Feb. 23, 2024 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:26:17
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | ||
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unidentified
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The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| What's happening, Billy? | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| It's good seeing you, Joe. | ||
| It's good being here. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| So you know George Knapp. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I do know George. | ||
| Did you get involved in the whole UFO thing with him? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I knew George, got introduced to him, you know, the way he pays the bills. | ||
| He covers the news in Las Vegas and does a lot of feature stories. | ||
| That's how I met George, and we've become good friends over the years. | ||
| I have a tremendous amount of respect for George and the work he does. | ||
| He's a great man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Real good guy, too. | ||
| Did he cover your story? | ||
| George has covered a lot of stories involving me over the years. | ||
| I've been to Las Vegas. | ||
| I moved there permanently in 1982, and since I've been there, I've been involved in a lot of different things, indictments. | ||
| I've done quite a bit of business there. | ||
| The biggest business mistakes I probably made, I did some business there with, I did some public-private partnerships with local government, and I didn't make any money. | ||
| As a matter of fact, I lost quite a bit of money, but I got quite a bit of notoriety that I wasn't looking for. | ||
| I got involved in a world that I didn't totally understand until I got into it. | ||
| I got into it for business and found myself wrapped up in a political world, and that wasn't good. | ||
| They think gambling is a dirty business. | ||
| The political world, that's the real dirty business, right? | ||
| Yeah, I would agree with that. | ||
| I've met a lot of people over the years in that world and have a lot of respect for some, and of course, I withhold my thoughts and comments about others. | ||
| That's a game that you don't want to bet on, right? | ||
| That is a rigged game. | ||
| Yeah, that's a pretty tough game. | ||
| That one there, that was pretty much over before you got involved, I think. | ||
| Most cases. | ||
| So, I've been paying attention to your story, and it's pretty wild, man. | ||
| You essentially started gambling in a pool hall when you were about six years old. | ||
| That's right, yeah. | ||
| That's a very young age to get the bug. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's kind of interesting how I got there. | ||
| You know, my father passed away when I was a year and a half old and my mother left to find work. | ||
| I was born and raised in a small rural town in central Kentucky, a little town called Mumfordville. | ||
| And I was lucky. | ||
| I had two sisters who were older than me. | ||
| My grandmother on my father's side took my oldest sister. | ||
| My aunt on my father's side took my other sister. | ||
| And my mother, my grandmother on my mother's side took me to raise me. | ||
| And luckily for me, I could have had four parents. | ||
| I couldn't have had a better role model than her. | ||
| She worked two jobs. | ||
| She was an extremely proud lady. | ||
| She wouldn't have taken any assistance from anyone if her life depended on it. | ||
| And so I learned a lot of things from her early on in life that have been extremely important to me and have kind of carried me through to where I'm at today. | ||
| And she worked these two jobs. | ||
| I mean, the first places, Jill, I ever went when I left my home were a Baptist church, you know, Sunday school on Sunday morning, you know, church afterwards, training union on Sunday night, prayer meeting on Wednesday night. | ||
| And I went to a Christian youth organization On Sunday night called the Royal Ambassadors. | ||
| But when I was around four, my grandmother, she had these two jobs. | ||
| And she had to have someone to keep an eye on me while my Uncle Harry had a pool room. | ||
| So she started dropping me off at the pool room when I was four years old. | ||
| And my Uncle Harry, he went to the back pool table. | ||
| He put up a couple old wooden Coca-Cola cases, handed me a pool stick, and he went back to work. | ||
| And I actually started banging pool balls when I was four. | ||
| And by the time I'm six, I'm racking balls in Uncle Harry's pool room and playing penny nine ball. | ||
| So my life when I was six, I'm in church five times a week, and I'm in my Uncle Harry's pool room, and I just began the first grade. | ||
| So that was my life. | ||
| Wow. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And then you went on from that to be arguably one of the most successful gamblers ever. | ||
| I did, and I have. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| There's been a lot of ups and downs. | ||
| I've got a lot of knots on my head in between. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| But, you know, someone asked me how I became so good at gambling. | ||
| I told them I became good at it by losing. | ||
| I think my life, Joe, when you look back on it, the thing that has sustained me has been perseverance. | ||
| You know, I learned from my grandmother at a very early age, you know, you don't quit. | ||
| You know, if you make a commitment to anything, you keep it. | ||
| Come, you know, come hell or high water. | ||
| And so when I look back on my life and I look back through where I began in gambling and, you know, where I'm at with it today, I literally almost can't believe that sometimes I didn't quit. | ||
| And I tried to figure out, okay, why didn't I quit? | ||
| Well, the bottom line is I loved it. | ||
| I had a passion for it. | ||
| It was something that I really enjoyed doing. | ||
| I don't think there's any question in my mind. | ||
| At one time, I was addicted to it. | ||
| And then, of course, I was determined to be successful at it. | ||
| And fortunately, I was. | ||
| And am. | ||
| So talk me through, how does it start? | ||
| So you're a little kid. | ||
| You're playing penny nine ball. | ||
| And then how does it go on to big million-dollar sports betting? | ||
| Well, I started off playing penny nine ball, and by the time I was nine or ten, I'm playing, you know, five dollar nine ball. | ||
| And as I got older and I made more money, the amount of money I was gambling for increased because I had more money to gamble with. | ||
| And as I became proficient at it, became good at it, it's like anything that you're investing in, if you're confident and basically certain that you're going to be successful, you want to win as much as you can. | ||
| And as my bankroll got bigger, as the amount of money that I had to bet with became bigger, I could beat all the local guys. | ||
| Like a solid shortstop? | ||
| Yeah, like a solid shortstop. | ||
| I couldn't beat a good player. | ||
| I played Allen Hopkins once. | ||
| Oh, no kidding. | ||
| He robbed me, and I played Steve Maserick once, and he robbed me, too. | ||
| I couldn't beat players of that caliber, but I could beat players that, you know, local guys. | ||
| I was a solid shortstop. | ||
| That's a very good description, Joe. | ||
| I used to play a lot of pool. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| When I lived in New York, I was playing eight hours a day. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We probably know a few guys. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| I know Alan Hopkins. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I met Steve Miserach once. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I played in a tournament with him in West End Billiards in New Jersey. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Elizabeth, New Jersey in like 1990. Yeah. | ||
| I used to go to Johnson City. | ||
| That was probably a little before your time. | ||
| Oh, I've heard of Johnson City. | ||
| That must have been amazing. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| And of course, you know, over the years, Ronnie Allen, I'm sure you know Ronnie Allen. | ||
| We probably know some of the same people, but I'm sure I was never as good a player as you. | ||
| I quit playing pool when I was like 15, 16 years old. | ||
| And then you got into heavy sports betting. | ||
| What was, like, the first thing you really got into where you, like, had to do research? | ||
| Because I know the way you would study, like, a team when you're placing bets, very meticulous. | ||
| You're looking for injuries. | ||
| You're looking for every possible advantage. | ||
| You essentially had an algorithm before there was algorithms. | ||
| Well, actually, I got associated with a guy who had an algorithm, and I was handicapped in sports, and I was doing it with a pencil and piece of paper as well. | ||
| Everyone else was at that time except one guy. | ||
| And I met this guy indirectly through others in the late 70s and became more directly involved with him in 1982 when I moved to Las Vegas. | ||
| And then by the mid-80s, he and I were sole partners. | ||
| The other people involved initially were all gone except he and I. Then I realized, Joe, during that period of time that he was going to eventually lose his edge. | ||
| And I recruited six other guys that had similar backgrounds to his. | ||
| And they did their analysis independent of what he was doing. | ||
| The only person they talked to was me. | ||
| And they provided me with their information. | ||
| I knew their strengths. | ||
| I knew their weaknesses. | ||
| And I would take a look at seven different pieces of information and then decide what I was going to do. | ||
| And then over the years, like anything else, I got a little bit better at what I did. | ||
| And luckily, you know, I've worked, Joe, over the years with probably a minimum of 50 handicappers. | ||
| Every one of them have basically gotten to the point to where they couldn't win. | ||
| You know, in order to win handicapping, you have to come up with new ideas, and you have to come up with new ideas that are relevant That means something, because the people making line are getting smarter, the competition's getting smarter, so whatever edge you start off with, that's going to erode. | ||
| Other people are going to catch on, okay? | ||
| Well, over the years, and when I was in my heyday, I was spending six to eight million dollars in research and development. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Every year? | ||
| Every year, yeah. | ||
| And now I probably spend at least a million now. | ||
| And as an example, football season is over. | ||
| We're already working on next season, the day the season is over. | ||
| We're doing simulations. | ||
| We're running lots of different things to go back and see if we can find something that would have made a difference in the game or will make a difference in the game going forward as far as the prediction is concerned. | ||
| That's relevant, that we can quantify, that makes sense. | ||
| And if we can, then that, you know, our information, it will strengthen our information and allow us, allow me to continue to be able to bet on sports. | ||
| I only bet on sports, Joe, today. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| If I didn't, I didn't have the passion for it. | ||
| I couldn't do it. | ||
| But I still win, and I have an advantage. | ||
| And if I get to the point that I don't have that advantage, I'll quit. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| But I still have the advantage. | ||
| But in order to maintain that advantage, I continually have to be able to recognize, find things that make a material difference or that quantify a difference with the outcome of a game to stay ahead of the herd, so to speak. | ||
| Because you got really smart people making a line. | ||
| You got other really smart people betting. | ||
| Okay, I'm the guy, I don't bet on Monday or Tuesday or Sunday night when the line's soft. | ||
| I'm the guy, I bet on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. | ||
| Why do I bet on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday? | ||
| Because that's when you can bet the most money. | ||
| Early in the week, you can only make small bets. | ||
| I'm not interested in making smaller bets today. | ||
| Why do they have it set up like that? | ||
| Just in case something happens, someone's injured? | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| When the line originally comes out, say on Sunday night or Monday morning, and all sports are different. | ||
| Some sports are more vulnerable than others. | ||
| The NFL is the least vulnerable sport of all. | ||
| It's the toughest of all to beat in the world. | ||
| As a matter of fact, most of the guys that gamble for a living or call themselves professional handicappers, they don't bet the NFL because it's just too tough to beat. | ||
| Okay, if that line comes out on Sunday or Monday or whenever it comes out, that's your best chance of finding something there where that odds maker missed something. | ||
| Okay, but by Tuesday, that's gone. | ||
| Okay, now different sports, you know, college football, a non-Power 5 conference team, you know, you may find more of an advantage with that early on or even later on because In the colleges, you know, they're making a line on, you know, 130 games, and it's much more difficult for them to make the line on 130 games. | ||
| You know, you've got personnel that changes every year. | ||
| I mean, it's just more difficult for them to do that. | ||
| And then on top of that, the Power 5 teams, you know, like Texas is an example. | ||
| There's not much about Texas that everybody doesn't know. | ||
| But when you're looking at Louisiana Tech or you're looking at one of these other teams, say a non-Power 5 team, Okay, the guy who's actually doing the handicapping may have an advantage over the guy making the line because there may be things pertaining to that particular team that it's not in the USA today. | ||
| It's not on ESPN sports. | ||
| I mean, there could be a little advantages. | ||
| Back to what you were talking about, why do they have the limits cheaper? | ||
| It's because the line's more vulnerable. | ||
| I would say by, you know, Tuesday with the NFL, by Tuesday, Wednesday with the college football, power five or non-power five, all those numbers are solid. | ||
| Years ago, Joe, the guys that I actually feel like were smarter bookmakers than the bookmakers today, as soon as they felt like the line was solid, they would take a full-limit bet. | ||
| Because if you're a bookmaker, stop and think about it. | ||
| What you're trying to do, you're trying to write as many bets on one side as you are on the other side. | ||
| So, as an example, once you feel like your number's solid, if you take a bet on a Wednesday or a Thursday and that game doesn't start until Sunday, you can move your line. | ||
| You've got four or five days to get action back on the other side. | ||
| Some of the bookmakers today, and frankly, I don't understand the rationale at all because it really doesn't make any sense, a lot of them wait until the day before the game or the day of the game before they'll take a full-limit bet. | ||
| Which makes no sense, because what happens if they wait till the day of the game or the day before the game and they take a full-limit bet, they have a small amount of time to get action back the other way. | ||
| I mean, if you're a bookmaker, what is bookmaking? | ||
| It's taking bets both ways and you're trying to earn the vigorous. | ||
| Okay, you're really not trying to gamble. | ||
| You know, there's going to be times you're going to be lopsided on one game, but what you're, you know, The ideal thing for a bookmaker is to have as many pets on one side as he does the other, and the volume equal out. | ||
| And you earn the juice, and basically you've got no risk, or very little risk. | ||
| Okay, so I can't answer your question as to why some people today wait until later on. | ||
| I mean, I think in their minds they may think, well, maybe the line's more solid or something. | ||
| That's the only way I could... | ||
| But at the end of the day, the line by... | ||
| Thursday is solid as a rock. | ||
| And I think if I were a bookmaker, and I have been a bookmaker, as soon as I feel like the line's solid on whatever the sport is, I want to take as many bets as I can take as early as I can take them to move my line to draw action back on the other side. | ||
| But you've got people out there today that some, not all, The guys that I think are smart, are smarter bookmakers, they start taking, you know, full limit bets on Thursday because that gives them Sunday night, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. | ||
| Now they feel like the line is solid, and it is solid. | ||
| But if they take a bet on a Thursday, they've got Friday, they've got Saturday, they've got Sunday to get action back on the other side. | ||
| But you have different strategies from different guys. | ||
| You've got a lot of guys out there today, Joe, that are booking. | ||
| They really don't know anything about booking. | ||
| They're great at creating databases. | ||
| They're great at creating... | ||
| You know, generating customer accounts and what have you, but they really don't understand the art of bookmaking. | ||
| And, you know, they've got these preconceived opinions that, you know, what most of them do, they'll go hire someone who They'll be their bookmaker and they'll look at that guy's – they'll look at his background or his bio and he'll have – he would have worked at some place in Las Vegas at some hotel and he'll have a title of XYZ or whatever it is and they don't really know anything | ||
| about bookmaking. | ||
| This guy looks like the real deal. | ||
| He's been interviewed and you read the things written about him and you would think he knows what he's doing. | ||
| So they hire the guy. | ||
| They put him in that position. | ||
| And a lot of those guys don't know anything about booking. | ||
| They really don't. | ||
| And what they do know is they know that they don't know a lot about booking, okay? | ||
| And so as a result, what they do, instead of trying to promote and create action, they're trying to—a lot of the things that they do, in my opinion, it keeps action down, so to speak. | ||
| Now, there's exceptions to the rule. | ||
| You know, you've got a sportsbook in Las Vegas called Circa. | ||
| They're open to anyone and everyone that comes in the door. | ||
