It was the best of busts; it was the worst of busts, the day I took down Tony Sarducci.
There was once a time when we had such hopes for the man. It was nearly ten years ago now that he made the announcement. “I’m goin’ clean,” he said. Even the papers picked it up. Front page news: “Sarducci runs a new game.” He gave us the feeling that anything was possible.
Tony Sarducci grew up in Chicago. He could’ve been some kinda mathematical genius and gone to MIT or done code-breaking at Fort Langley. He had a gift for numbers, an instinct for probability. They say he could count cards ten decks deep, which led to a defining moment in the Uptown Casino. They caught him counting cards and wanted to know his secret. He said it was a natural gift. They didn’t believe him, so they broke his right pinky and banned him for life. He was a young man then and he took it hard.
Tony Sarducci started as a small time bookmaker in the back alleys of Chicago and it seems only a blink of the eye before he owned a hotel and casino on the strip in Vegas. There was his famous motto: God really does play dice. That might strike you as kinda cutsie-pie, but Tony Sarducci meant it. He had a philosophical bent that was surprising given his fondness for crowbars to the kneecaps and cinderblocks chained to the feet. Years later, I had a chance to interview two of his associates, Harry the Weasel and Fat Boy Vincenzo, and they told how, late at night, if he took a shine to you, he’d invite you into the VIP lounge for a private party, and after a few drinks, he’d be quoting Wittgenstein and going on about statistical heuristic structures and other shit like that. You could tell his heart was somewheres else.
Even so, there was a practical side to the man and the practical side knew the value of diversity. By the time Tony Sarducci had renounced it all, he had accumulated an awful lot to renounce. Apart from the casino, there was the extortion, fraud and racketeering operations, the drugs and money-laundering, the prostitution and porn rings. We could never tie him to any of it, of course, but our forensic accountants knew it was there. It had to be. Tony Sarducci would’ve respected their opinion. “The numbers don’t lie,” they said. And he knew it.
And then Tony Sarducci walked away from it all. Some say he was too smart for the racket and just got bored. Others say he realized he was becoming too successful and it was making him look conspicuous. I have a different theory. I think he did it for his niece, Rosina.
Rosina Sarducci was a remarkable young woman who had about her a moral clarity that made you feel inclined to judge yourself unkindly when you were in her presence. I met her once during the investigation and she was beautiful. I don’t mean that she had a great body (though that was certainly true) and I don’t mean that she had radiant milky white skin (though I found myself stammering like a fool when I asked her questions); what I mean is that there was something about her, an aura, an electricity; it made me wanna be a priest just so’s I could hear her confession.
Rosina Sarducci volunteered at the Ninth Street Mission and her uncle came to visit her one day. It must’ve been a shock for him, flying in from the opulence of Vegas to see his own niece in the middle of such squalor. She had a one-bedroom apartment with roaches and mice. He must’ve said: “I don’t get it. You’re a Sarducci. Volunteer at the mission if you like, but at least let me set you up like a Sarducci.” He said this to her in a low voice as they stood together in the common room of the mission. There was a TV set stuck in the corner and a bunch of clients watching the Bulls battle it out against the Nicks.
Rosina pointed to the TV and asked: “What numbers are you runnin’ on the Bulls today?”
“What’s that gotta do with anything?”
“Humour me.”
Tony Sarducci must’ve thought his niece was a bit off but we’re all inclined to make allowances for a beautiful woman, even one who thinks so little of herself that she’d volunteer at a mission. So Tony Sarducci told her the spread.
“Now look at them.” She pointed to the clients sitting in a half circle around the TV set. “Which of them do you think is most into the game?”
Tony Sarducci looked at the odd assortment of people – not exactly the kind he’d invite to the VIP lounge on a Saturday night. There was the old lady with no teeth who hummed to herself while she swayed back and forth, and there was a younger man who was grizzled and had eyes that looked in two different directions. Tony Sarducci settled on a third, a man wearing a toque and sweats who was hunched over and staring at the screen.
“Him.”
“That’s Roger.” She tapped the man on the shoulder. “How much you got riding on the game, Roger?”
“Oh hi Miss Rosina. Just two bits. S’all I got.”
She was trying to make a point. She was trying to tell her uncle that the people most involved in the game were the ones who had a stake in the outcome. It was the same for social activists. “Do you think Rosa Parks could’ve made any difference if she was white? And Woody Guthrie. You think he could’ve written protest songs if he owned a shipping yard? In my own small way, it’s the same. I wanna change the world, Uncle Tony. I wanna make a difference. How could I do what I do if I went home at night to a bubble bath an’ a glass of wine? How could I live with myself?”
