1-900-RIPOFFS
Meet Jack Price. He's here to bury your bookmaker. He once
promised to blow his brains out if the football predictions he
gave out to customers on his gambling-advice phone line were
wrong. They were, but he and his brains are still with us. Meet
Ron Bash, a.k.a. the Coach. He is here to pound your bookie. His
ads say he took his team to the Final Four. Did he mention that
the Final Four he took them to was in Division III? Meet Kevin
Duffy. He once bragged in a New York Daily News ad, "I'm
coming off a great weekend & as usual, all my customers
crushed [their] bookmakers." Too bad the ad was delivered to
the News's offices before any of the games were played. In a
world of cheats, cons, grifters, swindlers, carnival barkers and
people you would not want to change your fifty, the brotherhood
of so-called sports advisors is a gutter unto itself. Consider
the service that told its clients that because of a late change
in the weather, they should bet the Kansas City Chiefs that day.
Only problem-as Phil Mushnick pointed out in his New York Post
column-was that the Chiefs were playing in Seattle, indoors, Or
consider Final Score Sports, a nationally advertised service that
once picked the Cleveland Browns to beat the Cincinnati Bengals
on a Monday night. Unfortunately, the game was the Denver Broncos
at the Buffalo Bills. Then there was the guy whose ad listed his
brilliant 10-year record for Monday Night Football. Oddly, he had
been in business for only five.
This is an industry in which duplicity is the leading
economic indicator.
It is also a business in which profits can be enormous-some
services are believed by at least one close observer of the
industry to make as much as $1 million annually. Last year the
people at the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs looked
into the advertising practices of the sports-adviser business and
came away with their hair on end. "These have been among the
most egregious, outrageous claims we've ever encountered,"
says a department attorney, Fred Cantor.
The idea of sports advisers seems square enough. For a fee of
about $300 a month, you call a guy who's really in the know about
sports-particularly football-on his 800 number, and he tells you
whom to bet on and how much to wager. Or you ring his 900 line,
and for about $10 to $50 per call, he'll give you-most often in a
recorded announcement-the one or two games that weekend on which
he thinks you can make a score. The average gambler could use a
leg up, right?
Not this kind. SI took a two-month test drive through the
world of sports-advisory services and found misleading ads,
bait-and-switches, repeated claims of fixes coming down,
misrepresentation of records, unforgivably high-pressured sales
techniques, phone harassment, phone threats, phony guarantees,
mail fraud, wire fraud and some perfectly dreadful manners. Even
the pictures lied. One man was shown in ads to be both Mountain
Man Obie ("the legend who broke the bank at Tijuana
[sic]") and Mike Zimbo ("the most feared name in
Vegas"). Two years ago the Lombardi Sports Wire, a
handicapping service based in Oceanside, NY, sent out different
letters to two groups of its customers. One group was urged to
take Pitt over Notre Dame in a "blowout," and the other
was urged to take Notre Dame over Pitt in a "blow out."
Apparently Lombardi felt strongly both ways.
Splitting games 50-50 like that-known in the biz as
"double-siding"-is the oldest trick in the
handicapper's very thick book. That way he knows he has at least
some happy customers coming back. The second-oldest trick is to
have one of your services try to sign up customers who haven't
been doing well with another of your services. Why not, when the
same guy owns both? Then there was the salesman trying to hawk
the Professor's Picks who told us, "We'll have a Play of the
Year for you every three or four weeks."
Oops!
These touts, who are largely unregulated, try to come off as
near clairvoyants who routinely hit 75% to 90% of the games on
their lists. But the honest handicappers who allow themselves to
be monitored independently are lucky to break 52.38%, which, with
a bookie's 10% commission on losses, is the break-even point for
the gamblers. The touts call themselves Bobby Cash, Edmund Slick,
the Swami, Dr. Bob, Action Man, Bill (Get) Wells and Bob
Winsmore. Very few names, as you may have gathered, are real. The
services claim to have the latest in computer and satellite
technology, as well as inside info from a sprawling network of
scouts, trainers (Jeff Allen Sports claimed to have "200
trainers on our payroll"), reports, traveling secretaries,
coaches and even athletes. In reality, what they usual have are
six salesmen in a 10 x 12 office working banks of phones while
the boss sits with the Gold Sheet on his lap, a hole in his shoe
and a wild guess on his mind. Most advisers have no computer, no
satellite, no sources and no more of a clue about whom to pick in
tonight's game than your uncle Wolfgang.
