Leave OJ out of it.

Nominate her to the gambling hall of fame.

i'm inclined to agree w you. also don't wanna go to fed court...don't they have like a 90%+ win rate?

Guy L is just getting some revenge after they decided to rain on his 1 drop parade...

Anything new on this? Wasn't Tom Hall going to be commenting sometime soon?

Yes; they can usually afford to wait until all loose ends are tied up from their investigations before coming forward w indictment. Their vast resources (compared to a county task force for ex.) allow them to continue investigations for years until they are satisfied w their evidence.

New juicy details being reported by various news sites:

"When the FBI applied for warrants this summer to raid three $25,000-per-night villas at Caesar's Palace Hotel and Casino, it omitted some key investigatory details that eventually resulted in the arrest of eight individuals, including an alleged leader of a well-known Chinese crime syndicate, defense lawyers maintained in Las Vegas federal court documents late Tuesday.

The authorities built, in part, a case for a search warrant (PDF) by turning off Internet access in three villas shared by the eight individuals arrested. At various points, an agent of the FBI and a Nevada gaming official posed as the cable guy, secretly filming while gathering evidence of what they allege was a bookmaking ring where "hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal bets" on World Cup soccer were taking place.

"If this Court authorizes this duplicity, the government will be free to employ similar schemes in virtually every context to enter the homes of perfectly innocent people. Agents will frequently have no incentive to follow the warrant procedure required by the Constitution," defense lawyers wrote the Las Vegas federal magistrate presiding over the prosecution."


http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...hout-warrants/

I'm working on a chapter on this for my book, here is a quick summary of the defendants' 45 page motion:

The defendants argue that the agents, impersonating Caesars engineers, exceeded the “scope of the residents’ consent” by remaining in the villas unnecessarily and conducting a search (recorded on hidden cameras), which led to the subsequent raid. The major Fourth Amendment issue being disputed is that, while “undercover agents may enter a [private] space into which the public has been invited” (such as a realtor’s open house) it is unconstitutional for them to “trick a person into giving up their privacy” without “reasonable suspicion of illegality.” According to the defendants, the latter standard is only met in specific situations, such as when the resident “invites the agent in to purchase drugs.” In addition, the defendants argue that the “government overcame the defendants efforts to maintain their privacy” by secretly terminating Internet connections at times (i.e. during World Cup matches) when the residents were most likely to be accessing the Internet and request “urgent” restoration of service. The defendants’ “private online activities” could only resume if they “invited a third-party onto the premises.” Entering the villas under apparent authorization from Caesars, the agents allegedly violated the defendants’ expectations of privacy. Chesnoff & Schonfeld argue that the “warrantless intrusion” against Phua & Co., based on deception, violated the Fourth Amendment per se. The defendants end their motion with a persuasive line of reasoning: “A ruling upholding these intrusions would cause innocent Americans to live their daily lives burdened with palpable fear that their government is regularly scheming to spy on them in their homes.”

Indeed.
It caused Tom Dwan to resort to twitter for the first time in several months, in order to link to a story entitled Can Authorities Cut Off Utilities And Pose As Repairmen To Search A Home?

I assume he's not happy about this "abuse" of power. The court case could be very interesting.

Tom is very anti-government/internet "libertarian" so I'd imagine he finds this abhorrent.

It would make sense he would embrace a worldview where contracts are toilet paper.

Being disgusted at the behavior of the FBI in this case doesn't make you anti-government, it makes you sentient. Anyone who isn't disgusted by this behavior should immediately jump in front of a train.

Once inside, the agents wandered around the premises as they covertly photographed the rooms, entering the previously off-limits media room. Inside, they saw a group of men watching the World Cup soccer game and looking at betting odds on their laptops — perfectly legal in Las Vegas.

What else the agents saw is not entirely clear at this point, but when they left, they seemed satisfied they had enough to get a search warrant.

"Yeah, we saw what we needed to see," an agent is heard on the tapes saying. His partner responds, "Very cool."

Defense lawyer Goldstein contends that not only was the search illegal, but the government knew it was and tried to cover it up. He contends that the materials submitted to a federal magistrate judge in seeking a warrant later carefully eliminated all indications that the federal agents had themselves cut the Internet line so that the villa occupants would ask for repairmen to come to the villa to fix the problem.

