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7/27/2019 My Father, the Scalper
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A Mere Bag of Shells
Each Summer from 1980 to 1984 I worked for my Dad. He was a ticket
scalper. Well technically, he had a license from the New York City
Department of Consumer Affairs to be a ticket broker, which allowed him to
sell tickets for up to 2 dollars over the face value. But of course, he never
did. How else would he have sent me to Boston University?
I was 15 years old in the Summer of 1980. I was born in the Bronx but my
parents moved us out to the Jersey exurbs when I was 7. It was hard, and
even harder on my 14 year old brother. We were both very connected to
City life, and though you may think I sound like a poser when I say it, from
the day we moved I counted down the days I could return.
My Dad was named Sheldon Glickman, but he had always gone by Shelly.
By 1980, he was the owner of an extremely lucrative business, called Jack
Rubin Theatre Ticket Service. The office by then was in the Actors Equity
building at 1560 Broadway, the corner of 46th Street, on the Eighth Floor.
Every now and then you would get in the elevator with a celebrity. Most of
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My Dad left the Army in 1958, came home, and went looking for a job. He
would walk in and out of shops and offices asking for work. It seems that
my Dad thought it still worked that way in 1987. His response to my
existential question about what I would do with my life as college
graduation approached was to say youll get a job, in a place. He
worked for a time for Cy Martin, who was the preeminent tailor and clothing
purveyor in Times Square. He was in sales, though sometimes because of
his good looks (he says) he would deliver some newly tailored fineries to
celebrities, Frank Sinatra at the Waldorf, (he has a signed 78 r.p.m. record to
show for it) Tony Bennett, and the like. He often delivered to Jackie
Gleason, who referred to Cy as the crotch and my Dad the little crotch.
Gleason was really not a nice guy, but in my fathers later flush days he still
enjoyed quoting Ralph Kramden referring to some small fortune he had
spent as a mere bag of shells.
He left that job (he wasnt into clothes), and looked for a new job in a
place. It was then that he met Jack Rubin, who would become my fathers
surrogate father, since he lost his when he was only 16.
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Jack Rubin was a Jew from Boston who ran away from home when he was
14, landed in New York City, and never looked back. He made ends meet
by doing odd jobs at and stealing from various carnivals and burlesque
shows, and successfully gambling. Earning enough money and making
enough contacts in show business, he established Jack Rubin Theatre
Ticket Service. And yes, he spelled it with an re, thinking, I presume, he
could attract a higher class of clientele that way.
I remember Jack Rubin well, though he died of a heart attack and alcoholism
when I was probably about 12 years old. Jack had an apartment on Central
Park South, the height of upscale in that era. I think Zsa Zsa Gabor lived in
his building at the same time. When we visited it was a very big deal, a taste
of how the wealthy and the celebrity elite lived. Do you think well see Zsa
Zsa in the elevator or the lobby!?
I also remember Jack making the trip with his wife Bobbi to our house in
New Jersey. In between puffs from his stogie and sips of scotch, Jack and I
played a few games of bumper pool in our finished basement. When we
went back upstairs he took the cigar out of his mouth and announced to the
gathered adults the kid knows all the angles. I knew what he meant but
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mostly found his presence in our home, even at the age of 10 or so, a
welcome antidote to the suburban sameness and boredom I felt for my 11
years there.
A few people worked at Jack Rubin when they were in the storefront. Jack,
of course, was tops. His right hand man was Milton. He was much older
than my Dad, and though was technically above my Dad, was never seen as
a successor to the business. Doby worked there too. He was just someone
who lacked the entrepreneurial zeal of guys like Jack and my Dad, but had a
lifetime of experience in the ticket business and knew it inside out. There
was also Ricky. He was a Puerto Rican kid who was the runner, basically
the delivery boy who exchanged tickets for cash or vice-versa with
treasurers at the various venues. We all had a special affinity for him and
were sort of protective of him since my Mom was Puerto Rican and we
always wanted to see our people succeed. I was an eventual successor to
Ricky.
What Ricky and I once did was deliver the money to the theatres, and get the
tickets in return. Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden too (sorry
Mets fans, but no one paid a premium for a seat in Shea Stadium). Being a
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theater ticket broker only required that you had two sets of connections, one
to the box offices and one to the clients. The money I dropped off was
called ice. That was the money you gave to the Treasurer of the theatre.
The Treasurer was the person who accounted for the money that came into
the theater and inventoried the tickets.
