In April 2010, a month before Operation Heat in New Jersey revealed the links between bigactionsports.com and the Lucchese crime family, Easy Street Sports said they were hosting bigactionsports.com.
The Costa Rica bookmaker that has recently been the subject of player complaints on US betting forums, appears to be connected with bigactionsports.com, the online bookmaker named in Operation Heat, which in May 2010 brought to the arrest in New Jersey of over 30 people linked to the Lucchese crime family.
In April 2010, more than a month before Operation Heat, a representative of Easy Street Sports answering a question from a player on the SBR forum stated “We host bigactionsports.com so if there are any issues please do not hesitate to send me a message and I will contact the appropriate people.”
In another post, the same representative also claimed that Easy Street Sports was run by the same management team that sold BetOnline to BestLineSports, both allegedly founded by a member of the Gambino crime family.
That\’s when we went back to re-read court papers from last year\’s Operation Heat and immediately noticed something that last year we had missed.
According to the Director of the Division of Criminal Justice who arrested Brian Ronald Cohen of Buffalo, N.Y., for running the Lucchese’s offshore gambling operation, Cohen run bigactionsports.com and the wire room.
Last year we understood that bigactionsports.com was also being used as a wire room for agents and players back in the United States, but now that with the “confession” from the online bookmaker representative, Easy Street Sports appears to be connected to the Lucchese wire room in Costa Rica, we knew there had to be other web sites involved.
So we cross checked information and found that a Costa Rica company called Cosei SRL, operating out of Oficentro La Sabana in San Jose, run by someone named either as Fabricio Ruiz or Fabian Blanco, owns or has owned at different times all the following online sportsbook sites:
bigactionsports.com
betparlor.com
betwebsports.com
bestbetsport.com
crsportsbetting.com
mywagerlive.com
wager4you.com and many more.
While many players on US forums seem to believe that in the current climate, Mafia-backed bookmakers may be the most honorable ones, honorability is not the problem here.
If a US-facing online bookmaker gets indicted, a scenario we have described in The Emperor Has No Clothes, there may be reasons to suggest that players will not get paid, possibly as a consequence of online bookmakers not having any incentive in finding new ways to process payments to US players.
Easy Street Sports (NR) enters the Orange list. Bookmakers Review recommends players to avoid all the online bookmakers listed above.
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