Yikes! Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown and New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly announced the indictment of 25 people Thursday following an 18-month investigation into illegal sports betting that spanned five states and allegedly yielded payouts of more than $50 million on horse racing, pro and college football, basketball, hockey and baseball.
“Illegal gambling is not a victimless crime,” Brown said at a morning news conference. “Such unlawfully earned profits are often diverted into more insidious criminal enterprises.”
A little more than 24 hours earlier, Nevada Gaming Control Board agents, who had been assisting New York investigators in the case since July 2011, arrested eight people in Las Vegas on charges of conspiracy, money laundering and enterprise corruption. Among those taken into custody was Mike Colbert, a prominent Las Vegas sports book director for Cantor Gaming.
The Las Vegas arrests initially were reported Wednesday by the Las Vegas Review-Journal on its website. The news caused a ripple effect throughout the insular, yet highly liquid, world of sports betting. While only $2 billion to $3 billion is wagered on sports each year in Nevada, the only state in which betting on individual sporting events is legal, it is estimated that another $500 billion is wagered worldwide by Americans, either with illegal bookmakers or via Internet betting sites.
The owners of Curacao-based Pinnaclesports.com, one of the most prominent sports betting websites, were named in the indictment.
“The ramifications of this are huge,” one industry source told ESPN. “The guys involved had to be handling millions of dollars a week.”
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WRITTEN BY Chad Millman | ESPN The Magazine & FULL STORY HERE