| I don't care who you are. | ||
| And they have room limits. | ||
| They give everyone the same room limits, and they're generous limits. | ||
| I mean, on the NFL, you can bet $50,000 a game. | ||
| On college football, you can bet up to $50,000 a game. | ||
| Sometimes they take $20,000, sometimes they take $30,000. | ||
| But they're smart. | ||
| These guys know how to book. | ||
| Anyone can open the counter. | ||
| I have an counter myself. | ||
| If they take a bet from me, they move the line. | ||
| And they're going to force somebody back on the other side of that bet. | ||
| But they know how to book. | ||
| There's guys there. | ||
| Nick Bogdanovich has been in the business for a long, long time and others. | ||
| They understand the art of bookmaking. | ||
| You've got others in Las Vegas and you've got others in other parts of the world that really understand bookmaking. | ||
| I mean, you've got some guys offshore that understand it extremely well. | ||
| It seems like such a complicated and stress-filled life. | ||
| And when you're telling me things like you're spending millions of dollars every year on research, before the internet, what kind of research are you getting? | ||
| Like, how are you getting research on NFL teams or boxers or anything, whatever you're gambling on? | ||
| Well, prior to the internet, they're... | ||
| Some of the information today that you can get off your smartphone was golden. | ||
| I mean, I used to have a crew of guys when I first moved to Las Vegas in 82. We would send them out to the airport and we had relationships with the various airlines and we would be able to get the newspapers that came off of all the planes that flew into Las Vegas. | ||
| And they were filled with local sports stories that were, you know, written by that local sports writer. | ||
| And we'd bring them back, and we had readers who read those stories. | ||
| And anything that they read in one of those stories that they felt like was material to that particular game, it would be passed along to the handicapper. | ||
| And today, you know, you can read a thousand newspapers online and get that same information. | ||
| Or you could... | ||
| We have a program that we've written now that we have like 140 beat writers in the NFL that we cover. | ||
| Anything that that beat writer writes or anything that comes out on Twitter or social media You know, the program we have, it will scrape it, and we have that immediately. | ||
| We know, so if there's a story there and there's anything in that story that we feel like that is going to have any real meaning toward the game, you know, we're able to take that. | ||
| A lot of time, you know, the time involved with it is everything, too, because eventually that story's going to come out everywhere. | ||
| But back when you're talking about prior to the Internet, Joe, way, way back, it's kind of crazy, but I used to have a Zenith Trans-Oceanic Radio. | ||
| I would sit and listen to pre-game shows and post-game shows, but the other thing I used to do is I would call a lot of the cities, and I had people in all these cities, and I would have someone to put the phone up to the radio, and I would listen to the pre-game show, and I would listen to the post-game show. | ||
| Yeah, and you're able to learn a lot from that. | ||
| And today, you know, information is a lot more accessible than it was then. | ||
| So you would send people to the airport. | ||
| They would find these local papers. | ||
| And you would scour these papers and go through these articles. | ||
| And what specifically are you looking for? | ||
| Hard hits? | ||
| Injuries? | ||
| How someone's doing? | ||
| Exceptional plays? | ||
| Someone who's really coming up? | ||
| What would you be looking for? | ||
| Well, you're looking for injuries and you're looking for game plans. | ||
| And as an example, if a coach says, look, we're going to slow this thing down. | ||
| We're going to start running a ball. | ||
| First thing, the total's not going to be as much. | ||
| If he slows this thing down and he starts running the ball, they're not going to get as many plays. | ||
| And there's probably a pretty high possibility that the total is going to come down some on this game. | ||
| They talk about players. | ||
| They talk about injuries, especially the quarterback. | ||
| If you're talking about the quarterback and you've got a quarterback who's playing injured, how that's going to affect his performance is really important. | ||
| And they're always kind of playing injured. | ||
| Always playing injured, as you talked about in the book I wrote. | ||
| You know, there's 1,400 players in the NFL. There's about 600 of them that have a value. | ||
| And we have a value assigned to each and every one of those individual players. | ||
| But as you've noted, a lot of them, almost every one of them are playing with some type of an injury once the season begins. | ||
| Okay, then, okay, who's playing? | ||
| Again, we listen, and we follow Dr. David Chow quite a bit, and we think he does an excellent job. | ||
| He's on Sirius on the NFL Network, and he talks about the key players on a weekly basis, and from an injury perspective, how he feels like that's going to affect their performance. | ||
| There are many more players that Dr. Chow doesn't cover that we cover that are playing injured. | ||
| And again, we do a lot of reading. | ||
| We've got 140 beat writers we cover. | ||
| I have a guy on my team. | ||
| He's a qualitative guy. | ||
| He's not a computer guy, right? | ||
| He probably knows more about the NFL as far as a qualitative guy is concerned, I believe, than any man alive. | ||
| What do you mean by that, a qualitative guy? | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| The 1,400 players, he knows who they are. | ||
| He knows their positions. | ||
| He knows what the value of those players are, as far as we're concerned. | ||
| He knows how to adjust their value based upon their injury. | ||
| And after we get the medical information, we'll figure out how we feel like their performance is going to be affected against that particular opponent that week. | ||
| And then we, if a player's worth a point and a half, we may downgrade him, he's only worth three quarters of a point, or he may be worth a point. | ||
| If a guy's out, okay, well we got a backup. | ||
| We know the value of the guy's out, what's a backup worth? | ||
| Okay, backup could be worth zero, he could be worth, you know, half a point, and he's replacing a guy that's a point and a half guy, so we have to downgrade the power of him by a point that week. | ||
| And the other thing, this qualitative guy, he watches every NFL game. | ||
| He grades every play. | ||
| Okay, how many times have you watched a football game and you'll see the score, it wasn't indicative at all of what the score should have been. | ||
| So let's say, you know, receiver's going down the field and he didn't have anybody within 20 yards of him. | ||
| And he gets thrown a perfect pass and he just drops it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, he was unlucky. | ||
| He should have had that pass. | ||
| On the other hand, let's say he's going down the field and we had a pass like that in the playoffs when San Francisco was playing Detroit. | ||
| They threw a ball and it hit a helmet, ricocheted, and ended up in a real long completion and a touchdown. | ||
| Well, that was lucky. | ||
| Okay, so when we look at the box score, we look at the yardage, we take that off. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| You know, there's plays that happen in the NFL when you look at box scores, as far as we're concerned, they're misleading. | ||
| Okay, when you look at the total amount of yards, everybody kind of looks at the same thing. | ||
| You look at the time position. | ||
| So you have to go over each individual play and deduct all the lucky shit. | ||
| Yeah, and then we have player participation. | ||
| We know who played in every play. | ||
| God, you've got to keep up on all this. | ||
| So to give you an example, Joe, Pittsburgh. | ||
| T.J. Watt's out. | ||
| He isn't playing. | ||
| Well, if you look at Pittsburgh's performance with him in the lineup and him out of the lineup, it's unbelievable that one guy could have much effect on a team. | ||
| So if you're looking at offensive performance against Pittsburgh with T.J. Watt out, You know, you're not looking at what Pittsburgh's defense really is, so you've got to make an adjustment when you look at that, and you've got to put that into your power rating. | ||
| When I wrote the book, it took me six months. | ||
| To do this one section, we wrote what we call the masterclass, okay? | ||
| And I wrote what we call betting strategy. | ||
| I wrote that for the 99,9% of the people who bet sports. | ||
| And we got a lot of new sports bettors today that have no chance. | ||
| I wrote that for them, okay? | ||
| And I put the basics in there. | ||
| I put basic betting strategy in there, which that's probably as important to them or more important to handicapping is. | ||
| I put all the charts in there that tells them exactly what each half point is worth. | ||
| I put charts in there that tells them exactly how a money line compares to a point spread. | ||
| Line on the game's two. | ||
| Here's a money line equivalent. | ||
| If you can get a better deal, take it. | ||
| If you can't, take the other. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| I put stuff in there, basic stuff, because none of that stuff is out there. | ||
| Now, guys don't have any idea, if they're buying a half a point, what the fair price is to pay. | ||
| And all these points, they have a different value. | ||
| As an example, if you're buying a game on or off of three, say from two and a half to three in the NFL or three and a half to three, that's worth 22 additional cents. | ||
| It's not worth 23, but it's worth 22. If you can do it for 20, buy it. | ||
| 21, buy it. | ||
| If you feel like it's going to be a low-scoring game and you can buy it for 22, whatever, buy it. | ||
| But if it's 23, you're better off taking a 2.5. | ||
| But people don't know that, Joe. | ||
| Okay, what's the value of 2? | ||
| Well, the value of 2 is much less than it is 3. The value of 2 is only worth 6 cents, where 3 is worth 23. The different numbers have different values. | ||
| So I put those charts in there for the guy that I pointed out to. | ||
| I also put another section in there. | ||
| We'll call it kind of the advanced section. | ||
| And that section, I tried to write in such a manner to where I felt like, you know, people could understand it. | ||
| And that's the guy or the lady who wants to become a serious handicapper. | ||
| And I explained in there exactly, 100%, Joe, exactly how I do everything, okay? | ||
| This book was written at the end of the NFL season, not this year, but last year. | ||
| It came out in August. | ||
| Everything that I know about sports betting and handicapping is in that book. | ||
| I would not have sold that information 10 years ago for $20 million, and I never had any intention of ever writing this book and putting that in there. | ||
| But I'm 77. It's my legacy. | ||
| I see all these new people that are betting sports, and they're doing it in states now where it's legal. | ||
| I'm proud of that. | ||
| I'm glad that sports has come around to that, but also I still have—there's a lot of things I'm apprehensive about also. | ||
| But anyway, so I wrote this. | ||
| That was one of the reasons I wrote the book. | ||
| But in those two sections, if you want to be Billy Walters and you want to be a handicapper, and I don't care what sport it is, I use the NFL as a model. | ||
| But this model is the same model for every sport, whether it be you're betting on golf or you're betting on NASCAR or you're betting on soccer or baseball. | ||
| It's the same principle. | ||
| That's the way they all work. | ||
| So I put that in there, and then for people who are betting any type of sport, but especially the NFL or college football, I put all those charts in there to explain to people. | ||
| Because right now, I don't care what site you go up on, Joe, a lot of these new places... | ||
| The reason they're making the money they're making is if you were to poll sports bettors out there today, everyone thinks making a bet on a sporting event, you're laying 11 to 10. That's the premise that we've all been taught, that you're laying 11 to win 10. A lot of these bets today—and matter of fact, | ||
| almost all—well, not a lot of them, all of them—these, we'll call them, you know, the teasers, the parlays, those bets, some of those bets, a guy's laying $1.50 and he doesn't even know it because there's no requirement to disclose the odds you're laying, so they're not going to tell you. | ||
| But like these in-game parlays, and you're doing these 3 and 14 parlays, and you're doing these teasers, a lot of these places are charging you $1.50 to $1. | ||
| You got no chance of winning. | ||
| You got zero chance of winning. | ||
| I couldn't win. | ||
| I wouldn't even think about playing them. | ||
| But the average person who's playing them, they don't know that. | ||
| So, because right now, there's no requirement to disclose that to the customer. | ||
| And we all want about a small amount of money, want a large amount of money, right, Joe? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, well, you got a lot of people out there, they're making these bets, and they're laying $1.40, $1.50, and they don't know it. | ||
| When you look at these publicly traded companies, you know, it's right out there in the public. | ||
| You know, when they report their earnings, they're You know, they're doing very well, but they all refer to these parlays and teasers. | ||
| That's where they're making the majority of their money. | ||
| They're not making the majority of their money on straight bets where people are at 11 to 10. They're making it on these proposition bets. | ||
| Well, what I'm getting from you is that... | ||
| To be a successful sports gambler requires an insane amount of dedication and research and understanding. | ||
| You've got to be on it all the time. | ||
| And most people are just not that sophisticated when it comes to these things. | ||
| If they're betting using an app or something like that, betting online, they're just doing it for fun. | ||
| They think they can win. | ||
| They've got a feeling. | ||
| They want to bet their team. | ||
| They want to make the game more exciting. | ||
| And so those people are basically very... | ||
| They're very under-researched. | ||
| They don't have the full grasp of understanding of the complexities of sports gambling. | ||
| Because it's a lot more complex than I ever thought. | ||
| When I was going over your stuff, I was like, oh my goodness. | ||
| This involves so much time. | ||
| So much time. | ||
| This is not a simple thing as like, oh, I follow sports. | ||
| I think Kansas City's going to win. | ||
| It's complicated. | ||
| Very, very complicated. | ||
| And to win at a level that you won at over your career and the numbers, what is the biggest bet you ever placed? | ||
| I bet $4.5 million on New Orleans to beat the Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl. | ||
| That was the biggest bet I ever placed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you win? | |
| I did. | ||
| I won it. | ||
| I got lucky and I won it. | ||
| You got lucky on that one? | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, any time you win, I mean, I feel like I'm lucky. | ||
| I mean, Joe, the world's made up of a lot of different kind of people, as we both know. | ||
| But no, I feel like any time I win a bet, I got lucky. | ||
| I mean, because there's, you know, I won a bet. | ||
| And the reason I had such a big bet is... | ||
| What I do, Joe, is I make a line on the game myself. | ||
| My prediction of what I feel like the differential should be. | ||
| Independent of what the experts do. | ||
| Completely independent. | ||
| I don't even look at their line when I make my line. | ||
| Really? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's high-level shit. | ||
| Well, that's all they... | ||
| I'm doing the same thing they're doing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it... | ||
| Believe me, the principles that I'm following and making my line are the same principles that the handicapper is making. | ||
| Joe, it's kind of like making a cake, you know? | ||
| One guy might put a little bit more flour in than the other guy does, and so that's how we end up with different lines, different numbers. | ||
| I make a line on each and every outcome of the sports that I'm involved in. | ||
| And you betting this on the individual players, their overall career, what age they are, how they've been playing this season, who the coach is, all the different factors, whether or not there's in-player disputes, in-between players. | ||
| There's a lot of things to take into consideration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Again, I put it all in the book, and you're right. | ||
| There's a lot of different factors that go into that. | ||
| Some more important than others, but there's a lot of factors. | ||
| And what happens is the larger the differential between the number they make and, in my opinion, the larger bet I make. | ||
| There has to be a minimum of a certain amount of... | ||
| Of separation or I won't make a bet. | ||
| But the larger the difference is between my opinion and their opinion, the larger bet I make. | ||
| So I'll just give you a rough example. | ||
| Let's say the NFL. And let's say I would have to have a minimum of, say, a point and a half differential from the line I make. | ||
| A point and a half, two points. | ||
| Well, I would bet one unit, okay? | ||
| That would be the smallest bet I would make. | ||
| But for each half point, if I made the line on a game six and they had an eight, I would bet one unit. | ||
| If they made it eight and a half, I would bet two units. | ||
| If they made it nine, I would bet three units. | ||
| If they made it nine and a half, I would bet four units. | ||
| If they made it ten, I would bet five units. | ||
| Well, the New Orleans game you asked me about, which I couldn't believe, was a Super Bowl game. | ||
| And this type of year, we never get this kind of differential. | ||
| But I had like a seven-point differential between the line I made and the line they made. | ||
| They made Indianapolis seven, and I thought the game should be pick'em. | ||
| And when I saw the line, I couldn't believe it. | ||
| I went back, I said, well, maybe you haven't made a mistake here. | ||
