Ms. O'Connor came from a working-class family in San Diego, one of 13 children of a part-time bookie.
Mr. Pantoliano's father was a hearse driver and compulsive gambler, his mother a seamstress and part-time bookie.
His supporting performance in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 19766) was well-received, but not until 1980 did Lancaster revive his career with an Oscar-nominated performance as an aging, small-time bookie in director Louis Malle's Atlantic City.
He thinks his missing father, a small-time bookie, who walked out one night to buy some cigarettes and never returned, has been 'whacked' by the Mob, and his adolescence is violent and darkly troubled.
In The Front (1976), released roughly a quarter of a century after Ritt's blacklisting, Woody Allen gave a much-praised performance as a part-time bookie hired by a group of blacklisted television writers to affix his name to their work so it could be sold.
As potentially lethal as the thugs may be, they are also slightly over-the-hill small-time bookies who seem anything but invincible, and the movie gives each a complicated personality.
Other shared activities, according to prosecutors, included murdering 10 people (two of whom were Mr. Flemmi's girlfriends), extorting small-time bookies and drug dealers in South Boston, selling drugs, laundering money and snitching to the F.B.I. on rivals who were going to testify against them.
There is the proliferation of heavily armed SWAT teams, even in small towns; the use of shock-and-awe tactics to bust small-time bookies; the no-knock raids to recover trace amounts of drugs that often result in the killing of family dogs, if not family members; and in communities where drug treatment programs once were key, the waging of a drug version of counterinsurgency war.
"At the time of Bookie's death, I just went by what we were told," she said.
"At the time of Bookie's death, I just went by what we were told," Barnes said.
It is just a matter of time before bookies offer odds on the outcome of his case.
