The Bookie: How I Bet It All on Sports Gambling and Watched an Industry Explode

by Art Manteris

A Legend in Bookmaking Tells the Story of an Industry and His Career

More than fifty-million people in the U.S. now bet on sports, and the many apps now available have put the excitement of this world at fans’ fingertips. But before FanDuel and Draft King, Las Vegas was where fortunes were won and lost. For more than forty years, Art Manteris was at the center of the action.

Sports betting is in Art Manteris’s blood. From his childhood in Pittsburgh, spent taking bets and collecting debts, first for his uncle Jack and then for his older brother, to his quick rise through the ranks at the biggest and most famous casinos in Las Vegas. Manteris spent his illustrious forty-year career running the largest Las Vegas sportsbooks in the Stardust, Caesars, and the Hilton. He took bets from crazed gangsters, icons of industry, Hollywood celebrities, and sports legends, as well as some of the most duplicitous and criminal figures in sports gaming history. If Billy Walters was the gambler, Art Manteris was the regulator.

The Bookie is a lively tale from inside the sportsbook from someone who has seen the highs and lows of this fast-paced world. Full of marquee names like Donald Trump, Phil Mickelson, Don King, Floyd Mayweather, Mike Tyson, Manny Pacquiao, The Bookie takes readers from the 1970s when Art’s job included handling wads of money stuffed in paper bags for his bosses at the mafia-run sportsbook to his role setting the legal odds for every major professional sports event in the U.S.—Super Bowls, World Series, NBA Championships, Triple Crowns, Prizefights, and Stanley Cups, to the times his sharp instincts knew the fix was in, his many run-ins with the infamous Billy Walters, and the moment when his integrity was brought under scrutiny by the Vegas Gaming Control Board.

Manteris’s job was to make his book big money while also keeping patrons entertained enough to keep coming back. Rife with never-before-told stories, The Bookie will be a primer on the art and science of sports gambling, and entertaining enough to compel any reader who loves a great story.

Genres: Nonfiction, Business

288 pages, Hardcover

Published January 13, 2026

Reviews

[Tim Karr · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was interesting to get the perspective and some of the behind the scenes stories of a sportsbook operator. It was no surprise that the sportsbook operator wanted to do everything he could to prevent the sharps from winning money from his business and that he wanted to entice as many squares to bet on loser props and parlays as possible.

At times this book almost felt like a companion memoir to Billy Walters' "Gambler: Secrets from a Life at Risk." Mr. Manteris spends an inordinate amount of time in his book talking about somebody he does not like or respect.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the rare gambling memoirs that refuses to perform for the reader. There are no big Vegas highs, no cinematic heists, no heroic outsmarting of the house. What Manteris offers instead is something far more unsettling: a calm, intelligent, deeply self-aware account of how someone who understands gambling better than most still manages to lose to it.

What makes this book so compelling is its restraint. Manteris doesn’t dramatize his life as a bookmaker or inflate his own importance. He explains the mechanics of bookmaking—odds, balance, risk, psychology—with clarity and precision, then quietly exposes how knowledge itself becomes a trap. The more he understands probability, the more convincingly he rationalizes behavior that slowly erodes his finances, discipline, and sense of self.

Unlike many addiction memoirs, The Bookie has no explosive rock bottom. The damage arrives incrementally, almost logically, which makes it feel frighteningly real. Gambling here isn’t a wild vice; it’s a mindset, a way of thinking that blurs the line between confidence and compulsion. Manteris’s greatest strength as a writer is his refusal to excuse himself—even when the excuses sound mathematically sound.

This is not a book about beating the system. It’s about discovering that the system doesn’t need villains or victims—it just needs participation. Quiet, sobering, and deeply credible, The Bookie is essential reading for anyone interested in gambling psychology, addiction, or memoirs that value truth over redemption.

Rating: 4/5

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. —ALDOUS HUXLEY

For more than forty years I was the guy who put out the odds on every game imaginable, and each year my sportsbooks—Caesars Palace, the Las Vegas Hilton, and Station Casinos—took in hundreds of millions of dollars in bets, including some of the biggest wagers in Las Vegas history. I set the odds on the biggest events in the sports world—including Super Bowls, the World Series, NBA Championships, Stanley Cup Finals, and NCAA championships, and I took wagers from some of the greatest names in sports, entertainment, and business—my preferred customers were household names who bet well into six figures and even seven figures. I was successful, winning more money than any Nevada bookie ever—and by a pretty wide margin. I’ve lost my share too, enduring the stress, the peaks and valleys, and I have the memories and emotional scars to prove it.

