Chauncy & the FBI

Chauncey Billups. (Blake Benard)

The boss is a big fan of the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team, so we noticed when the FBI arrested Chauncy Billups, the head coach of the Blazers, on accusations of gambling.

It sounded a little off to me. Near as I can tell all these games were private, they weren't held in any licensed venues, like a casino, which makes me wonder why they are any of the FBI's business in the first place. Further, it strikes me that someone who is playing poker with people he doesn't know is a mark looking to get fleeced.

Then I picked up a copy of Willamette Week in a coffee shop down in South Waterfront this morning, and found this story:

Waiting On the Flop by Anthony Effinger

The federal case against Chauncey Billups look flimsy to criminal lawyers. 

Wherein I found this little tidbit: 

"They are playing in an illegal poker game," the [New York criminal defense] lawyer, also a former Federal prosecutor, said. "There's a certain Caveat Emptor that comes with that."

All in all it sounds a like a big power play. The Feds want to bust some Mafia big shots, but the only thing they've got is this gambling scam. Well, remember how they got Al Capone - Income Tax evasion. So that might what they are doing here. Chauncy apparently had little to no actual involvement with this scam, but he ranks highest on the celebrity scale, so they put his name front and center in all their announcements to the media.

P. S. Previous post that mentions Chauncy.

High Tech Cheating

Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups during the teams first game on Wednesday. AP

I was happily floating along in the dream-like world that the NBA portrays, so this story surprised me:

Insane Mafia-Linked NBA Gambling Scandal Erupts; Terry Rozier, Chauncey Billups Arrested Among Dozens Of Alleged Riggers

In the middle of the story about all the criminals and their criminal activity, there is this description that sounds like something out of a Mission: Impossible movie:

According to the FBI, the alleged fraud included self-shuffling machines that had "been secretly altered in order to read the cards on the deck, predict which player on the table had the best poker hand, and relay the information to an offsite operator," said Nocella, adding "The offsite operator sent the information via cell phone back to a co-conspirator at the table and that person at the table was known as the 'quarterback.' The 'quarterback' then signaled secretly the information he had received to others at the table and together they used that information in order to win their games and to cheat the victims."

The scheme also allegedly used poker chip tray analyzers, special contact lenses or glasses that can read pre-marked cards, and an X-ray table that can read face down cards on the table. 

I guess all those Netflix shows about murder investigations that end up pointing to corruption at the highest levels of society are actually true stories, they've just changed the names to protect the guilty.

Lottery

Oregon Lottery

Just completed a phone survey about gambling. It was kind of obnoxious. The lady claimed she needed to read all of the questions in order to maintain the validity of the survey, or something. There were a few questions about me, but the bulk of the questions were about gambling, and most of those questions were about the Oregon Lottery, which apparently has about a zillion different ways to suck money out of your wallet. The lady asks about each game individually and after we've gone through umpteen games I was getting a little annoyed at having to keep answering 'no'. I was also a little bemused that there were so many games. I'm a little curious as to who was conducting the survey, but right now I think it was part of an advertising campaign for the Oregon Lottery. I mean, gee wilikers, look at all these games they have! You should play one.

Wrong Side of the Tracks - Netflix Series

Trailer - Entrevías [TEMPORADA 4, FINAL] (TeleCinco) | HD
Pack TV 2

Season 4 and all our whack-a-doodle characters are back. At the end of season 3, Irene, the adopted daughter of Jimena, dies. Six months later her death is still having an impact on the family. It shows up in different ways. The old man, Tiros, is finally emerging from his room. His son Santi has developed a serious gambling problem. Jimena, his normally rational, pragmatic daughter leads a protest that attacks the police. Nelson, Irene's teenage husband gets arrested for hitting a cop during that protest. Tiros finds out he has a 'mass' growing inside his head. Gladys finds out that while she can run the day-to-day operation of the bar, she is not a business woman and the bar is in trouble. Fortunately, Pepe, the previous bar owner, has returned from a six month vacation in Cadiz.

Then there's the cops:

• Ezequiel, the street-wise detective who resembles a bum.
• Amanda, the attractive, lesbian department head who is married to Jimena.
• Camilla, the new, cute recruit, paired up with Ezequiel.
• Rene, a new guy representing big business interests. Turns out he is Glady's ex-husband and Nelson's father. He is also a minister of a small church who happens to offer counseling to gambling addicts like Santi. He is totally suspicious, but he might turn out to actually be good guy. Then again, maybe not.

Let's not forget Sanchis. Near as I can make out, Pepe and Sanchis were soldiers under Tiros command and are all still devoted to each other. Sanchis has a bit of drug habit, but he can still be effective in certain high-stakes situations.

Dulce is the kickboxing young woman leading a gang.

Previous posts about this show:

• 2022 post
• 2023 post

Lottery

Quick.
Chris Kohler

A few weeks ago me and me gang were eating lunch at Walter Mitty's and a woman came up to our table and gave us each a $1 game ticket. Something about hourly drawings and if your number comes up you win $5. A couple minutes later the clock hit one o'clock and the TV playing in the corner above the bar announced this hour's number. None of us won. You realize that the lottery is a scam designed solely to suck money our of your wallet, right?

After watching this video the other day, I got to thinking about the lottery, or rather lotteries in general. And then I saw this one.

