Ybor City's Bolita: The Underground Economy
Near Tampa Bay, Florida
Alongside the cigar factories and the mutual aid societies and the lectores, Ybor City ran an illegal lottery that for decades was the shadow economy of the entire Tampa Bay region.
Bolita, from the Spanish word for little ball, was a numbers game imported from Cuba and adapted to the conditions of Tampa's immigrant community. Players purchased tickets on a number from one to one hundred. Each day or week, one hundred small numbered balls were placed in a bag, and a single ball was drawn. The holders of tickets matching the drawn number won. The odds were known, the stakes were small enough for a cigar worker's wages, and the game was everywhere: in social clubs, in the back rooms of cafes, on street corners, operated by a network of agents and collectors who moved through the neighborhood daily.
Bolita became the financial foundation for organized crime in Tampa in a way that scholars of American organized crime have noted was unusual for a city of Tampa's size. The game's control became something worth fighting over. Through the nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties, and beyond, bolita territories were contested between Italian-American crime families and Cuban and Spanish operators, with violence that tracked closely the patterns of organized crime in larger Northern cities but happened largely outside the notice of national press.
The most significant figure in Tampa's bolita history is Charlie Wall, a Sicilian-descended Tampa native who organized and controlled much of the game from the nineteen teens through the nineteen forties. His eventual murder in nineteen fifty-five, at the age of seventy-five, was one of many bolita-related killings that marked Tampa's mid-century criminal landscape.
The game itself was never fully eradicated. It ran in Tampa in some form until state lottery games arrived in the nineteen eighties and made it redundant.
Bolita funded buildings, paid for lawyers, corrupted police, and fed families. It was as much a part of Ybor City's economy as the cigar. It just did not make it into the same tourist brochures.
