Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, and welcome to life is a gamble. My
name is Richard Munchkin and my guest today is John Rogers.
John is an old school bookmaker who started out a
few miles from Steubenville, Ohio, where he actually had a
storefront sports book and lived through the transition of the
old days of carbon paper and using a paper and
pencil to record people's bets to moving offshore and taking
bets over the phone to the Internet age, and like
anybody in that business, he's got an amazing story to tell.
So let's get right into it. John Rogers, Welcome to
life as a gamble.
Speaker 2: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: So I want to really go back to the very beginning,
and that is when did you for where did you
grow up? And when did you first start gambling? Do
you remember the first bet you ever made on anything?
Speaker 2: Oh? My, I growed up in Toronto, Ohio, about nine
miles up from Steuvenville. Stuphenville is a pretty famous town
for a lot of these gamblers come out, and casino
employees and bosses and Jimmy the Greek Dean Martin. So
there was gambling all around. And my first adventure was
I was in sixth grade Catholic School. The monsignor asked
me if I wanted to go to the racetrack with him. Well, yeah,
by the way, he was the only good one out there.
I'll tell you you know, I could have been at
made a fortune right now if he would have molested me.
But you went in busch. Maybe I wasn't his type.
But he was a great guy, very great. So we
go to the racetrack. He gives me a couple of dollars,
I make a few bets. We have a good time.
And when I was in sixth grade, everybody was talking
about baseball, so I said, well, you know, guys want
to bet it, and so all the games were even
you could. All you have to do is pick a
winner twenty five dollars, just straight bets, and it was
pretty successful. I won about seven dollars off of the
fellas in a couple of weeks, and I had it
in a library book. And I didn show up for
school one day and they turned in my library book
and found that seven dollars and they wanted to investigate
where I got that money it was from. So they
brought me in the office and asked me, and I
told him I was, you know, taking baseball games from
the the other students, So that didn't go either. Well,
they wanted me to bring my mother and dad in,
and I said, my mother works at Duck School. We
don't have to bother my dad. So they said, yeah,
you do. So the nuns were worse than the FBI
because they made me donate the money to church. And
I had a Duck walk up and down the hall
after she beat my knuckles with a ruler.
Speaker 1: So, now, wait a minute, where was your edge if
you just had to pick one side of the other
of a baseball game.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but there's six graders. I mean, what do they
know what?
Speaker 1: But still if you have no juice, like right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, an ap would have did pretty good there. But
you know, yeah, these were sixth graders.
Speaker 1: So so you ended up as an adult becoming a
book maker and actually a book maker.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I went right into high school. I booked in
high school. I booked parlays only, parlays only in high school.
Got the sheets. I was a freshman. I was booking
everybody in the school, and I was probably you know,
probably three four hundred dollars a week, you know, five
ten dollars right.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: So there was this pool room that I used to
shoot pool on the seventh and eighth grade, and the
lady booked numbers in parlays too. So I was a
sophomore and I come home. My mother's crying on a couch.
I said, you know what's wrong? She said. The lady
from the poolroom called said, you're stealing her business. My mother,
don't stop me. They will and I go, well, Mom,
I'll take care of this. Don't worry about it. So
I took care of it, and I got up early
in the morning and went down and I threw a
book right through her window. And then I went at
lunch time and play some daily numbers. I said, don't
ever call my mother again. And that was the last
I heard of her. So I continued through high school,
and I was It was odd because when I was
in high school, I wasn't allowed to have a paper
and a pen, and I knew that I wasn't going
to go to college. And I had a bunch of
study halls because I need only couple classes to graduate,
and they didn't want me with paper and pen in
there because they knew what I was up to. So
when I graduated, and one kid had wrote in my
yearbook that I was the only one that ever said
what they were going to do and did I said,
I was going to be a bookmaker. So I opened
up right out of high school and have walked in
places and they're not unusual in this area where you
can walk in and put a bet down. We had
the boards up.
Speaker 1: That's that's amazing. So that I mean, so I guess
Steubenville was just a wide open town as far as gambling,
if you were allowed to have a walk in.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So just like a storefront, Yeah.
