On this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the legendary journalist Billy Graham talks about his early life growing up in a small town in Kentucky and how he became one of the most successful gamblers of all time. Billy talks about how he got started in the gambling industry, how he was introduced to the game, and what it was like growing up as a gambler in the late 60's and early 70's. He also talks about some of the biggest mistakes he ever made, and why he believes gambling is a dirty business. If you haven t heard of Billy Graham, you won t want to miss this one! This episode is sponsored by Train By Day, a company that makes custom T-Shirt designs and accessories. Check it out! The Joe Rogans Experience. Train by Day, by day, by night, all day. All day by night by night all day by day all day long by night. Enjoy! -Joe Rogan Podcast -Byday -By Night -By Day, All Day by Night by Night, by Day - By Night, By Night All Day by Night - By Day - by Night By Day by Day By Day By Night by Day By Night By Night (By Night, All Night) by Night (by Night) All Day All Day (By Day , All Day, By Day -All Day (by Day) By Night by Day , By Night...by Night By Day...By Night , by Night...By Day...by Day, all Day... By Night....By Night... By Day....By Day ...By Night.... By Day ... By Night..By Day.... By Night......By Night...... By Night ...By Day..By Night.......By Night ...by Night....by Night.. By Night? , By Day.. By Day , By Any Day.... What's a Good Day? By Everday...By Everday In The Morning...By Any Day, Have You Got It? , ? | By Day ? , Everday? By Day? By Night?? And Then What? by Anyday ? & By Night , By Anyday? ? By Night ? By Then? And By Night...? ...By Anyday , And Then Then, By Anytime? & Then...
00:00:50.000I moved there permanently in 1982, and since I've been there, I've been involved in a lot of different things, indictments.
00:00:58.000I've done quite a bit of business there.
00:01:01.000The biggest business mistakes I probably made, I did some business there with, I did some public-private partnerships with local government, and I didn't make any money.
00:01:12.000As a matter of fact, I lost quite a bit of money, but I got quite a bit of notoriety that I wasn't looking for.
00:01:19.000I got involved in a world that I didn't totally understand until I got into it.
00:01:24.000I got into it for business and found myself wrapped up in a political world, and that wasn't good.
00:01:30.000They think gambling is a dirty business.
00:01:32.000The political world, that's the real dirty business, right?
00:01:37.000I've met a lot of people over the years in that world and have a lot of respect for some, and of course, I withhold my thoughts and comments about others.
00:01:48.000That's a game that you don't want to bet on, right?
00:02:57.000She wouldn't have taken any assistance from anyone if her life depended on it.
00:03:02.000And 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.
00:03:14.000I mean, the first places, Jill, I ever went when I left my home were a Baptist church, you know, Sunday school on Sunday morning, you know, church afterwards, training union on Sunday night, prayer meeting on Wednesday night.
00:03:27.000And I went to a Christian youth organization On Sunday night called the Royal Ambassadors.
00:03:32.000But when I was around four, my grandmother, she had these two jobs.
00:03:36.000And she had to have someone to keep an eye on me while my Uncle Harry had a pool room.
00:03:41.000So she started dropping me off at the pool room when I was four years old.
00:03:45.000And my Uncle Harry, he went to the back pool table.
00:03:49.000He put up a couple old wooden Coca-Cola cases, handed me a pool stick, and he went back to work.
00:03:55.000And I actually started banging pool balls when I was four.
00:03:59.000And by the time I'm six, I'm racking balls in Uncle Harry's pool room and playing penny nine ball.
00:04:06.000So 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.
00:04:49.000Someone asked me how I became so good at gambling.
00:04:52.000I told them I became good at it by losing.
00:04:58.000I think my life, Joe, when you look back on it, the thing that has sustained me has been perseverance.
00:05:05.000You know, I learned from my grandmother at a very early age, you know, you don't quit.
00:05:09.000You know, if you make a commitment to anything, you keep it.
00:05:12.000Come, you know, come hell or high water.
00:05:14.000And so when I look back on my life and I look back through where I began in gambling and, you know, where I'm at with it today, I literally almost can't believe that sometimes I didn't quit.
00:05:31.000And I tried to figure out, okay, why didn't I quit?
00:05:57.000And then how does it go on to big million-dollar sports betting?
00:06:03.000Well, I started off playing penny nine ball, and by the time I was nine or ten, I'm playing, you know, five dollar nine ball.
00:06:13.000And as I got older and I made more money, the amount of money I was gambling for increased because I had more money to gamble with.
00:06:21.000And as I became proficient at it, became good at it, it's like anything that you're investing in, if you're confident and basically certain that you're going to be successful,
00:08:26.000You're looking for every possible advantage.
00:08:29.000You essentially had an algorithm before there was algorithms.
00:08:32.000Well, actually, I got associated with a guy who had an algorithm, and I was handicapped in sports, and I was doing it with a pencil and piece of paper as well.
00:08:43.000Everyone else was at that time except one guy.
00:08:46.000And 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.
00:08:56.000And then by the mid-80s, he and I were sole partners.
00:09:00.000The 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.
00:09:10.000And I recruited six other guys that had similar backgrounds to his.
00:09:16.000And they did their analysis independent of what he was doing.
00:09:24.000The only person they talked to was me.
00:09:26.000And they provided me with their information.
00:09:32.000And I would take a look at seven different pieces of information and then decide what I was going to do.
00:09:38.000And then over the years, like anything else, I got a little bit better at what I did.
00:09:44.000And luckily, you know, I've worked, Joe, over the years with probably a minimum of 50 handicappers.
00:09:55.000Every one of them have basically gotten to the point to where they couldn't win.
00:10:00.000You know, in order to win handicapping, you have to come up with new ideas, and you have to come up with new ideas that are relevant That means something, because the people making line are getting smarter, the competition's getting smarter, so whatever edge you start off with,
00:10:43.000We're running lots of different things to go back and see if we can find something that would have made a difference in the game or will make a difference in the game going forward as far as the prediction is concerned.
00:10:56.000That's relevant, that we can quantify, that makes sense.
00:10:59.000And 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.
00:11:24.000But in order to maintain that advantage, I continually have to be able to recognize, find things that make a material difference or that quantify a difference with the outcome of a game to stay ahead of the herd,
00:12:13.000When the line originally comes out, say on Sunday night or Monday morning, and all sports are different.
00:12:19.000Some sports are more vulnerable than others.
00:12:22.000The NFL is the least vulnerable sport of all.
00:12:25.000It's the toughest of all to beat in the world.
00:12:27.000As 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.
00:12:37.000Okay, 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.
00:12:49.000Okay, now different sports, you know, college football, a non-Power 5 conference team, you know, you may find more of an advantage with that early on or even later on because In the colleges,
00:13:06.000you know, they're making a line on, you know, 130 games, and it's much more difficult for them to make the line on 130 games.
00:13:15.000You know, you've got personnel that changes every year.
00:13:18.000I mean, it's just more difficult for them to do that.
00:13:20.000And then on top of that, the Power 5 teams, you know, like Texas is an example.
00:13:27.000There's not much about Texas that everybody doesn't know.
00:13:30.000But 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.
00:13:48.000I mean, there could be a little advantages.
00:13:51.000Back to what you were talking about, why do they have the limits cheaper?
00:13:55.000It's because the line's more vulnerable.
