Gaming the Game Read online

  THE MARKET

  “I controlled a large part of the market. I knew what the sharpest handicappers were doing,” Battista says. “These weren’t like those fucking shitheads out in Vegas with their bullshit tout services. The guys I moved games for, they were the big swinging dicks of the sports gambling industry. They’d say, ‘Go get me half a million a game,’ or ‘I need three hundred thousand a game,’ or whatever. That was the true money. It wasn’t like they were appearing on a bullshit sports syndicate show every weekend saying, ‘Well, I’m going with so and so.’

  “I knew I had the information—the right sides and the right numbers on the games—but you still needed to have the people to get big money down and to get it down with people who would pay. I had outs at a bunch of places online, a bunch out in Vegas, all over the world. Online sportsbooks would usually only take a hundred grand a game, and my thing was to make deals with Vegas books and local stores to get down on the games in fifties, forties, thirties, and twenties, and others for even less. I was routinely meeting people in Vegas, meeting people in New York, in Alabama, in Florida.

  “I used to hope I would lose around twenty thousand dollars to bookmakers, so they would see that I paid—my money was good. I knew that in a few months time, I was gonna take them for ten times that amount. There was a bookmaker in Philadelphia—I was betting him for about five thousand a game. I lost thirty-two thousand dollars to him in the first three weeks. A few weeks later, he paid me four hundred and forty thousand dollars and said, ‘I don’t know what you did. I never saw someone who would take twelve games a day and consistently go eight-and-four, seven-and-five.’ That is how strong the information was from my handicappers on college and pro football, baseball, and basketball. I would find guys who were taking between one and five thousand a game. It was going to be over for them in a matter of time, and they didn’t even know it. They were like, ‘This guy’s paying me. He owes me twenty-five grand and bang, he pays.’ I’d tell them, ‘Remember this when I win. I want it back right away.’

  “The new casinos in Las Vegas were so corporate and, even though they kept their sportsbooks, they didn’t take big numbers anymore. They would take five or ten thousand dollars from a sharp guy, and let a big spending sucker bet fifty or a hundred grand because they knew he couldn’t pick his nose. They needed those big spenders to pay for people like me and the guys I worked with and for all those years. The Computer used to use big-time celebrities, especially actors, to bet for him in the casinos. One time there was a movie producer who made two-point-eight million betting college and pro football in one weekend, and the sportsbook manager refused to pay him because he was convinced The Computer was behind his bets—and he was right!

  “I had two crews out in Vegas running around getting numbers in casinos like the South Coast and the Gold Coast. The smaller casinos took bigger bets than most of the larger casinos. They were monsters, and would take fifty to a hundred thousand, whereas the Mirage or Caesar’s would only take ten or twenty. They had so much action coming in that they could offset our bets.”

  MONEY MATTERS

  On Keeping Records Of Betting Transactions

  “When I moved for the four guys, they gave me a straight percentage of the volume of placed bets—win, lose, or draw,” Battista says. “These were guys who bet a few hundred thousand per game, easy. Twice a year they had to pay me a percentage of their earnings. I also bet a little on my own. I wrote most of my bets on three-by-five index cards. I also used some triple-ply forms in case I had to split up the work. I never put stuff on the computer if I didn’t have to. I had two shredders at home, and once all the bets had cleared, I would shred everything. It was a pain in the ass, but it was worth it. Joe Vito thought I was crazy, but there was no way I was putting all that I was doing on hard drives. These were not little figures. The government would have been very interested in that sort of stuff, and I was never going to take that risk.

