Gaming the Game Read online

  WIP co-hosts Howard Eskin and Mike Missanelli honored their bet by working the bar at Marina’s on February 28, 2002. Battista, an avid sports fan and listener of talk radio, got a kick out of meeting Eskin, then and still one of Philadelphia’s most controversial commentators. “Even though Howard comes off as a jerkoff on the radio, he has a good heart. He cared about helping people. He reminded me of Tommy Martino, though, because he was in love with himself and how he looked. I don’t think there were enough mirrors in his Lexus for him.” Contacted in March 2010, Mike Missanelli says he doesn’t recall the event or meeting Battista, and thus never realized throughout the more than two years of NBA scandal coverage that he had actually bartended alongside the scheme’s architect.

  Shady People in Sunny Places

  WHEN THE NFL season ended in February of 2003, The Animals couldn’t believe how poorly the past five months had gone. “It was our worst football season ever,” Battista says. “Normally we’d be up a few balloons, but we weren’t close to that.” Their fortunes were about to change, however, if they were willing to take a chance—and a journey. Battista received a phone call from a colleague who suggested The Sheep should meet with a guy in New York named Ronnie Park who was known for taking bets of more than a hundred grand. Park was a bookmaker who supposedly got his start working with the Kosher Kids, and who had big clients. “He was about ten years or twelve years older than me and was a sensational salesman,” Battista says. “He was given a lot of money by members of his family and used this as upfront money for a third of his bookmaking business. So, I went up there to meet with Ronnie and he said, ‘I hear a lot about you guys, and want to know if you’d be willing to move some stuff for me.’ We were interested because it would generate exposure and create revenue. Ronnie told me that he was going to open an offshore sportsbook and wanted to know if we would help him run it. He knew we had booked before and that we were doing well betting by that point.”

  A follow-up meeting was set for a month later for this fairly consequential negotiation, to be held at a McDonald’s of all places. “Tiger and I were sitting there in the McDonald’s waiting to meet with him, and a limo showed up with a driver,” Battista says. “The driver opened up his door and let him out, and we were already thinking, ‘Okay, this guy’s a fucking idiot.’ When we finally got down to business, Ronnie was a smooth talker. He offered us salaries, a percentage of his whole operation, and would cover the expenses of us traveling back and forth and things like that.” It all sounded great, but The Animals had families to consider. “We always wanted to go back to the islands, because we saw what we could have done before and we didn’t exploit it,” Battista says. “The only reason we didn’t was because we all had kids. It was tough saying, ‘Honey, here’s the money, so pay the bills, change the diapers, cook dinner, and walk the dog. I’ll be in Curacao for a few months!’ ”

  Even though the betting crew had families to think about, the offer was appealing because they still lived in fear of the FBI, the Pennsylvania State Police (who were far more willing to go after gamblers than were Philly cops), and of Philly mobsters. The Animals eventually agreed they should pursue Ronnie’s offer.1 “We made the deal, and the plan was for me to go down a couple of weeks before Tiger and Bull,” Battista says. “The goal was to be up and running for baseball season.”

  When Battista arrived in Curacao, he was picked up at the airport by Ronnie and his driver, who whisked him off to the lavish Floris Suite Hotel, where he’d be staying. Park was staying at another plush beachfront hotel nearby which was right next to Paramount Sports.2 “Ronnie had a bungalow right on the beach,” Battista says. “The Floris was gorgeous, and had this really prominent clientele. It was all too good to be true. I was going to be staying there for the first six weeks as we got everything started up. Even before Ronnie and I got started opening up his online sportsbook, All-Star Sports, I realized how important it was going to be for Tiger and Bull to get down to Curacao.3 There was so much shit going on there at that time with other offshore books, and we had no idea.”

  Ronnie Park already had a staff working on getting the office and computers set up, and it was going to be Battista’s job to develop customers. Though that would eventually occur as planned, it was immediately sidetracked when the computer system was activated. “As soon as we turned the computers on, we started gambling,” Battista says. “Even though we were supposed to be working on developing the business, we couldn’t see the numbers without booking and gambling ourselves!”