"I remember once a guy needed a bailout game real
bad," says a former salesman for a major tout operating out
of New York City. "He was buried, so he wanted to put two or
three dimes [$2000 or $3000] down on something good. I said I had
a lock for him. I put him on hold, and I went into my boss's
office and I said, 'Who do you want to pick, the Jets or
Minnesota?' And he said, 'Take Minnesota. My mom likes purple.'
So I gave this poor sucker Minnesota based on some lady's
favorite color. He lost."
Ripoffs Rule the Roost, Exhibit A: the Professor's
seven-days-a-week 900 Econ-O-Phone. For only $2 for the first
minute and $1 for every minute after that, the Professor (Ed
Horowitz, a 49-year-old former cocaine addict who claims he
taught a course in taxation one year, part-time, at the New York
City campus of Pace University) promises to give his
"essential" selections. We tried it. For the first
seven minutes, we heard a tape of the Professor-who babbled like
a man at a podium looking for his notes-plugging his other phone
lines and dispersing bits of gambling theory that never quite
went anywhere. Finally, he came to the pick we'd paid for. Guess
what it was-the New York Jets vs. Chicago Bears game from two
nights before. He urged us to take the high side of the
over-under (38); the total score of the game was 32 (Chicago won
19-13). It is not a good sign when you are picking games two days
late and still screwing them up.
SI: I have a complaint.
Professor's operator: So call the complaint department.
SI: I called the Econ-O-Phone. It gave me the Jets and the
Bears.
Operator: So, who'd he give you?
SI: It doesn't matter. the game was played Monday. Today is
Wednesday.
Operator: Oh. Has this ever happened to you before?
SI: No, this was the first time I ever used it.
Operator: What game did you want?
SI: I don't know. Just seeing what he said about baseball.
Operator: We're concentrating on football now. Call back
tomorrow night.
SI: But the ad says the deal operates seven days a week.
Operator: How much do you think you spent?
SI: Eight dollars.
Operator: You'll live.
Click.
Maybe the Professor has been distracted lately. On April 11,
he was arrested in New York City on charges of possessing
gambling records, a felony. The Professor plea-bargained down to
a $5000 fine and a misdemeanor conviction. Police who raided his
Queens office at the time of his arrest did not mention finding a
complaint department.
Ripoffs Rule the Roost, Exhibit B: The Source, a
sports-adviser service in Farmingdale, NY, owned by Stu Feiner,
who also owns a few 900 call-in lines. Exhibit C is Feiner's
brother-in-law, the aforementioned Kevin Duffy, perhaps the
nation's most prominent adviser, who became famous for running
ads that said, "I will go 7-0 for you today, absolutely
free." Too bad "absolutely free" meant you first
had to sign up for a month's service at $350. Then, if Duffy
didn't go 7-0 in the first week, you got the next month free.
Duffy, who operates out of Massapequa, Long Island, also claimed
to be no worse than 75% right, ever. Yet when his picks were
audited by the Sports Monitor of Oklahoma City, one of the rare
legitimate monitors (among the dozens of such outfits that
purport to keep tabs on the performance of tout services), he
never fared better than 58.8% in any regular football season
between 1985 and '88, and he sank as low as 39.7% for his college
picks in '87. Eventually the Sports Monitor refused to monitor
Duffy because of his "deceptive ad practices."
Feiner agreed to be monitored by SI for four weeks in
September. To his credit, he unfailingly gave us his choices. To
his discredit, Feiner went 19-32, a 37% win rate, and lost us an
imaginary $6,210 based on $100 per unit. During that same period,
we were anonymously calling Feiner's 800 number, where,
curiously, he claimed to be cleaning up. On Sept. 23, for
instance, after Feiner had gone 3-11 for the week on his picks
for SI, bringing his record for us to 11-25, one of his shills,
Kenny Leeds, said in response to our anonymous call, "This
week I [meaning the company] went 3-0, the week before, I was
3-1." On Oct. 3, after Feiner had gone 7-7 for the weekend,
we again called anonymously and got another Feiner salesman,
Larry Marco. "This past weekend, we swept the board,"
Marco said. Then Leeds called back. "This kid Feiner is
making betting history," he said. Yeah, so did Art
Schlichter.
