Trouble in Atlantic City

Making good progress on my E-book about the poker playing P.I., Frank Vagola. This is a super rough draft of a chapter from it. I'm up to 41K words so going into the home stretch. Enjoy. Tony



Tommy Tootoria was having a bad week and he was in a foul mood. Just hearing the name makes my skin crawl up! Tommy lived in a suburb of Atlantic City called Absecon, where I happen to live in also. It is a small town with some really nice expensive sections and some cheap one filled with motels on Route 35, which is the area I happen to live in. Tourists/Gamblers use these motels to avoid paying $200 plus a night to stay in an actual Casino. Unless of course you are a high roller/big spender who gets their rooms comped, paid for by the casino. Of course if that’s the case you most likely lose 10 times the price of the room in order to qualify for it for free. Worse yet many of the motels in Absecon are paid for as a monthly rate by down and out gamblers. Also some are used to deal drugs or by prostitutes to conduct their business. So Absecon is a real contradiction in status. On the one side of town you have $1.5 Million plus houses on the other side you have roach motels. Back to Tommy, he’s a vice president of a company that got the contract to pick up Atlantic City’s garbage. The contract was huge for 16 million a year and companies fight to for a chance to win it. You have to wonder why everyone wants the contract being garbage pickup is done all by Union workers some of which can’t be fired and make over 100K a year! Not bad for unskilled labor. So Tommy’s Company won the contract and on the surface it looked like he was on top of the world, just rolling in the dough. Behind the scenes things for Tommy were anything but great. In the previous football season he got totally beaten down. Losing a huge sum of money for the last 8 weeks straight of the regular NFL season. Then he chased his loses trying to make it back in the playoffs, only to fall deeper into a hole. The Super bowl was no better when a last second Interception caused his team to not cover the spread by a single point. That point put Tommy so deep into the hole that his business and house might be lost to the bookies. Of course he owed the money to one of the biggest mobsters in Atlantic City, NJ, and actually the whole country. The head of the Bubouts family the infamous Vinny! Indicted for every crime you can think of including 4 murders but none of them have ever stuck to him. Maybe it’s because the witness always had a way of changing their minds or disappearing at very opportune times. Tommy was in serious trouble the kind that your body could end up deep in the New Jersey Pine barons to maybe never be found again. He could end up like Jimmy Hoffa, rumored to be buried in cement under Giants Stadium in East Rutherford New Jersey, but only the people responsible for his disappearance know for sure.