General Betting
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Kerry Packer was a larger-than-life gambler, a mogul who signed $1 million markers as if they were checks to Con Ed. He gambled for the kinds of stakes that kick-started the adrenal glands of even the most jaded casino executives. They all knew better than to keep him waiting when he wanted to lay down a bet. But one night, in the fall of 1989, after Packer blew into Las Vegas and found his way to the newly opened Mirage, the baccarat crew was not quite ready for him. A graveyard-shift pit boss couldn't find the key to unlock the game at a table that had been reserved for Australia's most notorious billionaire. There was only one sensible option: grab a crystal ashtray, smash open the baccarat setup and begin dealing. Famously sporty Packer appreciated the effort. After getting ahead a couple million dollars, he made a $100,000 bet on behalf of the dealers.
Sixteen years and many outrageous nights later, Packer found himself in a far more precarious situation. He was at home in Australia, lying in bed suffering from a weak heart and kidney ailments. "I'm running out of petrol and I'm ready to die," he told his doctor before drawing his last breath. No doubt, as the 68-year-old mogul expired on December 26, 2005, the casino industry mourned the death of a man, but also the passing of Las Vegas's splashiest player. He loved nothing more than being in action for sums of money that few people could conceptualize. As one former Vegas casino executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity, conservatively estimates, during the last 15 or so years, the wildly swinging Packer had blithely endured a net loss of more than $20 million on the Strip.
Additionally, it is believed that he dropped many more millions to the casino operators in London, largely because he spent extended periods there, taking several suites at the Savoy Hotel. To quote the Vegas casino executive, who considered the business baron a friend, "Packer needed something to do with his days and nights. You can only have so many great meals."
Gambling was Kerry Packer's passion in the way that other men of great means develop big-budget obsessions with yacht racing or art collecting. Fitting for one with enough cash to roll as high as the moon, Packer wagered at the largest stakes the casinos would allow. But because he gambled for so much money-and had a tendency to quit while he was ahead, garnering the reputation on the Strip for being a "hit and run player"-the timing of Packer's passing brought some relief: he did not die on the heels of a big Vegas score, which would have suddenly been unrecoupable by the casinos. After all, following one of the Aussie billionaire's eight-figure wins, a gaming corporation's quarterly numbers sometimes ended up in the toilet.
That Kerry Packer, a brilliant entrepreneur, an astute stock market investor (he managed to liquidate his Wall Street holdings just prior to the big crash of 1987) and one of the world's great tokers (after experiencing a close brush with death in 1990, he tipped his lifesaving ambulance drivers and EMS workers a million dollars each), would eventually find his way to Vegas almost seemed inevitable. Having beaten polio as a boy, the pugnacious Packer grew up with an ingrained hunger for wagering. After young Kerry found himself with $10,000 of gambling debts, his father, Frank, a multimillionaire many times over, tried teaching his son a lesson by making him sell his car to pay off the tab. It may have been the right thing to do, but it failed to douse the burgeoning player's enthusiasm for high-wire propositions and his respect for gamblers with the guts to risk it all. Years later, Packer enjoyed telling people that his grandfather, Robert Clyde Packer, went to the races in the Tasmanian city of Hobart, found $10 on the ground, bet it on a 10-to-1 long-shot, and the horse won in glorious fashion. "He bought a ticket to Sydney and went into the newspaper industry and did quite well," Packer would grossly understate. "That's where my family started from: 10-bob on a race course."
By 1974, when Packer officially took control of his family's print- and broadcast-media empire, Consolidated Press Holdings, he was already regarded as one of the richest men in Australia. With extreme wealth and a craving for chest-thumping action, Packer quickly found himself frustrated by the modest betting limits offered in Aussie casinos. But that never stopped him from toying with the managers and owners of local gambling halls. "He liked to fly over Darwin and call down to the casino there, asking how much money they had in their cage," remembers the casino executive. "If they told him that they had $300,000, Packer kept flying. But if there was $800,000 or more, he'd touch down and gamble. He's a man who liked to make people sweat. And it quickly became clear to casino managers that the sooner you showed him you were sweating, the better off you'd be."
By all accounts, Packer was a ruthless and aggressive negotiator who commanded extraordinary respect and loyalty from his employees and the many hangers-on with whom he traveled around the world, terrorizing casinos and betting heavily but astutely on thoroughbreds: in 1997, Packer and a partner shared $6 million after successfully wagering on Might and Power to win the Melbourne Cup. Three years later, however, he reportedly dumped $28.2 million in blackjack losses to a London casino. Later that year, the Bellagio raked in $33.3 million in Packer cash. Even more stunning, back in 1994, just one day after a new owner took control of elegant Crockford's Casino in London, Packer lost $7 million there.
How did Packer handle those financial beatings? "Pretty well," remembers the casino executive. "He would get quiet and not be too happy about it; he'd start moaning and groaning about the lights being too bright, but he didn't act like a maniac or anything. The good thing was that a couple days after he left, you'd get a call from his secretary so she could make arrangements to settle up the markers. With a lot of big players, you need to go to them in order to get your money. Not so with Packer. He was a very desirable gambler."
Unlike high rollers who make casino bosses jump through hoops with outrageous demands, Packer's requests were minimal: he wanted nice rooms for himself and his entourage (which often included renowned golf coach Butch Harmon, actor Anthony Perkins and a clutch of polo players and cricketers), an on-call masseuse and, most critical of all, monstrously high limits and a guarantee that a vacant table would be waiting for him to gamble at. "Usually, Kerry would start out betting in the $500 range; he wasn't always pushing in money with both fists," remembers the casino executive. "But, if he began winning, it could quickly ramp up to $300,000 per hand at baccarat. When he played blackjack, I tried limiting him to $50,000 per spot, per hand. He played decent basic strategy, and there was a fear that he was getting better and better."
Partly for that reason, casino managers worked hard to rein in Packer, and, to varying degrees, they succeeded, executing a delicate balancing act that reduced their downside but didn't give him an excuse to take his business elsewhere. Impossible to control was the nonwagering largesse of this whale's whale. On a rush, he'd give members of his entourage $100,000 bankrolls before turning his free-spending sights on casino employees, who made it their business not to call in sick when the big-betting media magnate was in town. Probably the most extravagant toker Vegas has ever known, Packer routinely doled out six-figure gratuities that would be pooled among the dealers. "When Packer was in town, you could count on splitting $1 million 20 ways," says the former casino executive.
On one memorable occasion, Packer paid off a waitress's mortgage. Another time, after noticing that a blackjack dealer had been moved from the high-limit area to the regular pit, he placed $20,000 bets on each spot and told the dealer that he could keep all winnings from that round. Casino executives silently cringed at these shows of generosity because they knew the money he tipped would never make it back to the house's coffers. No doubt, Packer took some pleasure in stressing them out.
However, all the worry and hand-wringing was not without warrant. One New Year's Eve in the mid-1990s, Packer was betting $150,000 per hand at the Las Vegas Hilton. "I was in line to get a $40,000 bonus because we had cleared the $50 million mark in winnings," remembers veteran casino host Steve Cyr. "Going into that night we were at $58 million. But then Packer won $9 million and we got no bonus. He tipped $1.3 million to the dealers and gave $100,000 to the lounge singer."
Packer was less lucky on September 11, 2001. That day, after Al Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Packer was ahead millions of dollars and poised to leave Las Vegas with a tidy profit. Just one problem: air traffic was temporarily grounded and so was Packer. He stayed in town and his luck went south, transforming his winnings into a $6 million-plus loss.
More recently, following a particularly brutal cash-grabbing rage through Vegas-which, according to Cyr, "ended with [Packer] winning $20 million at four joints and $13 million at another one"-several casino bosses tried to minimize the danger of going up against an inveterate gambler who seemed to have bottomless resources, no qualms about dropping millions of dollars, and an understanding of variance swings. "Everyone finally said, 'To hell with this guy,'" recalls Cyr. "And they decided to keep him at 25 grand per bet."
Whether the casinos were successful in leashing Kerry to that relatively paltry limit remains highly doubtful. Undeniable is that he did not let anybody get between him and his God-given right to wager mind-boggling sums of money. When a member of Australia's Parliament, onetime Labor Party leader Mark Latham, described one of Packer's big casino losses (thought to be around $25 million) as "morally offensive," the billionaire became incensed. First, he pointed out, the losses were actually only about $7.5 million, an amount that was less than his annual contribution to just one children's hospital. Then Packer tersely added, "This is not someone else's money. This is my money. I am entitled to spend it in any way."
He did. And he did it with the kind of exuberant gumption and panache that will surely be missed from one end of the Las Vegas Strip to the other.
Sixteen years and many outrageous nights later, Packer found himself in a far more precarious situation. He was at home in Australia, lying in bed suffering from a weak heart and kidney ailments. "I'm running out of petrol and I'm ready to die," he told his doctor before drawing his last breath. No doubt, as the 68-year-old mogul expired on December 26, 2005, the casino industry mourned the death of a man, but also the passing of Las Vegas's splashiest player. He loved nothing more than being in action for sums of money that few people could conceptualize. As one former Vegas casino executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity, conservatively estimates, during the last 15 or so years, the wildly swinging Packer had blithely endured a net loss of more than $20 million on the Strip.
Additionally, it is believed that he dropped many more millions to the casino operators in London, largely because he spent extended periods there, taking several suites at the Savoy Hotel. To quote the Vegas casino executive, who considered the business baron a friend, "Packer needed something to do with his days and nights. You can only have so many great meals."
Gambling was Kerry Packer's passion in the way that other men of great means develop big-budget obsessions with yacht racing or art collecting. Fitting for one with enough cash to roll as high as the moon, Packer wagered at the largest stakes the casinos would allow. But because he gambled for so much money-and had a tendency to quit while he was ahead, garnering the reputation on the Strip for being a "hit and run player"-the timing of Packer's passing brought some relief: he did not die on the heels of a big Vegas score, which would have suddenly been unrecoupable by the casinos. After all, following one of the Aussie billionaire's eight-figure wins, a gaming corporation's quarterly numbers sometimes ended up in the toilet.
That Kerry Packer, a brilliant entrepreneur, an astute stock market investor (he managed to liquidate his Wall Street holdings just prior to the big crash of 1987) and one of the world's great tokers (after experiencing a close brush with death in 1990, he tipped his lifesaving ambulance drivers and EMS workers a million dollars each), would eventually find his way to Vegas almost seemed inevitable. Having beaten polio as a boy, the pugnacious Packer grew up with an ingrained hunger for wagering. After young Kerry found himself with $10,000 of gambling debts, his father, Frank, a multimillionaire many times over, tried teaching his son a lesson by making him sell his car to pay off the tab. It may have been the right thing to do, but it failed to douse the burgeoning player's enthusiasm for high-wire propositions and his respect for gamblers with the guts to risk it all. Years later, Packer enjoyed telling people that his grandfather, Robert Clyde Packer, went to the races in the Tasmanian city of Hobart, found $10 on the ground, bet it on a 10-to-1 long-shot, and the horse won in glorious fashion. "He bought a ticket to Sydney and went into the newspaper industry and did quite well," Packer would grossly understate. "That's where my family started from: 10-bob on a race course."
By 1974, when Packer officially took control of his family's print- and broadcast-media empire, Consolidated Press Holdings, he was already regarded as one of the richest men in Australia. With extreme wealth and a craving for chest-thumping action, Packer quickly found himself frustrated by the modest betting limits offered in Aussie casinos. But that never stopped him from toying with the managers and owners of local gambling halls. "He liked to fly over Darwin and call down to the casino there, asking how much money they had in their cage," remembers the casino executive. "If they told him that they had $300,000, Packer kept flying. But if there was $800,000 or more, he'd touch down and gamble. He's a man who liked to make people sweat. And it quickly became clear to casino managers that the sooner you showed him you were sweating, the better off you'd be."
By all accounts, Packer was a ruthless and aggressive negotiator who commanded extraordinary respect and loyalty from his employees and the many hangers-on with whom he traveled around the world, terrorizing casinos and betting heavily but astutely on thoroughbreds: in 1997, Packer and a partner shared $6 million after successfully wagering on Might and Power to win the Melbourne Cup. Three years later, however, he reportedly dumped $28.2 million in blackjack losses to a London casino. Later that year, the Bellagio raked in $33.3 million in Packer cash. Even more stunning, back in 1994, just one day after a new owner took control of elegant Crockford's Casino in London, Packer lost $7 million there.
How did Packer handle those financial beatings? "Pretty well," remembers the casino executive. "He would get quiet and not be too happy about it; he'd start moaning and groaning about the lights being too bright, but he didn't act like a maniac or anything. The good thing was that a couple days after he left, you'd get a call from his secretary so she could make arrangements to settle up the markers. With a lot of big players, you need to go to them in order to get your money. Not so with Packer. He was a very desirable gambler."
Unlike high rollers who make casino bosses jump through hoops with outrageous demands, Packer's requests were minimal: he wanted nice rooms for himself and his entourage (which often included renowned golf coach Butch Harmon, actor Anthony Perkins and a clutch of polo players and cricketers), an on-call masseuse and, most critical of all, monstrously high limits and a guarantee that a vacant table would be waiting for him to gamble at. "Usually, Kerry would start out betting in the $500 range; he wasn't always pushing in money with both fists," remembers the casino executive. "But, if he began winning, it could quickly ramp up to $300,000 per hand at baccarat. When he played blackjack, I tried limiting him to $50,000 per spot, per hand. He played decent basic strategy, and there was a fear that he was getting better and better."
Partly for that reason, casino managers worked hard to rein in Packer, and, to varying degrees, they succeeded, executing a delicate balancing act that reduced their downside but didn't give him an excuse to take his business elsewhere. Impossible to control was the nonwagering largesse of this whale's whale. On a rush, he'd give members of his entourage $100,000 bankrolls before turning his free-spending sights on casino employees, who made it their business not to call in sick when the big-betting media magnate was in town. Probably the most extravagant toker Vegas has ever known, Packer routinely doled out six-figure gratuities that would be pooled among the dealers. "When Packer was in town, you could count on splitting $1 million 20 ways," says the former casino executive.
On one memorable occasion, Packer paid off a waitress's mortgage. Another time, after noticing that a blackjack dealer had been moved from the high-limit area to the regular pit, he placed $20,000 bets on each spot and told the dealer that he could keep all winnings from that round. Casino executives silently cringed at these shows of generosity because they knew the money he tipped would never make it back to the house's coffers. No doubt, Packer took some pleasure in stressing them out.
However, all the worry and hand-wringing was not without warrant. One New Year's Eve in the mid-1990s, Packer was betting $150,000 per hand at the Las Vegas Hilton. "I was in line to get a $40,000 bonus because we had cleared the $50 million mark in winnings," remembers veteran casino host Steve Cyr. "Going into that night we were at $58 million. But then Packer won $9 million and we got no bonus. He tipped $1.3 million to the dealers and gave $100,000 to the lounge singer."
Packer was less lucky on September 11, 2001. That day, after Al Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Packer was ahead millions of dollars and poised to leave Las Vegas with a tidy profit. Just one problem: air traffic was temporarily grounded and so was Packer. He stayed in town and his luck went south, transforming his winnings into a $6 million-plus loss.
More recently, following a particularly brutal cash-grabbing rage through Vegas-which, according to Cyr, "ended with [Packer] winning $20 million at four joints and $13 million at another one"-several casino bosses tried to minimize the danger of going up against an inveterate gambler who seemed to have bottomless resources, no qualms about dropping millions of dollars, and an understanding of variance swings. "Everyone finally said, 'To hell with this guy,'" recalls Cyr. "And they decided to keep him at 25 grand per bet."
Whether the casinos were successful in leashing Kerry to that relatively paltry limit remains highly doubtful. Undeniable is that he did not let anybody get between him and his God-given right to wager mind-boggling sums of money. When a member of Australia's Parliament, onetime Labor Party leader Mark Latham, described one of Packer's big casino losses (thought to be around $25 million) as "morally offensive," the billionaire became incensed. First, he pointed out, the losses were actually only about $7.5 million, an amount that was less than his annual contribution to just one children's hospital. Then Packer tersely added, "This is not someone else's money. This is my money. I am entitled to spend it in any way."
He did. And he did it with the kind of exuberant gumption and panache that will surely be missed from one end of the Las Vegas Strip to the other.
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good read buzzer, thanks.
I have vague memories of his cricket tournament (if thats the right word) that pissed off the cricket authorities here, i think. I know little about cricket though so could be wrong and too lazy to Google. |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Series_Cricket
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yeah thats the one, cheers bandit
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''kerry packers cricket circus'' almost wrecked test cricket for good...cheers buzzer
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The story of Anargyros Karabourniotis (A.K.A. Archie Karas) reads like a story of an ancient myth, but it is both very real and of modern times. Born in 1950 in Antypata on the island of Kefalonia, Greece, the man who would eventually win upwards of $40,000,000 had next to nothing as a youth. His mom stayed at home and raised his brothers and sisters, while his father was a construction worker. The relationship between Karas and his father was always a volatile one, so Karas didn’t mind finding ways to spend time outside of the house. When he was a teenager his family was really struggling, and began missing a few meals. In order to earn a few dollars for his family, and so he could personally eat, he began shooting marbles in the neighborhood. From the start he was good at gambling, as he often left a winner.
When Karas was 15 years old, the relationship between him and his father became violent. While working for his father, they got into a disagreement about some of the work that had to be done. Unexpected to Archie, his father became instantly violent and picked up a shovel and launched it at his head, missing it by mere inches. That same night Karas decided to run away. He never talked to his father again, who died four years later. Karas wanted to get out of Greece, so he took a job on a ship as a waiter. The job earned him about $60 a month, and it also gave him a chance to explore the world, a chance he never thought he would get. When Karas turned 17 he became bored with ship travel and the work that went with it. On one trip to Portland, Oregon, he decided to literally jump ship. Karas hitchhiked down the west coast, eventually settling in Los Angeles when he was offered a job as a waiter. The money was decent, but the cash he made at the bowling alley next door would be a lot better. Shortly after accepting the job at the restaurant Karas began going to the bowling alley after shifts. In the back was a pool room, and despite never playing the game before he got very good very fast. While playing pool, as luck would have it, there was also a poker table. Again, he had never played the game, but again got very good at it in short order. Karas is on record as saying that when he was just 19 years old he knew he would never have another “real” job in his life. He was a gambler. Over the next two decades Karas would build his bankroll over $1,000,000 an unknown amount of times, according to him. He of course began playing for bigger stakes than he could get in the bowling alley, moving on to local casinos for high stakes poker games, and learning about big pool games during his travels at the casinos. Around 1990 Karas once again found himself a millionaire, this time holding about $2,000,000 to his name. However, in about two year’s time he would once again lose it all in high stakes poker games, eventually just leaving $50 to his name. Never one to worry too much about these things, he decided to take a trip to Las Vegas to see what he could scrounge up from some poker friends. What followed is now known in gambling lore simply as “The Run.” When he arrived in Vegas he met a friend who agreed to lend him $10,000. Within a couple of hours of playing a $200/$400 limit Razz game he was up $20,000. Karas excused himself from the table. He gave his friend back the money he owed him, plus $10,000 for staking him and was left with $10,000. He was back in business. With his new found bankroll Karas went on a scouting trip to look for juicy pool games. He learned that a well known business man from the area was looking for some action. Karas, while very open about many of his gambling stories, has never personally revealed the name of this person out of respect, and has simply referred to him as “Mr. X.” Karas and “Mr. X” agreed to play 9-ball and despite only having about $10,000 to his name, they agreed to play for $5,000 a game - at least to begin. Over the course of the next two and a half months the two played a marathon session breaking only for sleeping, and when “Mr. X” absolutely had to be somewhere business related. Karas and “Mr. X” would get as high as $40,000 a game. That was because “Mr. X” was trying to chase his losses. Over that stretch Karas estimated that he won $1,100,000. After “Mr. X” showed signs he was ready to go on a run, including hitting the nine-ball in on the break an unbelievable eight out of ten times, Karas felt it was time to put the cue stick down in favor of another game. Karas wasn’t trying to get out of not giving “Mr. X.” a chance to win his money back. In fact, he decided to challenge “Mr. X” in another game at which they both were very good: poker. On top of being a world class pool player, “Mr. X was also a world champion poker player. However, that fact didn’t stop Karas from once again getting the better of his man, this time to the tune of $3,000,000 before the business man decided to walk away. The next player to step up to the plate was Stuey Ungar. Ungar, considered by many to be the best poker player ever, lost $1.2 million to the red hot Karas. Then another person many consider to be the best poker player ever sat with him, Chip Reese. Reese went on to lose over two million dollars, which prompted him to utter the now famous quote regarding Karas: “God made your balls a little bigger. You’re too good.” Doyle Brunson, Johnny Moss, and Puggy Pearson all lost an undisclosed amount to him. At the end of his poker run he was up $17 million. Archie was an action junkie. He has said many times that it may take him 24 hours to win a million dollars at the poker table, while he can do the same with one roll of the dice at the craps table. At the poker table he had beaten the very best, and the rest didn’t have enough money to hold his interest. Archie was looking for action, and knew just the place he could get it. At this time the Horseshoe Casino had a reputation of allowing the biggest bets, which was right up Karas’ alley. On three separate occasions he booked wins of over a million dollars playing craps, including one amazing $4,000,000 session where he had every $5,000 chip the Horseshoe had in his possession. In less than eight months Karas ran $50 up to an estimated $40 million. All good things come to an end, and in spectacular fashion, so did “The Run.” It started with an $11 million downswing at craps. He followed that by losing another million to his nemesis Reese. He then lost $17 million playing baccarat. After a quick trip to Greece, to take a breather, saying he needed a break from gambling, he went back to the Horseshoe to try to relive his magic. It wasn’t to be. His remaining $12 million dwindled to just one million after losing it all at craps. He then challenged Johnny Chan to a $1 million freeze out match. He actually won it, upping his bankroll to $2 million, only to lose it in a couple days playing baccarat and craps. In just three weeks’ time his fortune was gone. The rumor is that the only thing he bought out of the $40,000,000 was a car. Karas expectedly resides in Las Vegas. In addition to playing high stakes poker, he has also found some minor success in the World Series of Poker. While he has yet to be able to win a gold bracelet, he has cashed in six events, with four of those being final tables. His most recent WSOP cashes came last year, where he once again came close to a bracelet, and finished 5th in the $10,000 2-7 Lowball event for $53,783. What might be most amazing about this story is to hear Karas tell it. When telling his story he shows no remorse. He has said time and time again that money doesn’t make him happy, and it makes no difference to him if he has a lot of it or not, he feels the same either way. |
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How about some fightin' words? Savor this tall-tale about Packer: A loud and obnoxious Texas high roller is playing at the same table as Mr. Packer. This man is being as obnoxious as, well, as the stereotypical obnoxious Texan in countless obnoxious Texan stories. [Why aren't there any obnoxious Rhode Islander stories?] Finally, Kerry asks the man to ease up. The man gets louder: "Do you know who I am? I am worth 60 million dollars, pardner!" He pauses to let this sink in, then says: "Sixty million dollars, pardner. That's what I'm worth." Packer eyes him and says: "I'll flip you for it!"
