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Busted Flush

The Albany Poker League, a/k/a APL or the Albany Poker League Penthouse Club, was busted last week, with four youngish local men arrested. The Times-Union broke the story, but Fox 23’s coverage was a bit more colorful. WYNT’s story is here, and WTEN’s here.

Located not in a penthouse but a warehouse, APL wasn’t a well-kept secret. The club had t-shirts, hats, and also advertisements on the web. Word of it had filtered all the way down to Columbia County, making it less-than-credible that its existence only recently came to the local authorities’ attention, as has been claimed. (The investigation hardly required its undercover Hold ’Em ringer.)

Meanwhile, the Albany metro area has more than its share of underground bars, after hours joints and the like, which operate with seeming inpunity. Someone surely must have been turning a blind eye to APL as well for the past three-plus years, and it seems telling that the State Police conducted this Colonie bust, not Town or County officers. (This blog post indicates that APL was already going strong in 2008; one of APL’s ads described itself as a social club which “has been running for about 10 years.”) A longtime Albany resident tells me that last she checked, a similarly-sized poker room could be found in the upstairs room of a bar often frequented by off-duty local cops. Bill Kennedy, eat your heart out.

A lively set of comments at the T-U’s site ranged from blasé to cynical:

• Ooohh! I feel so much safer now that these hardened criminals are off the streets. But it’s okay for the state of NY to have gambling…


• It’s because the state can’t tax it.


• Meanwhile, what real crimes were being solved while these “threats to the public safety” were playing poker?


• They may not be hardened criminals, but the guys who come and rob the joint with guns are. These guys let too many people know about the game and it makes it dangerous.


• These are the same idiots who [...] got robbed once by two guys with guns and another guy got pistol whipped in the parking lot. Drugs were being done outside of the building and people were drinking and driving home drunk. I know this sounds like a normal night [in Albany] but the gambling part is illegal.
  


• The hosts put the players in danger because of their greed and stupidity. They send email blasts daily and make poker league shirts. Not only are they begging for trouble but they throw it in the face of local law enforcement. If you are gonna run an illegal game they should use discretion. 
  

• It’s obvious they had a deal and something went wrong behind the scenes between the cops and the owners of this establishment.

Of course, both casual and organized poker games have always been held around these parts. There are several high-stakes games said to have been running for decades around Hudson, even as its more infamous craps and numbers rackets have faded. A friendly game which survived for most of the past decade in the back of a local bistro finally broke up, after the congenial, low stakes atmosphere was cancelled not by The Man, but due to the incursion of a number of hotheaded 20somethings.

But amateur poker games really started proliferating all over the country in the past 5-6 years, driven by the national broadcast of big stakes tournaments, followed by the inevitable celebrity saloon tourneys. Even non-gamblers can appreciate the appeal of imagining you’re living a scene from a spaghetti western. Plus the recent indictments of top online casinos such as Full Tilt also seems sure to spur the creation of even more such realspace games to fill that gaming void.

Generally “home poker games” are deemed quasi-legal or at least tolerated, so long as the host does not take a “rake” from the table or any other remuneration for hosting. Individual players are rarely if ever prosecuted, and the penalties for operations which skirt these legal lines are rarely adequate to deter card fans. The State seems to limit enforcement to those operations which cut into legal casino business, or have the potential to attract organized crime syndicates. For any big city, even a cursory Google search will turn up dozens of poker rings operating in the wide open, with only the occasional bust put on for show. APL may have crossed a line by collecting entrance fees and taking a share of each pot; or maybe they just failed to pay off the right people. Estimates of their monthly take run from $40,000 to $400,000 a month, with $10,000 seized on the day it was shuttered, so it can't have been for lack of ready cash.

A retired judge of my acquaintance is of the opinion that the four are unlikely to face serious fines or fees, unless the State can find some broader racketeering or tax charge to level at them. If it’s held down to Class A misdemeanors, which are all that have been charged at this point, $1,000 and a year in jail would be the maximum, he says.

While the APL Four’s fate is decided, in all likelihood someone else will fill the vacuum for their patrons, who according to Fox’s report report were still pulling up to the club’s door for several days after the bust. 

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UPDATE: Despite the arrests detailed above, word is that APL is back—but no longer taking a “rake,” making the games more or less legal, or at least less likely to be busted up again.