Ice was the face value of the ticket plus, you know, the bribe. So, for a $45
ticket for fifth row center to see, say,A Chorus Line in its heyday, the broker
gave $65 or $70. The Treasurer pocketed the difference and the broker got
the ticket. No checks, no credit cards, no tracking of the tickets. People
would be lined up at the box office window waiting to purchase tickets for
the rear mezz to see the show on some Tuesday night 6 months hence, and
Id drop off the $280 cash and get four forA Chorus Line that night, fifth
row center, so the family of some high level executive or the clients of some
big business could go to the show for an exciting night in the City.
The treasurer kept his own very large stash of the best seats in the house as
soon as the tickets were printed. Computers did not regulate the printing and
tracking of tickets until the 1990s. It was a free-for-all for the insiders. The
outsiders were suckers and rubes. This is how every single Broadway and
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most off-Broadway theaters were operating in New York City at the time,
without exception. There was not one box office Treasurer in a Broadway
theater who was not taking ice from brokers.
The 70s and 80s brought Andrew Lloyd Weber blockbusters. The first was
Evita, then Cats. Cats played at the Broadway Theater for God knows how
long. The Treasurer at the Broadway was Billy Geebler. He was a son of a
bitch who yelled at everyone all the time. A fat bastard to boot in a constant
sweat. Youd go and tell him what you needed, and hed take a swig of the
Maalox that was always on his desk and scream about how unreasonable
you were being. He did that to my Dad too but for some reason he liked
him. So hed get what he needed.
But still, Billy usually didnt sell his stash just days or weeks ahead of time
like the other Treasurers. Instead, he wanted to sell all the tickets up to six
months out. This was a big boon for Jack Rubin Theater Ticket Service,
because for one, Billy liked my Dad, who always played it humble in a
business filled with egomaniacs and tough guys, and for the other, my Dad
had hundreds of thousands stored away in his safe deposit box at the bank on
Sixth Avenue and 45th Street. Most brokers didnt have that kind of stash.
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foresight or discipline to make these kinds of ticket purchases. Their loss
was Jack Rubins gain. Shelly was the man with the tickets. As I said, Dad
was known as one of the decent guys in the business, so he didnt kill the
brokers who needed the tickets. You never knew when you were going to
need a favor. But still, Dad paid face value plus ice to the Treasurer already
and sat on them for months. He needed his ice from the other brokers.
The treasurers (and in the case ofCats, Shelly at Jack Rubin) had it good.
As a broker, you cant say I cant get that to a very wealthy person whos
used to getting his way almost all the time and expect to keep him as a
client. The brokers had to get the tickets from my Dad, so they were paying
ice twice first the bribe from my Dad to the Treasurer, then to my Dad
from the other broker -- then adding their cream cheese on top of that, and
suddenly, good tickets for Cats were starting to push towards $200 bucks.
My Dad, however, only paying ice once and having the ability to ride out the
months where hed have paid for tickets in a drawer that he couldnt sell yet,
would sell for less. This just compounded his Cats coup.
You are perfectly entitled to say that this is all a sleazy business, but many
of the clients of ticket brokers were the height of respectability and prestige
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in American life. Jack Rubin Theatre Tickets was in the rolodex of many of
the Secretaries and personal assistants to men of great power and prestige.
Often, the great man would call himself. I suspect that they enjoyed the
little thrill of a conversation with a genuine, self-made Broadway type guy in
an illicit business. So Walter Wriston, Chairman and CEO of Citicorp
always called, not his secretary. Robert Evans, Producer of the Godfather
and other American classics. Roone Arledge, President of WABC News and
Sports divisions too. In fact, I was the first kid to have a VCR because ABC
Sports had purchased dozens of the new machines for the 1976 Olympics
and offloaded one to my Dad when the games were over.
One Saturday morning in 1979 I picked up the phone at home and a client
was asking for my Dad. It was Anastasio Somoza, ruthless dictator of
Nicaragua, who needed two more tickets for an opera at the Met. One time
he canceled his tickets for the ballet, after apologizing profusely to my
father, he explained that he was having problems in his country. Not long
after that call he was dead from an assassins bullet in Paraguay. My dad
said he was nice and always very polite and, only incidentally, that he was a
horrible dictator. But, as is often the case of kings and dictators, the son was
a worse bastard than the father. The son, the new patriarch of a waning
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family fortune, was entitled and badly behaved when he spoke to my Father.
