Jasper “Doc” Sagansky, 1897-1997

This is "Doc Jasper" one of the true legends of the Boston underworld, once described by the U.S. Senate as one of the 150 biggest bookies in the U.S. Cops raiding his house once found an $8,500 life insurance policy on Mayor James Michael Curley. Curley acknowledged that he’d "borrowed" some cash from Doc, and Sagansky was merely protecting his investment.
Doc, who took his first pinch in 1916, was at one time a dentist in old Scollay Square, but the money was better in gambling, first numbers, and later sports betting.

 

Doc Jasper was the biggest sports bookmaker in Boston for most of the 20th century.

This photo is from 1943. His elderly Lithuanian-immigrant parents had just bailed him out after a long-overdue arrest. He’d been operating a betting parlor across the street from the BPD stationhouse in Charlestown, and had recently deposited $1.2 million in a local bank. The phone bills at his bookie joint were averaging $11,000 a month – big, big money in those days. At the time Doc was in cahoots with Mickey Redstone, father of Sumner Redstone, now the billionaire CEO of Viacom.
 

In 1988, on his 91st birthday, Doc Jasper became the oldest man ever sent to federal prison when he was jailed by U.S. District Court Judge William Young for contempt, after he refused to testify before a federal grand jury investigating a Mafia shakedown of his gambling operations. He did 10 months at the Plymouth House of Correction before he was ordered released. He died in a Brookline nursing home in January 1997. His family changed its name, and they are now known as by their new surname, Sage.

Check out the FBI affidavit below about of the Mafia’s $250,000 shakedown of Doc Sagansky, then aged 89, and his 78-year-old "muscle", Moe Weinstein.
The Mafia second-stringers left behind after the convictions of the Angiulos a few months earlier were trying to rebound, so Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi told the feds where they operating from – Vanessa’s, a bakery-deli in the Prudential Center. The feds put in a wiretap, and the following conversations were recorded verbatim.

Affidavit of Special Agent Richard B. Carter, FBI

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Affidavit of Special Agent Richard B. Carter, FBI

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