Speaker 2: That was we had hats. The hats were like fifty
some dollars. That way, nobody would buy. I mean, we
didn't have to replenish our inventory. So and then we
got into booking daily numbers, you know the numbers, you know,
and I think in the like seventy eight, they started
with the Ohio number. The Pennsylvania numbers started first in
the West Virginia, and we used to take all three
states because we're right on the river. So it was
called POW Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. So you'd come
in play POW all three states. You know, they're fifty
cents buy a dime or something like that, you know,
and the ladies really like that. We paid, you know,
when the places were paying five to one, five hundred
to one, we were paid six hundred to one. So
we got a lot of business in the Numbers and
numbers was big. Everybody had dream books and numbers, and
you know they had them all. We had an old
butcher in there. We called him the psychic prognosticator because
he Everybody used to ask the butcher but for a number,
you know, and he was to give numbers and sometimes
they would hit. So after he retired from them, I
had him working in my place and he brought in
all the women customers. It was beautiful. What so one
day he uh, I asked him, I said, Adam, give
me a give me a number. And he's seen the
layoff sheet. We used to lay off anything over twenty dollars.
So I write twenty dollars and he tells me seven
four eight. I write it on. He sees that, and
that night I get a call right after the numbers
are drawn, and he said, you better take care of me,
You better take care of me. I said, what's what's
what's up? Man, what's up? Seven four eight? Hit right
on the button. I said, that's great. You know, I
went like twelve thousand dollars. It was fantastic. I go
down and threw all the tickets for the next day
down there. He gave it to everybody in town. I
had to pay out like fifty thousand dollars, and he
still wanted me to give him a tip. The psychic prognosticated, Wow.
This lasted till Super Bowl nineteen ninety where I was
having a party at my house up the shop. We
were open till the Super Bowl opens. Next scene.
Speaker 1: Wait, let me stop you just a second. So I
would have thought when the state lotteries came in that
that would have really bit into the numbers business. But
but no, it was still going strong.
Speaker 2: It was. It went better because it was when they
the states started throwing it. They started putting them on TV,
and before it was a stock number, and then on
the weekends it was a race number, if you're familiar
with that. So they would use the last number of
the advances, decline and unchanges, and that's how they would
come up with the daily number, daily stock number. And
once it started having drawings at seven and seven thirty,
you know, and the states were having and it was big.
The States are paying five hundred to one. You bet
a dollar, you went five hundred. We were paying six
hundred to one, bet a dollar and six hundred. And
then we had a deal for them on Mondays if
you come in and they didn't have Sunday numbers there.
So if you come in on Monday and played your
numbers for all week and paid for all week, you
pay for five days, get the six day free. So
that was huge. People like deals, people like sales. You know,
they sure sure about themselves. So the number numbers was very,
very big business. And still you know, you're holding thirty
forty percent on the number.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it was that a bigger business for you
than the sports betting or or how did that break down?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was probably even because a lot of the
customers that played the numbers would come into the front
and you'd have to walk into the back to see
the board and all the the uh, the the games
that were on the board, and then in the back
room we had pogram machine where you could play pogram machines.
Speaker 1: So we it was just a wow, a license to
print money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was pretty good. It was. It was pretty good.
You know, even when I was away. The guys who
were running the place, you know, they always got the
first count. And even when I was away, I made money.
Speaker 1: So now I grew up outside Chicago, and I used
to play poker with a couple of pretty large book
makers and they had to sort of kick money off
to the outfit guys. Was that a problem in Steubenville?
Speaker 2: Uh? Well, you know it was Toronto. Now Steubenville was
a different, different animal. Okay, Stutville was nine miles down there.
They had their bookies and there was a lot of
paying off that went on down there. But I didn't
participate in that. I had I had someone looking out for.
Speaker 1: Me for.
Speaker 2: You know, because of my my you know, my mother
grew up in Steubenville. And the guy took a liking
to me, and he would let me know what was
going on, you know, if somebody was going to try
to rob us, or somebody was asking questions about us.
But you know, no, we didn't. We didn't pay any policemen.
You know, they had a job to do.
Speaker 1: And yeah, did you ever get robbed?
Speaker 2: H No, these guys in jail were going to rob us,
and he the guy from the his name was Phil
from the coin store Filmatucci from Steubenville, called me up,
told me come down, and he goes, they're talking about,
you know, robbing you and you're you park in the back.
He goes, before it gets dark, move your car around
the front. They got they have they don't have the
balls to rob you from the front. So because we
were right on the streets, you know. Yeah, so then
you know, we talked to the guys that were thinking
about it and they just their minds. So we never
had any problems like that.
Speaker 1: Oh that's good. So anyway you were saying Super Bowl
nineteen ninety.
Speaker 2: Super Bowl nineteen ninety, everything's calm. But we were always
you know, knew that they liked to raid on Super Bowls, right,
So everybody had come in. We had a timestamp on
these tickets, so everybody had come in. We just took
the tickets and we would run them through the shredder.
Now nobody knew that we were doing that. We didn't
have the tickets. We didn't want to have any tickets
on us, and we had the janitor in there and
we told him to if anything happens, we were feeling this.