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In Taghkanic, the sick plot thickens

The two incidents of racist graffiti reported here earlier today are not, apparently, the full extent of the spraypainting spree which seems to have begun sometime late Friday night or early Saturday morning in Taghkanic.

Another Taghkanic resident discovered Sunday night that his barn had been vandalized as well, with the crypic message “Yeh... hello.” Equally bizarrely, the words “My house” with an arrow were painted on the road nearby.

The State Police are investigating; the County Sheriffs office apparently did not have an open case on this as of Sunday night. It is unclear who attempted to black out some of the graffiti on the road. (Was it a neighbor who was rightly offended, or a road crew aiming to spare others the offense, or the perpetrators themselves trying to cover their misdeeds after the fact?)

Racist road graffito in Taghkanic

Spraypainted in purple and yellow sometime during the holiday weekend, a* racist graffito materialized on the pavement along a rural stretch of Old Route 82 in Taghkanic, close to the Livingston line.

At least one neighbor reported it to the police early on Saturday. Reports are that it remained untouched all day, but by Sunday brunchtime someone had attempted to partially erase it. (Click here if you really must see a photo of the defaced pavement before it was somewhat covered over; due warning, this includes graphic language.)

Unfortunately, whoever tried to remedy the vandals' crude message appears both to have run out of steam, and also followed the lines of the letters too closely, so that the offensive words remain legible. Lightly resurfacing the whole defaced area would be a more thorough fix.

The two-color, large-scale design would suggest that this took the offender(s)—pimply teenagers, one would suspect, from the childishness of both the act and the handwriting—a fair amount of time to create... Maybe someone saw them in the act. A canvass of area stores to see who was buying purple and yellow spray paint also seems in order.

* UPDATE: Two other neighbors now report a second incident of similar vandalism on County Route 10 near Taghkanic-Churchtown Road, verified in person. These call for a certain type of people to “go to hell,” along with “pigs too.” The second grouping has been mostly covered up, but is still discernible.

UPDATE #2: A barn in the same area was also vandalized; some details can be read here.

Kids these days

Two women—one 73 years old in Ghent, the other 68 in Copake—have been busted for cultivating large plots of marijuana on their land by the Columbia County Sheriff's Department, according to The Albany Times-Union’s crime blog.

Will the courts go easy on these wayward youth, so that they can grow up to be productive members of society?

A visit to a Hudson brothel

While researching the 1951 raids of Hudson’s red light district in 1951, this site popped up in Google. It’s not for prudes, and doesn’t give any real sense of the uglier side of Hudson’s sex trade, but it provides a specific (and explicit) account from the john’s perspective:

Death in Spring

Multiple media outlets are reporting two grim stories: the first of a father-son murder-suicide at a home on Route 82 in Ancram: the second of a body found in the Hudson River. Reports of the latter story conflict -- some saying the body was discovered near Athens and Coxsackie, the other citing the City of Hudson or Stockport as the location. Also, the Register-Star calls the drowned person a woman, while WTEN says it was a man... UPDATE: The Register's story now agrees that the gender is male.

Feds indict Columbia man in $50M fraud

A man with Columbia County ties was charged last month with “defrauding banks, other financial institutions, retailers, hospitals, and universities out of $50 million” by the FBI, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the Special Inspector for the TARP program.

Robert Egan, 64, the President of Mount Vernon Money Center (or “MVMC”) was indicted along with his CEO Bernard McGarry, 50, on charges of conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, plus six separate counts of bank fraud.

The logo of the company, which has been placed in receivership [PDF], was a tree with foliage made from dollar signs.

Though identified in the indictment as a resident of Bedford Corners in Westchester County, public records also show Egan with a Columbia County phone number, as well as owning an estimated half-dozen or more parcels in the Town of Livingston. He is also identified in some financial press reports as the owner of The Egan Group, a security firm.

The authorities’ press release states that the two men were soliciting and collecting “hundreds of millions of dollars from MVMC’s clients on the false representations that they would not commingle clients’ funds or use the funds for purposes other than those specified in the various contracts between MVMC and its clients.” The Feds argue that Egan and McGarry instead used clients’ cash “to fund tens of millions of dollars in operating losses in MVMC’s businesses, to repay outstanding client obligations, and to enrich themselves at their clients’ expense. ... [T]he cumulative total cash balances represented on the vault inventory reports for all of MVMC’s ATM clients falsely inflated the actual cash held in MVMC’s vaults by tens of millions of dollars.”

