For years, Alfonse M. D’Amato, the former Republican senator from New York, was the host at a Thursday evening poker game at his Capitol Hill office, playing with other lawmakers, staff members and lobbyists late into the night over pots that ranged from a few dollars to a few hundred.
Once New Yorkers collectively informed D’Amato that it was time to find a new line of work, he graduated to a higher-stakes game, playing with Howard Stern, among others. He is now a stalwart of a weekly game on Long Island where a bad night might mean that a player drops $5,000 or more.
As D’Amato tells it, and as his card-playing cronies confirm, he rarely leaves a game a loser. Yet it is a safe bet that his love of poker never proved so lucrative as it did last week, when he signed a lobbying deal with the Poker Players Alliance, a nascent group that hopes that D’Amato will help them become players in Washington politics, too.
Most immediately, the group is hoping that D’Amato, long known for his connections to Washington insiders and his ability to deliver perks to his constituents and interest groups, can help them overturn a new federal ban on Internet gambling–or at least exempt poker from its provisions.
“John Smith, maybe he doesn’t have the financial means or the ability” to travel to a casino, D’Amato said, gesturing with his hands and speaking volubly in his trademark accent. “The poor guy at home can’t bet $50 because we pass this law.”
The first big assault on poker players came in October when President Bush signed a bill aimed at online gambling by making it a crime to use credit cards or online payment systems for poker and other online casino games and sports betting conducted over the Internet. The law did not make it impossible or illegal for Americans to bet online, but it did make it trickier for players to get their cash to the offshore casinos that run the Internet sites.
“I think it’s fair to say that most poker players see themselves as nonpolitical,” said Walt Thiessen, 49, an entrepreneur from Warrenton, Va., who recently joined the alliance. “But the more that the government does to impede poker players, the more angry and frustrated they’re going to become.”
The booming popularity of poker has spawned any number of cable television shows and made media figures of professionals like Chris Moneymaker and Daniel Negreanu. Tens of millions of Americans play, primarily in home games but also at casinos, legal and illegal card rooms, and at scores of Web sites.
So perhaps it was inevitable that poker enthusiasts would assert themselves as another special interest demanding to be heard in Washington. The Poker Players Alliance, which says it has more than 160,000 members, most paying at least $20 to join the group, will open an office in Washington in the next two months “to oversee our political efforts there,” the group’s president, Michael Bolcerek, said. It hopes to build a grassroots organization whose political presence is felt in all 50 states, he said.
Moreover, D’Amato, for all his ability to attract attention and parlay his reputation into big money, may not have much sway in a Democratic-controlled Congress preoccupied with war, budget deficits and presidential politics. There is little interest there at the moment in turning back to a subject decided a year ago, when Republicans ruled.
D’Amato and his backers, said I. Nelson Rose, law professor at Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa, Calif., and an expert on gambling law, “think they have a pair of queens. But what have they really got? They don’t even have a pair.”
Still, former Representative Jim Leach, an Iowa Republican and one of the authors of the Internet gambling ban, said that D’Amato certainly added heft to the effort.
“Don’t ever underestimate Al,” he said on hearing of D’Amato’s role.
Certainly, D’Amato’s poker buddies have learned that lesson. “He’s tenacious, he’s fearless and he’s aggressive,” said Gary Melius, the host of the Monday game where D’Amato is now a regular. “He’s also really good at reading people.”
A waste of resources?
Subtlety has never been D’Amato’s long suit, and he has already embraced his new role with characteristic fervor. During an interview in his offices in a high-rise on Park Avenue in Manhattan, D’Amato did not answer questions about online poker as much as filibuster on the issue.
To him the implications of prohibiting online poker are profound, touching on matters as wide ranging as the war on terrorism, national security, the rights of the elderly and the handicapped and equal protection under the law. At times, he pounded his desk to make his point.
The money being spent to outlaw poker and enforce the ban, D’Amato said, could be better spent “in the battle against money laundering, trafficking in drugs, or trafficking in terrorism.”
He takes issue with Congress’s decision to lump in poker, a game of skill as well as luck, with games of pure chance like roulette and craps. “It’s really a great sport,” D’Amato said, perhaps the country’s favorite sport. “You don’t have 70 million people participating in baseball.”
