Joy Tomchin, a a New York real estate developer and prominent gay rights activist who has donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to political candidates and causes was involved in a shady exchange of $350,000 in cash from an illegal internet gambling ring.
So why would this appear on this Jamaica blog, well, Ms. Tomchin sits on the board of the Sutphin Blvd BID (Business Improvement District).
GREED. GREED, GREED.
At the Sutphin Boulevard Business Improvement District’s meeting on June 30 at the AirTrain Atrium, BID Executive Director Simone Price presents a handsome commemorative gift to the retiring BID Chairwoman local property owner and filmmaker Joy Tomchin. Photo by Walter Karling – See more at: http://queenspress.com/press-pix-july-3rd-2015-issue/#sthash.l8Fvh1Lp.dpuf
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From New York Times:
In a narrow doorway on Fifth Avenue, a short cab ride from the brand-name stores selling luxury and cachet to the wealthy, a man with the street name Mr. Gold handed a shopping bag to a woman in casual clothes.
The bag contained $350,000 in cash, proceeds from an illegal Internet gambling ring.
On Fifth Avenue in New York City, “Mr. Gold” handing a shopping bag containing $350,000 in cash to Joy Tomchin in June 2012.
Cash Drops and Keystrokes: The Dark Reality of Sports Betting and Daily Fantasy Games
By WALT BOGDANICH, JAMES GLANZ and AGUSTIN ARMENDARIZ
This shadowy exchange in June 2012 was remarkable for two reasons: The bag contained $350,000 in cash, proceeds from an illegal Internet gambling ring; and the woman who took it was a New York real estate developer and prominent gay rights activist who has donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to political candidates and causes. The previous month, the same woman — Joy Tomchin — accepted another bag with $335,000 in cash.
In both cases, Ms. Tomchin said she had taken the cash on behalf of her brother, Stanley, who prosecutors say helped run the kind of gambling operation that has proved so difficult to stop: old-style bookmakers and money collectors, assisted by modern technology that enables offshore computers to record sports bets and payouts, illegal in the United States, beyond the reach of American law enforcement.
In 2006, Congress tried to help prosecutors defeat these criminal rings. With legislators rushing toward adjournment, they passed a bill just after midnight to make it more difficult to gamble on the Internet, and to preserve the integrity of college and professional sports, by prohibiting online payments for illegal bets.
By almost any measure, the law has been a spectacular failure, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
The law could not stem the tide of illegal betting because the industry thrives not on online payments but on an old-fashioned shadow banking system where billions of dollars pass through paper bags, car trunks, casino chips and various money-laundering schemes.
At the same time, Congress failed to grasp the power of the inexorably evolving Internet, or how difficult it would be to regulate. By allowing entrepreneurs to exploit a legal, if suspect, exemption, the law unwittingly opened the way for the now-ubiquitous fantasy sports games that increasingly resemble gambling.
Today, young men, the most susceptible to becoming problem gamblers, are using the Internet to risk thousands of dollars daily on sports without the legally mandated safeguards that casinos and regulated sports books must follow. In that regulatory vacuum, fantasy sports now faces rising questions, and a federal investigation, over whether employees at leading sites used inside information to gain an unfair players’ advantage.
For their part, the professional sports leagues, having seen the profits to be made from fans’ deep engagement with fantasy sports, are modifying or even abandoning their long-held opposition to traditional sports betting.
This confluence of events — at a time when legal gambling in casinos and other locations is gaining wider acceptance in America — is renewing an old debate about whether the best way to regulate sports betting is to legalize it or to give law enforcement more tools to stop it from spreading.
The Times, in collaboration with the PBS series “Frontline,” investigated illegal gambling in the Internet era, focusing on the 2006 law. Reporters interviewed regulators, prosecutors, gamblers and technology experts; visited data centers in the United States and abroad; examined thousands of pages of government records; and used advanced Internet technology to explore how offshore gambling sites serve American bettors.
To satisfy a hunger for information delivered right now, offshore gambling sites have developed a powerful digital presence on United States soil, close to their American customers but hidden, until now, from investigators.
While offshore betting sites say they do not solicit American customers, hundreds of them have begun delivering their content from servers in the United States or setting up fast, dedicated portals that directly transmit bets to their foreign locations. Experts in gambling law said those delivery networks could also be legally responsible if they knew or should have known they were facilitating illegal gambling.
To identify the physical locations of gambling websites, The Times, with the help of several Internet research groups, employed a combination of Internet tracing tools with traditional methods of investigative reporting.
When one New Jersey company was recently asked why it hosted gambling sites, the company initially denied it, then immediately removed more than 100 of those sites from its network. Another network removed two sites after inquiries.
In defiance of United States law, some offshore sports books openly solicit American customers with slogans such as “Because You Can.” One even helped a reporter fund an illegal wagering account, then later explained how the transaction would be falsely recorded on his credit card as a purchase from a work clothes company.
Americans’ continuing interest in offshore gambling sites is reflected in the tens of millions of computer visits during a recent 12-month period, according to a company that monitors Internet traffic. Indeed, illegal betting in the United States far exceeds legal wagering at casinos, according to law enforcement officials. Since 2006, the government has prosecuted more than two dozen major online gambling rings that took in $10 billion in sports bets. One Texas-based ring processed $1 billion during a single season of the National Football League before it was shut down.
Because the betting sites are based offshore, in countries where gambling is legal, American prosecutors say they are limited mostly to rounding up people who recruit bettors and move money in this country, leaving the overseas sites free to replace those who were arrested.
“People would argue that it’s a victimless crime, and it’s not,” said Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, who has successfully prosecuted several gambling rings with Mafia connections. “Those who participate in it often use threats and intimidation.” Profits from these illegal rings also fund other criminal enterprises.
The 2006 law also failed to foresee how the developing Internet and a mania for ever-finer permutations of sports statistics would fuel a gold rush in fantasy sports.