Fun Poker Website!

While we're on the subject of animals...about a month ago on Mob Speak, I talked about a poker game called H.O.R.S.E. If you want to know more about this fascinating game, check out the Website: http://www.horsepokerguide.com/. It's run by a guy named Jimmy Taylor who not only knows a lot about the game, but presents the material in a simple and fun way.

What's more, you can play H.O.R.S.E. on the site.

Gone to the Dogs

Slick's dog, Herman the German Schnauzer, is so human that Slick and I wrote a gritty urban detective story for kids based on the real Herman. The manuscript (yet to be published) is called Dog Justice.

Well, a few weeks ago Slick took Herman to the movies. Herman cried during the sad parts and laughed during the funny parts. After the movie the guy behind Slick said, "That's amazing!" Slick replied, "I'll say, he hated the book."

The above part about Herman at the movies may be stretching the truth a bit, but the part about writing Dog Justice is entirely true.

Woman Writes as a Man Who Hung with the Mob

People constantly ask me how I ended up writing Slick's life story, a guy who hung with the mob. So I worked up a 45-minute talk I give at bookstores, libraries and writers groups. It always draws quite a crowd.

Back in 1996 in Albuquerque, NM, the TV station where I worked as Santa Fe station manager abruptly sold putting everyone out of work. There were no other jobs in TV broadcast so I scrambled around looking for something new. I'd already had a wide variety of jobs, mostly dull. Some of the more interesting ones included 15 years as a cartographer. I had the good fortune to help map a 6,000-year-old archaeological site in the Highlands of New Guinea. Through the years, I enjoyed stints as a certified NAWI scuba instructor, nightclub singer, and white water outfitter, to name a few.

So the prospect of finding a new job wasn't scary to me. But I had to find something that paid well, a daunting task in New Mexico, a state known for its Third World wages. Well, Indian casinos were springing up like tumbleweeds around the New Mexico desert. I interviewed blackjack dealers and other employees at those casinos and discovered that a person could earn darn good money from tips. Since I hardly knew how to hold a deck of cards (no kidding!) I decided to enroll in an Albuquerque casino dealers school by the name of A.C.E.S.

While I learned how to deal blackjack and Caribbean Stud, one of my teachers (Slick) carried around about 20 yellow-tablet pages on which he'd written the beginning of his life story. He was looking for someone to make his biography into a book. I took one look at his 3-grade scrawl and it was like meteor hit me. There was something so compelling, that I vowed to write Slick's story even though I'd never written anything before.

Now came the tough part. I had to learn to write, I had to learn write as a guy and I had to learn to write as a guy who hung with the mob. Plus I still needed to work full-time. Slick had no dough to pay me. We also had lots of communication problems. After all...Slick and I were about as opposite in our lifestyles as nuns and hookers. (Back then, anyway.)

One thing motivated me: I was so obssessed with writing this book, nothing could keep me from finishing it. I knew that striking it rich writing was about as likely as finding a gold nugget in a crackerjack box. That's why the authors that do make it big are booked on late night TV shows. They are definitely a novelty. But Slick thought otherwise...a big source of our arguments. Somehow our little partnership muddled along. He was motivated by money and I was crazy.

I approached the job like I was building a human being from scratch. Starting with a bare bones framework--Slick's exact words, run-on sentences, mobspeak, etc. I painstakingly fleshed out his story from his own narrative, interviews with his cronies and family, and years of research. As an unknown writer, I knew it had be really good to make the cut and get published. But I couldn't have asked for better material. I laughingly thought that Slick reminded me of a speeding freight train about to derail at any minute. He was always in the right (or wrong place depending on your point of view) at the right time. What a story!

To be continued...

Look for the end of the story coming soon.

Martha Frankel's OK!

Imagine my surprise when I went to get my mail today and there was a gift waiting for me. Martha Frankel, whose book Hats & Eyeglasses I just reviewed for the "New York Post," sent me a beautiful autographed canvas bag with the book's cover printed on it along with a kind note. Gee...it felt better getting this bag than the money I received for the review!

You go girl! And hope you sell zillions of copies. BTW, an autographed copy of Thief! is on its way to you.

Tony Borsalino & the Hooker

Some of you may know that Tony Borsalino figured prominently in last year's Chicago Outfit trial dubbed "Family Secrets." He's the guy who was ordered to hit Tony Spilotro back in the 1980s, but Borsalino refused.

