Max’s retardation rendered him incapable of understanding the nature of his offenses. Hessler, Max’s old running buddy, described him as “probably the greatest gambling mind in the world,” even though Hessler once had to teach him how to apply deodorant.

Max did not testify. Mum at the defendant’s table, he was befuddlement incarnate. His mouth hung open like a door left ajar. He wore the same mismatched outfit: purple trousers, a brown plaid shirt, scuffed and untied shoes.

In his jury instructions, District Judge Otis Godfrey explained that even if Max “realized that his act violated the law, he is not criminally liable if, because of a defect of reason, he did not understand that his act was morally wrong.”

The jury took less than a half-hour to acquit.

Over the last nine years, police have returned again and again to Max’s disheveled house. They root through drawers and leave with money. But Max has remained free.

Now he is also alone. His brother, Solly, who was also retarded and lived with Max for years, died last year. Even Max’s regular bettors have dwindled to five or six a day.

Most of the $700,000 officials have seized from Max has been divvied up by the IRS, state and local taxing agencies and Meshbesher. The $127,000 haul has been attached by state tax liens.

After Max was arrested twice in 1994, prosecutor Lystig tried to overturn the jury’s 1990 acquittal and to persuade a county judge to send him to a mental facility. After another examination by Perkins and a second court psychiatrist, the judge upheld the original verdict. Gaertner and state gambling agents vainly hold out hope that Max’s ragged living conditions might persuade a new judge to order the bookie into a state facility.

“I ain’t going anywhere,” Max says.

His memory of his two-year stint at the state school is still raw a half-century later. His house may be in ruins, but the mortgage is paid. He has done business there for so long; it’s the only place he knows where he can sit in silence and wait for the afternoon calls to come.

And if the government forces him? He shrugs.

“Any place there’s a phone, some paper and pencils,” he says, “I can do business.”