| Went back, redid it, redid it, and I'll pick'em. | ||
| So that's how I ended up with such a large bet. | ||
| When you go through something like that, how much time are we talking? | ||
| Like if you're placing a $4 million bet on a Super Bowl game, how much time are you researching? | ||
| Well, but that time of the year, I mean, all of our research is done. | ||
| I mean, it's this last game here. | ||
| Okay, the only changes you're going to make from the last games that these two teams played during the Super Bowl is, okay, are there any players injured that didn't, which you have to account for? | ||
| And, you know, clearly, if they're playing on a different surface or something maybe than, you know, than the teams normally do. | ||
| It's very small. | ||
| I mean, the second the game's over, we can have the line on the next game within six hours. | ||
| It's not a problem or less. | ||
| I mean, unless it involves, you know, some injury or something that, you know, may take us until we get some more clarity on that. | ||
| But I'm going to know real close to where I'm at Frankly, as soon as the game's over almost, more than an hour or two. | ||
| Now, there's been some times over the years where referees, specifically in basketball games, have been caught doing things, you know, calling penalties, trying to swing the game in favor of another team, and they get caught for it and busted. | ||
| How much do you think that goes on today? | ||
| Like, how much do you think, like, referees are bought off or maybe perhaps they're betting themselves? | ||
| I don't think that exists at all, Joe. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And if it does, it's very, very small. | ||
| But it has been, right? | ||
| Things have happened in the past, but you know who uncovered each and every one of those? | ||
| Gamblers. | ||
| People betting sports and bookmakers, they're the ones that made law enforcement aware of these things. | ||
| Because at the end of the day, whether you're a casino or whether you're a bettor, the integrity of sports is the most important thing in the world to you. | ||
| A good thing about what's going on today, there's probably more transparency in betting today than there ever has been. | ||
| All of the legalized gambling that's taking place, they have everyone's account information. | ||
| They know everything you're doing. | ||
| And the other thing about betting on sports, Joe, unlike, say, Wall Street, it is a small market, much, much smaller market than Wall Street. | ||
| So if you go out and you make a sizable bet in sports, The line's going to move, and it's impossible to hide it, okay? | ||
| Now, there's people such as myself, and I'm not the only one. | ||
| There's a lot of people in the sports business. | ||
| If they see a line on a game move half a point, a punt, or whatever, they know who calls that line to move 99% of the time, okay? | ||
| I'll give you an example. | ||
| The Arizona State situation that came up years ago. | ||
| I don't know if you remember that one or not. | ||
| It was their basketball team and they were fixing games. | ||
| And then what happened, there was a bunch of guys that came to Las Vegas and they bet on one of these games. | ||
| The line moved six or seven points. | ||
| I bet on the other side of it because, you know, of the line I make. | ||
| And, of course, I had no idea that, you know, they were shaving points. | ||
| And I lost the bet. | ||
| Well, they came back to town a little bit later and they brought six, seven guys and they were going to all the different sportsbooks and they were betting and the line moved six or seven points again. | ||
| Lines on games don't move six or seven points. | ||
| Well, the second time I didn't bet because – and sure enough, they won the game by like 20 again. | ||
| They came back the third time, and by now I'm taping the games. | ||
| I'm looking at the games. | ||
| They came back the third time, and they did the same thing. | ||
| Well, I called Steve Ducharme, who was the head of Game and Control for the Game and Control Board. | ||
| He was the law enforcement part of Game and Control. | ||
| And told him what was going on. | ||
| And they dispatched some agents. | ||
| They tried to get these people to talk to them. | ||
| They left Las Vegas, went back to Arizona. | ||
| And then later on, I think one of them got kind of caught up in a drug deal. | ||
| And then it came out they were fixing games. | ||
| And there were a couple of players that were intentionally thrown off. | ||
| And they were fixing games. | ||
| And that's how that scandal came out. | ||
| So it was exposed by gamblers. | ||
| Oh, it's by gamblers. | ||
| And how did you know it wasn't just luck? | ||
| Well, I mean, Joe, look, this would be like tracking an elephant in the snow. | ||
| I mean, you got guys who no one's ever laid eyes on, and they come to Las Vegas, and they bet on a game, and they move at six or seven points. | ||
| You know, if you're a handicapper, you know anything at all about betting sports. | ||
| If the line moves, you know... | ||
| And you're laying a second or third point. | ||
| You know, you better have a really strong opinion because they move this line for one reason. | ||
| It's to make it a lot less appealing to the person betting on that team. | ||
| So when somebody comes to town and they move a line six or seven points, no better in the world is going to do that. | ||
| And in order to do that, they went to every sportsbook in town, and they just, you know, they laid, you know, six, six and a half, seven, seven and a half, eight, eight and a half, nine, nine and a half, ten. | ||
| Okay, well... | ||
| Because they were new to betting, okay? | ||
| They knew they had an edge because of what they were doing, but they didn't know anything about betting. | ||
| As a result, you know, they created something that was easy for anyone to see. | ||
| I saw it again the first time. | ||
| I didn't know the exact, you know, I didn't know exactly who was doing it. | ||
| And I bet on the other side, of course, I lost my money. | ||
| And, of course, I came back the second time. | ||
| I'd seen these things before, and I didn't bet. | ||
| And then, of course, you know, we taped the game. | ||
| We looked at it. | ||
| It was pretty easy to see who was doing what they were doing. | ||
| They came back the third time, did the same thing. | ||
| Frankly, you know, to give you the... | ||
| I mean, these guys were trying to break in jails, what they were trying to do. | ||
|
unidentified
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Anybody... | |
| I mean, they were. | ||
| Anybody would do what they were doing was just stupid. | ||
| I mean, anyone could see what they were doing. | ||
| The only thing that surprised me, it took three games for someone to finally turn them in. | ||
| And sportsbooks, I don't think they ever turned them in. | ||
| I mean, I called the charm myself because, again, anything that involves the integrity of sports, they're affecting my business. | ||
| If people get to where they don't trust betting on sports, then the limits are going to go down, and it's going to reduce my ability to be able to bet on sports. | ||
| The other one, you know, with the referee, the NFL referee. | ||
| Gamers knew about that eight months before he got busted by law enforcement. | ||
| People quit betting on the games. | ||
| Well, sure, I mean, it wasn't like... | ||
| They just suspected that the calls were bad. | ||
| Well, no, what happened? | ||
| Anytime again, Joe, because the market's so small. | ||
| Okay, think about the New York Stock Exchange, or think about Apple stock. | ||
| You could buy... | ||
| $500 million worth of Apple stock, and the price on Apple stock would barely move. | ||
| On an NBA basketball game, if you were to bet $250,000 on an NFL basketball game, it would probably move a point and a half, two points. | ||
| So, and again, the people taking the bet, people such as myself and others, if a line moves on a game and it moves like that and, okay, I want to know who bet on that game. | ||
| If it's another handicapper or there's an injury out or there's something there that makes sense as to why that game moved, then okay, I understand it. | ||
| But if there's some mysterious person that's betting a lot of money on a game that hasn't been doing this for a period of time, and then I'm looking at the outcome of a game that doesn't make sense, or if I tape it and I see something that's out of the ordinary about the way the game's being officiated or some player's performance, This stuff is easy, Joe, to see. | ||
| And you're not dealing with exactly – you're not dealing here with master criminals. | ||
| You're dealing with people that frankly aren't very smart and – I mean they aren't very smart to be doing what they're doing and the way they go about it they're even – I don't know if you remember the thing years ago with Hot Rod Williams. | ||
| I mean there's – the ones – Trevor Burrus What was that thing? | ||
| Well, it was an NBA thing also. | ||
| But all the ones, if you go back and you look at the last five sports deals, whatever they were, small or big, every one of them were uncovered like that. | ||
| I did an interview one time on 60 Minutes in 2011, and I was asked at the end of the interview Which I had the most confidence in, betting on sports or investing in stocks? | ||
| And my answer was, I have a lot more confidence in betting on sports for the reason I pointed out. | ||
| It's a much smaller market, but as far as things being on the up and up, I have a lot more confidence in that, and I have way more confidence in that than I do the other. | ||
| Well, obviously you know it well. | ||
| Well, I not only know it well, but also if I didn't know it well, I know how small the market is. | ||
| I know how transparent the market is. | ||
| And if someone goes in to try to bet on sports and you're trying to fix a game, it's going to be so obvious. | ||
| It's so easy to detect and it's so easy to, and today it's even easier. | ||
| And the good thing about legalized sports betting is it's so transparent. | ||
| Everybody who has an account, you know, you take all of these young players that haven't, you know, they haven't been, I'll call it schooled correctly. | ||
| They haven't been, you know, whether it be their teams or whomever, they haven't explained to them, you know, the repercussions about betting on sports if they're a professional athlete. | ||
| You know, we've had some here recently that You know, basically, these guys are kids, Joe. | ||
| They're kids. | ||
| They don't know any better. | ||
| And someone should have sat down with them and explained to them the ramifications of what they were doing. | ||
| Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. | ||
| But we've had a few of them out there now. | ||
| But, you know, you've seen how quickly they catch them because it's all transparent. | ||
| They go in and make these bets. | ||
| It doesn't take them any time at all to figure out who they are, if they're a football player or whatever they're doing. | ||
| And it's been brought to the public's attention. | ||
| If it's that easy to catch them, somebody out there making large bets on something, moving the line substantially, and you don't know who this person is, and you're looking at it, and they do this more than one time or two times, and you're seeing an outcome of a game that doesn't make sense, it isn't going to take long to figure this out. | ||
| Now when you get to a situation like a guy like Pete Rose, that was a fascinating situation because this was at the time where gambling was illegal, unless you're in Vegas. | ||
| And you find out he might be betting on the team that he's coaching, and he might also be betting against his team. | ||
| I've never heard anyone ever say that Pete Rose bet against his team. | ||
| I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I've never heard that allegation. | ||
| I know he was accused of it, right? | ||
| You don't think so? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| I thought someone was saying... | ||
| John Dowd, I think, actually investigated this for baseball. | ||
| So he was always betting for his team? | ||
| I think he did bet on his team, but I don't think he ever bet against his team. | ||
| I'm not sure I've never heard that. | ||
| What was the problem with him betting against his team, or betting for his team, rather? | ||
| That seems like that just would be a guy who has confidence in his team. | ||
| Well, personally, I don't see a problem with it, but the people who are running baseball, or whatever the sport is, I haven't thought it really out, probably. | ||
| If I were on their side of it, and really thought through all of the different Pluses and minuses. | ||
| I may have a different opinion right off the shoulder. | ||
| I really don't see a problem him betting on his team or anyone betting on their team, although others do. | ||
| And I'm trying to think of a good reason as to why... | ||
| It would be a problem him betting him on his team. | ||
| I really haven't thought about that closely. | ||
| Was he ever accused? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think. | |
| I mean, I'm looking at the ESPN outside the line story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They obtained documents. | |
| There's no evidence that Rose was a player manager in 86 bet against his team. | ||
| No. | ||
| They show a vivid snapshot on how extensive his betting life was and all the bets he did make. | ||
| So it could have been just unfair accusations designed to taint his reputation even further? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I think he did bet on his team. | ||
| No, against. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If anyone accused him of betting against his team, I think they're wrong because I never heard that. | ||
| And I don't even think on the report that Mr. Dowd issued on behalf of Major League Baseball, I don't think there was ever any allegations in there that he bet on his team. | ||
| But it seems kind of crazy, right? | ||
| Wasn't he removed from the Hall of Fame? | ||
| Well, he never was in the Hall of Fame, but his consideration, he's never been voted in the Hall of Fame for that reason. | ||
| In 2022, he's bringing up a point where there's a manager or a player on the Rockies that signed an endorsement deal with Maxim Bett, and he said, like, if what he did was happening now, no one would ever think anything of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I don't know about that either because there was a young college player who's now, I think, a pro who's betting on his team. | ||
| And I don't think the NFL or—I don't think—first of all, I don't think they want you betting on sports, period. | ||
| But even betting on your own team, I don't think they want you to bet on your own team. | ||
| Are you aware of the UFC betting scandal? | ||
| No, sir, I'm not. | ||
| So the UFC, there didn't used to be rules in terms of, like, I could bet if I wanted to. | ||
| Anybody could bet on fights. | ||
| And what was going on was there was one trainer and the allegations were that this trainer was involved in an online betting group. | ||
| And he was letting these people in this online betting group know that one of the people that he was involved with was injured. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Then they find out that this guy had been doing this for quite a while, or allegedly had been doing this for quite a while, and so then they pass this law now or pass a rule with the UFC that no one can gamble. | ||
| But I would imagine that fighting is probably the most difficult thing to get right in terms of to figure out a line. | ||
| Did you do any gambling on boxing or MMA fights? | ||
| I haven't done any gambling on MMA fights. | ||
| I had fighters, but in the past I had three boxers in Las Vegas. | ||
| And we trained at Johnny Taco's gym. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Great gym. | ||
| And one of my best friends in the world, Billy Baxter, he had fighters at the same time. | ||
| He had better fighters than I did record-wise. | ||
| He had Roger Mayweather who became... | ||
| Black Mamba. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly right. | ||
| And Jesse Reed was our trainer. | ||
| Making prices on boxing, I didn't think was difficult at all. | ||
| MMA, you know, back to kind of what you were talking about there, again, well, the NFL, you know, you're talking about transparency. | ||
| I mean, if a player is injured, they have to report that. | ||
| The team does, the league does, so the public knows that. | ||
| And, you know, they have regular reporting requirements. | ||
| And then, like before the NFL games, every Sunday, an hour and a half before the games, they have to come out with a final report. | ||
| So, you know, for whatever reason, in boxing, I know when I had fighters that there wasn't a requirement to disclose that. | ||
| Famously, Manny Pacquiao was injured going into the Floyd Mayweather fight. | ||
| Yes, that's what I heard. | ||
| And a lot of people were furious about that because a lot of money exchanged hands during that fight. | ||
| Yes, it did. | ||
| Yes, it did. | ||
| So, again, not knowing as much as I would like to know before I make a comment on something, my only thinking is that You know a lot more about MMA fighting than I'll ever know, you and my friend Kevin Aole. | ||
| Would it make any sense to make that a requirement to disclose injuries? | ||
| It would. | ||
| Yeah, if you're dealing with gambling, it would. | ||
| Unfortunately, though, then you'd give your fighter, the other fighter, the opponent, a massive advantage. | ||
| If you know this guy's got a knee injury, you're going to target that knee. | ||
| If you know this guy's got a hand injury, you're going to know he can't punch. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's certain things that would change every aspect of your strategy for a fight if you found out that a fighter was injured. | ||
| Especially if there's something that would prevent them from grappling, you would know they probably didn't do any grappling in camp, and so you'd go with a grappling-heavy strategy. | ||
| Just grab ahold of them quickly. | ||
| Really force them to wrestle. | ||
| If you know he's got a blown-out knee and he can't really adjust on the feet or shoot for takedowns or even defend them well, you would definitely change things. | ||
| And fighters hide injuries all the time. | ||
| I mean, Dreckus Duplessis, when he won against Robert Whittaker, he had a broken foot. | ||