Jack Rubin Theatre Tickets cut him off the second time Baby Somoza stiffed
them. Anyway, it always helped me feel a little superior to all the suburban
numbskulls I went to school with, some of whom had only ever even been to
New York once or twice, knowing that a real Dictator had my home phone
number. Years later I would feel conflicted about it, but still never asked my
Dad to segregate the Somoza money from the other money he used to pay
my tuition, even though the car he bought for me had a U.S. out of Central
America! bumper sticker on it.
Venerable institutions did business with Jack Rubin Theatre Tickets. The
Union League Club, established in 1863, is a private organization of a
social nature with an impossibly grand Manhattan clubhouse. The office
actually had a dedicated telephone for the League club. It didnt have a dial
or numbered buttons, just a buzzer for the concierge there. They pressed the
buzzer and the phone would ring at Jack Rubin clear across town, and vice-
versa. It was a Bat Phone for the WASP establishment when they needed 4
forMiss Saigon on Saturday night. The New York Yacht Club had its own
dedicated phone at Rubin too.
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him and his wife. He only lasted for about half the assignment, however.
No one was sure about what happened to him. The next cop was more
serious and less bribable. So Jack moved the operations to a hotel room,
where my dad sat all day. This was probably his big career moment. The
other guys hung around the office and would just take phone calls, then they
would pass orders from customers by messenger to my dad in the Edison
Hotel, where he would maneuver to get the tickets and prepare the unmarked
envelopes for the cash or tickets to be delivered.
Its hard to imagine now that Broadway actors befriended theater ticket
brokers and considered them an equal part of the Broadway scene, but they
did. Famous actors were in and out of my Dads office when they had the
storefront. When I was born, Dad brought Sergio Franchi, the Italian tenor
who was starring on Broadway at the time, to Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx
to have him sing It had to be you to my exhausted mother. My mom
declined, and insisted that my father sing it, which he did. I actually have no
idea how Mr. Franchi got back downtown that night. Nevertheless, in those
days my Dad considered himself to be in show business and hard as it is to
believe today, he really was.
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By the time I arrived for my first summer assignment in 1980, the business
had changed. No longer did the storefront ticket business exist. We were in
Room 815 at 1560 Broadway. It was a good size office, considering that
Jack Rubin was a 4 man operation at that time, my Dad, the Michaels --
the two guys named Michael who assisted my Dad but over time established
the connections with the treasurers -- got to know the clients, and by the late
80s were essentially running the operation. There was also the regular
runner, John, an old time Irish West Sider who once decried people today
are animals. In my day in Hells Kitchen, if two guys got into a fight, they
would shoot you in the leg. Now, people kill.
Because of Jack Rubins spacious accommodations and reputation for
having some of the best tickets in town, some older brokers agreed to go into
semi-retirement by giving my dad half their business. Essentially, the old
broker would give Dad his rolodex of clients, and theyd split the cream
cheese 50-50. Around 1980, Jack Rubin Theatre Ticket Services became
Rubin-Ace. Charlie Shancupp was the owner of Ace Theater Tickets. A
nice old gentleman, he asked for and got a desk in the office so he had
something to do with his days. Mostly, his days consisted of arguing with
my father about the air conditioning (too cold), and eating his cottage cheese
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and melon for lunch. Except for the air conditioning, old Charlie never had
it so good. Charlies clients gained access to Rubins best seats, and his
clients called more than ever. My father would often say to us at the dinner
table these guys, they dont know how to maneuver like me.
Charlie Shancupp was well into his 80s and blind as a bat during this time.
He lived in Mt. Vernon with his wife Gloria. One day, he fell asleep on the
Metro-North train on the way in, and no one noticed until the train was
already in the underground train yard. He yelled for help and personnel
came to find him. The train he was on was already penned in, so they had to
walk him down the tracks and up a ladder that led to an opened manhole
cover. They did this with a guy who just a few weeks later broke a few
bones when he drove his golf cart off a small cliff. Traffic was halted while
this Mr. Magoo character climbed the last steps and his head poked up
beyond the hole and onto Vanderbilt Avenue. He told us a few people on
the sidewalk cheered as he emerged. He dusted off and got to work, though
of course a little late. He told us the story that morning without the slightest
hint of understanding about why we were laughing.
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Jack Rubin also bought out Supreme Ticket Agency. Same deal. It was
owned by Alan Deutsch. He was a skinny, amiable guy who had one of
those little sayings tacked up on his cork board about beating his wife. He
also carried his concealed weapon every day. He kept it holstered under his
jacket and was fond of flipping his jacket back behind the gun to unconceal
it whenever anyone teased him or disagreed with something he said. As far
as I know, he never shot anyone.
