Thursday, November 16, 2006; Page E02


More than two dozen people, including a professional baseball scout and a high-stakes poker player, were charged yesterday in connection with a billion-dollar-a-year gambling ring that rivaled casino sports books.

The illegal betting scheme was orchestrated through a Web site called Playwithal.com, run by poker player James Giordano, 52, of Pinecrest, Fla., according to New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Queens district attorney Richard Brown.

A break in the case came last year when investigators secretly hacked into a laptop computer that Giordano had left in a Long Island hotel while attending a wedding, police said. He was arrested early Wednesday by FBI agents who had to scale the walls of his fortress-like Florida compound.

Also arrested was Frank Falzarano, 52, of Seaford, N.Y., who was identified by prosecutors as a scout for the Washington Nationals and a former scout for the San Francisco Giants. He allegedly was a top earner in a network of 2,000 bookies who took more than $3.3 billion in cash wagers since 2004 from tens of thousands of customers nationwide.

The Nationals released the following statement: "The Nationals have no information nor any comment on any aspect of the legal proceedings announced today involving Frank Falzarano. Mr. Falzarano was a part-time scout who worked for an area scout, who is no longer with the club. Falzarano's contract with the Nationals expired on October 31 and was not renewed."

Though the gambling ring relied on a Web site, it was different from the online betting operations targeted by recent federal legislation. The scheme involved placing sports bets through bookies, who would assign bettors a secret code to track their wagers and monitor point spreads and results through the secured Web site. The bets were taken on all kinds of sports, including football, baseball, basketball, hockey, auto racing and golf.

The defendants allegedly laundered and stashed away "untold millions of dollars" using shell corporations and bank accounts in Central America, the Caribbean, Switzerland, Hong Kong and elsewhere, Brown said.

A total of 27 people in New York, New Jersey, Florida and Nevada were charged with enterprise corruption, money laundering, promoting gambling and other counts.

From http://www.washingtonpost.com