| And, you know, he beat one of the top guys in the world with a broken foot. | ||
| And that's kind of crazy that fighters do that, but that's the type of human being you're dealing with. | ||
| And they can win that way. | ||
| Like, it doesn't necessarily... | ||
| Just because you know that a guy's injured doesn't mean that this guy's going to lose. | ||
| There's certain guys that They find a way to win no matter what right and I would imagine that that what I would would the thing that would give me pause is scoring Judges scoring is horrible. | ||
| It's the worst part of the sport. | ||
| It's so bad. | ||
| It's so bad that maybe 10 to 20 percent of fights you'll have one car that's so off You're like, what the fuck was that guy watching? | ||
| It happens all the time. | ||
| As commentators, we're just scratching our head. | ||
| Like, how did he give it to the other guy? | ||
| In what world? | ||
| And I will go back and watch it again and see if I'm being biased. | ||
| I'll watch it with the sound off. | ||
| I'll just analyze all the positions and all the things that's happening and damage done and control the octagon and pushing the pace. | ||
| I'll look at the volume. | ||
| I'll look at the amount of strikes landed. | ||
| And then I'll be like, how? | ||
| How the fuck did that guy see it for the other person? | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And I always wonder if someone's on the take. | ||
| I always wonder. | ||
| Because I know that there was a case in Vegas where there was a woman who had given out very questionable decisions, like multiple questionable decisions. | ||
| And the last one was so egregious that she kind of just went away. | ||
| But I've always wondered if those people were on the take. | ||
| Because Don King famously was a sneaky dude and did a lot of very, you know, very under-the-radar shit that was probably not good. | ||
| And I would think that if you have a fighter and that fighter's working for you, You would definitely have relationships, at the very least, with these judges. | ||
| So they would be more inclined to score for you. | ||
| Maybe you take them on a vacation. | ||
| Maybe you take them to dinner. | ||
| Maybe you do whatever you can do to get inside their good graces. | ||
| And then if it's like, eh, this guy or this guy, I'm going to go with this guy because I like Don King. | ||
| Or, you know, Bob Arum, he does me well, so I'm going to lean towards that guy. | ||
| That would be a real issue with me if I was gambling, particularly on boxing. | ||
| Back when I got in, I was betting on boxing before I had fighters, but after I had— When you say you had fighters, what do you mean by that? | ||
| I had three fighters. | ||
| So you had contracts with them? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, yeah. | |
| And what is the contract involved? | ||
| Well, I was our manager. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, and actually three young men I brought up from Louisville. | ||
| And that was a connection. | ||
| My wife and I are both from Kentucky originally. | ||
| And Billy, I love boxing. | ||
| I've always loved fighting. | ||
| You know, I used to go to all the fights with the Silver Slipper, the, you know... | ||
| We, you know, it's, you know, just, I enjoyed it a lot. | ||
| So you're going to the smaller regional cards. | ||
| Oh yeah, Las Vegas. | ||
| I mean, you know, I remember at the Hacienda, which is the Mandalay Bay today, that's where the ESPN televised fights, that's where they began in Las Vegas. | ||
| And I remember I had a fighter. | ||
| He was a really good fighter. | ||
| He'd won the National Golden Clubs like five, six times as an amateur fighter. | ||
| He'd beat Aaron Pryor. | ||
| His name was Terry Silver. | ||
| And he was a lightweight and a really, really good amateur. | ||
| And I remember in order to get his first fight on television there, we had to agree to, with Bruce Trampler and Bob Arum, we had to agree to multiple contracts if he won the fight. | ||
| That's the only way to get him on the card. | ||
| That sounds like a Bob Arum move. | ||
| Yeah, but back to what you're talking about those days in the 80s. | ||
| I mean, you had Duke Durham. | ||
| Well, Duke Durham, who was Don King's guy in Las Vegas. | ||
| And then, of course, you had Don and you had Bruce Trapler that was Bob Arum's guy. | ||
| And, you know, I mean, you look at the various... | ||
| Organizations that did the ratings are the fighters. | ||
| And you look at some of the fighters, I mean, if they were signed with the right guy, I mean, they'd be ranked in the, you know, in the top ten. | ||
| And a lot of them couldn't bust a grape. | ||
| And then you'd have guys that didn't, that weren't signed or hadn't agreed to those contracts and they couldn't get rated, they couldn't get a fight. | ||
| So you're right. | ||
| There was a tremendous amount of politics in it, and that's the primary reason I got out of it. | ||
| But I still love boxing. | ||
| I love fighting. | ||
| I don't understand MMA nearly as well as you do. | ||
| I can help you out. | ||
| I'm sure you could. | ||
| Like I said, I have a friend, Kevin Aole. | ||
| I think you probably know Kevin. | ||
| Yeah, I know Kevin very well. | ||
| He's a good friend. | ||
| Good guy. | ||
| Yeah, he is a good guy. | ||
| He's been covering MMA forever. | ||
| Yes, he has. | ||
| And so I'm going to make it my business to learn more about MMA. It's complicated. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure it is. | ||
| But a guy like you that knows as much as you know about sports, you could get into it. | ||
| I'm sure I'd enjoy it. | ||
| It's a complicated thing to watch and pick fights. | ||
| It's a complicated thing to gamble on, because I think you have to have an understanding of a person's physical ability, independent of watching them in fights. | ||
| You have to be able to assess, like I can look at a fighter, like a guy like Ilya Toporia, who just won the world title against Volkanovski, when I would watch him fight and train, even though he was against lesser competition than Volkanovski, I was seeing the speed of his strikes, the accuracy, the defense, how good the defense was, his durability. | ||
| I was seeing this advantage. | ||
| I was like, man, even though this guy is an underdog, he's fighting the most dominant featherweight of all time, this guy's got some big advantages. | ||
| He's just got big advantages that I see as a fighter, as a person who knows how to fight, and I'm watching the way he moves, I'm like, he moves better. | ||
| He's more precise. | ||
| He's more accurate. | ||
| It's complicated. | ||
| And then you have to take into account, you know, how many times the guy's been fighting that year, how banged up he is. | ||
| Because just like quarterbacks on football days, you're going to fight injured. | ||
| Everybody fights injured. | ||
| There's always something. | ||
| There's always a neck thing or a back thing or a hand thing. | ||
| No fighter fights 100%. | ||
| Very, very, very rarely, I should say. | ||
| But, again, the thing that drives me the most crazy is the decisions. | ||
| Because if I was a gambler and I laid a big bet on Ilya Teporia and for some reason it went five rounds and they give it to Volkanovski and it's a terrible decision, there's not a more robbed feeling in the world. | ||
| That's a dirty feeling because it's so subjective as opposed to scoring. | ||
| If you're watching a basketball game, If the Lakers score more, they win. | ||
| It's real simple. | ||
| The ball goes in the net more, you win. | ||
| With fighting, you've got three people. | ||
| Some of them don't know how to fight at all. | ||
| And they're the ones who are deciding who wins and who doesn't win fights. | ||
| Back in the 80s, we had a lot of those controversial decisions in boxing. | ||
| That's another reason that I got out of boxing. | ||
| Yeah, there's some bad ones even in the 2000s. | ||
| Manny Pacquiao and Tim Bradley. | ||
| That was one where it was like, what the fuck? | ||
| And I think that lady that I was talking about was involved in that one as well. | ||
| There's been quite a few of them. | ||
| And when someone is an incredibly popular fighter, like a Canelo Alvarez or someone like that, where there's so much money invested in this fighter, and there's so much money potentially in future matchups, that if they lose... | ||
| Boy, that could switch the amount of money you make by an extraordinary amount. | ||
| But if they get away with a robbery, just a little bit of a robbery, over six months, a year, two years, people forget. | ||
| They forget. | ||
| Well, you've got to factor that into your handicapping. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have to factor in possible robberies. | ||
| Or them getting the best of it, right. | ||
| Yeah, that's crazy. | ||
| You have to factor that in. | ||
| So when you were gambling on boxing, what's the biggest bet that you ever made on a fight? | ||
| I never made any real large bets on fights. | ||
| What's a not large bet for you, though? | ||
| When Hagler fought Sugar Ray at Caesars, I think I bet about $200,000 in that fight. | ||
| Who'd you bet on? | ||
| I bet on Sugar Ray. | ||
| Did you really? | ||
| I think you got lucky. | ||
| I did get lucky. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think Hagler won that fight. | |
| My man Billy Baxter, he likes Sugar Ray quite a bit. | ||
| And there was a guy named Herbie Hoops at that time that was a pretty sharp guy. | ||
| Anyway, but... | ||
| You know, the Hagler one is a weird one. | ||
|
unidentified
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It was a weird one. | |
| Because he loses that fight and then goes and becomes a superstar in Italy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where's the mob from, Billy? | ||
| Where's the mob from? | ||
| I mean, if I had to guess... | ||
| And when I watched that fight, it's almost like Hagler wasn't trying to take him out. | ||
| It was almost, man, I wish he was alive today. | ||
| And he's one of my all-time favorite fighters, I have to say. | ||
| I grew up in Boston. | ||
| He was a tough man. | ||
| He embodied discipline. | ||
| Yes, he did. | ||
| He was the man. | ||
| And he was probably, before Terrence Crawford, one of the best switch hitters that's ever played in the game, or ever fought. | ||
| He was incredible. | ||
| He was so good at being able to switch. | ||
| Southpaw, Orthodox, he fought equally well from both sides. | ||
| And he confused the shit out of people because of that. | ||
| That's a great skill. | ||
| That's something Terence Crawford does so well. | ||
| Such a good skill. | ||
| The ability to switch sides. | ||
| It's just so baffling. | ||
| And if you've ever sparred before, if you're used to sparring Orthodox people, and then you sparred at Southpaw, your whole brain has to do all these extra calculations. | ||
| And if you're not accustomed to sparring, Just sparring with Southpaws. | ||
| Forget about fighting them. | ||
| It screws everything up in your head. | ||
| You have to readjust. | ||
| Unless you've gone through a whole camp with Southpaws. | ||
| That's one thing that people are very reluctant to do. | ||
| Like, say, if a fighter is scheduled to fight an Orthodox fighter, and then two weeks out, that guy gets injured, and then another guy steps in to take his place, you find out this guy's a Southpaw. | ||
| Like, oh shit. | ||
| Like, it's such a different strategy. | ||
| Everything changes with your movement. | ||
| You know, you don't want to lead into the power hand. | ||
| So instead of circling to the left, now you're circling to the right. | ||
| Like, there's a lot going on. | ||
| Well, the same thing goes with the southpaw quarterbacks. | ||
| I would imagine. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Big difference. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Ball's coming from a totally different angle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the tendencies are different, too. | ||
| There's something else. | ||
| I'm not a left-handed person, but I have a theory about left-handed people. | ||
| I think they just get better at things quicker. | ||
| I think there's something about left-handed people. | ||
| They see the way everybody's doing everything backwards, and so they have to see the way they do it and then do it their way, and I think there's some sort of an advantage in that. | ||
| Okay, well, I hadn't thought that one out yet, but... | ||
| Some of the best pool players are left-handed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of, like, killer left-handed pool players. | ||
| There's a lot of killer left-handed fighters. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I know a lot of people that are left-handed. | ||
| They just seem to have... | ||
| There's, like, an extra thing that they have that Orthodox people don't have. | ||
| I hadn't thought about that one, but... | ||
| You don't take that into consideration? | ||
| I hadn't, but I hadn't, but I'm going to go take a look at it. | ||
| So what was the biggest fight bet that you ever put on? | ||
| Probably that one. | ||
| How much was that? | ||
| The one that meant the most to me. | ||
| How much was the Hagler fight? | ||
| A couple hundred grand, probably. | ||
| But the one that absolutely meant the most to me is... | ||
| Terry Silver, this kid, I told you, got the fight at, we were at the Hacienda, which is now Mandalay Bay, and it was a six-round fight. | ||
| It was his first six-rounder, and he's fighting some kid out of L.A. You know Jimmy Montoya? | ||
| No. | ||
| Jimmy Montoya has been training fighters in L.A. for a zillion years, and he's stable. | ||
| Back in those days, he had like 120 fighters, okay? | ||
| And he would bring guys over, whether it be the Silver Slipper or the Show Boat or the Hacienda, and a lot of his fighters were on the card. | ||
| And he brought over this Hispanic kid, and this kid's fighting Terry, and you looked at the guy's record, and I think he was like maybe won three, lost two, and he had a draw. | ||
| And I'm thinking, well, this guy's got like zero chance. | ||
| So this is back when I'm drinking some, too. | ||
| So we go to the fight, my wife Susan and I, and Billy's working a spit bucket. | ||
| And the fight starts, and I'm betting everybody I can bet in the crowd. | ||
| I'm laying 5-1, 10-1, 20-1 up. | ||
| I think I'm just stealing, you know. | ||
| I mean, I think Terry's probably going to knock him out in the first round. | ||
| Well, Terry had gotten him a girlfriend in the meantime, and so he goes out there, and first round, he probably hit this guy 80 times. | ||
| The guy never laid a glove on him. | ||
| Terry Silver had a really, really good left jab, as good as any you've ever seen in your life. | ||
| But he didn't have a lot of power. | ||
| In the amateur ranks, like I said, he won like five national golden gloves. | ||
| But when he turned pro, he really didn't have a real good punch. | ||
| So he came out in the second round, and he drops his gloves, and he's showing off. | ||
| And this kid hit him, and when he hit him, His mouthpiece went out. | ||
| And then he's got the wailing on his head. | ||
| And I'm thinking, I'm watching this, I can't believe it. | ||
| And he, you know, he kind of knocked him silly, so to speak. | ||
| Well, Terry's, you know, but he's had enough fights. | ||
| He probably had as an amateur probably 50, 60 fights. | ||
| So he got out of the round, so they come out in the third round, and he still isn't shaking it completely off, and the guy goes wailing on him again. | ||
| And now, you know, he's bleeding, and he's got a gash over one eye, blood's coming out of his mouth. | ||
| So the fourth round comes out. | ||
| He's still just wearing him out. | ||
| My wife, Susan, said, look, you've got to stop this fight. | ||
| So I run down to Billy. | ||
| I said, Billy, I said, stop the fight. | ||
| And I said, by the way, I need to borrow $50,000. | ||
| He looked up at me and he said, let's let him go a little longer. | ||
| So Terry gets out of the round. | ||
| He comes out in the fifth round, and the fight completely turns around. | ||
| And he starts wearing this other guy's head out. | ||
| And he wins the fifth round. | ||
| I mean, it's not even close. | ||
| So they come out for the sixth round. | ||
| And this was only a six-round fight, Joe, but it was one of the best fights I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| And, I mean, they stood toe-to-toe in the sixth round, and they fought, and bell rings. | ||
| Well, I got a draw. | ||
| But it was one of the best fights I've ever seen. | ||
| It was a six-round fight, and I got a draw. | ||
| And the reason I got a draw is I had a kid who was a real classy fighter. | ||
| And I got to tell you the ending of this story. | ||
| I'm in prison. | ||
| I'm in Pensacola. | ||
| And I get letters. | ||
| And I got a letter. | ||
| And I hadn't seen Terry Silver since then. | ||
| When I gave up the fighters, I gave Terry to somebody. | ||
| I gave Tyrone Moore to Billy. | ||
| And I gave Dana Rosten to Billy. | ||
| I'm in prison. | ||
| Fast forward 2018-19. | ||
| I wish I'd have brought the letter. | ||
| I'll send you a copy of the letter. | ||
| And a letter from Terry Silver. | ||
| And he said, Billy, I remember he was talking about the fight, and he said, I remember you tried to stop the fight. | ||
| He said, I could not lose that fight for you and Miss Susan. | ||
| And he went on to talk about, you know, that and talked about our relationship. | ||
| And anyway, he sent me this letter. | ||
| And I mean, I don't know, 40 years later, I get this letter in prison from this kid. | ||
| And it's all about that night, that fight at the Hacienda, and how he wasn't going to lose that fight. | ||
| And he wasn't going to allow him to lose that fight because of Susan and me. | ||
| And it was touching. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Dodge that bullet, huh? | ||
| Yeah, well, Billy would have stopped the fight, but the problem was, I said, I need to borrow $50,000. | ||
| He said, he hesitated, he said, let's let him go a little longer. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So what did you wind up going to jail for? | ||
| I went to jail for insider trading. | ||
| See, Joe, publicly people know I've been on sports and they know I'm pretty good at that. | ||
| But I do a lot of other things, Joe. | ||
| Since the late 80s, you know, I've owned golf courses. | ||
| I had seven golf courses in Las Vegas, which... | ||
