Interference (55 page)

With Halas's death, the old world of professional football officially came to an end. The new age was ascending.

46 The Computer Group

IN LAS VEGAS, A GROUP of gamblers who used computer technology to aid their handicapping and betting was creating a stir. Known by the local gaming community only as the Computer group, it was rumored to be backed by wealthy New York businessmen, probably from Wall Street, who were betting enormous sums of money on a variety of sporting events. Each week, the Computer group poured so much money into the betting pool that the line moved, causing the legal Vegas sports books and illegal bookmakers around the country to make adjustments.

On NFL games alone, the Computer group routinely bet as much as $250,000 a game. Wagers were placed with numerous bookmakers. Sophisticated gamblers outside the computer circle were so impressed with the group's record that they began to bet with it once they saw the line begin to change—to the chagrin of legal and illegal bookmakers, who occasionally could not lay off their bets because of the high, one-sided volume and the rapidly changing line.

The Computer group had begun during the late 1970s, primarily betting on horses. The bettors who were involved with the Computer operation allegedly had obtained inside information about fixed horse races on the East Coast. They would bet heavily on these races at the legal sports books in Las Vegas but cover their apparent knowledge of the fixed races by betting moderately on races that were not fixed. Consequently, the Computer group began destroying the legal books in Vegas.

“While I was running the Stardust sports book in 1978-79,” Marty Kane told me, “I got so goddamn hot at the Computer guys that I told them to get the hell out of the Stardust. And if they didn't, I'd run their asses out. My responsibility was to make the Stardust win. And what they were doing was absolute dynamite.

“The Computer guys would play slow, and then they'd send their beards in and they'd play big. We got so jammed up with these horses that they could, in one day, take the profit away from the casino for three months. They'd come and bet twenty-five horses in a day; and they might have two or three races in which something was going on [that were fixed]. And they'd load you up with those, but they'd cover it up by giving you a lot of other horses, which came by way of the computer.”

After several Boston-based bookmakers were indicted and convicted for fixing horse races, the Computer horse-betting operation ceased.

“So all of a sudden, they came along with football,” Kane continues. “And they had two fabulous years. They won a lot of goddamn money. They drove bookmakers crazy all over the country. The Computer guys were handicappers and bettors. I know guys around here who made so much money with these goddamn guys, it was unbelievable.”

An FBI investigation of the Computer group began in Las Vegas in early 1984. Through a succession of wiretaps authorized by U.S. District Judge Lloyd D. George, the FBI collected information that no fewer than eight people had been involved in the illegal gambling business, simply known as Computer. The mastermind of the group was Dr. Ivan Mindlin of Las Vegas, an orthopedic surgeon who was sidelined from his practice by a 1981 car accident after founding his gambling empire.

Las Vegas gambler Lem Banker told me, “Mindlin loved to gamble and was a very intelligent guy. I got to know him, and he asked me how to handicap. I showed him some basic things. Then he started getting into sports.

“After he had some personal problems during the late 1960s, Mindlin left Vegas for New Jersey. When he got there, he called me and asked if I knew any gamblers. I'm originally from Union City, New Jersey, so I went back and introduced him to a few friends of mine. Mindlin got into gambling there and was moving money for Gil Beckley.

“Mindlin later returned to Vegas in the early 1970s, and he met a guy named Johnny Bura, who was from Youngstown. They called him ‘the Machine.' Bura was one of the first sports gamblers to use a computer, and he was a bookmaker who would only deal with professionals. Mindlin learned how to use Bura's computer, and then he put together a crew of computer specialists.”

The FBI described Mindlin's Computer group as a highly sophisticated illegal bookmaking operation. “They are taking bets and laying them off with local, legal books [in Las Vegas],” an FBI affidavit asserted.

Mindlin, with houses in Las Vegas and Vail, Colorado, was accused by the FBI of directing his associate William Thurman Walters to place layoff bets for the Computer group. According to the FBI, “Walters operates a large bookmaking operation which he uses to place bets with legal and illegal bookmakers for the ‘Computer' group. Walters will contact illegal bookmakers and place bets on desired games and point spreads or [Computer associate Glen Andrews] Walker will contact various bookmakers and ‘beards' and instruct them on how to place certain bets for the ‘Computer' group.”

