Online Casino Caught in Gambling Ring Bust
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Online Casino Caught in Gambling Ring Bust
7 Dec 2006
James Giordano, a leading online casino gambling kingpin, let his guard down on the night of a family wedding. This serious mistake brought his US 3.3 billion illegal gambling ring crashing down. On June 15th, 2006, Giordano, who usually didn’t leave his laptop out of his sight, did so that night in his Long Island hotel room. The laptop, which contained everything about his illegal online casino betting empire, was confiscated within three hours by the New York Police Department investigators. His online casinos profit-making business was in ruins.
‘This is the largest illegal gambling operation we have ever encountered,’ said Raymond Kelly, the Police Commissioner. The online casino gambling ring relied on a website which was different from the online casino betting operations targeted by recent legislation, the police explained. The entire scheme involved placing sports bets through bookies for all kinds of sports, and having those bookies assign bettors a secret code to track their bets and monitor point spreads and results through the restricted website.
Allegedly, the defendants laundered and stashed away ‘untold millions of dollars’ using bank accounts and shell corporations in the Caribbean, Central America, Switzerland, Hong Kong and elsewhere, said Richard Brown, Queens district attorney. The 27 members of the illegal online casino gambling ring were charged with enterprise corruption, promoting gambling, money laundering, and other counts. He said US 500 million dollars in assets were confiscated. Search warrants executed in several locations resulted in the seizure of online casino gambling records, hundreds of millions of dollars in property, and computers.