It is not clear that poker has 70 million players, either. (D’Amato’s source is a study commissioned by the poker association.)
But one of his trademark tactics is throwing around numbers that might or might not be considered, well, a bluff. He talks of the million players who have already joined the poker association–a misstatement that prompted his handler, presidential style, to clarify that what the former senator meant is that the group hoped one day soon to have that many names on its rolls.
After New York voters replaced D’Amato with Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat, in 1998, the former senator opened Park Strategies, a lobbying and corporate strategy firm whose client list includes banks, telecommunications companies and a few racetrack owners.
“I play as much now as I did before the ban.”
–Ethan Ruby, member, Poker Players Alliance He acknowledged that he did not understand the impulse that prompted a person to place a wager on a horse. But he spoke rhapsodically about the sense of community that poker has fostered in his life, and the banter, camaraderie and friendly competition that can make the game so engaging.
The intimacy of the game, in fact, produced some political headaches for D’Amato while he was chairman of the Senate Banking Committee after an article in The New York Times disclosed that he had invited lobbyists to play in his office. That gave extraordinary access, some charged, to those representing banks, securities firms and other financial institutions.
D’Amato has a different view, defending his activity as an innocent pastime that followed in the footsteps of President Harry S. Truman’s poker games with cronies. “It was a great way to while the time away–to have fun and talk politics,” he said.
Plenty of Americans are still playing poker online, if no longer at sites run by publicly traded companies, which fear reprisals from Washington despite being based overseas.
Instead, online players have shifted to smaller, privately owned sites. They are forced to find other means for transferring money in and out of their accounts, given that the new law more closely monitors financial institutions processing wagers.
“I play as much now as I did before the ban,” said Ethan Ruby, a member of the poker alliance who lives and works in Manhattan. Ruby said he simply took the money he had on account at PartyPoker, his old site, and transferred it to Full Tilt. He then linked his poker account to his checking account instead of a credit card.
“It’s a much more tedious process now,” Ruby said.
Still, it only took a few days. “You can’t cork this,” D’Amato said. “You can’t stop this through some silly bill.”
Online poker will only go further underground, he continued, providing an opening for unscrupulous foreign operators seeking to take advantage of the hunger of Americans to play poker.
“When you have regulation, where you have openness, you can ensure you have a game that won’t be unfairly cut or disadvantaged or manipulated,” D’Amato said. You can also tax the winnings of players whose ups and downs are tracked online, a figure the poker alliance puts potentially in the billions.
Rose, the law professor, while doubtful of the chances for the lobbying effort in the short run, said D’Amato and his backers would be well served in keeping the issue alive until there is more interest in the matter. “If they stay active the next two years,” he said, “then there could be a serious bill” to carve out an exception for poker.
Certainly, D’Amato has staying power.
“The later the game goes, the more Al is going to win,” said Larry Elovich, a Long Island lawyer who said he has been playing poker on and off with D’Amato for 50 years. “He has the ability to stay awake when the rest of the players are all tired.
Source: CNET

We should legalize sports betting in New Jersey. Simple as that.
There are some hurdles, however. For starters, according to some arcane federal law, only four states are currently allowed to offer sports betting — Nevada, Oregon, Montana, and Delaware.
Now, Nevada has Vegas, where nearly every casino operates a sports book. Oregon, up until a month ago, allowed limited NFL betting, and Montana also allows limited action at a handful of bars and taverns.
And Delaware? Well, it looks like they may be smartening up. A bill is being introduced in their legislature to allow a sports book to open at Dover Downs racetrack.
As for New Jersey, pushes for legalized betting have come and gone, though now, powerful state Sen. Ray Lesniak is planning on introducing a resolution that would take the issue to the United States Congress.
While that’s all well and good, I don’t think politicians have much say in the matter.
You ask me, there’s only two teams in this game: The casinos vs. the sports leagues.
The sports leagues simply do not want any more legalized sports betting.
“It would send two very bad messages,” NFL attorney Jay Moyer has previously told New Jersey officials, according to the AP. “One is that anything goes when it comes to raising revenues, and two, that gambling and sports are natural partners.”
