Bookies in Exile

[Duncan Frissell]

Today's NYT Magazine:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/17/magazine/17GAMBLING.html?position=&pagewanted=print&position=

August 17, 2003

Bookies in Exile

By WILLIAM BERLIND

Costa Rica is highly prized by the world's backpackers and sightseers for 
its unspoiled natural beauty, but it's easy to forget that when arriving in 
its grimy capital, San Jose. The newly remodeled airport is surrounded by 
chain hotels, freshly paved roads and shiny corporate plazas. After that it 
goes rapidly downhill. A dusty highway heading vaguely toward downtown 
takes you through the poorer suburbs of San Jose, packed with families in 
corrugated-tin-roof shacks. Above them, on the sides of the surrounding 
hills, Costa Rica's elite live behind high, fortified walls. The entire 
valley is blanketed with smog from auto fumes, brush fires and burned trash.

This Costa Rica doesn't make for much of a postcard, but to a small group 
of men, Americans mostly, it is alluring, enchanting and brimming with 
possibilities for adventure. The men are bookmakers taking bets and 
dispensing winnings over the Internet, and Costa Rica has exactly what they 
need -- a government that welcomes new investment in almost whatever form 
it takes, a well-developed business environment that makes it possible get 
phone lines hooked up and computer equipment serviced and a sizable 
English-speaking population capable of manning the phones and helping 
customers place their bets. Legal prostitution, as well as a plethora of 
strip clubs, seedy casinos and bars festooned with Budweiser signs, round 
out the atmosphere.

Betting operations are now among San Jose's most lucrative and visible 
enterprises, and their success has transformed the city. One prominent 
suburban landmark is an office building occupied by an outfit called 
BETonSPORTS.com. Throughout its nine floors, 1,500 Costa Ricans are 
employed (in mostly clerical positions) and offered amenities like on-site 
day care and classes to improve their English.

Most of the bookmaking companies, though, are a good deal smaller and 
harder to see, tucked away in strip malls and shadowy side streets. The 
American proprietors are generally in their 30's and 40's, and for them, 
the Internet provides not only the means to escape the reach of American 
law, but also a chance to turn what had been the equivalent back home of 
small, local shops -- sustained by personalized attention and all the 
headaches that involves -- into booming, virtual superstores that can rake 
in action from all over the world. The experiences of these men in Costa 
Rica, as well as of those elsewhere in Central America and the Caribbean, 
started out as thrilling adventures in what seemed to them like Las Vegas 
in the 1950's. But as betting operations multiplied, the offshore business 
has become hotly competitive and complicated. Worse, in recent years 
lawmakers and ambitious prosecutors back in the States have been mounting 
ever more serious legal challenges. Returning home to a normal life now 
means facing the possibility of going to prison. And so, many of the 
bookmakers who started out so optimistically are finding themselves locked 
into an isolated way of life that with each passing day seems a worse bet.

....