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

the time, youd be on with unknown but nubile actresses and flamboyant actors, all talking a big game about their summer stock or whatever.

The business moved upstairs sometime in the mid-70s, from a storefront on West 46th Street Broadway and 8th, when the crime rate was staggering and the opportunities for corrupting police officers were waning. On Saturday nights in the early 70s, mom would drive us down from the Bronx to pick up Dad at work. The mounted cops who protected the business from criminals and overly motivated law enforcement would put me up on the horse and lead me around up and down the street. Dad would offer the cop a swig of whiskey from his flask, take a shot himself and then load us back into the Station Wagon and drive us back up the West Side Highway. Saturday Night!

But this story isnt meant to be about me being nostalgic for a lost exotic childhood. Its about a business, an industry, hell, a way of life that is gone now but once flourished in New York and ought to be documented. The ticket business.

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.

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 for A 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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These were the beginning of my fathers halcyon days when he took over for Jack and ran the business. He was loaded and was about to score more.

Before Cats, brokers werent really required to lay out cash well in advance for tickets. A broker would get a call from a client on Thursday saying he wanted to take his wife out to see Les Miserables (Lay Miz) on Saturday night. The broker would call the Treasurer; if he had two good ones for Saturday night, face value $55 plus $30 ice, the broker would have the runner bring over the $170 cash and theyd either bring back the two tickets or leave them at will call. The broker would charge his client $135 per, thats $85 cost plus $50 cream cheese the brokers profit. Hed bill the client and he hoped hed get back his $170 plus $100 cream cheese in under 30 days. So cash flow was always an issue in the ticket business, but not as bad as it would become.

Now, if your client wanted to go to see Cats, and for a time, everyones clients wanted to go see Cats, you had to deliver $60,000, $70,000 or $100,000 a pop to Billy at the Broadway to get your tickets, where they would sit in your drawer and you wouldnt see any reimbursement, much less any cream cheese, for months. A lot of brokers didnt have the funds or
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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 of Cats, 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 viceversa. It was a Bat Phone for the WASP establishment when they needed 4 for Miss Saigon on Saturday night. The New York Yacht Club had its own dedicated phone at Rubin too.

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The business was illegal, so selling tickets directly to the general public was never going to happen. Selling them indirectly, however, had possibilities. Jack Rubin Theater Tickets had concierge friends in the Waldorf Towers, the Plaza, the Pierre, and a number of other venerated hotels in midtown Manhattan. When an out of town, not in- the- know guest inquired with the concierge about seeing a show that night, he responded that he could go to the TKTS booth in Duffy Square and get a half price ticket to sit in the corner of a theater hosting an unpopular show, or he could pay some money and get good seats at a blockbuster. The concierge took a cut of Jack Rubins cream cheese, but the additional volume made it worth it, especially since my dad sitting on stacks of Cats tickets on any given day.

Mr. Tepper at the Waldorf was tight with my father. I would go by to deliver tickets and pick up cash from him from time to time. Though he was a server working in the service industry, it seemed he commanded a higher regard for his professional station in life than one would expect. He walked and talked with a regale bearing, and seemed to be accepted into the private club of wealth and celebrity in a similar way to my father. Not the same, but similar. Mr. Tepper and his cohorts at the Pierre and the Plaza knew how to get things done in a get your hands dirty kind of way like my father, but of
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course, they lacked the little bit of gangster edge that shadowed my fathers world.

Legality was a constant backdrop of conducting business, but the industry always had a few things going for it. One was the top-shelf, powerful clientele. Another was the corruptibility of cops and public officials. But it still wasnt always smooth sailing. When a New York Attorney General, Police Commissioner or Commissioner of Consumer Affairs hadnt been viewed as active enough, a good ticket scalper perp walk was always popular with the tabloids and the working class public. In 1964, my dad along with other brokers were arrested and escorted to the prison tombs, 2 by 2, in a chain gang type line for the cameras. That was the first time Dad was on TV!

They were sentenced to time served, fined $500, and were forced to shut down for 6 months. Upon his release, Jack Rubin got in a taxi with my Dad, went straight to the office, put paper over the windows, and continued to do business. The cop assigned to ensure that they were not conducting business was duly bribed with scotch, theater tickets and introductions to the Broadway stars that would sometimes frequent the business for pictures with
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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 hotter in 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 exwife 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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