He had a suit jacket because he always went to
church and if anything happened, just walk out the door
and I'll see it tomorrow. And we were putting the
money in this suit jacket. Well, the FBI had to
place but and they knew the plan. But the only
thing they didn't know what the janitor look like in
a suit. They knew what he looked like, you know,
wearing a baseball hat everywhere, baseball hats and everything. And
when they raided us up there a couple hours before
the Super Bowl, George, his IQ is like maybe seventy
or whatever. But he had a good heart. He walks
right out the door like he's supposed to. So I'm
at home by now, and there is Chevrolet's all through
my yard about twelve fifteen cars, and my garage door's open.
Now I hear a knock on my door, you know.
He walked in the garage, knocked on my door, opened up,
and it's George. He said, Boss, we got rated up
town that I figured that George. Who brought you here?
He said, Keith. I said, well, get he's car and
I'll see you tomorrow. Now, the FBI was up upstairs
searching through the house. Jesus, and there is no cell
phones at the time. FBI didn't happen in the nineties,
and my house phone rings and they want to talk
to the agent and charge the people uptown. They said, hey,
we missed George. He must have walked out the door.
We didn't recognize him. Did he show up there? The
guy goes, no, we haven't seen him. So they got
zero tickets. They got zero money. And you know, they
just come in and did the search and seizure and
you know, and they had they had to come down
and ask me, can you ask your mother to sit
on the back porch while we searched the house. She's
given us a hard time, So that's the tie in
in her. You know, he's giving them a hard time.
You take my son, you're gonna have to take me
with you. I said, come on, I just relaxed, let
them do their job and we could get all with
our parties. But the funny story was my niece was
like three years old. She went to the hospital and
her father went to YEO, he's a pretty smart, wise guy.
And I used to say to her hospital and I'd
make her cry. So she was about three years old,
and her dad told her, say FBI to him. This
is prior to the bus, Say FBI to him. That
will make him cry. And I'd act like I cry,
Say FBI raids the house. They got hats on FBI.
She's three years old. I'm sure she can't figure out.
She run around moring FBI, FBI and goes, how does
she know? So that that set me back. We had
to shut down for a while.
Speaker 1: And so if they didn't find any tickets or any money,
then did they end up not charging you with anything. No.
Speaker 2: They had seven one hundred and fifty hours of recording,
so they were dealing with I have quite a bit
of money, so they thought that I was selling drugs,
and seven hundred and fifty hours of tate there was
drugs weren't mentioned one time. So I was probably a
bigger better than I was a bookmaker then, so and
everybody got busted in the area, and I was like,
if they had a chart, I would be at the
top of the list because I was calling these guys,
you know, and betting and they were laying off to me.
So that was that they got guys from Pittsburgh, Youngstown
and East Liverpool across the river weird and ironically nobody
in Steubenville. So uh that that that that went on,
and so I was going to fight the case. The
worst I could have got with the I think the
you know, the sentence in guidelines was twelve months and
Molnsville or somewhere wouldn't have been too bad. So I said,
now I'm going to fight it. I want to see
this process how it goes. So I'm not giving up,
not giving up. But I had a problem. I had
seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in CDs in the
bank because I was claiming my income and I'm trying
to figure out how am I going to get this
cash out of there without them, you know, taking it,
because they eventually were going to come up and seize
that money. They just needed to go through some evidence
or whatever. So I get go to the bank, I said,
I'm want to cash his CD in early and I said,
I want five five fifty thousand dollars cashiers checks. They said, okay,
I fly to Vegas. I go down and put them
up in five different hotels and each morning I go out,
I take a five thousand dollars. I'd play a little bit,
probably half or forty five minutes. Cash out, get the cash,
go up to the window. They say, you have any markers.
I go, I got a cash deposit. They give me
the money. Then I put it in a place out
there called the vault. You ever hear of the vault?
Speaker 1: Oh? Yeah, yeah, that place got ropped.
Speaker 2: Well, thank god I was out of there by.
Speaker 1: This, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: And then I went back home. I got the other
five hundred thousand. I did the same thing. And at
the time it was great because they would say what
can I do for you? What can I do for you?
I said, can you pay for my first class airfare?
And I flew out their coat. So I would get
buy a first class air ticket and they would pay
me reimburse me for it, you know, one way on
the way home. And I would do that to two
or three hotel. Then they got smart and they start
stamping them tickets that they were paid by the Tropicana
or paid by Mirage, and I could only could use
them one time. Right then you could just catch them in,
you know, get your money back. So that was a
pretty good gig.
