Last stop Wonderland, continued

by Chris Wright

Gary Dascoli, meanwhile, is more philosophical. "All you can lose here is money," he says. "You can't get your heart broke. Dogs don't know you, you don't know them -- if you lose, it's nothing personal." But then Dascoli's not losing any more. In fact, Dascoli just hit for $533. "You see all these people here cursing God," he says. "As if he's worried about what goes on at a dog track."

Perhaps the biggest gambler at Wonderland is Milton native Charles Sarkis, the man who bet millions of dollars on the park's success. After 35 years in the food business, Sarkis has built a reputation as a formidable businessman. He has also built up a mini-empire of restaurants: Pappa Razzi, Joe's American Bar & Grill, the Atlantic Fish Company, Abe & Louie's, J.C. Hillary's, Charlie's Eating & Drinking Saloon.

At 60 years old, Sarkis is still a frightfully handsome man. Dressed in a crisp blue shirt and yellow tie, with close-cropped gray hair and a pair of wide-set, watery blue eyes, he has the look of a lounge singer about him -- Tony Bennett without the nose. His wealth, charm, looks, and Hollywood dress sense have afforded Sarkis a kind of celebrity status in Boston.

Apparently, that wasn't enough.

Sarkis branched out into gaming in 1977, when he bought Wonderland for $1.7 million. This raised a few eyebrows at the time -- the elegant restaurateur immersing himself in the gritty world of dog racing. But Sarkis had a connection to the track long before he bought it. And that fact, too, raised some eyebrows.

For a half-century, Sarkis's father, Abe, was one of the most recognizable faces at Wonderland. "My dad was a great guy," Sarkis says, sitting in a booth at Abe & Louie's, his upscale steak house on Boylston Street, "but he was a bookmaker."

The son of Lebanese immigrants, Abraham Sarkis was raised in the South End -- then a rough-and-tumble, low-income neighborhood -- in the 1920s. When his family hit hard times, Abe began working as a lookout for a local speakeasy. "He had a little button he could push to signal that the police were coming," Sarkis says. "Who was going to suspect a 12-year-old kid?"

By the 1930s, not-so-honest Abe was running the hottest numbers game in town. "He and two or three other guys invented the lottery as we know it," Sarkis says. "He was a mathematical genius." When Wonderland opened in 1935, Abe moved in. He loved the dogs, and he loved the people who loved the dogs, and the people who loved the dogs loved Abe. The track became a social scene and a gold mine wrapped up in a single package.

But as Abe became the bookie to be reckoned with at Wonderland, he drew heat from local law enforcement, and he racked up an impressive rap sheet of gambling arrests and tax-evasion charges. This did little to dampen his passion. Abe's love affair with Wonderland endured -- and so did his legal woes. When he died of cancer in 1991, at the age of 77, Abe was facing charges of illegal phone betting.

And it wasn't only the law he had to contend with. Abe was also the target of several armed robbery attempts, including one in which his wife slammed the door in the face of a well-armed thug dressed in priest's robes. When Charlie was still a boy, his mother said to him, "You're not going to go into that business. You're going to be legitimate."

In 1958, Sarkis enrolled at Georgetown University, where he studied business. In 1964, he opened his first restaurant, Boraschi's on Boylston street. "I wanted to be respectable," he says. "I wanted my children to be proud that people wouldn't talk about their father in the negative."

But when he bought Wonderland, Sarkis and his family endured an onslaught of negative gossip. "It's caused a lot of heartbreak, a lot of unpleasant media," Sarkis says. "It was always that I shouldn't be in racing and this and that, babalabaloom. I guess if your father is a bookmaker, you shouldn't be in the legitimate gambling business. I thought because I had made my own money -- I was naïve enough to think that people would take you as you are."

Actually, unkind words have proved to be the least of Sarkis's worries. Competition from casinos, the lottery, and tracks in Rhode Island that offer slot-machine wagering has spread the gambling dollar dangerously thin, and has left Wonderland spiraling toward insolvency.

Page | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Next

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.