Disgraced sports betting tout Adam Meyer may have actually been a federal snitch after all, according to unsealed court documents.
Meyer, who formerly headed up the Real Money Sports tout service, pled guilty last September to felony extortion and racketeering charges stemming from his point-of-a-gun shakedown of Gary Sadoff, a wealthy Wisconsin businessman and former Real Money Sports client, from whom Meyer extorted over $45m.
Meyer is due to be sentenced in US District Court next month. His lawyers are seeking a jail stint of no more than five years while prosecutors have committed to asking for no more than 12 years in stripes.
Meyer’s attorneys filed a lengthy sentencing memo with the court explaining why their client deserves a break. The memo was filed under seal, based on the attorneys’ claims that its contents would be “problematic” for Meyer if they were made public. But the judge rejected this request and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel got a peek at the unsealed memo’s contents.
THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR SNITCH
In November 2015, the same judge rejected a similar request to keep Meyer’s original ‘public authority’ defense under lock and key. Those documents claimed that Meyer had been snitching to the feds regarding internationally licensed online bookmakers since 2007, following his conviction for fraud for passing bogus checks at tribal casinos in Connecticut.
The newly unsealed documents indicate that Meyer had scammed about $6m from casinos in Connecticut and Nevada, leading to two felony fraud convictions. Federal sentencing guidelines call for prison terms of up to five years for a first conviction, and four years for the second, yet Meyer received only two years’ probation.
Former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Cramer told the MJS that “other than being handcuffed when he was first arrested, it sounds like he didn’t spend a day in custody.” Given that Meyer already had a criminal record prior to his 2007 sentencing, Cramer called the feds’ departure from the sentencing guidelines “huge. Absolutely huge.”
Meyer’s original defense in the extortion case claimed his role as a snitch required him to befriend “offshore bookmaking organizations” and other alleged undesirables. The 2007 court documents indicate that Meyer’s probation contained an order that he was not to gamble, “except with the authority and under the direction of law enforcement.”
Meyer’s attorneys are aware that snitches get stitches, which is why they argued that Meyer not serve ‘conventional’ prison time, as it would be “extremely dangerous for Meyer to become housed among the general [prison] population.”
PUTTING THE ‘OUCH’ IN ‘DOUCHE’
If Meyer hadn’t already more than qualified for his douchebag badge, the sentencing memo goes on to reveal that Meyer was screwing over his betting client Sadoff long before the pistol came out.
Meyer’s attorneys claimed that Meyer and liquor distributor Sadoff were once “friends” based on their common love of major wagers. In fact, Sadoff once lent Meyer the use of his private jet to help Meyer’s grandfather get home following cancer treatment.
Sadoff also helped Meyer obtain a $1.8m bank loan by personally guaranteeing payment. Meyer soon defaulted on the loan due to what Meyer’s lawyers claim was his “obsessive, out of control gambling,” leaving Sadoff holding the bag.
Later, when Meyer got into financial difficulty, he hit upon the idea of creating a fictitious bookie named Kent Wong who was hell bent on collecting gambling debts supposedly owed by both Meyer and Sadoff. This led to the pistol-pointing incident that ultimately convinced Sadoff to go to the police. Meyer’s accomplice in that incident, Ray Batista, was sentenced to four years in prison earlier this month.
