 Tips & shafts By George Fels Consulting Editor George Fels has been writing for Billiards Digest since 1980, and his "Tips & Shafts" column is usually our readers' first stop when they crack open the magazine. For better or worse, pool has been his only mistress for 40-plus years.
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January: No-goodniks January 2026 [Reprinted from June 2007] “The suspect is said to be an avid pool player, who frequents pool halls and plays for cash. He is considered armed and dangerous.”
In well over 50 years of reading Chicago newpapers, I have absolutely never seen an alleged criminal typified that way. Yet there it was in the Chicago papers in late March. At least equally intriguing is that the subject, one Mario Rivera, a reputed drug trafficker, is totally unknown to Chicago’s pool crowd. He certainly doesn’t play tournaments, nor does he appear at either of Chicago’s two action rooms. At Chris’s Billiards, a hefty percentage of the regulars are Mexican American, and even they never heard of him. So, how “avid” could he possibly be?
Whoever he is, however well he plays, Rivera is well removed from being pool’s most embarrassing aficionado. The game has been attracting the ultimate in undesirables for decades. And while “The Music Man’s” immortal Professor Harold Hill warned that poll would bring trouble, that was parody; some of the people that pool has lured are well beyond Hill’s most putrid fantasies, and make the elusive Mario Rivera seem like one of the K. of C. Jaycees’ 10 Outstanding Young Men.
Consider New Jersey’s horrific contract killer, Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski, who estimated that of his 100-plus hits, no more than half were for pay. As the Polish are not widely recruited by La Cosa Nostra, Kuklinski had some time to, well, kill before securing his lucrative employment. He was known early on as a petty criminal and, you guessed it, pool hustler. What was his weapon of choice for his first murder, at the callow age of 18? You guessed it again: a pool cue.
And Kuklinski wasn’t the only Mafiosi to make the game cringe by linking his name to it. The late “Crazy Joe” Gallo and his two brothers were all highly skilled at straight poll, reliably reported to run 70-80 balls consistently. Gallo, while called “vicious and psychotic” by authorities, somehow still kept company with some good people. One of his better friends was the distinguished actor Jerry Orbach, an odd coupling between one of pool’s proudest associations and one of its most mortifying. And Gallo gambled on a regular basis with the fine Philadelphia player Nick Vacchiano, who could beat Gallo but couldn’t spot him a thing.
In Chicago, between the mid-’60s and mid-’70s, we had a room called The Golden 8-Ball, which we all knew was Outfit-owned. Generally speaking, the only known mobsters we ever saw there were the two owners. But early in its existence, one of its patrons was the much-feared Felix “Milwaukee Phil” Alderisio, who was so well placed in his organization that he ran things in at least two states. Two of the underlings in his entourage thought they were pool players, and one day when the late Vince “Pancho” Corelli was in the place, Phil arranged for one of them to take Pancho on, much as the Roman Emperors used to arrange gladiator matches. Needless to say, Pancho kicked the guy’s butt six ways to breakfast, and Phil and his pals thought that was just hilarious. “You ever need a backer, you come see me,” Phil advised Pancho, who did just that a few nights later when the great Leonard “Bugs” Rucker strolled in looking for action. They agreed on one-handed one-pocket for $300 a game under Phil’s sponsorship, and Pancho won. No one wanted to think about what might have happened had he lost.
In fact, back in New York’s glory days of pool, there were several well-known bookmakers who frequented the famous Ames, 711 ad McGirr’s rooms. When those guys declared their money on a pool proposition, you could be virtually certain that there would be no monkey business between players. Jack “Jersey Red” Breit was once doubled over with a gut punch after a missed shot and pointedly told that a death penalty would accompany the loss of game (which he discreetly won). Another player was indeed killed after dumping the wrong match, compounding his mistake by stupidly bragging to the wrong people.
Speaking of New York, one of the first rooms to surface in the post-“Hustler” boom was a placed called Tekk on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. In short order, Tekk became the headquarters to a number of Asian games, and the room had three shootings. Remarkably, none of these incidents cost Tekk its license. One neighbor wrote The New York Times to demand that poolrooms be banned nationwide.
The list of no-goodniks isn’t even exclusively male. When the utter scumbag known as Tonya Harding came to notoriety a generation ago, the national news media missed no opportunity to characterize her as “pool-playing.” Never mind if it was relevant to the story, she was “cigar-smoking, pool-playing Tonya Harding” as long as that dismal story held any life.
Is it really fair to vilify the game when bad people come to it? Possibly excepting Harding, the real villains would seem to be gambling and loitering. Both are extremely passive endeavors in which the practitioners strive to get something for nothing, and the inevitable results is that bums come around. (In fact, if the early rooms had banned loitering, pool would not have half the stigma it has today.)
Respect for the law does not normally run high among bums. You might want to exercise caution the next time you ask a stranger to play. Mario Rivera is still out there — and, as we’ve seen, he’s not nearly the worst. |
