Billy Walters, a high-stakes gambler and sports bettor, shares his early obsession with penny nine-ball at age six and decades of algorithm-driven research, spending millions on postgame injury analysis to exploit line vulnerabilities—like his $4.5M Super Bowl bet won by "luck." His 2017 insider trading conviction hinged on discredited testimony from Tom Davis, a liar with ties to Dean Foods’ bankruptcy, yet Walters faced $45M in fines while corrupt FBI agent David Chavez escaped consequences. Walters’ book exposes systemic failures, including Phil Mickelson’s withdrawn testimony and media silence despite leaked allegations. From surviving an armed robbery to mentoring inmates and founding Opportunity Village after his son’s terminal illness, Walters pivots from gambling’s chaos to legal battles and philanthropy, framing the justice system’s corruption as his greatest adversary. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
And 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 Joe 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.
Well, 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.
But someone asked me how I became so good at gambling.
I told him I became good at it by losing.
And, You know, I think my life, Joe, when you kind of look back on it, the thing that 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 where I'm at with it today, I literally almost can't believe that sometimes I didn't quit.
And I've 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.
Well, actually, I got associated with a guy who had an algorithm, and I was handicapping sports, and I was doing it with a pencil and piece of paper as 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, you know, they did their analysis independent of what he was doing.
The only person he 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 mean something.
And because the people making the line are getting smarter.
The competition is getting smarter.
So whatever edge you start off with, that's going into a road.
Other people are going to catch on.
Well, over the years, and when I was in my heyday, I was spending six to eight million dollars in research and development.
We're already working on next season, the day this season was 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 a 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 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 make, you know, that quantify a difference with the outcome of a game to stay ahead of the herd, so to speak.
Because you've got really smart people making the 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?
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 advantage with that early on or even later on because in the colleges, you know, they're making a line on 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 little advantages.
But back to what you're 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 5 or non-Power 5, 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-immit 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 is solid, if you take a bet on a Wednesday or Thursday and that game doesn't start till 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.
You're really not trying to gamble.
There's going to be times you're going to be lopsided on one game, but the ideal thing for a bookmaker is to have as many bets on one side as he does the other in 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, or smarter bookmakers, they start taking full-limit bets on Thursday because that gives them, 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 got Friday, they got Saturday, they got Sunday to get action back on the other side.
But you have different strategies from different guys.
You 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 they've got these preconceived opinions that what most of them do, they'll go hire someone to be their bookmaker.
And they'll look at that guy's, you know, they'll look at his background or his bio, and 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 that are written about him, and you would think he knows what he's doing.
So they hire the guy that 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 they know that they don't know a lot about booking.
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 sports book 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 20s, sometimes they take 30s.
But they're smart.
These guys know how to book.
I mean, and they want to, anyone can open the counter.
I have an account there 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, who's been in the business for a long, long time, and others.
They understand the art of bookmaking.
And you've got others in Las Vegas that 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.
Well, prior to the Internet, 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 written by that local sports writer.
And then we 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 can read a thousand newspapers online and get that same information.
Or you could 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, and 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 is going to come out everywhere.
But back when you're talking about prior to the internet, we, and, you know, Joe, way, way back, it's kind of crazy, but I used to have a Zenith Trans Oceanic Radio.
And I used to, I would sit and listen to pregame 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 pregame show, and I would listen to the post-game show.
Well, you're looking for injuries and you're looking for game plans.
And, you know, as an example, if a coach says, look, you know, we're going to slow this thing down.
We're going to start running the ball.
You know, first thing comes, the total is not going to be as much.
If he slows this thing down, he starts running the ball, you know, 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 on this game.
They talk about players, they talk about injuries, especially the quarterback.
You know, if you're talking about the quarterback and you've got a quarterback who's playing injured, I mean, how that's going to affect his performance is really important.
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 if a player is 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've 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 half a point.
And he's replacing a guy that's a point and a half guy.
So we have to downgrade the power rating 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 the 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, a receiver's going down the field and he didn't have anybody within 20 yards of him and he gets thrown a perfect pass, 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 had a helmet ricochet and ended up in a real long completion and a touchdown.
Well, that was lucky.
So when we look at the box score, we look at the yardage, we take that off.
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.
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 that 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.
And I wrote what we call betting strategy.
I wrote that for the 99, 910% of the people who bet sports, who, and we got a lot of new sports bettors today that have no chance.
I wrote that for them.
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 than 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.
Flying on the games two, here's a money line equivalent.
If you can get a better deal, take it.
If you can't, take the other.
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, or you might, whatever, buy it.
But if it's 23, you're better off taking a two and a half.
But people don't know that, Joe.
Okay, what's the value of two?
Well, the value of two is much less than it is three.