Yeah, um, Mr. Moyer? You might want to get your head out of the sand, lest you suffocate.
First off, without betting, sports leagues would probably go belly up, especially the NFL. For every tried-and-true NFL fan, I bet there’s 100 who are only interested in the point spreads and fantasy stats.
And when it comes to “anything goes” and raising revenues, the answer to that is “Hell yes, anything goes.” And the money that could be raised with legalized sports betting is of budget-changing, property tax-lowering proportions.
Some stats, courtesy of Forbes: Vegas takes some $2.5 billion in sports bets each year. Figure a standard five percent “vig” (the cut the casino takes) and that’s $125 million into the casino’s pockets.
Now, while $2.5 billion is a lot, consider this number: $230 billion. That’s a best-guess estimate of what’s “illegally” bet in this great nation each year.
Now get this: Vegas, for all it’s charms, is still in the middle of the desert, and people have to fly to get there. Atlantic City, on the other hand? There’s 62 million people — 20 percent of the nation’s population — within a 300 mile radius.
Taking all these numbers one step further, if A.C. managed to score 20 percent of the $230 billion illegally bet each year, that would be $46 billion legally bet in our casinos. Take the five percent vig, and that’s $2.3 billion.
(And why would bettors choose A.C. over their current bookies? Because most illegal bookies charge a 10 percent vig. Simple as that.)
Now, the hard part: New Jersey must take half that $2.3 billion — just like Pennsylvania takes from it’s casinos — a far cry from the eight percent we now charge A.C. operators. So let’s call it an even billion into the state’s coffers.
One more step: There’s some 1.2 million property tax payers in the state. Do the math, and the resulting number — $833 — could go to each and every one of us.
(You can put your calculators away now.)
Granted, the numbers above are wildly best-case scenarios, but the fact remains: Sports betting is huge, denying it exists is foolish, and we’re wasting a golden opportunity to increase revenue.
Or, as Lesniak put it, “Why should millions of dollars go to Las Vegas, offshore casinos, and the mob?”
Good question.
Source: Trentonian

State-run gambling companies in the European Union may find it harder to defend their monopolies after Europe’s highest court lifted a barrier Italy used to keep out foreign competitors.
The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg today ruled Italy can’t use criminal law to stop gaming companies licensed in other EU nations, including the U.K.’s Stanley Leisure Plc, from taking bets in the country. A law barring publicly traded companies from obtaining licenses restricts “the freedom to provide services.”
State monopolies in France, Germany and other countries have been criticized by companies such as Ladbrokes Plc for blocking their cross-border online gaming business. Shares of providers such as Austrian Web bookmaker Bwin Interactive Entertainment AG surged after today’s court decision, which may remove some restrictions on the EU’s 50 billion-euro ($66 billion) industry.
“This is a step further toward a liberalization of the European gambling markets,” said Lode Van Den Hende, a lawyer in the Brussels office of Herbert Smith. “Overall this is very good now for the gaming operators. If this had gone against them they could have closed shop.”
A spokesman for Italy’s state monopoly, which oversees gaming in Italy, wasn’t immediately available to comment.
Liverpool Bets
Massimiliano Placanica and two other people who operated shops in Italy where people could place online bets with Stanley’s office in Liverpool, England, faced criminal charges under Italian law because Stanley didn’t have a local gaming license. Stanley argued its U.K. license should be recognized by all EU countries.
The court prohibited the use of criminal law in particular in cases where foreign betting companies were refused the required license by the country, as was the case for Stanley.
“The Italian criminal penalties for the collecting of bets by intermediaries acting on behalf of foreign companies are contrary,” to EU rules, an 11-judge panel of the court said.
The tribunal today left it to the national courts to decide whether by restricting the number of operators in the gaming and betting industry in the country, Italy was “genuinely” contributing to the goal of preventing crime.
`Landmark’ Decision
Stanley said it was a “landmark” decision that will put pressure on governments and the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm in Brussels, to end national protectionism.
“We think it’s time that the commission and national lawmakers act now to end this protectionism,” said Adrian Morris, deputy director-general of Stanley.
