Just the previous weekend I heard a guy I knew talk about how he was in the stands at a women't ITF tournament match in a middle-sized city here in Romania.
The "stands" is a big word according to him, there were the two players on the field, their respective coaches and a fence-like structure which separated this guy, one of the couple of spectators there, from the match itself. He was telling us how he could bet during the match for "esoteric" things like what player was going to break next and things like that, and that he made a nice chunk of money betting that the match was going to be a succession of break games. He was also telling us how both of the coaches were also on their phones throughout the match, most probably not to instant message or to post on social media.
I usually take a laissez-faire attitude towards vice, but I am strongly against sports betting because of it's inevitable impact on sport. I love the idea of the extreme meritocracy of sports and view this as threat to it's integrity.
The writers claim of `the extreme meritocracy of sports`is pretty amazing. Considering all the research into 'Everyone in Baseball is born in August' to the constant drum of doping scandal. Or people moving whole families, or rich buying second houses (near sky slopes) to pump their kids past the poorer competition, etc.
It's pretty crazy for anyone to imagine sports as 'meritocracy' when exact birth-day, parents wealth, school district/ college wealth, etc, clearly is a HUGE driver of sports outcome (1/4 ? 1/2 ? ). And that is not tying in genetics, or cheating, or more.
Scrape any 'meritocracy', and you'll find it a) by humans, b) in a culture, and underlying unfairness of the cultures still has a heavy impact.
I know someone who was able to send his children to medical school in a foreign country, when they weren't accepted into schools in our country. He was able to pay ~$500,000 in tuition, plus all the living expenses, etc.
Now they have graduated and are (by all accounts very fine, even superb) doctors. My kids will always earn a fraction of what they do. Hard to argue that wealth doesn't create opportunities.
Oh and by the way, my father is a doctor, so you could argue that his wealth enabled my brother to make it into medical school (7 years of undergrad, multiple years of applying before being successful) in the first place.
Totally agree, and I think it's odd that we went from it being illegal in most places in the US to bring able to do it instantly on our phones, anywhere and we all are just letting it happen not seeming to even care as a society
> very few things more despicable than cheating in sport.
Why though? It's practically a victimless crime. Sport is, by definition, recreation and entertainment. If the perpetrators of sport make better entertainment via corruption of the rules or laws, then who does it hurt, really? Certainly not the spectators or the bottom line of ticket sales.
I can honestly think of a lot of crimes and sins more despicable than this. I mean truly, if you need help listing or recognizing them as heinous, I don't know what to say for you.
You seem to seriously misunderstand the nature and significance of sport. Sport is one of the most sacred, meaningful, and universal rites we have as a species. It is a worshipful and passionate celebration of all our greatest virtues: courage, selflessness, sacrifice, resilience, humility, elegance, grace, and so many more. Anything that compromises the integrity of such a celebration could hardly be further from a "victimless crime"; it gravely injures us all.
Granted, sport may at it's best exhibit some of those virtues, but it also encourages tribalism, the linking of one's identity and mental state to essentially a die roll of weekly fixture results, encourages heroicising people who while good at sport often fail to live up to hero status in other aspects of their lives, and, at least where I live, is inexorably tied through corporate deals and sponsorships with vices such as gambling and drinking. If we're being intellectually honest, it's not all sunshine and roses.
Here here! How vile does one need to be to betray fair play? When this trust is broken it completely dismisses the values of hard work and playing by the rules. But are these things still valued by everyday people?
Really? On a scale of despicable "things" that would presumably include activities such as: genocide, ethnic cleansing, serial murder, mass rape, child porn, slavery, kidnapping, mass murder, terrorism, war profiteering, deliberate mass environmental contamination, pension fund fraud, etc and etc, along with all their related activities and variants?
I'd place cheating on sport pretty low along any broad scale of despicable human activities.
So the lackey gets 5 years in prison, the players are let off the hook and the mafia directing and financing the operation isn’t even investigated. Is organized crime a joke in Europe? Apparently millions of dollars were being laundered through this scheme. How much illegal activity went into generating the capital?
apparently corruption runs rampant throughout all of europe. from the banks that facilitate the laundering of funds, to the port authorities that allow boatloads of cocaine from Colombian cartels, to the criminal states like albania. DW has a video called "The cartels of Marseille" that goes into the drug side of it. but of course there is art, human trafficking, weapons dealing, etc.