Speaker 1: So really smart that you paid the tax, you know,
so many guys don't want to pay the taxes. But
you know, you could have really good screwed if you
hadn't paid your taxes.
Speaker 2: Right, you have to pay. You have to pay, and
let them figure out if you paid it off. You know, yeah,
if you pay Zebra, it's easy to figure out.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So I loafed around Vegas from ninety and ninety three,
were making bets out there and just trying to figure
out what I was going to do get this case
behind me, and they kept delaying it. They won't. They
didn't charge me. They didn't charge me. They wanted me
to give up. And they called in a bunch of
people from my hometown and half of them, or more
than half of them, come to me. Said they're calling me,
and what's and I tell them And I said, tell
them the truth, what you know that I did. Don't
tell them what you heard I did, because you know
Nut's here said you could tell them the truth, but
because you know I was not going to corrupt justice,
and you know, give them an easy charge on me.
So they went in there and the FBI even told
my attorney he said he told these guys just to
tell the truth. You know, I was a bookmaker. That
was it. I mean was going there at eight o'clock
in the morning leaving at seven o'clock at night. I mean,
what do they think I was doing in there?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: So that went on and kept lingering on. Tonight one
of my old customers said, Hey, we have this thing.
I got this thing in Antigua where they're going to
give us ninety nine years tax free. We can you
could book customers from the United States, but you can't
book any local. And I said, how did this come about?
He goes and eighteen ninety two your Way treaty within
the United States. They had took away their sugar cane
down there for something in Antigua, and they give them entertainment,
and listed on an entertainment was gaming. So that made him.
That made it so they could open up a new industry.
So the company was already down there. The guy from
Las Vegas, Kenny White, had a relative down there and
he knew this guy that bet with me. So Kenny
White and them guys opened this business in July of
July thirteenth. I was just looking at the license nineteen
ninety three, and they were working it pretty good. But
the phone bill were like it was like a dollar
US dollar a minute, so you couldn't beat the phone bill.
And so by the end of the year, Kenny, they
had enough. And this guy asked me if I wanted
to go down there and look at it, because I
wasn't working. I went down there and looked at it.
The roads were horrible, there was no air conditioning. The
bugs were everywhere. And I said to my friend, I said,
I'm going home and heat like always interrupted me said
I don't blame me. I said, I'm going home and
get my stuff. I'm moving here.
Speaker 1: How are you going to beat the how are you
going to beat the price of the phones?
Speaker 2: Well, they come up with the local company come up
with that you could use cable and wireless. You know,
it's international company. And they were putting a trunk through
you know or something, and the rates really had changed.
They changed the law and I started taking over. We
started making money. Then they they informed me we had
a ninety thousand dollars bill we had to make up.
So I was in for it. We went there and
it was all paper and and then you know the
old days where you you uh writing down on a
piece of paper, split the paper and night. You know,
you have a stack of papers like this. One guy's
grading the yellow copy, you're grading the white copy, and
then you're coming up with figures. It was a lot
of work back then.
Speaker 1: You know, you really lived through this amazing transition in
the whole field of sports betting. Oh, I mean from
being on the phone, pencil and paper, you know, carbon copies,
all of that two you know, the the internet days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we it ramped ups. We did that until
you know, most of these companies were hired hundreds of
an employee. We ours at the carib was one hundred
dollars minimum bet because we we wanted to grow up,
not out, and so we didn't want to hunt our
employees taking the phone. The phone bill was still a
little bit expensive. And so the beginning of ninety seven,
in the ninety sixty years, something about this internet. In
ninety seven, at the end of it, this company come
to me and had a program, and we put the
program in and it was working good, but it would
only take one hundred and fifty bets at the same time.
So that's not going to work for us because we
need a lot more than that. So we ended up
a guy was working down there for a company that
had disputed over money. He come to us, wanted to
build us a program. I said, this is too new
of you leaving this company. I don't want them to
say that I stole you from them. Come back in
a month if you're not doing anything. And he come
back in about a month he said, I got this
program right, and it was our own proprietary software. We
could make changes on the fly, and off we went.
We had everything on there. We had daily numbers from
all the states. We put horse racing on there. We
had you could bet the doal Jones whether it was
going up and down.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, we had these. And your company was called
carib Right, carib Sports, rib Sports.
Speaker 2: Yes. So we had all these unique things on our site,
these squares that they talk about. You know, you start
without like a one hundred blocks and you fill them
in and you know, if the score is eight to six,
you you know, you do that. Them things sold like crazy.
It was like a ten percent hold on them things.