The value of two is only worth six cents, where three is worth 23.
The different numbers have different values.
So I put those charts in there for the guy that I pointed out too.
I also put another section in there.
We'll call it kind of the advanced section.
And that section, I try to write in such a manner to where I felt like people could understand it.
And that's the guy who, or the lady, who wants to become a serious handicapper.
And I explained in there exactly, 100%, Joe, exactly how I do everything.
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 out there 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 the 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, but the NFL, I put all those charts in there to explain to people, because right now, I don't care what sites 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 betters 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 three and four-team 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've 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 to bet a small amount of money, want a large amount of money, right, Joe?
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, you've 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 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 a majority of their money on straight bets where people are laying 11 to 10.
Can 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 between players.
There's a lot of things to take into consideration.
Well, but that time of the year, I mean, all of our research is done.
I mean, this last game here, okay, the only changes you're going to make from the last games that these two teams played are in the Super Bowl is, okay, are there any players injured which you have to account for?
And, you know, clearly, if they're playing on a different surface or something maybe 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, it 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 is over almost within 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 referees are bought off or maybe perhaps they're betting themselves?
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 better, 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 has 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.
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 a half a point or whatever, they know who caused that line to move, 99% of the time.
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, the line I make, and of course, I had no idea that 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 sports books, so 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, and sure enough, they won a game by like 20 again.
Well, they came back the third time, and but 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 Ducharm, who was the head of gaming control for the Gaming Control Board.
He was the law enforcement part of Gaming 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.
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 it six or seven points.
You know, if you're a handicapper or you know anything at all about betting sports, if a 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 sports book in town and they just, you know, they laid 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, 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 jail is what they were trying to do.
Anybody, I mean, they were.
Anybody would do what they were doing.
It 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 I don't, sports books, I don't think ever turned them in.
I mean, I called Deshar 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 a referee, the NFL referee, gamblers knew about that eight months before he got busted by law enforcement.
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 NFL, 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 they're not very smart to be doing what they're doing and the way they go about it.
They're even, you know, about, you know, I don't know if you remember the thing years ago with Hot Rod Williams.
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.
And so, you know, 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, way more confidence in that than I do the other.
Well, I not only know it well, but I 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 school correctly.
They haven't been, they haven't, 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.
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've seen how quick 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 public's attention.
So 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, 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.
And when you get to a situation like a guy like Pete Rose, that was a fascinating situation because this is 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 also might also be betting against 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 in on his team.
Yeah, well, 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.
Here 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 Betts And he said, like, if what he did was happening now, no one would ever think anything of it.
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.
And pretty significant injury.
This guy winds up going out and fighting, loses in the first round, hurts his knee, like throws a kick, blows his knee out.
Apparently his knee was already hurt.
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.
Is that did you do any gambling on boxing or MMA fights?
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 a hold 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, yeah, you would definitely change things.
And fighters hide injuries all the time.
I mean, Drekis Duplicis, when he won against Robert Whitaker, he had a broken foot.
And 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 know, 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.
And I would imagine that that what I 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, you know, 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 Aram, 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.
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 really, 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 Aram, we had to agree to multiple contracts if he won the fight.
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 Volkanovsky.
When I would watch him fight and train, even though he was against lesser competition than Volkanovsky, 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 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 Iliad Toporia and for some reason it went five rounds and they give it to Volkanovsky and it's a terrible decision.
There's not a more robbed feeling in the world.
That's a dirty feel 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 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.
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 something 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.
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.
South Paul 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 Terrence Crawford has 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 sparring a 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.
And 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 South Paul.
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.
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?
Jimmy Montoya has been training fighters in L.A. for a zillion years.
And he's table back in those days.
He had like 120 fighters.
And he would bring guys over, whether it be the Silver Slipper or the Showboat or the Hacienda.
And a lot of his fighters are 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, you know, I think he was like maybe 1-3, lost 2, 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 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.
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 lift jab, as good as any you've ever seen in your life.
But he didn't have a lot of power.
And 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 these 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 to wailing on his head.
And I'm thinking, I'm sitting, I'm watching this.
I can't believe it.
And he kind of knocked him silly, so to speak.
Well, Terry's, you know, he had enough fights.
He probably had his anameter probably 50, 60 fights.
So he got out of the round.
So they come out in the third round, and he still ain't shaking it completely off.
And the guy goes away on him again.
And now, 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, he gets out of the round.
He comes out in the fifth round, and the fight completely turns around.
And he starts waiting.
I mean, he starts, he got, you know, 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 sixth round fight, Joe, but it's 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 sixth-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, I've 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 Rawson 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's from Terry Silver.
