The sound is more frequent than a Sugar Ray Leonard comeback. During a busy Sunday in March it can last for hours.

Ring, ring …

“Hello?”

“Hey, Dave, it’s L-Train. What’s the spread on the Wake Forest-Stanford game?” a raspy voice asks.

“It’s Wake minus four. What do you need?”

“Give me Wake for a $100.”

“You got it, buddy. Good luck.”

It is 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, March 16, 1997, in a posh, ocean-front condominium in San Diego, and Dave’s* phone is about to blow up. For the last hour, the cordless black Sony hasn’t stopped ringing.

The Wake Forest-Stanford game isn’t until 4:30 p.m., but it’s already the gambler’s pick of the day. Nearly everyone who has called Dave has put money on Wake Forest. It is peak gambling season, but Dave looks tired. After a long night of drinking, the 26-year-old San Diego State student is still hurting. His bloodshot eyes and throbbing head tell the story: he’s fighting a bad hangover.

But Dave knows he can’t stop. Not this time of year. It’s the second round of the NCAA college basketball tournament, and his clients are in gambling nirvana. They need a fix. The games are their drug.

Dave, the bookie, is their pusher.

The addicts can’t dial his number quick enough.

Ring …

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Moose. What’s the line on the Wake-Stanford game?”

“Wake minus four.”

“Cool. Give me Wake Forest for $250.”

“No problem. Wake minus four for $250. You got it.”

Dave laughs as he puts the phone down. Moose is one of his favorite clients.

“The Moose,” Dave says, “always loses.”

Dave stirs up a screwdriver to fight off the mental cobwebs; he looks relaxed and loose. Stress free.

“Why be like everyone else?” he says.

He’s drunk on life. For the last two years, Dave has made tens of thousands of dollars running an illegal bookmaking operation from an off-campus condominium.

Before he came to San Diego three years ago, Dave was a small-time bettor in the Midwest. He says he only bet on sports as a hobby as a way to add excitement to a boring, regular-season game.

For a year, Dave lay low on the gambling scene. He never envisioned running a bookmaking operation until someone showed him the way.

“It wasn’t until two years ago that my brother Ike* came to San Diego and introduced me to the wonderful world of bookmaking,” Dave said.

Ike, 24, represented the other side of betting. He told his older brother that the money to be made in sports gambling was in taking the bets, not placing them.

“Ike knew the ropes of being a bookie,” Dave said. “He went to a huge college, a Big Ten campus, where he used to work for a guy who was a major bookie. So when he came to San Diego, he asked me if I knew people who bet. I said, ‘Of course I do.’

“That is when he asked me if I wanted to start booking games.”

Dave and Ike’s operation started off slow. They pooled together $5,000 and started telling friends they were accepting bets on college and pro football games. Only five people bet with them the first week, but most were fairly big gamblers “$100-and-up-a-game players,” Dave says.

Two weeks later, the brothers were almost bankrupt.

“The first couple of weeks we got killed,” Dave said. “We had to use our credit cards to bail us out. It was crazy. I said to Ike, ‘I thought we were supposed to be winning. What the heck are we doing wrong?'”

The following week, Dave and Ike won $5,000. And for the next nine months, the money poured in.

“It was unbelievable,” Dave said. “The money just started rolling in. At first we were lucky to survive, and then all of a sudden I had all this money. I was out buying things I never had before.”

Dave purchased these things with other people’s money. Guys like the Moose, L-Train and 25-year-old Mesa College student P.J. Krupp* became Dave’s personal ATM.

Krupp’s story is classic. He is one of Dave’s closest friends and, until a year ago, one of his best clients. Over the last two years, Krupp estimates he has lost in excess of $5,000 from bad betting.

“Betting with Dave killed me,” Krupp said. “I lost a relationship with a girl I was with for two years because of my gambling problem. It was like everything revolved around (gambling).

“During the football season, I would race out of bed on Sunday at 9:30 a.m. to grab the paper and see the betting lines for the day. My girlfriend would be like, ‘Where are you going?’ and I would lie, ‘I’m going to get something to drink.’ Meanwhile I was downstairs with the newspaper, checking the lines to see who I was going to bet on that day.”