Feiner was fined $13,000 in February 1990 by the New York
City Department of Consumer Affairs for false and misleading
advertising, yet he sent out a promotional brochure last month
that reported a "1991 documented record college and pro:
9-3." Knowing Feiner's record as we did, we asked him how he
could say this. "That's what I had the first week." he
said, before you started documenting me." Fine. That
would've been the weekend of Aug. 31-Sept. 2. The booklet,
however, was dated Sept. 19-Oct. 7, 1991. During one of our
anonymous calls, Leeds told us he had "strong
information" on a game he wanted us to buy, so strong it was
a dead mortal lock, so strong that he was putting $2000 of his
own money on the game. We were dubious.
Leeds: You don't believe me? I'll fly you out here [from
Colorado].
SI: Fly me out there?
Leeds: I'll fly you to __ Long Island, and I'll have you take
a ride with me!
SI: Why?
Leeds" To see how I pick it [his winnings] up and where
I pick it up from.
SI: Can you fly me out this week?
Leeds: What I'm saying isÉI'm using-that's a little bit of a
mild exaggeration. Don't get me wrong, but I've met a lot of my
clients. I've met Dan Marino.
SI: You know Dan Marino? Leeds: Well, I stood next to him at
the Super Bowl, and my friend took my picture with him.
Other than suffering the repercussions of having your home
telephone number sold to dozens of other advisers, other than
sitting through the constant pitches to pay for "special
information games" or "steam plays of the year,"
other than getting con calls from the very same service claiming
to be another service that heard you were looking for somebody
new, you'll find dealing with 800 phone services is a real treat.
true, Mike Warren, a nationally marketed Baltimore handicapper
(whose real name is Mike Lasky), went 12-4 over the four weeks we
purchased his picks, but before he would give us even one game,
his salesmen bugged us to buy into bigger packages. One day is
was the "once in a lifetime pick-six extravaganza."
SI: You mean none of our games is in your top six?
Warren salesman: No, you're getting about the eighth-best
pick.
SI: How fair is that?
Salesman: You get what you pay for.
Feiner says that if somebody calls his 800 number and doesn't
sign up, "We'll call him every day for a couple months,
because eventually they'll change their minds.
At least with a 900 number you don't have to leave your home
number and be subjected to callbacks from hard-selling touts. But
since setting up a 900 service takes only a couple of thousand
dollars, tops, and requires almost no overhead, and since no
license or education is required, and since almost nobody's
cracking down on misleading ads, just about anybody can get into
the business. "I look at the papers and tout sheets,"
says Jimmy (the Greek) Snyder. "Every son of a bitch and his
brother is in there. I don't want to be one of them." Of
course, the Greek was one until last year, when Warren, who paid
Snyder to use his name and picks, chose not to pick up his
option. Snyder is now threatening to sue Warren over the terms of
termination of the contract. Warren calls Snyder "the most
unprofessional guy I even worked with."
That's funny. Some people say the same thing about Warren.
Two former Warren employees told SI that during their tenure with
him they received "hundreds" of letters from customers
complaining of unauthorized charges of $50 and $75 made by
Warren's company on their credit cards in late 1987 and early
'88. Such phony charges can be challenged by a simple phone call
to the credit-card company, but gamblers are reluctant to draw
attention to their gambling activities. Besides, said one of the
ex-employees, "Warren probably figured that gamblers
wouldn't notice an extra charge." Both sources say they
confronted Warren about the charges and were threatened by him.
Both then quit. Warren wholly denies their claims. "There's
never been a complaint about that by a customer," Warren
says.
"Mike Warren is a pathetic handicapper and a tremendous
con artist," says Feiner. Says Warren, "Stu Feiner?
He's got a big mouth, always talking big. He knows this hoodlum
and that hoodlum-gonna break my legs. You know what? He can't
break an egg. I gave him my address. He's so short, the only
thing he can reach is my legs."
If you think guys like Feiner and Warren will make you wish
you have never installed your phone, Atlanta's John L. Edens,
alias Johnny DeMarco, the Babe Ruth of 900 sales pitchers, will
make you wish Alexander Graham Bell had never been born.
According to published ads and taped phone calls, Edens:
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