And he said, Billy, he said, you know, I remember he was talking about the fight, and he said, you know, and he said, you know, I remember you tried to stop the fight.
He said, 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.
See, Joe, publicly, people know I bet on sports, and they know I'm pretty good at that.
But I do a lot of other things, Joe.
Since the late 80s, I've owned golf courses.
I had seven golf courses in Las Vegas, which 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 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'd 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 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 the 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.
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 then 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 2024.
Betting on sports is legal in the majority of the United States.
In 2023 in Las Vegas as a circle hotel, I was 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 and charged 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.
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.
And so anyway, they chose not to indict us.
They dropped the case.
It was over with.
But we were exonerated in all the charges except the one charge, and they were voted 11 to 1 to acquit us on that.
And then I was indicted three times after that for the same thing, betting 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 Icon, 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 that 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 work 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 go, 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.
And 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, what point 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 better.
So, 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 jail.
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.
60% 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 that 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 Reed 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 Reed passed away before we were able to get anything done.
Well, a former sheriff in Las Vegas, Bill Young, he told me, he said, Billy, 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 Leary 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 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've 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've got about a thousand people there, friends, and you've 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.
So 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 condition repair, truck driver.
And when we decided to do this, of course, it takes money.
There's another family in Las Vegas, the Inglestead family, and so they agreed to put up $2 million.
Susan and I agreed to put up $2 million.
And the state agreed to put up a million.
So the night they made this announcement, I was asked to come and speak.
Alice Johnson is a lady that I was in prison 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 or 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 a 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 grayheaded 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've 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, in Nevada.
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 condition repair, 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.
But there were a number of reasons I wrote this book.
I mean, 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 cinch that a large, large part of them are going to become addicted, okay?
If I had been pitched on sports the way they were 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.
And 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 Leck Lodge, which works with intellectually challenged people.
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 as even the life you led, 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'd 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.
And I didn't raise any money through him, but I hit it off with him.
I liked the guy a lot.
He played golf, and we knew some other people.
He had a home in La Jolla at the time.
And so we became friends.
In 2002, Donaldson-Lufkin and Jennerette 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 at 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 it came out in court.
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 a 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, or I don't think anyone, and most people, I don't think anyone in Texas even knew about it, especially 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, 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 different milks.
Well, the stock trade 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 was that they were growing substantially.
And that was really the play with the stock.
Now, 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, you know, J and G. 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 they 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 spending off White Wave, the organic division.
They hired a company to come in and do an assessment and came back and said, well, the timing 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 JP Morgan.
And the only reason I bought the stock, for me it was a very, very small amount of stock, a very small investment.
The only reason I bought the stock was JP 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 spend 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?
Stocks, 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 Food stock, but I'm not paying any more than $10.
If it goes past $10,000, 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, you know, the price of milk is going to go up because the farmer's got to feed his milk with corn, right?
And then on top of that, what happened when the corn prices went way up, the Dean 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 they did that, I went back in and I bought another, say, 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 those things were temporary.
Droughts don't last forever.
And I knew as soon as a 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 $4.5 a share.
Now, from that August until the following February the next year, every time Dean Food's stock would go down, I would buy more of it.
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 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, anytime there's a material transaction with a public 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 they did, Mr. Davis, he identified me, and rightfully so, who I was, what our relationship was.
So the SEC, they were doing their investigation.
I mean, after the case in New York, when Mr. Alcott and I went away, there was nothing there, this Dean Foos thing came up.
And I didn't realize it at the time, but Tom Davis had gotten involved in some, you know, 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, and one of the stories, they put Tom Davis' name in the book.
So Tom Davis and his lawyer, a guy named Millsheimer, 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 said, look, they denied emphatically that they'd ever given me any inside information.
Told him 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 file 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 in 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 this interview, he decided that he did want to make a deal.
So his lawyer had represented Mark Cuban in his case in Dallas when 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 things have, you know, 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 information.
So Chris Clark, there's another young lawyer who had just joined their firm, and this young lawyer was named Tom Naftis.
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 these same prosecutors investigating this case.
So Tom Davis and Mill Sheimer, they end up retaining Chris Clark and this Benjamin Naphtalis 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 go spend any time in prison.
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, is once you tell them, then they'll decide, okay, if you're willing, this is what we're willing to do for you.
Well, Davis went to have these proffer sessions with the FBI and the prosecutors and pertaining to me.
If you were going to have a proffer session and you were going to tell someone about someone else, how many proper sessions do you think it would take for you to tell someone that story?
And let's say the proffer 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?
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, the Texas Rangers, and the guy that was this, I mean, he'd gone from that to this.
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 Wynne Hotel celebrating his deal he's cut with the government.
He lost another $50,000 gambling.
That's how whacked out this guy was.
