Follow the moneyPolice get $500k for sting operation
After participating in federal sting operation that shut down Internet gambling businesses, a local police department in Maryland is receiving a check for nearly $500,000; agents from Anne Arundel Police Department went undercover to assist DHS officials seize millions of dollars in a sting operation; the money comes from a gambling case where federal investigators in Baltimore established a dummy gambling company that handled more than $33 million in transactions
After participating in federal sting operation that shut down Internet gambling businesses, a local police department in Maryland is receiving a check for nearly $500,000.
Last Thursday, Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold accepted $470,407.62 on behalf of the county for helping DHS officials seize millions of dollars in a sting operation dubbed “Operation Texas Hold’em.”
Leopold called the event, “the single largest asset distribution in county history.”
The money comes from a gambling case where federal investigators in Baltimore established a dummy gambling company that handled more than $33 million in transactions. Beginning in December of 2008, three Anne Arundel County police officers went undercover to assist the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents leading the sting operation.
William Winter, the special agent in charge of the DHS office in Baltimore, explained that the dummy corporation allowed agents to have “person-to-person” contact with those running Internet gambling businesses that used payment processors based in the United States. Under federal law, it is illegal for companies with servers in the United States to accept or process payments for Internet gambling.
Using the dummy corporation, agents negotiated contracts to process fees from gambling organizations. Once the corporation began processing fees, agents were able to track the payments to eleven different foreign bank accounts located in Portugal, Malta, Panama, The Netherlands, and the United States.
The accounts were seized, and federal agents are now sharing the assets with the local agencies and foreign countries that assisted in the sting operation.
The Anne Arundel County Police Department’s portion of the seized assets is based on the number of hours that local police spent working on the case.
Police Chief James Teare said that the money comes as a big boost for the department and will be used to help pay for new undercover vehicles, equipment, and training.
“This is huge, especially in these economic times,” Teare said. “We just went through a very tough budget where we’re getting vehicles taken away. This infuses money to be able [to buy] vehicles, weapons that are less lethal and to do training that is much needed for these officers to do their job.”
