Bookmakers dinner: An exclusive seat at the table with legends of Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS - The invitation to the "Old Guys Rule Super Bowl Dinner" is brief and explicit: no dates, no outsiders. Suggested attire is "smart casual," the limits of which will be tested by the guests this Tuesday night ahead of the Super Bowl. These guys are good at testing limits.

Mentioning "dinner with Roxy" gets you past security and inside the iron gates at Turnberry Place, a posh condominium high-rise off the Strip, where actor James Caan, star of "The Gambler," is among past celebrity residents. Dinner is up the marble stairs in the wine room at the Stirling Club, a private bar and restaurant on the third floor. Las Vegas legends, including the late crooner Tony Bennett, have performed here. Tonight's guests enjoyed similar career longevity as Bennett.

"You probably have 500 combined years of Las Vegas bookmaking in this room," says the smooth Vinny Magliulo, one of 11 bookies and oddsmakers at a table full of nicknames.

The Pencil and the Suit are here. Vegas lore prohibits disclosing their identities. They're surrounded by others of their generation, who picked up and moved to Las Vegas when they were young and stuck around in some cases for 50 years. There's a pair of cousins from Pittsburgh who came to town to earn their gambling chops under the tutelage of their uncle, the revered sharp bettor Pittsburgh Jack Franzi.

Two beloved sports betting icons are at each end of the table. Michael "Roxy" Roxborough, tonight's host, sits at the head of the table in a tailored white suit and salmon dress shirt. Jimmy Vaccaro, the elder statesman in the room, is at the other end of the table, in his trademark white sweatshirt and snow-white pompadour hair.

Articulate and always sharply dressed, Roxy was the preeminent oddsmaker and the face of sports betting in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s. He regularly hosts a dinner for the town's veteran bookmakers before the Super Bowl, an informal tradition between friends with its origin a mystery -- no one remembers how many "Old Guys Rule" dinners there have been over the years or when they began. They just know they have enjoyed each other's company for decades and that they should always let Roxy pay.

Most of the guests were Roxy's clients when he ran an odds-making service Las Vegas Sports Consultants from 1982 to 1999. Some were his students at UNLV, where he taught a college class on bookmaking.

"In my race and sportsbook class, anybody that was in race and sports got an A," Roxy says. "They were potential customers."

The attendees mostly began as ticket writers and nighttime managers at old-school spots like the Royal Inn, the Barbary Coast and the Stardust. They climbed the corporate ladder and ended up running the sportsbooks at Caesars Palace, the Mirage and the SuperBook. For decades, they were the kings of American bookmaking, dating back to the 1970s, a time when Vegas wise guys of all kinds were taking shots at them.

Vaccaro is another Vegas icon, who appeared on "The Simpsons" and gained national notoriety for being one of the only bookmakers to offer odds on the Buster Douglas-Mike Tyson fight in 1990. Vaccaro made Tyson a -2700 favorite and took big bets on the champion even as the price grew. Roxy says one of the bettors who backed Tyson gave him the betting slip -- $82,000 to win $2,000 --as a memento. That was all it was worth after Douglas pulled one of the biggest upsets in sports history.

Vaccaro is now with the South Point sportsbook, a local Las Vegas spot. He often posts on social media about his trips to the spa and naps. Roxy joked in the invitation that they had to eat early because "Jimmy had to go to bed," but the affection for the man who has been booking bets in Las Vegas for 5o years is palpable.

Vic Salerno, a California dentist turned Las Vegas sportsbook operator, is here, next to Richie Baccellieri, a longtime bookmaker and college basketball diehard who is sporting a navy blue track jacket over an untucked polo shirt.

Baccellieri teases Vaccaro from across the table: "Jimmy, can you believe the nerve of Vic, saying that you still work?"

Vaccaro: "I can't hear you."

Baccellieri: "I can't yell any louder."

Vaccaro: "When are we going to eat?"