Illegal bookmakers around the country had grown suspicious of those associated with the Computer group—whom they learned to identify—and some refused to accept their bets. Consequently, the Computer group established a national network of beards, with no visible connection to the Computer group, to place its bets.

The FBI report continued, “Mindlin commonly gives Walters a ‘Computer' order on a particular game at a particular point spread and tells Walters that the order is ‘open.' This is believed to mean that the ‘Computer' group will accept as much in wagers as can be obtained on the desired game and line.”

The FBI chose the day before the 1985 Super Bowl to raid the group. As one agent explains, historically it is the day before Super Sunday when bookmakers receive their largest volume of bets from gamblers. Thus it was guaranteed that the Computer group would be active.
¹

The Computer group won an estimated 65 percent of its wagers. Its big betting money often forced the point spread of a sporting event to be dramatically altered. For instance, it bet so much on one team in a college football game that the point spread went from six to eight points for the other team. Then,
minutes before the game, the Computer group doubled its bet on the opposing team—with the inflated eight-point handicap. The ideal situation was for the team it bet on first to win by seven points—thus allowing the group to catch a middle and win both bets, which it often did.

The biggest victims appeared to be the small-time, illegal bookmakers around the country who received the last-minute bets from the Computer group's beards and had no time to lay off these bets with bigger bookmakers.

Mindlin and Walters each received 7 percent of the profits, according to the FBI. Walters then paid off his staff with a share of his earnings. On a single day, Walters netted $100,000 and gave his associate Walker 2 percent of that amount. In 1984 alone, the Computer group netted $25 million. At the time of the January 19, 1985, raids, the Computer group was preparing to purchase a large business building in New York City.

After conducting successful raids on forty-five locations in twenty-three cities in sixteen states, federal officials described the Computer group as the largest sports-betting operation in history. More than fifty people were under investigation—but no indictments were ever brought.

However, the brains of the Computer group insisted that they were only handicappers and bettors and nothing more.

During my interview with Mindlin, he told me, “The FBI raided the Stardust because there was skimming going on. They just came in the middle of the day, closed it, and then reopened it with other people becoming the managers. The former people were barred from coming into the place. And the FBI used the opportunity to go through everything, the books and records. Well, one of the things that came under scrutiny was the sports book.

“So they called me in, and they wanted to know who I had given money to in the hotel organization. And I said, ‘What are you talking about?' And the FBI agent said, ‘We know as a fact that you have given over seventy thousand dollars to someone in this organization.' I asked, ‘How did I do that?' He said, ‘It was very clever of you. We happened to pick up on it, and when we added it up we figured out what happened. You see, every time you won a thousand dollars, they credited you with a thousand dollars. But every time you lost, you paid him eleven hundred dollars. So the plurality of the hundred dollars over the thousand
dollars is the method you used to give the extra hundred dollars to someone.'

“I looked at the guy—this is the guy in charge of an FBI gambling investigation—and said, ‘Do you know what eleven-ten is?' He said no. And that was the initial start of their investigation.

“When the raids took place, they claimed that it had become a layoff operation. It was totally ludicrous. You don't have to be a psychology Ph.D. to understand that if a person is a bettor and is doing well, the last thing in the world he is going to do is to change it and go into something illegal.

“Anyone who knows anything about gambling recognizes that if you have devised a way to beat a game—any game, whether it be commodities, the stock market, sports betting, casinos, anything—the last thing in the world you would do would be to change the rules that you have, with regard to bookie versus bettor. Because, as a bettor, you have the sense of what it is you want to do. A bookie has to be passive. And the bettor might end up doing what the bookie wanted to do. Plain, cold mathematical logic tells you that a guy who is a successful bettor is never going to become a bookmaker.”

