Here's a good article on the modern bookmaking business....
GAMBLING A VERY BIG WINNER FOR THE MOB
Sunday, February 19, 2006
By TOM TRONCONE
Staff Writer
A week or so before the Super Bowl, "Artie" from Wayne called an 800 number his friend gave him when the football season started. He provided his user name and password.
The woman who answered the phone spoke with a thick Hispanic accent.
"Give me the Steelers 20 times," he said in the gambler's parlance for a $100 bet.
On the Thursday after the game, Artie "settled up" with the friend, collecting $90 -- his winnings minus a fee -- and bought a few rounds of drinks for his buddies.
Artie made money on Pittsburgh's victory. So did one of the Mafia families operating sports betting rings in New Jersey, authorities believe.
Win or lose, the mob -- to no one's surprise -- is one of the biggest winners when it comes to sports wagering in the Garden State.
"It's the bread and butter of organized crime," said New Jersey State Police Capt. Mark Doyle, who oversees mob investigations for the agency in North Jersey. "They use this money to finance everything else they do, from drug distribution to prostitution to payoffs to unions and elected officials. Bettors have no idea where the money goes."
Scores of people are arrested each year in New Jersey for taking part in million-dollar betting rings connected to the Mafia. Most offenders never see the inside of a prison.
But no sports betting operation has ever received international attention like the one police busted earlier this month.
Authorities say former Philadelphia Flyers star Rick Tocchet and New Jersey State Trooper James Harney ran a sports betting operation that took in more than $1.7 million in bets in a little more than a month leading up to the Super Bowl.
Janet Jones, wife of hockey great Wayne Gretzky, allegedly placed $500,000 in bets with the ring. The names of other famous athletes have popped up as possible bettors as well.
The ring, authorities said, was "affiliated" with the Bruno crime family, which is based in Philadelphia but controls gambling operations throughout South Jersey as well as in parts of Newark.
But how would a ring such as the one the ex-hockey player and the trooper supposedly ran be connected to organized crime?
The state police wouldn't divulge details of the alleged mob ties. A defense lawyer hired by one of those charged in the case insisted the ring had no ties to organized crime. To date, authorities have said only that some mobsters may have been bettors and that Harney associated with others.
According to mob and sports betting experts, the answer could lie in the unseen world of big-money gaming. Peel back the veneer of any large betting ring and a world of "hedging," "vigs," "tributes," "protection" and "wire rooms" emerges.
Mob families split profits
It's a world where tens of millions of dollars are pumped into the coffers of the five mob families that control sports betting in New Jersey: the Genovese crime family in Bergen, Passaic, Hudson, Morris and Somerset counties; the Lucchese family in Essex, Morris and Union counties; the DeCavalcante family in Union and Monmouth counties; the Bonanno family in Union, Monmouth, Middlesex and Essex counties; and the Bruno/Scarfo family in South Jersey and the Silver Lake section of Newark.
Here's how it works:
A bookmaker and several associates grow a stable of regular bettors. They can choose to open their own office -- known as a "wire room" -- and receive incoming bets via an 800 number or through a password-protected Web site.
Such an operation is extremely risky and involves a large, detectable organization, mob investigators say.
In late January, the last of 19 people charged with operating a Genovese sports betting ring from a bar in Garwood pleaded guilty to gambling charges in Monmouth County. They included the street boss of one of the six Genovese crews that operate in the state, Ludwig "Ninny" Bruschi.
The case was one of the rare instances in which gambling rooms operated locally: Bruschi's crew used a Genovese wire room in New York City.
"We see it less and less," said one veteran detective. "It just makes more sense financially these days to do it outside the country."
Most rings simply outsource the bookmaking.
"You go down to Costa Rica and you see blockhouses with satellites," Doyle said. "And inside they have banks and banks of computers."
In nearly every case, the wire rooms are run by organized-crime families. The services charge bookmakers $20 to $30 a week per bettor. At the end of the week, the leader of the ring either calls the service or visits a secure site to see which of his clients are winners, which owe him money, and how much he owes the mob for use of the service.
The bookmaker pays the fee -- $20,000 to $30,000 a week -- to a contact in New York or New Jersey, mob investigators say.
But there's more.
If a bookie is "overexposed" on a certain team -- say, 1,000 people have bet the Giants but only 100 have bet their opponent -- the bookie will try to find a colleague who is in an opposite position. The two bookies then split their bets.
The mob does the same thing. A Genovese wire room receiving heavy betting on the Giants will exchange bets with a mob family from the city of their opponent. They combine to "hedge" the bets and "middle" the lines, a process that takes advantage of the difference in spreads in the two cities based on fan bases, investigators say.
"If you have everyone betting the Giants one day, you reach over to another operation that is getting heavy betting on the Steelers and take 20 of their 40 bets," Doyle said.
A no-lose situation
Although a bookmaker may not always win, the mob never loses.
"In order for a bookmaking operation to be successful, they have to hedge off," said Robert Buccino, longtime state mob investigator who now is chief of detectives in Union County. "If it's New York versus San Fran, New York could be minus 3 here, but go out to Cali and it's minus 1."
It's a strategy that police often employ during their investigations, with one officer calling in the favorite and another betting the underdog.
"So we don't lose the state's money," Doyle explained.
Authorities haven't disclosed whether they believe Tocchet and Harney used the services of a wire room. They have accused Tocchet, a millionaire former star athlete, of financing the alleged ring -- a role the mob usually plays in gambling rackets. They have also said that Harney sometimes took bets on his cellphone while patrolling the New Jersey Turnpike.
The federal government estimates that Americans illegally bet up to $200 billion each year, while less than $3 billion is bet legally on sports each year in Las Vegas. And while no numbers are available for only New Jersey, the tri-state area is considered the most active illegal gambling area in the country.
"It's a big moneymaker," said Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli. "It's dangerous because it's an unregulated business, where the consequences of not paying can be violent."
How the mob's gambling interests intersect with the lives of everyday people is evident, he said, in a major sports betting bust made by his office and the state police on Feb. 9. Paying the Genovese family for use of a Costa Rican wire room, the operation took in about $1 million in bets each week on football, hockey, soccer and other sports, Molinelli said.
Charged with operating or participating in the ring are a group of more than 50 people who run the social gamut: They include the manager of the Satin Dolls club in Lodi, the owner of Double D's Adult Lounge in Morristown, the owner of a long-term parking lot at Newark Liberty International Airport, a South Hackensack computer wholesaler, a Little Falls deli owner and a well-known Elvis Presley impersonator.
"Anytime you can cut off an income stream to organized crime, that's something we want to do," Molinelli said.
Besides financing other illicit activities, illegal sports betting "feeds the army" of soldiers who do the mob's dirty work, Buccino said.
It has always "allowed them to make money to live," he said.
"Sports betting should be legal," Buccino said. "Look at what the lottery did to the numbers racket: It killed it. And that used to be such big money [for the mob]."
