Frank Deluca does not look like a man who has taken bets on everything from presidential elections to the birth weight of strangers' babies. He looks like a retired dentist who has made peace with a mild disappointment. He is seventy-one, he wears a cardigan that predates the Carter administration, and he pours coffee with the precision of a man who has calculated the odds of spillage. "I never cheated anyone," he says, before I have asked. "That's why I'm still alive. The cheaters all ended up in the Truckee River. The Truckee doesn't forgive."
I found Frank through a series of phone calls that began with a clerk at the Mapes Hotel and ended with a woman named Sheila who ran a laundromat on Fourth Street and seemed to know everyone in Washoe County who had ever taken a risk. "Frank's the last one," she told me, folding someone else's shirts with the efficiency of a person who had seen too much to be surprised by any of it. "The others went corporate, went digital, went to prison, or went fishing. Frank just went to breakfast."
Frank's breakfast is at the Gold 'N Silver Inn, where he has eaten the same meal since 1968: two eggs over easy, bacon crisp, wheat toast, coffee with cream. The waitresses call him Mr. D and they do not ask about his work. "They know," Frank says. "Everybody knows. That's not the same as talking about it."
He started in 1959, taking football bets from soldiers at Stead Air Force Base. The soldiers were young, away from home, and constitutionally optimistic, which made them excellent customers. "A kid from Ohio bets on Ohio State because Ohio is where his mother lives," Frank explains. "That's not a wager. That's homesickness with a point spread." By 1965 he had expanded to baseball, basketball, and what he calls "special events"—elections, award shows, the duration of marriages. He claims to have called the Nixon resignation within three hours, not because he had inside information but because he had been taking bets on it for eighteen months and the money had started to move.
The honesty, he insists, was a business decision. "A crooked bookie makes money once. An honest bookie makes money forever, or until the IRS catches up, which in my case took thirty-four years." He served eleven months in federal prison in 1987, a term he describes as "educational" and "bad for my back." He returned to Reno, paid his fine, and resumed taking bets within six weeks, because, as he says, "What else was I going to do? Sell real estate? I'm not a monster."
His current operation is smaller than the old days. He uses three telephones—rotary, because he does not trust buttons—and a notebook with columns he invented himself. He does not take bets over ten thousand dollars. He does not take bets from people who are crying. He does not take bets on deaths, which he considers bad luck, or on the outcomes of active lawsuits, which he considers bad judgment. "I have standards," he says. "They're low, but they're standards."
On my eighth day in Reno, Frank allowed me to watch him settle accounts. This involves receiving phone calls, writing numbers in his notebook, and occasionally making a face that suggests he has just tasted something bitter. "That's the face of a man who laid off too much of the wrong action," he explains. "I made that face in '74 when the Raiders beat the Dolphins. I made it again in '80 when Reagan won. I am making it now because you, Ms. Kwan, are going to write something that brings attention I do not need."
I told him I would change his name. He laughed, a sound like a filing cabinet opening. "You will try," he said. "And you will fail, because everyone who needs to know who I am already knows. The others—tax collectors, journalists, people with badges—already know too. They just can't prove anything, because I am, as I have told you, honest. Honest within the margins, honest to the penny, honest in a way that makes their jobs very difficult."
On my last night in Reno, Frank took me to the river. The Truckee moves fast and cold, even in August, and it makes a sound like a conversation you are not invited to join. "The cheaters," Frank said, gesturing toward the water with his coffee cup, which he had brought from the diner because he does not trust riverside coffee. "They thought the water would hide them. Water doesn't hide anything. Water just moves the evidence downstream, where someone else finds it."
He is retiring at the end of the year, he tells me, though he has said this every year since 1992. He has three grandchildren in Sacramento he has never met, a daughter who sends birthday cards with no return address, and a small house with a mortgage he could pay off tomorrow but chooses not to, because "a man without a debt is a man without a story."
As I left, he pressed a scrap of paper into my hand. On it was a number: 7. "That's not a bet," he said. "That's the over-under on how many months before they shut down the Gold 'N Silver for renovation. My money's on under. Some things you don't need odds for. Some things you just know."
I drove out of Reno at dawn, the paper still in my pocket, the number already forgotten. But I remembered what Frank said about the river, about honesty, about the cheaters who thought water would hide them. I am not certain he was talking about bookmaking. I am not certain he was talking about anything other than himself, which is, I suspect, what all of us are doing when we appear to be giving advice. The Truckee does not forgive. Neither does Frank. Neither, I am learning, does the story you thought you were writing, which turns out to be writing you.