Although still present, organized crime in Italy was severely curtailed by the maxi-trials (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxi_Trial) of the 1990s--which followed the murders of prosecutors Falcone and Borsellino--trials that sent hundreds of mobsters and those colluding with the Mafia to hard prison for many years.
Mafia, the organized crime syndicate born in Sicily and exported all over the world, was particularly affected by the maxi-trials.
I must say that only the ill-informed could claim that the Sicilian Mafia of today is as strong and profitable as that of the 1970s and 1980s.
Matteo Messina Denaro, the last head of the Mafia, recently arrested and about to die of cancer, led a life that, were it not for the nefarious consequences of his actions and role, would be considered quite ridiculous, certainly not comparable to that of the Mexican or Colombian drug lords: he had little "disposable income", lived in a small apartment, and frequented a few prostitutes, energized by Viagra.
Bernardo Provenzano, who before Messina Denaro was the head of the Mafia, lived for at least a decade in a farmhouse, largely alone, communicating with his "picciotti" with "pizzini," small pieces of paper with something barely comprehensible written on them: when they arrested him, he looked like an elderly man in rough shape.
The Camorra has followed a similar decline, mostly due to internal fighting in the 90s and early 2000s, while the 'Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, is unfortunately still strong, in Italy, Spain, Central Europe, Canada, Australia and South America. The books of Gratteri on 'Ndrangheta are an interesting read.
I hate organized crime as much as one can hate organized crime and "mafiosi", and I would still to this day favor and support the iron fist of Mori, the police chief sent to Sicily a hundred years ago, who used rather, let's say, energetic methods to eradicate the mafia. I would give life imprisonment to mobsters, like one gives candy to kids on Halloween. Generously.
But the Mafia and Camorra are no longer as powerful as they once were. And I hope they will be even less so in the future.
Uhm, I live and i Was born in sicily. MMD lived a great life with a lot of money in comparison to shitty overtaxed italian salaries and got arrested just to get medical attention without enacting the Andrea bonafede identity. He was seen many many Times in castelvetrano. He sold himself to the police.
Binnu was an ignorant peasant, only good at violent acts, just like Riina and the other corleonesi. He sold himself to the police too. Those people are not criminal masterminds a la Gustavo Frings, are just analphabet goat shepherds with a knack for vioolence.
Mandamenti might be less powerful such as in commanding entrepreneurs Who to hire and so on (mainly because sicily is depleted of Economic activity) but they still control a big part of sicilian politics, huge part of sicily national health system, lots of first sector (natural environment plus huge eu subsidies so a lot of scams and so on), tourist and nightlife activities, drug and prostitution (often in collaboration with black axe from nigeria)…calabria is even shittier and more crippled…should i go on?
I could disagree with something you say, in particular about the great life that Messina Denaro lived (in my opinion, I live a better life, and I am not talking about some grandiose "living with clear conscience", like materially I mean), but overall I agree with what you write. I also agree that Messina Denaro, in the end, wanted to be caught.
In fact, in my original comment, I wrote, "Although still present, organized crime in Italy was severely curtailed...". It is still present.
From a cultural point of view, though, blatant extortions, homicides et similia would no longer be accepted either by the citizens and the politicians, even the corrupted ones; times have changed.
I mean, something like the assassination of Mattarella, the President of the Region Sicilia and brother of the current President of the Italian Republic, would be difficult to imagine nowadays. Or the killing of Generale Dalla Chiesa.
Similarly, a new season of terrorism, like the one that in the 70s and 80s terrorized, in fact, Italy, would be difficult to imagine nowadays; the "New Red Brigades" of the early 2000s looked like a group of out-of-shape, ideologically retired "nostalgics", more than a "serious" terrorist group (even if they were able to killed two minor--and I say minor from a political, and not human point of view--semi-political figures)
There is still a lot to do to eradicate organized crime, and as I wrote before, were it for me, I would use the iron fist again, and again. And again.
The history of that is interesting. Italians from Sicily emigrated to the U.S. in 1880-1920. Many brought their mafia ties and traditions with them.