| You know, I built from scratch four of them and the other three, but I've owned and operated golf courses since the late 80s. | ||
| I've had golf courses in Chicago, New Mexico, Arizona, but I had seven in Las Vegas. | ||
| You know, when I got out of school, I went into the automobile business. | ||
| I was in it 16 years. | ||
| I got out. | ||
| But I'm in the automobile business too, so I had 22 car dealerships at one time. | ||
| So I had the golf courses, car dealerships, bet on sports, but I also invest in stocks. | ||
| I invest my own money, not someone else's money. | ||
| And, you know, actually I probably have a bigger presence with that than I do betting sports because it's a bigger market. | ||
| You can bet more. | ||
| Well, I bought a stock. | ||
| I'd owned it for 10 years. | ||
| And I'd gotten involved. | ||
| There was an SEC investigation. | ||
| The initial investigation was into myself and Carl Icahn. | ||
| And it involved a stock trade that I did with that that he'd owned stock in. | ||
| And that investigation went three and a half years. | ||
| It went nowhere because there was nothing there. | ||
| There was no wrongdoing at all. | ||
| And then... | ||
| And then there was a stock that I'd owned for 10 years, a stock called Dean Foods. | ||
| And they'd been involved in a material transaction they'd spun off a part of their company. | ||
| And I owned a large amount of this stock. | ||
| And the SEC was looking at anyone who bought and sold stock around a certain period of time, and I was one of those people. | ||
| And it was at the end of the other investigation, and because of my notoriety, who I was, I'd been indicted six times before, and I'd gone to court and beat them five times. | ||
|
unidentified
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That started in 1983. So you were already a marked man. | |
| Well, yeah. | ||
| What had you been indicted for? | ||
| I'd been indicted for betting on sports. | ||
| Joe, stop and try to get your head around this one. | ||
| In 1990, in Las Vegas, Nevada, the gaming capital of the world, the FBI took myself and my wife out of our home, and handcuffs and my wife, they had leg irons on her, and we were arrested and we were charged with being part of a criminal conspiracy. | ||
| Conspiring to bet on sports. | ||
| Bet on sports. | ||
| Now, here we are in 2024. Betting on sports is legal in the majority of the United States. | ||
| In 2023, in Las Vegas at the Circle Hotel, I was an inducted into the Sports Gamblers Hall of Fame for betting on sports. | ||
| But in 1990, in Las Vegas, Nevada, I was indicted, along with my wife, in charge with betting on sports. | ||
| So, yeah, I'd gone to court a number of times. | ||
| I'd beat them a number of times. | ||
| Every one of the indictments were centered around my sports betting. | ||
| That's what they were centered around, nothing more than less. | ||
| You know, I was a sports bettor. | ||
| So was sports betting illegal? | ||
| What were the laws? | ||
| Absolutely it wasn't illegal. | ||
| No? | ||
| No, not illegal at all. | ||
| I was charged with being part of a criminal conspiracy, conspiring to bet on sports. | ||
| Betting people in other states was ridiculous. | ||
| I went to court, my wife and I. We were exonerated. | ||
| So was it because it was legal in Vegas but not legal in other states? | ||
| They tried to make it that way. | ||
| But when we went to court and the facts came out, we were exonerated on all the charges. | ||
| There was one charge. | ||
| The vote was 11 to 1 to acquit us. | ||
| And come to find out that one guy who voted against us hadn't told the truth in his interview to be on the jury. | ||
| He was a former police officer. | ||
| So anyway, they chose not to indict us. | ||
| They dropped the case. | ||
| It was over with. | ||
| But we exonerated all the charges except the one charge, and they were voted 11-1 to acquit us on that. | ||
| And then I was indicted three times after that for the same thing, batting on sports. | ||
| It was thrown out of court every time. | ||
| And then, so anyway, but what happens, what I realized through all of this, Joe, is the higher profile you have, the bigger target you become. | ||
| Especially if you're someone who's beat them a number of times over a period of years, there becomes a vendetta. | ||
| You're the guy that everybody wants to bring down. | ||
| And then I'm involved in New York originally with a guy with Carl Icahn, one of the most successful investors in the history of the world, and that investigation went nowhere because there was nothing there. | ||
| And then this issue came up with Dean Foods, and bottom line was there was a lot of motivation to get me, to indict me, and that's exactly what happened. | ||
| The four people, there were five people involved in my case, Three prosecutors, a supervisor and the former U.S. attorney. | ||
| Four of them, as soon as my case was over within a matter of months, held press conferences and their claim to fame was they had sent me to prison. | ||
| Three of them have gone into private practice today. | ||
| Their sole business is they represent people with white collar crimes in the Southern District of New York. | ||
| They bring them back over with the people that they worked with for years and they cut deals. | ||
| The fourth one ran for the U.S. Congress in New York. | ||
| He's now a United States congressman. | ||
| And the guy who was a former U.S. attorney, he is now working for a law firm representing people with white collar crimes. | ||
| So they went from what they were doing to these very high paying jobs making a lot of money. | ||
| The other fellow is now in politics. | ||
| He's a congressman from New York. | ||
| So there's a lot of motivation for people on that side to send high-profile people to prison. | ||
| That's kind of how they get to the next rung of the letter, so to speak. | ||
| You know, the reason I wrote this book, Joe, is I started—I began to write this book in 2003 with a guy in Las Vegas. | ||
| His name was Jack Sheehan. | ||
| Good friend, good writer, good guy. | ||
| And we worked on it for a while, and I decided I'm not writing any book. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, fast forward 2017. I walked into federal prison in Pensacola, Florida when I was 71 years old with a five-year sentence, which could have easily been a life sentence. | ||
| And while I was in prison, my daughter committed suicide. | ||
| So I had to write this book. | ||
| I had to write it for a number of reasons. | ||
| I wanted to share my childhood that you and I went over a little bit. | ||
| I want to help people because, you know, I don't care who you are or what part you're at in your life. | ||
| We all have issues that we're dealing with. | ||
| So I wanted to share my childhood and then I wanted to share You know, the addictions that I had when I was younger. | ||
| I had an issue with alcohol. | ||
| I got addicted to betting sports. | ||
| And then later on in my life, as I became more mature and I was able to overcome those things, you know, I got in business. | ||
| I've been successful with that. | ||
| And, you know, I've become a fairly successful sports bettor. | ||
| And then I went to prison, which I had to share that experience because when I went into prison, there was only one positive thing that came out of that, Joe. | ||
| I mentored around two dozen men. | ||
| And some of these men have been in prison 20, 25 years. | ||
| And it really opened my eyes. | ||
| You know, every time there was a visitation where I was at in prison, I had someone who visited me. | ||
| Sixty percent of the people in prison never get a visit. | ||
| But these men that I mentored, not a one of them wanted to go back to prison. | ||
| But I spent a lot of one-on-one time with them and the closer they would get to release, you know, the more apprehensive they became. | ||
| I mean tough guys, you know, I mean tough guys, you know, ripped guys, had been in prison 20-25 years, they would become very emotional. | ||
| They didn't want to go back to prison but they knew they were probably going to come back to prison because they had no way to earn a living. | ||
| The only thing they learned in prison was how to become a better criminal. | ||
| And yeah, they were going to get out. | ||
| While they were in the halfway house, they were going to get a job someplace, making minimum wage. | ||
| But as soon as that was over, they had to do something to feed their families. | ||
| And they, you know, they had no job skill set. | ||
| So when I got out of prison, I knew I had to try to do something about that, okay? | ||
| And so I got involved with Harry Reid when I originally got out of prison, former senator from Nevada, former majority leader. | ||
| And I got involved with Harry because clearly Democrats are in power and I wanted to put vocational schools in the federal prisons. | ||
| And I was willing to put up some of my money initially to get it started. | ||
| And unfortunately, Senator Reid passed away before we were able to get anything done. | ||
| Well, a former sheriff in Las Vegas, Bill Young, he told me, he said, Bill, he said, the best reentry program in the United States, it's in Las Vegas. | ||
| He said, it's called Hope for Prisoners. | ||
| I said, I never heard of it. | ||
| He said, well, I want you to meet this guy that runs it. | ||
| So there's a guy who runs it, his name is John Ponder, who's been in prison himself twice. | ||
| He started his program in 2012, Joe. | ||
| The recidivism rate is only 5%. | ||
| So, you know, being a leery guy, being a gambler, you know, there's a lot of people looking for your money these days. | ||
| We all know that. | ||
| But I met with John Ponder and became really impressed with him. | ||
| But the more I learned about him and the program and what he's done, I got superly impressed. | ||
| And so my wife and I got more involved. | ||
| We made some financial assistance available, and they were able to add to some of the things they were doing as far as, you know, teaching and stuff. | ||
| This is an 18-month program these people are in, by the way. | ||
| And the first thing they do, almost every one of these people have an issue with drugs. | ||
| First thing they do is get them off of drugs. | ||
| Second thing they do, they get them right with their families. | ||
| You got to be right with your family. | ||
| And that's the reason this program works so good. | ||
| And every month, we have a graduation there. | ||
| The graduation, Joe, was held at Metropolitan Police Headquarters in downtown Las Vegas. | ||
| There's usually 50 to 75 police officers there. | ||
| Come to find out there's 200 police officers in Las Vegas Metro that are mentoring these people now. | ||
| A typical graduation, you've got the mayor there, you've got the district attorney there, you've got a judge there, you've got the head of corrections for Nevada, sometimes the governor's there if he's in town. | ||
| And usually you got about a thousand people there, friends, and you got a lot of mentors in the Las Vegas area that come. | ||
| They come up and they receive their diplomas. | ||
| And the second that's over, there's a job fair and they all have jobs before they leave. | ||
| And then in these graduations, they'll invariably always have someone who's been out of the program for a year or two years or five years. | ||
| They'll come up and speak and they'll talk about their life and how it changed their life. | ||
| The current governor we have, he was a former sheriff that was involved in this program. | ||
| His name is Joe Lombardo. | ||
| And so Joe recognized how important it is for these people to have a job skill set when they come out of prison also. | ||
| So we spoke to him and the head of corrections in Nevada, and we now are putting vocational schools in Nevada prisons. | ||
| And they're going to be able to get certified to be an electrician, a plumber, air-conditioned repair truck driver, And when we decided to do this, of course it takes money, there's another family in Las Vegas, the Ingolstadt family, and so they agreed to put up two million dollars. | ||
| Susan and I agreed to put up two million, and the state agreed to put up a million. | ||
| So the night they made this announcement, I was asked to come and speak. | ||
| And I got there, and there was another speaker, her name was Alice Johnson. | ||
| Do you know Alice Johnson? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Alice Johnson is the lady that I was imprisoned at the time, but President Trump pardoned her, and he pardoned her because her case got brought to his attention by Kim Kardashian. | ||
| And so Alice Johnson got up and spoke, and I was blown away with her, and I was blown away with her speech. | ||
| I think she was from Mississippi, I think, or Louisiana, one of the two. | ||
| And she'd gone to prison for being, quote, a drug mule. | ||
| And if I understood her correctly, and I think I did, I think her role as a drug mule was she was conveying messages between the guy selling drugs and the guy supplying drugs, and she was strictly on the phone conveying messages. | ||
| Never touched a drug, never sold a drug. | ||
| First time offense, they gave her life in prison with no parole. | ||
| First time offense. | ||
| So she was in prison, I think, about 22 years and had become a model person in prison. | ||
| I think she'd become a minister. | ||
| And she got pardoned. | ||
| But that went into either all or most of the prisons in the United States that night. | ||
| So we followed it up. | ||
| We went out to Indian Springs State Prison in Nevada. | ||
| And we walked in the gymnasium. | ||
| I was there with John Ponder and myself. | ||
| And there's, I don't know, 500, 600, 800 inmates there. | ||
| And when we originally walked in, we started talking to them. | ||
| You could kind of see, you know, they were kind of disinterested. | ||
| Some were listening, but most weren't. | ||
| But when John got up and he got to talking about what we were going to do, you could see they started to get more interested. | ||
| And when I got up there, you know, I said, well, you guys are probably trying to figure out what this old graded dude here is to talk to you about today. | ||
| So I kind of explained to them while I was there what my background was, the fact that I'd been in prison, and what we were going to do with the vocational schools. | ||
| Well, Joe, when you got finished, you could hear a pin drop. | ||
| And we started doing Q&A. And it seems like the questions went on forever. | ||
| Finally, the correctional officer said, you know, they have to get back. | ||
| And we had to end the Q&A. But now we have vocational schools in Nevada prisons. | ||
| And it's just, to me, it's not only those men that I remembered that I mentored. | ||
| Okay, when they go home, a lot of them have families, you know, they got four or five children. | ||
| Okay, so those children, if that father goes home and he has a job as an electrician, a plumber, air conditioning, repairer, Their father is no longer a criminal. | ||
| Their father is an electrician. | ||
| He's a plumber. | ||
| And I think there's a much greater chance that that child will follow in those footsteps than possibly that of crime, a life of crime. | ||
| So anyway, long story. | ||
| That's a beautiful thing to be proud of. | ||
| Well, I am proud of it. | ||
| But there were a number of reasons I wrote this book. | ||
| I mean, you know, I see the... | ||
| So-called, whatever number you pick out, the 50 million new people that have been in sports. | ||
| And I see the way that sports is being marketed, the way it's being pitched to these people. | ||
| And I can see, you know, it's almost a sense that a large, large part of them are going to become addicted, okay? | ||
| If I had been pitched on sports the way they're being pitched on sports today with a phone, I mean, I got addicted without it. | ||
| I can only imagine what it would have been with it. | ||
| And then on top of it, there's no law whatsoever now that they have to disclose anything. | ||
| So people are making bets on sports. | ||
| They have no idea what the odds are they're laying or getting or anything else. | ||
| There's no disclosure whatsoever. | ||
| And then on top of that, you know, They don't even understand the basics of sports betting, so I wanted to put that in the book. | ||
| By the way, Joe, you didn't ask me this. | ||
| 100% of any money that comes out of this book goes to charity. | ||
| It goes to Opportunity Village in Las Vegas, which is an organization that works with intellectually challenged people. | ||
| It goes to Hope for Prisoners, and it goes to an organization in Louisville, Kentucky called Cedar Lake Lodge, which works with intellectually challenged people. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| That's really great that you're doing that, man. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| This case that they got you on insider trading, what was the allegation? | ||
| What did they say that you had done? | ||
| Well, they said that a guy who was on the board at the time had passed me along non-public information. | ||
| And I had taken that non-public information, and I had used it to trade on the stock, take advantage, unfair advantage, illegal advantage, and made money. | ||
| And that was the allegation, and that's what I was convicted of when I went to prison. | ||
| Now, you know, I could give you the background and the details of it, Joe, and I think even Even the life you lived, I think you would find it fairly interesting. | ||
| I owned this stock for 10 years, and this fellow who was on a board of directors, his name was Tom Davis. | ||
| I recently met this guy in Dallas, Texas in like 2000. And I was trying to raise money. | ||
| I was trying to buy American Golf and National Golf properties. | ||
| He was running Donaldson, Lufkin, and Jennerette in Dallas at the time, which was an investment bank. | ||
| And I went there to try to raise the money to buy these entities. | ||
| I didn't raise any money through him, but I hit it off with him. | ||
| I liked the guy a lot. | ||
| He played golf. | ||
| We knew some other people. | ||
| He had a home in La Jolla at the time. | ||
| So we became friends. | ||
| In 2002, Donald Lufkin and Janet Rett got sold out and he started his own private investment firm. | ||
| And then, you know, he would call us on deals in Las Vegas and we invested in some of the deals he called us on, some of the deals we didn't invest in. | ||
| This guy was a very prominent guy in Dallas. | ||
| He owned part of the Dallas Stars. | ||
| He owned part of the Texas Rangers. | ||