  At that time in the development of offshore gaming, bettors in the U.S. still had to phone in their bets, even though they could now track betting information online. The Animals were about to benefit in ways they could never have imagined simply by monitoring the phone calls pouring into the new sportsbook, and their rise to the betting summit would be all but complete. “I was the one in charge of the phones,” Battista says. “As soon as I listened to the phones and I realized who was calling us down there, I called Tiger and Bull and said, ‘You guys gotta get down here right away.’ I knew practically all the guys calling to place bets with Ronnie’s new offshore book, and they were some of the world’s sharpest bettors. These were people we had heard about but who would never do business with us. Now, we were receiving their bets! It was unbelievable. They were calling Ronnie to place bets, move games, everything. There was no way we could wait for Tiger and Bull to join me like we originally planned. If I was foaming at the mouth, I knew they would go fucking crazy when they saw and heard what was going on. Instead of coming down in a few weeks, they came down a couple of days after I called them. They got set up in the same hotel as me, and we were ready to go. The first day I brought them into the office, we each sat at different desks. I had them pick up phones to listen to the calls coming in. We were all just looking at each other listening silently to these sharps and their movers calling down to Ronnie’s new book. Tiger just stared at me across a desk with his mouth and eyes wide open as he heard call after call coming in from these guys we had been competing against, and gave me and Bull a thumbs up as he mouthed, ‘ Oh my God .’ We knew right then that this was going to be unreal for us.”

  Don Best is an extremely important Web site that offers real-time odds and line moves from sportsbooks around the world. A subscription to the site has long been a must for professional gamblers, who treasure the one-screen snapshot of consequential betting line information. Bookmakers liked the arrival of Don Best because people no longer had to keep calling for rundowns. It saved bookies money in manpower and it helped them with their phone bills, even if they had “800” numbers. In large part because of his established New York clientele, Park had a solid customer base to get All-Star Sports off the ground. Importantly, though, sharp guys heard about Ronnie Park’s new All-Star Sports by seeing it listed on Don Best, which had just started becoming popular. “So, the sharp guys had all this information and were betting serious money with All-Star Sports,” Battista says. “We were just taking it all in. Even though we were pretty sharp and ahead of most of the people we dealt with, this was another level for us. Ronnie had agents in the U.S. who had to stand for the money. I got to know the agents really well, which meant I got to know who their clients were.” It was all coming together for Park and his Animal colleagues.

  “We worked every day, seven days a week, eight to twelve hours a day,” Battista says. “It didn’t matter that much to us because we were used to working our asses off. When we were down there we were all away from our families, and we worked around the clock so that when we came back to the States we wouldn’t have to work at all. We each had our own deals with Ronnie: salary, percentage of the business, food and living expenses. And, we were getting an education you couldn’t get anywhere else.”

  After a few months, All-Star Sports had approximately fifty employees, and Battista moved from the Floris to a rented five-bedroom house. By then, he had taken over the company finances at Ronnie’s request. “I got
hooked up with the biggest agents in the world. These guys also had actors, movie producers, presidents of big companies, all betting big money. I was so focused on developing relationships with these people for whenever we would be leaving offshore. I was dealing with people on a daily basis, and got introduced to the sharpest guys in places like Poland, Russia, and Taiwan. Now I knew who the big guys were all around the world, and how they were moving games. Before I went to Curacao, I thought there was just Vegas and offshore. I thought I always knew how money was moved around, and that I was good at it. But, when I got down there, I was like, ‘Jesus Christ!’ It was so overwhelming. Now I knew why Uncle Sam was so eager to stop those sportsbooks, because you were talking billions of U.S. dollars flowing through those places that the government couldn’t touch.”