I started riding horses and getting more familiar with guns and quick draw. I even took a couple of acting classes. In my head I came up with this plan where I’d leave Pitt and make a brief pit stop in Las Vegas to finish school at UNLV. My sister and her family had moved there, and of course Uncle Jack was there too. In reality, I was doing so poorly in school my parents kind of nudged me out to go live with Nikki. I said goodbye to my family, transferred to UNLV intent on finishing my degree, and then planned to head off to Hollywood to study under Glenn Wilder’s tutelage and become a professional stuntman. Little did I know that I’d never leave Vegas.

As a kid, I admired anybody associated with sports gambling. It was exciting and something I wanted to do when I got older. I looked up to my uncle and my brother. I enjoyed the thrill of it all. I got to learn the lingo pretty fast. Words such as spread, which is the expected point difference between two teams, or juice, which is where the bookies make their money. If I heard someone tell Jimmy they were “laying a nickel” on a game, I knew that meant he was betting five hundred dollars. If he said “a dollar” it was one hundred, or “a dime”—that was a thousand. If someone was “square,” then they were a recreational bettor. I also learned that the toughest part of a bookie’s job was getting paid. That was never easy. Jimmy always carried a gun and brass knuckles with him. I never saw him use them, but I knew why he had them. If you owed Jimmy money, you did not want him or his guys coming after you.

One guy, about our age, lost a fair amount of money, probably a few hundred. To us it was a lot, anyway. He wouldn’t pay. So we decided to track him down in Uncle Nick’s handicapped-accessible van. Jimmy and Uncle Jack had bought him a tricked-out model, with a bed inside and a steering wheel that could be driven with just one hand. We loaded Uncle Nick into the van and went looking for the deadbeat and found him at the old Silverbird sportsbook. I went in and told him that Uncle Nick was outside and wanted to see him. He had no idea who Uncle Nick was but he was scared.

When he skulked outside, I grabbed him and threw against the building, but the bastard got free and ran. I chased him, around and around the parking lot, to no avail. I can’t tell you how stupid it looked. Surprisingly he paid us later that day, and that was an eye-opening moment for us. “Okay, so this is how we’re going to do this. That’s what we have to do!” But shortly after, Uncle Jack found out about our little operation and shut it down. Once again, he proclaimed us idiots.

“Don’t worry about it, kid,” he’d grumble. “We got a little busy.” I mentioned them to Red three or four times, also saying these tickets didn’t line up perfectly. But he’d be very evasive and dismissive, telling me that sometimes the machines didn’t line up or sometimes the tickets didn’t fit into the machine properly. It bugged me, but I was just breaking into the industry. Ruffling feathers with these guys didn’t seem like the smartest move, so I didn’t. And by not wanting to get anyone angry, I apparently made it clear I could keep my mouth shut. So, I was promoted to the cashier’s cage, which let me see copies of the tickets that were cashed. This move brought me full circle in the betting process, from receiving the money to paying it out. That’s when I clocked the subtle differences in the copies of those odd straight bets with the flat amounts.

When you laid them on top of each other, the carbon copies didn’t exactly line up. There were days, usually Wednesdays and Thursdays, when I would still write tickets, so I started playing with the machine. I tried to see if the copies would go out of line or if there was any way I could make them get out of line, and I couldn’t. I put two and two together, and eventually, I figured out what was going on: The supervisors were manipulating the handwritten betting tickets, adding multiple teams to what originally was a $1,000 straight bet and turning it into a three- or four-team parlay with six-to-one or ten-to-one payouts.

The way it worked was one of the supervisors, who had access to all three copies of the tickets via those late-night visits with some of the ladies in the audit department, would turn the single-game bet for a flat amount into a four-team parlay with larger payouts by tacking on additional winning teams to the tickets. Betting flat amounts is common on parlays, not so much on straight bets, so when they were done manipulating the tickets, it’d look like a normal parlay. If the first team lost, they would eat the $1,000. But if it won, they’d rework the tickets and take home a ten-to-one four-team parlay payout for $10,000.

He was surprised when I told him. I don’t think he knew what was going on. Hell, the gaming control board investigators were still all over the Stardust, and even they didn’t have a clue. Uncle Jack was impressed that I could figure out something so intricate. He also knew that I had to get the hell out of there before it all cracked wide open. He lined me up with Michael Gaughan, the owner of the Barbary Coast, and I made my next big move.

I thought that was far too nice. At an anti-money-laundering meeting I begrudgingly attended some time later that involved several high-ranking IRS and Nevada Gaming Control Board officials, Walters’s name came up. A chief compliance officer mentioned that I referred to him as “the devil.” “No,” I corrected, because it simply wasn’t true. “I called him ‘the Antichrist.’”