Mostly the three older guys sat around talking and bantering with one
another while the Michaels did all the work and the other runner and I
waited for another delivery or pick up. WCBS-FM, the old New York oldies
station, was always on, at least until the older guys left. One poignant
conversation I recall was Charlie and Alan, complaining about the
mosquitoes and other flying insects when they spent time in their second
homes in Florida. My Dad, who had a house in Puerto Rico, told how there
were virtually no flying insects in Puerto Rico. They argued; Alan and
Charlie couldnt believe it. How could there be no mosquitoes, if anything
its hotterin Puerto Rico, to which my Dad replied, what can I tell you,
there are no mosquitoes in Puerto Rico. Occasionally conversations like
this would bring the entire office to a halt, the old men because of their
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interest and investment in the subject, and the younger guys because they
were paralyzed by the nonsense they were hearing.
Even with the addition of Charlie and Alan, there was still more room in the
office. My Dad started offering phone and shelter to a couple of street
scalpers, as well as to a couple of the ticket brokers who relocated to Jersey
where selling the tickets above $2 over the face value was legal. For the
Jersey brokers, it meant that they could take orders over the phone in their
office in Jersey, and have a runner sit in my Dads office and wait for
instructions from the home office to pick up or deliver tickets or money. It
not only helped defray the cost of rent, but gave Jack Rubin another source
for tickets in a pinch.
One of the scalpers was Lenny Levy. He lived in an apartment in Hells
Kitchen and spent most of his days on the street in front of Madison Square
Garden and near the theatres of the most popular Broadway shows. He
didnt smell bad, but he smelled like the street; a faint mix of dust, grime
and mustard. Lenny had a guy inside the Garden box office, and this was his
main line. Hed get shadowed a few tickets and hawk them on the street
before the game started.
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Lenny and I always got on well because I was the only guy in the office with
any college credits. Not that he had ever taken a college course or even
graduated high school, but he really did have an interest in the arts and
intellectual conversation. He was into foreign and independent films before
almost everyone. So he would be able to talk with me about Spike Lee and
Jim Jarmuschs first films, something he couldnt remotely do with anyone
he came in contact with in his work life. I remember he went to see The
Crying Game before I had even heard of it. He was like OHHHHH! Leo,
you have got to see this film!! Oy, and the ending!!! Rips your heart right
out!
Lenny died a few years later, he was just in his mid 60s. He took literally
dozens of herb pills, over one hundred different vitamin pills, and drank
special teas each day. This was another of his fascinations, and he swore it
would keep him alive well past 100. He would castigate my father for his
bad dietary habits and my Dad, in turn, would ask him if hed talked to a
doctor about his vitamin regimen. Lenny always said they dont know
nothing. Without warning, he just didnt wake up one morning. Or, as Dad
and the other guys in the office put it, he just woke up dead. Lenny
always struggled so he didnt have a funeral at Riverside Chapel on the
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Upper West Side, which is referred to by everyone in the business as Cape
Canaveral, because its where all the ticket brokers go to be launched into
the next world. He instead had his funeral at a small, very conservative
Jewish funeral home in Borough Park, Brooklyn. It wasnt like him at all,
but I suppose it was more affordable. He didnt have a Will, there was just a
note in a little box next to his bed which said if you find this note, please
bury me under a palm tree. I guess all the cold and rainy nights scalping
tickets on Seventh Avenue took its toll after all. After the funeral, his ex-
wife had him shipped to Florida. The end.
My brother and I were running a little business in the back of my Dads
office from 1992-93. We got to use it for free, but we had to give up a desk
twice a week for the accountant. The back room was where the books were
kept and the accountant clandestinely did his work. One set of ledgers was
in plain sight on some shelves that everyone could see. The other set was
kept locked up in a safe that only my father and the accountant had the
combination for. These were where the real ledgers were kept. The
showpiece books were entirely phony, showing that the business was
making about one tenth of what it was actually making based on the many
thousnands of tickets they were fictitiously selling at the fictitious rate of 2
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bucks over the face value. My Dad always said it was not his intention to
cheat the IRS. It was just that there werent enough tickets on Broadway to
justify the amount of money the business was actually making at 2 bucks a
pop. So twice a week, we ceded a desk and the CPA would go about the
business of reconciling the fake and the real books. At the end of the session
he offered various advice to my Father about justifying the thousand dollars
a day that was taken out of the petty cash box, or perhaps fake diversifying
the business to help scale down the almost impossible number of tickets he
was selling according to the fake books and show a little more income.
