Ex-bookie
goes straight to share his crime story
Downtown Profile
Written By Laura Brown
For 45 years, Al Bozzi was a gambler, a liar, and a cheat. He doped horses, tricked bookies, and stole money from his wife and kids. While his family scraped for pennies in an East Boston housing project, he lived for the next scam and the big score, dropping thousands of dollars in bets "from Maine to Spain," as he tells it.
"I was a bum, and I stayed that way for a long time," says Bozzi, 64, now a toned-down Boston cab driver. "Gambling was my forte. If it wasn't horses, it was cards, and if it wasn't cards, it was dice."
His wild lifestyle finally caught up with him in the mid-1960s, when his 17-year-old son ratted to federal law-enforcement agents about his father's illegal gambling equipment and then wired his father's car to explode.
"I hated him so much I wanted him put in jail or dead," says David Bozzi, now 39.
The older Bozzi got a tipoff about the raid and the wired car, and took off for California until the heat died down. But, he slowly began to realize he was pushing his luck.
He says he cheated on his last horse race in 1977. After that, he decided he'd start making an honest living, before he drove away his wife and three kids for good.
"I was able to bounce back and rise from the ashes," he says, white-haired and wiser. "A lot of gamblers don't come back."
Now settled into a small house on the North Shore, Bozzi's planning more than a comeback. With the help of the son who once tried to kill, he working on a book about his colorful life, which he calls, "The Big Score."
Set in the infamous Scollay Square, the back side of the racetrack and dimly lit bookie joints, the stories read like vintage Damon Runyon.
Filled with the details of Bozzi's scams and adventures, they're lively tales of hard living and hard loving, winning and losing, elation and tragedy.
Starting with Bozzi's childhood in East Boston, they move through his short stint in the army, his on-again, off-again marriage to his only wife, Angie, and the increasingly sophisticated ruses he came up with to beat the bookies at their own game.
Most of the action begins in the former Scollay Square, the Combat Zone of the '40s and '50s that was torn down to make way for Government Center.
"I introduced myself to Scollay Square, and oh, what a place," Bozzi recalls. "For the next 10 years I drove a cab part-time and that was my playground."
But Bozzi, known to his friends and family as "Bo," was too clever, too conniving, to just bet and lose. Realizing the bookies won almost all of the time ("You've got town chances: slim and none"), he decided he had to fin ways around the system if he was going to make any money.
Together with a few buddies, he quickly got in on the high-tech scam of the day -- a special switchboard relay system that picked up race results only minutes after a race was run and made them available at a special phone number, for a high fee.
Since many bookmakers allowed bets a few minutes after post time on the assumption that nobody could get the results so quickly, the system worked like a dream.
"Now you had a fighting chance because you were betting winners," Bozzi says. "And there's no better feeling than-beating the bookmaker."
Bozzi and his friends worked the system, known as past posting, for years, improving it with body wires that could transmit a message directly to a bettor inside a bookie joint.
Meanwhile, they played other tricks on the bookies, using invisible ink, altered racing forms and an endless series of schemes.
"We were known as the gimmick boys," Bozzi says. "But as fast as we made the money, we blew it on dogs and drinking and overnight excursions."
The gambler's life took a heavy toll on Bozzi's wife and two young sons.
"If I gave them $500 or $600, I always managed to steal back $300 or $400," he says.
By 1959, the short money and hard times got too much for Angie, and she tried to commit suicide. The near-tragedy haunted Bozzi for years, but he kept on gambling and cheating. Scrapes with organized crime slowed him down, but still didn't stop him completely.
Bozzi marks a run-in with his son over the boy's tip to the feds, who he doesn't believe are interested in his case any more, as the turning point in his life.
His voice softens to a near-whisper as he describes his rekindled relationship with David, another son and daughter, and his wife.
"The biggest score of my life was to regain my family," Bozzi says.
After his wife survived a cancer operation five years ago, he was even more thankful.
"I said to myself, 'Al, you don't have to make that big score anymore. This is the biggest score you can make,'" he says. "It wasn't money, and it was right there in front of me."
He and Angie work hard to pay the bills, but they're happy, Bozzi says. And David, who moved to Georgia years ago to escape his family's problems, is back at home helping his father finish his book.
If you are finished looking through this section of the Livewire web site, and would like to see other parts of this web site. Click below to return to the Livewire Background Page
If you have any questions about, or any suggestions for this website, please feel free to contact us at info@taketwoentertainment.net