Still, Mr. Hilton knew who Billy Walters was, as did I. Time after time, I stood up to him. Ours became the biggest feud in Vegas. After his ill-fated attempt to take down my book, Walters tried to have me fired. He even suggested that he had a guy in Reno who could replace me. And he might have succeeded in getting rid of me, if not for Jimmy Newman and Arthur Goldberg, who saw through his scheme. That prompted Newman to famously say to Goldberg, “Walters would fuck his own grandmother out of a dollar.”

Frank and Lorenzo had heard exactly the same thing from their father. Almost everyone around them, including my Uncle Jack, agreed. At that juncture, with us naysayers piling on, it looked like the concept was doomed to fail. But it wasn’t long after my fateful words that UFC clicked—and Frank, Lorenzo, and Dana White started to build a worldwide phenomenon. Some years later, they sold the UFC for $4.1 billion. They made a very good bet.

While I had a lot more responsibility overseeing all of the Station Casinos sportsbooks, there was one area I didn’t have to worry about—Stations didn’t do boxing. They were, however, heavily involved as part owners of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, a new mixed martial arts league that was quickly gaining popularity. Stations was in a delicate situation, owning a sports league as well as casinos and sportsbooks, so we weren’t posting odds on any of those matches. Frank and Lorenzo wanted me to take bets on their matches, but the head of compliance and I argued against it.

My first day on the job, I was called upstairs and asked what I thought of UFC. I told my bosses I was old-school. I was a boxing guy and didn’t know enough about mixed martial arts to give them a credible opinion. They told me they had a couple of big events coming up and to evaluate them and come back with my assessment. I did my due diligence, and I got to see some of the sport’s biggest stars, including Tito Ortiz, Ken Shamrock, and Chuck Liddell. It was a fascinating process. I also spoke to all my boxing contacts at HBO and Showtime, Hall of Fame announcers Al Bernstein and Bob “the Colonel” Sheridan, ring announcer Jimmy Lennon Jr., former Caesars boxing and special events guru Rich Rose, and everybody in the business with an opinion I respected. It turned out they were all as old-school and biased as I was.

Frank and Lorenzo had bought the UFC a couple years earlier for about $2 million and were now about $30 million in the red, with no light at the end of the tunnel. The UFC president was Dana White. I really liked Dana. He was a regular guy and a pretty big gambler in the casino, usually at table games. He also bet big games with me, usually the Super Bowl. He’d put down $50,000 or $100,000 straight and then another $50,000 or so on prop bets, then he’d go off to a private party at Red Rock.

When the dust settled my relationship with the NBA ended, but not until I demanded and received the back pay they owed me. Meanwhile, Stern and the NBA continued to play down the situation as best they could, limiting the damage and doing their best to protect the “integrity” of the game. Of course, I couldn’t help but recall how Stern and I had discussed my concerns about the referees during our very first meeting, and that my suspicions had proved true in the end. And if not for the FBI, the corruption could have gone on much longer.

Five months later, in April 2007, Toledo senior running back Harvey “Scooter” McDougle was charged with fixing football games on behalf of two Detroit gamblers. These crooks allegedly gave McDougle and other athletes cash, groceries, cell phones, and cars for their participation. Turns out that the FBI had been investigating a Detroit gambler, Gary Manni, for more than a year over a separate matter when, somehow, they learned about the Toledo situation.

The fewer fouls called, the lower the point total would be. The more fouls called, the higher the point total. Kenny determined that Donaghy called more fouls or fewer fouls based on whether he bet the under or over. And during those two seasons, Kenny identified twenty-six games called by Donaghy—twenty-five of which he and his accomplices won on. For Kenny, there was no question: Donaghy had intentionally fixed NBA games. And there was evidence to suggest there were many more than twenty-five.

Deep into the financial crisis and subsequent recession, the Station Casinos regulatory compliance team had encouraged me to build or acquire the best gaming systems available. Stations had also developed proprietary sports gaming software, and we wanted to learn what we could about online gaming systems. My vision, however, was also more far-reaching than system development alone—and this was in line with my company’s reputation for thinking big.

Ron Sacco had been operating in the Caribbean for years. In the 1990s, he ran his operation out of the Dominican Republic, where big bribes to politicians and army generals were rumored. He was profiled by 60 Minutes in 1992 after the FBI and Dominican officials raided his $100 million-a-month operation. Three weeks later, he was up and running again in Antigua with satellite dishes receiving games and phone towers connecting thousands of bettors using his company’s 1–800 numbers. That didn’t last long either. He was later sentenced to sixty-eight months in prison by a federal judge in San Francisco, one of nearly a dozen convictions during his career for illegal sports betting.