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Would be fantastic if it were true.
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That story has been in the Aussie press a number of times, which of course doesn't guarantee its veracity.
One Packer story that is true, is the one where Packer sold his Channel Nine television network to Allan Bond for a Billion dollars. A few years later he buys it back after Bond fcuks it up, for a bit over 100 million. Packer was quoted as saying " You only get one Allan Bond per lifetime ". |
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There's a lot to be said about Alan Woods but this is fairly to the point
Born in Australia in 1945, Alan Woods, as a child, has a passion for bridge and was gifted with brillance and aptitude for mathematics, which fascinated him. But it wasn't until his 30s that gambling took a major part of his life. In the late 70s, Alan Woods was a mathematician working as an actuary, he learned to count cards at blackjack then became a pro gambler travelling casinos around the world for three years. In 1982, tired of the risky business of blackjack card counting, Allan Woods headed to Hong Kong, China with fellow card-counters, Bill Benter and their Vegas friend Walter Simmons. As Woods would say: "The beginning were nightmarish" but the trio finally devised a software program that gave them the edge in horse racing. After losing their $150 000 bankroll in the first two years. He had his first successful year in 1986-1987, winning $100 000. Years later, all three of them were multimillionaires. And for the next twenty years, he and his team of computer wizards, racing analysts, accountants and money runners rocked the Hong Kong Jockey Club's world. He was strictly a number guy. He had not been on a racetrack for over twenty-five years. His job ressembled more that of an accountant and computer programmer. For him, it was all about statistics, numbers, and computer calculations. His advice to someone who wanna be a pro gambler would be: "Don't do it unless you want to be a computer programmer." Most remembered as an horse bettor extraordinaire, Alan Woods was a great all-around gambler. He has been a world-class bridge player, a sports bettor, a globetrotting blackjack player, and a stock market speculator. Horse betting was his main job and the stock market was were he did his "gambling". In the late 90s, he took a $100 millions plunge when he attempted to short the NASDAQ stock market index just weeks before the dot.com bubble burst. Bad timing! Sixty days later he would have been a multi-billionaire. Passed away on January 28, 2008, at 62 years old from an appendiceal cancer. Allan Woods, aka Mr Huge, built an estimated fortune of $670 million before his death. Which make him the world's greatest horse racing handicapper. |
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nice one buzzer keep 'em coming
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Titanic Thompson, aka Alvin C. Thomas (1892-1974), grew up in rural Arkansas in a gambling family. As a child he pitched pennies at the line, hunted small game with his .22 rifle, threw rocks at targets, hunted birds by throwing rocks and played poker, dominoes and checkers.
He invented his own proposition bet, where he threw pennies into a small box. As he would his whole life, Titanic spent hours practicing and always looking for a gaff, a gimmick, or a way to cheat. He’d practice long hours cheating with a pair of dice or a deck of cards. He could do the standard mechanic’s moves, but it was his supernatural vision that made him millions at poker and golf; millions he lost on the horses and baseball bets to bookmakers. With the sharpened nail on his little finger, Titanic could make marks, dents and crimps on paper playing cards that only he could see with those amazing eyes. He could bend the cards where the slight wave would catch a glint of light. Titanic was able to play in the largest poker games all over the country and mark the old paper playing cards during the game against some top gamblers who were very alert to cheating and the standard mechanic's moves. Titanic left home at age 16 to haunt the pool halls, domino games, bowling alleys, dice games and poker games. He learned to cheat at dice. He'd start with the aces or sixes, or any combination of those touching, give a few false shakes that made a sound, and then roll stiff-wristed, straight down the table to avoid craps. If you were accurate twice in a hundred times you had way the best of it. Titanic made most of his money from dice and poker before he took up golf, and he made millions. He was cheating top gamblers. As a teen, Titanic got a job as a trick shot artist with a travelling medicine show, which helped him learn the con. He won $2,000 and a small river boat shooting dice but killed a man in a fight on board in self-defence. Within a few short years, Titanic had made a huge fortune. He'd travel in a huge, nickel-plated Pierce-Arrow automobile with the tools of his trade in the trunk: right and left-handed golf clubs, a pool cue, a bowling ball and horseshoes. He was ambidextrous, and had many proposition bets to make all through any game. After winning at many changing props, he'd offer to bowl, play golf, shoot targets or shoot pool left-handed. He was a natural lefty. Titanic wore loose custom-tailored suits, made to partially conceal the .45 pistol he carried in a shoulder holster. There have been three poker robberies here in Lubbock Texas recently, and gamblers are carrying guns inside gambling joints as they did back in Ty's day. Titanic hired a bodyguard to drive and carry an extra gun for 10 per cent of his winnings. When a dice game owner set Ty up for a robbery, he killed two more men, shooting the masked and armed robbers, even though he had a bodyguard. Later, an alarm bell at a poker game alerted them. Ty turned over the poker table to use as a shield. He and his bodyguard each shot a robber dead. In 1932, in Tyler, Texas, Titanic killed his last man. When a man in a ski mask pointed a gun at him, Ty dropped to one knee, presenting a smaller target, and shot him twice. It turned out to be his 16-year-old caddy. The caddy lived long enough to tell the police he was a robber in his spare time. Unlike the first four men he had killed, Titanic felt deep remorse over the death of the young caddy, but the fact that he had killed five men made Titanic most fearsome around the gambling halls of America. In Missouri, he trapped two of the biggest gamblers on a proposition bet by moving a road sign that said “20 Miles to Joplin” five miles closer to town, and betting the sign was wrong. These propositions became tales shared by gamblers, who love to swap stories, and Ty became famous. Ty married five women, all teenagers at the time of the marriage, so the age gap between him and his wife kept getting bigger. The gamblers and the women could tell you that Titanic Thompson's dark eyes could be gullible, child-like, confused, bemused, charming, magnetic, penetrating, predatory, all-knowing and scary when need be. In the early twenties, Titanic went to Chicago where he met Nicholas "Nick the Greek" Dandalos, America's most famous gambler at the time. He asked the Greek to flip a coin for $15,000 at the first meeting. He sent his two-headed quarter into the air and grabbed it when the Greek called heads. Later, he tried to bet Nick Greek on the weight of a large rock they saw when out driving. The Greek pointed out that this rock looked very different to all the others and Titanic admitted he had pre-weighed it. Al Capone was the absolute mob boss of Chicago and a big admirer of Nick the Greek. This was in prohibition when the mobsters had tons of money. Capone got Nick the Greek and Titanic in some large poker games and they played partners. It was in these games that Titanic announced he could drive a golf ball five-hundred yards, when he “felt like it”. After one poker game, Titanic bet Al Capone $500 he could throw an orange over a tall building. He palmed the orange and threw a lemon filled with lead bird shot. This was one of Titanic's regular propositions. When winter came, Titanic took the gamblers out to a golf course next to frozen Lake Michigan when “he felt like” driving a golf ball 500 yards. He turned toward the lake and sent his golf ball flying unto the ice. Reportedly, he won $50,000. With Titanic, the myths, legends, and stories may or not be precisely true. Nick the Greek and Titanic went to the lucrative poker games in San Francisco and Los Angeles, California. As partners, they made a fortune. It was here Ty took up golf, and very quickly he was terrific at it. He won $56,000 his first day gambling at golf. The Greek could get them into the poker games, and Ty's eyes would beat them. However, Titanic lost millions on horses and sports bets. He followed the horses that followed the horses. In Tijuana, Mexico, Titanic attempted to fix a six-horse race. He bribed five of the jockeys, but one refused to go along. Titanic told him he had a man in the grandstands with a high-powered rifle and a scope. He would shoot any jockey whose horse got in front of Nellie. With Nellie nearing the finish line with a comfortable lead, she fell and broke her leg. That cost Titanic $1.5 million and broke him. He had bet with bookies around the country. Nick the Greek sent a fresh bankroll, and Titanic was playing poker that night. He bragged he never stayed broke over six hours. Titanic would sit in a hotel lobby kicking his house shoe up into the air and catching it on his foot. He had some props! He could throw the hotel keys into the lock, and Doyle Brunson swears he saw him do it. He would bet on how many cards he could throw into a hat at 20 paces. Of course, he could always throw what he needed to win a bet, right or left-handed. Titanic would set the horseshoes stakes 41 feet apart, when regulation was 40 feet. The longer distance would fool champions at horseshoes. When future legendary gambler, Hubert Cokes was 14-years-old, he assisted Titanic by hiding in a hotel room next to his. Titanic would bet he could throw cards under the hotel room door and have them bounce into a hat. Hubert was hiding in the closet to place the cards in the hat. These two became lifelong friends. |
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Titanic, Nick the Greek, and Hubert “Daddy Warbucks” Cokes were all in New York at the end of the 1920s, a golden time. Titanic and Cokes were backing a teenage New York Fats, later to become Minnesota Fats after the movie The Hustler came out in 1961. Cokes was called Daddy Warbucks after the character in Little Orphan Annie. He was tall, bald, very rich and had an ever-present cigar.
They taught Minnesota Fats "the conversation" and he became world class at it. The challenge, the proposition, the negotiation, the bragging, the con, the spots. They'd make the sucker really want to beat them and think he could. At pool and later golf, they'd go after the best pool player in any town and hope he had the biggest gambler to back him. Ty would win a series of bets. First he'd get a spot and win by one stroke, then play even, then give spots, bet on several trick shots, and play left-handed or one-handed. Tommy Thomas, Titanic's son, wrote me this: Hubert Cokes was my godfather and I spent time with him when I was growing up and knew him very well ... He was not a capable card man like Ty but used some of the gaffs. I still have a leather cup he gave me where you twist the bottom and the dice are switched. Used it playing backgammon, another cup just like it that was straight for your opponent ... I would go down to the Elks in Evansville and watch Hubert play one-pocket for hours. He would always get on Ty's case just like Ty would do when we were talking about him. Ty said Hubert was the most dangerous smart man he ever knew. He would carry two .45 pistols and walk into any pool hall and challenge anyone to a game of one pocket or a fist fight for any amount of money. Over the years when I would call Hubert he would let me know he was following my career as a gambler and always seemed to know when I took off a big score. He did not teach me about cards but did teach me about life. Hubert told me a story about Ty you might like. He said they were in Kansas City and he bankrolled Ty to go to Evansville … where they were playing poker for high stakes because of all the oil money. Hubert had not heard from Ty for weeks and thought he would call him to see if he was winning any money. He talked to Ty and he told him things were so bad everyone was soaking watches just to get by. Hubert knew Ty well enough he caught the next train to Evansville. He walked into the poker game and saw that Ty was winning thousands of dollars. They both took their winnings and bought up oil leases and became wealthy in the oil business. Cokes kept his, Ty ended giving my mother all producing income and half of all mineral deeds when they divorced. That was about ten grand a month for Mom in the forties. Ty and Hubert were always going to kill each other but really were good friends. The last serious beef they had was in the McCurdy Hotel. Ty was so angry at Hubert he waited in the hotel lobby for him to come down the elevator and was going to shoot him. Cokes figured Ty would be waiting for him and came down through the kitchen and walked up behind Ty and said, "Slim, are you ready to go to the golf course?" After that they managed to get along. In New York Titanic was courting the biggest mob boss and gambler, Arnold Rothstein. The two became close friends. Damon Runyon, one of America's most famous writers was also there, hearing all the Titanic Thompson stories. His character, Sky Masterson, patterned on Titanic, was in a short story that became the hit play and movie Guys and Dolls. Arnold Rothstein was the model for the Nathan Detroit character. Like Ty, Sky was a fabulous dresser, very handsome, a lady’s man, and a huge proposition bettor to whom the sky was the limit. Marlon Brando played Sky in the movie, while Frank Sinatra played Nathan Detroit. Titanic once won a bet with Rothstein throwing a heavy peanut across Times Square. He had packed the peanut with birdshot, lead. He did this with walnuts, pecans, oranges, lemons, and he was always ready. He won a bet on license plate poker when the car he had pre-arranged had 333 and drove by when Ty doffed his fedora. Ty hired an ex-math professor to teach him the odds on many dice, poker, and prop bets. He won a bet from Rothstein betting two of the next thirty people to walk by would have the same birthday. Ty learned a great many props from the professor. At any game, Titanic kept up a steady stream of challenges that he could keep in his head, but made other gamblers dizzy. On a train ride to the track the gamblers bet on how many white horses they would see. The next day, Rothstein had hired a man to plant extra white horses. Ty had hired a man to plant even more. Ty won the bet by guessing a number higher than Rothstein’s and then admitting what he had done. Ty finally got Rothstein in a three-day poker game where everyone was cheating Rothstein, especially Nate Raymond, Ty, and Joe Bernstein, now in the Poker Hall of Fame. Rothstein lost $500,000 and was very slow to pay. The houseman for the game, George “Hump” McManus killed him. The publicity for McManus' murder trial made Titanic Thompson a nationally-known name. The public saw newspaper pictures of a rail-thin, 6'2" movie-star-looking, handsome, tall man, with thick, jet-black hair. Ty was immaculately dressed in expensive clothes, with big sparkling diamonds on several fingers. While testifying, Ty was asked if poker is a game of chance. “Not the way I play it,” Ty said. The stock market crash sent Titanic roaming all over America in the 1930s, often with Hubert Cokes or Minnesota Fats. He came here, to Lubbock, Texas, from the 1930s until the early 1960s. Johnny Moss was living here in 1938, when Ty offered a proposition that Johnny could not shoot a 46 with only a four iron on nine holes at Meadowbrook, our local golf course. Moss had his four iron welded down into a two iron, but he couldn't sink putts because Titanic had paid a man to raise the lips on each cup. Moss snapped and had a man go around and tap them back down. Moss had his whole bankroll bet, $8300, and won. At draw poker Ty's prop was that Moss did all the dealing, but Ty could cut anytime. He had the aces crimped and could cut to one as needed. In his biography, Moss said he won all his money back and a Cadillac after he figured it out. When Ty returned to Meadowbrook when he was older, he'd have a top golfer as a partner or do prop bets of throwing half dollars into a cup, or pitching golf balls into a shot glass. He’d bet he could make two balls in three strokes from 25 feet. He'd hit both balls at the same time on the first stroke. At other golf courses, he'd bet he could chip into a row boat or bet he could shoot flying birds out of the air with his pistol. Like his peanuts, the pistol was loaded with bird shot. I caddied at Meadowbrook as a teenager in the early fifties. Sometimes, on a full moon, called a Comanche Moon in Texas, the gamblers played by moonlight. Once, a rich-looking, tall man hired me to retrieve golf balls while he was trying to teach a Doberman Pinscher to catch balls he had lofted high into the air. The dog was trying, but would usually drop the golf ball. This guy would hit a hard, low line drive and hit the dog in the side. When I told people about this, they said it had to be Titanic Thompson, but I'll never know. |
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In 1939, there was an oil boom in Evansville, Indiana, and the poker game at the McCurdy Hotel had $25,000 pots. Name gamblers playing included Titanic Thompson, Hubert Cokes, Minnesota Fats, and high roller Ray Ryan.
Both Cokes and Ryan got very rich from oil royalties, while Titanic made a lot of money on royalties but gave his mineral interest to his wife when they divorced. Neither Titanic nor Ryan could ever beat Minnesota Fats at one-pocket, however, and they lost a lot of money. In his delightful biography of Titanic, The Man Who Bet on Everything, Kevin Cook said Fats won a million dollars from Titanic playing pool. Maybe… It was in Evansville that Titanic made a famous prop bet. He hired a farmer to count the watermelons on his truck and park near the McCurdy Hotel. He got the gamblers on the porch involved in the conversation and bet he could guess very near the exact number of watermelons on the truck. As he did in golf, pool or horseshoes, he only won by one. Just one, as always. Golf was Titanic's best game and, without cheating, he was one of the very best in the United States. He never entered golf tournaments, saying he could not afford the pay cut, because he played for more on one hole than top pros made in a year. When Nick the Greek got him in the country clubs of California, Ty beat some the well-known golfers. He stayed one of the best for 20 years. The conversation never stopped. A million props: the math props he’d learned; the eye-hand coordination props he’d practiced hours on end. He'd bring in a “ringer” – a pro such as Ben Hogan, Raymond Floyd or Lee Elder – after he had worked up the bet. Ty always put grease on the club face to improve distance and control, and when Jack Binion had a professional gambler’s golf tournament, they allowed grease. Ben Hogan, one of America's greatest golf legends, said Ty was the best shot-maker ever and also the best short game player, and that he could beat anyone right- or left-handed. Ty would join a country club, lose on the small, appear a braggart, and work up a really large bet. It might take weeks. When Lee Trevino refused his invitation to go on the road, Ty came back to El Paso with Raymond Floyd and he “barely beat” Trevino. This was when Ty was old and had $20,000 on the match. Next Ty played Byron Nelson, then America’s leading pro, in Dallas in 1933 for some big money, with many people betting on Nelson, while Ty “moved in” to take all bets. The conversation had Ty getting a three-stroke handicap. Nelson shot a 67. You know what Ty shot? Exactly what he needed to win the bet, a 69. At times he was near the course record, if he got in a jam. His years of throwing and practising hand-to-eye coordination came in handy. He used slices and hooks as he needed them, and put a lot of “English” down when he needed it too; be it in pool, golf or capturing another teenage bride. Titanic Thompson played partners with some of the most famous golf pros. He’d try every kind of bet with Lee Elder as his caddy, the first prominent African-American pro golfer. Elder would wear overalls and appear a little slow, then Titanic would offer to take his caddy as partner and play the best two golfers in town, and Ty would play left-handed. To his credit, Titanic made Elder a full partner and gave him an even split of the money. As Ty became older and more famous, folks would ask if he was Titanic Thompson whenever he laid out a proposition, and gamblers would make small bets against him just to see him do his legendary throwing props. And when plastic cards replaced paper cards, his big poker advantage vanished, while casinos, with their long dice tables, could prevent his control of the dice. And so, like many of the great gamblers who had a lot of gamble in them – Johnny Moss, Nick the Greek and Minnesota Fats – Ty didn't have much money at the end of his life. Tommy Thomas, Titanic's son, was born in Evansville in 1944. After Titanic left, Tommy read about him as he grew up and began to practise long hours with a deck of cards. He became a master-cheater, travelling the country, practising hours and hours until he became an even better card mechanic than his father. Ty and I both said so. I caught Tommy cheating in a huge Hold’em game in 1975. When Tommy and an ageing Titanic were finally reunited, they began to play against each other for the remainder of Ty’s life, and to cheat each other. Ty helped his son get in poker games and sent him back to Evansville to be tutored by Hubert Cokes. I asked Tommy about the end of Ty's life, spent in a nursing home. He wrote me this. Every week I was in town he would call every day, saying, "What time will you be here?" I rarely missed a day being with my dad. Ty and I loved to gamble with each other, playing heads up poker. Whoever won the other's stack of chips got a hundred dollars. The only difference was Dad didn't have much money and we played his best game, Pitch. I reminded Dad he had loaned me money to go to Tyler Junior College when we first met, and, after all the years of gambling with each other, I felt like I still owed him $500. If Dad lost [the game], I would take it off the $500; if he won, I would pay him. We played for $25 a game and he was very sharp and the best player. Make no mistake, Dad and I took no prisoners and would win at any cost. If we could cheat and get away with it, so be it. I remember our final game and the last time I would see Dad. Over the months, the $500 I owed Dad from college had been reduced to $200. Dad knew he was the best player but couldn't figure out how I was winning. Later that night I would be on my way to Cincinnati to play poker for several weeks and knew Dad would miss me. But there was something different about today. I knew Ty had the cards on the bed waiting for me. I don't think he knew that, weeks before, I happened to look in the empty card box and saw that he had left two tens in the box. This gave him a big advantage in the game of Pitch. As I walked into the nursing home, he walked up and put his arms around me. He said, "Son, I think I am going to die here." Then he said what I had been waiting my whole life to hear. "Son, I love you." We hugged each other and went to the bed for what would be our final game. While I was gone Ty had two strokes and died. During that final game we were sitting on the bed and I dealt the cards for both of us. Knowing the advantage he had with the two tens in the box, he said, “Son, something is not right. You should not be winning.” I said, “Dad, I have been cheating you.” He said, “Impossible, no way.” I said, “If I can prove it, can we call the debt I owe you after 12 years all even? We agreed and, after showing him, we were now even for the first time since he helped me go to college. What a day. Dad said he loved me and the debt was cancelled. By the way, it’s easier to cheat the greatest gambler in the world when he is in his eighties with failing eye sight. Ty was the best hustler the world has ever known. He would win all your money and turn around and give you the shirt off his back. It was always about winning, not the money. For the last 16 years I have ministered in the maximum security prisons and know most of the men there have never heard the words that I have come to cherish, "Son, I love you." Thank you Dad, I love you too... Tommy Thomas |
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We'll see if this stays up this time. No reason why it shouldn't!