“This judgment is another step along the road to fairer competition in Europe,” Christopher Bell, chief executive of Ladbrokes, said in an e-mailed statement. “We have already seen Italy and Spain move to open up their betting markets and this judgment supports our view that the policies of many EU governments are inappropriate and disproportionate in restricting free and fair competition.”
Bwin said the decision was a “milestone toward the opening of the European gambling market.”
The commission last year started probing 10 EU countries including Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and France for discrimination by barring rivals from offering the same services as their state lotteries. They face being taken to the EU court depending on the outcome of the investigation.
Share Gains
Stock in Bwin, whose co-chief executive officers were detained for three days in September by French authorities, rose as much as 5.20 euros, or 21 percent, to 29.60 euros, heading for its biggest one-day gain in almost seven years. They traded at 28.49 euros as of 3:54 p.m. in Vienna.
Unibet advanced as much as 15.50 kronor, or 9.2 percent, to 183.5 kronor in Stockholm, the biggest jump since December 2005. The company sponsors a professional cycling team whose members were barred last month by the organizers of a French race from wearing uniforms that displayed Unibet’s Web site address.
Ladbrokes shares gained as much as 3.1 percent to 408.75 pence in London trading.
Sportingbet Plc, the online bookmaker that owns Paradise Poker, advanced as much as 4.25 pence, or 8.7 percent, to 53.25 pence in London. Gaming VC Holdings SA, a Web casino company that gets most of its sales from Germany and Austria, rose as much as 8 pence, or 7.8 percent, to 111 pence.
Questionable Effects
Still, lawyers including Quirino Mancini at Sinisi Ceschini Mancini and Partners in Rome said today’s decision may be limited to the circumstances in this case. The court focused on Stanley’s business, which “isn’t pure online betting,” he said.
“Those who will now claim this is a big ruling for the whole online betting industry may be wrong,” he said. Other bookmakers, including Bwin have a different model and may not directly benefit until another round of court proceedings.
The decision won’t have any effect on Germany’s state monopoly, said Friedhelm Repnik, spokesman for the association of the Lotto corporations, Germany’s lottery.
“The situation in Italy is a completely different,” he said. “They have a partially open market, here in Germany we have a clear state monopoly, whose central goal it is to prevent gambling addiction.”
The court has previously backed gaming monopolies if they’re designed to prevent gambling addiction, he said.
Italy had already opened up its gaming market by introducing new rules in July 2006, said Mancini. Three months later it offered 16,000 licenses, which “caused a major change in the whole gaming distribution network in Italy,” he said.
British operators Ladbrokes and William Hill Plc are just two non-Italian companies that got a license to set up betting shops in Italy, he said.
The case numbers are C-338/04, C-359/04, C-360/04 Procuratore della Repubblica v Massimiliano Placanica, Christian Palazzese and Angelo Sorrichio Placanica.
Source: Bloomsberg

Gary Kaplan used to throw lavish parties in Costa Rica and plaster the name of
his thriving online-gambling company on buses in New York. Now, the founder of
BetOnSports PLC and the multibillion-dollar industry he helped spawn are in
much-reduced circumstances — the man on the run, the industry in disarray.
Kaplan, 48, is a fugitive from a racketeering-conspiracy and fraud indictment
filed last year in U.S. District Court in St. Louis charging him with heading a
criminal enterprise that illegally took in more than $3.5 billion in wagers
since 2001.
Several colleagues of Kaplan also have been charged, including BetOnSports’
former chief executive, David Carruthers, who was arrested at the Dallas-Fort
Worth airport in July during a stopover on a flight from London to the
company’s headquarters in San Jose, Costa Rica. Carruthers and several others
charged in the case have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.
Kaplan’s whereabouts are unknown.
The Kaplan indictment is part of a broad federal crackdown in which executives
from other foreign online-gambling operations and credit-card processing
companies also have been indicted.
Last October, Congress passed a law banning almost all forms of online
gambling. Recently, the Justice Department served subpoenas for records on the
investment banks that helped BetOn­Sports and other online-gambling companies
raise money through public stock offerings.