Dinner is served around 7 p.m. Steak and lamb chops are the most popular dishes. Red wine flows. The discussion bounces from unsolved Vegas mysteries to run-ins with the mob to hallucinogens. The biggest debate is on how to fairly handle changes to starting pitchers after a baseball bet has already been placed.

Robert Walker, a longtime Vegas bookmaker, is asked to set the over/under on how long one of his former co-workers at the Stardust survived after stealing more than $500,000 from the casino and disappearing in 1992. Walker opens the line at "days."

When Art Manteris, former sportsbook executive at Caesars Palace, the Hilton SuperBook and Station Casinos, mentions the name Sammy Spiegel, the driver of violent Vegas mobster Tony Spilotro, the table quiets in an uneasy acknowledgement of what it was like dealing with lingering organized crime members at the start of their careers.

Manteris explains how as a young sportsbook employee at the Barbary Coast, he felt obligated to confront Spiegel about a $1,600 overpayment on some winning bets. Spiegel refused to give the money back and said his figures were correct. Manteris knew the sharp play was to leave it at that, but he was worried.

"I thought I was going to get fired," Manteris says. "But Jimmy [Vaccaro] covered it, put the money in the box for me."

Chris Andrews, sportsbook director at the South Point in Las Vegas and cousin to Manteris, says Jimmy once saved him a much larger amount of money by helping him quickly adjust player prop odds on Super Bowl LII between the Philadelphia Eagles and New England Patriots after the action had gotten lopsided on the game.

"That turned out to be my best Super Bowl," Andrews says. "We won like 40% of the state's take, the little old South Point."

"That was your best Super Bowl? It was my worst," Manteris laments.

There's little talk of Sunday's game between the Kansas City Chiefs and underdog Eagles. No mention of Patrick Mahomes or Taylor Swift, but there is plenty of nostalgia about past games, some more lucid than others.

Andrews remembers how proud he was of a cross-sport prop bet he offered on Super Bowl XXXVII between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Oakland Raiders. He had Manchester United's goals scored vs. total interceptions thrown by two teams in the Super Bowl. He booked it to need United goals and felt good after Man U beat West Ham 6-0.

"I thought I was the smartest bookmaker ever," Andrews says. "Then, [Raiders quarterback] Rich Gannon throws five picks, and [Buccaneers quarterback] Brad Johnson tacks on a sixth."

Roxy says he's only missed one Super Bowl in his lifetime, in 1979, when he got lost in the Nevada desert while on psychedelics.

"I was doing some of my most creative work back in those days," he says with a smirk.

The night winds down as cannolis, cheesecake and tiramisu arrive, and Roxy pops the question: "Who is the best sports bettor of the last 25 years?"

"After Billy, right?" Baccellieri asks.

Baccellieri is referring to Billy Walters, considered by most to be the most successful American sports bettor ever, but there is some debate about his process. Nick Bogdanovich, a longtime Vegas bookmaker, says the demand and interest in Walters' bets is unrivaled.

"Well, I mean, when everyone in the world is trying to steal your plays, every bettor and every bookmaker, and you're still able to get down," Bogdanovich says of Walters. "No one knows what side he's got, not even his wife sitting next to him, and to make hundreds of millions of dollars doing it, I think that's game over. No one has ever done that."

While Walters is the consensus greatest bettor, Rufus Peabody, a well-known sharp from a younger generation, is mentioned as the best handicapper of the day. The discussion turns into whether you'd rather be a great bettor or a great handicapper.

"I think I'd rather be Rufus," Walker says, questioning if it's possible to sustain an advantageous influence like Walters had on the betting market for decades."

"I'd say, yes," Andrews chimes in. "He's been sustaining it for over 40 years."

The same can be said for the guys at the table, a group of bookmakers who spent their 20s and 30s in Las Vegas, partying and playing beer-league softball together and never left. Long before FanDuel and DraftKings, these were the kings of American sports betting. Around half of them are still working at the sportsbooks, although Roxy says those are "feather-betting [cushy] jobs." The other half has accomplished the true bookmaker's dream: comfortable retirement.