And they we were selling fifty sixty of them every week,
you know, I mean probably more. But I went down
there not knowing anything about these guys how they worked.
I'm not a intellectual mathematician, you know, like these guys
are setting the lines. But the only thing I had
was a good grass of the obvious. So when when
they would come in, a guy would come in and
bet something, we would move it. And the next guy
come in and we would give him the number, you know,
move from four to four and a half. He wouldn't
bet it. So I had to figure, well, I must
have something here. He don't want to bet it. Then
if I move it from you know, too far, guy
might bet it back. Then you know, I just move
it back. So after a while we figured out if
we give them a dime on the side and the
nickel on a total, you know, there's still one to
bet because they know they're going to get paid. So
we probably every year we would probably lose a half
a million dollars to the wise guys diamond and nickel.
But our line was strong and we would beat everybody else.
Speaker 1: And you'll take the information and try to go bet
at other places.
Speaker 2: No, no, because you know the same thing. You know,
people were down there. You know, more and more groups
are coming to Antigua. Right, So when we started advertising,
we were Antigua and you could play do this legally,
more people were coming and I'll say for every ten
that got down there, three or four must have got
in business. And maybe out of the four, one made it.
Because there was guys down there just ripping and tearing
people off, you know, saying them they could get them this,
they get this, they got this connection, that connection never
get anything going. Most of them used the depositive money
of customers instead of having their their own money, and
when they would, you know, burn through the money, they
didn't have any money to pay the customers. But Crib
we always did one thing. We kept two million dollars
over on hand, over the deposit money, so we always
had it. So when later on in two thousand and three,
when the Justice Department got me, they did.
Speaker 1: It for what wait, was this the nineteen ninety case
finally or.
Speaker 2: No, the nineteen ninety case was over in ninety seven.
They failed to charge me because they had an agent
that approached me and he once, I'm have a lawyer,
he's not allowed to talk to me. We were at
our country club. We were matched up on the on
a team in an event. He was trying to intimidate me.
A deer laying across the field. He pulled his pistol
out and shot at it. I'm sure he just shot
over it, said to try to intimidate me. We went
in there inside, and he would say, you should just
give up and move on with your life. Just get
this behind you and move off. Then he started telling
me how they did the whole investigation. And he was drinking,
and I was ordering drinks and ordering him drinks, and
it's going on and on and on, and I am
just getting all the information I ever want to get
out of this guy. He's the case agent. So we
get to the end and I said to him, I
was done. Ready to guy, He said, my attorney told
me the FBI gets eighty five percent of their information
off innocent conversations like this. You guys are trained. And
he looked at me and said, who trained you. I said, look,
this conversation's over. You're trying to make me feel good
about myself. I'm out of here. And he looked at
me and he said, if you ever say this conversation
took place, I'll be on a witness sand and call
you a fucking liar. And who are they gonna believe
a bookie or an FBI agent well, one of my
friends was to the right of him. I looked at
him and made sure he heard that. And then this
acquaintance was to the left. I looked at him. He
kind of nodded that he heard it. I got up
to the left. So my lawyer always gets his office
like nine o'clock and I never would call until nine
p thirty. He gets things in wrange. I said, FBI
approached me last night. He goes, no, he didn't. I said, yes,
he did. And here's what happened. So he calls the
agent's boss up in Columbus, Ohio, and he said, your
agent approached my guy. He said, no, he didn't. He said,
you better check with your agent. Then he gets a
call from that guy's boss in Cincinnati and he goes,
what do I hear about this agent approaching your client?
And he told him and then their case just went
all away. They gave me all my stuff back after
seven years, brought my car back. They had they had
seized my house, took the siegure off my house. So
I was one to know there. And yeah, I still
was living in the house because they were trying to
go through forfeiture proceedings and they needed me to be
guilty to do that. So they returned everything. And by
that time I was I was an Antigua and everything
was going good. Our program was up and running. Uh
you know, there's all kinds of books opening up everywhere.
This is ninety nine or whatever. You know. The two
thousand we put credit cards on on online where you
could use your credit card before I remember, we were
running them. You have to get you give us your
credit card number. We would run it by hand, and
one year we did a half a million dollar in
credit card running by hand. The first month we put
our credit cards online, we did a half a million
dollars on that. Wow. So the automated system, it was
really great. Then we put a casino link on there,
so we had a people could transfer money play casinos.
It was just the wild wild West, I'll tell you.
Speaker 1: Oh I remember, Yeah, I was there on the player's side.