Well, Slick said that in the 1950s he was staying at the Lido Hotel in Miami Beach. One day he and Tony Borsalino were having lunch at the famous Wolfie's Restaurant when a hooker approached Tony. He told her he was kinky and would like to slap her around a little.

She asked, "How long?"

"Till I get my money back," he said.

She disappeared fast.

Don't Let the Bedbugs Bite

Slick & our friend, Tony Montana, were at a Borders book signing today reminiscing about the old days in Chicago. They both laughed at how normal people woke up to an alarm clock. But Slick, Tony and many other poor folks woke up to biting bed bugs. They wondered how many people experienced the same thing?

P.S. Tony added, "And when one bedbug died, a million came to the funeral."

NEW YORK POST review by Cherie Rohn

The following review appeared today in the New York Post:

KNOW WHEN TO FOLD 'EM
A POKER ADDICT TAKES THE FLOP
By CHERIE ROHN


February 17, 2008 -- "If you don't have anything . . . get out." That's sage poker advice, especially if you're addicted to online poker and staying in means you lose everything you care about.

"Does it strike me as odd that I'm turning down four- and five-thousand-dollar assignments," asks author Martha Frankel, "so I can win 85 bucks on Wednesday? No, it doesn't strike me as odd at all."

One word describes Martha Frankel's memoir "Hats & Eyeglasses": Fearless. Frankel writes about her life as if she were Indiana Jones stepping out over bottomless space. Make no mistake. Fearless in this case means powerful, even uplifting and funny.

The title refers those times "when you're playing cards and losing so bad your ship is sinking. All that's left on the water's surface are your hat and eyeglasses," Frankel explains. The metaphor also highlights Frankel's downward spiral into online poker addiction. Frankel uses her finely-honed humor to cut through the crap. Nothing is sacred, least of all Frankel. "I slept around, drank too much, took drugs with names I couldn't even pronounce and felt my life slipping away."

She has the guts to bare all in part because she's grounded by the love and encouragement of her Jewish friends and family - a colorful mish-mash of die-hard gamblers and lovable eccentrics like Aunt Tillie, who "taught us to say s - - - and never tired of hearing us try to use it in a sentence."

While other young girls played canasta and sewed a running stitch, Frankel learned to read the Daily Racing Form from her father. Her world revolved around daily doubles and bookies, eventually paying off with winnings of thousands of dollars.

By her mid-40s, Frankel was a highly-respected celebrity interviewer commanding serious money from major magazines. Enter the friendly neighborhood poker game. Obsessed with winning, she spent days on end dealing out hands on her couch, and then playing anywhere she could find action. She became so good that Frankel started beating the guys in her poker group and beyond.

But she apologized for winning. Like many women, Frankel was programmed to please the men around her, "make them feel comfortable and not threatened." There's a lesson here more women could learn: "There are no sorrys in poker." When Frankel put friendship aside and went for the jugular, she earned the respect of the men around her, especially the ones she beat.

But Frankel's downfall came from another medium where "cleavage and attitude" had no effect: an Internet site called Paradise Poker. After years of racking up thousands of dollars in debt, she finally called Gambler's Anonymous with less than $60 in her pocket. She mustered the courage to come clean to close friends and family who had no inkling of her decades-long addiction. But rather than telling them, she sent the "Hats & Eyeglasses" manuscript to do the explaining. She expected angry retorts but instead they showered her with words of comfort and expressed sorrow for her ordeal.

Her husband Steve Heller remains somewhat in the background, yet was clearly supportive of his independent, life-on-the-tilt wife. We learn a lot about Frankel from the way she tells Heller in a letter that accompanied the manuscript "This is the hardest thing I have ever had to do." The admission of her addiction proved cathartic. Now she was able to forgive herself.

Frankel shows us the tender underbelly of her struggle with personal demons that "twist your insides and make sanity fly out the window." We root for her not because she asks us to, but because Martha Frankel reeks of chutzpah and owning up. By so doing, she achieves her "hat trick" - love, self-worth and redemption. No apology necessary.

Cherie Rohn is the co-author of "THIEF! The Gutsy, True Story of an Ex-Con Artist."

And here's the link to the NY Post Website: http://www.nypost.com/seven/02172008/postopinion/postopbooks/know_when_to_fold_em_97968.htm