So I'm thinking that maybe instead of offering one prize of a hundred million dollars they offer 10,000 prizes of $10,000. Maybe that would do some good. Or maybe it doesn't make any difference, Maybe people who play the lottery haven't got any sense, and they guy in the video is right.

Curious Lock

[1452] Help Me Identify This Bizarre Lock
LockPickingLawyer

YouTube commenters quickly identified it as a lock for a bookmakers/runners betting slip clock bag. It was used for bets on horse races to prevent any bets from being placed after the race had started. From the complexity of the mechanism it would seem that bookmakers are even more paranoid than banks. Guess I can't blame them.

Molly's Game

Molly's Game | Official Trailer | Own it Now on Digital HD, Blu-ray™ & DVD
A very great story. Molly Bloom was an Olympic class skier until she had an accident and through an odd chain of circumstances, she ends up hosting poker games. I don't really understand the attraction of gambling myself. I played poker at a friend's house a few times when I lived in Houston, but for me the cards were just excuse to hang out with my friends and drink beer.

The best part of the show was just the idea of people playing poker for those kind of stakes (think of some big number, it doesn't matter if it's accurate, there's probably someone who bet it). If I think about it, there must be a few people who do it, and maybe I just don't hang with those people. I wonder if there is some fundamental difference and what that difference might be. Or maybe it's just that some people like to gamble, and some people don't.

Still, I'm thinking there might be a hundred thousand people in the country who could afford to play in those games, people for whom losing $10K would be no more than a minor annoyance. Of course not every one who has ten million dollars is a dedicated poker player, and a dedicated poker player might very well buy his way into a $10K game with his last $10K.

Molly is a dynamo. No nonsense, straight shooter, straight to the point. She is so direct it's almost painful.

Kentucky Derby

Kentucky Derby 2019 (FULL RACE) ends in historic controversial finish | NBC Sports
Maximum Security won the race, but then somebody cried "foul", and then Country House was declared the winner. I watched this video a couple of times and I fail to see what the big stink is about. It's a horse race, fer cryin out loud. But then I'm not an expert, and I don't have a gazillion dollars riding on the outcome. I fully expect lawyers to get involved, which means we're going to be hearing about this for months.

I like horses, not enough to spend any time or money on them, but I like them. They are kind of like big, dumb dogs. I've ridden a couple of times and I've been to a rodeo or two, but I don't think I've ever been to a horse race.

A post by Borepatch got me onto this.

Oriental Trading

Iaman dug up a story from 2009 in the The Wall Street Journal about one Terrance Wantanabe, owner and heir of the Oriental Trading company, and how he lost $127 million in one year gambling in Las Vegas. Talk about going down in flames. Iaman reaches into the wayback machine and pulls out this recollection from 2002:

While working at Pitney Bowes, I visited a customer near the office in Omaha, the Oriental Trading Company office (OT). It was a odd business, huge corrugated steel building full of collapsing cardboard packages from China, messy, dirty, a couple employees running frantically ragged. No wonder his employees received starvation wages, I've never seen such dilapidated cars as those in the OT employee's parking lot.

Oriental Trading has expanded. They now have three buildings in the Omaha area. Below are images from Google Maps, all using the same scale. You can see how they have grown.

This building is 750,000 square feet which is 17 acres. The site is 120 acres.

They import gimcracks and geegaws, the kinds of trinkets they give away as prizes at the midway games at carnivals.

The company has changed hands several times in the last few years:

• 2000 Terrance Watanabe sold Oriental Trading to Brentwood Associates
• 2006 Brentwood sold it to the Carlyle Group for $1 billion. 
• 2010 Oriental Trading files for bankruptcy. 
• 2011 K.K.R. bought a portion of the company's debt. 
• 2012 They sold it  to Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway for $500 million.

Gambling with Venture Capital

I was talking to a guy at DevSIG a week or so ago, and he was lamenting the state of venture capital. He was telling me that the average return on venture capital investments since the year 2000 was about 2%. With those kind of numbers, who is even going to consider putting any money into a new venture?

What you have to realize is that venture capital has more in common with gambling than it does with prudent investing. You know those warnings that come with every advertisement for the lottery? (Maybe you don't, maybe that's an Oregon only thing). Every time an ad comes on for "Power Ball" or "Scratch Its" or whatever, they always close the ad by saying:

“Lottery games are based on chance, should be played for entertainment only and should not be played for investment purposes.”

This is similar to the logic saying that venture capital is not for everybody. And it's true. Venture Capital guys are not looking to make a nice reliable 5 or 10 percent return on their money. They are looking for the next big score: cell phones, iPods, Blackberries. They are willing to gamble millions of dollars on somebody's big idea IF they can imagine it being a tremendous success and earning billions of dollars. If they bet wrong and all their money vanishes occasionally, that's okay, that's the way ball bounces. Maybe the next one will hit it big. So they keep coming back, looking for that one deal in a million that's going to be the breakaway hit of the year.

Every movie is made like this. Someone sells the concept, someone puts up the money (20 million on black to win), a crew goes to work and puts the story on film. Once it's in the can, you sit back and chew your fingernails until the first gross receipt numbers come in. Then it's Champagne (if you backed a winner) or beer (to cry in if you didn't).