I asked Las Vegas oddsmaker Michael Roxborough about the Computer group and Mindlin. “I know who he is,” Roxborough replied. “Nobody really knows what he was doing. And to this day I have trouble tracking [his operation]. I didn't really care where the money was coming from but if anybody asked me, ‘Where was it coming from—from the guys booking or betting?' I really couldn't tell. Sometimes they would have a really big impact on the college games. Those games would really move. On the pros, there's so much money being bet, sometimes the games didn't move all that much.”

Roxborough explains that the Computer group was destroying most of the oddsmakers and legal bookmakers in Las Vegas. “They drove us up a wall one year in colleges,” he says. “They were betting early in the week and late in the week, and I could never figure out what they were doing. I remember that we had to beat them to win one season, and we didn't beat them. They were real good on colleges. And then the following year, they were real, real bad.

“But the year they had was real good. When the people know you're running real good, you get a lot of followers. A lot of people were tagging on to their games, and it was a bad year for the books.”

Scott Schettler, the manager of the Stardust Sports Book since 1983, told me, “At the Stardust, I don't gamble. I book. Now the Computers had good years and bad years. To a bookmaker, that means nothing. Because all I'm doing is bringing the winners and the losers together in my sports book and hoping they both make a bet. Regardless of whether the Computers win or lose, I know how to maneuver the business to get money on the other side.

“I am a bookmaker. I do not know who is going to win or lose the games. I put the number up on the board, and then I change the point spread as the money comes in. So no matter who wins or loses, I don't care.

“Let's say that the Computer guys did win twenty-five million dollars. Theoretically, if you book your games right, you had twenty-five million bet on the other side. So for every big winner, there is a big loser. And all I want is the juice. That's just the basic theory of bookmaking.”

47 Oddsmaker

MICHAEL ROXBOROUGH IS THE heir to Bobby Martin, the man who sets the line for Las Vegas on sporting events, mostly on NFL games.
¹
Roxy went to high school in Vancouver, British Columbia, and became a student of political science at American University in Washington, D.C. He switched to psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

Bringing an academic but extremely sophisticated approach to oddsmaking, Roxborough is the president of Las Vegas Sports Consultants, which he founded in 1981, and which has a staff of five full-time employees.
²

Roxborough is anything but flashy. He dresses like an insurance agent, wearing dark suits, basic white shirts, and conservative ties. His wife teaches Sunday school in Las Vegas. He is an intense, no-nonsense man, who hardly drinks and never smokes. A vegetarian who swims a half mile four days a week, he is more like Charles McNeil, the University of Chicago mathematician who refined the point spread system, rather than a streetwise Bobby Martin or a flamboyant Kentucky gentleman like Ed Curd.

Roxborough's office is on the twelfth floor of the Valley Bank Center on Convention Center Drive, down the street from the Las Vegas Convention Center and up a few doors from the Stardust, just off the Strip. The main room where Roxborough's staff works is Spartan. There is no artwork, no football posters on the walls. There are three desks, five chairs, several wire machines, a large IBM computer, and a slew of pocket calculators.

There is a clutter of long sheets of paper from the wire services scattered about the room, mostly filled with general sporting news, and more important, results of the recent college and professional football games, including player injuries and other data. The sports sections of several daily newspapers and weekly and monthly sports magazines are piled atop the desks. They are creased, underlined, and marked up, highlighting bits of trivia, which might figure as variables in some oddsmaking equation.

Roxy's adjacent private office is equally unspectacular except when his window shades are open. He has a panoramic view of the Strip. The most sophisticated piece of equipment on his desk is a small fax machine.

“I got interested in oddsmaking because I liked to go to the racetrack, and I liked to gamble,” Roxborough told me. “It's funny. I thought gambling was a good thing to do, and I thought it would be great to be a professional gambler. When I came to Las Vegas, I learned that it was different than I thought. I wanted to be a professional gambler to escape conventional work. What I found out was, yes, I was escaping conventional work, but it looked like I was going to have to work sixty hours a week to do it. I figured: It's not really glamorous, and it's a lot of work. And I also found that people don't make a lot of money by just going out and trying to pick winners. These gamblers are value people or arbitragers.