Industry observers estimate that online wagering, which had hit about $12
billion a year, is down by as much as 50 percent. BetOnSports largely has
closed its operations. Federal authorities estimate that 98 percent of the
company’s business came from the United States.
The saga of BetOnSports and Gary Kaplan demonstrates how some online-gambling
sites rose fast and crashed hard by operating at, or beyond, the edge of the
law.
While Kaplan has a checkered background that includes run-ins with law
enforcement, he may have gotten as far as he did in part by surrounding himself
with executives like Carruthers, who came to BetOnSports with a mainstream
business background.
Before Kaplan became an international online gambling impresario, the native of
New York was a bookie and had been busted in 1993 by that state’s authorities
for running an illegal sports-betting operation, according to his indictment.
He moved to Florida, where he allegedly continued his bookmaking operation, and
then on to Aruba and Antigua before later finally settling in San Jose. The
Costa Rican capital, with light-handed gambling regulation and a ready work
force, began attracting other online betting operations.
Kaplan made a splash. He took over a nine-story office building in a
shopping-mall complex and outfitted it with a day-care center for workers’
children as well as luxurious suites and a rooftop pool for visiting high
rollers that BetOnSports sometimes flew in for huge galas.
Obsessed with security
BetOnSports’ headquarters also housed a shooting range — a reflection of
Kaplan’s fascination with guns and an obsession with personal security, say
people who know him. He, his wife and two children routinely traveled with
armed bodyguards.
The bodyguards were, at least in part, “an ego thing,” said Kenneth Weitzner,
founder of Eye on Gambling, a website that tracks Internet gambling.
Kaplan created the illusion that he thought went with a successful gambling
operation, said Weitzner, who visited Kaplan at his Costa Rican operation.
Another acquaintance called Kaplan “tough and intimidating.” In one tale, he
supposedly shot a computer monitor after BetOnSports lost big on a football
game.
As BetOnSports grew into one of the biggest online gambling companies, it tried
to move mainstream. Kaplan hired veteran gambling-industry executives, such as
Carruthers, who had worked for Ladbrokes PLC, a major British wagering company.
In 2004, BetOnSports had an initial public offering in London that raised about
$100 million and its stock was listed on a branch of the London Exchange.
Sites operated openly
While Internet gambling is legal in many countries, the U.S. long has contended
that it violated various federal statutes — even before the specific ban was
enacted last fall.
Federal officials made periodic efforts to attack online gambling, but the
companies often managed to operate relatively freely in the U.S. BetOnSports
was able to run U.S. marketing campaigns, including ads on 250 New York City
buses in 2003.
Even as the industry soared, federal agents were building criminal cases. Some
of BetOnSports’ “customers” in 2002 and 2003 turned out to be undercover
investigators gathering evidence for last year’s indictment.
BetOnSports’ name appeared in news reports in connection with a 2005 criminal
case filed by New York prosecutors against an allegedly mob-connected gambling
operation that was sending bets to an entity in BetOnSports’ headquarters in
San Jose.
In those reports, BetOnSports officials said the entity simply leased office
space and was evicted after the indictment. Bet­OnSports wasn’t charged in the
New York case.
Crackdown questioned
Some observers find the federal government’s crackdown on Internet gambling
curious, given the national explosion in casinos and lotteries in recent years.
These people wonder whether the initiative will backfire by pushing gamblers to
less-reputable operations.
The recent criminal cases and legislation are “an anti-consumer-protection
movement because they’re eliminating the most reputable publicly traded
companies,” said Nelson Rose, a law professor in California who is an expert on
gambling laws.
In recent years, BetOnSports and others, including some U.S. casino operators,
had lobbied Congress to legalize online gambling, arguing that it could then be
regulated and taxed.
As for Kaplan, he is being sought by U.S. and international law-enforcement
officials, including Interpol, whose website carries a “wanted” poster for him.
Although his home was in Costa Rica, some believe he has left that country. One
rumor has him and his family in Israel, there on an Israeli passport.
If Kaplan is apprehended or returns voluntarily to the U.S., he will have to
answer the indictment filed against him in St. Louis.
If convicted, he could face a lengthy prison sentence and large financial
penalties.
Source: St. Louis Today