Authors: Beth Raymer
“Still as gullible, I see.”
“I missed you,” I said.
He put Jyrki back into his hamster hotel and shut the miniature door.
“Say you missed me too,” I said.
“I missed you too,” he said. “Friends?”
I placed a pillow on top of my nose and hugged it to my face. Any way I could keep him in my life, I would. If it meant being friends, so be it. “Whatever,” I said.
When we arrived at the Miami airport and checked in for our flight, Dink really did have to show his felony card to the attendant behind the counter. The expression on her face changed as she read the words: “Donald Dershowitz, Convicted Felon.”
“Thank you, sir,” the woman stammered, returning the card.
I snatched it from her hand before Dink could take it back. It was the size of a business card and as pink as a valentine. I slipped it into my back pocket, for a keepsake.
Disco blared from the cabs and electronics stores. Skinny drug dealers in tight jeans roller-skated around the main square, selling joints. Two-door Datsuns with flame decals on their hoods spewed exhaust onto the narrow streets. Our cabbie didn’t bother to stop for pedestrians.
Dink hardly fit into the taxi. He pinched his nose to avoid the fumes. “We’re headed for the eighties,” he hollered nasally over the driver’s Bee Gees tape. “I can’t do it again.”
There were no street signs or addresses in Costa Rica. Directions were given in relation to landmarks, some of which had been destroyed by earthquakes long ago. Thankfully, Big Tim, our sportsbook tour guide in the passenger seat, knew where to take us. Big Tim used to work for Dink in Vegas. But in 1997, when online sports books began popping up in the Caribbean and Central America, he headed south in search of employment. We picked him up at the Hotel Del Rey, which Fodor’s travel guide described as “the city’s most notorious gambling establishment … swarms with prostitutes … avoid it.” But to Big Tim, who rented a room there by the month, the Del Rey was home.
I leaned back against the headrest and inhaled the smell of
burning trash. Though it was common knowledge that there were about three hundred Internet gambling parlors operating outside the United States, the practical details of the insular world remained a mystery. Dink and I had no idea what to expect. En route, Tim briefed us. Other countries, Antigua, Australia, Curaçao, and the Isle of Man, were also friendly to online gambling. But none of them could compete with Costa Rica, which combined low startup costs with reliable telephone and Internet service. In San José, office space was cheap and abundant, as were bilingual employees willing to quit their jobs as dentists and teachers to work for four dollars an hour sitting in front of a computer screen, taking bets from moody gamblers. Government fees and licenses, if one bothered to apply, cost less than eight thousand dollars, compared to the six-figure sums needed to open in the Caribbean. The Isle of Man had the misfortune of being situated in the dreary climes of the Irish Sea, and Australia was too far away. Costa Rica, conveniently located in the same time zone as Chicago, could be reached in three hours from Miami, Houston, and Atlanta. Going home was no problem; but why would a gambler want to? Prostitution was legal and McDonald’s delivered.
Stocky goons armed with machine guns motioned our car through the sports book’s gate. Surveillance cameras followed us from the parking lot to the receptionist’s desk, up the elevator, and along the hallway, where more armed guards stood one after the other.
Inside, the betting floor resembled your typical offshore call center if it were designed for a porn film. Just-out-of-college Latinas in tube tops, miniskirts, and platform heels sat cross-legged behind computer screens.
“Me-jammy
Heat, game two twenty-four, minus six,” they enunciated into the microphones of their headsets. Between calls they brushed their long hair and applied fruit-flavored lip gloss. The few male employees took up seats in the far back row, beside the foosball table. The nonstop ringing of telephones and clerks confirming bets ranging from ten dollars to ten thousand dollars sounded the book’s success.
Beeber, a red-faced American in his forties, ran the place. He sat
at a metal desk in a back office enclosed in bulletproof glass. Dink knocked on the glass, interrupting the animated conversation Beeber was having with himself. His bodyguard stood at his side. Beeber had no patience with small talk. If Dink was serious about opening up offshore, he said, wiping sweat from his sideburns, he ought to know a few things going in. First and foremost, there had been some kidnappings. American bookmakers and their families had been kidnapped and held for ransom. It was wise to have bodyguards. Ex-policemen made for excellent protection. They could also help get you a gun. You should be packed at all times. Second, the electricity went out constantly and employees were never on time. Many of them had drug problems. If you had high blood pressure,
Fuggetaboudit
. Extortion attacks, another major problem. Russian computer hackers were sending e-mails threatening to take your Web site off-line the morning of the Super Bowl. You had to Western Union the cocksuckers forty grand to get them off your back. Not fun.