00:13:57.000I would say by, you know, Tuesday with the NFL, by Tuesday, Wednesday with the college football, power five or non-power five, all those numbers are solid.
00:14:09.000Years ago, Joe, the guys that I actually feel like were smarter bookmakers than the bookmakers today, as soon as they felt like the line was solid, they would take a full-limit bet.
00:14:23.000Because if you're a bookmaker, stop and think about it.
00:14:26.000What you're trying to do, you're trying to write as many bets on one side as you are on the other side.
00:14:32.000So, as an example, once you feel like your number's solid, if you take a bet on a Wednesday or a Thursday and that game doesn't start until Sunday, you can move your line.
00:14:41.000You've got four or five days to get action back on the other side.
00:14:46.000Some 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.
00:15:00.000Which 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.
00:15:13.000I mean, if you're a bookmaker, what is bookmaking?
00:15:16.000It's taking bets both ways and you're trying to earn the vigorous.
00:15:19.000Okay, you're really not trying to gamble.
00:15:22.000You know, there's going to be times you're going to be lopsided on one game, but what you're, you know, The ideal thing for a bookmaker is to have as many pets on one side as he does the other, and the volume equal out.
00:15:36.000And you earn the juice, and basically you've got no risk, or very little risk.
00:15:40.000Okay, so I can't answer your question as to why some people today wait until later on.
00:15:47.000I mean, I think in their minds they may think, well, maybe the line's more solid or something.
00:15:58.000And 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.
00:16:13.000But you've got people out there today that some, not all, The guys that I think are smart, are smarter bookmakers, they start taking, you know, full limit bets on Thursday because that gives them Sunday night,
00:16:54.000You know, generating customer accounts and what have you, but they really don't understand the art of bookmaking.
00:16:59.000And, you know, they've got these preconceived opinions that, you know, what most of them do, they'll go hire someone who They'll be their bookmaker and they'll look at that guy's – they'll look at his background or his bio and he'll have – he would have worked at some place in Las Vegas at some hotel and he'll have a title of XYZ or whatever it is and they don't really know anything
00:17:44.000And what they do know is they know that they don't know a lot about booking, okay?
00:17:51.000And 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,
00:18:51.000Nick Bogdanovich has been in the business for a long, long time and others.
00:18:55.000They understand the art of bookmaking.
00:18:59.000You've got others in Las Vegas and you've got others in other parts of the world that really understand bookmaking.
00:19:05.000I mean, you've got some guys offshore that understand it extremely well.
00:19:14.000It seems like such a complicated and stress-filled life.
00:19:19.000And when you're telling me things like you're spending millions of dollars every year on research, before the internet, what kind of research are you getting?
00:19:29.000Like, how are you getting research on NFL teams or boxers or anything, whatever you're gambling on?
00:19:35.000Well, prior to the internet, they're...
00:19:40.000Some of the information today that you can get off your smartphone was golden.
00:19:46.000I 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.
00:20:02.000And they were filled with local sports stories that were, you know, written by that local sports writer.
00:20:09.000And we'd bring them back, and we had readers who read those stories.
00:20:13.000And 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.
00:20:23.000And today, you know, you can read a thousand newspapers online and get that same information.
00:20:31.000We have a program that we've written now that we have like 140 beat writers in the NFL that we cover.
00:20:41.000Anything 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.
00:20:54.000We know, so if there's a story there and there's anything in that story that we feel like that is going to have any real meaning toward the game, you know, we're able to take that.
00:21:03.000A lot of time, you know, the time involved with it is everything, too, because eventually that story's going to come out everywhere.
00:21:10.000But back when you're talking about prior to the Internet, Joe, way, way back, it's kind of crazy, but I used to have a Zenith Trans-Oceanic Radio.
00:21:25.000I would sit and listen to pre-game shows and post-game shows, but the other thing I used to do is I would call a lot of the cities, and I had people in all these cities, and I would have someone to put the phone up to the radio, and I would listen to the pre-game show,
00:21:41.000and I would listen to the post-game show.
00:21:43.000Yeah, and you're able to learn a lot from that.
00:21:46.000And today, you know, information is a lot more accessible than it was then.
00:21:55.000So you would send people to the airport.
00:22:43.000They talk about injuries, especially the quarterback.
00:22:47.000If you're talking about the quarterback and you've got a quarterback who's playing injured, how that's going to affect his performance is really important.
00:22:56.000And they're always kind of playing injured.
00:22:58.000Always playing injured, as you talked about in the book I wrote.
00:23:02.000You know, there's 1,400 players in the NFL. There's about 600 of them that have a value.
00:23:08.000And we have a value assigned to each and every one of those individual players.
00:23:12.000But as you've noted, a lot of them, almost every one of them are playing with some type of an injury once the season begins.
00:23:23.000Again, we listen, and we follow Dr. David Chow quite a bit, and we think he does an excellent job.
00:23:30.000He's on Sirius on the NFL Network, and he talks about the key players on a weekly basis, and from an injury perspective, how he feels like that's going to affect their performance.
00:23:44.000There are many more players that Dr. Chow doesn't cover that we cover that are playing injured.
00:24:19.000He knows what the value of those players are, as far as we're concerned.
00:24:22.000He knows how to adjust their value based upon their injury.
00:24:28.000And 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.
00:24:37.000And then we, if a player's worth a point and a half, we may downgrade him, he's only worth three quarters of a point, or he may be worth a point.
00:24:45.000If a guy's out, okay, well we got a backup.
00:24:48.000We know the value of the guy's out, what's a backup worth?
00:24:51.000Okay, backup could be worth zero, he could be worth, you know, half a point, and he's replacing a guy that's a point and a half guy, so we have to downgrade the power of him by a point that week.
00:25:02.000And the other thing, this qualitative guy, he watches every NFL game.
00:25:09.000Okay, how many times have you watched a football game and you'll see the score, it wasn't indicative at all of what the score should have been.
00:25:18.000So let's say, you know, receiver's going down the field and he didn't have anybody within 20 yards of him.
00:25:25.000And he gets thrown a perfect pass and he just drops it.
00:26:34.000Well, if you look at Pittsburgh's performance with him in the lineup and him out of the lineup, it's unbelievable that one guy could have much effect on a team.
00:26:45.000So 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,
00:27:02.000and you've got to put that into your power rating.
00:27:04.000When I wrote the book, it took me six months.
00:27:10.000To do this one section, we wrote what we call the masterclass, okay?
00:27:14.000And I wrote what we call betting strategy.
00:27:17.000I wrote that for the 99,9% of the people who bet sports.
00:27:22.000And we got a lot of new sports bettors today that have no chance.
00:27:53.000I put stuff in there, basic stuff, because none of that stuff is out there.
00:27:57.000Now, guys don't have any idea, if they're buying a half a point, what the fair price is to pay.
00:28:02.000And all these points, they have a different value.
00:28:05.000As 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.
00:28:16.000It's not worth 23, but it's worth 22. If you can do it for 20, buy it.
00:28:37.000Well, the value of 2 is much less than it is 3. The value of 2 is only worth 6 cents, where 3 is worth 23. The different numbers have different values.
00:28:46.000So I put those charts in there for the guy that I pointed out to.
00:29:26.000Everything that I know about sports betting and handicapping is in that book.
00:29:31.000I 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.
00:30:05.000That was one of the reasons I wrote the book.
00:30:07.000But 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.
00:30:16.000But this model is the same model for every sport, whether it be you're betting on golf or you're betting on NASCAR or you're betting on soccer or baseball.