When the allies liberated Sicily in WWII, many of those Italian-Americans acted as interpreters and assisted the military in consolidating control. The U.S. appointed many mafiosi to manage the island; after all, they were staunch opponents of the Fascists, who had tried to eradicate the mafia.
Only southern Italy still has strong mafia roots. Northern Italy is much less corrupt. Southern Italy has the better food though, so it seems the mafiosi at least have good taste in cuisine.
That's not a coincidence. Mafias subsist on corrupting industries and extracting illicit revenue from them. To do this, they need to have a degree of understanding of the industry in question. It is far harder to corrupt manufacturing industries that compete in the global market (northern Italy) than agrarian/food service/tourism industries (southern Italy).
Er, the trend is actually the opposite nowadays, with mafia orgs increasingly moving to the North - because there is more money to be made, and the strong community ethics that previously protected those areas have been massively eroded over the last 40 years.
Read the article man. It was not an opinion, nor a generalization.
> Sitting across from the FBI agents, Borremans sensed that they weren’t interested in the investigation. The Americans interrogated Rivera, but that’s where the case ended. A senior FBI official said in an interview that the agency reviewed the case as a courtesy to the Belgian police, but he would not comment on the details.
Yes, it is a crime. First, the money being paid out to the fixer doesn’t appear out of thin air. There is a counterparty to the transaction that is literally being stolen from when the fixer fixes a match. But more importantly, this is likely being done to launder money. Dirty money goes to the players and clean money comes to the fixers in the form of gambling winnings.
> There is a counterparty to the transaction that is literally being stolen from when the fixer fixes a match.
Not really. Almost no real persons bet on obscure low rank tennis matches... the betting companies know exactly what their role in all of this is, they won't bat an eye unless you completely screw over their financials or draw attention to them - all in all, they still make a fuckton of money.
Most importantly, the "gamblers" usually hedge their bets in the case of something going wrong unexpectedly. That keeps the risk low on average for the "gamblers", the loss from the betting service's profit and taxes (aka the spread between win/loss quotas) is way cheaper than other commonly used forms of money laundering.
Hell, you can launder money with gambling just fine even if you're not involved in fixing matches. Been a decade ago since I had someone explain this to me (I worked in a bar/slot machine joint, adjacent to a betting place), but in general it works by having a ton of people, immigrants from the mastermind's network, using combination bets (e.g. 4 out of 6) with "safe" bets (i.e. pay-outs just an inch above pay-in). They would get 1000€ in the morning, spend all their day at the betting place, and return the money and betting slips to account for it. Even if they'd lose a few hundred, the bosses didn't care as long as they got the slips to back it up. Cops can't do a thing as the bets are all legit and taxes been paid.
This doesn’t really make sense for a number of reasons. This investigation began after reports of suspicious betting. Those reports must have come from bookmakers who felt they were being ripped off. And the bookmakers only stand to lose from this behavior because they’re the ones who have to pay out.
And yes, you can launder money through a casino. But you lose a lot.
They’re market makers. They can’t be entirely delta neutral. There are things called betting exchanges where you can buy and sell bets with other people, and those can be neutral if the operator doesn’t act as a market maker but then there are many situations where people won’t be able to place bets.
Because you'd have to fund a create a betting body that organizes this data and determines when it's low ranking or not. We don't need an SEC for tennis; what a colossal waste of taxpayer resources.
The betting company already analyses for suspicious bets and so on. If certain betting markets look more trouble than they are worth they can independently decide not to offer them. The tax payer is not involved.
> A strange tip had arrived from Belgium’s gambling commission.
I can't speak to Belgium specifically, but in many areas one of the responsibilities of the gambling/gaming commission is ensuring "fair" gambling. So they probably care more about the impact of match fixing on the "fairness" of sports betting rather than the reputational (I assume that's what you meant rather than "repetitional") risk to any particular sport.
When betting is involved, I don't see match fixing as all that different from someone bribing a casino employee to use dice loaded in their favor or help them cheat in a game of cards. Or depending on who's involved, maybe it's more like the casino using dice loaded in the casino's favor.
In any case I think it basically amounts to fraud. The published odds are inaccurate because the outcome has been fixed, allowing the people aware of that to make money at the expense of the people unaware. Fraud is generally a crime, so as long as the match fixing isn't reflected in the published odds IMO it isn't all that surprising that it's a crime.
