In quite a few movies about 20th century US mobsters, the term “vigorish” pops up. It’s the interest you have to pay weekly if you owe money to a loan shark or mobster. It’s never all that clear what the interest rate might be, but it’s always absurdly high. If you borrow $1000 — which in these films you probably did in order to “bet on the ponies” — you probably owe “a couple of bills a week.” That would be $200, for an annual percentage rate of around 700%.
“Vigorish” popped up in print for the first time in 1911 in “The Apaches of New York” by Alfred Henry Lewis. The book was a collection of true stories compiled by Lewis, who was a journalist. At that time, vigorish was something slightly different: “When the victim gets up from the table the “bank” under the descriptive of “viggresh” returns his one-tenth of his losings. No one ever leaves a stuss game broke and that final ray of sure sunshine forms indubitably the strong attraction.”
That is, if you were a big loser at a card game called “stuss,” at the end of the night they’d give you back 10% of what you lost so you wouldn’t leave completely empty-handed. “Stuss” was apparently a version of the game “faro.” That game, by the way, was originally called “pharoah” when it was created in France in the early 1700s. It was the most popular gambling game in the 1800s. It was also easy to cheat at, according to early editions of “Hoyle’s Rules of Games.” And to briefly return to 20th century movies, all those scenes of poker games in cowboy movies are fiction; those guys would have been playing faro.
“Vigorish” seems to have faded out of use around 1920 or so, but reappeared in the 1930s, complete with a new meaning: “When negotiating a loan from a Broadway usurer, one asks how much “vigorish” or interest, will be charged. “How much off the top?” means the same thing, since interest is deducted in advance and thus comes ‘off the top’ of the bills counted out by the money lender.” (Lowell Sun, 1935).
Nowadays the word quite possibly owes its usage to the movies (and books) that include it. It seems to have appeared more often in fiction since about the late 1950s, when it appeared in the best seller “Manchurian Candidate:” “Eugénie Rose Cheyney..loved Marco. That fact gave Marco a large edge, tantamount to wiping out the house percentage in banker’s craps. No matter what the action, that is a lot of vigorish to have going for anybody.”
As far as anybody knows, “vigorish” could be derived from the Russian word “vyigrysh,” which means winnings. That might in turn be based on Yiddish. But the trail is very unclear. After all, as a mobster mentor tells his young friend in Goodfellas: “never say nothin’ to nobody.”