Krupp says he has cut his gambling back drastically. He claims he hasn’t bet for two months, but he remembers how he lost control. He remembers betting only $20 to $50 a game to start, but before long his addiction spiraled out of control.

“(My betting) started off low, but then it got to be $500 to a $1,000 a game,” Krupp said. “Then I had to face reality.”

Reality meant paying Dave, his friend.

“It was funny because when Dave first started taking bets, it was great,” Krupp said. “Every time we went out, he was buying all the drinks. But after a while, I realized he was buying drinks with my money.”

The drinks were nothing.

Dave began his own version of “Shop Till You Drop” when he purchased new leather couches that cost $2,000. He then bought a big-screen TV and a set of new golf clubs.

Dave became Donald Trump.

But it all paled in comparison to what he bought next.

“With the help of some of the bettors I have in real estate, I was able to put down $35,000 on a beach house,” Dave said. “I own a house. Can you believe that?”

Pay up or shut up

Living in a beachfront condominium and watching sports all day would sound like an unbelievable job to most college students.

But unfortunately for some bookies, complications arise when it comes time to collect the profits from deadbeat gamblers.

Everyone has heard the tales of late-paying bettors with broken legs and missing fingers, but it isn’t always that easy for bookies.

“You can’t make that many threats,” Dave said. “You have to be careful. The key is to not let them get down too much.”

All too often gamblers will double down on a bet to recoup their losses from the last game. A majority of the time they end up putting themselves in a bigger hole. Because the money bet with a bookmaker is never placed upfront, it is easy for many gamblers to bet what they don’t have.

“It gets convenient to call in a bet to a bookie and not have to front the money,” San Diego Police Detective Brett Toovey said. “I have seen cases where guys have been down a couple thousand, so they bet $5,000 on the next game to get it back. Then they lose again and get down $10,000, so they bet $10,000 on the next game. Then they keep going up. But finally the bookie will say, ‘No. You can’t bet until you pay me what you owe me first.'”

This is when things can get ugly. When a debt gets into the tens of thousands of dollars, anything can happen to those who refuse to pay.

Ask Toovey.

“I saw a guy who was shot in the face once,” he said. “I believe it was because he didn’t pay, but it was never proven. Things like that happen in this business. I once saw a guy’s car with the word ‘pay’ scratched into the driver’s side door.”

Perhaps the best deadbeat story is that of L.B. or “Law Boy,” as Dave calls him. L.B., was a major player, a “nickel” player who would usually bet nothing less than $500 a game.

Last year L.B. was on fire, and according to Dave, he won 13 straight bets for nothing less than $350 a game.

But the following summer, L.B got cold. Ice cold. He couldn’t win any baseball bets, and before long he was down $15,000 to Dave.

That is when L.B. disappeared.

“He had given us a fake address the whole time he was betting with us, and when we called
him his voice mail always came up,” Dave said. “Finally, after a lot of work, we were able to come up with his address. But by that time, it was eight months later.

” We didn’t want to scare him and come after him, so we got someone to go into his house and take everything off his desk. We got all his of his personal stuff. We got his social security number, phone bills, tax information, a TRW and some family pictures.”

Dave had L.B. cornered.

In a scene straight from “Goodfellas,” Dave sent out his delivery man to get the message to L.B.

“We let him know we knew everything about him,” Dave said. “We shocked him with an envelope from a guy in a trench coat in the presence of other co-workers. It didn’t say anything about who we were. It just had a note inside that said, ‘Call this phone number at 6:30 p.m.’ We knew we had him.

“Sure enough, he called. He was scared shitless.”

L.B. couldn’t pay Dave everything at once, but he is working out a payment plan.

Getting caught

The bookmaker’s lifestyle: Is it worth the risk to a student? By examening at past cases in which college bookmakers received little more than a slap on the wrist from the courts, many college students might answer “yes.”

“Yeah, it’s worth the risk,” said Greg, a 24-year-old physical therapy major who bets about $50 a week. “The odds of getting caught taking bets is phenomenally low. It’s like saying, ‘If you could rob a bank and get away with it, would you do it?’ You know it’s wrong and you know it’s illegal, but it seems like an easy way to make a living.

“For the most part, being a bookie seems like a victimless crime. The only people who seem to be truly affected are the bettors and their wallets.”

