The Arrests
He was in the bed sleeping when the two men walked into his bedroom. Billy Walters sleeps in a big clean bed in Las Vegas, in a small but elaborate home renovated to his liking, with palm trees and white flowerpots and two satellite dishes in the yard, and four large televisions in the den, and a security guard who sits just out of sight behind the shrubs across the street. This environment was disrupted early last Jan. 5, when the two strangers introduced themselves to Billy Walters with all the subtlety of an alarm clock. He greeted them by sitting up in the bed, blinking. His wife wasn't in the bed with him. They already had her, probably.
"You're going to have to get dressed," one man said. Billy Walters reached down for the pile of wrinkled clothes he had worn the night before. The room was quiet. The men watched him dress.
"We don't like to have to do this to you," the other man said.
His wife Susan was downstairs with a third man in the kitchen. There was not a lot of chit-chat. Susan and Billy Walters were led across their fine, trimmed yard in handcuffs. The path to law and order wended past a copy of the daily newspaper, which lay on their driveway like an upturned headstone. As Billy Walters glanced down at the headline, he realized that he was the front-page news:
INDICTMENTS TARGET BETTING GROUP IN LAS VEGAS
As he tells it, what steams Billy Walters most of all was the sight later that day of his pretty wife in leg irons, chains scraping the floor as she staggered toward him. Afterward, when they had been released without bail, she revealed how the manacles had eaten through her stockings.
Seventeen days later Billy Walters and 16 associates held the first meeting of the legendary Computer Group. This was a celebrated occasion in gambling history, and long overdue. The men and women of the Computer Group had been pioneers in their field. All the Computer Group did, apparently, was wager money on college football and basketball games, but for five hysterical years they did it better than anyone else ever had. It was almost as if they had invented junk bonds. Every season the cash arrived by the millions, all because their computer told them which teams should be favored to win everything from the mammoth Ohio State-Michigan football game to the basket-ball game pitting Monmouth against Fairleigh Dickinson. The Computer Group did not fix games. It simply understood them.
The group began to assert its mastery of sports betting in 1980, when the computer as an everyday machine had no firm place in sports. Most of the big Las Vegas players of 1980 were still relying on their own good sense and whatever trends they could pick up. A computer seemed to them a gimmick from the future, a big blinking queen-bee serviced by men in white coats. There were relatively few of these "personal computers" that are everywhere today. As a matter of fact, the Computer Group didn't even own its own computer. Until 1983. the group settled for renting time on a computer 2,400 miles away in Rockville, Md. As for the group's invaluable program, it was maintained on thousands of clumsy old "batch" cards, kept in shoeboxes, then fed to the computer like hay into a thrasher.
Although dozens of workers served the Computer Group, only one man communicated with the machine itself. He was Michael Kent, a 34-year-old mathematician who had spent II years helping to develop nuclear submarines for Westinghouse. He found such work boring. In 1979 he quit his job and moved to Las Vegas, to bet on football games. In 1980 he became partners with a man he hardly knew, an orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Ivan Mindlin, who Kent says agreed to place bets for them on a 50-50 basis, in accordance with his computerized forecasts. In the 1980 season the computer wizard and the doctor shared winnings of $100,000 playing college football. By 1983 they were winning almost $1 million in one week of college football - or, at least, that's what Michael Kent was told. He never bothered to check the books.
By then Dr. Mindlin had built their little corner business into something resembling a national conglomerate, which had opened betting offices staffed by a dozen employees in New York and Las Vegas. The Computer Group had burgeoned into the first truly national network of sports bettors, able to buy up the best point spreads from coast to coast. At the height of its powers, the Computer Group of 1983-85 wielded more influence over the millions of Americans who bet on sports than any superstar athlete or Super Bowl franchise. Yes, it was even more important than the split-fingered fastball. In its sleekest moments, the Computer Group had as grand an effect upon its constituency in the 1980s as OPEC had upon American consumers in the 70s.
As its influence grew, the Computer Group became something of an underground social club, extending an unofficial membership to at least one smalltime hoodlum, as well as sharing information with the likes of lrwin Molasky, the powerful real estate developer and Las Vegas civic leader.
Profits were staggering. The group never had a losing season betting on college football or college basketball. According to figures compiled recently by Michael Kent, the Computer Group in 1983-84 earned almost $5 million from wagers on college and, occasionally, NFL games. Yet Michael Kent suspects that his records are incomplete. They do not account for personal bets made by Dr. Mindlin, or Billy Walters, or by the dozens of other associates who had access to the Computer Group's information. By the time everyone had exhausted Kent's forecasts in the 1983-84 sports year, they might easily have earned 110 million, perhaps $15 million. Perhaps more.