| He was a member of Preston Trail Country Club. | ||
| When he was in La Jolla, I played golf with him. | ||
| I played a member guest with him one time at La Jolla Country Club. | ||
| I had a lot of respect for this guy. | ||
| And every time I was ever around this guy, he was the most buttoned-up guy that you could ever imagine. | ||
| And I didn't realize it at the time, and I don't think most people around him realized it, but I think he ended up with a real issue with alcohol. | ||
| And he came out in court and it looked like he ended up with some sort of an uncontrollable issue, I think, with women, too. | ||
| And I think he lost all of his money gambling. | ||
| And then what happened after he lost all of his money gambling, he was on the board of directors of a charity in Dallas, and he'd actually embezzled some money from them to pay some of his gambling debts. | ||
| Clearly, I was totally unaware of any of this. | ||
| I don't think anyone in Texas even knew about it, especially, you know, the people at Dean Foods. | ||
| Well, what happened is Dean Foods, when I got involved with it early on, they were made up of like three different divisions. | ||
| They had just a, we'll call it a regular milk division, which was the majority of their business, the majority of their revenue. | ||
| Then they had an organic division called White Wave, and then they had another division that primarily sold products to institutions, say like McDonald's and long shelf type products. | ||
| Well, during the years, people quit drinking a lot less milk. | ||
| We'll call it fluid milk. | ||
| And as a result, the fluid milk business was in decline. | ||
| The organic business was growing leaps and bounds, you know, soy milk, oat milk, different types of those types of different milks. | ||
| Well, the stock traded at a depressed price because the majority of their revenue came from fluid milk, just regular old milk. | ||
| But the other parts of their business, they were growing substantially. | ||
| And that was really the play with the stock. | ||
| The federal government, they set the price of raw milk every month. | ||
| That's publicized. | ||
| So that's what the farmer gets for his milk when he sells it to someone who's in the milk business. | ||
| So I bought in this stock, and I realized pretty quick that I thought it was like J&J. I thought it was something that didn't have a lot of volatility to it. | ||
| Well, I realized there was a lot more volatility to it than I realized because the price of milk... | ||
| The price of petroleum products because Dean Foods had a huge fleet of trucks for transportation that were all running on diesel fuel. | ||
| And then the cartons were made out of oil. | ||
| And there were a lot of things that had a material influence on how they were going to do as a company. | ||
| Well, in 2010, Dean Foods came out and publicly announced that they were looking at spinning off White Wave, the organic division. | ||
| They hired a company to come in and do an assessment and came back and said, well, the time wasn't right for them to do it, but it was something they would certainly consider in the future if they felt like it was in the best interest of the company. | ||
| In 2000, I sold all of my stock. | ||
| In 2011, at the very end of 2011, I bought 58,900 shares of that stock from J.P. Morgan. | ||
| And the only reason I bought this stock, and for me it was a very, very small amount of stock, a very small investment. | ||
| The only reason I bought the stock was J.P. Morgan was their lead bank. | ||
| And I knew if I ever tried to talk to that analyst about Dean Foods and he wasn't available, he was in a blackout period, maybe there was something going on, you know. | ||
| Because I knew they were going to spin this company off eventually, and not only did I know it, everyone else knew it. | ||
| It wasn't a matter of if, it was just a matter of when. | ||
| So you fast forward to May of 12, that month Deutsche Bank had come out with a report, and they had predicted that White Wave was going to be spun off. | ||
| Well, they had an earnings report that month in May, and I had put a limited order in to buy the stock. | ||
| Do you know what a limited order is? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, it's like making an offer on a house, okay? | ||
| A limited order on stock, let's say the stock's trading at $10. | ||
| You call your broker up and you say, okay, Joe, I want to buy so many shares of Dean Foods stock, but I'm not paying any more than $10. | ||
| If it goes past 10, I don't want any. | ||
| But anything you can buy for 10 or less, I want to buy this number of shares of stock. | ||
| So I put a limited order in that day to buy that stock, and I didn't get it bought. | ||
| I got half the stock bought because the price had gone up. | ||
| Well, the next day they reported earnings and they also announced that they were back considering to spend off White Wave stock. | ||
| Stock went up about $1.20. | ||
| I bought another 750,000 shares of stock and paid the additional $1.20. | ||
| I didn't sell a share. | ||
| That was in May. | ||
| In June, I didn't buy any stock. | ||
| In July, there was a severe drought in the United States. | ||
| Corn prices went through the ceiling, and when corn prices went up, the price of milk's going to go up because the farmer's got to feed his milk with corn, right? | ||
| Or corn. | ||
| And then on top of that, what happened when the corn prices went way up, the bean food stock price went way down. | ||
| And I had a loss on the stock at that time of, I had a paper loss of, I don't know, three, four, five million dollars. | ||
| Well, when he did that, I went back in and I bought another, say, a million and a half shares of the stock. | ||
| Which was consistent with what I've done with every stock I've ever owned almost. | ||
| If I buy a stock, price goes down, I'm going to buy more of that stock to average a price out, especially if I feel like the stock is really undervalued. | ||
| And the only reason Dean Food's stock had gone down was because of this drought and the corn prices had gone up. | ||
| Both of those things were temporary. | ||
| Droughts don't last forever, and I knew as soon as the drought normalized itself, the stock would go back up regardless. | ||
| But on top of that, Dean Foods had announced that they were considering spending off white wave stock. | ||
| This was the second time publicly that they had done this. | ||
| Okay, because in 2010, they did it, they did a study. | ||
| Now this is 2012. So in August, when they reported earnings, they confirmed, we're going to spend off White Wave stock. | ||
| Stock goes up about $4.50 a share. | ||
| I didn't sell a share, Joe. | ||
| I bought another million shares. | ||
| I paid an additional $4.50 a share. | ||
| From that August until the following February of the next year, every time Dean Food's stock would go down, I would buy more of it. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So now we get to February of 2013, and I own 5,300,000 shares of the stock. | ||
| Well, I wanted to buy a home in Palm Desert, so I bought a home at a place called Bighorn Country Club. | ||
| I sold a million shares of the stock to pay for the house, and I kept 4,300,000 shares. | ||
| Two weeks later, Dean Foods reported earnings, and the earnings were bad. | ||
| The stock went down $2. | ||
| That was one of the charges of insider trading they charged me with, Joe. | ||
| They said that I had prior knowledge that the earnings were going to be bad. | ||
| I avoided a $2 million loss on a million shares of stock that I sold. | ||
| But I lost $8.6 million on the stock I kept. | ||
| So does that make sense to you? | ||
| If you're trading on insider trading, I would only sold a million shares of it? | ||
| I mean, why wouldn't I sell it all, you know? | ||
| That was one of the charges. | ||
| But anyway, fast forward— How did they try to prove that you had insider information? | ||
| Well, I'm going to get around to that. | ||
| I'm a slow storyteller. | ||
|
unidentified
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No worries. | |
| I like it. | ||
| But I'm thorough. | ||
| I had 31 months to think about this in prison, Joe. | ||
| So anyway, fast forward to the following August, which was a year after they had announced publicly they were going to do this. | ||
| I kept my 4,300,000 shares and then the following August when they finally spun it off is when I sold the balance of my stock. | ||
| So they did the investigation and what happens, any time there's a material transaction with a publicly traded company, the SEC, they'll send out a list of people who've bought or sold significant amounts of stock to the boards of directors and they'll ask them, do you know this person? | ||
| And when he did, Mr. Davis, he identified me, and rightfully so, who I was, what our relationship was. | ||
| So the SEC, they were doing their investigation. | ||
| And after the case in New York with Mr. Alcott and I went away, there was nothing there, this Dean Foods thing came up. | ||
| I didn't realize it at the time, but Tom Davis had gotten involved in some pretty bad things. | ||
| So the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, they leaked two stories. | ||
| And all the details in the book about the leaked stories, 100% of it. | ||
| And when they leaked these stories, in one of the stories they put Tom Davis' name in the book. | ||
| So Tom Davis and his lawyer, a guy named Milsheimer, they contact the SEC and they say, look, we want to come and give a voluntary interview. | ||
| So they go up, they give a voluntary interview, and they say, look, they denied emphatically that they'd ever given me any inside information, told them under no circumstances had they ever given me any inside information. | ||
| Well, the SEC but more importantly the FBI continued to investigate Tom Davis. | ||
| They learned that he had embezzled this money from a better women's charity in Dallas. | ||
| They learned that he had a fraudulent tax return filed because what happened when he took this money out of this charity, When he put the money back in the charity, it creates an entry. | ||
| You know, a withdrawal and an entry. | ||
| Well, the guy who normally filed the taxes for the charity had told him, we're going to have to show this withdrawal and this entry. | ||
| He said, oh, no, no, you can't do that. | ||
| Because he didn't want other people on the board of directors to know what he had done. | ||
| So he gets someone else to file a return, which is fraudulent. | ||
| He doesn't disclose this. | ||
| And then come to find out, he had given insider information to someone else in Dallas, another man there. | ||
| So they continued to investigate him, and I think after he and his lawyer learned that they had him for embezzlement, they had him for tax fraud, and they believed they had him for insider trading, this other man there that he had actually given insider information to, Two years after he'd given his interview, he decided that he did want to make a deal. | ||
| So his lawyer had represented Mark Cuban in his case in Dallas where Mark Cuban had an SEC case. | ||
| In that case, his lawyer had hired a lawyer out of New York, a guy named Chris Clark. | ||
| And Chris Clark was the lawyer that recently represented President Biden and had to withdraw from the case. | ||
| I'm sorry, he didn't represent President Biden. | ||
| I'll take that back. | ||
| He represented President Biden's son. | ||
| But he had to withdraw himself from the case for some reason sometime back. | ||
| That's the same Chris Clark. | ||
| Well, anyway, Milsheimer had called us Chris Clark and said, look, you know, we gave an interview two years ago, but evidently things have changed. | ||
| They felt like they were under a threat of him getting some major jail time because he embezzled the money, he filed a fraudulent tax return, and he had given us other guys that information. | ||
| So Chris Clark, there's another young lawyer who had just joined their firm, and this young lawyer was named Tom, his name was Naftalis, and he, I think Benjamin Naftalis, and he had just worked at the Southern District in New York, and he'd been gone for a short period of time, and he'd actually worked in, I think worked with the same prosecutors investigating this case. | ||
| So, Tom Davis and Milsheimer, they end up retaining Chris Clark and this Benjamin Naphtalus to represent them. | ||
| So they go up there and decide they're going to make a deal with the government. | ||
| In return, the government, they're not going to, you know, they're not going to push for him to spend any time in prison. | ||
| So he, do you know what a proffer is? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I didn't know what one was either until this case came up. | ||
| What a proffer is, Joe, if you meet with prosecutors or you meet with the FBI and you decide you're going to tell them something about someone else, that's called a proffer. | ||
| You're going to tell them everything you know. | ||
| It has to be truthful. | ||
| And the reason for a proffer is once you tell them, then they'll decide, okay, this is what we're willing to do for you. | ||
| Well, Davis went to have these proper sessions with the FBI and the prosecutors pertaining to me. | ||
| If you were going to have a proper session and you were going to tell someone about someone How many proper sessions do you think it would take for you to tell someone that story? | ||
| And let's say the proper sessions lasted two hours each, two and a half hours each. | ||
| How long do you think it would tell for you to explain to someone, you know, how long do you think it may take? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It took him 29 of them. | ||
| He had 29 proper sessions, Joe. | ||
| 60 hours. | ||
| To get his story straight about supposedly how he gave me inside information. | ||
| And in court he said, I never asked him for inside information one time, he quote, voluntarily gave it to me, inside information, as if I would know what he was giving me was inside information. | ||
| And in court he testified he didn't think he was going to do one day in jail. | ||
| The bottom line was embezzling from maturity, filing a fraudulent tax return, giving another man inside information. | ||
| All those things he wasn't going to do one day in jail for any of them. | ||
| And he was their only witness against me, Joe. | ||
| Now, my lawyers caught him and A minimum of 25 lives. | ||
| I mean, he came out in court, I think on one business trip, he called 22 escort services. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the guy... | ||
| He was off the rails. | ||
| No, the guy that I described to you that I met in 2000, 2002, The guy that used to own part of the Dallas Stars and the Texas Rangers, and the guy that was this—I mean, he'd gone from that to this. | ||
| With drugs involved? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| A lot of alcohol was involved. | ||
| I don't know that. | ||
| But to give you an idea how wacky this guy was, he pleads guilty to a bunch of felonies. | ||
| It wouldn't make no difference. | ||
| He had pled guilty to 100 of them because they told him he was convinced he wasn't going to do a day in jail. | ||
| And they were going after you. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And so anyway, after he does this, to give you an idea how wacky this guy was, after he does this, he comes to Las Vegas and he throws a party at the Wynn Hotel celebrating his deal he's cut with the government. | ||
| He lost another $50,000 in their gambling. | ||
| That's how whacked out this guy was. | ||
| So anyway, so that was their only witness against me, Joe. | ||
| They had no other witnesses against me. | ||
| They had 60 days of wiretaps on me. | ||
| How many of you think they played in court? | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| The lead FBI agent in the case who was in charge of the entire squad of the White Collar Crime Investigation Unit in New York, his name was David Chavez. | ||
| When these stories were leaked in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Our lawyers filed a complaint with the court accusing the FBI and the Southern District of leaking this information to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| They came back and denied it, said this never happened, said we were on a fishing expedition. | ||
| That's what Preet Bharara said, we were on a fishing expedition. | ||
| But the judge, to their surprise, I think he said something like, well, these quotes are almost identical to the ones that were made at the grand jury. | ||
| See, he orders an evidentiary hearing, which completely shocked them because normally the judges are just a rubber stamp for them up there and they just take their word. | ||
| You know, we didn't have anything to do with this. | ||
| There's no point in having a hearing. | ||
| Well, this judge, he did. | ||
| He said, well, we need to have an evidentiary hearing. | ||
| So, a couple days before the hearing, they sent a letter over to the judge. | ||
| It's a letter, they call it in camera. | ||
| What that means is it's a private letter that no one else can see. | ||
| My lawyers never got a copy of it, but they sent this letter over to this judge. | ||
| They said, Judge, you know what, we did do this. | ||
| David Chavez, the head of the white-collar crime unit for the FBI in New York, he's the one who did it. | ||
| Yeah, there were five other FBI agents who were aware of it, who were in the meetings with him, but they really didn't have anything to do with it. | ||
| It was just him. | ||
| But he did it, and we want to fess up. | ||
| But we want you to keep this totally private. | ||
| We don't want anyone to know anything about this. | ||
| It'll hurt our reputation, and we recommend that you hold him in contempt of court. | ||
| Well, our lawyers had found out that there was a letter, but they found out we weren't—they weren't telling us what was in it. | ||
| So, you know, my lawyers were—you know, they got—they filed a bunch of motions for this judge to make this letter public. | ||
| Well, finally the judge did make the letter public and copy the letters in my book. | ||
| There were approximately 2,000 emails, Joe. | ||
| They turned over five or six is what they turned over. | ||
| Those public emails are in my book, too. | ||
| But I'm going to give you an example of what those emails contain. | ||
| There's a guy who is a journalist for the New York Times. | ||
| He's still there. | ||
| His name is Protus. | ||
| And his name is Ben Protus. | ||