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yup dont see why not..great stuff
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A man who became almost as legendary as any man in romantic fiction and certainly America's most famous gambler.
He was born in Rethymnon, Crete, from which his father sent him to live with a wealthy godfather in Smyrna, Turkey, where attended the English run Baxter school. He was later educated at the Greek Evangelical College there. He spoke English, French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Greek and Yiddish as well as being a talented poet. After travels in America he had planned to study at Oxford and graduate to a Donship in Philosophy. Nick ( whose real name was Nicholas Andrea Dandolos ) was the son of a rug merchant and the godson of a wealthy shipowner. When he was 18 years old, his grandfather sent him to America, giving him an allowance of $150 a week. In Chicago he met and fell in love with a girl, but they quarreled and Nick moved on to Montreal. There he became friendly with a leading jockey of the day, Phil Musgrave; assisted by the jockey's advice and his own natural ability for working out odds, Nick won $500,000 in six months' betting on horse races. Nick then went back to Chicago and promptly lost the entire amount playing card and dice games that were unfamiliar to him. But he was not at all deterred from continuing in his chosen profession. He began to study these games assiduously and in a few years had become so well known as a freelance gambler that casino proprietors were offering him large salaries to work for them. He usually refused, but became an enormous attraction at the casinos nevertheless merely by playing - partly because he would seldom stop gambling even after losing (as he frequently did) as much as $100,000 in a single session at the tables. Naturally this unpredictable gambler with a knowledge of philosophy and a passion for Aristotle & Plato was the source of endless speculation and rumour. It is widely believed that he once won a city block in Los Angeles, that he challenged an arrogant opponent to draw one card for $550,000 (the other man backed down), that he played faro for 10 days and nights without sleep. In the January of 1951, as the story goes, Nick the Greek approached Benny Binion with an unusual request-to challenge the best in a high-stakes poker marathon. Binion agreed to set up a match between Dandolos and the legendary Johnny Moss, with the stipulation that the game be played in public view. During the course of the marathon, which lasted five months with breaks only for sleep, the two men played every form of poker imaginable. Moss ultimately won "the biggest game in town" and an estimated $2 million. When the Greek lost his last pot, he arose from his chair, bowed slightly, and uttered the now-famous words, "Mr. Moss, I have to let you go." Dandolos then went upstairs to bed. He was enshrined in 1979 as a charter member of the Poker Hall of Fame. Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman also met Nick the Greek, according to the autobiographical Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!. Nick explains to Richard how he wins big not by playing the tables, but by knowing the odds at the tables and betting against others who have superstitious beliefs about the outcome. Albert Einstein stopped of in Las Vegas on a coast to coast journey. It was Nick who met him at the airport and chaperoned him around the Vegas casinos in a story told by Nick himself. Einstein was famous for saying that no one could win money at the roulette table, 'unless he steals money from the table while the croupier isn't looking'. So during a visit to the Tropicana Casino Nick approached a roulettte table and placed a handful of chips on red. It won and he let it ride and after winning again he did the same to further success. He then cashed in his chips, pocketed the cash and turned to grin at Einstein. Nick then said, "Any questions?" "One", said Einstein. "And that is........?" "I was wondering if you would be kind enough to wash my mouth out with soap?" During his life Nick Dandolos donated more than $5,000,000 to charity and more than $2,000,000 to 'friends' in need. He sent 29 chilrdren of friends through college, paid hospital bills for 1,000 or more individuals and set up non-interest loans enabling another 300 or so to launch businesses of their own. "He lived the life of a modern Socrates," a friend said shortly after Nick's death. "He believed in absolutely nothing material. His sum total of possessions at the time he died would have fitted handily into a shoe box. His most valuable presonal effects were the kind he could take with him. And he did...!" Nick Dandolos claimed that he went from rags to riches over 73 times and near the end of his life Dandolos was reputedly near broke and playing $5 limit Draw poker games in Gardena, California. |
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Nick The Greek was, allegedly, cheated by this man. I wont go into all the details/rumours/counter rumours and eventual death which was supposedly linked to the cheating many years before and will just put a bit up about Ray Ryan.
Ray Ryan already had headed west in the late 1940s to Los Angeles, Hollywood, Las Vegas, and Palm Springs. In LA, he rented a suite at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel for extended periods. Old and newly acquired friends stopped by. Card-playing went on all hours of the day, and he was betting heavily on horse racing. No one could miss him. Allen Smiley, always looking for the next rich “sucker” to take for a bundle, heard of Ryan’s heavy betting and asked about him. Smiley once chaperoned a wealthy oilman to the New Orleans-area Beverly Club owned by Frank Costello and Philip “Dandy Phil” Kastel, then to a Las Vegas casino, and finally a gambling den in the Midwest. In the process, the oilman lost “a small fortune” of $100,000 or more in each place. Smiley hoped Ryan might be his next victim. Tommy Guinan, whose sister was Prohibition-era actress and New York nightclub hostess Texas Guinan, knew Ryan betted as much as $125,000 a day, but warned Smiley to stay away from him. Ryan liked to place large bets at post time and often made a killing when he could get a bet down. Ryan, hoping an unsuspecting bookie might be willing to accept his bets after post time, developed elaborate schemes to learn the race winners. One scam was to sequester himself in the shower in his hotel suite while his friends — gamblers and bookies — waited in the living room to go to the track. Meanwhile, Ryan sneaked in a phone call to a spotter at the track to find out who had won the first race. When he left the bedroom, Ryan apologized for making the guys miss the first race, adding he really had a favorite horse he wanted to bet on. Usually one of the waiting bookies — certain Ryan had no idea who actually won — accepted his bet on the race. Ryan picked up thousands of dollars in the process. Another scam involved his frequent lunches with bookies, who never turned down a meal with one of their biggest bettors. They’d meet before the races began and never were out of each other’s sight before lunch. As the waiter passed out the menus, inside Ryan’s was a piece of paper listing the winners of the first two or three races. Ryan pretended to scan the menu while memorizing the note. He earlier had slipped the waiter $500 to pass the information to him. During lunch, the men talked about a lot of things, and eventually Ryan casually mentioned he’d like to place bets on the early races at the track. Some bookies never suspected anything, believing he couldn’t know which horses won because he was with them the entire time. Bookies who took the bets of $10,000 or more on each race soon discovered lunch was a costly affair. That wasn’t cheating to Ryan. It was just being smart enough to get the edge on the next guy — something they were trying to do to him. Early on, he managed to pull off the charade numerous times, but later most bookies shied away from taking his bets after post time regardless of whether they had been with Ryan the entire day. He never bet huge bundles of cash on the scams ($10,000 wasn’t a large bet for Ryan) because he considered it a practical joke rather than a money-making scheme. He loved to amuse his friends with stories of how he put one over on a bookie. His enormous personal appeal also brought him into contact with movie stars, studio executives, and producers in LA and Palm Springs. Hollywood folks flocked to Palm Springs to get away from prying eyes and the hubbub of sprawling LA. The pace in Palm Springs was slower, the weather milder, and no one cared what anyone did behind the walls and iron gates of the mansions. Ryan relished being around movie stars and executive moguls, cementing friendships with Johnny Rosselli (an influential mobster) and other hoods who made California their empire and Palm Springs their pleasure palace, and drawing into his sphere of influence wealthy businessmen in the relaxed atmosphere of dinners and galas in Palm Springs and LA. Ryan would collect hundreds of photographs of himself with movie stars and other new friends. One of Ryan’s famous acquaintances was Phil Regan, a well-known tenor who had appeared in two dozen motion pictures in the 1930s and 1940s. Regan had just starred in the role of Lucky Ryan in the 1946 movie “Sweetheart of Sigma Chi” when they met. Born in 1906, Regan grew up in a cold-water flat in Brooklyn, the son of Irish immigrants. He later joined the New York City Police Department, and at a party given by a vaudeville producer, he went to a piano and sang. A radio executive hired him and his career as the “singing cop” began. Through Regan, Ryan would meet young multimillionaire Chicago businessman Ralph E. Stolkin, and that partnership would lead to one of the largest oil strikes in West Texas, the financial backing of a Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis movie, and going head-to-head with Howard Hughes for ownership of a major Hollywood studio. |
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People often ask on here about good books to read about gambling and whilst not giving away anything that will give you an edge these days Mob Murder of America’s Greatest Gambler is one of the best books I've read.
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During a year-long gambling binge at the Caesars Palace and Rio casinos in 2007, Terrance Watanabe managed to lose nearly $127 million.
The run is believed to be one of the biggest losing streaks by an individual in Las Vegas history. It devoured much of Mr. Watanabe's personal fortune, he says, which he built up over more than two decades running his family's party-favor import business in Omaha, Neb. It also benefitted the two casinos' parent company, Harrah's Entertainment Inc., which derived about 5.6% of its Las Vegas gambling revenue from Mr. Watanabe that year. Terrance Watanabe, 52, is believed to have the biggest losing streak in Las Vegas history, losing $127 million dollars in one year. Mr. Watanabe, who now lives in the Bay Area, stands near the entrance to Stanford University on Dec. 3, 2009. Today, Mr. Watanabe and Harrah's are fighting over another issue: whether the casino company bears some of the responsibility for his losses. In a civil suit filed in Clark County District Court last month, Mr. Watanabe, 52 years old, says casino staff routinely plied him with liquor and pain medication as part of a systematic plan to keep him gambling. Nevada's Gaming Control Board has opened a separate investigation into whether Harrah's violated gambling regulations, based on allegations made by Mr. Watanabe. In April, the Clark County District Attorney's office charged Mr. Watanabe with four felony counts in district court for intent to defraud and steal from Harrah's, stemming from $14.7 million that the casino says it extended to him as credit, and that he lost. Although Mr. Watanabe has paid nearly $112 million to Harrah's, he has refused to pay the rest. He denies the charges, alleging that the casino reneged on promises to give him cash back on some losses, and encouraged him to gamble while intoxicated. If convicted, Mr. Watanabe faces up to 28 years in prison. Jan Jones, Harrah's senior vice president for communications and government relations, says Mr. Watanabe's civil suit and his defense against the criminal charges are attempts to get out of paying a debt and to avoid accepting responsibility for his own actions. "Mr. Watanabe is a criminal defendant who faces imprisonment," Ms. Jones says. "All of his statements need to be seen in that light." Several former and current Harrah's employees say their managers told them to let Mr. Watanabe continue betting while he was visibly intoxicated, even though casino rules and state law stipulate that anyone who is clearly drunk shouldn't be allowed to gamble. These employees say they were afraid they would be fired if they did anything to discourage Mr. Watanabe from gambling at the casinos. Just as in civil cases, people with alleged unpaid debts sometimes try to get out of criminal charges by claiming that casinos had a hand in keeping them intoxicated. Although Mr. Zadrowski declined to comment specifically on Mr. Watanabe's case, he says this kind of defense never works in criminal court: "Uniformly, the rule is nobody made you drunk." State regulators have the authority to fine casinos for letting people gamble who are visibly intoxicated, but such fines haven't been levied, says Brian Duffrin, executive secretary to the Nevada Gaming Control Board and the Nevada Gaming Commissions. Still, casinos will sometimes bar gamblers who are behaving erratically or whom they suspect won't pay their debts. "It almost becomes a cost-benefit decision," says Glenn Christenson, a former Station Casinos executive who is chairman of the National Center for Responsible Gaming, an industry-funded addiction organization. Journal Community Mr. Watanabe says in court documents that he was barred from the Wynn casino in 2007 because of compulsive drinking and gambling. A Wynn spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter. Harrah's Caesars and Rio casinos continued to put out the welcome mat. As part of the criminal case against Mr. Watanabe, Wilson Ning, a Harrah's marketing executive, testified before a grand jury in April that he didn't see Mr. Watanabe intoxicated at Caesars or Rio casinos, according to Mr. Zadrowski, the chief deputy district attorney who runs the bad-checks unit. In 2007, Mr. Watanabe's prodigality became almost as legendary as his gambling. According to court documents, Mr. Watanabe says he regularly handed out to Caesars employees bundles of $100 bills that could total as much as $20,000. Al Deleon and Kristian Kunder, two of Mr. Watanabe's personal handlers at Caesars, say he had thousands of Tiffany gift boxes filled with $50 gift cards or $100 gift coins that he would hand out to bartenders, nightclub operators, security guards and others. They say he once told a security guard to go to a supermarket and buy every cut of steak, and then proceeded to hand them out to employees. The Trinket Empire A native of Omaha, Neb., Mr. Watanabe built his fortune on plastic trinkets, the kind given away at carnivals and church fund-raisers: batons filled with tinsel, magic wands that light up, plastic spider rings that cost $1 for a bag of more than 100. His father, Harry Watanabe, founded the import business, Oriental Trading Co., in 1932, after immigrating to the U.S. from Japan. As children, Mr. Watanabe and his younger sister and brother worked with their father after school. His mother, Fern, a Nebraska native, was a secretary there. When Terrance Watanabe was 15, his father asked him if he wanted to take over the business, as is Japanese tradition for the first-born son, says his sister, Pam Watanabe-Gerdes. By the time he was 20, he was chief executive. Some who knew Mr. Watanabe in Omaha describe him as guarded and shy. But he was also savvy at both marketing and selecting merchandise, says Bob Thomas, a chief operating officer at the company. It was those skills that helped Mr. Watanabe grow a modest toy business into a catalog empire that raked in $300 million in revenue by the time of its sale in 2000, Mr. Thomas says. The job was all-consuming, say former associates. He traveled for long stretches of time examining merchandise in Asia. He never married. His sister and others who know him say they don't believe he ever had a significant romantic relationship. "That was his life, that company," Mr. Thomas says. "It engulfed him." In 1995, Mr. Watanabe bought an 18,000-square-foot mansion on four acres for $1.8 million, according to RealQuest. A major Omaha philanthropist, he gave millions to AIDS services, according to his foundation's records. He also donated nearly $500,000 to political causes, mostly to the Democratic National Party. In 2000, Mr. Watanabe sold his company to Brentwood Assoc. of Los Angeles for an undisclosed sum. Oriental Trading has since been acquired by the Carlyle Group. After the sale, Mr. Watanabe said his plan was to throw himself into his philanthropic work and have more fun. "If it's not fun, it's not worth doing," Mr. Watanabe told his hometown newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, in 2000. Donations from his foundation grew, but he soon became restless. Several business ideas, including opening a restaurant, went nowhere. "He didn't know what to do with his time," says his sister. Betting the House He found an answer at a Harrah's casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the river from Omaha. He started gambling there in 2003, according to documents filed in Mr. Watanabe's civil suit. He became one of the casino's top customers, says Gabe Sullivan, a former Harrah's host who attended to Mr. Watanabe there. Once he began traveling to Las Vegas frequently in 2005, Mr. Watanabe's gambling and drinking intensified, according to his civil suit. In 2006, Mr. Watanabe resided primarily at Wynn Resorts' Wynn Las Vegas casino. But, he says, his heavy betting drew the attention of Chief Executive Steve Wynn. After meeting with him in June 2007, Mr. Wynn concluded that he was a compulsive gambler and alcoholic, and barred him from the casino, according to a letter to the Nevada Gaming Control Board drafted by Mr. Watanabe's attorney, Pierce O'Donnell. Ms. Jones, the Harrah's vice president, says, "It was not our understanding that he was kicked out of Wynn because of problem gambling." The casino operator offered him lucrative terms to gamble at its casinos, according to Mr. Watanabe's letter to the Control Board and copies of emails sent from Harrah's to Mr. Watanabe's assistant that were included in the court filings. In a series of emails signed by Mr. Ning, the Harrah's marketing executive, the casino company laid out the terms that it was willing to offer him, which included "a special formula just for Mr. Watanabe." Mr. Ning specified such offers as tickets to the Rolling Stones, $12,500 a month for airfare and $500,000 in credit at the gift stores. Harrah's also offered 15% cash back on table losses greater than $500,000, special high-limit games and other incentives. Mr. Watanabe alleges that Harrah's later rolled those terms back. Mr. Ning didn't respond to requests for comment. Ms. Jones declined to comment on whether the company rolled back any incentives, but says "the practice of offering incentives and discounts to significant players is not unusual." Harrah's Total Rewards Player's Club system, a loyalty program similar to that of other big casinos, created a special rank for Mr. Watanabe, "chairman," according to the filing and several employees. Before Mr. Watanabe, the most exclusive rank was "Seven Star." Mr. Watanabe resided for free in a three-bedroom suite at Caesars, had access to his favorite bartender, drank a special brand of vodka, Jewel of Russia, and was constantly surrounded by attendants to serve his every need, such as a seven-course meal from the casino's Bradley Ogden restaurant delivered to him while he was gambling, according to the court filing and employee accounts. Ms. Jones says Mr. Watanabe was treated just like any other high-end gambler: "When his requests were appropriate we met them." Losing $5 Million in a Day One reason Mr. Watanabe was seen as so valuable to Harrah's, say Messrs. Deleon and Kunder, two of his handlers, is that he gravitated toward games with low odds, including roulette and slots. "He was considered a 'house' player because slots and roulette are house games -- they have terrible odds for the player," says Mr. Kunder. "And the way he played blackjack, he made it a house game. He made such bad decisions on the blackjack table." Ms. Jones disputes this interpretation. "I don't put a lot of credibility" in that, she says. Several employees say Mr. Watanabe would stay at the tables for up to 24 hours, sometimes losing as much as $5 million in a single binge. He was allowed to play three blackjack hands simultaneously with a $50,000 limit for each hand. At one point, the casino raised his credit to $17 million, according to court documents. Ms. Jones says for high rollers, the company will often extend credit. When Mr. Sullivan, the Iowa casino host, visited Mr. Watanabe in Las Vegas during the height of his binge in 2007, he says, Mr. Watanabe appeared incoherent and had trouble remembering details of conversations. Other employees recall Mr. Watanabe stumbling around and dozing off at casino tables, some of which were located next to a nightclub blaring loud music. Mr. Kunder and Mr. Deleon say they both voiced concerns to managers that Mr. Watanabe was too intoxicated, and were told not to get involved. "Nobody wanted to be the one to cut him off," Mr. Kunder says. "We were afraid of what upper management would do if he left because of our actions." Mr. Kunder left Harrah's in the summer of 2008 to work at nightclubs. He has since moved to Chicago and works at a cell-phone company. Mr. Deleon left the casino in March 2009 to do similar work at Red Rock casino, owned by Station Casinos. Mr. Sullivan left Harrah's in March 2008 when his contract wasn't renewed by Harrah's. Ms. Jones says the departures were not related to Mr. Watanabe, but declined to further discuss the situations of individual employees. Looking the Other Way Mr. Watanabe alleges that during this period Harrah's not only didn't make him leave when he was drunk, but it plied him with alcohol and prescription drugs to encourage him to stay and gamble. Several Caesars employees say there was no policy to keep Mr. Watanabe drugged or drunk. But, they say, staff knew the company wanted to keep one of the Strip's most lucrative customers, and so looked the other way. A picture of him was hung in employee back rooms, they say. Ms. Jones says there was nothing inappropriate or unusual about fulfilling the reasonable requests of a good customer. "We're in the gambling business," she says. "We had no reason to believe that Terry Watanabe was anything other than a big player with huge resources who made an adult decision to bet the money he did. Are we going to provide an environment that keeps him very happy? Of course we are." Regarding Harrah's alcohol policy, Ms. Jones says, the company tells its employees to ask people who are clearly intoxicated to refrain from gambling, as required under state regulations. Employees attend a responsible-gaming class every year where they learn how and when to tell gamblers to leave the casino. The company has a phone number that employees can call to anonymously report unethical or improper behavior by other employees. There are no reports that anyone called the number regarding Mr. Watanabe, Ms. Jones says. In its marketing materials, Harrah's reports its record as an early advocate and funder of organizations that help gambling addicts. Among other measures, it honors requests from addicts that they be barred from all casinos run by the company. In September 2007, Mr. Watanabe fell in his room and hurt his back. He says his handlers -- including Mr. Kunder and Mr. Deleon -- supplied him doses of the prescription pain medication Lortab without a doctor's prescription, his court filing says. Mr. Kunder says he gave Mr. Watanabe prescription pain medication from his personal supply a single time on the day after the fall upon Mr. Watanabe's request. Mr. Deleon says he never gave Mr. Watanabe drugs. Ms. Jones said that if employees ever provided Mr. Watanabe drugs, it would be against company policy. Mr. Watanabe's sister says she and her brother and sister-in-law weren't aware of how much money he was losing until a 2007 Thanksgiving visit, when he opened up to her about the depth of his losses. "It was embarrassing for him," she says. Two weeks later, she says, she returned to Las Vegas and brought him home. Mr. Watanabe was back in Las Vegas gambling for a period in 2008. But he entered a residential treatment facility that year and hasn't entered a casino since, Ms. Watanabe-Gerdes says. In July 2008, Mr. Watanabe sold his Omaha mansion for $2.66 million to a developer, according to Douglas County records. He now lives near San Francisco. Next summer, Mr. Watanabe is due to stand trial on the felony charges stemming from his debts. In May, he pled not guilty. The conclusion was.. Dramatic developments were announced Thursday in a Las Vegas courtroom in the criminal case against Terry Watanabe, Omaha philanthropist and former owner of Oriental Trading Company. Criminal charges are dropped against Watanabe and civil lawsuits have been stopped dead in their tracks. Harrah's Entertainment had accused Watanabe of failing to pay $14.75 million in gambling debts that he ran up in Las Vegas casinos. Following the complaint, prosecutors in Clark County, Nevada filed criminal charges against Watanabe that could have put him in prison for 28 years. Watanabe filed a civil suit against Harrah's Entertainment in which he alleged Harrah's employees had supplied him with liquor and prescription painkillers while he lost tens of millions of dollars. In court papers Watanabe said he had lost nearly $190 million. But it all ended when Clark County District Court Judge Donald Mosley on Thursday accepted a confidential deal between a prosecutor and lawyers for 53-year-old Watanabe. Trial had been set for next week. Attorney Pierce O'Donnell says Watanabe didn't intend to defraud Caesars Palace and the Rio hotel-casino or their corporate owner, Harrah's Entertainment. Watanabe agreed to drop civil lawsuits against Harrah's, and Harrah's agreed to freeze counterclaims pending binding arbitration. |
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I love these stories - thank you for sharing.