"When you worked it down all the way to the bottom," says Billy Walters, "it might have been 1,000 people using our information."
Finally, in 1987, success got the best of them. They had to break up, just like the Beatles. Despite all the time they had spent working together, the members of the Computer Group had never really known one another. In most cases they had spoken only by phone, in staccato conversation, using code names. Faces rarely had been attached to voices. And so, as their legend had grown in recent years, it was only proper that these reclusive celebrities be united last Jan. 22 in Las Vegas, to shake hands and wonder where all the time had gone, as 17 of them assembled in Courtroom No. 4 of the Foley Federal Building, awaiting their arraignment on 120 counts of conspiracy, gambling, and racketeering charges.
Among these Garbos there were two their partners most wanted to see: Billy Walters, gambler of gamblers, who had come to Las Vegas in debt and was now a millionaire; and the treacherous doctor, Ivan Mindlin, whose cunning had built the group up-and then led to its demise.
On the day they were arrested, just two weeks before the five-year statute of limitations on their case would have run out, Billy Walters sat in a holding cell with Dr. Mindlin and a third member of the group, Billy Nelson. Dr. Mindlin wore his hair longer than Walters remembered - combed back, until it splashed against his shoulders. The three of them were discussing their contempt for the FBI, and, in particular, the ambitious special agent Thomas B. Noble, whose investigation of six years had uncovered so very little. Walters and Nelson went back and forth in their denigration of Noble, using many unpleasant terms, until finally the doctor spoke up. Walters recalls Mindlin saying: "Yeah, and can you believe that S.O.B. told two people that, if they'd tell him how I killed my wife, he'd go easier on them?"
Now, in the courtroom 17 days later, his former colleagues whispered about Dr. Mindlin. He was the most intriguing presence among them. Yet he sat alone in a corner, as if he were the least popular boy in school.
In groups of four they were called to the bench of U.S. Magistrate Robert Johnston. Dr. Mindlin's was the first name called. Each man and woman was asked about his or her education, and it turned out that all had attended college, with the exception of Billy Walters. Then the magistrate wanted to know how they intended to plead.
"Not guilty," each of them said.
"Not guilty," the magistrate repealed each time, a little sarcastically. He then proceeded to set all the gamblers free, on their own recognizance, and several of them hurried back to their homes, for there were games that night, and wagers to be made.
He was in the bed sleeping when the two men walked into his bedroom. Billy Walters sleeps in a big clean bed in Las Vegas, in a small but elaborate home renovated to his liking, with palm trees and white flowerpots and two satellite dishes in the yard, and four large televisions in the den, and a security guard who sits just out of sight behind the shrubs across the street. This environment was disrupted early last Jan. 5, when the two strangers introduced themselves to Billy Walters with all the subtlety of an alarm clock. He greeted them by sitting up in the bed, blinking. His wife wasn't in the bed with him. They already had her, probably.
"You're going to have to get dressed," one man said. Billy Walters reached down for the pile of wrinkled clothes he had worn the night before. The room was quiet. The men watched him dress.
"We don't like to have to do this to you," the other man said.
His wife Susan was downstairs with a third man in the kitchen. There was not a lot of chit-chat. Susan and Billy Walters were led across their fine, trimmed yard in handcuffs. The path to law and order wended past a copy of the daily newspaper, which lay on their driveway like an upturned headstone. As Billy Walters glanced down at the headline, he realized that he was the front-page news:
INDICTMENTS TARGET BETTING GROUP IN LAS VEGAS
As he tells it, what steams Billy Walters most of all was the sight later that day of his pretty wife in leg irons, chains scraping the floor as she staggered toward him. Afterward, when they had been released without bail, she revealed how the manacles had eaten through her stockings.
Seventeen days later Billy Walters and 16 associates held the first meeting of the legendary Computer Group. This was a celebrated occasion in gambling history, and long overdue. The men and women of the Computer Group had been pioneers in their field. All the Computer Group did, apparently, was wager money on college football and basketball games, but for five hysterical years they did it better than anyone else ever had. It was almost as if they had invented junk bonds. Every season the cash arrived by the millions, all because their computer told them which teams should be favored to win everything from the mammoth Ohio State-Michigan football game to the basket-ball game pitting Monmouth against Fairleigh Dickinson. The Computer Group did not fix games. It simply understood them.
The group began to assert its mastery of sports betting in 1980, when the computer as an everyday machine had no firm place in sports. Most of the big Las Vegas players of 1980 were still relying on their own good sense and whatever trends they could pick up. A computer seemed to them a gimmick from the future, a big blinking queen-bee serviced by men in white coats. There were relatively few of these "personal computers" that are everywhere today. As a matter of fact, the Computer Group didn't even own its own computer. Until 1983. the group settled for renting time on a computer 2,400 miles away in Rockville, Md. As for the group's invaluable program, it was maintained on thousands of clumsy old "batch" cards, kept in shoeboxes, then fed to the computer like hay into a thrasher.