“I think he’s paranoid from doing too many drugs,” I whispered to Dink as Beeber and his bodyguard walked to the men’s room. “He’s got, like, specks of cocaine all over his face.”
“I think that’s dandruff,” Dink said. “I really don’t think the stuff he’s saying is that farfetched.”
“He sits behind bulletproof glass fifteen hours a day! Who does he think is gonna come gun him down? The dude across the street selling oranges from his oxcart?”
“Maybe he has poor relations with some bad people back east, who knows,” Dink said. “Save it ’til we leave. There’s cameras everywhere, people can probably hear what you’re saying.”
“Russian computer hackers?”
I whispered.
The second sports book we visited was a sleek four-floor operation that employed a thousand Costa Ricans and offered free on-site day care. There were no bulletproof windows or bodyguards in sight. Framed photographs of players from the New York Giants and a wedding picture of the bookie’s mother and father hung from his office walls. Leonard, the owner, seemed more levelheaded than Beeber. I asked about the Russian hackers.
“Well, we’re guessing they’re Russian; they asked that the money be wired to St. Petersburg,” said Leonard. But the hackers, in his opinion, should’ve been the least of anyone’s concerns. The biggest enemy was, still, the U.S. government, which did not approve of Costa Rica’s cozy relationship with the betting industry. Try as they might to escape the United States’ antigambling laws, offshore bookmakers still worried that the U.S. government would find ways to prosecute them. Bookmaking might be legal in Costa Rica, but the fact that most customers were American meant that, in the eyes of the United States, they could still be tried under American law. The specific law, the gambling community had recently found out, was U.S. Code Title 18, Section 1084, commonly known as the Wire Act. Born of then attorney general Robert Kennedy’s efforts to break the Mafia’s violent grip on American life, the 1961 law made it illegal to use phone wires to place bets across state and international lines. But it remained a matter of opinion whether the law could be applied to the highly unregulated world of the Internet. The bookmaker who would become involved in the precedent-setting case was a U.C. Berkeley graduate with a degree in nuclear engineering; a self-proclaimed “nice Jewish boy from Long Island” named Jay Cohen.
Everyone in the gambling world had heard of Jay Cohen and everyone shared the same worry: if they can bust Jay, they can bust anyone.
In 1996, Cohen was a twenty-eight-year-old options trader in San Francisco who figured that opening an Internet sports book would be good business but wasn’t sure it was legal. His lawyers didn’t see any problems provided all the company’s employees and bank accounts existed in a jurisdiction that allowed gambling. One year and six hundred thousand dollars later, Cohen and his partners moved to Antigua and launched World Sports Exchange. Soon, Cohen had two thousand customers and was booking as much as two hundred million dollars a year.
The rise of online gambling and the media attention it received angered social conservatives, who cautioned that the Internet made it too easy to turn into a degenerate gambler. No longer would you
have to go through the trouble of finding a bookie. If you felt the sudden urge to bet the Eagles two minutes before kickoff, you could do so from the privacy of your own home. You could “bet with the click of a mouse,” which was the very phrase World Sports Exchange used to advertise its services.
This didn’t make Las Vegas casinos and certain states very happy, either, since they were equally bent on protecting local gambling monopolies. Professional sports teams, though they relied on gambling to develop their audience, did not want to be associated with shady operations and threatened legal action against online gambling sites using their trademarked logos.
Jay Cohen probably would have survived the increased legal scrutiny surrounding online betting had he not made one mistake. He couldn’t resist speaking to the media. It was the sort of hubris that revealed his inexperience in the world he had taken by storm. Seasoned gamblers knew that even where their profession had the stamp of legality, such legitimacy was tenuous at best. Gambling was loathed by many and always under public scrutiny; it was best to keep a low profile. That’s why successful gamblers leased their cars, always paid in cash, and instructed their kids to say that Dad worked in “consulting.” You never knew when or how you would be pulled down.