After all, he owned 5 upscale cars.
Of course, my father knew that these measures were the equivalent of the
duck and cover safety precautions should a nuclear bomb explode in your
town. He knew that in the event of a tax clampdown, he was pretty much
radioactive toast. This was just in case the rogue tax agent stumbled into his
office demanding to see this or that. The insurance against the clampdown
came in the mutual assured destruction between the ticket brokers and one
Dinny McMahon, Collector of Internal Revenue, 2nd District. Apparently,
there was a day when certain highly placed civil servants were muckety
mucks, and Dinny, a friend of President Truman, received the appointment
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for this peach of a job. Dinny was a shake down artist with big, big friends.
The brokers gave him money and the IRS left them alone. One might think
that the arrangement would lead to mutual suspicion and a healthy distance,
but it wasnt the case. Dinny was an honored guest at many brokers
personal and family events. And as a member of the Knights of Malta, the
elite Catholic mens club, he pulled a few strings to get me into St. Patricks
cathedral for my first wedding. There were a few giggles behind us when
Father White (an African-American) pronounced Mr. and Mrs. Glickman
husband and wife at the headquarters of American Catholicism.
Most of the old brokers were boom and bust guys through and through, my
Dad being no exception. When he had it, he spent it and gave it away. To
the very end he said that despite what we all tried to tell him, he never
thought the gravy train would end, ever. But of course it did. Computerized
tracking of tickets at the theaters, and a little later the Internet put the first 7
nails into the coffin and legalization of the business put the eighth and final.
My father had a million squirreled away in a safe deposit box, a quarter of a
million in cars sitting in the driveway at any given time, a house in Puerto
Rico, a house on two acres of land in New Jersey, well over 100 watches,
virtually all of which were expensive brands and ten exotic parrots. -- Hell,
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he even owned a parrot store for a while. He put me through Boston
University and put me and my first wife through law school. He was
making $500,000 $600,000 and closing in on three quarters of a million per
year in cash, only a small fraction of which he was paying taxes on. And at
the end he had virtually nothing. Its gone, all of it, and he was too frail by
then to work in a pizza place.
But hes not alone, amazingly, most of these other brokers, guys who were
literally just bathing in it, have got nothing today to show for it. No
annuities, no mutual funds, no retirement plans, no other investments or
businesses. They made it, they spent it, and then the well ran dry. Phil
Cohen owned Capri Ticket Service. A real egomaniac. He had an upscale
apartment on East End Avenue. He would drive his Mercedes every day to
work in midtown. He paid monthly for the garage in his Upper East Side
building, and he paid monthly for the lot near work. He now lives with his
daughter in a sad condominium development in Florida. Jimmy Sommers,
similar story. A real man about town with a blond show girl wife. They
now live in subsidized housing in New Jersey and collect some welfare
benefits to buy food.
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My father died a few weeks ago. I had more questions for him about the
business but, though frail, he died suddenly. Some details are lost, I guess
forever. But the spirit of the story lives on in the form of my Fathers estate,
to which I have the distinct pleasure of being the Executor to.
A lapsed whole life insurance policy he borrowed on but didnt pay back. A
house, once paid for but re-mortgaged to the hilt. A brand new posh
automobile leased with about 500 miles on it. Just a few watches, the others
sold to pay the monthly lease on the car. Oh, and a 30 year old gelding that
is still costing him $450 per month, even in heaven. Now, it is my
obligation as Executor to liquidate his assets to pay his creditors.
Im really not complaining, whining a little for having to organize the mess,
but not complaining. Because when he had it, he shared it. How many kids
get unlimited access to vacation homes in Puerto Rico? College and
graduate school paid for? How many 17 year olds get to sneak a ride in their
Dads two-seater Jaguar convertible and take 120 mile per hour joy rides
with an impressed girlfriend on the back roads? A few I suppose, but not
many. As he used to say when Mom objected to some obscene amount of
money he spent on something completely frivolous, quoting Ralph Kramden
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with quick snaps of his finger hed say, it came in fast and I gave it away
just as fast.
But back to the business at hand, if you know anyone who can help me, a
Manhattan family man with no pets or livestock, find a home for an elderly
equine and can provide a gentle mode of transportation, please let me know.
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