Although dozens of workers served the Computer Group, only one man communicated with the machine itself. He was Michael Kent, a 34-year-old mathematician who had spent II years helping to develop nuclear submarines for Westinghouse. He found such work boring. In 1979 he quit his job and moved to Las Vegas, to bet on football games. In 1980 he became partners with a man he hardly knew, an orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Ivan Mindlin, who Kent says agreed to place bets for them on a 50-50 basis, in accordance with his computerized forecasts. In the 1980 season the computer wizard and the doctor shared winnings of $100,000 playing college football. By 1983 they were winning almost $1 million in one week of college football - or, at least, that's what Michael Kent was told. He never bothered to check the books.
By then Dr. Mindlin had built their little corner business into something resembling a national conglomerate, which had opened betting offices staffed by a dozen employees in New York and Las Vegas. The Computer Group had burgeoned into the first truly national network of sports bettors, able to buy up the best point spreads from coast to coast. At the height of its powers, the Computer Group of 1983-85 wielded more influence over the millions of Americans who bet on sports than any superstar athlete or Super Bowl franchise. Yes, it was even more important than the split-fingered fastball. In its sleekest moments, the Computer Group had as grand an effect upon its constituency in the 1980s as OPEC had upon American consumers in the 70s.
As its influence grew, the Computer Group became something of an underground social club, extending an unofficial membership to at least one smalltime hoodlum, as well as sharing information with the likes of lrwin Molasky, the powerful real estate developer and Las Vegas civic leader.
Profits were staggering. The group never had a losing season betting on college football or college basketball. According to figures compiled recently by Michael Kent, the Computer Group in 1983-84 earned almost $5 million from wagers on college and, occasionally, NFL games. Yet Michael Kent suspects that his records are incomplete. They do not account for personal bets made by Dr. Mindlin, or Billy Walters, or by the dozens of other associates who had access to the Computer Group's information. By the time everyone had exhausted Kent's forecasts in the 1983-84 sports year, they might easily have earned 110 million, perhaps $15 million. Perhaps more.
"When you worked it down all the way to the bottom," says Billy Walters, "it might have been 1,000 people using our information."
Finally, in 1987, success got the best of them. They had to break up, just like the Beatles. Despite all the time they had spent working together, the members of the Computer Group had never really known one another. In most cases they had spoken only by phone, in staccato conversation, using code names. Faces rarely had been attached to voices. And so, as their legend had grown in recent years, it was only proper that these reclusive celebrities be united last Jan. 22 in Las Vegas, to shake hands and wonder where all the time had gone, as 17 of them assembled in Courtroom No. 4 of the Foley Federal Building, awaiting their arraignment on 120 counts of conspiracy, gambling, and racketeering charges.
Among these Garbos there were two their partners most wanted to see: Billy Walters, gambler of gamblers, who had come to Las Vegas in debt and was now a millionaire; and the treacherous doctor, Ivan Mindlin, whose cunning had built the group up-and then led to its demise.
On the day they were arrested, just two weeks before the five-year statute of limitations on their case would have run out, Billy Walters sat in a holding cell with Dr. Mindlin and a third member of the group, Billy Nelson. Dr. Mindlin wore his hair longer than Walters remembered - combed back, until it splashed against his shoulders. The three of them were discussing their contempt for the FBI, and, in particular, the ambitious special agent Thomas B. Noble, whose investigation of six years had uncovered so very little. Walters and Nelson went back and forth in their denigration of Noble, using many unpleasant terms, until finally the doctor spoke up. Walters recalls Mindlin saying: "Yeah, and can you believe that S.O.B. told two people that, if they'd tell him how I killed my wife, he'd go easier on them?"
Now, in the courtroom 17 days later, his former colleagues whispered about Dr. Mindlin. He was the most intriguing presence among them. Yet he sat alone in a corner, as if he were the least popular boy in school.
In groups of four they were called to the bench of U.S. Magistrate Robert Johnston. Dr. Mindlin's was the first name called. Each man and woman was asked about his or her education, and it turned out that all had attended college, with the exception of Billy Walters. Then the magistrate wanted to know how they intended to plead.
"Not guilty," each of them said.
"Not guilty," the magistrate repealed each time, a little sarcastically. He then proceeded to set all the gamblers free, on their own recognizance, and several of them hurried back to their homes, for there were games that night, and wagers to be made.