The indictment [PDF] alleges that the men engaged in a scheme known as a “playing the float,” in which banks and other clients thought their company was holding and replenishing cash in over 5,000 ATMs via an armored car service, while also providing payroll services to hospitals, schools, and other institutions. If, for example, $70-$75 million were being held for clients in February of this year, in truth only “approximately $20 to $25 million in cash” was said to be on hand. That cash would be “floated” around as needed to help cover for the missing millions, according to the charges.

The “float” apparently came to the attention of officers of Webster Bank, which operated about 160 ATMs that were stocked by Egan’s company, in late January, when they realized they were about $12 million short and the bank notified Federal investigators. Egan is further alleged to have admitted the scheme in a phone conversation apparently tapped and recorded by the FBI.

The pair face up to 30 years in jail and massive fines if convicted. The Feds urge anyone who believes they may have been the victim of this alleged fraud to contact contact the Victim Witness Coordinator at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Wendy Olsen-Clancy, at (866) 874-8900.

Xtra cash

UPDATED: After noticing ATMs consistently out of order at Xtra Marts around the area, I asked a cashier what the deal was. He told this story, said to be from someone who services the machines:

“The guy who owns the ATM company stole, like, 50 million bucks. They caught him, but they’re calling back all the cash ’til they sort it out.”

“The guy” was said to be in his mid-60s... However, another (more authoritative) source has since told this site that the theft may have involved the owner/operator of an armored car company servicing the machines taking cash—not the ATM company itself. This second source also indicates that the alleged perpetrator has a house and other business ties to Columbia County.

These being second and third-hand stories—which have yet to make it into the area press—they should be treated strictly as rumors whose details require verification. Or maybe someone would rather the word didn’t get into print.

UPDATE #2: The Connecticut and Delaware business press carried a story in February which matches up with some of the particulars of the above, which if it is the same alleged crime would suggest that this went well beyond Xtra Mart machines.

UPDATE #3: OK, folks, thanks for all the tips; the fuller story is now posted here.

Pala-tines

Mid-Hudson News reports that a Germantown man (allegedly) stabbed his brother in the arm with a fork. Oh, and put a gun to his kin's head.

Sweeney in Stripes

PHOTO: Union College Concordiensis (2006)

The Albany Times-Union and just about everyone else reports that former GOP Congressman John Sweeney, who has run into problems with alcohol before will go to jail due to his latest DUI arrest:

He will serve 30 days in the Saratoga County jail as part of the plea agreement following his sentencing scheduled for April 23. After Sweeney is released from jail, he will be fitted with an alcohol detection ankle bracelet, a device that reveals the presence of alcohol in the wearer's body. The system will allow Sweeney's probation officer to monitor him from a computer. It costs $4,000 a year [...]

However, by pleading guilty Sweeney evidently will manage to hold onto his law license and avoid a felony conviction. His lawyer insists he’s a “model citizen” and is being “unfairly persecuted” for driving while being a former Congressman.

Meanwhile, in Litchfield County...

The New York Daily News and pretty much everyone else on the planet reports that:

[Rip] Torn appeared before a judge wearing cowboy boots and shackles to face charges of trespassing, possession of a firearm without a permit, carrying a firearm while intoxicated, criminal mischief and burglary. Torn's lawyer insisted the actor wasn't planning a heist when he broke into a bank Friday night in his hometown of Salisbury.”

CBC reports what is likely to be the defense’s spin:

“Court materials say Torn, whose real name is Elmore Rual Torn, was so intoxicated when he broke into the bank carrying a loaded gun, he thought he had returned home. Torn had broken a window to get into the building and had placed his hat and boots by the door.”

The Litchfield County Times’ report features some especially choice details:

“Mr. Torn’s zipper was undone on his pants, he was wearing multiple coats, dark blue pants and suspenders, the police report stated. Mr. Torn allegedly did not listen to any of the verbal commands and ‘would continue to mumble to me,’ the trooper stated in the report. [...] Trooper Parker said he found an H&R model 929 .22 revolver loaded with nine rounds of ammunition inside his right jacket pocket, the report stated.”