Queenswalk: The Palatial Home of the Tin-Horn Punk, Part One

Frank A. Erickson was born in New York City on November 27, 1895. His mother was Irish, and his father was of Swedish descent. Very early in his life, his parents died, and he spent his childhood in an orphanage. By the time he was a young man, he was working in Coney Island as a busboy in a restaurant. The job didn’t pay well, and young Frank was looking for extra work. Legend has it that a patron of the restaurant gave him five dollars and asked him to run over to another local bar and place a bet for him on a race at the Sheepshead Bay track. The man had sent him out too late to make the bet, as the race was already on, and the horse lost anyway. But Frank Erickson had found his calling. He also kept the five dollars.

He began his life as a bookmaker soon afterward, and ran bets in his spare time. By the mid-1930s, he was one of the biggest bookies in New York, and was living like a lord in his new home in Forest Hills at 105 Greenway South, a medieval style banker’s castle he purchased for $75,000. At the time, the average home in a middle class neighborhood was perhaps a quarter of that amount. Frank Erickson also got married, and was the husband to a girl he had met and befriended in the orphanage, those long years ago.

Being the biggest bookie in New York was not without its notoriety, or an association with much more violent criminals and organized crime. The Depression era saw a whole new class of gangsters coming up, and Erickson knew them all, and called many of them friends. Gambler Frank Costello was one of his closest friends. He also hung out with Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano. He was the right hand man of Arnold Rothstein, another Queens resident who was well-known as a kingpin in New York’s Jewish Mob.

Erickson was an extremely intelligent man, and it is said that he and Moses Annenberg, from Chicago, invented nationwide synchronized betting, establishing a country wide wire service where bets could be aggregated from all over the country. Erickson and Frank Costello started the system of laying off bets, which means buying bets from other bookmakers to even the odds, and minimize losses. They also set up the lay-off and odds systems still used today by bookmakers.

All of this bookie action made Frank Erickson very well known, and very rich. It also made him the target of law enforcement and politicians. His career was in the public eye from the 1920s well into the 1950s. He was no stranger to the court system. Between 1919 and 1926 he was arrested for gambling at least five times. The charges never stuck. Reform mayor Fiorello LaGuardia hated him, and called Erickson a “tin-horn punk,” and threatened to have him deported, although technically, as Erickson was an American-born citizen, LaGuardia couldn’t do that.

But he could see to it that law enforcement harassed Erickson any chance they got. 1939 was the year they really started to go after him. In May of that year, the mayor’s office released to the press the results of a lengthy investigation of Erickson and his gambling operations. Much of it was stating the obvious: Frank Erickson was probably the largest bookmaker in the United States, accepting bets from every racetrack in the country. He had an unofficial staff of over 3,000 people across the country, and for many years ran his operation from an office in New Jersey, so as to sidestep New York City’s gambling laws.

Over the past year, he had also operated an office in Manhattan. There he had four unlisted phone numbers registered to his company, the Logwood Realty Company. The investigator found that no real estate transactions seemed to be going on there. Erickson told investigators, under oath, that he used those phones for personal calls, and arranging theater tickets, haircuts and other appointments. Erickson said that the thought that he was collecting gambling proceeds in his Broadway office was shocking.

The report also said that Frank Erickson was associating with unsavory criminal types, such as the late Dutch Schultz, Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, Jimmy Lapenna, slot machine kingpin Leo Byck, and Brooklyn racketeer Joe Adonis. He also included among his many friends law enforcement officials, politicians, and court officials. One of his closest friends was Brooklyn District Attorney William F. X. Georghan. The two men had been friends for years, and Erickson contributed to his campaign funds. The papers reported that the Governor of New York had repeatedly warned Georghan that his relationship with Erickson was “manifestly ill-advised,” but Georghan remained a friend throughout both of their lives.

Although Erickson ran a huge bookmaking operation that was patently illegal, and many of his associations were shady, to say the least, it was hard to dislike the guy. He wasn’t a scary mobster like some of his acquaintances, he was an affable, roly-poly man who joked with police, investigators and reporters, and was known to give generously of his millions to charity, especially charity to children’s causes. He was “Uncle Frank” to a lot of the city’s children, including the children of some of the city’s most notorious mobsters.

Since law enforcement never was able to get him on gambling charges, they searched for other ways to send Uncle Frank to jail. In 1939, they decided to get him on gun charges. Erickson had a permit for a handgun, which he dutifully renewed every year. Mayor LaGuardia wanted to know why the man he called “a notorious gambler and persona non grata in this city,” was able to keep renewing his gun permit. The city came down on the Maspeth precinct that renewed the license, and tried to find some irregularities. They finally found something.

The application to renew the gun permit asked if the applicant had ever been arrested. Erickson had been arrested several times, although he was never convicted of anything. So he answered “no.” The District Attorney had him arrested again, this time on charges of perjury. Around the same time, they also arrested him on a charge of vagrancy. Erickson had admitted under oath that his wealth came from being a professional gambler, so an indictment came down to arrest him for being disorderly, and having no visible means of support, i.e.; a vagrant.

It seems that the law stipulated in Section 899 of the Code of Criminal Procedure that “Any person who has no visible means of support, or any person who maintains himself for the most part by gaming is a disorderly person.” The millionaire bookie had been hauled into court on a misdemeanor. So what happened next? It was classic Frank Erickson. The story will conclude next week.

(Photograph:Christopher Bride for Property Shark)

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