"They just managed not to tell the magistrate what it is they had actually done," says Goldstein.

Indeed, Goldstein notes that he and his clients never would have known that it was the FBI agents who cut the line were it not for one slip of the tongue that the agents made — recorded on tape — when talking among themselves. He adds that when the defense asked for further recordings, the FBI provided two blank CDs, claiming the recording devices malfunctioned.

"There's no real way of looking at this other than to say that it is a cover-up," contends Goldstein.

Cover-up or not, the legal theory used here by the Justice Department and the FBI would change the legal rules of the road dramatically if adopted by the courts.

"The theory behind this search is scary," says George Washington University law professor Stephen Saltzburg, author of a leading criminal law text. "It means the government can cut off your service, intentionally, and then pretend to be a repair person, and then while they're there, they spend extra time searching your house. It is scary beyond belief."

http://www.npr.org/2014/10/29/359725...-search-a-home

I don't think it's righteous indignation that's causing Tom to be unhappy about this situation. He's fairly invested in the situation, so to speak.

That aside, though, I agree that was appears to have been done here is bull****, I hope the case gets thrown out of court.

I didn't mean to suggest there's no reason to be upset, fwiw.

Phua got phucked. Throw the case out!!

One of the accused defendants is Paul Phua, charged under the name Wei Seng Phua. The government alleges that the 50-year-old Malaysian man is a "high-ranking member" (PDF) of the 14K Triad specializing in loan sharking, illegal gambling, prostitution, and drug trafficking.

this was common knowledge?

if by common knowledge you mean commonly known to be complete 100% bull**** then yes.

I thought it was commonly known to be true? Obv. could be completely wrong here.

100 % is a pretty strong number.

lol @ people thinking if you're appalled by this you must be "anti government"....if you're a real American who believes in the constitution you should be ashamed of what they are doing. Still amazing to me that poker players of all people vote for republicans and democrats.

"if you're a real American who believes in the constitution you should be ashamed"

Scotsman, much?

^ I'm not an American, but it strikes me that, while old world nationalities, particularly here in Europe are created based on groups of people speaking the same language, many of which have successfully formed their own states while other nationalities, such as the Ruthenians not having got there, in the new world it is the reverse; nationalities are products of the the state (including union, federation) they are based on, so I would find it hard to imagine what the defining characteristic of being American is if not 'the republic for which it stands' and all that.

If agents are so fearless in obviously circumventing the constitution, brazenly deceive a Federal Magistrate about the basis for their warrant request, does anyone doubt that they lack any sort of integrity and are a danger to this country? These guys they were targeting are super high rollers in life. Multi-millionaires. Politically juiced in their own country and probably here as well. Can easily afford the best legal counsel in the country. Yet these agents decided to collect evidence in a blatantly illegal manner. You would have thought they would have minded their P's & Q's to make sure they made a solid, honest case against the group, considering the defense resources they were going to be up against. I can only imagine what kind of tactics they stoop to when the targets are just average joes. If they can do this kind of stuff to big ballers at Caesars, what happens to the guy who makes 35K a year at Home Depot?

This state security and get tough on crime garbage, that Bush started and Obama (good liberal lol) expanded and solidified has got to go. If the judge finds that these public servants violated the constitution and the defendants civil liberties, the agents themselves should be held accountable. Personally I feel that Law Enforcement Officers who abuse our fundamental rights, they deserve prosecution and punishment more than some poor drug addict who gets 4 years in prison for smoking something.

Rand Paul needs to run for the Republican nomination. Not because he could ever win, but because civil liberties have to be part of the debate and agenda in this country.

Just an aside to how bad it's getting. When you sign up to play internet poker, bet a ball game, trade foreign exchange, invest in Contracts For Difference, you get a nice little message from the Company: We do not take accounts from the following countries: Iran, Nigeria, Liberia, Afghanistan, North Korea, Syria, or the UNITED STATES. Really nice company we are keeping these days.

One good thing for the defendants - they have one of the best possible lawyers in Tom Goldstein.