New York: Gambling ring busted
More than two dozen people, including a former professional baseball scout and a high-stakes poker player, were charged in connection with a $1 billion-a-year gambling ring that rivaled casino sports books.
The massive illegal betting scheme was orchestrated through a site called Playwithal.com, run by the poker player, James Giordano, 52, of Pine Crest, Florida, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said on Wednesday.
A break in the case came last year when New York Police Department investigators secretly hacked into a laptop computer that Giordano had left in a suburban New York City hotel while attending a wedding, police said. He was arrested early on 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, a one-time scout for professional baseball teams the Washington Nationals and 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 ring relied on a Web site, it was different from the online operations targeted by federal legislation, said Deputy Inspector Brian O’Neill, who supervised the investigation. 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 restricted Web site.
(AP)
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