I'll tell you one not in the same league but true of human nature and gamblers. The dream of many is to learn to card count, and although its widely known and difficult to get away with these days you can make fair money at it. So, how does one card count. You need a system - a method to improve your memory. There is such a book that you can buy now. Its one of the original 'memory' books. How to Develop a Perfect Memory (1993) ISBN 1-857931-06-8 When given the chance of riches and a high roller life by the author to his student, the student said 'looks like hard work to me.' 20 years later, I'm still too lazy to study it. True. |
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Slightly off topic but when tepmtation raises its head, in the hands of a compulsive gambler this would have been 'interesting'
 You may struggle to believe this. Even while it was happening to me, I struggled too. One morning before Christmas, I checked my online bank account and noticed – although that seems too mild a word for it – that someone had just given me a quarter of a million pounds. A woman with an unfamiliar name (which it feels unfair to mention) had, without warning, paid £250,000 into my current account. It was an exciting moment. This is not the kind of figure that a writer for the Guardian gets blasé about. I assumed there was a glitch in the website; but when I logged off and on again, the money was still there. An hour later: still there. It had been deposited the day before, but there was no sign of anybody looking for it. I Googled the woman, and found several people with her name, but decided that I couldn't contact them. This was very private business that I wouldn't want to spread around. (Nor can you assume you'll get an honest answer to the question: "Excuse me, is this gigantic sum of money yours?") Besides, maybe it was my money now? If £10 notes are the property of the bearer, would the same apply to all those zeroes? Should I put it into a high-interest account until the matter was resolved? (There didn't seem to be quite enough to run away with. Nowhere near enough if I took my wife and children, which ideally I would.) Maybe there would be a reward, ahem, for giving it back? Or might this all be some ingenious scam? It would have to be very ingenious indeed, because I couldn't work out how anyone might profit by giving me a quarter of a million pounds. Of course there was the slim chance that this money had been given to me on purpose. I focused on that. In March I'd published a novel, so I took to wondering if some shy patron of the arts had loved it and gone frankly rather overboard. (Her shyness would be so pronounced, of course, that she'd prefer to ferret out my bank details rather than post me a cheque.) Maybe the eccentric companion of a deceased forgotten aunt was giving me my legacy? I tried strenuously to believe so as I typed an email to my bank explaining things. Later, I rang the UK Payments Council, which oversees the payments system, in search of answers. It turned out that it is familiar with "erroneous transfers", which occur when somebody mistypes an account number or a sort code. "If that combination happens to belong to someone else, then that payment will go through to a third party," a spokewoman confirmed. "Although if they use that money, essentially they are committing theft," she warned. "No matter how much you need it or how much you want it, that money doesn't belong to you." Not even the interest? "No." This was a blow. It was softened, however, by the news that my case was the largest that she had heard of. "I've seen it happen with £10,000 or £20,000, but you're the first in my time with a quarter of a million," she said Days passed, and still the money didn't move. I checked continually. There was something hypnotic about the sight of my usual domestic debits splashing on the surface of that enormous balance. Between checks, I kept forgetting that the money was there, and then – perhaps when an Aston Martin drove past – remembering. Another thought occurred to me. What if I just borrowed the money for a few hours, and gambled with it? I would return the full amount afterwards, providing I won. A friend suggested that I would be in breach of trust law, but I found it hard to believe that anyone would prosecute me if they got their money back. All I'd need would be an online betting account, an odds-on certainty and a stiff drink. I'd get £50,000 richer in five minutes if a 1-5 shot came home. If it didn't, admittedly, I'd get prison. At last, just over a week after the money had arrived, my bank called. It was as I'd feared: I'd have to give everything back – although they needed my approval to transfer the money. (The results of saying no were not explained.) In the process of typing a sort code, the bank explained, this mysterious woman had pressed "6" when she meant "8", and lost a fortune. I've tried to trace her since, without success. I'd like to tell her about the interesting week I had with her money. I'd also like to find out what her week had been like. Rather fraught, I'm guessing. Finally, I'd thank her for ensuring that I'll never make that same mistake – mainly because I no longer have a quarter of a million pounds. |
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Yes it's long but it's well worth the read
He was in the bed sleeping when the two men walked into his bedroom. Billy Walters sleeps in a big clean bed in Las Vegas, in a small but elaborate home renovated to his liking, with palm trees and white flowerpots and two satellite dishes in the yard, and four large televisions in the den, and a security guard who sits just out of sight behind the shrubs across the street. This environment was disrupted early last Jan. 5, when the two strangers introduced themselves to Billy Walters with all the subtlety of an alarm clock. He greeted them by sitting up in the bed, blinking. His wife wasn't in the bed with him. They already had her, probably. "You're going to have to get dressed," one man said. Billy Walters reached down for the pile of wrinkled clothes he had worn the night before. The room was quiet. The men watched him dress. "We don't like to have to do this to you," the other man said. His wife Susan was downstairs with a third man in the kitchen. There was not a lot of chit-chat. Susan and Billy Walters were led across their fine, trimmed yard in handcuffs. The path to law and order wended past a copy of the daily newspaper, which lay on their driveway like an upturned headstone. As Billy Walters glanced down at the headline, he realized that he was the front-page news: INDICTMENTS TARGET BETTING GROUP IN LAS VEGAS As he tells it, what steams Billy Walters most of all was the sight later that day of his pretty wife in leg irons, chains scraping the floor as she staggered toward him. Afterward, when they had been released without bail, she revealed how the manacles had eaten through her stockings. Seventeen days later Billy Walters and 16 associates held the first meeting of the legendary Computer Group. This was a celebrated occasion in gambling history, and long overdue. The men and women of the Computer Group had been pioneers in their field. All the Computer Group did, apparently, was wager money on college football and basketball games, but for five hysterical years they did it better than anyone else ever had. It was almost as if they had invented junk bonds. Every season the cash arrived by the millions, all because their computer told them which teams should be favored to win everything from the mammoth Ohio State-Michigan football game to the basket-ball game pitting Monmouth against Fairleigh Dickinson. The Computer Group did not fix games. It simply understood them. The group began to assert its mastery of sports betting in 1980, when the computer as an everyday machine had no firm place in sports. Most of the big Las Vegas players of 1980 were still relying on their own good sense and whatever trends they could pick up. A computer seemed to them a gimmick from the future, a big blinking queen-bee serviced by men in white coats. There were relatively few of these "personal computers" that are everywhere today. As a matter of fact, the Computer Group didn't even own its own computer. Until 1983. the group settled for renting time on a computer 2,400 miles away in Rockville, Md. As for the group's invaluable program, it was maintained on thousands of clumsy old "batch" cards, kept in shoeboxes, then fed to the computer like hay into a thrasher. Although dozens of workers served the Computer Group, only one man communicated with the machine itself. He was Michael Kent, a 34-year-old mathematician who had spent II years helping to develop nuclear submarines for Westinghouse. He found such work boring. In 1979 he quit his job and moved to Las Vegas, to bet on football games. In 1980 he became partners with a man he hardly knew, an orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Ivan Mindlin, who Kent says agreed to place bets for them on a 50-50 basis, in accordance with his computerized forecasts. In the 1980 season the computer wizard and the doctor shared winnings of $100,000 playing college football. By 1983 they were winning almost $1 million in one week of college football - or, at least, that's what Michael Kent was told. He never bothered to check the books. By then Dr. Mindlin had built their little corner business into something resembling a national conglomerate, which had opened betting offices staffed by a dozen employees in New York and Las Vegas. The Computer Group had burgeoned into the first truly national network of sports bettors, able to buy up the best point spreads from coast to coast. At the height of its powers, the Computer Group of 1983-85 wielded more influence over the millions of Americans who bet on sports than any superstar athlete or Super Bowl franchise. Yes, it was even more important than the split-fingered fastball. In its sleekest moments, the Computer Group had as grand an effect upon its constituency in the 1980s as OPEC had upon American consumers in the 70s. As its influence grew, the Computer Group became something of an underground social club, extending an unofficial membership to at least one smalltime hoodlum, as well as sharing information with the likes of lrwin Molasky, the powerful real estate developer and Las Vegas civic leader. Profits were staggering. The group never had a losing season betting on college football or college basketball. According to figures compiled recently by Michael Kent, the Computer Group in 1983-84 earned almost $5 million from wagers on college and, occasionally, NFL games. Yet Michael Kent suspects that his records are incomplete. They do not account for personal bets made by Dr. Mindlin, or Billy Walters, or by the dozens of other associates who had access to the Computer Group's information. By the time everyone had exhausted Kent's forecasts in the 1983-84 sports year, they might easily have earned 110 million, perhaps $15 million. Perhaps more. "When you worked it down all the way to the bottom," says Billy Walters, "it might have been 1,000 people using our information." Finally, in 1987, success got the best of them. They had to break up, just like the Beatles. Despite all the time they had spent working together, the members of the Computer Group had never really known one another. In most cases they had spoken only by phone, in staccato conversation, using code names. Faces rarely had been attached to voices. And so, as their legend had grown in recent years, it was only proper that these reclusive celebrities be united last Jan. 22 in Las Vegas, to shake hands and wonder where all the time had gone, as 17 of them assembled in Courtroom No. 4 of the Foley Federal Building, awaiting their arraignment on 120 counts of conspiracy, gambling, and racketeering charges. Among these Garbos there were two their partners most wanted to see: Billy Walters, gambler of gamblers, who had come to Las Vegas in debt and was now a millionaire; and the treacherous doctor, Ivan Mindlin, whose cunning had built the group up-and then led to its demise. On the day they were arrested, just two weeks before the five-year statute of limitations on their case would have run out, Billy Walters sat in a holding cell with Dr. Mindlin and a third member of the group, Billy Nelson. Dr. Mindlin wore his hair longer than Walters remembered - combed back, until it splashed against his shoulders. The three of them were discussing their contempt for the FBI, and, in particular, the ambitious special agent Thomas B. Noble, whose investigation of six years had uncovered so very little. Walters and Nelson went back and forth in their denigration of Noble, using many unpleasant terms, until finally the doctor spoke up. Walters recalls Mindlin saying: "Yeah, and can you believe that S.O.B. told two people that, if they'd tell him how I killed my wife, he'd go easier on them?" Now, in the courtroom 17 days later, his former colleagues whispered about Dr. Mindlin. He was the most intriguing presence among them. Yet he sat alone in a corner, as if he were the least popular boy in school. In groups of four they were called to the bench of U.S. Magistrate Robert Johnston. Dr. Mindlin's was the first name called. Each man and woman was asked about his or her education, and it turned out that all had attended college, with the exception of Billy Walters. Then the magistrate wanted to know how they intended to plead. "Not guilty," each of them said. "Not guilty," the magistrate repealed each time, a little sarcastically. He then proceeded to set all the gamblers free, on their own recognizance, and several of them hurried back to their homes, for there were games that night, and wagers to be made. The Operation In a room alone, just he and his computer, Michael Kent was simply another technology dweeb. But plug him into a network of bettors, and now, with the flick of a switch, Kent was utterly brilliant, a mastermind. These dozens of betting agents, or beards, as they are called, were as essential to Michael Kent as the electrical juice that drove his computer. He could not begin to succeed without them. And so, each day, without equivocation, he turned over his forecasts of the upcoming games to Dr. Ivan Mindlin, who then passed them on to his New York partners, Stanley Tomchin and Jimmy Evart, who, until 1984, were responsible for placing the majority of wagers for the Computer Group. Dr. Mindlin had been making personal bets through Tomchin and Evart long before the Computer Group was formed. According to a partner in the group, Mindlin had built up a debt of some $100,000 to Tomchin and Evart when Michael Kent came along in 1980. By offering Kent's computer information to them, Mindlin was able to work off his debt quickly. Tomchin and Evart were so impressed with the accuracy of Dr. Mindlin's information that they agreed to move money for him on a regular basis. Their colleagues describe Tomchin and Evart as a pair of Ivy Leaguers, more erudite than the normal gamblers. Tomchin, a Cornell alumnus, was a world-class backgammon and poker player; his friend Jimmy (Sneakers) Evart was said to have attended Harvard. Tomchin and Evart were well known in New York gambling circles as the "Computer Kids." In 1983, when Billy Walters began making bets for the Computer Group, he often received his orders from Tomchin and Evart. The Group's main betting pool was wagering $40 million per year, but all the action in the world could not sustain Evart's interest. His newlywed wife insisted that he stop gambling, and so, in 1984, he walked away from the money and moved to Spain. According to a former partner, Tomchin moved to San Francisco and eventually left the group . His former partners say he is now an options trader in Santa Barbara. Tomchin declined to answer questions in connection with this story. The Computer Group foundered in Evart's absence until October 1984, when Dr. Mindlin offered Billy Walters a percentage of the group's winnings and placed him in charge of moving the weekly millions. At that time Walters worked out of a lovely three-bedroom home overlooking the eighth fairway at the Las Vegas Country Club, Indeed, Billy Walters wore clothes suggesting that he had been called in from the golf course. His gray speckled hair was styled straight back. away from his thin face. its expression creased by the transitions of gambling, from sadness to happiness and then back again. His face was older than his body. He was always thinking about work. He had been assigned (he enormous responsibility of exploiting the weakest betting lines, and it did not matter where they were. Billy Walters was supposed to find them. and where they failed to exist, he was expected to create them. He was a powerful broker in an unregulated industry. Walters blanketed the country with bets, taking action wherever it was available, which was at times in as many as 45 states. In 44 of them he dealt exclusively with illegal bookmakers. To help bear that burden he hired six people to work for him in Las Vegas, at a salary of no more than $700 per week, plus the occasional bonus. His wife served as an accountant, but he depended most upon his young assistant, Glen Walker, who had quit his job in the publicity department at NBC Sports in New York and relocated to Las Vegas, so enthralled was he by a 1980 story in Sports Illustrated about Las Vegas gambler Gary Austin. "That copy of Sports Illustrated changed my life," Walker says today. Billy Walters maintained a low profile in Las Vegas. If he appeared at a sports book it was usually around midnight. when he might come to open a betting account with $100,000 or more in cash - however much he could fit in a Famous Amos Cookies bag. As for more public matters, he preferred that business be conducted by Glen Walker. So Walker would visit the Las Vegas sports books each day, to settle up or place bets, and fend off the legions of bettors who wanted to know which games the computer liked that week. He worked with three other group employees at the "C&B Collection Agency," which was a front for their betting operation. His colleagues would meet there, at an office park on Spring Mountain Road., when they weren't moving money out of Billy Walters' house. Perhaps Walters' favorite employee was gentle Arnie Haaheim, a big bright laughing man who was unable to mask his tremendous emotions. He liked women - liked to talk about them, actually, until he was all talked out. Then, says Walker, Arnie would stare off, leaning on his elbow, as passive as a solar cell at dusk. All around him phones were ringing and money was being wagered in thick sexy wads, but Arena would just sit there, his jaw hanging open while Billy Walters shouted orders. By and large, though, there was little humor in their work. On a Saturday of college basketball they might bet 60 games, which required that they be aware of every injury, casualty and rumor surrounding all 120 teams. They had to chart the movement of the point spreads in various sports books for each game. They had to find the weakest lines, and they had to make and keep track of their wagers by the hundreds. They worked almost every day from September through March. Some days they would start at 6 a.m. and finish at midnight. Always Walters felt obliged to protect the Computer's information from the public, because these numbers were as valuable to him personally as they were to the group. His employees never even heard mention of the name Ivan Mindlin. The voice delivering the daily betting orders was known only as "Doc" or "Cowboy," and Billy Walters would say nothing more to identify him. Occasionally, however, it paid to be careless. On a Wednesday afternoon, ever so casually, Billy Walters might tell Glen Walker to make a call over to the old Gary Austin Sports Book on the strip. "We want to lay $30,000 on Wisconsin giving 3 to Purdue," Billy Walters would tell him. Walters knew that several wise guys would be passing time near the counter at Gary Austin's. And they would notice that the line favoring Wisconsin over Purdue would rise to 3 1/2 points. And they would ask who was responsible for moving the line, and they would be told the truth: That $30,000 had just been laid by the computer. And then.. The wise guys would bet on Wisconsin themselves. These wise guys would whisper to other wise guys. Tout services would hear that the computer liked Wisconsin. A run would begin on Wisconsin. News of Wisconsin would spread nationally. By the time word reached the man in Louisiana or the woman in Illinois, there would be no mention of the Computer Group. They would simply be told that they had better get something down on Wisconsin. You can see now that the betting market in Las Vegas is no different than Wall Street. Fed by rumor, speculation and greed, a stock like Wisconsin can grow hot for no substantial reason. By Thursday or Friday, Wisconsin might be inflated to a 5-point favorite, 5 1/2 in some markets. At this point Billy Walters believed the price could rise no higher, and so he would marshal his forces: "Open order on Purdue taking 5!" In moments, they would be on their speed-dial phones, reaching every available source nationwide, betting as much as they could wherever Purdue was a 5-point underdog. They were a frantic yet focused group inside the "C&B Collection Agency," attempting to flood all the markets simultaneously, before the point spread could drop. Into one phone they would shout a few words and then hang up while dialing another number on another phone, back and forth, until they were frazzled. In two minutes Walters alone could place bets through a dozen beards or bookies. So: On Wednesday they'd bet against Purdue. to lower its value in the market. Now on Friday they were buying as much Purdue as they could, a grand total of $1 million or more. And wouldn't you know it: Sometimes Wisconsin would beat Purdue by 4 and the Computer Group would win the "middle" - bets on both teams paying off in the same game. Now and then, Billy Walters fooled his own employees. Glen Walker recalls more than one occasion when Arena Haaheim laid his own money on the first team (in this case Wisconsin) only to find out later in the week that the Computer had preferred the opponent (Purdue) all along. On Saturday they would sit in Billy Walters home and watch the game on television. "Arena, what's the matter?" Walters would say. "I don't see you cheering over there." No betting operation bad ever controlled the market on such a synchronized and national level, but Billy Walters admits, he didn't always have his way so easily. "There were other times I bet $130,000 or $140,000 just to move the line," he says in his low Kentucky drawl. "One thing about the public, they'll follow anybody as long as you're picking winners," Because they pay a 10% service fee to the house on all losing bets, professional gamblers have to win 52.38% of their games just to break even. Records of the 1983 college football season seized from Dr. Mindlin show that the Computer Group won an incredible 60.3% of its games against the spread. The Computer Group's main betting pool began that season in September with a $1.1 million line of credit, and concluded Jan. 2 with $5 million cash. Of course, in those days the official point spread was softer than mayonnaise. The mathematical wizard Michael Kent admits that the Computer Group might never have risen to prominence if not for the removal of Bob Martin, who since 1967 had been making the official line for Las Vegas. However, in 1980, Martin was sentenced to 13 months for the crime of transmitting wagering information across state lines by telephone. If the federal government had not gotten rid of Bob Martin, then the FBI might never have felt compelled to spend six long years investigating the Computer Group. More often than not, Michael Kent's line was more accurate than the official line in Las Vegas. Line-makers will argue that the only purpose of their official line is to entice betting action on both sides, that they are not responsible for outsmarting experts like Michael Kent. Nonetheless, the people who were making that line in the early 1980s were a particularly feeble lot. Other gamblers noticed the same weaknesses, but they couldn't take advantage to the same extent as the Computer Group. "They had some amateurs setting the line at that time, and the line was very weak," says Lem Banker, whose nationally syndicated newspaper column made him perhaps the most famous gambler in Las Vegas. "It was a good opportunity to win, and a lot of people did." Greater than any individual, the mysterious Computer Group emerged as the prominent voice in Las Vegas, much like a Wizard in Oz. "When a handicapper gets going good, a 'following' phenomena goes into effect," says Michael (Roxy) Roxborough, now the top Las Vegas linemaker, whose services are purchased by 35 sports books. "A game might open at 3 [points], and the followers raise it up to a 6. With these computer guys, every time a game moved, they were the ones credited with moving it, whether they did it or not. Their legend may be larger than they actually were." The top gambling rings today use the Computer Group as their model. In Las Vegas, a classroom genius like Michael Kent has to depend entirely upon someone like