The Internet Is All Sad For This Guy Whose Life Got Ruined By Running An "Office Pool".... Except It Was Very Clearly Not An Office Pool

(Source) — They were everywhere, 11 cops in full body armor, tearing apart his modest three-bedroom condo. And all John Bovery could do was watch. They knocked down a closet shelf. They ripped down a wall inside the laundry room. They even used a box cutter to shred a bedroom pillow. Finally, when the search didn’t produce the evidence they expected, one of them demanded answers. “Where is the cash?” he asked Bovery, who said he was handcuffed and seated in a recliner in his living room. “Where are the betting slips?” Bovery tried, once again, to explain. He was not a bookmaker. He was not hiding anything. He was a football pool operator who was so open about his business, and so convinced he was doing it legally, that he listed his home address in Parlin on the pool’s website.
But this wasn’t any ordinary office pool. This one, he told investigators and NJ Advance Media, was worth $837,000 in 2009. This one had 8,000 entries from around the globe — men and women sending in $100 for a chance to win that huge pot. The players included prominent sports broadcasters, New Jersey state troopers, dozens of lawyers and — according to Bovery — the agents for Tiger Woods and other PGA Tour golfers.He was working as a currency broker for a Wall Street firm in 1990, and says his organizational skills made him a natural to run a fantasy football and baseball pool each year. That’s when a co-worker told him about a different kind of game. It was called a “survivor pool,” and the premise was simple. Each participant picks an NFL team, without the Vegas point spread, to win its game that week. If that team loses, the player is out. If that team wins, he or she advances to the next week. Sitting in a Woodbridge sports bar last month, I asked him when his pool spread outside of his office building. He laughed. “When did it get out of the building?” he asked. “When did it get out of the country is probably a more appropriate question.”t had 362 players in 1992, cracked 1,000 four years later, then topped 2,000 six years after that. The pool had become a second full-time job, with hundreds of envelopes and checks spread across the beige carpet in his condo. It grew so large that, eventually, an agent at the sports marketing firm IMG found out about it. Soon, Bovary said, he was on the phone with Mark Steinberg, the longtime agent for Tiger Woods, who had taken three entries under the account name “TIGERMARK” — leading him to suspect that the golfer was involved in making the picks. Steinberg said in an email it was “absolutely false” that Woods played in the pool but did not answer a question as to whether he participated. Bovery eventually started using an outside company called “officefootballpool.com” to track the picks, because it had become impossible for one man. In its final full year, there were 8,377 entries, he said, with one financial planner from Philadelphia walking away with $520,000 after a deal with three other players was struck.

Those are just some excerpts from the article so you get the gist, but I suggest reading it all if you’re so inclined. But basically this guy was finally busted when his website started bringing in over 800k and he quit his job to make money off that full time. Now I’m not a puritan, I think gambling should be legal, but at this stage of the game it isn’t. I think murdering people who go 65 in the high speed lane should be legal too, but it’s not. So when we do these things, and break these laws, we have to be careful about them. I really don’t get how the entire internet feels bad for him. Can’t just run an international gambling ring that Tiger Woods plays in then throw your hands up when the FBI kicks down your door and say, “Whoa whoa whoa, guys. This isn’t gambling. It’s just a friendly little office pool. Sure there’s an 800,000 pot and sure I make a salary off it and sure people join from all across the world. But did you see the name of the website? officefootballpool.com. It’s not illegalgambling.com, just some gentleman’s agreements between me and my couple hundred friends I’ve never met.” And while I admit he’s got a point there, I’m not sure a judge would say the same.