So anyway, so that was their only witness against me, Joe.
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 Bahara said.
We were on a fishing expedition.
Well, the judge, to their surprise, I think he said something like, well, these quotes are almost identical to the ones that were made to 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.
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 that 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 send this letter over to this judge.
They said, Judge, you know what?
We did do this.
Said, David Chavez, the head of the white-collar crime unit for the FBI in New York, he's the one who did it.
And said, 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 they weren't telling us what was in it.
So, you know, my lawyers were, and, you know, they filed a bunch of motions for this judge to make this letter public.
Well, finally, the judge did make the letter public.
And the copy of the letter is 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 let me 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 Protos, 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, this 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 says, so is the New York Times.
It's an FBI agent threatening this guy.
So this guy, Protos, he calls up this guy, Zoe Bell, who's the number two in the U.S. Attorney's Office.
He's right under Pre-Bahar.
And he tells him a whole story.
He said, you know, I did a story.
I had to go and do a correction.
He said, I call this FBI agent, and he threatened me.
He threatened me, and he threatened the New York Times.
This guy, Zoe Bell, 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, Protos, calls him up.
That email is in the book, too.
Okay?
So 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 Pullium.
She's still there.
She still writes for them.
If you look at stuff she writes, it's very similar to Ben Protos.
They're all countergovernment kind of stories.
Chavez says he has a relationship with her.
And 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 at the same very within seconds of each other, Tom Davis's name wasn't in the first one.
My name was in there.
Phil Michelson's name was in there.
Carl Icon'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 Melchimer, goes and denies it two years later after they find out all these other things.
He decides he isn't going to, 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 taps.
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 is really bad.
You know, they stopped the trial 15, 20 times.
The jury, they were sleeping, and one guy snoring 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 lawyers 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 had wrapped their case up, I had to make a decision while 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.
You make, you know, he said, 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 end 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.
And 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 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'd 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 this?
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 him.
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 Icon, everybody in the world had read these stories about Phil Mickelson, myself, etc.
Everybody read that Phil Mickelson had given a million bucks back he'd made in the 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 inside 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.
Yeah.
So, oh, 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 involving 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.
Army Katan, when I decided to write this book, I have a fellow who works with me, advises me on a lot of things.
The guy's got a lot of expertise in these areas.
His name is Glenn Bunting.
And Glenn recommended Armin Katan to me.
And Armin 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 in 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, it's pretty much, it's in my words.
I mean, I wrote the vast majority of the other.
But I work with a lot of great people in the book.
I work, again, Army Katan.
I can't say enough good things about Armin, but Armin and explaining this story along with Glenn Bunting of the Southern District.
You'd have to understand Glenn Bunning's background, too.
Here are two people who worked at the highest levels of journalism, but they've also worked with 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 Armin, I think if I'm quoting Armin correctly, said, I've never seen anything like this.
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'd hired a prison consultant.
And I wanted to, I was looking for some place I could go to that my wife could communicate, you know, not communicate, 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.
It's alcohol.
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 sentence.
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, and 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.
And anyway, well, 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 that 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'd ever seen in any place.
Medical care there was pitiful.
One of the doctors, his nickname was Dr. Death.
I mean, there was a guy there that they diagnosed with not hemorrhoid, I think he had 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 who went in, 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 Dr. Death, takes a big thing off the other side of his face, the wrong side.
He gets up and the guy 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, 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.
It 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 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 yet 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 Lowell 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.
They're just, 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 got sent us 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 describe this place as being some kind of country club.
You think it's a country club, Potney, you go down there and check in.
And you go over there and get you some of those boots that you're forced to wear.
There 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'd give 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 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 chased them out, and they got some that did fit better.
But I mean, it just, anyway, it is what it is.
But look, prison is 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 that 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.
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 Bahara, the former U.S. attorney.
I sued David Chavez.
I sued Daniel Goldman, who's now the congressman up there, and I sued, or five of them I sued.
Oh, Zoe Bell, the guy who was the second in command up there, 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 a 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, you know, 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 have filed it within the time of the statute of limitations.
But the fact that it didn't even get reported that I filed a suit and made these allegations, that's what puts a chill into me.
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 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 passed along inside 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 a 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 them 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.
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 unrightly, unjustly prosecuted.
And you hear about these cases all the time, partner.
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, you know, I think people care, I think the popularity of the book is more tied to the human interest side of it than anything else.
And the 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 Michelson.
There's not one of these people who have refuted one word you've 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?
The book's called Gambler, Seekers from a Life at Risk.
But back to the audio book part of it, the publisher trapped me.
He said, would you try to do this?
He said, most people can't do it.
And of course, that's all they had to do was tell me that.
And so I'd 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 you 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.