  “When you used to bet offshore before computers, everything on the phone was recorded. So, if there was a dispute, you could pull the tape. I used to always have them repeat my bet back to me so there were no problems. Also, my voice was so well known that people would say, ‘Sheep is on the phone.’ They knew who I was, and there was a mutual trust for the most part. Even if there was a misunderstanding, all the offshore stores had claims departments, and you could call and have them pull up the tapes. There were times where an offshore book would have a new clerk who would take a thirty thousand dollar bet from me, let’s say. Well, the clerk would hang up and be asked by a superior about who had just placed the bet. When the clerk would say, ‘Sheep,’ the manager or whoever it was would scream, ‘What?! Call that fucker back and tell him he can have three thousand, that’s it!’ And I’d say, ‘No fucking way! The clerk took the bet. Pull the tape. You honor the bet!’ As time went on and people started betting online, there was no debate about what or when you bet.

  On Moving Money

  “Moving money within the U.S. meant moving cash,’ Battista says. “At least twice a week, I was traveling somewhere to pick up or drop off money, usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I wasn’t going to stop if I was carrying money, which always went under my seat. There were two things under my seat: the money and my ‘piss cup,’ which was actually one of those things they place beside your hospital bed. Any trip involving money was planned so that I wouldn’t have to stop, and that included having food, snacks, soda, and water in the car. If you stopped, you were taking too much of a chance in my eyes, leaving that kind of money in the car. Also, you didn’t want to put yourself in a position to get robbed. Keep in mind that most of those trips were at night because I was working during the day. I always used my beat-up old minivan, and if I had the money with me I never sped.

  “If I went somewhere and was bringing back two hundred and fifty thousand dollars or more, I always had somebody along for protection. I used the guy Mike Rinnier hired years prior to run security for his supermarkets, and I would pay him depending on where I was going and how long it was. On the rare occasions we were really concerned about safety picking up money, especially down in Atlantic City if we thought some mobsters might be looking to rob us, two of us would meet in a casino bathroom where the person who picked up the money would pass it under the stall to me, and we’d go our separate ways. That way, if my partner was being set up, I’d be long gone with the money.

  “The biggest thing about big-time sports betting is being able to hide the money being moved around. There are certain offshore sportsbooks that have their own banking systems. One of them was Paramount, down in Curacao. They were interconnected with banking that was done offshore. So, you could have millions in your accounts, and do transfers from client to client. Paramount had such a stronghold on the U.S. sports gambling market. They had to control at least sixty percent of it. They started in the late 1990s and were The Godfather of the sports gambling industry. They took action online or on the phone, and they took the biggest bets. For every big-time bettor, there had to be an agent. An agent would put a customer [the bettor] into Paramount, and stand for the money. As long as you were on the ‘ins’ with these guys, you could move money anywhere you wanted.

  “Harry was the main guy at Paramount, and was one of five partners who owned it. Well, Harry was good friends with Joe Vito, and Joe was Paramount’s agent on the East Coast, for Philly and New York. They also had guys down South, in Florida, and out West, in Nevada, which we always called ‘the desert.’ Their network was so good that you could move money anywhere in the U.S., and to Asia, Taiwan, Europe, anywhere you wanted. The agents would get paid a percentage of the money they were being asked to move. The guy out West got busted for being an agent a month before I was arrested, and the authorities took in more than a hundred and twenty-five million dollars between a bunch of places in Arizona.

  “In the late 1990s, an associate of mine needed to move a million-and-a-half back home from the desert. He rented a ca
r in Vegas, and was driving on I-70 in Kansas when he was stopped doing ninety miles an hour listening to Bon Jovi’s ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’! Well, he forgot his license in Las Vegas, and they found five hundred thousand in the car. They told him if he could provide the winning bet tickets for all the cash, he could get the money back. They offered him a third of it back if he couldn’t, and that’s all he could do. Just moving money on the streets, getting a percentage of what needs to be moved, guys were making one to two million a year.

  “If you had the right clout and you had been around long enough, you had your own banking system and could transfer all kinds of money. I am talking zillions of dollars were moved this way on a daily basis. New York, Vegas, and Florida were the triangle of Paramount’s agent network in the States. A lot of times you’d hear there was no money in the desert or that the desert was dry. That was because it was easy to get money to New York from all over the East Coast, but getting out to Las Vegas was a pain in the ass. There was so much more action on the East Coast and it wasn’t that dangerous driving cash from, say, Philly to Atlantic City or to New York. There were plenty of bettors who didn’t like dealing in Florida because there was so much drug and crime stuff going on down there, and people didn’t want to take the risk of picking up a load of money there.