And initially you had to deal with Western Union trying
to send money that way. But then eventually PayPal came in, and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we had money Gram and money Gram we had
it for a while till someone got jealous and found
out about it and called money Gram and we got
cut off. But the checks would just print up in
the office. I'd be sitting there in the printer would
ting that like ten fifteen checks would come off and
we would just put them in the bank. It was
the greatest thing you ever seen.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: So we were taken at that time because we took
daily numbers, squares and all these small bets. You know,
we were probably it was like a big cement mixer.
We were probably about a seventy five dollars average bet,
and we were taken between one hundred and fifty thousand
and two hundred thousand bets a week.
Speaker 1: So so its two hundred thousand bets, not two hundred thousand.
Speaker 2: Dollars, No, two hundred thousand bets, wow, about seventy five
an off season, you know, football and basketball, baseball season
was probably down to fifty two dollars average bet. But
it was we used to It used to cost us
a dollar ninety to take a bet on the phone.
It was costing us about three cents on the internet
per bet. Yeah, though it was. It was fantastic. Everything
was coming up, everything was running good. And then nine
to eleven happened. Nine to eleven happened, and then they
passed a terrorist bill, and they formed the RSCID and
giving them a bunch of money to investigate internet crimes.
And you know, I think Tommy Chong got he went
to jail for the bongs things. That was the same
Pittsburgh office that was investigating me. And on June third,
two thousand and three, that's when I got raided. I
was up in my office in Toronto. And because it's
you know, they can only raid a place like offshore
if it's illegal, illegal in both countries. But it was
legal in Antiga. And by this time we had an
office in Belize too, so it was there. So all
they could do is get me. So they come flying
in and get me. And I was paying my taxes again,
even though the only thing they left in my office
was my quarterly payments. I was paying about one hundred
and twenty five thousand or two hundred and fifty thousand
a quarter in taxes, so that's the only thing they
left in my office. So they get everything. I go
home and I tell my wife, well, they raided my
house too. At the same time, she knew exactly what
to do. We never talked about it. After we got
like forty phone calls in the morning over the weekend
that were hang ups, and we were out of town.
Eight o'clock in the morning, my phone rangs and I
pick it up and they hang up. I just looked
at my wife and she looked at me, and I said,
I have to go to my office to pick up
my phone. And I was taking my kids to school,
so i'd go over. And as I drive into my
office is about two hundred and fifty yards away, car
comes flying around me, blocks me off. Everybody's jumping on
the cars. They're screaming, putting their hats on. I opened
the door of my truck and he's trying to rip
my door off and he's yelling, where's the guns? Where's
the guns? I said, you got them? I said, I
use pencils. So he shows me the warrant. Obviously they
were in my office before because he was asking me
the culmination is safe, and no one even knew was
in there. And I go over to the phone. I
call my lawyer's office and the secretary says, is this John.
I go, yeah, she goes, your wife just called we're
sending somebody up. So that was pretty good. So I
go home and I told her I I said they
got it all. My wife be cause what do you mean.
I said, they got it all today? She says, I
don't know what you're talking about. I said, we had
seven and a half million dollars this morning. Now I
think they got it all. She goes, I'm driving a
car with no air conditioning and we got seven and
a half million dollars. I said, yeah, saving for a
rainy days pouring right now. So I go up to
the bank. I got a bank account. I'm in the
bank account. They they got this package. It was my
drop dead package, so if I die, my wife would
know where everything was. But they had heard me tell
my dad where it was because they had my office
miked up. So they get that, and I got three
depositive boxes, and they're trying to figure out the round
robin and what belongs to watch right what bank? So
I'm up in the bank trying to withdraw money and
they won't only give me seven thousand cash. And I
was building a house at the time, so I ended
up getting one hundred and fifty out for my lawyer,
two hundred and fifty thousand for the house. And I
look over, they're in the safe. They're drilling my deposit box.
Oh jeez. So in the deposit box, the three they
finally got them all. I had like a million and
a half in cash and three hundred and sixty gold coins,
and I had one silver bar that was in my office.
They in my warehouse, they called it, and they made
the biggest deal about that. I had a one hundred
ounce bullion in there. Silver bars in his warehouse. You
know it was it was one bar. So the next day, ironically,
I come back to my office and I looked at
the door. Someone tried to break in. Now this is
after the raid. I said, these criminals are pretty I'm
trying to break in my office after ray, What did
they think that cops left something there? So here's the
whole process again. We're going through the whole process. And
we find out later because of Antigua filed a wto
grievance against the United States because they were hampering their
banking system and stuff because Antiga was growing with all
these sports books. Right, So Antigua fouled a grievance again
the United States that hey, we're doing this. You know
you told us, you showed us how to set this up.