00:30:29.000So I put that in there, and then for people who are betting any type of sport, but especially the NFL or college football, I put all those charts in there to explain to people.
00:30:41.000Because right now, I don't care what site you go up on, Joe, a lot of these new places...
00:30:47.000The reason they're making the money they're making is if you were to poll sports bettors out there today, everyone thinks making a bet on a sporting event, you're laying 11 to 10. That's the premise that we've all been taught, that you're laying 11 to win 10. A lot of these bets today—and matter of fact,
00:31:07.000almost 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,
00:31:27.000But like these in-game parlays, and you're doing these 3 and 14 parlays, and you're doing these teasers, a lot of these places are charging you $1.50 to $1.
00:34:25.000Believe me, the principles that I'm following and making my line are the same principles that the handicapper is making.
00:34:32.000Joe, it's kind of like making a cake, you know?
00:34:34.000One guy might put a little bit more flour in than the other guy does, and so that's how we end up with different lines, different numbers.
00:34:43.000I make a line on each and every outcome of the sports that I'm involved in.
00:34:48.000And you betting this on the individual players, their overall career, what age they are, how they've been playing this season, who the coach is, all the different factors, whether or not there's in-player disputes, in-between players.
00:35:04.000There's a lot of things to take into consideration.
00:37:02.000Okay, the only changes you're going to make from the last games that these two teams played during the Super Bowl is, okay, are there any players injured that didn't, which you have to account for?
00:37:14.000And, you know, clearly, if they're playing on a different surface or something maybe than, you know, than the teams normally do.
00:37:32.000I mean, unless it involves, you know, some injury or something that, you know, may take us until we get some more clarity on that.
00:37:38.000But I'm going to know real close to where I'm at Frankly, as soon as the game's over almost, more than an hour or two.
00:37:45.000Now, 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.
00:38:02.000How much do you think that goes on today?
00:38:05.000Like, how much do you think, like, referees are bought off or maybe perhaps they're betting themselves?
00:38:11.000I don't think that exists at all, Joe.
00:38:22.000People betting sports and bookmakers, they're the ones that made law enforcement aware of these things.
00:38:28.000Because at the end of the day, whether you're a casino or whether you're a bettor, the integrity of sports is the most important thing in the world to you.
00:38:35.000A good thing about what's going on today, there's probably more transparency in betting today than there ever has been.
00:38:43.000All of the legalized gambling that's taking place, they have everyone's account information.
00:38:51.000And the other thing about betting on sports, Joe, unlike, say, Wall Street, it is a small market, much, much smaller market than Wall Street.
00:38:59.000So if you go out and you make a sizable bet in sports, The line's going to move, and it's impossible to hide it, okay?
00:39:10.000Now, there's people such as myself, and I'm not the only one.
00:39:14.000There's a lot of people in the sports business.
00:39:16.000If they see a line on a game move half a point, a punt, or whatever, they know who calls that line to move 99% of the time, okay?
00:39:56.000Well, they came back to town a little bit later and they brought six, seven guys and they were going to all the different sportsbooks and they were betting and the line moved six or seven points again.
00:40:07.000Lines on games don't move six or seven points.
00:40:09.000Well, the second time I didn't bet because – and sure enough, they won the game by like 20 again.
00:40:16.000They came back the third time, and by now I'm taping the games.
00:41:08.000And how did you know it wasn't just luck?
00:41:11.000Well, I mean, Joe, look, this would be like tracking an elephant in the snow.
00:41:15.000I mean, you got guys who no one's ever laid eyes on, and they come to Las Vegas, and they bet on a game, and they move at six or seven points.
00:41:25.000You know, if you're a handicapper, you know anything at all about betting sports.
00:41:35.000And you're laying a second or third point.
00:41:39.000You know, you better have a really strong opinion because they move this line for one reason.
00:41:47.000It's to make it a lot less appealing to the person betting on that team.
00:41:52.000So when somebody comes to town and they move a line six or seven points, no better in the world is going to do that.
00:41:58.000And in order to do that, they went to every sportsbook in town, and they just, you know, they laid, you know, six, six and a half, seven, seven and a half, eight, eight and a half, nine, nine and a half, ten.
00:42:53.000Anybody would do what they were doing was just stupid.
00:42:56.000I mean, anyone could see what they were doing.
00:42:58.000The only thing that surprised me, it took three games for someone to finally turn them in.
00:43:02.000And sportsbooks, I don't think they ever turned them in.
00:43:05.000I mean, I called the charm myself because, again, anything that involves the integrity of sports, they're affecting my business.
00:43:12.000If 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.
00:43:20.000The other one, you know, with the referee, the NFL referee.
00:43:24.000Gamers knew about that eight months before he got busted by law enforcement.
00:43:49.000$500 million worth of Apple stock, and the price on Apple stock would barely move.
00:43:58.000On 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.
00:44:13.000So, 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.
00:44:24.000If 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.
00:44:31.000But 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,
00:44:53.000And you're not dealing with exactly – you're not dealing here with master criminals.
00:44:57.000You're dealing with people that frankly aren't very smart and – I mean they aren't very smart to be doing what they're doing and the way they go about it they're even – I don't know if you remember the thing years ago with Hot Rod Williams.
00:45:10.000I mean there's – the ones – Trevor Burrus What was that thing?
00:45:16.000But 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.
00:45:29.000I 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?
00:45:42.000And my answer was, I have a lot more confidence in betting on sports for the reason I pointed out.
00:45:49.000It's a much smaller market, but as far as things being on the up and up, I have a lot more confidence in that, and I have way more confidence in that than I do the other.
00:46:09.000And 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.
00:46:17.000It's so easy to detect and it's so easy to, and today it's even easier.
00:46:22.000And the good thing about legalized sports betting is it's so transparent.
00:46:26.000Everybody who has an account, you know, you take all of these young players that haven't, you know, they haven't been, I'll call it schooled correctly.
00:46:35.000They haven't been, you know, whether it be their teams or whomever, they haven't explained to them, you know, the repercussions about betting on sports if they're a professional athlete.
00:46:44.000You know, we've had some here recently that You know, basically, these guys are kids, Joe.
00:47:04.000It 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.
00:47:09.000And it's been brought to the public's attention.
00:47:12.000If it's that easy to catch them, somebody out there making large bets on something, moving the line substantially, and you don't know who this person is, and you're looking at it, and they do this more than one time or two times, and you're seeing an outcome of a game that doesn't make sense,
00:47:29.000it isn't going to take long to figure this out.
00:47:33.000Now when you get to a situation like a guy like Pete Rose, that was a fascinating situation because this was at the time where gambling was illegal, unless you're in Vegas.
00:47:46.000And you find out he might be betting on the team that he's coaching, and he might also be betting against his team.
00:47:56.000I've never heard anyone ever say that Pete Rose bet against his team.
00:48:00.000I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I've never heard that allegation.
00:48:21.000What was the problem with him betting against his team, or betting for his team, rather?
00:48:25.000That seems like that just would be a guy who has confidence in his team.
00:48:29.000Well, 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.
00:48:42.000If I were on their side of it, and really thought through all of the different Pluses and minuses.
00:48:50.000I may have a different opinion right off the shoulder.
00:48:52.000I really don't see a problem him betting on his team or anyone betting on their team, although others do.
00:49:00.000And I'm trying to think of a good reason as to why...