Cohen, though, felt confident that his business was totally aboveboard, and he said so in the pages of
The Wall Street Journal
and
Sports Illustrated
and during prime time on
60 Minutes
. He explained that he modeled his business on another sports book, one that was completely legal and operated freely in New York State. This was Capital OTB, the off-track betting corporation that served as the state’s bookie for horse racing. And just like World Sports Exchange, Capital OTB took bets by phone from bettors anywhere in the United States. If Capital OTB was legal, how could WSE, doing the same thing, be illegal?
Cohen’s media crusade turned his brown eyes and baby fat into the public face of offshore Internet gambling. But once gambling had a face, the government had a target.
In 1998, the United States charged Cohen in a criminal complaint with violating the Wire Act. As Attorney General Janet Reno said at the time, summing up the government’s position: “You can’t go offshore and hide. You can’t go online and hide.”
Cohen did not view himself as some mobster in hiding. He was a law-abiding employer based in Antigua. The Wire Act did not apply. To prove his point, he returned to America to fight the charge, surrendering himself to FBI agents in New York City.
When the trial began, the government attacked Cohen’s arguments in straightforward terms. It wasn’t enough that his company operated wholly in Antigua. By using phone lines to book American customers, the company had clearly violated the Wire Act. Signaling its intent to establish a precedent, the government said it didn’t matter that the Wire Act only referred to phone lines, which had been the traditional means of getting down with your local bookie. Had the Internet existed in 1961 it too would have been included in the law.
Cohen was found guilty on eight counts of violating the Wire Act and sentenced to twenty-one months in prison. After losing his appeal, he served his time at Nellis prison camp in Nevada, twenty-five miles north of the Las Vegas Strip.
“And all that bullshit was before September eleventh,” Leonard said. “Now the government is propagandizing that bookmakers in Costa Rica may be funding terrorists. They’re saying there may be a link. That we may be wiring our winnings to Al-Qaeda. They’re using that as an excuse to shut us down.”
“The government’s retarded,” Dink said. “People were bookmakers in the United States. They were never anything
but
bookmakers. Then they made the laws too tough so the bookmakers moved to Costa Rica. And now the bookmakers are funding terrorists by taking some bet on the Cubs from a guy in Chicago?”
Congress, criminal complaints, prison camps: these were just abstract words to me. The money was what stuck. The two-hundred-thousand-dollar days; the fifteen-million-dollar months. The numbers these men were netting were as supersized as their chauffeur-driven
Hummers, eight-thousand-square-foot compounds, and Costa Rican girlfriends’ newly implanted double-D silicone breasts. House parties were thrown nearly every night. The beginning of baseball season, a finalized divorce: there was always a reason to celebrate.
The faint light of the moon led guests up a stone path to a bookmaker’s mountaintop estate. Hookers from the Del Rey dipped their toes into the heated infinity pool that overlooked three volcanoes. Friends visiting from the States snacked on the smorgasbord of sushi laid out around the teakwood deck. The air was cool, the plants and trees rain-rinsed. Lightning bugs flashed near the Jacuzzi where the bookmakers gathered. In velour tracksuits, sipping rum from highballs, they discussed the conversion of European hockey odds and rated each other’s fantasy basketball teams. The Costa Rican clerks—and their friends, siblings, cousins, and uncles—passed joints and took turns on a guitar. Arpeggios floated into the rustling mango trees until sunrise, when they yielded to birdsong.
After such a party, my enthusiasm soared. On hotel stationery I would list potential employees for Dink’s offshore headquarters. My dad would make an awesome sales manager. Newly single (Brenda Baby had broken his heart), he’d been looking to flee to a foreign country to escape alimony payments to my mother. During my parents’ marriage, my mom never had a job, a result of my father’s old-fashioned attitude. On the grounds that
she
left
him
, Dad refused to pay alimony, leaving Mom, at fifty years old, to support herself on a minimum-wage retail job. Mom raised my sister and me and I felt she deserved alimony. It was the only thing my father and I argued about. “You know I love you kids,” Dad was fond of saying when I confronted him about Mom’s situation. “I just don’t want to give your mother any money.” If I offered him a job at Dink Inc. International, I could give him a high salary, then dock his paycheck a couple hundred bucks and send my mom some of the payment she was entitled to. And if my sister ever got clean, she might be right for a clerical position. It would be a win-win situation for the entire Raymer family.