  Battista was suddenly at the center of the big-time sports betting universe. “We were partners with the Kosher Kids that baseball season,” he says. “Ronnie had been a clerk for the Koshers back in the 1970s, and now we were moving their games. We worked with them for seven weeks, and they made something like six million dollars in that short period of time. I was also talking to The Computer, and especially his movers, a lot. I also developed a relationship with another one of the world’s main sharps—Zorba the Greek. Zorba owned his own sportsbook, and would partner up with The Computer all the time to control the market. The Computer knew it was a nice thing to have a sportsbook in your pocket, and Zorba could move numbers and money around for him. They would move games together. It saved The Computer a lot of time, and made both of them a lot of money. Zorba was one of the few guys offshore who could pull off booking and betting at a high level.” Just as The Sheep strengthened his ties to Zorba and The Computer, another of the world’s top handful of sports bettors came calling—literally.

  “There was one afternoon when Ronnie was out partying and I was left to run the office,” Battista says. “The Chinaman called and asked to speak with him, but he got me. He was furious about a line move on a baseball game and was screaming at me that he told Ronnie not to move the number. I was thinking, ‘Who the fuck is this guy to be telling us what the line should be?!’ I explained to him that we got so much action on one side of the game that we had to move the line, and he said he would have bet enough on the other side if we had just told him. He wanted to keep the market sound until Asia and Taiwan opened up. The Chinaman controlled the markets in Taiwan and Asia. Whereas we would give him fifty-dime bets, his connections there would let him bet hundreds of thousands. Before that conversation, I kind of knew how big he was, but after that call I really started grasping what a fucking monster he was. That was my first time ever speaking to him, and I had no idea then that I’d be working for him down the line.”

  Unfortunately for The Animals, and especially for Ronnie Park, the burgeoning offshore sportsbook was about to crash and burn in less than a year. “All-Star Sports was doomed from the start,” Battista says. “Ronnie cut such bad business deals with so many people. He also spent so much money on unnecessary overhead, like expensive furniture and shit like that. The expenses were so out of hand, and the deals he cut with people were too good to last. He had too many friends and he couldn’t say ‘no’ to anybody. I thought he had oodles of money, but it was all just on the sheet. After working for him a few months, I realized his finance sheets—where you list assets and liabilities—weren’t real. All I thought was, ‘Oh my God. We’re fucked.’ A lot of money was owed to him and people wouldn’t pay. Sixty or seventy guys owed him money, and they were never going to pay.

  “He was sitting on a gold mine, but didn’t know what he was doing. When you’re down there, you have to choose—either you’re going to book, or you’re going to bet. He tried to do both, and it destroyed him. Only a select few people could do both down there. Ronnie’s lifestyle of spending money was also ridiculous. He would blow money on drugs, women, plastic surgery, all that stuff. He’d bring people down from the U.S. and wine them and dine them. He played the role as good as anybody, even though he had a wife and kids back home. He was so different than we were, and that was part of the problem with his business. Nobody outside the company knew about any of this, though, and people were flocking to his sportsbook.

  “By the start of summer, Tiger and Bull had gone back to the U.S. because they saw that the house was going to cave in. They got paid, and went back with their families. I stayed down there though, because we were hoping to get to football season where they could call down to me and I would be able to get big numbers without affecting the market. Even though I was working for Ronnie, the interests of The Animals were way more important.

  “When preseason football started in August, Ronnie was trying to recruit legitimate businessmen to come down and invest in his company. Once they visited and looked at everything, they all said they weren’t interested because they saw what we did. This thing couldn’t survive, and Ronnie owed so many people money. It was like a massive pyramid scheme that didn’t make any money for the head of it. I went to him in October and told him I was going home. Anyone with half a brain would have known his business model couldn’t work, and none of us—me, Tiger, or Bull—wanted to be there when Chernobyl happened. I could have justified being away from my wife and kids if the business model and profit margin were different, but none of this made sense.

  “When I told Ronnie I was leaving, he begged me to stay and offered me a bigger portion of the company. But, there was no way I was staying on that sinking ship. I told him my concerns about the financial situation, but he tried to tell me he was going to turn it around. He may have been a master manipulator, but I wasn’t falling for any of his bullshit. As I was getting ready to leave, I went over the company’s finances with Ronnie’s secretary so that someone could know what to do when I was gone. She was blown away by how fucked up everything was. When I left, I went around to all the people he owed money to let them know I had nothing to do with what was going to happen. I planned on dealing with these people in the future, and I didn’t want them pissed at me or The Animals for what Ronnie was trying to do. Ronnie’s partner in All-Star Sports was a guy named Chinese John, who controlled a lot of Chinatown in New York. I never even knew his last name or if ‘John’ was his real name, but when he went back to New York, he became another one of my outs.”

