Joseph Vincent Moriarty
(1910-1979) American mobster
Joseph Vincent Moriarty (June 1910 – February 26, 1979), also known as Newsboy Moriarty, was an Irish American mobster in Hudson County, New Jersey who controlled the numbers game.
Biography
He was born in June 1910 in Jersey City, New Jersey to Ellen Hussion (1884–?) and Michael Moriarty (1883-c1919) of County Galway, Ireland who had married on April 15, 1906, in Somerville, Massachusetts.
He got started in the numbers racket when he was 13 years old, around 1923. He always wore the same set of inexpensive clothes. By the 1950s he lived with his two sisters in a small brownstone in the Horseshoe section of Jersey City that housed the poor Irish immigrants.
In the numbers game a player picks any three-digit number and bets anywhere from a few pennies to a few dollars. The wager would be placed at a neighborhood candy store, newsstand, or tavern. Each day, the winning number is determined, and there may be none, one, or multiple winners. The number was usually the last three digits of attendance figures at a specified race track or the dollar figures of U.S. Treasury receipts, published in the next day's newspapers, or another tamper-proof number. A player's chance of winning with any given bet is one in 1,000 for a three digit number, 10 x 10 x 10.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joseph Vincent Moriarty” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.