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NEW YORK – More than two dozen people, including a professional baseball scout and a high-stakes poker player, were charged Wednesday in connection with a billion-dollar-a-year gambling ring that rivaled casino sports books.
The illegal betting scheme was orchestrated through a Web site called Playwithal.com, run by the poker player, James Giordano, 52, of Pine Crest, Fla., according to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Queens District Attorney Richard Brown.
A break in the case came last year when investigators secretly hacked into a laptop computer that Giordano had left in a Long Island hotel while attending a wedding, police said. He was arrested early Wednesday by FBI agents who had to scale the walls of his fortess-like Florida compound.
Also arrested was Frank Falzarano, 52, of Seaford, on Long Island, identified by prosecutors as a scout for the Washington Nationals and a former scout for the San Francisco Giants. He allegedly was a top earner in a network of 2,000 bookies who took more than $3.3 billion in cash wagers since 2004 from tens of thousands of customers nationwide.
“This is the largest illegal gambling operation we have ever encountered,” Kelly said at a news conference. “It rivals casinos for the amount of betting.”
Though the gambling ring relied on a Web site, it was different from the online betting operations targeted by recent federal legislation. The scheme involved placing sports bets through bookies, who would assign bettors a secret code to track their wagers and monitor point spreads and results through the secured Web site. The bets were taken on all kinds of sports, including football, baseball, basketball, hockey, car racing, and golf.
The defendants allegedly laundered and stashed away “untold millions of dollars” using shell corporations and bank accounts in Central America, the Caribbean, Switzerland, Hong Kong and elsewhere, Brown said.
The prosecution is seeking the forfeiture of $500 million in assets, “among the largest such cases ever filed,” Brown said.
A total of 27 people were charged in New York, New Jersey, Florida and Nevada on charges including enterprise corruption, money laundering and promoting gambling. Giordano had waived extradition in Florida and was expected to be arraigned next week. Falzarano was ordered held on $500,000 bail. The names of their lawyers were not immediately available.
Charges also were brought against three companies that allegedly helped Giordano develop and secure the Web site: Primary Development Inc. of Farmingdale, N.Y., Prolexic Technologies Inc. of Hollywood, Fla., and Digital Networks SA Inc. of Davie, Fla.
Search warrants executed in several locations resulted in the seizure of gambling records, computers and hundreds of millions of dollars in property, some of it stashed in a secret room concealed by a bookshelf in the Manhattan home of one of the suspects.
The property includes four Manhattan condominiums, millions of dollars in cash, tens of thousands of dollars worth of casino chips from the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, jewelry, gold coins, and a football signed by the 1969 New York Jets following their Super Bowl victory. Also seized was original artwork by Peter Max and Salvador Dali.
Police launched the investigation last year after receiving a tip from a suspect in a separate organized crime probe. Over the next several months, detectives with computer expertise broke the code for the Web site and began electronic surveillance of the suspects.
Giordano “carried everything about the gambling enterprise on a laptop computer never let out of his sight, except when he left it at a hotel in Nassau County where he had returned this past June for a family wedding,” Kelly said.
In the three hours that Giordano and his wife were at the wedding, investigators entered the hotel room with a warrant, found the laptop on a desk and made a digital copy of the hard drive without his knowledge, police said.
Giordano won a Texas Hold ’em tournament at the Bellagio worth nearly $100,000 earlier this year.
Ok, this looks like a fully fledged organized crime operation. I don´t consider myself to fall in that category :hattip:
Good job I hide my Picassos at a friend´s house:wink-wink
kar wrote:The prosecution is seeking the forfeiture of $500 million in assets, “among the largest such cases ever filed,” Brown said.It’s all about the benjamins; they seen that stack of cash and said this is ours for the taking and they struck out to take it.
In the three hours that Giordano and his wife were at the wedding, investigators entered the hotel room with a warrant, found the laptop on a desk and made a digital copy of the hard drive without his knowledge, police said.
Bet he wishes he would have paid for the finger print lock laptop, not that it would have stopped the feds.
Lol…oh man, all i have to say is…
As i sit here in my little….5 room apt. that i pay 700$ a month for and comes with shit, …i lean back in my chair, close my eyes and just imagine what it would be like to be rich enough from this line of work, to actually have the feds interested in me!
lmaoooo
if you have that much money, and you get caught because you were that careless, all i can say is…oh well, better you than me!
lol
Giordano won a Texas Hold ’em tournament at the Bellagio worth nearly $100,000 earlier this year.
So the confiscated chips were legitimate winnings from the Bellagio?
Dominique wrote:So the confiscated chips were legitimate winnings from the Bellagio?Yes , but there going to say he used illegal money to buy into the tournament ,
Man, they should charge the Bellagio for money laundering!
Online casinos are accused of money laundering because people can play and “wash” money, how come the Bellagio can launder money?
Casinos used to be the #1 target of money laundering ,
Money is first wired from their offshore bank account to a casino in some tourist centre abroad. The casino pays the money in chips; the chips are then cashed in; and the money is repatriated via bank check, money-order or wire transfer to their domestic bank account where it can be explained as the result of good luck during a gambling junket. Organized crime groups have been known to purchase winning race track and lottery tickets for a premium to help account for their cash.
So the Bellagio pays out poker winnings in chips? That’s a little weird, wouldn’t a $100,000 payout be automatically subject to taxes and the sort, and be paid out with a check or money order or cash or something. Why would they let their chips walk out the door.
Why would they let their chips walk out the door.
Because a $500 chip costs them pennies to make. They would love to have everyone take home casino chips for souvenirs.
That may be true, but casinos generally rotate their chips every so often so old chips can’t walk in the door and be clamied as money. Maybe I don’t know enough about this stuff, but I can’t imagine someone opting to keep several hundred souvenir chips over $100,000 or whatever that equals after taxes.
It is not unusual for serious players to keep a stash of chips. In the US, if you transact more than $10,000 in cash, the casino is required to file a Currency Transaction Report with the Treasury Dept.
Some players don’t want to provide the identification documents necessary for that paperwork, and keep their bankroll in casino chips to avoid that problem.
Actually, casinos are required to report transactions of $5,000 and more.