  “If a big-time bettor had a rare bad week, and, for example, lost a million-three to an offshore sportsbook like Paramount, here is how that might have been handled. The bettor would tell the sportsbook he had three hundred grand in cash in New York, and a mover would be sent to get the money and hold it on behalf of the sportsbook. The same thing would happen, say, in Vegas or California, where movers would be holding another five hundred thousand total out there for the sports-book. Then, the bettor may have a mover do a client transfer of the remaining half-million from the bettor’s account to the sportsbook. The sportsbook wouldn’t get their hands on all the money right away, or at the same time.

  “Once the money was in one of the offshore books, they had their own internal banking systems where they could transfer money between accounts, between clients, and between other books. That’s part of the reason why the U.S. government was so interested in what was going on down there because you can see how people who aren’t gamblers, like drug dealers and terrorists, would want to use the sportsbooks to launder money.”

  On “Settling”

  “Most bookmakers at ‘Mom and Pop’ stores made people settle every week, usually on Tuesdays,” Battista says. “They might have let serious bettors settle up once a month or agree to a settlement figure. For instance, the bookmaker might have allowed someone to bet for weeks or months until he owed the bookmaker ten thousand dollars or vice-versa. Most local sportsbooks would let you bet on credit. Now, if you bet a big book out in Vegas or offshore, they usually required you to have money in an account. If you were betting in Vegas, you were actually betting in cash. If you took the Pittsburgh Steelers minus four for ten grand, you gave them eleven thousand in cash to place the bet, and they’d give you a ticket. If the Steelers won by more than four points, you gave them your ticket and they’d give you twenty-one thousand dollars.

  “Back when The Animals first started betting offshore before those books really knew us, we’d have to post money into accounts. Regular customers [i.e., not pro gamblers] would have to sign up online, pick a code name and a password, and tell the sportsbook how they were going to put the start-up money in their account. Back then, they’d take money from credit cards, certified check, bank transfer, PayPal, and Neteller. For regular bettors, the offshore sportsbook would credit successful bettors’ credit cards or send people checks, whatever. If you were invited to be in the ‘elevator club,’ so to speak, meaning if they knew you were going to be betting big money and were good for it, you were dealt with entirely differently.

  “The only option of getting paid if you were betting hundreds of thousands of dollars was to work with an offshore agent. Agents would usually have settlement figures of five hundred thousand dollars, but some would settle at as little as two hundred grand. Others would settle every week, regardless of how much you made or owed. Every agent cut different deals with his clients. For instance, you might have an agent call a gambler on a Monday and say, ‘Okay. I owe you seven hundred and eighty grand this week, but you had an outstanding balance of one twenty-five from last week, so your balance is six hundred and fifty-five thousand.’ The gambler might then tell the agent, ’Great. Carry one-fifty-five and put the rest in my Paramount account,’ or he might say, ‘Carry one-fifty-five and put two hundred in Florida, put a hundred in the desert, and let me pick up two hundred in Philadelphia.’

  “Typically, gamblers would leave at least twenty percent of their earnings with the sportsbook so that they wouldn’t have to meet with the agents. The idea was to spread the rest around to the other parts of the country because you never knew where you’d need or want to cash out. In that club, that’s how it worked. Almost all of those transactions were done in cash. You usually settled with your agents on Tuesdays, after you assessed everything from the weekend and talked to the agents on Monday.”

  On Paying Taxes

  “Mike Rinnier was the one who taught me,” Battista says, “‘You never stiff Uncle Sam. You always pay your taxes.’ I have a record of showing that every time I got busted, it says that I claimed being a professional gambler and that I paid taxes on my earnings. Pro gamblers usually show checks coming in from sportsbooks for winnings, and checks out to sportsbooks for losses. What people don’t seem to understand is that even in good years you have stiffs and losses. When I lost money many years ago, I still claimed I won five grand just to keep the government happy.”