00:49:07.000It would be a problem him betting him on his team.
00:49:09.000I really haven't thought about that closely.
00:49:36.000If anyone accused him of betting against his team, I think they're wrong because I never heard that.
00:49:41.000And 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.
00:49:54.000Wasn't he removed from the Hall of Fame?
00:49:57.000Well, he never was in the Hall of Fame, but his consideration, he's never been voted in the Hall of Fame for that reason.
00:50:04.000In 2022, he's bringing up a point where there's a manager or a player on the Rockies that signed an endorsement deal with Maxim Bett, and he said, like, if what he did was happening now, no one would ever think anything of it.
00:51:24.000Then 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.
00:51:36.000But I would imagine that fighting is probably the most difficult thing to get right in terms of to figure out a line.
00:51:46.000Did you do any gambling on boxing or MMA fights?
00:51:50.000I haven't done any gambling on MMA fights.
00:51:53.000I had fighters, but in the past I had three boxers in Las Vegas.
00:53:16.000So, again, not knowing as much as I would like to know before I make a comment on something, my only thinking is that You know a lot more about MMA fighting than I'll ever know,
00:54:02.000There's certain things that would change every aspect of your strategy for a fight if you found out that a fighter was injured.
00:54:09.000Especially 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.
00:54:20.000If you know he's got a blown-out knee and he can't really adjust on the feet or shoot for takedowns or even defend them well, you would definitely change things.
00:54:29.000And fighters hide injuries all the time.
00:54:32.000I mean, Dreckus Duplessis, when he won against Robert Whittaker, he had a broken foot.
00:54:37.000And, you know, he beat one of the top guys in the world with a broken foot.
00:54:41.000And that's kind of crazy that fighters do that, but that's the type of human being you're dealing with.
00:54:49.000Just because you know that a guy's injured doesn't mean that this guy's going to lose.
00:54:52.000There's certain guys that They find a way to win no matter what right and I would imagine that that what I would would the thing that would give me pause is scoring Judges scoring is horrible.
00:55:56.000Because 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.
00:56:04.000And the last one was so egregious that she kind of just went away.
00:56:08.000But I've always wondered if those people were on the take.
00:56:11.000Because 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.
00:56:22.000And 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.
00:56:32.000So they would be more inclined to score for you.
00:56:40.000Maybe you do whatever you can do to get inside their good graces.
00:56:43.000And then if it's like, eh, this guy or this guy, I'm going to go with this guy because I like Don King.
00:56:48.000Or, you know, Bob Arum, he does me well, so I'm going to lean towards that guy.
00:56:53.000That would be a real issue with me if I was gambling, particularly on boxing.
00:56:59.000Back when I got in, I was betting on boxing before I had fighters, but after I had— When you say you had fighters, what do you mean by that?
00:57:44.000I 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.
00:58:07.000And he was a lightweight and a really, really good amateur.
00:58:12.000And I remember in order to get his first fight on television there, we had to agree to, with Bruce Trampler and Bob Arum, we had to agree to multiple contracts if he won the fight.
00:58:27.000That's the only way to get him on the card.
00:58:36.000Well, Duke Durham, who was Don King's guy in Las Vegas.
00:58:40.000And then, of course, you had Don and you had Bruce Trapler that was Bob Arum's guy.
00:58:47.000And, you know, I mean, you look at the various...
00:58:54.000Organizations that did the ratings are the fighters.
00:58:57.000And you look at some of the fighters, I mean, if they were signed with the right guy, I mean, they'd be ranked in the, you know, in the top ten.
00:59:05.000And a lot of them couldn't bust a grape.
00:59:08.000And then you'd have guys that didn't, that weren't signed or hadn't agreed to those contracts and they couldn't get rated, they couldn't get a fight.
00:59:55.000It's a complicated thing to watch and pick fights.
01:00:00.000It'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.
01:00:12.000You have to be able to assess, like I can look at a fighter, like a guy like Ilya Toporia, who just won the world title against Volkanovski, when I would watch him fight and train, even though he was against lesser competition than Volkanovski, I was seeing the speed of his strikes,
01:00:30.000the accuracy, the defense, how good the defense was, his durability.
01:00:36.000I 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.
01:00:45.000He'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.
01:01:14.000Very, very, very rarely, I should say.
01:01:17.000But, again, the thing that drives me the most crazy is the decisions.
01:01:23.000Because if I was a gambler and I laid a big bet on Ilya Teporia and for some reason it went five rounds and they give it to Volkanovski and it's a terrible decision, there's not a more robbed feeling in the world.
01:01:36.000That's a dirty feeling because it's so subjective as opposed to scoring.
01:01:40.000If you're watching a basketball game, If the Lakers score more, they win.
01:02:23.000And when someone is an incredibly popular fighter, like a Canelo Alvarez or someone like that, where there's so much money invested in this fighter, and there's so much money potentially in future matchups, that if they lose...
01:02:35.000Boy, that could switch the amount of money you make by an extraordinary amount.
01:02:41.000But if they get away with a robbery, just a little bit of a robbery, over six months, a year, two years, people forget.
01:04:28.000And if you've ever sparred before, if you're used to sparring Orthodox people, and then you sparred at Southpaw, your whole brain has to do all these extra calculations.
01:04:35.000And if you're not accustomed to sparring, Just sparring with Southpaws.
01:04:44.000Unless you've gone through a whole camp with Southpaws.
01:04:46.000That's one thing that people are very reluctant to do.
01:04:49.000Like, say, if a fighter is scheduled to fight an Orthodox fighter, and then two weeks out, that guy gets injured, and then another guy steps in to take his place, you find out this guy's a Southpaw.
01:05:23.000I'm not a left-handed person, but I have a theory about left-handed people.
01:05:27.000I think they just get better at things quicker.
01:05:30.000I think there's something about left-handed people.
01:05:32.000They see the way everybody's doing everything backwards, and so they have to see the way they do it and then do it their way, and I think there's some sort of an advantage in that.
01:05:40.000Okay, well, I hadn't thought that one out yet, but...
01:05:43.000Some of the best pool players are left-handed.
01:06:35.000Jimmy Montoya has been training fighters in L.A. for a zillion years, and he's stable.
01:06:42.000Back in those days, he had like 120 fighters, okay?
01:06:46.000And he would bring guys over, whether it be the Silver Slipper or the Show Boat or the Hacienda, and a lot of his fighters were on the card.
01:06:55.000And he brought over this Hispanic kid, and this kid's fighting Terry, and you looked at the guy's record, and I think he was like maybe won three, lost two, and he had a draw.
01:07:08.000And I'm thinking, well, this guy's got like zero chance.
01:07:14.000So this is back when I'm drinking some, too.
01:07:16.000So we go to the fight, my wife Susan and I, and Billy's working a spit bucket.
01:07:21.000And the fight starts, and I'm betting everybody I can bet in the crowd.
01:07:53.000In the amateur ranks, like I said, he won like five national golden gloves.
01:07:57.000But when he turned pro, he really didn't have a real good punch.
01:08:02.000So he came out in the second round, and he drops his gloves, and he's showing off.
01:08:07.000And this kid hit him, and when he hit him, His mouthpiece went out.
01:08:14.000And then he's got the wailing on his head.
01:08:16.000And I'm thinking, I'm watching this, I can't believe it.
01:08:19.000And he, you know, he kind of knocked him silly, so to speak.