| And if you look up all the stories he does, it's pretty easy to see. | ||
| You know, he writes stories predominantly about cases that involve the Southern District in New York. | ||
| Well, in the one email that they turned over involving Ben Protus, Ben Protus had written a story about our case, and he was forced to do a redaction, a correction. | ||
| And when he was forced to do the correction, he was upset about this because the story had been given to him by this guy, David Chavez. | ||
| So he calls this Chavez up and he said, look, he said, the story you gave me, I had to do this redaction, and he's complaining to the guy. | ||
| The guy says, look, you're on my radar screen now, and so is the New York Times. | ||
| It's an FBI agent threatening this guy. | ||
| So this guy Protus, he calls up this guy Zobel, who's the number two in the U.S. Attorney's Office. | ||
| He's right under Preet Bharara. | ||
| And he tells him the whole story. | ||
| He said, you know, I did a story. | ||
| I had to go in and do a correction. | ||
| He said, I called this FBI agent, and he threatened me. | ||
| He threatened me, and he threatened the New York Times. | ||
| This guy, Zobel, he sends an email out to the rest of the people in the U.S. Attorney's Office, or a number of people in the U.S. Attorney's Office, and he tells them. | ||
| He recants exactly what happened. | ||
| This guy, Protus, calls him up. | ||
| That email's in the book, too. | ||
| There were five of those emails. | ||
| There was another email in there where they identify a lady who writes for the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| Her name is Susan Pulliam. | ||
| She's still there. | ||
| She still writes for them. | ||
| If you look at stuff she writes, it's very similar to Ben Protus. | ||
| They're all counter-government kind of stories. | ||
| Chavez says he has a relationship with her. | ||
| The bottom line was, you know, like my case, if she were to call you up and interview you, things that she learned about people he was investigating, she would pass it along to him too. | ||
| That's one of the emails they turned over. | ||
| That's in my book also. | ||
| So what happened is when these two stories got leaked in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times within seconds of each other, Tom Davis' name wasn't in the first one. | ||
| My name was in there. | ||
| Phil Mickelson's name was in there. | ||
| Carl Icahn's name was in there. | ||
| But they continued to leak the stories in there. | ||
| And then finally they got Davis' name in there, which when his name came in there, he gets Milsheimer, goes and denies it two years later after they found out all these other things. | ||
| He decides he will be a witness for them. | ||
| In return, he doesn't think he's going to do a day in jail. | ||
| And he hires this lawyer up there who had worked with them for eight years, the prosecutors. | ||
| It still takes him 29 meetings for him to get his story straight. | ||
| So I go to court. | ||
| He's the only witness against me. | ||
| They don't play one wiretap. | ||
| But when a jury went back, Joe – by the way, the FBI agent, Chavez, was suspended from the FBI. The judge in our case referred his case to the Office of Public Integrity in Washington, D.C. And he recommended he be charged with two felonies, criminal contempt and obstruction of justice. | ||
| Do you know what happened to Mr. Chavez? | ||
| He was allowed to retire, Joe, with pay, and he's never been prosecuted for anything. | ||
| So when the jury went back and they convicted me, They didn't know that there were 60 days of war attacks. | ||
| They didn't know that the lead FBI agent for three and a half years who had been doing this case had been thrown out of the FBI and had been described by the judge doing their case. | ||
| He said he should be charged with two fellows. | ||
| They didn't know any of that. | ||
| Now, in retrospect, like I said, I had 31 months to think about this. | ||
| Our case went on for a little over three weeks. | ||
| We're in the winter in New York. | ||
| Weather's really bad. | ||
| You know, they stopped the trial 15, 20 times. | ||
| The jury, they were sleeping, and one guy snored so loud. | ||
| The judge stopped the trial. | ||
| So they'd already completely lost interest. | ||
| And the case is about insider trading. | ||
| I mean, a lot of people don't understand stock trading, Joe. | ||
| And, you know, they got cross-sided up there with the lawyer showing them graphs and all these type things. | ||
| And the one guy on the jury had said, he said the next week he was going to have to leave. | ||
| He couldn't stay on the jury any longer. | ||
| He was going to go on a trip. | ||
| So after the prosecution that wrapped their case up, I had to make a decision whether I was going to testify or not. | ||
| My lawyer said, look, nobody can believe this guy, Tom Davis. | ||
| And he said, there's no way they can convict you if they can't believe Tom Davis. | ||
| And we had 23 witnesses prepared to testify. | ||
| And we talked about it, and the lawyer said, it's strictly your decision. | ||
| We're just telling you, we don't think that there's any way they can convict you if you don't testify. | ||
| So we ended up putting five witnesses on. | ||
| We put on three stockbrokers that I did business with, a controller from our company, and a pilot who had flown me. | ||
| And he was on there for one reason. | ||
| There was an allegation I was in Texas at a certain time and I wasn't, and we proved I wasn't. | ||
| Anyway, we rested our case. | ||
| Big mistake. | ||
| I should have testified. | ||
| We should have put the other people on regardless of whether the jury was bored or whether they wasn't or whether the guy was going to leave or whether he wasn't. | ||
| And the other thing that It was another reason that I got convicted, and I'll go to my grave believing this. | ||
| Phil Mickelson was supposed to come and testify. | ||
| He told me he would. | ||
| Phil Mickelson got involved in this case. | ||
| It was really another screwy deal. | ||
| And I wrote about it in a book, and I only wrote about it in a book because there was no way to tell the story unless I explained my relationship with him. | ||
| But he bought stock of this company, too. | ||
| And when the SEC attempted to interview him, he took the Fifth Amendment. | ||
| And when I learned he took the Fifth Amendment, I said, what in the hell are you doing? | ||
| Just tell the truth. | ||
| I didn't realize it, but he was involved in another investigation, a money laundering investigation, That had been going on for a year that had nothing to do with me and he was afraid to testify with the SEC because he was concerned they would ask him questions about this money laundering case. | ||
| Now he had already given interviews to the FBI and he'd emphatically denied that I'd ever given him any inside information. | ||
| How do I know that? | ||
| I got a copy of the interviews. | ||
| That's another thing, Joe. | ||
| If someone does an interview with the FBI and they tell them something that ends up getting you in trouble or you end up getting indicted for that, you never get to see any of that as part of discovery. | ||
| But if you tell them something that basically proves a guy's innocent, you get indicted. | ||
| They have to give you a copy of that. | ||
| It's called Brady material. | ||
| Well, I got a copy of the interviews. | ||
| I know exactly what he told the FBI. And the same thing he told me he told them. | ||
| And, well, the prosecutors weren't about to call him because they knew what he was going to say. | ||
| He told me he would come and testify. | ||
| In the 11th hour, he changes his mind. | ||
| His lawyers told him not to come and testify. | ||
| Well, these stories that got leaked in the paper early on with him, myself, and Carl Icahn, everybody in the world that read these stories about Phil Mickelson, myself, etc. | ||
| Everybody read that Phil Mickelson had given a million bucks back he made in a stock trade. | ||
| Well, if you don't know anything about this case and you see someone who's being investigated for insider trading, two people, you see one guy give a million dollars back, there's only two conclusions you can come to. | ||
| Either he's innocent, he gave a million bucks back, or he bought his way out, one of the two. | ||
| But regardless, it makes the other guy look guilty as hell, the guy who supposedly gave him insider information, because why in the hell would a guy give a million dollars back on a stock trade if he didn't do something wrong or he wasn't buying his way out? | ||
| That's what the average guy thinks, right? | ||
| That's what I would think. | ||
| Well, what they didn't realize was he gave this money back, this money laundering case that he was involved in. | ||
| He miraculously gets dropped out of that. | ||
| The guy that he wired the money to went to federal prison, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So all that's in the book. | ||
| That's the reason I had to write the book, Joe. | ||
| I mean, the only reason he's in my book, he's in two chapters of 28. I couldn't have written a book and told this story without writing my relationship in there with him. | ||
| The only thing I wrote in there was what I had to write in there. | ||
| I mean, there are a lot of things, I mean, that I didn't put in there, and I'm not going to put in there. | ||
| I only put the stuff in there that involved our betting relationship, our friendship, and this issue with the SEC. | ||
| Nothing more, nothing less. | ||
| Anything else involved in him or his personal life, it's not in the book, and I would have never put it in the book. | ||
| So that's the component, you know, about myself and him and about the Southern District, about my indictment. | ||
| And the only way I could have told a story is write a book. | ||
| Arm and Kattan, when I decided to write this book, I have a fellow who works with me, advises me on a lot of things. | ||
| A guy who's got a lot of expertise in these areas. | ||
| His name is Glenn Bunting. | ||
| And Glenn recommended Armand Gattayan to me. | ||
| And Armand worked with 60 Minutes for eight years. | ||
| He was a correspondent there. | ||
| He was with CBS Sports, I think, for like 12 years. | ||
| He's a highly, highly well-known, extremely respected journalist. | ||
| He'd done 12 books. | ||
| He won 12 Emmy Awards. | ||
| He did the book on Tiger Woods. | ||
| So I wanted Armin involved in this because I had to tell this story about my prosecution, about the Southern District of New York. | ||
| I had to tell the story about the involvement of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| But I had to have someone who could write that story who was a former investigative reporter, and Armin is one of the absolute best in the world, but someone who no one would question their credibility. | ||
| And Armin and Glenn Bunning and our team did a magnificent job in helping me tell that part of the story. | ||
| You know, the rest of the book, you know, is pretty much, it's in my words. | ||
| I mean, you know, I wrote the vast majority of the other. | ||
| But I work with a lot of great people in the book. | ||
| I work, again, Armand Catan. | ||
| I can't say enough good things about Armand. | ||
| But Armand, in explaining this story along with Glenn Bunting of the Southern District, you'd have to understand Glenn Bunting's background too. | ||
| Here are two people Who worked at the highest levels of journalism, but they've also worked with the government and prosecutors. | ||
| I mean, they worked and they know this business inside and out. | ||
| And you could ask either one of them. | ||
| Frankly, they were in disbelief of what the facts were until they confirmed what the facts were. | ||
| And Armand, I think if I'm quoting Armand correctly, said, I've never seen anything like this. | ||
| It sounds so dirty. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it was. | ||
| What is that like, giving up 31 months of your life or something so gross? | ||
| Well, Joe, 31 months of your life when you're 71 years old, which very easily could have been a life sentence. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was rough. | ||
| I mean, I left my wife at the time. | ||
| We've been married. | ||
| This is our 48th year of marriage. | ||
| But, you know, I left her, said goodbye, and I walked into a federal prison. | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| You didn't know if you were ever getting out. | ||
| I didn't know I was ever getting out because, again, my age. | ||
| Also, it's fucking dangerous. | ||
| Yeah, it is dangerous. | ||
| And I was in what they... | ||
| This is another misnomer, Joe. | ||
| You know, and this is one of the biggest misnomers there is, and this is the reason I love you and I love your show, because you get a chance here to tell your story. | ||
| You know, we're not in sound bites, and we're not, you know, it's not some BS orchestrated story out there, you know. | ||
| I went to Pensacola Prison, and I hired a prison consultant. | ||
| I was looking for someplace I could go to that my wife could commute to reasonably. | ||
| And while I was in prison, she was in Kentucky the majority of the time, so it wasn't a bad commute for her. | ||
| But they also had a program there. | ||
| It's called RDAP. If you've had issues with alcohol in the past and you qualify for this program, you go through it and you get a year from your Senate. | ||
| So I thought I could possibly qualify for that. | ||
| Well, I go there and there had been a story written about this prison like in 2008. I think it was written by either Barbara Walters or someone like Barbara. | ||
| And they described this prison as like a country club. | ||
| And it had swimming pools and the people could play golf. | ||
| Anyway, I'm going to tell you the place that I went to, okay? | ||
| I don't know what it was like in 2008, but I can tell you what it was like in 2017 on October the 10th when I walked in there. | ||
| I was in a dorm. | ||
| I was in a building. | ||
| It was built in 1960. And this building, this is where naval airmen used to be housed. | ||
| I was in a room 18 by 22 with nine other prisoners on bunk beds. | ||
| They had black mold all over the walls. | ||
| There was no heat whatsoever in this building. | ||
| I'm in Pensacola, Florida. | ||
| I'm not in Miami. | ||
| I'm in a concrete block building. | ||
| It's got chillers that run 24-7. | ||
| So in the winter there, I mean, you can't imagine how cold you would get in there. | ||
| There's 200 men on this floor. | ||
| We had a restroom on each side of the entrance. | ||
| But you got 10 men in an 18 by 22 room, and you got black mold all over the walls, and you got no heat. | ||
| The food in this place was just horrible. | ||
| There were prisoners who came down who had been in multiple levels of federal prisons. | ||
| Every one of them said it was the worst food they had ever seen in any place. | ||
| Medical care there was, it was pitiful. | ||
| One of the doctors, his nickname was Dr. Death. | ||
| I mean, there was a guy there that they diagnosed with hemorrhoids and he died of colon cancer. | ||
| I could tell you another story. | ||
| It's funny, but it's not funny, to give you an idea how bad the medical care was. | ||
| There was a guy went in and he had a place on his face. | ||
| They told him, come back, they were going to take it off. | ||
| It's like in February. | ||
| Guy goes back in, this doctor's death, takes a big thing off the other side of his face, the wrong side. | ||
| He gets up, and the guy, he wishes him Merry Christmas on the way out. | ||
| Now, we're in the middle of February. | ||
| The guy put a big hole in the complete wrong side of his face, left the other face. | ||
| That was one of the doctors that was there. | ||
| So I got the flu when I first went in there, and I'm really sick. | ||
| I mean, really, really sick. | ||
| And I got so sick, I've been in bed like three or four days. | ||
| Well, I went down immediately to try to get something for the flu. | ||
| They told me to drink more water and to take aspirin. | ||
| And I could get the aspirin out of the commissary. | ||
| Two days later, I go down. | ||
| I'm starting to have problems with my lungs. | ||
| I got chewed out for coming back down again. | ||
| They gave me nothing. | ||
| Luckily for me, there were some guys that were inside the prison that gave me some things that could help me. | ||
| Hadn't been for that, I'm not sure. | ||
| I don't know what the outcome of that would have been. | ||
| It could have been bad because I was bedridden for six, seven days. | ||
| And I saw that on multiple occasions. | ||
| So the good thing about the place was there were no bars. | ||
| You could walk around it, you know, at certain times with total freedom. | ||
| There was a track. | ||
| They had a place you could do weights. | ||
| The visitation there was great until COVID came along. | ||
| And so you had plenty of opportunities to have visits. | ||
| There weren't bars. | ||
| You had a track. | ||
| That was all good. | ||
| But I can tell you, the medical care there, the food, and the conditions themselves were horrible. | ||
| I mean, they were horrible. | ||
| And the people who came down from low and medium security prisons, they said they were much better in the prisons they came from than they were there, those conditions were. | ||
| So that's the reason, along with the fact, you know, when I got out, I had to do something about this. | ||
| I mean, it was just... | ||
| But that's a story that isn't being told. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| I saw some guy the other day who got sentenced to Pensacola, and I saw the story that some lazy journalist just rewrote something they read that somebody else put in there two or three or four years ago that isn't accurate, and they described this place as being some kind of country club. | ||
| You think it's a country club, partner? | ||
| You go on down there and check in. | ||
| And you go over there and get you some of those boots that you're forced to wear that are seconds that are made in China. | ||
| I got a pair of boots when I got there. | ||
| The second day, I had lost a toenail. | ||
| Luckily for me, at the time, there was a doctor there, and I went and saw this doctor, and he gave me some shoes that had softer soles. | ||
| From what I understand, they've eliminated those today. | ||
| You have to wear the boots that they give you there now. | ||
| They're steel-toed boots. | ||
| And they're not even good ones. | ||