Billy Walters, who was educated in alleys. "There is no gambler's college," Walters says. "Everything I know, I learned the hard way. Now, how do I know when the spread has risen as high as it's going to get? I have to depend upon my years of experience. I use my feel and the information I get from my contacts around the country to decide when I should bet and when to back off." Sitting at his desk each day, Billy Walters based his decisions upon numbers he wrote on two pieces of paper. On one page was a list of point spreads compiled by Michael Kent's computer. In the case of Wisconsin at Purdue, Kent might have decided: Purdue -I over Wisconsin. On the second page Billy Walters was keeping track of the official lines at various sports books in Las Vegas. Wherever he could find a difference of I '/2 points between the Computer Group's line and the official Las Vegas line, he would bet on that game. If the official line decided: Wisconsin -5 over Purdue, then what Billy Walters had here was a massive 6-point difference of opinion. In such a case he might bet $1 million on that game. The greater the difference, the more he would bet (see box, p.40). So confident was the Computer Group that its weekly wagers often exceeded the ceiling of its betting pool. According to ledgers seized by the FBI, Michael Kent's group in one week wagered $4,571,050 on college basketball games alone - more than twice as much as its reservoir in the pool at that time. Including the college bowl games and the NFL play-offs. the group bet more than $5.5 million that week, turning a profit of almost $700,000. And that represented the work of Michael Kent's tiny group. Dozens of other bettors had access to his information. Who knows how much additional revenue they earned? Billy Walters claims that he gambled more than $500,000 of his own money each week with the help of computer information. He is just one of many big winners whose profits do not appear on the group's ledgers. Even though he tried to gamble like the button-down brokers on Wall Street, Walters admits that he too fell victim to the occasional betting frenzy. During the Christmas holidays six years ago, Walters found he was betting hand over fist on Michigan in the Sugar Bowl against Auburn. It was one of those rare times when the tout services were opposing the computer on a major game. No matter how much Billy Walters bet on Michigan for the Computer Group and for himself, the line remained the same. The public kept laying money on Auburn, giving 41/2 points. "I kept betting on the game, and the line kept coming back, so I just kept betting," Walters says. "I guess I got a little carried away. I had more than $1 million on that game. I literally bet my entire net worth on that game, and probably some additional." Trailing 7-6 in the fourth quarter, Auburn took possession at its 39 with 7:44 left. If Auburn scored a touch-down to cover, Billy Walters would lose $1 million. But Auburn kicked a 19-yard field goal to win, 9-7, and Billy Walters is today a rich genius. The Computer Wizard One day Michael Kent, who was the centerfielder, got to wondering about his company softball team. How good were he and his teammates, really? When they destroyed a poor opponent by 15-4, was that as impressive as beating a good team by 6-5? His team had won a couple of league championships, but what had they really accomplished? All his life he had found answers to such questions in numbers, statistics. He simply had to find out what those numbers meant. What was the numerical definition of a good softball team? His thoughts drifted naturally in this direction. Kent was a 27-year-old math-' mathematician at Westinghouse in suburban Pittsburgh. Every day he worked with computers. to help design a better nuclear sub. At night, he says. he began to formulate a computer program that rated the strength of his softball team. Each week he would update the statistics, then feed the information into the high-speed Control Data computer at Westinghouse. His teammates were interested in this output of statistics - it was flattering to them - but Michael Kent ultimately was disappointed by the results. When (he work was done he had a printout listing his team's strengths and weaknesses. So what? He had given order to these numbers, but there was no application, no further use for them. He says he began work on a more complex program. The game was college football. This time he could foresee a dollar sign in front of the numbers. The year was 1972. He recorded information from old NCAA football guides, which list the scores and statistics from the previous season. Then he visited the library, the old newspapers in particular, in order to see which teams had been favored each week, and by how many points. He examined the spreads and the slats. attempting to find a correlation. Which statistics, he wanted to know. were important in assigning a point spread? He knew of only one way to find out. He began to write a program. The computer would ask hundreds of questions in algorithmic. pinpointing strengths and weaknesses for each team. As his wealth of information grew, Kent learned that some strengths were more important than others. There was a value to first downs and there was another value to yards gained. Home-field advantage had a value. So did strength of schedule. So did success against common opponents. The list of questions went on and on, some so picayune that the average football fan might have laughed in the face of this stocky, bespectacled mathematician. Billy Walters believes that the program even accounted for the distance of the visiting team's road trip. The hobby soon became his vocation. He began to test his model by placing bets with local bookies. He says he worked an average of two hours per night over the course of seven years, fine-tuning his football program and developing a similar program for college basketball, until one morning he walked into the plant and quit his job. He was very quiet about it. Only his closest friends were informed of his plans. He moved to Las Vegas in lime for the 1979 college football season. For the last seven years he had been saving his money, to wager on football and basketball games. Still, when he looked in the mirror, it was a hard thing to believe, that the person staring back at him was a professional gambler. When Michael Kent arrived in Las Vegas, he clearly was on his own. No gambler of note was depending solely upon a computer to analyze bets. Allow yourself to go broke because of a machine? That was crazy thinking. But Michael Kent didn't know anything about Las Vegas common sense. He was from Pennsylvania. He wanted to know where he should do his laundry. On a daily basis he wanted to bet as many games as he could, whenever he perceived the slightest 1 1/2 point advantage, and this was more crazy thinking. Common sense in Las Vegas said that you couldn't win big by betting a lot of games. You should concentrate on just a few games. That's what common sense said. Michael Kent didn't know about that, either. Most of what he knew about this business was contained in a book called Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic, by Richard A. Epstein. Chapter 2 told him the percentage of his money he should bet, depending upon how much he liked the game. The book was written in the language of numbers. Michael Kent wanted to meet this man Epstein. The job of betting sports fulltime was a little harder than he had imagined. Kent would wake up early, update his information from the morning newspapers. tap into the Control Data computer on which he was renting time, and establish a belting line for each game. Then he and a friend would spend the rest of the day and night visiting sports books and private bookmakers, seeking out the most favorable point spreads. He was not instantly successful. "That first football season was curious," Kent recalls, speaking by phone from Las Vegas, under the supervision of his attorney, Steven Brooks of Boston. "l started real well. Then in midseason, there were five big games, and I lost all five by a point, by a half-point. by a missed field goal. All crazy things. It put me down. and for the rest of the year I'd lose every week." According to his records, he lost $40.000 that football season. His bad luck continued two months into the basketball season. "I was getting killed," he says. "I was at the point where I was debating what my future was going to be. Then, I remember, there were 17 games I was betting one night, and I won 16 of the 17. That was a definite high. to get me back on the plus-side." He found that betting the games was an awesome responsibility. It was not an easy thing to settle up with a bookmaker after each round of bets, carrying huge bundles of cash in and out of public places. Whenever he had a lot of money on him, he feared he was being followed. If he happened to notice two men walking behind him on the sidewalk, he would run as fast as he could into the nearest casino, and stand near a security guard for a while. Of course, this only drew more attention to himself. He asked security guards to escort him to his car whenever feasible. He also depended heavily upon valet parking. He didn't like the idea of carrying 150.000 into a dark garage. Valet parking was much safer. He didn't know how to just be cool about it. He couldn't chill out. He was working 80 hours a week in the strangest city in America and he was always worrying. He won $150.000 betting college basketball in 1979-80, but it was a terrible way to live. He gave betting one last try for a football month in the fall of 1980. Exhausted, with no alternative but to go home, he says he placed a call to Dr. Ivan Mindlin. He had met the doctor once before. In 1979, while playing tennis with fellow gambler Billy Nelson, Michael Kent had mentioned his use of a computer in betting. Nelson had said that Kent should meet this Dr. Mindlin. "I thought they could help each other," Nelson said in a deposition year. They seemed to understand each other. When Kent arrived at Mindlin's house on Ottawa Drive, the doctor explained that. quite ironically, he had been attempting to forecast major league baseball games by use of a computer program. When Michael Kent heard this. in 1979, he felt almost as if Dr. Mindlin was a brother. In 1980. when they began to work as a team. he came to think of Dr. Mindlin )as a father. Later Dr. Mindlin would place his arm around Michael Kent and say that they were, as gamblers, married to each other. Years later, Kent's attorney marvels at the hypnotic grip Dr. Mindlin maintained over his brilliant yet woefully naive client. Says Steven Brooks, "I would sit down with Michael for hours, discussing different parts of his arrangement with Dr. Mindlin. and I would say: 'Why did you do this?' And he would say, 1 don't know.' It was incredible. He didn't know why they were doing anything. He just trusted Ivan completely." In 1982 Michael invited his older brother John Kent to mow-to Las Vegas. Michael taught John how to feed data to the computer, training John to work for the Computer Group. Later, Michael would invite another brother, and even his mother, into the betting pool. Michael's success provided wonderful experiences for all of the Kents. Michael was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars each season. and he wasn't even paying taxes on it. He was depositing his winnings with banks in the Bahamas and Switzerland, the same banks that Dr. Mindlin was using, according to Kent. Only in the last few years did Michael Kent begin to understand the full extent of his creation. As far as he knew, the Computer Group consisted of himself, members of his family. Dr. Mindlin and a few others who helped them make bets. From 1980 through January 1985, he figured that his group had wagered close to $140 million and turned a profit $14 million. The idea that his information was earning two or three times that much without him getting his fair share ... well. he never really came to grips with the possibility that anything unethical could come of his work. While other regular players in Las Vegas schemed and flattered Dr. Mindlin in their vain attempts to gain access to the Computer Group's information, Michael Kent walked freely through town, blissfully anonymous, unaffected and ingenuous, the neon reflecting from his glasses. The Doctor His enemies, who are many, exult in spreading rumors that portray Ivan Mindlin as a doctor ruined by his gambling. They say that he would listen to baseball games while performing surgery to the detriment of his patients, and that he would leave the operating room to gather up the scores. In reality, Dr. Mindlin enjoys an excellent reputation as an orthopedic surgeon, according to three respected Las Vegas attorneys who specialize in medical cases - all of whom approved Mindlin to give objective medical examinations for use in court cases. "A doctor would have to be highly thought of to be approved by both sides in a case," says attorney Bruce Alverson, who lauds Dr. Mindlin. Attorney Neil Galatz expresses sadness over Mindlin's recent legal troubles with the Computer Group. "It's a shame," he says, "because he was a fine doctor." Lem Banker, the famous sports bettor, says he has been a friend of Dr. Mindlin's for 30 years, since he served as house physician for hotels on the Las Vegas strip. "He was my doctor," says Banker. "I actually showed him some of the finer points of handicapping. Sometimes we'd stop into the hotels and go partners, shooting craps. I had a lot of respect for his mind." Though the doctor reportedly had a good run playing the horses, one of his partners says that Mindlin was a loser betting on ballgames - that by1980, the doctor had run up a $100,000 debt to a pair of New York bettors, Stanley Tomchin and Jimmy Evart. Dr. Mindlin was able to work off that debt in October 1980, when Michael Kent dropped by (like manna from heaven) to discuss his computer program for handicapping football and basketball games. As he spoke, Michael Kent could not have been very impressive to a man like Ivan Mindlin. Kent was something of a Lt. Colombo in that regard. He did not speak elegantly. He wore drab clothes. He said he had grown up in Chicago as a Cubs fan. And he looked like a Chicago Cubs fan, just in from the bleachers. To Dr. Mindlin he must have looked like a pigeon, with a beard and glasses. Kent said he had grown weary of betting the games himself. What really tired him, he said with all sincerity, was having to deal with such large amounts of money. The chores of betting were wearing him out. He says he and Dr. Mindlin agreed: Kent forecasts the games, Mindlin makes the bets, and they split the winnings 50-50. With their handshake, the Computer Group was formed. And from that day forward, Dr. Mindlin took it upon himself to insulate Michael Kent from the outside world, just as Kent had wished. Kent was left alone to work with the numbers, while Mindlin took care of the streets. Mindlin apparently loved the streets, where he was deemed something of a Renaissance man, a street-smart manager who knew how to move truckloads of money and an intellectual genius as well. As time went on and the group's profits soared, he began to take more and more credit, until it was common knowledge throughout Las Vegas that he - Dr. Ivan Mindlin - was the inventor of the Computer Group's invaluable program. In March 1986. Sports Illustrated became the first national publication to report the story of the Computer Group. Dr. Ivan Mindlin explained to the magazine that he had taught himself computer programming while serving on the faculty at Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, N.J., the first hospital in the country to have an IBM computerized record-keeping system. Mindlin told an intricate tale, of how he'd run 25,000 past college basketball games through computer services from coast to coast so see how accurate the pregame spreads were against the final score. The magazine reported that Mindlin "devised his own programs to make a number' on each game, and that he serves as the alleged mathematical mastermind behind the mysterious Computer Group, which just might be the biggest known sports betting ring ever established anywhere." The name of Michael Kent was mentioned nowhere in the story. Though many members of the Computer Group might have thought that Dr. Mindlin was the grand inventor, there is very little to support that view. Those partners of Dr. Mindlin's who agreed to give interviews all maintained that Michael Kent invented the group's program for handicapping football and basketball games. The only program Dr. Mindlin produced was for betting on major league baseball, and they say it was a failure. Dr. Mindlin has declined to comment on this and all other matters. His attorney, Morris Goldings, is evasive when asked who invented the group's programs. "We're not getting into the vanity of it," he said recently from his car phone. Last February, however, Goldings said bluntly: "What does Kent say? That he was the brains and Mindlin was the beard? That's our position too." Each day Kent and his brother John collected the statistical data for every team, fed it into the computer, updated their program. fine-tuned all of the forecasts and then dumped them into a computer file to which Mindlin had access. From that point on. Kent -who was either too busy or too gullible to notice the fence that Mindlin was constructing around him - abdicated all responsibility to the doctor. Dr. Mindlin's responsibility was so relay the information to Stanley Tomchin and a few other beards (or betting agents), who would survey the market and make the bets. Those phone calls and his accounting duties for the group were the extent of Mindlin's workload, but other matters kept him busy. To the doctor's credit, the Computer Group grew very quickly under his direction. As they were beginning to earn millions each season, Dr. Mindlin was injured in a 1981 car accident in Florida, which left him unable to perform surgery. He applied for disability insurance, and his practice was limited to giving expert testimony in medical cases. As his reputation as a gambler grew, he was able to strike up an acquaintance with Irwin Molaksy, mighty Las Vegas developer with whom Mindlin reportedly shared "his" computerized information in exchange for Molasky's friendship and all the avenues it might open up to him. Now street-famous for his work with the Computer Group, Dr. Mindlin entered into the commodities business. Once more he turned to Michael Kent and Kent's friend, Mark Ricci who began work on a program for predicting the price of commodities futures. Based on their efforts, Dr. Mindlin farmed a private commodities firm he called Commend, which may have served him in several ways. For one, he allegedly was able to launder money through Commend. Michael Kent's brother, John, in a sworn deposition last year. testified that he received $112,695 from Commend for his work on the Computer Group's sports data base. John Kent testified that he never did any work for Commend. Dr. Mindlin also found that commodities could serve as another point of contact with Irwin Molasky, who invested with him through Commend, according to Molasky's attorney Stanley Hunterton. Mindlin also established a relationship with Dominic Spinale, who reportedly was a smalltime hoodlum with ties to Chicago mobster Tony Spilotro. Spinale happened to be under investigation by the FBI at the time his name was being used by Mindlin to open a betting account at the Stardust Hotel. If Mindlin could change one thing, he would probably never have become friendly with Spinale, which might have averted all of the troubles that engulf him today. The Feds Special Agent Thomas B. Noble has developed quite a reputation in the FBI for his six-year investigation of the Computer Group. Quite sad, really. "He got himself in a jam," says a fellow special agent. "He was a rookie when this thing started. Everybody was saying, Forget about it, you haven't got anything.' But, somehow, he convinced one of his superiors that it was bookmaking, and got him to go along with it. He (Noble] is always saying how every case he's working on is the greatest thing. In the end, it never works out." Thomas Noble says that joining the FBI was "just something I had always wanted to do." He was made a special agent in 1982 and was assigned to Las Vegas a year later. He had not been there long when a gambling investigation of Dominic Spinale led him to Dr. Ivan Mindlin, who had opened a betting account at the Stardust Hotel in Spinale's name. A muted alarm began to ring between the ears of Thomas Noble. This had the look of a betting operation run by La Cosa Nostra. The Mafia. Organized crime. Soon after he had been questioned by the FBI about Spinale, Dr. Mindlin began to spend more time at his house in Vail, Colo. A second alarm went off. The subject seemed to be distancing himself from Spinale, his LCN (La Cosa Nostra) contact. Noble traced a check endorsed by Spinale to an account maintained by Michael Kent Kent referred the FBI's inquiries to his attorney. Another alarm. Michael Kent had the same attorney as Ivan Mindlin Spinale was next observed by FBI operatives associating with a young blonde subject named Glen Walker, who walked with a pronounced limp (the result of a high school football injury). Walker was trailed to an establishment called "C&B Collection Agency." Further investigation indicated that the "C&B Collection Agency" was not actually a collection agency but was in fact the front for a gambling operation. Informants led special agent Noble to believe that Walker represented the Computer Group, the most successful gambling ring in the city, the gambling ring in which Dr. Mindlin was an admitted member. The alarm in Noble's head was now whistling like a steaming tea kettle. Noble respectfully informed his superiors that he believed he had discovered one of the largest illegal bookmaking operations in the nation. The distinction between bookmakers and mere bettors is an important one. Though federal prosecution of illegal bookmakers declined in the 1980s. the government still enjoys good legal footing in such cases, because it can easily be proved that bookmakers are in the business of illegal gambling. It is much more difficult to prosecute the mere bettor, because the laws weren't clearly written to apprehend him. In a 1981 case in Rhode lsland (U.S. v. Robert Barborian and Anthony Lauro), the U.S. District Court ruled that the use of telephones or other wire communication for interstate gambling "does not cover an individual bettor, even if the bettor wagered substantial sums and displayed sophistication of an expert in his knowledge of odds making." But special agent Noble was certain that he was chasing bookmakers. More agents were assigned to aid Thomas Noble. Surveillance was increased. Wire taps were approved in December 1964. Every day was a new adventure. Two years with the bureau and he was about to crumble the LCN's finest bookmaking ring with one squeeze of his fist. Had it all started so quickly for J. Edgar Hoover? "Through legally intercepted conversations," wrote Noble, forcing himself to sit at his desk long enough to compose this sworn affidavit in January 1985 while bookmakers were making book outside, "this investigation has determined that Ivan Mindlin directs William Thurman Walters on the placing of what are believed to be layoff' bets for the Computer' group. Walters operates a large bookmaking operation which be uses to place bets on desired games..." This allegation was the keystone of special agent Noble's investigation. Layoff bets, by definition, are made exclusively by bookmakers wishing to protect themselves against large losses by making bets with other bookmakers. "Besides this operation," Noble continued, "Walters controls a bookmaking operation under the guise of C&B Collection Agency. This second bookmaking operation is run by Glen Andrews Walker who uses the premises and facilities of C&B Collection Agency as a bookmaker's wire room... The big day was January 19, 1985, the eve of Super Bowl XIX, in which San Francisco would crush Miami, 38-16. The weekend would prove to be even more momentous for special agent Thomas Noble. He had requested 43 separate raids to take place in 23 cities in 16 states - perhaps the largest series of coordinated gambling raids in history. "Historically," wrote Noble in requesting the raids, "(during) the weekend wherein the National Football League holds its Super Bowl' championship, the betting volume for bookmakers is very high." He was right on. The members of the Computer Group were caught redhanded. Betting ledgers and hundreds of thousands of incriminating dollars were seized. All that remained before Thomas B. Noble could ascend toward the top of the FBI like a rocket toward the stars was this matter of legal paperwork. He simply had to prove that the Computer Group was an illegal bookmaking operation, that it was in fact a strong arm of the LCN. "He said that to me once," recalls Billy Walters. "Noble said to me 'We're closing in on your friends in La Cosa Nostra.' I'm telling you, the guy's read too many comic books.'" |
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the first part is above..........