01:08:23.000Well, Terry's, you know, but he's had enough fights.
01:08:26.000He probably had as an amateur probably 50, 60 fights.
01:08:30.000So he got out of the round, so they come out in the third round, and he still isn't shaking it completely off, and the guy goes wailing on him again.
01:08:37.000And now, you know, he's bleeding, and he's got a gash over one eye, blood's coming out of his mouth.
01:12:58.000And then there was a stock that I'd owned for 10 years, a stock called Dean Foods.
01:13:02.000And they'd been involved in a material transaction they'd spun off a part of their company.
01:13:07.000And I owned a large amount of this stock.
01:13:09.000And the SEC was looking at anyone who bought and sold stock around a certain period of time, and I was one of those people.
01:13:18.000And 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.
01:13:32.000That started in 1983. So you were already a marked man.
01:13:42.000I'd been indicted for betting on sports.
01:13:44.000Joe, stop and try to get your head around this one.
01:13:48.000In 1990, in Las Vegas, Nevada, the gaming capital of the world, the FBI took myself and my wife out of our home, and handcuffs and my wife, they had leg irons on her, and we were arrested and we were charged with being part of a criminal conspiracy.
01:15:41.000But we exonerated all the charges except the one charge, and they were voted 11-1 to acquit us on that.
01:15:47.000And then I was indicted three times after that for the same thing, batting on sports.
01:15:52.000It was thrown out of court every time.
01:15:54.000And 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.
01:16:06.000Especially if you're someone who's beat them a number of times over a period of years, there becomes a vendetta.
01:16:12.000You're the guy that everybody wants to bring down.
01:16:15.000And then I'm involved in New York originally with a guy with Carl Icahn, one of the most successful investors in the history of the world, and that investigation went nowhere because there was nothing there.
01:16:28.000And 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.
01:16:39.000The four people, there were five people involved in my case, Three prosecutors, a supervisor and the former U.S. attorney.
01:16:47.000Four 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.
01:16:55.000Three of them have gone into private practice today.
01:16:59.000Their sole business is they represent people with white collar crimes in the Southern District of New York.
01:17:04.000They bring them back over with the people that they worked with for years and they cut deals.
01:17:09.000The fourth one ran for the U.S. Congress in New York.
01:18:05.000Well, 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.
01:18:21.000And while I was in prison, my daughter committed suicide.
01:19:10.000And, you know, I've become a fairly successful sports bettor.
01:19:18.000And then I went to prison, which I had to share that experience because when I went into prison, there was only one positive thing that came out of that, Joe.
01:19:37.000You know, every time there was a visitation where I was at in prison, I had someone who visited me.
01:19:43.000Sixty percent of the people in prison never get a visit.
01:19:46.000But these men that I mentored, not a one of them wanted to go back to prison.
01:19:52.000But 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.
01:20:01.000I mean tough guys, you know, I mean tough guys, you know, ripped guys, had been in prison 20-25 years, they would become very emotional.
01:20:10.000They 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.
01:20:17.000The only thing they learned in prison was how to become a better criminal.
01:20:23.000While they were in the halfway house, they were going to get a job someplace, making minimum wage.
01:20:27.000But as soon as that was over, they had to do something to feed their families.
01:20:31.000And they, you know, they had no job skill set.
01:20:35.000So when I got out of prison, I knew I had to try to do something about that, okay?
01:20:40.000And so I got involved with Harry Reid when I originally got out of prison, former senator from Nevada, former majority leader.
01:20:50.000And I got involved with Harry because clearly Democrats are in power and I wanted to put vocational schools in the federal prisons.
01:20:59.000And I was willing to put up some of my money initially to get it started.
01:21:03.000And unfortunately, Senator Reid passed away before we were able to get anything done.
01:21:09.000Well, a former sheriff in Las Vegas, Bill Young, he told me, he said, Bill, he said, the best reentry program in the United States, it's in Las Vegas.
01:21:20.000He said, it's called Hope for Prisoners.
01:21:48.000But I met with John Ponder and became really impressed with him.
01:21:55.000But the more I learned about him and the program and what he's done, I got superly impressed.
01:22:01.000And so my wife and I got more involved.
01:22:04.000We made some financial assistance available, and they were able to add to some of the things they were doing as far as, you know, teaching and stuff.
01:22:14.000This is an 18-month program these people are in, by the way.
01:22:18.000And the first thing they do, almost every one of these people have an issue with drugs.
01:22:21.000First thing they do is get them off of drugs.
01:22:25.000Second thing they do, they get them right with their families.
01:22:29.000And that's the reason this program works so good.
01:22:32.000And every month, we have a graduation there.
01:22:36.000The graduation, Joe, was held at Metropolitan Police Headquarters in downtown Las Vegas.
01:22:43.000There's usually 50 to 75 police officers there.
01:22:48.000Come to find out there's 200 police officers in Las Vegas Metro that are mentoring these people now.
01:22:54.000A 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.
01:23:05.000And usually you got about a thousand people there, friends, and you got a lot of mentors in the Las Vegas area that come.
01:23:12.000They come up and they receive their diplomas.
01:23:15.000And the second that's over, there's a job fair and they all have jobs before they leave.
01:23:19.000And 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.
01:23:26.000They'll come up and speak and they'll talk about their life and how it changed their life.
01:23:34.000The current governor we have, he was a former sheriff that was involved in this program.
01:23:42.000And so Joe recognized how important it is for these people to have a job skill set when they come out of prison also.
01:23:50.000So we spoke to him and the head of corrections in Nevada, and we now are putting vocational schools in Nevada prisons.
01:24:01.000And they're going to be able to get certified to be an electrician, a plumber, air-conditioned repair truck driver, And when we decided to do this, of course it takes money, there's another family in Las Vegas, the Ingolstadt family,
01:24:18.000and so they agreed to put up two million dollars.
01:24:20.000Susan and I agreed to put up two million, and the state agreed to put up a million.
01:24:25.000So the night they made this announcement, I was asked to come and speak.
01:24:30.000And I got there, and there was another speaker, her name was Alice Johnson.
01:24:36.000Alice Johnson is the lady that I was imprisoned at the time, but President Trump pardoned her, and he pardoned her because her case got brought to his attention by Kim Kardashian.
01:24:48.000And so Alice Johnson got up and spoke, and I was blown away with her, and I was blown away with her speech.
01:24:57.000I think she was from Mississippi, I think, or Louisiana, one of the two.
01:25:03.000And she'd gone to prison for being, quote, a drug mule.
01:25:07.000And 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.
01:25:20.000Never touched a drug, never sold a drug.
01:25:22.000First time offense, they gave her life in prison with no parole.
01:25:56.000I was there with John Ponder and myself.
01:25:58.000And there's, I don't know, 500, 600, 800 inmates there.
01:26:03.000And when we originally walked in, we started talking to them.
01:26:07.000You could kind of see, you know, they were kind of disinterested.
01:26:11.000Some were listening, but most weren't.
01:26:13.000But 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.
01:26:18.000And when I got up there, you know, I said, well, you guys are probably trying to figure out what this old graded dude here is to talk to you about today.
01:26:26.000So I kind of explained to them while I was there what my background was, the fact that I'd been in prison, and what we were going to do with the vocational schools.
01:26:35.000Well, Joe, when you got finished, you could hear a pin drop.
01:26:39.000And we started doing Q&A. And it seems like the questions went on forever.
