Red Box and the Baton Rouge Line

Shreveport and Bossier City, Louisiana, autumn 1973. Federal agents spent the football season investigating several bookmaking operations and raided them all at once on the last day of the season. Bettors wagered on single games against the point spread, on slips like 'G.B. + 14 = 200', paying the bookie 10 per cent 'juice' on losses. A one-count indictment filed in April 1974 charged Henry Floyd 'Red' Box and ten other men with conducting an illegal gambling business under the federal statute that reaches operations of five or more people. One defendant was severed and six pleaded before trial; four went before a jury for five days with 21 witnesses, one of them pleading guilty mid-trial. The evidence against Box: he owned the Guys & Dolls Billiard Parlor; phone records showed 223 calls from the parlour and 20 from his home to Price, a Baton Rouge bookmaker; two immunised bookmakers, Cook and Stewart, described Box as a bettor and customer, and Cook said he had occasionally 'laid off' bets with Box, who was free to decline them, and Stewart had given Box favourable odds; and about $3,800 in slips bearing Box's name at 11-to-10 odds were seized from Stewart's operation. Box argued he was never a bookmaker at all: nobody showed he had customers, set a line or ran a book from the pool hall; he was simply a heavy bettor who sometimes got favourable odds.