  LIFESTYLE

  “I was so busy with work that I didn’t go on vacation with my wife and kids unless we were going to Vegas. Anytime there were events or holidays, Denise and the kids would go without me. I’d be home on the computer betting. My life centered around that computer and those phones at the expense of my family. I’d get done betting at ten-thirty at night and then spend the rest of the time before going to bed watching games I bet. I used to justify what I was doing by saying to my wife, ‘I work like this to provide for you and the kids. You can do whatever you want to do, buy whatever you want to buy.’

  “Things got real stressful working seventy hours a week moving for people, making sure I destroyed the phones and stuff like that, moving from place to place so I didn’t get caught, but without forgetting to do this and that. What little time there was after all of this I spent with my wife and kids. The thing was, you were always hearing about this or that guy getting picked up and you were worried about them ratting you out. I had already been arrested twice years ago and didn’t want to get caught again.”

  None of Battista’s clients worked more than one or two sports in earnest, if for no other reason than they couldn’t handle the grind for longer periods of time. The Sheep was not as fortunate, however, because collectively his clients worked every sport and thus he operated year-round. “People like The Computer and Zorba have ‘betting seasons’ because when you’re gambling around the clock you need the break,” Battista says. “Gamblers that work all year round get fried. Well, I was getting fried—mentally and physically. For example, to work baseball from openers in the morning to the afternoon games to the night games and then the ten o’clock West Coast games, you were fucking spent by the end of the day. Then, you had to get up the next day and start all over again. The thing was, you had to be in the chair. You had to be in front of the computer because there were earners there that you didn’t want to miss. It was the same thing during football season, where on a Sunday morning I was in the chair at eight and wouldn’t get done until half-time of the Sunday night game at like eleven o’clock. You had to be there all the time . I used to actually pay people to sit in front of the computer if I had to go run an errand or pick up my kids from school or something, so that if a line changed I wouldn’t miss
it.

  “If I had stayed with just The Chinaman, I could have handled it. I really needed an assistant to handle the other guys. No one person could have handled what I was trying to do. I had the best computers, the best setup, the best phones—everything—but it was all too much. I don’t think I did what I did out of greed. I didn’t seek any of those guys out. They each came to me, and I just couldn’t say no. As everything got out of control, probably around fall of 2004, I started using more and more pills. Tommy introduced me to OxyContin right before the Eagles-Patriots Super Bowl, and after that I was using them all the time. Even though I was used to Percocets and Vicodin, OxyContin was so different and so much stronger than anything I had ever taken before. I was eating pills like crazy before I started using Oxys. I used to eat four or five Percocets at a time and now I could just take one OxyContin. The amount of pills I swallowed before then was unbelievable.”

  THE BIG PICTURE

  “I dressed like a slob, always wore a baseball cap, never wore jewelry,” Battista says. “I wasn’t flashy. Mike Rinnier always drilled into our heads that you didn’t want to draw attention to yourself. You wanted to be as far under the radar as possible. In my business, you couldn’t have a personality that wanted glory. You wanted to win, of course, but you didn’t want anyone to know what you were betting. If people caught wind of what I was betting, it bothered me. Sometimes you didn’t want the lines to move and if people found out what I was betting, it would cause problems. People always wanted to know who the world’s top guys were on, but I didn’t want people to know because that meant I would make less. I wanted my hand controlling the market without anyone knowing about it. As soon as some people in the business find out what you’re doing, they cut your limits back, and you can’t do this and can’t do that. The less people knew, the more money you made. Part of my success was because I didn’t oversell myself. I wasn’t anywhere near as sharp as the guys I worked with and for. But, I’d work my balls off, keep my business to myself, and make sure everybody got paid.