01:26:46.000Finally, the correctional officer said, you know, they have to get back.
01:26:49.000And we had to end the Q&A. But now we have vocational schools in Nevada prisons.
01:26:57.000And it's just, to me, it's not only those men that I remembered that I mentored.
01:27:04.000Okay, when they go home, a lot of them have families, you know, they got four or five children.
01:27:11.000Okay, so those children, if that father goes home and he has a job as an electrician, a plumber, air conditioning, repairer, Their father is no longer a criminal.
01:28:27.000And 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.
01:28:37.000By the way, Joe, you didn't ask me this.
01:28:40.000100% of any money that comes out of this book goes to charity.
01:28:43.000It goes to Opportunity Village in Las Vegas, which is an organization that works with intellectually challenged people.
01:28:49.000It goes to Hope for Prisoners, and it goes to an organization in Louisville, Kentucky called Cedar Lake Lodge, which works with intellectually challenged people.
01:29:09.000Well, they said that a guy who was on the board at the time had passed me along non-public information.
01:29:16.000And 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.
01:29:28.000And that was the allegation, and that's what I was convicted of when I went to prison.
01:29:33.000Now, you know, I could give you the background and the details of it, Joe, and I think even Even the life you lived, I think you would find it fairly interesting.
01:29:48.000I owned this stock for 10 years, and this fellow who was on a board of directors, his name was Tom Davis.
01:29:56.000I recently met this guy in Dallas, Texas in like 2000. And I was trying to raise money.
01:30:03.000I was trying to buy American Golf and National Golf properties.
01:30:07.000He was running Donaldson, Lufkin, and Jennerette in Dallas at the time, which was an investment bank.
01:30:14.000And I went there to try to raise the money to buy these entities.
01:30:18.000I didn't raise any money through him, but I hit it off with him.
01:30:33.000In 2002, Donald Lufkin and Janet Rett got sold out and he started his own private investment firm.
01:30:41.000And 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.
01:30:51.000This guy was a very prominent guy in Dallas.
01:31:09.000And every time I was ever around this guy, he was the most buttoned-up guy that you could ever imagine.
01:31:15.000And 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.
01:31:26.000And he came out in court and it looked like he ended up with some sort of an uncontrollable issue, I think, with women, too.
01:31:36.000And I think he lost all of his money gambling.
01:31:39.000And then what happened after he lost all of his money gambling, he was on the board of directors of a charity in Dallas, and he'd actually embezzled some money from them to pay some of his gambling debts.
01:31:52.000Clearly, I was totally unaware of any of this.
01:31:55.000I don't think anyone in Texas even knew about it, especially, you know, the people at Dean Foods.
01:32:03.000Well, what happened is Dean Foods, when I got involved with it early on, they were made up of like three different divisions.
01:32:13.000They had just a, we'll call it a regular milk division, which was the majority of their business, the majority of their revenue.
01:32:21.000Then 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.
01:32:33.000Well, during the years, people quit drinking a lot less milk.
01:33:22.000So that's what the farmer gets for his milk when he sells it to someone who's in the milk business.
01:33:31.000So I bought in this stock, and I realized pretty quick that I thought it was like J&J. I thought it was something that didn't have a lot of volatility to it.
01:33:39.000Well, I realized there was a lot more volatility to it than I realized because the price of milk...
01:33:43.000The price of petroleum products because Dean Foods had a huge fleet of trucks for transportation that were all running on diesel fuel.
01:33:56.000And then the cartons were made out of oil.
01:33:58.000And there were a lot of things that had a material influence on how they were going to do as a company.
01:34:06.000Well, in 2010, Dean Foods came out and publicly announced that they were looking at spinning off White Wave, the organic division.
01:34:16.000They hired a company to come in and do an assessment and came back and said, well, the time wasn't right for them to do it, but it was something they would certainly consider in the future if they felt like it was in the best interest of the company.
01:34:33.000In 2011, at the very end of 2011, I bought 58,900 shares of that stock from J.P. Morgan.
01:34:44.000And the only reason I bought this stock, and for me it was a very, very small amount of stock, a very small investment.
01:34:51.000The only reason I bought the stock was J.P. Morgan was their lead bank.
01:34:56.000And 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.
01:35:06.000Because I knew they were going to spin this company off eventually, and not only did I know it, everyone else knew it.
01:35:11.000It wasn't a matter of if, it was just a matter of when.
01:35:14.000So 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.
01:35:26.000Well, they had an earnings report that month in May, and I had put a limited order in to buy the stock.
01:36:30.000In July, there was a severe drought in the United States.
01:36:34.000Corn prices went through the ceiling, and when corn prices went up, the price of milk's going to go up because the farmer's got to feed his milk with corn, right?
01:36:47.000And then on top of that, what happened when the corn prices went way up, the bean food stock price went way down.
01:36:57.000And 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.
01:37:04.000Well, when he did that, I went back in and I bought another, say, a million and a half shares of the stock.
01:37:10.000Which was consistent with what I've done with every stock I've ever owned almost.
01:37:14.000If 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.
01:37:22.000And the only reason Dean Food's stock had gone down was because of this drought and the corn prices had gone up.
01:39:21.000I had 31 months to think about this in prison, Joe.
01:39:24.000So anyway, fast forward to the following August, which was a year after they had announced publicly they were going to do this.
01:39:33.000I 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.
01:39:41.000So they did the investigation and what happens, any time there's a material transaction with a publicly traded company, the SEC, they'll send out a list of people who've bought or sold significant amounts of stock to the boards of directors and they'll ask them, do you know this person?
01:39:57.000And when he did, Mr. Davis, he identified me, and rightfully so, who I was, what our relationship was.
01:40:05.000So the SEC, they were doing their investigation.
01:40:11.000And after the case in New York with Mr. Alcott and I went away, there was nothing there, this Dean Foods thing came up.
01:40:20.000I didn't realize it at the time, but Tom Davis had gotten involved in some pretty bad things.
01:40:31.000So the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, they leaked two stories.
01:40:38.000And all the details in the book about the leaked stories, 100% of it.
01:40:43.000And when they leaked these stories, in one of the stories they put Tom Davis' name in the book.
01:40:49.000So Tom Davis and his lawyer, a guy named Milsheimer, they contact the SEC and they say, look, we want to come and give a voluntary interview.
01:40:58.000So they go up, they give a voluntary interview, and they say, look, they denied emphatically that they'd ever given me any inside information, told them under no circumstances had they ever given me any inside information.
01:41:13.000Well, the SEC but more importantly the FBI continued to investigate Tom Davis.
01:41:20.000They learned that he had embezzled this money from a better women's charity in Dallas.
01:41:25.000They learned that he had a fraudulent tax return filed because what happened when he took this money out of this charity, When he put the money back in the charity, it creates an entry.
01:42:00.000And then come to find out, he had given insider information to someone else in Dallas, another man there.
01:42:08.000So 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,
01:42:24.000this other man there that he had actually given insider information to, Two years after he'd given his interview, he decided that he did want to make a deal.
01:42:34.000So his lawyer had represented Mark Cuban in his case in Dallas where Mark Cuban had an SEC case.
01:42:42.000In that case, his lawyer had hired a lawyer out of New York, a guy named Chris Clark.
01:42:47.000And Chris Clark was the lawyer that recently represented President Biden and had to withdraw from the case.
01:42:55.000I'm sorry, he didn't represent President Biden.
