A Colorado man who allegedly ran an online gambling site with ties to Teddy Mitchell has been arrested by state authorities. Boulder resident Larry Kyle Richardson was arrested Friday after a grand jury indicted him for racketeering in connection with the operation of an illegal online gambling site between Jan. 1, 2010 and Jan. 8, 2013. The Daily Camera quoted the Colorado Bureau of Investigation citing 195 instances in which suspected gamblers wrote checks totalling nearly $300k to Richardson to cover their wagers.
The indictment accuses Richardson of sharing a percentage of his ill-gotten gains with California resident Richard Hancock, one of nine individuals swept up in an illegal online sports betting and poker bust by the US Attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma in September 2012. In August 2013, Hancock was handed a 16-month prison sentence on top of the $2.45m in asset forfeitures for his online activity. In July, Mitchell pled guilty to illegal gambling and money laundering for his role in the Oklahoma case, which involved setting up clients with a Costa Rica-based website while settling up accounts in person. Mitchell is looking at a maximum of 25 years behind bars when he’s sentenced on Jan. 17.
JUSTIN SMITH MEASURED FOR AN ANKLE BRACELET
Over on the east coast, poker player Justin ‘BoostedJ’ Smith has received two years probation for his involvement in the Taiwanchik-Trincher illegal sports betting and poker ring that was taken down so spectacularly by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York in April 2013. In September, Smith pled guilty to accepting a financial instrument in connection with an illegal online sportsbook. On Monday, Judge Jesse M. Furman spared Smith a stint behind bars, although Smith has to spend the first three months of his probation under house arrest. Smith, who had previously agreed to pay $500k to atone for his sins, was also ordered to perform 200 hours of community service.
ADAM ANHANG’S EX-WIFE BLAMES HER ARREST ON MAFIA, CORRUPTION
Even further east (Spain, to be exact), the woman accused of orchestrating the 2005 murder of CWC Gaming CEO Adam Anhang is fighting efforts to extradite her to the US. Aurea Vazquez Rijos (pictured above) was arrested in Madrid last summer after stepping off a plane from Italy, where she’d sought refuge five years after she was indicted in the US for her role in Anhang’s murder. Anhang was in the process of divorcing Vazquez after only six months of marriage when he was stabbed multiple times outside a restaurant in Puerto Rico, where he’d agreed to meet Vazquez in order to discuss a divorce settlement. Alex Pabón Colón, the man convicted of killing Anhang, told police Vazquez had promised him $3m for killing her soon to be ex-husband, who ran a profitable Costa Rican-based online gambling software operation.
In December, Vazquez told Madrid’s National Court that she was never aware that she was subject to a US indictment. She also claimed there was no case against her and that she’d been tricked into traveling to Spain, calling her arrest “an act of the Mafia and corruption.” Spanish law doesn’t allow extradition to countries where defendants face either the death penalty or a life sentence without parole. The court is expected to rule on Vazquez’s fate later this month.
