Pittsburgh's gambling habit grew out of its working-class roots.
"A lot of guys working would go down to the bars, and the next thing you know, somebody's running a card game," said Ed Meena, a history professor at Point Park University, Downtown.
"You just had, like, regular gambling places, and a lot of them were associated with big guys who controlled the numbers."
Anthony M. "Tony" Grosso, who controlled Western Pennsylvania's illegal numbers -- or daily lottery -- racket for decades, was among the biggest. At its peak in the late 1960s, his business employed an estimated 5,000 people and grossed $30 million a year.
Gus Greenlee, a numbers runner in the Hill District from the 1920s to 1940s, used his proceeds to open the original Crawford Grill nightclub, form the Pittsburgh Crawfords Negro League baseball team and build a $100,000 stadium in the neighborhood.
In the South Side, Chester Stupak, the son of Polish immigrants, ran what some boast was Pittsburgh's longest running dice game of craps, from 1941 to 1991.
"Pittsburgh has always been on the take," said John L. Smith, a newspaper columnist in Las Vegas who wrote a biography of Stupak's son, Bob. "It always turned a blind eye. ... If it's illegal but everyone does it, is it really OK?"
Through the Depression, numbers runners passed through the mills trading betting slips for wagers, and paying winners. Women collected among the housewives at home.
Before the Pennsylvania Lottery's 50-cent daily number premiered in 1972, illegal bets paid out on combinations of stock market figures from the numbers of shares traded, shares up and shares down.
A penny bet returned a $7 jackpot.
"The numbers writers in the steel towns were as important as the mayor and chiefs of police, because they paid out the next day," Meena said. "When you hit, they came and found you."
With casino gambling going legit when licensed slots parlors open in Pittsburgh and Washington County, state gambling regulator Kenneth McCabe said he wonders what will happen. Before joining the board, McCabe served as special agent in charge of the FBI Pittsburgh field office.
The biggest backlash, he said, could come over video poker and slot machines.
"Go to some of these social clubs, and who goes in there to politic, to drink beers?" McCabe said. "It's the police chief, the local politicians meeting in different social clubs where they have these slot machines going.
"Now we say you've got to enforce it, where for years they turned a blind eye?"
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