01:43:07.000Well, anyway, Milsheimer had called us Chris Clark and said, look, you know, we gave an interview two years ago, but evidently things have changed.
01:43:16.000They felt like they were under a threat of him getting some major jail time because he embezzled the money, he filed a fraudulent tax return, and he had given us other guys that information.
01:43:28.000So Chris Clark, there's another young lawyer who had just joined their firm, and this young lawyer was named Tom, his name was Naftalis, and he, I think Benjamin Naftalis, and he had just worked at the Southern District in New York,
01:43:46.000and he'd been gone for a short period of time, and he'd actually worked in, I think worked with the same prosecutors investigating this case.
01:43:54.000So, Tom Davis and Milsheimer, they end up retaining Chris Clark and this Benjamin Naphtalus to represent them.
01:44:02.000So they go up there and decide they're going to make a deal with the government.
01:44:06.000In return, the government, they're not going to, you know, they're not going to push for him to spend any time in prison.
01:44:22.000I didn't know what one was either until this case came up.
01:44:25.000What 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.
01:44:38.000You're going to tell them everything you know.
01:45:33.000To get his story straight about supposedly how he gave me inside information.
01:45:40.000And in court he said, I never asked him for inside information one time, he quote, voluntarily gave it to me, inside information, as if I would know what he was giving me was inside information.
01:45:57.000And in court he testified he didn't think he was going to do one day in jail.
01:46:01.000The bottom line was embezzling from maturity, filing a fraudulent tax return, giving another man inside information.
01:46:09.000All those things he wasn't going to do one day in jail for any of them.
01:46:13.000And he was their only witness against me, Joe.
01:46:18.000Now, my lawyers caught him and A minimum of 25 lives.
01:46:25.000I mean, he came out in court, I think on one business trip, he called 22 escort services.
01:46:36.000No, the guy that I described to you that I met in 2000, 2002, The guy that used to own part of the Dallas Stars and the Texas Rangers, and the guy that was this—I mean, he'd gone from that to this.
01:47:07.000And so anyway, after he does this, to give you an idea how wacky this guy was, after he does this, he comes to Las Vegas and he throws a party at the Wynn Hotel celebrating his deal he's cut with the government.
01:47:18.000He lost another $50,000 in their gambling.
01:47:35.000The 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.
01:47:47.000When 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.
01:48:04.000They came back and denied it, said this never happened, said we were on a fishing expedition.
01:48:09.000That's what Preet Bharara said, we were on a fishing expedition.
01:48:13.000But the judge, to their surprise, I think he said something like, well, these quotes are almost identical to the ones that were made at the grand jury.
01:48:21.000See, 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.
01:48:32.000You know, we didn't have anything to do with this.
01:48:36.000He said, well, we need to have an evidentiary hearing.
01:48:41.000So, a couple days before the hearing, they sent a letter over to the judge.
01:48:46.000It's a letter, they call it in camera.
01:48:49.000What that means is it's a private letter that no one else can see.
01:48:53.000My lawyers never got a copy of it, but they sent this letter over to this judge.
01:48:58.000They said, Judge, you know what, we did do this.
01:49:02.000David Chavez, the head of the white-collar crime unit for the FBI in New York, he's the one who did it.
01:49:10.000Yeah, 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.
01:50:17.000And if you look up all the stories he does, it's pretty easy to see.
01:50:21.000You know, he writes stories predominantly about cases that involve the Southern District in New York.
01:50:29.000Well, in the one email that they turned over involving Ben Protus, Ben Protus had written a story about our case, and he was forced to do a redaction, a correction.
01:50:41.000And 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.
01:50:49.000So he calls this Chavez up and he said, look, he said, the story you gave me, I had to do this redaction, and he's complaining to the guy.
01:50:58.000The guy says, look, you're on my radar screen now, and so is the New York Times.
01:51:03.000It's an FBI agent threatening this guy.
01:51:06.000So this guy Protus, he calls up this guy Zobel, who's the number two in the U.S. Attorney's Office.
01:51:18.000He said, I called this FBI agent, and he threatened me.
01:51:21.000He threatened me, and he threatened the New York Times.
01:51:23.000This guy, Zobel, he sends an email out to the rest of the people in the U.S. Attorney's Office, or a number of people in the U.S. Attorney's Office, and he tells them.
01:51:55.000If you look at stuff she writes, it's very similar to Ben Protus.
01:51:59.000They're all counter-government kind of stories.
01:52:02.000Chavez says he has a relationship with her.
01:52:06.000The 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.
01:52:21.000That's one of the emails they turned over.
01:52:25.000So what happened is when these two stories got leaked in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times within seconds of each other, Tom Davis' name wasn't in the first one.
01:52:42.000But they continued to leak the stories in there.
01:52:44.000And then finally they got Davis' name in there, which when his name came in there, he gets Milsheimer, goes and denies it two years later after they found out all these other things.
01:52:52.000He decides he will be a witness for them.
01:52:56.000In return, he doesn't think he's going to do a day in jail.
01:52:59.000And he hires this lawyer up there who had worked with them for eight years, the prosecutors.
01:53:05.000It still takes him 29 meetings for him to get his story straight.
01:53:15.000But 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,
01:53:33.000criminal contempt and obstruction of justice.
01:53:36.000Do you know what happened to Mr. Chavez?
01:53:38.000He was allowed to retire, Joe, with pay, and he's never been prosecuted for anything.
01:53:47.000So when the jury went back and they convicted me, They didn't know that there were 60 days of war attacks.
01:53:54.000They 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.
01:54:07.000He said he should be charged with two fellows.
01:55:57.000We 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.
01:56:05.000And the other thing that It was another reason that I got convicted, and I'll go to my grave believing this.
01:56:13.000Phil Mickelson was supposed to come and testify.
01:56:25.000And 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.
01:56:32.000But he bought stock of this company, too.
01:56:34.000And when the SEC attempted to interview him, he took the Fifth Amendment.
01:56:40.000And when I learned he took the Fifth Amendment, I said, what in the hell are you doing?
01:56:45.000I 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.
01:57:02.000Now he had already given interviews to the FBI and he'd emphatically denied that I'd ever given him any inside information.
01:57:13.000If 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.
01:57:28.000But if you tell them something that basically proves a guy's innocent, you get indicted.
01:57:52.000In the 11th hour, he changes his mind.
01:57:55.000His lawyers told him not to come and testify.
01:57:58.000Well, these stories that got leaked in the paper early on with him, myself, and Carl Icahn, everybody in the world that read these stories about Phil Mickelson, myself, etc.
01:58:10.000Everybody read that Phil Mickelson had given a million bucks back he made in a stock trade.
01:58:14.000Well, 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.
01:58:28.000Either he's innocent, he gave a million bucks back, or he bought his way out, one of the two.
01:58:33.000But regardless, it makes the other guy look guilty as hell, the guy who supposedly gave him insider information, because why in the hell would a guy give a million dollars back on a stock trade if he didn't do something wrong or he wasn't buying his way out?
01:58:45.000That's what the average guy thinks, right?
01:59:04.000That's the reason I had to write the book, Joe.
01:59:06.000I 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.
02:00:31.000So I wanted Armin involved in this because I had to tell this story about my prosecution, about the Southern District of New York.
02:00:41.000I had to tell the story about the involvement of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal.
02:00:46.000But 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.