You send representatives down there how to set this up.
You even give us some Indian regulations on how they
were handling gambling, and now you want to stop us
because they really didn't understand how big the Internet was
going to get when they did disagreement in ninety two. Right, yeah,
they said, oh fuck, you know this internet could be big.
So to retally, they start hunting down the operators in
u Antigue. And that's when I think J Cohen got
in the mix w sex and they were J Cohen
did something different than me. He transmitted a bet. He
was on the phone and took a bet from an agent. Right.
I never transmitted any bet. They tried to get me
on the phone, you know, before every everybody was changing
their names. That's when I changed mind to I talked
to this guy one time. He sent down two hundred
and fifty dollars and he bet twenty five dollars bets. Now,
when somebody in office said he wants to talk to
the boss, he wants to send fifty thousand downs. So
I know it's an agent, right. So he gets back
and he wants to know my name and everything, and
I tell my name's William. So a couple of days later,
the phone rings and they I think it's somebody from
my hometown. I pick up the phone. This is this
is John. The guy goes, I thought your name was William.
I said, John's my middle name, William Jay. Then I
throwed out Caesar because in Las Vegas there was a
guy called Montana Mel. We used to hang out a
team may Day's place up there, Little Caesars, and he
used to call me big sees there. Montana Mel was
a legend out there. So I go, that's how William J.
Caesar was created. So I went with that the rest
of the time. But they they tried everything, and their
last thing that they tried on us was my guy
was in Belize.
Speaker 1: He goes to the.
Speaker 2: FedEx place down there and they asked him what's in
this package because you have to put on your set
it out package is like if it was a check
we put documents or whatever. And it wasn't uh, nothing
was rude on it. He said, I didn't bring that
down there. They said, well, it comes from mailbox, etc.
And it was a big package. And he called me
up and he said there's a package of fed X.
I said, get our attorney. Have the police. There have
the FedEx investigators get him there, and I watched a
videotape opening this box up. So they go all down
there and they videotape opened up the box in between
two card drives. There's a kilo of cocaine. Wow, it
was going to a laundry matt in New York City.
So they go, we have the tapes from mailbox, et cetera.
We know what the guy looks like. We know that
he got to go onto a plane the Miami and
we're gonna have him picked up there. Good good. No
more information was ever given to us. That went dead.
It was like a dead end. No one said anything.
So if that package makes it to the airport and
a dog smell it, or because there's it's not determined
what's in the box, and they open it up, then
they would have the right to come and dismantle our
office down there, close our servers down, take everything down,
because obviously selling drugs in both countries is illegal, right,
So they played that dirty trick on us. They did
some other tricks. They used the Patriot Act to freeze
the corresponding banks money in Belize in New Orleans and
the government of Belize had to let them know it
was okay to take our money. They would give them
our money, cribs money, if they would let the rest
of the US dollars flow through, because that would shut
Belize's economy down, you know. Sure, So that's what they did.
We went the court down there. We won the fight
in the court down there, but the US used the
Terrorist Act on us. We were domestic terrorists to seize
our money in New Orleans. Now the word gets out
on the internet fast, and so everybody starts taking withdraws.
This is where our you know, or where we had
two million over our deposit money. So obviously we had
plenty of money to pay anybody that wanted to withdraw.
And they would ask me about I'd get on the
phone and I said, listen, if you this is just
going to keep you up at night, take your money
out and when you think, you know, you get your money,
you could send it back here and and we'll move on.
But they that's what a lot of people did. Some
people left their money there who could have never had
a problem paying. Wow, it worked out good, and we
give our the players. You know, it's a reason to
come back to the site. Every day, you know, like
on you know, Tuesday, you could lay a dollar two
on the NFL up to five hundred dollars. On Wednesday,
we would pick ten or fifteen people and give them
two hundred and fifty dollars.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: On Friday, you could lay a dollar five from midnight
to you know, eight o'clock in the morning on college football.
So people come back to the site. Our rettention rate
on customers down there was unbelievable. We had some that
day one. Customers were still there when I left. So
I'm fighting the case, trying to get my money back.
Here comes October thirteenth, two thousand and six. And prior
to this, there was a company in England, Sporting bet,
that were going to make us an offer, and it
was probably for about fifty million dollars. Wow. And so
here comes October thirteenth, two thousand and six, and they
had stuffed They failed to pass against this. They failed
to pass an HR bill nine times on its own.
They stopped this in this port security bill, and at
eleven o'clock on the night I was watching c SPAN
and they passed. It was on a twenty fifth hundred
page of this document, which no one ever read that
made it, you know, aiding in a betting, traveling, using
a banking system everything. That's what finished it for me
if I wanted to if I continue, my attorney said
that they would probably charge me with ongoing criminal enterprise.