The Raids Michael Kent and his brother, Bill, had been invited to spend the Super Bowl weekend at the home of Dr. Mindlin in Vail. Colorado. Before he left Las Vegas, Michael Kent was asked to run a couple of errands for Mindlin. First, he received cash and checks from Billy Nelson, the gambler who had originally brought Kent and Mindlin together and who now served as an aide to Billy Walters in the Computer Group. Next Kent visited the cashier's cage at the Horseshoe Casino, where he showed the cashier a dollar bill scrawled with a series of handwritten numbers, a password of sorts. The cashier handed Kent cash from the account of Billy Walters. That week Michael Kent carried some $500,000 in cashier's checks and perhaps $100.000 cash to Vail, for delivery to Dr. Mindlin. Kent says his brother Bill happened to be sitting on the doorstep of Mindlin's home in Vail on Saturday, Jan. 19. when he was approached by three men identifying themselves as FBI agents. "One guy tried to kick the door in," Michael Kent says. "Bill said. What did you do that for?' The door was unlocked. Bill reached over and opened it." The FBI took down the names and addresses of the Kent brothers, and then Michael Kent sat and watched television while the FBI rummaged through the house, confiscating money, records and gambling paraphernalia. An FBI agent was careful not so obstruct Kent's view while he was watching television. "I thought that was rather polite," Kent says. "They let us come and go as we pleased. I remember we went out for lunch - Ivan too. Ivan seemed to be taking it very well. He didn't seem to be too overly concerned." Indeed, the doctor simply turned around and began his own investigation of the FBI. Sources say that Mindlin, in his uniquely audacious manner, hired a private investigator to follow special agent Noble. But Michael Kent wasn't taking it very well at all. He had been detained by police only once before, he says. for driving with a loud muffler. "It's a bad crime in Goldsberg, Pennsylvania," he explained in a deposition. The night of the Vail raid he would return to Las Vegas so find she FBI raiding his condominium as well as the homes of his partners. Vacationing in Florida, Billy Walters and Billy Nelson were also raided that day. Clearly they were all in some sort of trouble. He says it struck him then how very little he knew about the group he had created. One year earlier, special agent Thomas Noble had contacted Michael Kent about the check that had been endorsed by Dominic Spinale. At that time Kent had listened to Dr. Mindlin, who advised him not so worry. But, this matter of FBI raids was much more serious. At the advice of special agent Noble, Kent says he hired his own lawyer, separate from Mindlin. Kent was referred to attorney Steven Brooks in Boston. As Brooks learned more about she gambling operation, he urged Kent to take precautions that would protect him from Mindlin. "I would tell Ivan that I wanted to do things differently on the advice of my lawyer," Kent says. "Ivan would say, Oh, don't listen to him. What does he know? He's a schmuck.'" Kent says he finally came so understand Mindlin's priorities. But Kent's attorney believes his client might still be loyal to Dr. Mindlin to this day, if not for the FBI's frightening raids five years ago. "Remember, Michael thought everything was fine back then." Brooks says. "He had no idea that he should suspect Mindlin of anything." The Beard Dale Conway says he was sitting as his desk, placing a bet over the phone from his Salt Lake home, when he stood to answer a knock at the door. In his driveway he could see a postal service truck. Conway opened the door to receive his mail and a man shouted, "FBI!" Suddenly, he claims, several G-Men came surging into his living room. "They ran upstairs so where my boy David was playing in his room, Conway remembers. "He was just 12 years old. He's sitting on the floor playing. They knocked on the door and I guess he didn't answer quick enough, because they just busted the door down. The door's still all busted. I just left it like it was." FBI records show that Dale Conway's telephones had been wiretapped prior to the Jan. 19, 1985 raid of his home. He says he had been making bets of $1,000 and less for Billy Walters, whom he met at a poker tournament in Las Vegas. "I don't see what's the big deal about betting on a ballgame," says Conway, 61, who has since been indicted for his part in the Computer Group. The government seemed to believe that Dale Conway was much more than a simple gambler. In fact, Las Vegas Strike Force attorney Eric Johnson - who was acting as lead prosecutor in the case - flew to Salt Lake in May 1985 to plead that the government be allowed to retain as evidence $75,179 in cash seized in the January raid of Dale Conway. Johnson noted that Conway's money had been hidden in coat pockets and inside a box tied so a rope behind the furnace wall. "I don't think this is normal operating procedure for individuals who are trying to use their money in a legal manner," Johnson told the judge. Johnson also said, "This is not your typical bookmaking operation, your Honor." And he said: "You're talking about over a thousand hours of tapes that have to be listened too. You're talking 216,000 pages of computer printouts that have to be reviewed." And he said: "We believe that bookmakers from coast to coast in a number of states have been involved in this. It's set up like a corporation. If your Honor would like, I can even show a chart demonstrating the vast complexity of this case." The judge declined to view the chart. Is was obvious that the strength of Eric Johnson's argument that day - and the strength of the case itself - was that the government was going to expose and arrest a national network of illegal bookmakers. Too many times to count, Eric Johnson referred to Dale Conway as a bookmaker. He said Conway was just one of the many bookmakers involved in this investigation. He made it sound as though, once the government had learned so make sense of all she information is had seized, it would become easier to apprehend and bring to justice all future bookmakers. "This case is complex and mammoth in proportions," Johnson told U.S. District Judge Bruce S. Jenkins in Salt Lake that day. The judge asked many questions, and listened to Eric Johnson's answers, and then he ordered that the $75,179 be returned, along with stock certificates and other seized monies. Five years later, Dale Conway wonders when the rest of his "bookmaking evidence" will be restored so him. "They even took my 12-year-old's Dungeons & Dragons game," says Conway, "I guess because there's dice in that game, they called its gambling device.'" When this matter is settled, he'd appreciate it if someone from the FBI would come by to fix the door. Project Layoff Some new bookies were in town, and they wanted to meet Billy Walters. So he came to the Desert Inn for lunch. The year was 1984. Waiting for him at the Desert Inn were Walters' top associate, Glen Walker, and a common gambler known in town as Matius (Fat Matt) Marcus. There were also two other men whom Walters had never seen before. They introduced themselves as Danny Donnigan and John Cleary, though Glen Walker still wonders if those were real names. "I remember Danny Donnigan sitting there in his Brooks Brothers sweater," Walker says. "It didn't seem right. These guys just didn't fit in." The two men turned their attentions to the kingpin Billy Walters, asking him many questions as they buttered their bread. Which is the most efficient method so establish a betting line? How does a fellow handle layoff bets? Basically they wanted Billy Walters to tell them how to become bookmaker. Walters says he began by saying: "I'm not a bookmaker, but..." He gave them advice and drew them into further conversation, which is how he generally handles his suspicions. Later he asked to speak with Walker privately. Says Billy Walters: "I told Walker, I said. These guys aren't bookmakers. They don't know what they're talking about.' I told Walker I would have nothing so do with it." In the parking lot Billy Walters says he found a Lincoln Mark IV with Louisiana plates. The two men had mentioned that they'd recently moved from Louisiana. Walters wrote down the license number and passed it onto a private detective. "Of course he couldn't trace it anywhere," Walters says. "So that was it for me. I had no association wish them whatsoever." But Glen Walker could only envision pigeons and soft point spreads, easy money. He bet with the new bookmakers, and he was not the only one. Fat Mat and his preppy bookies were quickly able to establish business all over town. For all of their dumb innocence, they were very sure of themselves. Fat Matt could be found hanging out (literally) at Gary Austin's sports book on the strip, passing out business cards. He was so brazen that, had the thought had occurred to him, he might have placed an ad in the newspaper: "Fall Malt's Illegal Bookmakers! We Take Bets From Anyone!" Indeed, he and his partners showed no fear of the law whatsoever. It is amusing now to imagine the strategy sessions held at FBI headquarters in Las Vegas in January 1985, after 11 phone conversations between Glen Walker and the Marcus Sports Service had been intercepted. Special agent Thomas Noble sprang into action! He assigned other agents to investigate the illegal bookmaking operation; intelligence filtered in. The Marcus' group had swelled into one of the largest illegal bookmaking operations in the country, grossing as much as $2 million a week in bets. Their clients included associates of New York Mafia boss "Fat Tony" Salerno, and Chicago racketeer Tony Spilotro, who was betting them for upwards of $50,000 per week. But Noble's chief interest in Matt Marcus was his association with the Computer Group. "Intercepted conversations indicate that the Waiters-Walker bookmaking ring operation uses this [Marcus] bookmaking operation on a regular basis to place what are believed to be layoff bets in violation of Title 18. United States Code. Sections 1955, 162(c) and 1952(d)," wrote Noble in the FBI affidavit, before his men went after Matt Marcus and tried to shut him down. And so, on Jan. 19, 1985, on the eve of the Super Bowl, several FBI rents raided the Marcus Sports service. Perhaps they even broke down some doors. Certainly their firearms were loaded and ready. They raided the illegal bookmakers like they had never been raided before. Meanwhile, the men who worked with Matt Marcus sat in chairs and crossed their legs, perhaps smirking to each other from time to time. Undaunted by the FBI, the Marcus Spans Service continued to accept bets for several months more. Then one day a pair of angry bettors marched into the office and demanded money they thought they had coming. They might as well have tried to get a refund from, say. the Internal Revenue Service. In other words. they did not come away with their money. Nonetheless, they had guns. Real guns, loaded with real bullets. The men behind the Marcus Sports Service were scared almost to death. They closed down their office shortly thereafter and went back to the Foley Federal Building at 300 Las Vegas Blvd., where they resumed their normal duties as agents for, yes, the Internal Revenue Service. The Brooks Brothers colleagues of Fat Matt Marcus had been nothing more than governmental meter maids. The Marcus Sports Service was their brilliant "sting" operation, with which the IRS had hoped to catch Billy Walters and other gamblers. It seems now that the IRS probably should have shared its plans with the FBI. Perhaps then this peculiar business of the FBI raiding the IRS could have been avoided. "We knew upfront about that," special agent Noble says today. "We knew what it was. If you look carefully at the warrants, you'll see that we knew. We don't operate in a vacuum." The FBI now says that it went forward with the raid in order to give the IRS bookmaking operation more credibility in the streets. In layman's terms, one government agency raided another government agency in order to convince the criminals that the other government agency was not in fact a government agency, but was rather an illegal operation that happened to be run like a government agency. When the Las Vegas Sun broke news of the IRS scheme, more than four years after its demise, Nevada's U.S. Senators, Harry Reid and Richard Bryan, asked to see the records and reports of the undercover bookmakers, to learn what good had come from the sting. In his reply. IRS Commissioner Frederick Goldberg informed the senators that the records of Project Layoff, as it was named, were no longer available. They had been "disposed of." Destroyed would have been a stronger term, and just as accurate. Goldberg was able to inform the senators that the project had operated at a loss of $577,770, which in 1985 amounted to the federal income taxes paid by 350 average Americans. Among the losses were $75,000 in uncollected gambling debts. The rumor in Las Vegas is that these were accrued by the notorious Tony Spilotro who - as it turned out was simply continuing his career of stiffing the IRS. A few months later, Spilotro was found buried in an Indiana cornfield, although no one believes the IRS would have anything to do with that - at least not as long as Tony was in red to the government for $75,000 The IRS is facing two Congressional investigations, and its Nevada office has been shaken up severely. But it's not as if the 1R5 is going to have to go through a terrible punishment, like, say, an audit. "The IRS owed me something like $10,000 when I was done betting them," Glen Walker says sadly. "I asked if I could get it written off of my taxes." The Gambler Billy Walters moved to Las Vegas eight years ago with his family and his immense ego and very little else. He was worth more dead than alive, as they say. For too many years he had been operating a used-car dealership in his home state of Kentucky, and then gambling away the profits. In 1982 he plea-bargained to a misdemeanor bookmaking charge - possession of gambling records, it was called - and was sentenced to six month probation and a $1,000 fine. He was in debt to several bookmakers, and he could not command credit. At 35, into his third marriage, with an ill son who was supposed to have died years before, Billy Walters believed he had no alternative but move to Las Vegas, to be a full-time professional gambler, to lay all that he had on this one final hand. Walters can pinpoint his problems from those days, now that he is worth millions of dollars. As recently as 1982, when he was preparing to leave Kentucky, he had lacked focus. He was a gambler, that was definite, but he had no idea how to gamble professionally. He wanted to win every single day. When he lost at the race track or when he lost betting games or when he lost playing poker or when he lost playing golf, he always felt compelled to get down another bet, to retrieve what he had lost that very day. He recalls an evening in Kentucky when he was pitching nickels with a friend. The wagers grew until Billy Walters had lost his house - his house, from pitching nickels. Then he had to come home and tell his wife. "I'm not one to beat around the bush," he says. Standing now in his kitchen, head down, hands in pockets, he seems to be recreating the scene. "I just came home and said to her, Look, honey, I was pitching nickels with a guy today, and I lost the house. And we might have to move.'" They didn't have to move but it took Billy Walters a year and a half to pay off the mortgage incurred by the revolution of the five-cent coin. He kept the house, but he lost his wife. She left him. That was his second wife. "She couldn't take it. Fifteen times I've come home where I've lost every single penny we've got," he says, as if revealing a scar. His father died when William Thurman Walters was not yet 2 years old, and his mother ran off, and his grandmother, who was a maid in Mufferville, Ky., left him under the supervision of his uncle each day. His uncle ran a pool hall. Billy Walters estimates that his first bet was made at the age of 5, when his uncle would assemble islands of Coke cases around a pool table so that the boy could reach the felt. As soon as he began to work, his grandmother charged him rent. He hustled pool, betting his rent money. He was not yet a teenager. At 13 he moved back in with his mother, in Louisville. At 16 he had fathered a child and married the mother. Some morning he worked 4:30 till 7:30 at a bakery, some nights it was 3 to 11 at a gas station. Most days he went to school. Sometimes he ran a poker game - he was still just a teenager - in a house adjacent to Billy's Lounge. That marriage lasted one year. It's been much longer than a decade since he's seen his daughter. His occupations have included newspaper boy, farmhand, shoe-shiner, baker, tobacco worker, foundry worker, painter, car dealer, realtor. To him, these were mere side jobs. In his mind he was a professional player - of pool, gin rummy, poker, blackjack, roulette, golf, the horses, whatever. He remarried and with his second wife had two sons, which has since led Billy Walters to decide that his own childhood was not so desperate. His oldest son, Scott, should have been dead at the age of 5. "They said he had 30 days to live," Billy Walters says. "He had the tumor back behind the left eye, where they couldn't operate. After radiation they told us every day he was going to die. I stayed drunk the whole time. I was 26 at the time. It was the only thing in my life I wasn't able to handle. I neglected my business and my family and stayed drunk. After nine months I went back to running the business." The business, he says, was a wholesale auto dealership in Louisville. "I earned $400,000 or $500,000 a year," says Walters, "but I never accumulated one dollar." Three years after his son had been diagnosed, Billy Walters was wed to his current wife, Susan, and she has been a wonderful partner. They will celebrate their 14th anniversary in September. She moved with him to Las Vegas in 1982 and served as his accountant when he began to move money for the Computer Group. She was indicted with him in January 1990 and expected to go to trial with him in November 1990, if the case got that far. Walters says he went to work for Dr. Ivan Mindlin in 1983, making bets in Las Vegas and a few other territories. By then the Computer Group was four years old and churning out millions in profits each season. In return for his work, Walters received free use of the group's betting information. Because he didn't have to share his profits with others, he might have been earning more from the Computer Group than Michael Kent, the computer wizard who so naively trusted Dr. Mindlin. For the first time in his life, Billy Walters was winning consistently and holding onto the money. He invested in real estate, fast food franchises and other ventures. His confidence was such that he could play golf matched for thousands of dollars. He even captured the 1986 Super Bowl of Poker in Lake Tahoe. There has been recent talk that he won more than $3 million in one day of roulette in Atlantic City. Apparently, Walters hired agents to take notes at the roulette tables, in attempt to locate "biases," or patterns, in the wheels. Sources at Caesars Palace say that after Walters beat them for more than $1 million in one sitting, the wheel was sent to NASA for an examination and dissection that revealed specific biases - but no for the numbers Walters had been playing. Nobody knows his secret, and he isn't saying, though he admits he has been barred from playing roulette in the major casinos. Late in 1984, Walters' reputation had risen so high that he was invited to join the Computer Group on a percentage basis. In other words, he would share in profits with Michael Kent, Dr. Mindlin and other core members of the group. Walters continued to place additional bets for himself until January 1985, when the FBI raided the group of its records and cash, shutting down Walters for the remainder of the college basketball season. He complains about harassment by the FBI, saying it confiscated funds and refused to transfer them to the IRS to pay his taxes. He claims he is persecuted in part because the government loathes his attorney, Oscar Goodman, a colorful Las Vegas lawyer who has represented many mob figures. "You've got to understand my position," he says. "After the government went through all the evidence, they decided not to prosecute us. For three years they tell us the case is dead. Then all of a sudden, two weeks before the statute of limitations is going to run out, they come back with these indictments. The day before we were indicted, my attorney (Goodman) tried to contact the Strike Force to say we would be willing to turn ourselves in. The Strike Force wouldn't return his calls. The next day they come barging into my house, drag me out of bed, put my wife in leg irons. I'm telling you, you don't believe it until you've gone through something like this, what the government can do to you." Walters says he agreed to give this, his first interview, out of a feeling of desperation. He perceives himself to be a rare gambling success story - a man who was in debt before he came to Las Vegas. At 43, he wonders why he isn't put forth as a role model. "People look at us gamblers and say, You don't have a job like we do, you don't work 9 to 5, you have to be doing something wrong," he says. "I came to Las Vegas because it's the Wall Street of gambling. If you can get arrested for betting games here...well, let me just say I never would have dreamed that the things that have happened to me, with the FBI and the rest of it, could happen here." Then he admits that his life could be much worse. Inviting a reporter upstairs, he visits with his son, Scott, 22, is no bigger than a 14-year-old, and outside the house he wears a cap or wig to cover the hair loss caused by his cancer treatments. He recently got his first job, as a busboy at the Horseshoe casino downtown. His father says he could be no prouder of his son. In this relationship the gambler is called "sir." "Let's see those autographed baseballs of yours," Billy Walters says, and the two of them sit on the bed, reading the signatures of Scott's heroes. The Mogul At one time Irwin Molasky was vice president of Lorimar-Telepictures, which produced television shows ranging from "Dallas" to "The Waltons." Today, surrounded by his vast real estate holdings, he settles for being one of the most powerful men in Las Vegas. There he lives atop the Regency Towers, which stands like a castle overlooking Irwin Molasky's kingdom. At one time the Regency Towers was known as a high palace for the mob. Irwin Molasky would surely argue that this no longer is the case. Indeed, he commenced another debate over a piece of real estate in 1975, when the subject was his California resort Rancho La Costa. At that time, Penthouse magazine reported the La Costa was controlled by "mobsters," that it served as their "power center," and that it used "illegal profits" from "the mob's worldwide operations." Molasky and his co-owner at La Costa, Merv Adelson, who at one time was chairman and chief executive at Lorimar, did not appreciate such unsavory allegations. So, they filed a $490 million libel suit against the magazine. The legal proceedings were drawn out over 10 years at a cost of $25 million, until Molasky and Aelson finally settle for an apology. A major booster of UNLV basketball, Molasky at 62 is highly image-conscious. It is important that he be recognized as a sober and legitimate businessman. And in fact, Molasky has never bee charged with a crime. Molasky's attorney, Stanley Hunterton, readily admits that his client enjoys betting on ballgames, as do thousands of his fellow residents Las Vegas, where is can be a legal and rather social activity. However, Dr. Ivan Mindlin was not interested in currying favor with thousands of legal bettors. He was interested mainly in Irwin Molasky. For years, Dr. Mindlin had been pretending to be the brains behind the Computer Group, claiming to be the inventor of its unbeatable program for forecasting ballgames. It appears that Dr. Mindlin was never much more than an intermediary for the group, as his own attorney admits today. But Mindlin surely knew how to maximize his position. By sharing the group's betting information with Irwin Molasky, and making a winner out of Irwin Molasky, he became a friend of Irwin Molasky. When Dr. Mindlin needed help in the commodities business, who did he look to? Irwin Molasky, with whom he became partners in the purchase and sale of commodities, according to attorney Stan Hunterton. Michael Kent, the mathematician who established the Computer Group's forecasts, recalls hearing Dr. Mindlin speak of Molasky in 1983-84. "From what I remember," says Kent, "let's say it was a situation where we had taken a team with 4 points. Well, for some reason that day, the team we took had jumped up to 5 points - which almost never happened. Usually when we took a team, the points went in our direction." "I remember saying, Shoot, it's too bad we didn't wait and get that team at 5.' And Mindlin said to me, Don't worry - I'll go ahead and give the 4 to Molasky, and we'll go up and take the 5.'" That day they sold their bets on the underdog at 4 points to Molasky. "It was a good deal for us," says Kent. "Molasky didn't know any better, so he wouldn't mind taking the 4 . And we were able to use the money to bet on the 5, which was a better bet." As the Computer Group investigation lay dormant from 1986-88, Molasky and everyone else using the group's information appeared safe from prosecution. Then, in 1988, the government began to resurrect its case. Molasky hired Hunterton, who says he had served as a special attorney within the Organized Crime Strike Forces for 10 years, until 1984. Hunterton acknowledges that he was involved in the early stages of the government's case against the Computer Group, approving requests made by FBI special agent Thomas Noble. But Hunterton denies the assertion, made by others in the group, that representing Molasky was a conflict of interest. Using his contacts - which the attorney admits were the reason Molasky hired him - Hunterton reportedly was able to win immunity for Molasky, in return for his testimony before the grand jury. However, Molasky's testimony seems to have been a mere formality. "I've seen the (Computer Group) indictment," said Molaksy's longtime attorney Sam Lionel, who worked with Hunterton on this case, "and it doesn't appear that anything he testified to had anything to do with what is contained in the indictment." Whatever the substance of his testimony might have been, his appearance before the grand jury ensured that he would be excluded from any indictment the panel might hand down. Irwin Molasky's record as a law-abiding citizen was thus preserved, and his good name has been spared. However, some of the indicted members of the Computer Group think he may not be entirely finished with this business - not yet, anyway. If their case goes to trial in November, as scheduled, they plan to subpoena Molasky and question him vigorously, not only about his betting with Ivan Mindlin, but also regarding his attorney, Stanley Hunterton, who played both sides as effectively as anyone in the Computer Group ever had. The Fall After he had been raided by the FBI in January 1985, Michael Kent began to ask the kinds of questions he should have been raising long ago. So began the end of the Computer Group. He wanted to know how the group was run, and what became of his information after he gave it to Dr. Mindlin, and how much money his program actually was generating. His partners in the computer group informed Kent that his precious information was being shared with the outside world in ways that could only profit Mindlin. Here was Michael Kent, the mastermind, still living in his humdrum condo in Las Vegas, while Mindlin had homes in Vegas, Colorado and California. Dr. Mindlin even seemed to profit from the FBI's raids. Kent alleges that when the raids shut down the group's activities six weeks into the 1984-85 college basketball season, Mindlin claimed the group had simply broken even on its bets to that point. Therefore, no profits would be paid to any members of the group. But when the FBI allowed Kent and others to review the seized records, Kent says he discovered that his group had earned a total of $1.6 million in those six weeks of basketball. By 1986 Kent had hired a lawyer of his own, Steven Brooks of Boston, who advised him that many of his current practices with Dr. Mindlin were either illegal (such as Kent's failure to pay taxes) or inexplicable (his failure to oversee Mindlin's handling of the money). Kent says he tried to change the way he conducted business with Mindlin, but had little success. Wary that he could not account for the actions of his partner, Michael Kent nonetheless kept trying to deal with Mindlin. He says he offered Mindlin exclusive rights to the computer forecasts for the 1987 college football season at a fee of $700,000. In return, Kent would tell Mindlin which teams to play and how much to bet, and Mindlin could keep all profits. However, Kent says, the forecasts lost money for Mindlin in the first week, at which point he canceled their agreement. Kent says he never received payment for his one week of service, which he valued at $35,650. At this point Michael Kent was at the end of his rope. He had placed all of his trust in Dr. Mindlin. In return Mindlin had seemed to treat him like a son. The truth of their relationship, Kent now believed, was that he had been playing the fool to Mindlin for all these years. In 1988 Michael and his brother John Kent filed a joint suit against Ivan Mindlin, demanding $589,719 in Computer Group profits and payment for services. They suspect that he owes them more, but in all likelihood they will never be able to prove it. At the same time, Michael Kent went tot he FBI, admittedly to punish Mindlin. Kent agreed to explain what he knew about the Computer Group and turn over evidence. In exchange, he was granted immunity from prosecution. Dr. Mindlin's attorney, Morris Goldings, was also representing Michael Kent when the FBI began its investigation in 1984. Today he accuses Kent of extortion. "Kent has admitted under oath that he told Dr. Mindlin, If you don't pay me the money you owe me, then I'm going to the feds with you.' That's the kind of guy Michael Kent is." Indeed, Kent's lawsuit revived the government's interest in its dormant case against the Computer Group. "I don't blame Mike Kent at all for turning over to the government," Billy Walters says. "This was the only way he knew of to get even...Kent is a bright guy in mathematics. He knows numbers like nobody else. But he's absolutely dumb from a common-sense standpoint. Mindlin would tell Kent that he was betting, say, $5,000 when he was really betting $20,000. And Kent had no idea." Yet Billy Walters admits that he too was fooled by Mindlin. Walters says he quit the group in the spring of 1986 when Mindlin refused to honor a $110,000 debt. "I knew from day one who I was dealing with, but never for a moment did I think the guy could steal money from me," Walters says. "I thought I was too important to the operation. I was the guy who moved the money." By 1987, the Computer Group was dead, victim of a human virus. Vanity and greed had infected its affairs. The computer wizard, Michael Kent, was refusing to supply his information, and the gambler, Billy Walters, was refusing to move the money. Yet Dr. Mindlin was still in business. He hired Kent's friend, Mark Ricci, of all people, who in the 1970's had worked with Kent at Westinghouse. Mindlin's new group had its run of modest success, but it could not begin to compare with the impact he had made with the Computer Group. Indeed, the doctor was something of a tragic figure, broken by his own greed, devastated personally as well as professionally. While trying to recoup his relationship with Michael Kent, the doctor had engaged in a worldwide, yearlong search to find a cure for his only son, Gary Mindlin. In the end, he succumbed to a cancerous brain tumor, the same type from his Billy Walters's son had been so miraculously spared. The another tragedy struck the Mindlin household. In 1988, the doctor's wife, Georgia Mindlin, died from respiratory failure consistent with an allergic reaction. The coroner found that she was probably allergic to penicillin - penicillin that she apparently received from her husband, the doctor. The autopsy report indicated that Georgia Mindlin, 56, was suffering from a sore throat on March 19, 1988. Dr. Mindlin admitted to giving her 500 to 1000 milligrams of penicillin, which she took orally, after her evening meal. Some 25 minutes later she told her husband that she wasn't feeling well. She got out of bed and collapsed, falling into cardiorespiratory arrest. The doctor called for an ambulance. The police arrived at 11:52 p.m. to find an emergency crew trying to save Georgia Mindlin. Police say that Dr. Mindlin attempted to revive his wife with a shot of adrenaline after her airway had closed off in reaction to the penicillin. "It's easily reversible with things like adrenaline if it happens before the airway closes," says Eagle County coroner Donna Meineke, who requested the autopsy of Georgia Mindlin. "But it (the injection) has to happen in minutes. Once the airway closes off, oxygen can't get to the brain." Vail police lieutenant Corey Schmidt says he conducted his investigation of Georgia Mindlin's death without interviewing her husband. "I think he left town," says Schmidt, who declines to make his report public. "I didn't have a lot to go on, other than friends' and relatives' hunches that it (her death) was purposeful, but we couldn't nail it down." Special agent Thomas Noble says that the FBI is looking into the death of Georgia Mindlin. "Once you read the coroner's report, it will be clear why we have an interest," he says. When Michael Kent was deposed last year for his lawsuit against Mindlin, the doctor's attorney questioned him repeatedly about the death of Georgia Mindlin. Kent admitted that the FBI had indeed asked him about it, but said he'd known little of her death - as little as he had known about Dr. Mindlin's betting activities with the Computer Group. Lt. Schmidt is surprised to hear of the FBI's interest in Georgia Mindlin, considering that the Bureau never asked him for his report. "If they're doing something, why wouldn't they have contacted me?" he wonders. As for his own probe, Schmidt says he found nothing more than the hunches of relatives to make him suspect foul play. He declares the investigation inactive. "We haven't had one since 1979," he says, referring to murder in Vail. "Not that we've been able to prove, anyway." The End His former colleagues say that Ivan Mindlin still has not given up. They say he works with a beard in Miami, using the same program Michael Kent developed 10 years ago. Kent himself would be the first to warn his successors that the business is no longer so easy. Kent has formed a legal sports betting corporation with two partners - his brother John Kent and their friend, Mark Ricci, who stopped working for Mindlin in 1988. Their attorney, Steven Brooks, boasts that all profits of MJM Inc. (it stands for Michael, John, Mark) are reported to the IRS and that all bets are placed in full harmony with the law. In a recent deposition, Ricci estimated that their three-man betting group won $800,000 last year, which would have represented two good weeks for the Computer Group. When Michael Kent was a mere centerfielder, trying to decipher the strengths and weaknesses of his softball team at Westinghouse 18 years ago, there was no real computer science in sport. Kent was at the leading edge of all that. Today every statistic is calibrated, measured. Every human decision can be backed by numbers. Michael Kent was among the first to find reason within the numbers. In November, if all goes as planned - and there is nothing in the history of this case to suggest that it will - his partners will be reunited in the courtroom once more (Kent himself was granted immunity.) Though Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Johnson was the lead prosecutor in the government's investigation of the Computer Group five years ago, and though his name is listed atop the Jan. 4 indictment, he will not be in charge of the case when it comes to trial. At that critical point, the six-year case will be handled by Jane Hawkins, even though she has been an Assistant U.S. Attorney for less than two years. As a matter of fact, when Eric Johnson was leading the Computer Group investigation in 1985, Jane Hawkins was a humble clerk for Judge Lloyd D. George, before whom - and a fine coincidence this is - she will be trying the case. "That may have been the smartest thing Eric has ever done, getting himself away from this thing," admits FBI special agent Thomas Noble. Abandoned now by all the others who have worked on this case, Noble seems to be hanging out to dry. He works for the FBI out of Chicago these days, his reputation stained. For six quixotic years he led the chase after the Computer Group in the belief that it was the largest bookmaking operation in the country. Following Noble's lead, the FBI obtained wiretaps on the group's telephones for five months, until there existed more than 1,500 hours of taped conversation, which then had to be laboriously reviewed and transcribed. He requested and was granted the aid of special agents to follow the group's actions all over the nation. He provided information that resulted in raids of 45 homes or offices in 16 states. He requested a raid of the Internal Revenue Service. (But he knew what he was doing!) He oversaw the seizure of evidence by the truckload: bank checks, the origins of which had to be traced, hundreds of thousands of dollars with serial numbers that demanded verification, gambling ledgers that had to be interpreted, not to mention 216,000 pages of computer printouts, incomprehensible to all but Michael Kent. There were 89 boxes of evidence in government storage, much of it still there today. Then there was the matter of dealing with this vast array of people. Every man and woman raided had a lawyer demanding appeasement. The government sent Eric Johnson and other attorneys to various sites, defending the FBI's right to retain evidence, including large amounts of cash. It is no easy thing to capture a group of criminals these days. Thomas Noble still maintains his firm belief that the Computer Group was a criminal enterprise worthy of prosecution. But at what cost? If a bill could be brought before the taxpayers, the price of this investigation might total $1 million, which does not include the $577,770 lost by the IRS in its parallel attempt to capture the group. Then, in January, after six years of investigation and review, after the case had been opened and shut and opened again, the indictments at long last came down in Las Vegas. Nineteen men and women were placed under arrest. Each was charged with up to 120 counts of conspiracy, gambling and racketeering, related to their obvious use of the telephone to place bets and exchange betting information across state lines. There was no charge of bookmaking. No bookmaking. So the government admits, at last, that the Computer Group simply was betting on games. If not for Ivan Mindlin's careless association with a petty hoodlum, there might never have been a FBI inquiry. But the inquiry began, and it was extended into the next decade by innuendo and intrigue, and by Thomas Noble's desire to understand how these people were earning so much money. Six years with Big Brother has not cured the Computer Group of its addiction to gambling. Of the 19 who were indicted in January, most are still gamblers. Like deposed heads of state, they await trial while the system grinds on without them. In Las Vegas, all the top betting operations now have access to their own Michael Kents. They hire their Billy Walters to move the money on a national level. Aided by their Glen Walkers and Dale Conways and Arnie Haaheims, they flood the market and try to manipulate the line. In all of the Vegas sports books there are agents for the betting combines, soldiers armed with cellular phones and beepers, waiting for instructions. For all their vast organization, these modern brokers of sports bets will never match the sensation created by their forefathers, who, not 10 years ago, were sophisticated enough to beat the linemakers at their own game. Their legacy was to ruin the game for all who might try to duplicate their success, including themselves. "Next year," says Michael Roxborough, an official linemaker in Las Vegas, "we've got a new computer program that's going to help us make a better line." The following information was drawn from two sources: (1) the betting ledgers of Dr. Ivan Mindlin, seized by the FBI on January 18, 1985; and (2) a chart compiled by Michael Kent, using the seized ledgers and other records of his own. Both sources hove been identified as exhibits in Kent's civil suit against Mindlin. It should be pointed out that these figures account for the activity of the main Computer Group, and thus represent only a fraction of the total profits earned by Michael Kent's computer forecasts. Year Credit Line Amount Bet Profits Betting/Profit ROI '80-'81 $370,000 $5,280,000 $700,000 $7.54 13.3% '81-'82 $920,000 $20,900,000 $3,400,000 $6.15 16.3% '82-'83 $1.790.000 $29,640,000 $3.721.000 $7.97 12.6% '83-'84 $2,230,000 $141,830,000 $4,810,000 $8.70 11.5% '84-'85 $3,590.000 $37,410,000 $1,298,000 $28.82 3.5% TOTAL: $8,900,000 $135,060,600 $13,929,000 $9.70 10.3% *Betting/Profit = the amount wagered in order to profit $1 The Best of Times, The Worse of Times The Computer Group reached the height of its powers in 1983-85. The national betting network was operating at its peck of efficiency, which freed Michael Kent to further fine-tune his computer program. The 1983 seasons represented the lost windfall year for the Computer Group, which had enjoyed a great run of three years against betting lines created by the inexperienced linesmakers in Los Vegas. By 1984-'85, the linesmakers were beginning to improve appreciably, as were other bettors competing in the market against the Computer Group. THEIR BEST WEEK The 1983 college football campaign was the best season the Computer Group ever had. Though the group began the season with a relatively low credit line of $1.1 million, it placed $23,440,000 in bets and won $3,850.000. It was only fitting that the group capped its best season with its best week ever, the last week of the 1983 season, which included the New Year's Day bowl games. It tamed out that Michael Kents's computer program was at its best in the post season. While other handicappers had trouble rating the rare match-ups found in bowl games, the computer was as efficient as ever. Amount bet Wins Losses Ties Net Profit % of Games Won $2,907,300 $1,977,000 $912,000 $18,100 $974,000 68.4% In order to earn $1 that week, they bet (2.99. The return on their investment that week was 33.5% THEIR WORST WEEK The following football season was the worst in the group's five years of betting on college sports. Laying $21,240,000 in bets, the group finished the season with heavy losses in 7 of its lost 9 weeks, including Week No. 7 below, which happened to be its worst week on record. Facing a deficit o1 $545,000 in the final week, the Computer Group won 85% of its wagers on bowl games, netting $628,900 and rescuing its members from red ink. The group finished with a small profit of $83,670, but a profit nonetheless. Amount bet Wins Losses Ties Net Profit % of Games Won $2,184,700 $655,800 $1,133,400 $395,500 $(590,940) 36.7% |
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lol you can tell there isnt many 0-0's to trade
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Bob Voulgaris had become one of the most successful sports gamblers in the world when, in 2004, he started to lose. It wasn’t just a streak of bad luck, a series of randomly unfavorable outcomes that could last only so long. His edge, he realized, was gone.
