A year after announcing his retirement as the foremost kingpin of the city's illegal numbers rackets, Raymond Marquez was in jail yesterday facing a familiar charge: running a multimillion-dollar gambling operation.
Along with 24 people accused of being his aides, Mr. Marquez was arrested over the weekend and accused of reviving a gambling empire that handled more than $6 million a year in illicit bets. In raids begun on Thursday, Police Department officials said that they had closed 22 gambling parlors on the Upper West Side and in Harlem linked to Mr. Marquez's numbers network.
For almost 50 years, Mr. Marquez, 68, known as Spanish Raymond, has been a well-known figure in Harlem and East Harlem, acquiring a reputation among numbers gamblers for paying the highest odds and paying promptly. Mr. Marquez, who lives in a $1 million home in Great Neck, N.Y., and who once owned a 62-foot yacht, was denied bail yesterday and was being held in the Manhattan House of Detention.
In July 1997, while locked in a legal battle to prevent the city from confiscating $7.5 million in court fines and back taxes stemming from another gambling case, Mr. Marquez said in an interview that he had quit the numbers business to concentrate on writing his autobiography.
Mr. Marquez's lawyer is his son, R. David Marquez, who denied yesterday that his father was back in the numbers racket. ''These latest accusations are nothing more than pure vengeance by prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney's office who have tried unsuccessfully for years to put my father in prison,'' the son said.
A complaint filed yesterday in Manhattan Criminal Court asserted that Mr. Marquez was the head of a gambling ring that handled bets totaling more than $500,000 a month. The latest charges suggested that the enterprise Mr. Marquez is accused of running had shrunk since his last arrest in 1994, when he was said to be grossing about $3 million a month in wagers and controlling 56 locations where bets were processed.
The complaint by Detective Raymond Alamo of the Manhattan North Public Morals Division said that evidence against Mr. Marquez had been obtained from court-authorized interceptions of his cellular telephone conversations with top aides in May and June. Detective Alamo said that the gambling network had been in operation since last September and that Mr. Marquez had been under surveillance since January.
According to the complaint, the gambling spots were located mainly in stores that pretended to be legitimate businesses or in the rear of real businesses, including a barber shop and a bagel shop.
After Mr. Marquez's arrest in 1994, he was indicted on 221 counts of running an organized crime enterprise. In 1996, in a plea deal with the Manhattan District Attorney's office, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts and agreed to pay $1 million and serve 90 days in jail.
But the jail sentence was found to be invalid under state law, and Mr. Marquez sought to withdraw his guilty plea and requested a trial on the charges. A State Supreme Court justice refused to rescind the plea bargain but, instead of a jail term, sentenced him to five years' probation in addition to the $1 million fine.
Mr. Marquez is appealing the ruling barring him from a trial, and he wants the District Attorney's office to return the $1 million fine. He also is challenging the city's claim that he owes $6.5 million in business taxes from profits he made from his gambling operations in the early 1990's.
In a July 1997 interview, Mr. Marquez defended the numbers business, calling it an honorable profession. He said that he offered petty gamblers, who rarely bet more than $1, better odds and larger payoffs than state-authorized lotteries and gambling games.