I'd have no chance to get my money back. So
I end up quitting and I turned it over to
the employees I didn't want. There was employees in Antigua
and Belize, and we even had an office, a legitimate
office in London, so we just turned it over to them.
I didn't want to all lose their jobs. And you know,
we left them with the deposit money and you know,
with no one holding the steering wheel. A couple of years,
they made in like three more years and that was
the end of it. All the money was gone. I
think they must they probably stuffed a couple of customers.
But I was out in October thirteenth, two thousand and six. Yeah,
and it was perfect for me because my kids were
nine years old. You know, I could come home spend
all the time with them. I wanted, you know, I
just had to get my get through this case. And
it was the same thing their first offer was had
to take all my money and give me twenty five years.
They said, I laundered dollars. I go, who wants to
feed me for twenty five years? So then they come
up they're going fifty percent of the money. And we
told him, I said, Johnny fift away from settling this case.
Then they try to pull that Bruce Cuttler thing, like
did John god to get my lawyer off the case.
And they told him that he was gonna charge him
for you know, I try to set up a trust
one time and I transferred the money through him. They
said he laundered the money and he wouldn't back off.
He was great. But the thing that I knew from
the beginning, when you're fighting with the US government, you
hire a courtroom atturn. If you hire a guy that's
known for making deals, they don't take it serious. They
know that they don't have to work. They're gonna make
good deal. And he went all away. We had some
tough days, went all the way to two thousand and twelve.
August twelve, twenty twelve, they said, by this time there
was eight million dollars there and the interest rate. You know,
you went through the two thousand and eight period where
the banks could have been charging you for keeping their money,
and some of the money was froze. The cash they
had it had growed to eight million dollars. So they said,
we'll give you seven point five million dollars back, and
the money that you have in England you could bring
it back here with no taxable implicate implications. And they
just wanted to show that they got five hundred thousand
from me, and they won, right like they won won
the case because they they were dead. The treaty said
in that treaty that these companies could run these businesses,
but they were using the term saying, well, we're not
after the company, we're after an individual, so we could
go after this individual.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: They were trying to go outside the spirit of the agreement,
you know. So they didn't even want that to get
out about the treaty because all the rest of their
cases would fall apart against everybody else if anybody wanted
to go the whole nine yards, right, and so we
went the whole way. We beat them. We give them
the half a million dollars. My lawyer said, listen, we
could fight for two more years and get it all,
or get this behind us and then when they wrote
up the agreement, they wrote it up as a deal
instead of a fourth fiture forfeiture. So it took it
to my tax attorney gave me something that's called supper
monthal authority, where his advice was, you could write this
off because this is a business expense and if you
were never in this business, you wouldn't have this expense.
And the supplemental authority says, if they come back and
they they they say they don't allow this deduction, then
they can only charge you interest, no penalty for not
paying so and the thing. So it worked out. I went,
I cleared that statue of limitations and it worked out good.
I wrote off all my attorney's fees. I wrote off
to half a million dollars here and I'm living happily
ever after.
Speaker 1: Yeah, got to spend time with your kids. Had a
hell of a ride all those years.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I had a nice ride. And you know,
my son went to his graduate at Columbia and as
a creative writing and he wrote a book about Brazil
because they were They grew up half the time in Brazil.
My wife's Brazilian. We live in Copa Cabana, three or
four months a year and he wrote a book about Brazil.
And his next book he wrote was it's called Humpty Dumpty,
and it's about the local book maker. There's a part
in there it's about our town and the local bookmaker.
But his name spelled different. J O h N R
O d g E r S. You know that's not you, dad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the book's not out.
Speaker 2: The book's not out, but I'll bet it is out
because the first book had a lot in it about
our lives in Brazil too, so yeah, it should be interesting.
Speaker 1: So well, John, I want to thank you for doing this.
It's an amazing story. So I really appreciate you taking
the time with me today.
Speaker 2: I hope I didn't go on too long, you know,
and I get to you know, this is the fire
in my belly about the government. I told my attorney
I was going to write a book one day. I
had to say, I'm same guy for forty years, right,
I was going to write a book one day and
how to live a life of crime and never be
charged with what. He come back and he said, you're
going to need a new attorney for that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well that's it for this episode. And I want to
thank John Rogers again for his amazing story. As always,
you can reach me at Life is a Gamblepod at
gmail dot com, or you can find me on Twitter
at RWM twenty one. Until next time, everybody,