> So they probably care more about the impact of match fixing on the "fairness" of sports betting
Not the 'fairness' of sports betting, but the impact on the sports betting industry. If people think sporting matches are fixed, they will stop gambling which is bad news for the gambling industry. It's why the NFL, which is now in bed with the gambling industry, is so paranoid about players gambling. It not only is bad for the NFL, but especially so for the gambling industry they are partnering with.
The sports contest is not a gambling game though or even inherently part of one. The players are not casino employees of any kind.
The fact that a person can bet on anything that doesn't make influencing the outcome of events generally a crime.
Influencing outcomes is a natural response to wagering on outcomes. If that's fraud and unsavory then maybe the problem is the actual institution of gambling and not the manner in which people choose to participate.
(I'd also apply this argument to whether insider trading or stock manipulation should be illegal.)
I've never really understood why match fixing or throwing a match would be a crime. It takes what is a private matter between competitors and a league organizer and makes it a public matter that the courts supposedly can deal with.
If it was a private matter leagues would be inclined to either self-police the behavior or just admit the whole thing is rigged. I mean, WWE seems to do just fine with a completely fixed system.
Would prohibition really work? It's not like there isn't already a large network of illegal betting in place for all the bets that can't happen legally... it would simply make them thrive even more.
Making things illegal/banned might feel good at first, but if it's barely enforceable and/or the demand for that thing remains very high all you are doing, as a state, is foregoing on a lot of taxes while not even diminishing harm often (sometimes even causing your own harm... I'm looking at you "war on drugs"... and before that the alcohol prohibition).
Let's say we have a game with time running out and the winning team has the ball. They can take a knee and win by 10 or they can kick a field goal and win by 13. They can dribble out the last 7 seconds and win by 8 or they can shoot a 3 and try to win by 11.
If they are good sports and just kill the clock, is that fraud? If somebody pays them to kill the clock and not cover the spread, is that fraud?
Is risk of somebody manipulating the outcome like this just part of what makes it a gamble?
It was pretty confusing that you switched to a second example and second sport mid-paragraph without saying so or switching pronouns. It sounded like the team had four options for its final point total until the end makes you ask, what kind of sport has both field goals and shoot a 3?
I think the problem is that, historically, leagues claim to self-police but then the amounts of $ involved ends up meaning enough individuals can be bribed/threatened/etc. that "fair" matches end up fixed. In the best case, this ends up as fraud and so ends up in the courts anyways, in the worst case, the amounts of $ at play mean people turn to violence and...well that ends up in the courts.
So think the idea is that we're better off just making it a public matter from the start, rather then waiting till things escalate into other forms of crime.
It should be handled by civil law. The leagues sell tickets to fair competition. If the players fix the match, then the league is selling a defective product, and common sense suggests they should refund the ticket sales. And the players were presumably contracted to provide fair play, so if they damage the league by breech of contract then common sense suggests the league should be able to sue the players responsible for the cost of the refund. They could require players to take out insurance to ensure they'll always be able to pay.
Making it a criminal matter is just a subsidy to the gambling industry.
You cannot legally wager on WWE anywhere in the US, currently (or I imagine anywhere outside it either). [https://www.forbes.com/betting/novelty/wwe/] I didn't know anyone took it seriously as a sport, let alone would want to bet on it. But apparently yes. It's hilarious to hear the term "Academy Awards... a fixed entertainment event". (Waiting for cynics to mention elections.)
> According to a March 2023 CNBC report, WWE—which produces fixed sports-style events such as WrestleMania and Royal Rumble—wants to quell gambling regulator concerns by reducing the chances that high-profile match outcomes leak to the public.
> WWE is “working with” the accounting firm EY, better known as Ernst & Young. EY and rival PwC have helped safeguard results for the Academy Awards, a fixed entertainment event available for wagering in select sports betting states. As it stands, betting operators like DraftKings Sportsbook, FanDuel Sportsbook, BetMGM Sportsbook and Caesars Sportsbook have offered limited wagering on the Oscars.
> WWE, which agreed to merge with UFC... is reportedly pursuing regulated wagering in CO, IN, MI. However, multiple state gambling regulators disputed the CNBC report that used anonymous sources.
Why would you answer a question about the legality of match-fixing in Belgium at Belgian/European sports betting operators, with a citation from US law?