He had begun betting on sports in the late 1990s, and within five years, before he had reached his 30th birthday, Voulgaris had accumulated a fortune. He says he routinely wagered a million dollars in a single day of NBA games. He considered his mean to be an unholy winning percentage that approached 70 percent. A man of no fixed address, he dated models and traveled the world. He was also an accomplished poker player, buying his way into high-stakes games from Las Vegas to Macau. He was essentially leading the fantasy life of your basic under-35 North American male. A specialist in the NBA, his sports gambling success was almost completely the result of a kind of studied perspicacity, born of a talent for pattern recognition and the stamina to watch uncountable hours of televised basketball. In betting parlance, the man could suss out an edge -- and in 2002, he discovered one that would line his pockets for years. It all had to do with how most bookmakers set their halftime totals, the predicted number of points scored in each half of the game. Each half, of course, is its own discrete period of play, and the fourth quarters of close games can end in elongated foul-clogged stretches of free throws, timeouts, fast play and, hence, a burst of scoring. But incredibly, bookmakers at the time didn’t account for this fact; they simply arrived at a total for the full game and cut that figure roughly down the middle, assigning some 50 percent of the points to the first half and 50 percent to the second. Terms to know for this story BLACK BOX: Any secret and proprietary computer model used by a gambler to make smarter decisions. EWING THEORY: Phenomenon, first described by Bill Simmons, in which a team gets better when its overrated superstar leaves. Named after Patrick Ewing. QUANT: An expert in using data and analytics to make decisions. SUBJECTIVE BETTOR: Any gambler who does not use rigorous quantitative analysis to find an edge. TILT: To act or bet irrationally out of frustration over a loss. DEFENSE-ADJUSTED VALUE OVER AVERAGE (DVOA): Measure of a QB's efficiency compared to a league average QB, adjusted for situation and opponent. EXPECTED POINTS ADDED: Measure of how many "expected points" -- points a team can expect to score on average, given the down and distance -- that a QB has added through his play, adjusted for clutch situations. FIRST-DOWN RATE: Percentage of plays in which a QB gained a first down on running plays, not counting kneel-downs. For years, Voulgaris exploited this edge, playing both sides of it repeatedly. It is possible to say that it alone made him millions, combined with some keen observations regarding the game-management tendencies of three head coaches: Eddie Jordan, Jerry Sloan and Byron Scott. “Those were three coaches I had nailed perfectly,” Voulgaris, now 37, says. “I knew exactly what they were going to do. I mean, it was a joke, it was so easy.” In retrospect, he regrets only not having bet more aggressively during this halcyon period. “I thought it would last forever,” he tells me when I visit him at the house he was then renting in the Hollywood Hills for $12,500 a month. “But it didn’t.” Eventually, the bookmakers did finally catch on. Responding specifically to the money they saw Voulgaris minting -- though, for the most part, they didn’t yet know the identity of the gambler winning with such consistency -- they forever altered the method by which they set their NBA halftime totals. And that’s when Voulgaris started to lose. And lose big. He lost a third of his bankroll in the final month of the 2003-04 season alone. Exasperated, his patience gone, he started to “tilt,” boosting the volume of his wagers in an effort to win back what he’d already lost. He won’t quantify exactly how much he gave back to the bookmakers all told except to describe it as a catastrophic time. He took the second part of the 2004-05 NBA season off. Mulling things over, he realized he needed a new approach. In essence, he decided he could no longer rely on his ability to suss out edges by his wits alone. He needed the help of a new machine. Like baseball after sabermetrics, like Wall Street in the 1970s, sports gambling over the past decade has undergone a quantitative revolution. Nearly every successful sports bettor in the world now uses some form of computer model to assist in the handicapping of sporting events. Like their brethren inside hedge funds, these gamblers are known as quants. Like the advanced trading systems operating on Wall Street, the models used by this technologically adroit breed of sports bettor are sometimes called black boxes. Their models (and their identities) are shrouded in secrecy. Their algorithms are proprietary. And with each passing year, their sophistication mounts. One veteran Las Vegas handicapper, who goes by the pseudonym Steve Fezzik, laments, “They’ve left me, and others like me, in the dark ages.” Bayesian methods, Monte Carlo methods, Markov chains, k-nearest neighbor algorithms, Chapman-Kolmogorov equations -- the key advances in statistical analysis, probability theory and predictive modeling have been marshaled toward the object of beating the bookies out of a dime. Their goal is nothing less than a sustainable edge. It is a paradoxical quest. The history of sports betting is littered with the corpses of gamblers who have enjoyed spectacular runs only to flame out just as quickly when their edges die. When they see a gambler winning big, bookmakers correct their mistakes. Rival gamblers spot the same edges -- or copy them -- and bet the line back to plumb. Indeed, while the wide availability of information in the Internet age and exponential increase in computer processing power have given rise to the sports gambling quant, those very same factors have made the pursuit of a sustainable edge that much more quixotic. The marketplace evolves. The betting public, square though it may be, is better informed than ever before: Reams of team and player statistics reside in the cloud, awaiting download. The bookmakers, meanwhile, have joined the quantitative battle. Some who formulate the opening lines (only a few still do so; all the others simply copycat) have engineered their own sophisticated models. Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street trading firm, started a division called Cantor Gaming in 2008 to operate a sportsbook business in Las Vegas, then acquired the consulting firm that had been the oddsmaker of record for the gambling world. Cantor’s computer model is named Midas. Andrew Garrood, a former high-finance quant whose previous experience included developing pricing models for interest rate derivatives at a London bank, designed it. “It’s hubristic to believe that the edge you have today will be yours forever,” he says. “The marketplace will always catch up.” None of this, of course, has stopped the world’s sharpest quant bettors from trying. A slim six-footer with dark hair and dark eyes, Voulgaris talks fast. His eyes flit. He has the canny, quick-minded air of a merchant in a bazaar in the Eastern Mediterranean. Since birth, he seems never to have lacked for self-confidence. He likes to say that he had no mentors when it comes to his gambling career, but in reality, he did. When Voulgaris was 18, he took a gap year between high school and college. First he traveled to Greece, visiting the hardscrabble villages -- Argos, Tripoli -- where his parents were born and raised before they immigrated, in their 20s, to Canada. (Voulgaris’ legal first name is Haralabos.) Then he and his father made a trip to Las Vegas, where they lived for most of the next two months at Caesars Palace. The elder Voulgaris had risen from poverty to become a successful Winnipeg entrepreneur. He developed commercial real estate; he owned and operated a Greek restaurant called Hermes -- the patron god of (among other things) games, sports and sudden enrichment. His net worth grew into the millions; he also happened to be an avid gambler. Voulgaris’ father bet on horses, sports of all kinds, card games, dice games, penny stocks. He was also, his son now suggests, the consummate square. “He would just hold up a newspaper and get a feel for what he wanted to bet. There was no rhyme or reason to it. He was very, very superstitious. He would have dreams, with, like, numbers and colors in them, and that would influence him.” Voulgaris says his father went broke twice, both times sending the family into near destitution. “Don’t write ‘degenerate,’ ” Voulgaris tells me. “He was an ‘unsuccessful’ gambler.” Nevertheless, Voulgaris remembers those Vegas days fondly. He couldn’t join his father on the casino floor for his blackjack sessions; he was 18 and underage. So he spent most of his time in the Caesars sportsbook. Because it was basketball season, he watched a lot of NBA, but with a purpose. He paid attention to adjustments, the ebb and flow of the pace of play. He took notes on what he saw. He eavesdropped on his fellow gamblers. Even then, as a pup bettor, he had a dim view of this group: “Most people who are in a sportsbook in Las Vegas spouting their opinions are morons.” His father would join him at night. At times they wagered together. The younger Voulgaris recalls that his biggest bet the whole trip came on an Atlanta-Golden State game, $100 on the spread, “which I lost.” These were formative times. His two months in Vegas -- and, really, the whole of his childhood -- were an education by counterexample. But while many people, if faced with Voulgaris’ early experiences, might have renounced the gambling life with the fervor of a prohibitionist, Voulgaris seems to have gleaned a kind of edge from it. “I learned at a young age that it’s tough to beat the house,” he says. “Unless you know what you’re doing.” By the time the younger Voulgaris was enrolled at the University of Manitoba, working as a skycap at the airport and betting small amounts on the NBA and CFL, he and his brother -- two of four siblings in all -- were paying their parents’ rent. The first computer model put into the service of sports gambling dates to the late 1970s, when Michael Kent, a former nuclear submarine engineer for a Pentagon contractor, wrote a program that predicted NFL, college football and college basketball scores. Kent fed his algorithms, inscribed on punch cards, into a rented mainframe that had less processing speed than today’s high-end laptops. At the time, though, he was going up against green-eyeshade bookmakers armed with nothing more than adding machines and intuition. It was hardly a fair fight. Kent eventually moved to Las Vegas, where a betting syndicate -- the legendary Computer Group -- formed around his work, winning untold millions for its members well into the 1990s. Kent continued to develop models and bet on sports up until seven years ago. He is now retired, according to his lawyer, his whereabouts closely guarded. “He’s very reclusive,” the lawyer, Steven Brooks, says. Billy Walters, a core member of the Computer Group, has, however, stayed in the game; he now has a staff of consulting mathematicians who have built advanced predictive models to project scores. Walters, Kent and their syndicates stood basically alone until the late 1990s, when PCs became powerful enough to do the computation work required by predictive models, and more data became available to feed them. Voulgaris was well aware of these predecessors. Analytics and predictive modeling had “always fascinated me,” he says. “I’d always wanted to have a model of sorts.” Throughout his career, Voulgaris had been what is known as a subjective bettor, albeit one so astute that he became a whale. Two huge bets -- both for the Lakers to win the title in 1999 and 2000 -- had turned about $80,000 in savings into more than $1 million, his first fat bankroll. As a purely subjective bettor, Voulgaris had been placing perhaps 350 individual wagers each season. But after the disastrous end to the 2004 season, with his edge gone, he decided that he should increase his betting frequency by an order of magnitude but decrease the sums he was putting at risk on each wager. It only made probabilistic sense. If his return on investment (ROI) fell from 20 percent to, say, 5 percent, that was okay. Five percent of $50 million is better than 20 percent of $5 million (all figures are hypothetical; Voulgaris is as cagey as any gambler about the true size of his bankroll). This new approach would require an enormous amount of research and analysis. It would require projecting a score for each and every game in an NBA regular season -- all 1,230. A single human mind would be overwhelmed by the workload; only a computer program could handle it. “If you think about it,” he says, “you’d be a slave to the game of basketball otherwise.” Voulgaris chose the right moment to start building a predictive model for NBA games. Four years earlier, in the 2002-03 season, the league had for the first time made play-by-play information available to the public, whereas before only box scores were published. This trove of fresh information had no immediate practical value, except perhaps to assuage fan curiosity. But by 2006, a large enough sample of data had accumulated to employ it with scientific rigor. To help him build his model, Voulgaris required a specialist in the field, a mind trained in the codes of statistics, mathematics and computer science. He started the search in 2005. It took him two years and six individual tryouts -- most of those interviewees were found online, Voulgaris says, and two of them landed in NBA front offices -- to find the right person. The right person was a literal math prodigy. As a preteen, he had won national math contests; he had been the subject of awestruck articles in major newspapers. He had scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT when he was in seventh grade. At the time of his interview with Voulgaris, he had just quit a high-paying job designing algorithms for an East Coast hedge fund with a roster of Nobel-grade quant talent. Voulgaris does not wish to have the name of this math whiz appear in print, presumably out of fear that some rival will attempt to find the whiz -- let’s call him the Whiz -- and poach him. When I visit Voulgaris at his rental in the Hollywood Hills, he tells me that he’s recently made the Whiz his partner. “50-50?” I ask. “No.” The relationship got off to a rocky start. In 2007 the Whiz basically spun his wheels striving to build a model on his own during his first offseason in Voulgaris’ employ. “He was optimistic that he’d be able to come up with something by the time basketball season started,” Voulgaris says, “and he just flailed away.” Voulgaris decided to shorten the leash, and together the two determined that what they needed was a program that could simulate a game of basketball between any two teams at any point in a season and spit out a projected score. To do so, they would have to break the game down into its basic unit, the possession. Each simulation would therefore be a series of mini-simulations. First, the program would have to predict the number of possessions each matchup would likely produce. Then it would need to judge the likeliest outcome of each possession: Score or no score; one point, two points or three; micro-forecasts ascertained from historical performance data. It would also have to take into account a vast number of potential occurrences, each missed shot or successful rebound creating the possibility of still other occurrences -- a garden of explosively forking paths, as if in parallel universes. The program would run tens of thousands of simulations for each matchup, discarding the most outlandish or improbable results. It would be a black box -- prophecy as output. Between the statistical analysis, the algorithms and the programming, it took two years to create their first model, version 1.0. Voulgaris continued to bet subjectively, marking time until the model was ready. When they finished, they called it Ewing. (It wasn’t named after Patrick, per se, but after the “Ewing Theory,” a purported phenomenon famously described by Bill Simmons under which a team improves whenever its overrated superstar leaves the franchise.) At some point in the process of breaking the game down into its component parts, they realized that Ewing would also require a kind of feeder model, one that could forecast the lineups a team would most likely use each game and the minutes each player was likely to see on the court. They called that model Van Gundy. Van Gundy, in turn, required its own feeder tool, one that would track the overall roster patterns for each team, the trades, the draft picks, the midseason player-acquisition tendencies. That database, less intricate than the other two, they at times jokingly referred to as Morey, as in Daryl Morey, the quant-minded GM of the Rockets. Ewing, Van Gundy, Morey. Player, coach, GM. The names of each corresponding, of course, to the job of each tool. In the summer of 2007, Voulgaris and the Whiz took Ewing on a dry run, testing the simulator against games from the previous season to see how accurately it could retroactively “predict.” But something funky was happening. Every score the model spit out was higher than the average lines produced by the bookmakers -- the standard by which they would be judging themselves. The model, in other words, was recommending that Voulgaris bet the over in every single game. After weeks spent poring through code, Voulgaris finally caught the flaw. When assigning variables in the model, the Whiz had somehow assumed that the league-average free throw percentage was 88 percent, when in fact it’s around 75 percent -- an absurd mistake on the part of the Whiz, whose basketball knowledge at the time was practically nil. In more advanced versions of Ewing, they would jettison this primitive free throw method. Now, says Voulgaris, they’ve adjusted Ewing so that it predicts the player most likely to be fouled on any given individual possession, then uses that player’s specific free throw percentage to run its simulation. If Ewing has a secret sauce, it’s just this sort of thing: Finding scraps of information, sliced and diced ever more finely, that reveal something about how a system -- in this case, a game of pro basketball -- will operate in the future. The key is to find those scraps that are more predictive than others. Case in point: One of Ewing’s most important functions is to assign values to players. Each player has two values -- on offense and as a defender -- and those values are constantly changing. Ewing will also automatically adjust the value depending on who’s guarding whom. Oklahoma City’s Kendrick Perkins “is more valuable guarding Dwight Howard than he is guarding Shane Battier,” Voulgaris says. Why? “Because Howard is a unique player, and you need a big to defend him.” Likewise, according to Voulgaris, Celtics seven-footer Jason Collins is “useless every game, except when he’s guarding Howard, which he does really, really well.” Player values also change across a season and a career. So Voulgaris and the Whiz created, for Ewing, an aging component. Further number-crunching revealed that different types of players, based on position and size, will reach their zeniths at different ages and on trajectories that are possible to predict. Ewing now grasps the curve of the lifespan of the point guard, the shooting guard, the forwards, the center -- and predicts the downslope and expiration date of every NBA career. When Ewing went live with actual betting for the first time toward the end of the 2008 season, Voulgaris was not yet sold on its powers. For one thing, his subjective-gambler side wasn’t ready to surrender control to a machine. For another, the model was performing unremarkably with their money on the line -- right above the break-even line. But Voulgaris had something in mind, “a long project, like a six-month-long project, to model a certain part of the game of basketball.” He and the Whiz spent the offseason pursuing this mysterious project, the precise nature of which Voulgaris will not discuss. “I don’t even want to allude to what it might be,” he says when I press him, “because I don’t think anyone else is doing anything like it.” By 2009, once they’d added this mysterious additional model to Ewing’s inner workings -- version 2.0 -- they started making bets based on the scores it produced after the All-Star break. “We just, like, crushed the second half of the season,” Voulgaris says. Since then, as each subsequent season has passed, Voulgaris’ confidence in Ewing has increased. So too has the frequency of his wagering. In a season, he now regularly puts down well over 1,000 individual bets. “I mean, I don’t want to sit here and brag,” he says. “But this is literally, like, the greatest thing ever when it comes to sports betting.” Despite believing himself to be in possession of the world’s most lethal gambling device, Voulgaris, in the middle of Ewing’s second season on the job, nearly walked away from it all. It might come as little surprise to learn that Voulgaris has intermittently dreamed of becoming the general manager of an NBA franchise. “This is going to sound really arrogant,” he says. “But the whole process” -- of studying the game of basketball with the end of beating the books -- “has led me to believe that I’d be able to put together a better team than almost any general manager in the league. If not maybe all.” In pursuit of this, in 2010 Voulgaris broke one of the cardinal rules of the sharp sports bettor: He sought publicity, conducting interviews with gambling and NBA-centric blogs. As with everything Voulgaris does, it was a calculated move. He wanted to burnish his bona fides as a quantitative basketball expert. And it worked. Despite the fact that he was giving up a yearly income that he says would dwarf all but the highest-paid executive in the NBA -- who is Jerry West of Golden State, Voulgaris is quick to point out -- he stopped gambling and signed a contract during the 2009-10 season with one of the co-owners of an NBA franchise to consult on matters of player acquisition and roster assembly. The owner, according to Voulgaris, made certain alluring pledges. “He was like, ‘You could be my GM someday; we can do this together.’ It was this whole spiel.” Voulgaris won’t name names, nor will he say how he first met this particular owner. He has had contact with other NBA executives; he has met, for example, Daryl Morey. (Voulgaris has assured me that it wasn’t the Rockets he consulted for.) As his move to the NBA suggests, there is today much common currency between the analytical work of the sports gambler and that of an increasing number of professional teams’ front offices; one of the chief goals of both, after all, is to value players. The quant revolution in sports at large has brought these two worlds closer together than ever before, at least intellectually. Every winter at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, members of the gambling community openly intermingle with GMs and their staffs of wonkish analysts. “If I were the general manager of a team,” says Voulgaris, who will be attending the Sloan conference for the second time, in early March, “and I had someone building models and doing quantitative work -- if that person could not beat the Las Vegas line, his model wouldn’t be worth anything to me.” The reason? The way he sees it, the best and perhaps the only way to test one’s theories about player value is to take those theories to market. And the only market that’s liquid with money flows in the billions is the betting line, where opinions have a daily price. “Over thousands of samples of games, our model is constantly being tested on whether it’s right or wrong,” Voulgaris says. “If we’re wrong, we lose money. If we’re right, we make money.” Voulgaris spent five months working for the NBA franchise. He says he advised his co-owner client on several trades. But he also felt excluded, held at arm’s length. “It was like if someone put a puzzle in front of you and said, ‘Solve this.’ But then, in order to solve it, you needed this special key that they weren’t going to give you.” He feels now that for all the momentum of the quant revolution in the NBA, there may be a glass ceiling for its true practitioners. “There’s a real disconnect between the basketball people, the business people and the -- for lack of a better word -- stats nerds. The stats nerds have no chance of ever becoming general managers. They’re just being used as a resource to mine.” At the end of the contract’s term, in the summer of 2010, Voulgaris decided to end his NBA flirtation and go back to being a gambler. In truth, though, what Voulgaris says he missed most during his five-month hiatus from gambling was the gamble itself: “I was bored out of my tree.” Little wonder, given the frisson of his betting sessions. During the NBA regular season, which he splits between any number of North American and international ports of call, he watches as many games as he can, clocking more than 80 hours a week. No matter where he is -- LA or, say, Monaco, where he rents a flat -- his normal position during his game-day gambling shifts is supine on a couch, feet up on an ottoman, body nearly horizontal, a MacBook Pro resting between his lap and his knees, Ewing’s interface on the laptop’s screen, his dog (a Jack Russell named Coltrane) lying under his feet. He typically faces a wall against which rises a rack of Samsung flat-screens: a 65-inch central TV flanked on both sides by vertical ranks of three 40-inch screens, each showing a game. From here, he orchestrates his wagering: Ewing spits out a projected score and a number representing its level of confidence for each potential wager. Any projection above a certain threshold on that confidence scale Voulgaris will bet, though he sometimes overrides Ewing’s recommendations. He shows no emotion while watching the games on which he’s laid tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands, though he does very much sweat it on the inside, he says. In his words, “You’d have no chance of telling whether I was winning or losing.” During the season, he will bet, watch games, eat and sleep -- in that order of importance -- and do little else. To stay in shape, he doesn’t consume food after nightfall. This is a lifestyle not exactly conducive to relationships: He partly attributes his recent breakup with a girlfriend of five years to his odd hours during the season. Despite it all, Voulgaris faces the same issue that all sharps face: the sustainability of his edge, no matter how sophisticated the model that produces it. When he returned to gambling for the 2010-11 season, Voulgaris says Ewing clocked an ROI of more than 6 percent. By 2011-12, it had fallen to 5.14 percent. Of course, the lockout-shortened season made for a bizarre outlier year, and Voulgaris and the Whiz had to adjust. Basically they subtracted a varying amount from the scores Ewing gave them, trying to account for the rust that kept scoring low at the start of the season, and the compressed number of games that later fatigued players -- and also kept scoring low -- toward the end of the season. But the limits of Ewing were apparent to Voulgaris. Already he sensed the inevitable. “We’re probably already at the point where my capability to make money is decreasing every year,” he says. “Every time you make a bet, you’re educating the people taking the bets. They’re learning the right way to make a line. They figure s -- out based on what you’ve already figured out.” If, year after year, his margins are deteriorating, Voulgaris must increase the number of bets he makes in order to account for that slippage, just as he did when he moved from a subjective to a quant approach. He and the Whiz tweak Ewing in a ceaseless effort to incrementally improve its ability to spit out projections that carry high-enough confidence readings. “You’re not even improving it so much as trying to stop it from getting worse.” Like a fund manager, he must cope with the fine line between ROI, the number of bets he makes and the natural volatility caused by the random. The more he wagers, the more he courts ruin. In one unguarded moment, he tells me, “You can’t do this forever.” When I visit him in LA over the summer, he and the Whiz are working to finish several potential alterations to Ewing, incorporating offseason player movements and adjusting the model to account for the weird data produced by the 2011-12 campaign. The predictive tool will end up responding in a very predictable way: Its margins will continue to narrow. By the middle of the 2012-13 season, Voulgaris will only say, “This has been one of the more difficult years.” Voulgaris has only a blurry eye on his own future; Ewing’s simulations can’t help with that sort of prediction. Maybe, he muses at one point, it will be that sports gambling is someday legalized throughout the U.S., which will unleash a thundering flood of square money from casual bettors, exponentially increasing the liquidity in the market. The limits that bookmakers place on bets would increase and so would Ewing’s edge. The prospect makes Voulgaris as giddy as it’s possible for him to be. “That would literally be, like, the best thing ever,” he says. He wonders whether he could become a gambler akin to the Brit Tony Bloom, whose predictive soccer model won him enough quid to acquire the recently promoted Brighton FC. “It’s good to have goals in life, no matter how unrealistic,” Voulgaris says with a wry grin. And with enough gambling winnings, he says he would have only one goal. “I would buy a basketball team.” |
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I'll leave it at that there's enough 'light' reading there for anyone and in amongst it there's some very good 'tips' for anyone starting out. Good luck to all.
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good reading buzzer
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I don't suppose anyone's looking in but Howzat-Kerry Packers War is on BBC4 now
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going to read this entire thread one night...cheers buzzer sterling work
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..and adjusting the model to account for the weird data produced by the 2011-12 campaign
Holy cow. These guy sounds nothing more than a chancer. So many inconsistencies in that story it's untrue. |
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I agree (with Mr Angry)
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Excellent thread Buzzer....maybe there is life in the old dog of a forum yet !!!
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I would be amazed if any more than half a dozen
forumites read the main post, but nodded approval. |
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Re Billy Walters. Just finished reading The Smart Money by Michael Konik and although he has changed some names, the main character is supposedly Billy Walters. Easily one of the best gambling books I've read, Konik starts to worksfor him putting on and ends up having to punt hundreds of thousands every weekend and the trouble with not getting froze out or rumbled by the bookies.
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Read every word and glad I took the time...thanks to all posters :-)
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outstanding thread..a refreshing change
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Somewhere in the forum was a thread called ( I think ) - Betting Shop Charecters. Anyone know where that is? That was a great read!!
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I've bumped it for you jt, it's on chit chat
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Cheers Buzzer
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