We spent Christmas together at home, hopeful Michael was on the road to recovery. Friends circled around us, offering their support and prayers. The Fertitta brothers, Frank and Lorenzo, couldn’t do enough for us, and my old Barbary boss, Michael Gaughan, made sure to check in as well. He always told people, “Once you’re my guy, you’ll always be my guy.” True to his word, I was his guy.

We lucked out when Hawaii, led by the freshman backup quarterback, pulled out a 17–13 win, covering the 3.5 points that was on all those advantage cards. Serves them right. But how sophisticated gamblers got on the quarterback in the first place continues to baffle me. Regardless, the ongoing trickling out of valuable information across the sports world remained a concern. And I knew, with PASPA gone, it was going to get far worse.

My staff scoured the internet and social media, looking for any news about McDonald being out. For more than an hour, they found nothing. Finally, a little more than two hours after I was notified, the first media report on McDonald being out showed up on Twitter. Hawaii had actually sent a player out during warmups wearing McDonald’s No. 13 jersey, trying to keep McDonald’s actual status quiet. But obviously, some pros in the betting market knew before even the media did. This is just one example.

By 2021, thirty-one states had legalized sports betting. And the online operators were on a trajectory for incredible growth. DraftKings’ annual gross revenue for the year was $1.3 billion, which was a 110.9 percent increase from 2020. FanDuel had also doubled its revenues from the year before and was now at $2 billion. They weren’t making any money yet, but you couldn’t ignore just how big they were getting. And BetMGM—an online joint venture between MGM and UK gaming company Entain formed a month after PASPA went away—not only doubled its revenues but had signed partnerships with the NBA, NHL, and MLB. They had individual team partnerships with the Baltimore Ravens, Detroit Lions, Denver Broncos, Pittsburgh Steelers, Las Vegas Raiders, and Tennessee Titans of the NFL; the Detroit Red Wings of the NHL; the Washington Nationals of MLB; and the Philadelphia 76ers of the NBA. They were on the verge of partnerships with Madison Square Garden and had become the game sponsor for the New York Knicks and New York Rangers.

I had other reasons driving me toward retirement. I always prided myself on being professional, diplomatic, courteous, and respectful with colleagues and competitors alike. And also with customers. Now I felt pushed in the opposite direction, forced to give in to big corporate tech or international conglomerates.

For instance, I always warned my bosses to be careful when subscribing to paid “tout” services. Most are scams or telemarketing operations advertising “free” or “guaranteed winners,” boasting of season-long winning percentages over 65 percent. And the higher above a 65 percent winning ratio the headline reads, the likelihood of it being totally bogus rises proportionally. I always told my customers to do their own research, bet their own games, or follow a handicapper they trusted and respected. Certainly, there are great sports information services available today. For example, I’ve long believed Jim Feist had a good opinion on NFL and college football. There are several sites and services out there now that have great stats and do a lot of data analysis for you. The Action Network is an example. The ESPN website is great, and SportsLine and a few others provide great data too. Unabated is another great new odds program with incredible handicapping analytic tools.

My message to the leagues, gaming companies, and public is this: Don’t keep putting players in the ridiculously compromising position they are in today.

[Thomas Kelley · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you have read any sports betting books from the bettor's point of view this read will give you a look at the other side. The author who comes from a family that had various ties to bookmaking or sports betting. While his friends had newspaper route, he was taking sports bets at school. The author throughout this read works at or helps develop various sports books at the Las Vegas casino's Caeser's, Las Vegas Hilton and Stations spending over forty years in the industry. With this book the author claims he will give you all the inside information of the sports betting information.
The author also claims that while he worked for various sports books, he won the most money compared to any other book in Nevada. While the author gives you a look behind the curtain on how some of the super fights were put together or the various high rollers operate. I wish the author would have revealed a little more. It is interesting how the attitude of the author changes over time where in the beginning he thought it would be great if sports betting was available across the country and fought against things like PASPA (Professional and Amateur sports protection act) but you know the old adage be careful what you wish for because you just might get it. When PASPA was defeated as now you are well aware sports betting as exploded across the country with some of the sports betting apps now in bed with the various sports leagues and now their problems with individuals trying to fix games. Crazy to think having betting in a grocery store. One thing for sure in this book the author is definitely not a fan of Billy Walters who he claimed he had the biggest feud in Las Vegas against. Give this book a read and see what you think.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book offers great insight into the history of Las Vegas and the future of sports betting. Art has lived a remarkable life, and his stories take you along on his journey.