Sometimes Jim Mergler makes money when he goes to the track and bets.
Sometimes he makes money when he goes to the track and doesn’t bet.
Mergler is a stooper, just one of the many who’ve appeared at tracks across the continent for decades. And a stooper, simply put, is someone who picks up discarded pari-mutuel tickets in hopes of finding a forgotten winner. You’ll see them at virtually all tracks; many are obvious. Others, though can be shy and arguably stealthy.
“At face value, there seems to be no harm in letting customers hunt for thrown-away treasure,” writes T.D. Thornton, a former track publicist at Suffolk Downs in Massachusetts, in his book Not By A Longshot.
“But things can get out of control when stoopers overturn garbage containers and annoy patrons who have paid a premium to sit in exclusive areas of the track.
“Although entirely legal,” Thornton continues, “it is for these reasons that stooping is considered an unsavory practice, and every track has its own policy on how to deal with it, ranging from immediate banishment by security officers to ignoring it.”
Mergler has been tossed out of tracks and then finds that these same tracks will let him come back. That’s because in addition to stooping, he is an avid bettor and tracks today cannot afford the luxury of chasing such people away.
He is quick to point out that he doesn’t snatch tickets from clubhouse tables and he condemns that technique. He admits it can be a problem. “A person will go to the restroom or to make a bet and leave tickets on his table,” says Mergler. “Someone will walk past the table and pick them up, but that’s stealing. I’ll report it if I see it. If I know the person who discarded the ticket, I’ll tell him.”
Mergler waits until a racing program is over to begin collecting discarded tickets. Sometimes he makes money even when the tickets he picks up aren’t winners. “If someone has placed a lot of bets and one horse has been scratched, he’s entitled to a refund, but he might not realize that and tosses the ticket away,” he says. “Or people might not even care about the refund.
“I’ve heard that Oaklawn Park [thoroughbred track] has a million dollars in uncashed tickets every year,” he grins.
Old-time stoopers faced a truly difficult task -- not only did they have to physically bend over and collect discarded tickets, but they also had to compare each one to the results to find the winners.
Today, the task is made considerably easier by the fact that stoopers like Mergler can run the discarded tickets though a betting machine to check for winners -- which is a good thing! “One ticket out of a thousand is a good one,” Mergler admits.
He also points out that some bettors don’t understand the machines and occasionally forfeit valuable tickets. One time he found a ticket worth more than $2,000 after it had been run through a machine and was still discarded.
Stacy Cahill, general manager of racing at Scioto Downs in Ohio, says that she seldom sees stoopers at her track these days. “I kind of wish we had more,” she adds. “I heard once that a Scioto bettor put his son through college by picking up tickets, but I don’t know if that’s true or not. In this economy, I would think that people would triple check their tickets before throwing them away!
“If you think about it,” Cahill grins, “stoopers help the track clean up discarded tickets.”
Even The New York Times, which routinely ignores horse racing, found stooping to be worthy of a feature last December. The prestigious paper profiled Jesus Leonardo, 57, a New Jersey resident who feeds his family with the money he earns sorting through tickets discarded at a mid-town Manhattan OTB parlor.
“This has become my job, my life,” Leonardo is quoted as saying in the Times piece. He estimated that in the last decade he’s found tickets worth half a million dollars.
His ‘occupation,’ however, requires him to spend up to 10 hours a day feeding the discarded slips through a scanner in hopes of finding a winner. Fellow customers at this OTB parlor say it’s an unwritten rule that all the tickets thrown away belong to Leonardo.
In 2006, Leonardo cashed a Pick 4 ticket from Retama Park in Texas worth $9,500 and late last year he made $8,040 from a discarded ticket on the races at Santa Anita.
Leonardo was a horse player before he became a stooper, says the article. He bet a Pick 3 in 1999, only to watch his horses finish out of the money. Like all bettors, he tossed his ticket away in disgust.
“But just as I was leaving, I looked up at the screen and realized an inquiry had been made,” he told the Times reporter. The inquiry broke his way and now Leonardo’s ticket was worth $900. That is, if he could find it. But he couldn’t.
Leonardo searched and searched, but to no avail. He pleaded with the parlor manager. Finally that manager told him that if he wanted to take the garbage home he could. So he did. The bad news was that Leonardo never found his $900 Pick 3 ticket. The good news is that he found two other winners in the trash worth $2,000.
That’s when Leonardo became a stooper. Or, more correctly, a trash collector. Every day he goes to the same OTB parlor and waits for the day’s garbage to be put at the curb for pick-up. He opens it, finds the discarded betting slips, and puts them in a separate garbage bag, and takes the New York Port Authority train home.
Before he became a stooper, Leonardo had worked at odd jobs, often painting houses and cleaning windows. His practice of bringing home tickets didn’t go over too well with his wife at first, but she soon realized he was making money doing it.
It wasn’t long before Leonardo became a stooper entrepreneur. He paid a couple buddies $25 to pick up trash at several others OTB parlors in New York and bring it to him -- he estimated that he now sorts up to 7,000 tickets each night. He stacks them neatly and takes them back to the OTB parlor the next day -- standing by the scanner for hours, feeding them through in hopes of hitting a winner.
Leonardo insists that he declares his found money each year to the United States Internal Revenue Services and pays his taxes.
According to the Times piece, bettors at New York tracks and OTB parlors tossed away more than $8.5 million in winning tickets in two years.... and Jesus Leonardo just wants his small share of that.
In December 2009, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review reported that bettors had left $2.8 million in uncashed tickets at Pennsylvania tracks the year before.
“For the most part, racing regulators and track operators look the other way unless a problem arises,” writes reporter Andre Conte in the Tribune. “Regular players tend to self-police track behavior and said they tolerate the practice as long as no one steals or becomes a nuisance. Pennsylvania does not have laws against stoopers redeeming tickets and the racing commissions do not ban the practice.”
In Pennsylvania, unclaimed tickets not cashed by April 1 of the following year go into the state’s general fund. That’s a drop in the bucket to a state treasury, but it can be a windfall for dedicated stoopers.
Mike Jeannot, president of The Meadows Racing, says that stoopers are so insignificant in the overall picture that they’re allowed to freely ply their trade. “It really just isn’t on our map of things we look at these days,” Jeannot has been known to comment.
Bobby Zanakis worked as a bus boy at The Meadows in the early 1970s and recalls finding three $10 tickets on a horse that was scratched, giving him $30 in refund money. That night, Zanakis made $21 for bussing tables. He learned his lesson. He is now a horseplayer, but says that the art of stooping is dying. He explains that the staff at the new Meadows racino sweep up too quickly for stoopers to profit.
You might wonder how a bettor can overlook winning wagers, but even experienced racing fans admit to it. Gordon Waterstone, associate editor of The Horseman & Fair World, says that he bet regularly during his years as publicity director at Hazel Park in Michigan. “It was an annual rite of mine to save all — yes, all — my bet tickets,” he says. “At the end of the meet I would give that huge — and I mean huge — envelope to our comptroller, and he would take the computer print-out of the outs and take the tickets home and go through them one by one (he had help from his wife) and find all the winners that I had forgotten to cash.”
Waterstone admits that he’d often get busy and thus forgetful during the races.
“I’d always have several hundred dollars worth of tickets still uncashed,” he says. “He and I split the money 50-50. And he was a good friend who I trusted wholeheartedly... although I’m still unsure what he’d really do if he found a ticket worth ten grand in there!
“Then again,” grins Waterston, “I don’t think I’d forget a ticket worth $10,000.”