02:00:59.000And Armin and Glenn Bunning and our team did a magnificent job in helping me tell that part of the story.
02:01:06.000You know, the rest of the book, you know, is pretty much, it's in my words.
02:01:10.000I mean, you know, I wrote the vast majority of the other.
02:01:13.000But I work with a lot of great people in the book.
02:01:19.000I can't say enough good things about Armand.
02:01:21.000But Armand, in explaining this story along with Glenn Bunting of the Southern District, you'd have to understand Glenn Bunting's background too.
02:01:29.000Here are two people Who worked at the highest levels of journalism, but they've also worked with the government and prosecutors.
02:01:36.000I mean, they worked and they know this business inside and out.
02:02:41.000You 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.
02:02:50.000You know, we're not in sound bites, and we're not, you know, it's not some BS orchestrated story out there, you know.
02:03:00.000I went to Pensacola Prison, and I hired a prison consultant.
02:03:05.000I was looking for someplace I could go to that my wife could commute to reasonably.
02:03:12.000And while I was in prison, she was in Kentucky the majority of the time, so it wasn't a bad commute for her.
02:03:23.000It's called RDAP. If you've had issues with alcohol in the past and you qualify for this program, you go through it and you get a year from your Senate.
02:03:30.000So I thought I could possibly qualify for that.
02:03:33.000Well, I go there and there had been a story written about this prison like in 2008. I think it was written by either Barbara Walters or someone like Barbara.
02:03:41.000And they described this prison as like a country club.
02:03:45.000And it had swimming pools and the people could play golf.
02:03:49.000Anyway, I'm going to tell you the place that I went to, okay?
02:03:52.000I 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.
02:07:26.000And the people who came down from low and medium security prisons, they said they were much better in the prisons they came from than they were there, those conditions were.
02:07:35.000So that's the reason, along with the fact, you know, when I got out, I had to do something about this.
02:07:46.000I saw some guy the other day who got sentenced to Pensacola, and I saw the story that some lazy journalist just rewrote something they read that somebody else put in there two or three or four years ago that isn't accurate, and they described this place as being some kind of country club.
02:08:02.000You think it's a country club, partner?
02:08:59.000And you're not supposed to go to some country club.
02:09:01.000But you should be able to go to some place where you don't have to sleep next to black mold.
02:09:07.000And 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.
02:09:16.000Just the fact that you gave up 31 months of your life, the fact you had to go to that place, and that now you know all the actual details of the case, you know all the stuff that was withheld, that's got to be a tough pill to swallow.
02:09:29.000I mean, that would make me very bitter.
02:09:31.000Joe, when I got out of federal prison, to give you an idea, I was still under home confinement.
02:09:38.000I filed a federal lawsuit in New York.
02:09:41.000I sued the former head of the FBI. I sued Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney.
02:10:04.000I 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.
02:10:13.000Do you know that not one media organization in New York even reported the lawsuit?
02:10:18.000New 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.
02:10:47.000It's in federal court for eight months.
02:10:50.000Their only answer was the statute of limitations ran out.
02:10:53.000After eight months, the judge threw it out.
02:10:55.000I would have had to file this federal lawsuit while I was in federal prison under federal custody in order for me to file it within the time of the statute of limitations.
02:11:05.000But the fact that it didn't even get reported that I filed this suit and made these allegations, that's what puts a chill in me.
02:11:41.000Well, 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.
02:11:54.000You go and meet, and this lady's name was Rebecca Dawson.
02:11:58.000You 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.
02:12:14.000Okay, after they had interviewed me, they had thoroughly investigated my background.
02:12:19.000The recommendation to the judge was to give me a year and a day and a $10 million fine.
02:12:24.000The judge gave me five years and I paid in fines and restitution $45 million.
02:12:34.000On top of that, Joe, I was ordered to pay another $9 million for Tom Davis's legal fees, the guy who testified against me.
02:12:44.000Dean Foods, for some unexplainable reason, first part of it I understand, the second part I don't understand at all.
02:12:53.000When he originally got his attorney, They were paying his legal fees because he was on a board of directors.
02:13:04.000Okay, but after he decided to become a government witness and he pled guilty to a bunch of things and one of them was, you know, passed on insider information, they continued to pay his legal fees even after that.
02:13:19.000So his legal fees were like $9 million.
02:13:22.000So they got a law firm, came forward, filed the thing, and the judge ordered me and Tom Davis to reimburse Dean Foods for $9 million.
02:13:32.000Because this guy, he's not going to give me any money.
02:15:26.000In my case, the guy that worked with this guy, Chavez— He blew the whistle on him because of what he was doing.
02:15:34.000Prior to me being indicted or anything else, we learned this through our discovery.
02:15:39.000The guy blew the whistle on him inside the FBI. That guy got transferred to some other part of the United States when they promoted Chavez.
02:16:48.000You know, I've worked with Josh Dubin, who used to be a part of the Innocence Project, and now he's doing some things on his own, and it's all about releasing people from jail that have been unjustly prosecuted.
02:17:13.000The 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.
02:17:27.000But the book is, everybody would kind of think, well, the book's written about this guy as a professional handicapper.
02:17:34.000They want to know about his interest in life there.
02:17:36.000Well, what's actually come back, I think, I think the popularity of the book is more tied to the human interest side of it than anything else.
02:17:47.000And a guy went on to say, he said, Billy, you know what the perfect story is?
02:17:52.000He said, well, the perfect story is when a story is out there, there's complete silence.
02:17:57.000He said, in your case, your story involves the FBI, it involves the New York Times, it involves the Wall Street Journal, it involves Phil Mickelson.
02:18:08.000There's not one of these people who refuted one word you said in this book.
02:19:33.000It looked like a lot of money, but it was like four thousand bucks, but it looked like forty.
02:19:38.000So I leave the joint, it's like 4 o'clock in the morning, and I drive home, and I'm living in a condo, and I pull up in front of the condo, I didn't have a garage.
02:19:47.000And I pull up in front of the condo, and I got out of the car, and all at once, two guys with a ski mask on, they jumped out, they were hidden down below the next car.
02:19:58.000One of them had a double-barrel shotgun, the other one had a.45.
02:20:02.000They stuck a shotgun next to my ribs, a.45 next to my head.
02:21:32.000All at once I realized, I'm in the trunk of this car.
02:21:35.000And this wasn't back when they had a deal where you could open the trunk of the car.
02:21:38.000And it was a Lincoln, and I got panicking.
02:21:42.000I got thinking, I'm going to smother it in the trunk of this car.
02:21:45.000So I got a tire tool, and I tried to get the trunk open.
02:21:49.000And you know, your adrenaline, I wasn't that strong a guy, but adrenaline, I bent this tire tool in half and that truck wasn't going anywhere.
02:21:55.000Well, finally, I got to go through the back seat.
02:21:58.000There's some holes in the back seat where they got speakers and stuff.
02:22:01.000And I finally dug through there and punched a hole in the back seat of the car and I'm screaming.
02:22:07.000I never did wake my wife up, but I woke up to the next door neighbor.
02:25:02.000I got my knee all propped up in a chair with ice on it.
02:25:07.000And I'm doing the audio portion of this book.
02:25:11.000You'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.
02:25:21.000The part of the book in there that others wrote and there were words used that I don't use every day, sometimes I'd have to repeat those paragraphs two, three, four times.
02:25:31.000The second day, it took me 40 days, 40 hours to do this thing.