Beth Raymer was in a panic.
Her biggest player, a Long Island guy named Dave Greenberg, lost a bundle, wouldn’t pay and couldn’t be found. Raymer, a bookie’s agent, knew an uncollected debt spelled disaster.
Finally, she got a chilling voice message from the deadbeat himself.
“I was in trouble in the stock market years ago . . . I’m on probation,” he said. “And, uh, my parole officer wants to talk to me about who I’ve been speaking to on my cellphone. He has all the numbers.”
The numbers included the cell of her fiancé, Jeremy, who had been collecting bets for her start-up, and now Raymer faced a horrible choice: Eat the $25,000 debt or risk jail for both of them. She had to make Dave settle up without getting ratted out.
But how was a nice girl like Raymer, 34, a Fulbright scholar with an endearing giggle and a habit of twirling her curls, supposed to pull off a Tony Soprano?
She recounts those and other high-stakes dramas in “Lay the Favorite,” an account of her life working in the underground trenches of professional, and often illegal, gambling, which took her across New York City, Las Vegas and the seedy international betting meccas of Curacao and Costa Rica.
Many who rule the industry are nothing like Hollywood’s tough-talking Mafiosi, she says. They’re nebbishy nerds who pig out on junk food, gaze at computers all day, work constantly and have no clue how to deal with people.
“They’re all Jewish kids who went to Stuyvesant,” Raymer says. “They’re mathematically inclined, but their social skills are lacking. It’s what makes them cute.”
The daughter of a Florida car salesman with a gambling problem, Raymer had been to the track a few times as a kid but had a sketchy résumé: amateur boxer, social worker, “in-house stripper” — she danced for lonely-hearts at their homes for $150 an hour — and waitress.
She met bookie Douglas “Dink” Heimowitz, of Forest Hills, Queens, through a mutual friend in 2001. After taking a job as his assistant, Raymer met all manner of comically named insiders, including Fat George, Texas Toast, Chunky, Bah-Bah and Yitzhak, a heavily cologned Israeli chiseler who claimed he could read through playing cards with a laser hidden in his ring.
“New Yorkers love sports, and they love to gamble,” said Raymer, who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. “The minute you open that can, people are like, ‘I need that! Can you get me in?’ ”
One of her tasks was “pay and collect” — delivering winnings and taking money from those who lost. It brought her to every corner of New York, “from a laundromat in Chinatown to a dentist office on Park Avenue,” she told The Post.
“My biggest fear was leaving behind a backpack on the subway with tens of thousands of dollars.”
And, of course, there was always the worry about getting busted. Betting on sports is illegal almost everywhere outside of Vegas, and bookmaking can earn you a lengthy prison term.
That nightmare became a possibility with Raymer’s dilemma over Greenberg, who ran up his $25,000 tab betting on NFL games in a single, disastrous weekend.
“He was a huge Jets fan,” she said.
They worked out a risky compromise. He paid her $1,000, and she agreed to reopen his account.
When the lucky louse hit a long-shot, seven-team baseball parlay, the day was saved. The $25,000 debt was more than wiped out. Dave even won $20,000 more.