That is what most bettors say until one day they call up their bookies and no one answers. Most gamblers think just that until the levy breaks and their bookie gets caught.

Such was the case in January when the San Diego Police Department arrested and convicted two SDSU students and a former Grossmont College student on charges of bookmaking.

According to Toovey, who broke the case after a four-month investigation, it was the first time in years that students at SDSU were arrested for bookmaking.

Over the past three years, Toovey says he has arrested more than 60 people in the San Diego area for bookmaking, but none of them was a college student.

After such a long span without an arrest, how did these students get caught?

They were careless.

At the end of the 1995-96 football season, the SDPD received an anonymous complaint that gambling activity was occurring at The Brigantine Restaurant on 9350 Forte St. in La Mesa.

The investigation was delayed until the following year, in the heart of the college and pro football season, when Toovey entered The Brigantine as an unsuspecting customer. After he began frequenting the restaurant, Toovey heard a bet called in on a football game from Stephen Fera, a 23-year-old employee at the restaurant.

“I heard him call a $50 bet in to a bookie, so I asked him if he could get a bet in for me,” Toovey said. “Over the next few weeks of the season, I ended up placing some bets through Fera.”

Toovey became more friendly with Fera, and he got what the investigation needed most Fera’s home phone number.

“Once I got his number, I was able to see who he was placing the bets through,” Toovey said. “Then I got a search warrant to use a dial-number-recorder that was placed on Fera’s home phone. After that we knew who the bookmaker was.”

With the use of the dial-number-recorder (a device that is placed on the phone box outside the house and used to read the telephone number of an outgoing call), Toovey was able to trace the gambling activity to the pager number and home phone number of David Lebhar, a 25-year-old SDSU student.

“I knew that Fera was placing the bets by calling Lebhar at home and on his pager,” he said. “When we entered Lehbar’s house, we found everything we needed. We seized all of the bookmaking records, tally sheets and betting lines that Lebhar had kept, and from that information the arrests were made.”

Lebhar, Fera and a third acquaintance, Mason Brooks, a 24-year-old SDSU student who was Lebhar’s roommate at the time, were all convicted of misdemeanor bookmaking. They spent a couple of nights in jail, and they all pleaded guilty to misdemeanor bookmaking. They each received three years’ probation and community service and were forced to pay restitution and a fine.

It was a sentence that some say was nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

“Lehbar got off easy,” Toovey said. “His should have been a felony case, and Fera’s and Brooks’ should have been a misdemeanor.”

Currently, Lehbar and Brooks still attend SDSU, and, remarkably, Fera continues to work as an oyster bar cook at The Brigantine.

When Lehbar and Fera were contacted by The Daily Aztec, they declined to comment.

But Brooks did say: “(The case) is something I don’t want to talk about. It’s over. I want to put this behind me. That is all I want to say about it.”

Patrick Walsh, general manager at The Brigantine, when reached by The Daily Aztec, also refused to comment unless the name of the restaurant was withheld from the story.

According to Toovey, Lebhar’s bookmaking operation was small time.

“Lebhar wasn’t that big,” Toovey said. “Most of the bets that he took were only $20 to $100, and he only had about 20 clients whom he dealt with. He didn’t have a lot of big-time gamblers.”

Lebhar ran a bad book. He was irresponsible and paid the price by getting caught. Although it could happen to anyone, Dave says it won’t happen to him.

“I have never really been worried about getting caught,” Dave said. “I have never even come close to being worried. I’ve even had a couple of cops that bet through me. They were friends of a friend, and they were calling me up under different names. It was kind of funny.”

Humor. What else would you expect from a college bookie who drinks screwdrivers for breakfast and watches sports all day?

Dave the bookie can afford to crack jokes.

It’s now 6:45 p.m. Sunday night, and Dave is drunk on life, again. Stanford just beat Wake Forest. Everyone who called on the game lost.

“What a hard day’s work,” Dave says, laughing. “Nine hundred thirty-five bucks. Not bad.”

Dave says he is going to slow down his bookmaking operation after the college basketball season ends. He wants to take some time off “to have fun.”

For two years now, Dave the bookie has had plenty of time to laugh all the way to the bank.

*Names have ben changed upon request.