| Like I say, the majority of them don't even fit the people. | ||
| How do I know that? | ||
| I worked in the laundry myself. | ||
| And I was the one over there issuing that stuff. | ||
| And then I went to the head of the place and I said, look, these things are horrible. | ||
| People are coming back. | ||
| Their feet are bleeding and everything else. | ||
| Finally, they changed them out and they got some that did fit better. | ||
| But I mean, it's just, anyway, it is what it is. | ||
| But look, prison isn't supposed to be, it's supposed to be a punishment to a certain degree. | ||
| And it's supposed to be a detriment. | ||
| And there's no question about that. | ||
| And you're not supposed to go to some country club. | ||
| But you should be able to go to some place where you don't have to sleep next to black mold. | ||
| And if you do have a medical issue, you know, and you truly do have the flu, and it's diagnosed by the flu by them, that you get something to treat the flu. | ||
| Just the fact that you gave up 31 months of your life, the fact you had to go to that place, and that now you know all the actual details of the case, you know all the stuff that was withheld, that's got to be a tough pill to swallow. | ||
| I mean, that would make me very bitter. | ||
| Joe, when I got out of federal prison, to give you an idea, I was still under home confinement. | ||
| I filed a federal lawsuit in New York. | ||
| I sued the former head of the FBI. I sued Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney. | ||
| I sued David Chavez. | ||
| I sued Daniel Goleman, who's now the congressman up there. | ||
| And I sued, or five of them I sued. | ||
| Oh, Zobel, the guy who was the second in command up there at the U.S. Attorney's Office. | ||
| I'm going to give you an idea. | ||
| I filed a federal lawsuit up there, and the lawsuit speaks for themselves, and I laid out the allegations of all the things that these people did from my perspective. | ||
| Do you know that not one media organization in New York even reported the lawsuit? | ||
| New York Times, New York Post, The New Yorker, not one of those news organizations even reported the fact that I had filed a suit against these people we're talking about. | ||
| That's what bothers me. | ||
| Forget about... | ||
| I mean, if somebody files... | ||
| I don't care what the suit is or what the allegations are. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| It's news. | ||
| It's news. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I filed this suit. | ||
| It's in federal court for eight months. | ||
| Their only answer was the statute of limitations ran out. | ||
| After eight months, the judge threw it out. | ||
| I would have had to file this federal lawsuit while I was in federal prison under federal custody in order for me to file it within the time of the statute of limitations. | ||
| But the fact that it didn't even get reported that I filed this suit and made these allegations, that's what puts a chill in me. | ||
| How can that happen? | ||
| Because it's dirty. | ||
| They all have relationships. | ||
| How did those lawsuits, all the lawsuits that you filed, how did they pan out? | ||
| Well, the one I filed against them got threw out because of the Statue of Invitations that ran out. | ||
| And that was really the only suit that I filed. | ||
| It was the only suit I could file. | ||
| So there's no recourse? | ||
| No, there's no recourse. | ||
| No. | ||
| Which is unbelievable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, another thing, Joe, after I was convicted, once you're convicted in the federal system, there's a department, I forget what the name of it is, but they work for the courts. | ||
| You go and meet, and this lady's name was Rebecca Dawson. | ||
| I won't forget her name. | ||
| You go up, you spend a day, they interview you, they get all your background, and they go back, check your background out extensively, and then they turn that over to the judge with a recommendation, their recommendation. | ||
| Okay, after they had interviewed me, they had thoroughly investigated my background. | ||
| The recommendation to the judge was to give me a year and a day and a $10 million fine. | ||
| The judge gave me five years and I paid in fines and restitution $45 million. | ||
| On top of that, Joe, I was ordered to pay another $9 million for Tom Davis's legal fees, the guy who testified against me. | ||
| Dean Foods, for some unexplainable reason, first part of it I understand, the second part I don't understand at all. | ||
| When he originally got his attorney, They were paying his legal fees because he was on a board of directors. | ||
| That part I understand. | ||
| Okay, but after he decided to become a government witness and he pled guilty to a bunch of things and one of them was, you know, passed on insider information, they continued to pay his legal fees even after that. | ||
| So his legal fees were like $9 million. | ||
| So they got a law firm, came forward, filed the thing, and the judge ordered me and Tom Davis to reimburse Dean Foods for $9 million. | ||
| Because this guy, he's not going to give me any money. | ||
| I paid the entire $9 million, right? | ||
| So the Supreme Court comes along later on and they rule that a portion of those fees they weren't entitled to. | ||
| So they have to refund me the portion of those fees. | ||
| What do you think happened there? | ||
| Dean Foose goes bankrupt. | ||
| I got stiff on them too. | ||
| I never got a neck on my mother's back. | ||
| I'm glad you can laugh. | ||
| Well, Joe, you know, you got two choices of this. | ||
| I wanted to tell a story. | ||
| You know, look, I'm not the only guy who's been through something similar to this. | ||
| A lot of people go through this, they get out of prison, they say, look, man, you know, I just want it over with. | ||
| You know, I don't want to have a reoccurring problem with so-and-so and so-and-so. | ||
| Who wants to piss off powerful people? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm not cut out of that cloth by now. | ||
| I actually did this more for other people than I did for myself. | ||
| There's so many people out there, Joe, that don't have the resources. | ||
| They don't have the resiliency that I do. | ||
| They don't have the support that I do. | ||
| And this is going on today, partner, and this is going to continue to go on. | ||
| Until the people who make the laws do something about this, okay? | ||
| Look, the vast, vast majority of the people in law enforcement are great people, and I agree with that too. | ||
| The problem that you've got there, and I see this over and over, is there are some bad ones. | ||
| Like any profession, you have some bad ones, okay? | ||
| The problem I see there is when they don't—the bad ones they have, the good ones turn a blind eye to it. | ||
| They don't do anything about it. | ||
| Because they don't want trouble. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'll give you an example. | ||
| In my case, the guy that worked with this guy, Chavez— He blew the whistle on him because of what he was doing. | ||
| Prior to me being indicted or anything else, we learned this through our discovery. | ||
| The guy blew the whistle on him inside the FBI. That guy got transferred to some other part of the United States when they promoted Chavez. | ||
| Dirty. | ||
| But again, I get it. | ||
| I mean, I've had people who are very close to me when I decided to write this book and when I decided to sue those people in New York. | ||
| And, you know, aren't you worried about this? | ||
| Aren't you worried? | ||
| I said, look, I'm not worried about nothing. | ||
| You know, at the end of the day, I can't live my life like that. | ||
| I mean, look, I'm not doing anything illegal. | ||
| I'm not doing anything unethical. | ||
| You know, but does that mean that someone can't target me for something? | ||
| Oh, they can target me for it. | ||
| I mean, again, that's the other problem. | ||
| I mean, so this guy Chavez, right? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| They allow him to retire. | ||
| He gets paid. | ||
| He doesn't get prosecuted. | ||
| Okay, what can I do with Chavez? | ||
| I can't do anything with Chavez. | ||
| I can't sue him. | ||
| I can't do anything. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| It really is crazy. | ||
| Wow, that's crazy. | ||
| You know, I've worked with Josh Dubin, who used to be a part of the Innocence Project, and now he's doing some things on his own, and it's all about releasing people from jail that have been unjustly prosecuted. | ||
| And you hear about these cases. | ||
| All the time, partner. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| It's so dirty. | ||
| The publisher that did my book, Simon& Schuster, the editor there, we were talking one day, and we were talking about the book, and the book's done very, very well, and we're proud of that. | ||
| But the book is, everybody would kind of think, well, the book's written about this guy as a professional handicapper. | ||
| People want to know about that. | ||
| They want to know about his interest in life there. | ||
| Well, what's actually come back, I think, I think the popularity of the book is more tied to the human interest side of it than anything else. | ||
| And a guy went on to say, he said, Billy, you know what the perfect story is? | ||
| I said, no. | ||
| He said, well, the perfect story is when a story is out there, there's complete silence. | ||
| He said, in your case, your story involves the FBI, it involves the New York Times, it involves the Wall Street Journal, it involves Phil Mickelson. | ||
| There's not one of these people who refuted one word you said in this book. | ||
| I hadn't thought about that. | ||
| And they haven't because it's all factual, it's all true, and there's no grounds to refute anything I said in the book. | ||
| Is that the most corrupt thing that you've ever... | ||
| I mean, you're a guy who's been involved in gambling your whole life, which people think of as a very shady business, dangerous. | ||
| You're involved with all sorts of unscrupulous characters. | ||
| Is that the most dirty thing you've ever been involved with? | ||
| Not even close. | ||
| No? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not even remotely close. | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, undoubtedly. | ||
| Undoubtedly. | ||
| Which is crazy because you guys, you've had your life threatened. | ||
| I read that you were in a trunk of a car at one point in time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What was all that about? | |
| It was the early 80s, Joe, before I moved to Las Vegas. | ||
| I had a nightclub in Louisville. | ||
| It was called Butch Cassidy's. | ||
| It was a country music joint. | ||
| You had to fight your way in, fight your way out. | ||
| And anyway, it was the day after the Super Bowl, and everybody I owed, I paid. | ||
| And of course, most people that owed me, they hadn't come by yet. | ||
| But we had some popular band there, and I forgot what the door charge was, five bucks, ten bucks, whatever it was. | ||
| And I had a pocket full of money. | ||
| It looked like a lot of money, but it was like four thousand bucks, but it looked like forty. | ||
| So I leave the joint, it's like 4 o'clock in the morning, and I drive home, and I'm living in a condo, and I pull up in front of the condo, I didn't have a garage. | ||
| And I pull up in front of the condo, and I got out of the car, and all at once, two guys with a ski mask on, they jumped out, they were hidden down below the next car. | ||
| One of them had a double-barrel shotgun, the other one had a.45. | ||
| They stuck a shotgun next to my ribs, a.45 next to my head. | ||
| And they robbed me. | ||
| And the guy's got the shotgun. | ||
| The old shotgun's jumping up and down. | ||
| I said, man, just calm down here. | ||
| I said, everything's cool here. | ||
| I'm trying to cool him down, see? | ||
| What was so funny, I just got back from Vegas, Joe. | ||
| And I didn't tell this story in a book, but I get a chance to tell it here. | ||
| And I used to play a lot of poker out there, and at the Golden Nugget, there was a guy out there that sold watches. | ||
| His name was Sam Angel. | ||
| And he sold these knockoff watches. | ||
| I mean, they looked like they were authentic as they could be. | ||
| You could buy a Rolex from him at the time for like $35. | ||
| And I had this Rolex watch. | ||
| It was a knockoff. | ||
| It wasn't real, but man, they looked real. | ||
| Well, anyway, they took my money, but they didn't touch that Rolex watch. | ||
| So, I mean, clearly it was an inside job. | ||
| So, they took me back in the trunk of the car, and they said, they opened the trunk of the car, and they told me to get in. | ||
| I first walked as a no, I'm not getting the trunk of this car. | ||
| And they said, look, you'll get this trunk of this car one of two ways. | ||
| Either you're going to get it on your own, or you're going to fall in. | ||
| So anyway, I got in the trunk of the car. | ||
| They closed the trunk of the car. | ||
| So I told me, you know, your mind gets to racing. | ||
| I figure, well, they pull out, they're going to empty that double-barrel shotgun on me. | ||
| So I'm scrambling around. | ||
| I got the tire loose and got behind, you know, the spare tire. | ||
| The car goes by. | ||
| I breathe a sigh of relief. | ||
| They're gone. | ||
| All at once I realized, I'm in the trunk of this car. | ||
| And this wasn't back when they had a deal where you could open the trunk of the car. | ||
| And it was a Lincoln, and I got panicking. | ||
| I got thinking, I'm going to smother it in the trunk of this car. | ||
| So I got a tire tool, and I tried to get the trunk open. | ||
| And you know, your adrenaline, I wasn't that strong a guy, but adrenaline, I bent this tire tool in half and that truck wasn't going anywhere. | ||
| Well, finally, I got to go through the back seat. | ||
| There's some holes in the back seat where they got speakers and stuff. | ||
| And I finally dug through there and punched a hole in the back seat of the car and I'm screaming. | ||
| I never did wake my wife up, but I woke up to the next door neighbor. | ||
| So he goes over and wakes my wife up. | ||
| So Susan comes out. | ||
| She figures, you know, I come on the joint. | ||
| I'm drunk in the back of the car, right? | ||
| Well, anyway, she comes out. | ||
| She hears me in the backseat. | ||
| Finally, she opens the trunk and gets me out. | ||
| But no, I'm 99% sure I know who did it. | ||
| But anyway, it was a memorable experience. | ||
| Your whole life has been a series of memorable experiences, sir. | ||
| True. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| One thing about it, Joe, I got my money's worth. | ||
| If it weren't all in tomorrow, I'd have to get shortchanged. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you've got a great book out, and you've got wild stories, and you seem to have your peace of mind. | ||
| Oh, I do. | ||
| Which is amazing, considering what you've gone through, especially with the trial, what they did to you. | ||
| It's amazing that you're so relaxed and so calm and so at peace, and that speaks to your character. | ||
| Joe, my oldest son, when he was seven years old, was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. | ||
| He was given 30 days to live, and that changed my life. | ||
| I was a young guy at the time, gone all the time, as I wrote about in a book, and completely focused on making money. | ||
| I went through that, and it changed my life. | ||
| And as a result of that, I got involved with working with intellectually challenged people. | ||
| I got introduced to an organization in Las Vegas called Opportunity Village. | ||
| And it's strictly an organization that works with intellectually challenged people. | ||
| And that's been one of the most fulfilling things that's ever happened to me. | ||
| So, you know, it's every negative thing that's ever happened to me in my life, everyone, something positive has came out of it. | ||
| And that, involving my son Scott, who the grace of God is still alive today, he defied all odds. | ||
| But that changed my life. | ||
| It made a lot better man out of me. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Billy, tell everybody the title of the book, where they can get it. | ||
| And is there an audiobook available? | ||
| There is. | ||
| Did you read it? | ||
| Unfortunately, I read it, Joe. | ||
| Oh, perfect. | ||
| You'll have to listen to this old ruspy voice. | ||
| I want you to read it. | ||
| It's your story. | ||
| I'd like it to be in your voice. | ||
| Well, the publisher trapped me. | ||
| The book's called Gambler, Seekers from a Life at Risk. | ||
| But back to the audiobook part of it, the publisher trapped me. | ||
| He said, would you try to do this? | ||
| He said, most people can't do it. | ||
| Of course, that's all they had to do was tell me that. | ||
| So I had a partial knee replacement. | ||
| So I go in this studio a couple weeks later. | ||
| I got earphones on like we have now. | ||
| I got a producer. | ||
| I got my knee all propped up in a chair with ice on it. | ||
| And I'm doing the audio portion of this book. | ||
| You've probably done a number of them, but You know, the part of the book that I wrote, the part of the book that's in my words, I had no problem with at all. | ||
| The part of the book in there that others wrote and there were words used that I don't use every day, sometimes I'd have to repeat those paragraphs two, three, four times. | ||
| The second day, it took me 40 days, 40 hours to do this thing. | ||
| The publisher, she started laughing. | ||
| She said it's so obvious, you know, you would never use a certain word. | ||
| But it was an experience. | ||
| I'll never forget it. | ||
| I'm glad I did do it. | ||
| But Simon Schuster's right. | ||
| There's very few people probably will do it because it's not an easy thing to do. | ||
| No, it's not an easy thing to do. | ||
| But that sounds like your whole life. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Well, listen, Billy, I appreciate your time. | ||
| I appreciate you coming in here. | ||
| And I appreciate you writing your book. | ||
| And I'm glad you did. | ||
| I really am. | ||
| I'm glad I got a chance to sit down and talk to you. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| I really appreciate it, and I have nothing but the utmost respect for you and what you do. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I appreciate that. | |
| All right. | ||
| Bye, everybody. |
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