I myself have stared into those beautiful green eyes, and I can imagine how Tony must’ve felt, standing in that bare room, with those broken people, shamed by his niece’s beautiful green eyes. Something happened. His heart thawed. Some people think he didn’t get the point. He may have been a hotshot when it came to numbers, but he was dense as a lead pipe when it came to life lessons. But he must’ve got something from his talk with Rosina because he walked away from it all. Some people take a cynical view and think alls he did was substitute one racket for another. I’m not so sure. I think, at least at the beginning, he really wanted to change. He really wanted to make a difference. But the old Tony was lurking there in the shadows.
Tony went legit. Remember his tagline? “Every one of youse has got a winning ticket in the lottery of life, only some of youse forgot to check da numbers.” Remember that? He said it on a thirty second spot. When our organized crime unit in Arlington saw that ad of his, you shoulda seen the eyes roll. We all figured he was up to something, so up went the twenty-four hour surveillance and the wiretaps. But he was clean. Then came our next theory: the crazy card. We figured he’d gone nuts. But our profilers couldn’t see it. He seemed so normal apart from his whacked out TV ads. In the end, we realized that Tony Sarducci really did wanna make a difference. I guess his niece had gotten to him.
Tony Sarducci decided to start small. He was gonna bring an end to the war in Iraq. He made his contacts, did his research, set the odds and then started a pool. At first, people laughed at him, but I guess ridicule is the price you pay for genius. When people saw how sincere he was and when they heard that the money was being handled by a big accounting firm and was earmarked for reconstruction, they started to warm to the idea. He hit a critical mass when he booked his ten millionth bet. There were billions of dollars on the table, and people wanted their winnings sooner than later. Pressure on the government was unbearable and within months, they’d pulled out the troops. Without the Americans, the Brits felt silly, so they ate the last of their crumpets and sailed home.
It wasn’t just the money. Pundits were quick to realize that the decisive factor was public engagement. Most people weren’t willing to lay down money without learning a little about the issues. They started educating themselves. They started learning about other countries and about their own country’s foreign policies. They learned new words like “waterboarding” and “collateral damage.” Pretty soon, they were paying as much attention to the evening news as they used to pay to a Pistons game.
That’s not to say that Tony Sarducci didn’t have his detractors, but when he pulled off a repeat performance with Darfur, people were already beginning to talk about a Congressional Medal of Honor. By the time Tony started making odds on the Congo, he was booking a hundred million plus bets per armed conflict. Tony had become an international player, the first private individual in history to dictate terms to China’s communist party. Soon, China and Taiwan were on friendly terms, and Korea’s 38th parallel had become the site of a math competition in Tony’s honour. Mexicans flowed freely back and forth across the U.S. border. Israelis fasted on Ramadan and Palestinians brought presents to Bar Mitzvahs. Even Canada’s Québecois benefitted; they were no longer afraid to shop in the West Edmonton Mall. But Tony’s reach went beyond armed conflicts. Within five years, scientists had discovered a cure for HIV/AIDS and every child in sub-Saharan Africa had the antidote. Poverty was a thing of the past and the last factory to spew toxic waste had closed its doors. Clean energy was freely available, and people were lying on beaches without fear of cancer or global warming. Only one thing remained: the activist’s holy grail: world peace.
The odds favoured New Year’s Day. You probably remember it. I don’t think there was a person on the planet who didn’t feel that optimistic lurch in their gut. There were two handguns left – in Tibet of all places. Once we nabbed the rebel monks and whisked their arms to Mt. St. Helen’s for a ceremonial flinging into the crater, it would be official. Only it never turned out that way. As the ball dropped in Times Square, violence erupted in Spain.
That’s when I received an anonymous tip that the fix was in. I threw together our old team and we started investigating. Police had arrested an alleged instigator – a man who claimed to be an activist advocating for the rights of tomatoes at La Tomatina and was holding farmers hostage. I pulled the photos from Interpol and recognized Harry the Weasel. We all made the connection instantly.
Seems our Tony Sarducci couldn’t resist the temptation. The numbers were just too big. Through a shell company, he put everything he had on January second. So when the monks agreed to give up their handguns a day early, he panicked and called in a marker from Harry the Weasel.
When I made the arrest, things got pretty wild. Even though it was Tony who’d messed up all on his own, to a lot of people, he was still the big hero, and they took it out on me. They didn’t wanna believe that this winner of the Nobel Peace Prize was just another low-life skunk. So there I was with my tires slashed and rocks through my front window, and email death threats. It was pretty clear that our chance at world peace had just gone up in smoke. Things got bad everywhere. China and Taiwan had a trade dispute, guns went off in the Congo again, Big Pharma raised the price of its antidote, America told the foreigners to go back where they came from.
I don’t understand it. We were so close. I dunno. Maybe right from the start there was just something wrong with Tony’s approach.