The question asked "Is this a crime?", not "Would this be a crime if done in the US?"
(Counterfactual: "Why Kinder Surprise Eggs are Illegal in the U.S.": https://www.distractify.com/p/why-are-kinder-eggs-illegal. Short answer: banned since 1997 by US CPSC for "containing inedible parts", under a 1938 US law originally passed in response to antifreeze in an antibiotic medication. Yet (phtalate-based) plasticizers in donuts, bread, fast-food in the US, known to be harmful to organs, and heavily restricted in the EU, are not banned in the US.)
Taking the immorality of all of this away for a second, you can't help but marvel a little bit at this. I don't know that "fixing sports betting with minimal hassle from the authorities" could get much more optimized than this. Consider ...
(a) It's a sport[0] that, while popular enough, isn't, well,... popular enough for its spectators/gamblers to make up enough of the electorate to draw the necessary attention.
(b) If I'm understanding things correctly, it's not "huge games" they're talking about. There's a "subset" of "a" that care about this.
Taken together, those two minimize the interest in the sport (perhaps the minor leagues ... of hockey ... in Texas?)[1]
(c) From what it appears, the players (the most important part of the equation, I'd imagine) don't get jail time. Therefore, it's a matter of finding a reasonable number of "the right kind of player" -- someone who's aging out of the sport, who's (minimal) success was such that the "cost of their reputation" was affordable to organized crime. Someone who's realistic next step in the career ladder was going to be "teaching tennis to children", soon, anyway.
(d) That person is also, likely disenfranchised with the sport and is likely easy to gain loyalty from. And, of course, their celebrity is such that a player "gaining a conscience" would simultaneously remember their mortality.
On the financial side, it's a matter of decentralizing some of the "people who create accounts on betting sites", "people who place bets", and "people who transfer money" down to minimal assignments per person -- the various "mules" end up making up a large part of the actual crime being committed. It has to make prosecuting something like this incredibly tedious. If "the organization" behind this could recruit enough people, their exposure to "committing an actual crime" might end up being so minimal that there's not incentive enough to get them to give up higher rungs in the organization[2]. It would require a sophisticated investigator, but it because of (a), above, it's difficult to find that investigator.
There's not a lot of incentive for the betting outfits to take simple steps like "disallow betting on matches of minimal significance" or taking really any steps to solving this problem. Besides the fact that many are already operating on the fringes of legality and I wouldn't be shocked if all were run by questionable/criminal outfits/individuals, the article makes it sound like "these low level players/low level games" are optimal to the criminals. I'd imagine there's fear about encouraging the criminals to move up to more important matches.
[0] It hurts to say it as it was one of the few that I played well and the few I enjoyed watching.
[1] I can hear someone saying "in X country, and all countries combined, has more followers than GOD!" or something like that. I'll save you the trouble and both concede that "if you're right, I wouldn't know anyway" and that ... maybe minor league hockey really is popular in Waco ... or something. Neither was my point; only that "the people who do care", for whatever reason, don't represent a loud enough voice (or a voice the authorities care enough about) to be useful.
[2] Especially against the usual "snitches get stitches" tactics.
The operator of archive.today et al has certain philosophical ideas about SSL, EDNS subnets, and other topics which seem to be at odds with some providers of DNS, such as Cloudflare. A common theme of folks having issues with this recently seems to be DNS over https, commonly with Cloudflare. I think perhaps we can view the captcha loop as somewhat retaliatory.
> Borremans was a tall, slender man with searching blue eyes and a bald head who cycled 40 miles to and from work every day. He was the son of a cheese vendor. Borremans joined the police force at 19 and worked for years in a carjacking unit. Once, he broke up a criminal network trafficking luxury cars between the Belgian port city of Antwerp and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Does that paragraph strike anyone else as strange being in a top tier newspaper like The Washington Post? It reads like a grade school essay where the student is trying to stuff a bunch of miscellaneous facts into a paragraph rather than the polished prose you usually see in a top tier newspaper.
It sounds like a journalist trying to sketch a background, to make the story relatable to ordinary readers. You don't have to be a superhero to do your job well...
I have been reading The Washington Post regularly for 45 years, and very little that I encounter in it surprises me. It has never seemed particularly well edited.