  More important than simply having another quality out was the prospect of working for a bettor Battista considered among the top three in the world. “When I told The Chinaman I was leaving the sportsbook, he asked me what I was planning on doing,” Battista says. “I told him about heading back to the U.S. and working with The Animals again. He asked me to consider moving for him, and I told him I’d think about it.” Especially grateful to Tiger for his steadfast leadership and support, Sheep remained with his longtime betting pals—at least for the moment.

  Battista reflects on the rise of The Animals through the short-lived yet invaluable All-Star Sports effort, cognizant of how naïve they were at the start. “In the mid-90s, we were learning and attacking,” he says. “We graduated betting college in the late 90s. Going to Curacao in the early 2000s was like getting an MBA in betting, and we realized how little we knew before and how much shit was going on with The Computer and a few other guys. We just didn’t realize how many resources there were to get money down around the world.”

  As if the incredible offshore experience wasn’t enough already, a bonus awaited The Sheep. Before leaving Curacao, Battista was presented with a veritable money-making machine in the form of nine-year NBA referee Tim Donaghy, by way of two longtime Battista associates.

  Jack Concannon graduated from Cardinal O’Hara High School rival Monsignor Bonner in 1983. Concannon, a basketball star who led Bonner to their first Catholic League championship since 1960, was a six-foot-six forward who went on to play for nearby St. Joseph’s University. Concannon later coached Bonner for five seasons ending in 1996, and by 2003 he was part owner of a Delaware County insurance agency. The
public image of Concannon would be sullied in a few years, but for now he was largely known as just another guy. “Jack really played the role—good Catholic family guy, successful businessman,” Battista says. “Meanwhile, he had a reputation among my crowd for being down Atlantic City losing his shirt and betting all the time. I knew Jack fairly well, going back to when we were kids. We’re the same age, and I’ve known him since fifth grade when we played football against each other. He was the quarterback for St. Lawrence, and I was a lineman for Holy Cross, and we played against each other in CYO basketball, too. Concannon actually sold me my life insurance back in 2000.”

  All of this would be Delaware County trivia if not for Jack Concannon’s betting relationship with his friend Tim Donaghy. “Jack was friends with Pete Ruggieri, going back to high school at Monsignor Bonner, and they played golf together,” Battista says. “Pete was a pro gambler like me, and we were friends for years. Jack always wanted to know what football games Pete was on because he knew Pete was sharp. Well, Jack used to play golf with Pete and would use Pete to get his sports bets down; Pete was Jack’s agent. In 2003, Jack was betting NBA games for two thousand dollars per game, but started betting some games for five thousand, and those five grand games were crushing .” For pro gamblers, such curiosities typically don’t go unnoticed, much less without further inspection.

  “It didn’t take us long to figure out what was going on once we looked into those games—they were games Timmy Donaghy was reffing,” Battista says. “Nothing was ever spoken between Jack and Pete about Timmy, but Pete and I just put two and two together. We knew that Jack and Timmy were friends, so we figured that Jack had some arrangement with Timmy. We couldn’t fucking believe it. Here we were, professional gamblers, being provided with an NBA referee’s picks on the games he was reffing! So, we started copying Jack’s bets on games Timmy was reffing, and we did that for about thirty games that year. Pete and I gave Timmy a nickname, “Bingo,” and when Pete would call down it was me asking Pete, ‘Who is Bingo on tonight?’ Timmy had no idea Pete and I knew what he was doing, and neither did Jack.” As for Concannon’s wagers on games Donaghy officiated, Battista excitedly says, “Timmy’s picks were great. In fact, I started calling Timmy ‘Elvis’ because he was The King. He was unbelievable .”