By Steve Rhodes
Thanks to the good folks who have been coming out to the venerable Beachwood Inn on Monday nights to watch The Chicago Code, it’s been great fun having you. But I’ve got one question for y’all: Were you stunned?!
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And just because the Code got canceled doesn’t mean we did; I’m still there every Monday! FYI: A Beachwood dance party indeed did commence, but not until much later. Like they say, nothing good happens before midnight.
Cover Stories
Just to get a taste of Bob Dylan’s almost incomprehensible body of work, check out our first installment today of a week-long celebration of the man’s 70th birthday: Chicago Does Dylan, in which Chicago artists or artists playing Chicago venues perform their versions of songs from the master.
Running Chicago Like A City
We show Rahm how.
State Senate Panel Not As Heinous As We Thought
Please see the correction attached to this post.
Poker Face
“A Chicago man pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges Monday, admitting that he helped Internet poker companies find banks to process millions of dollars in gambling proceeds even though he knew it was illegal,” AP reports.
“Bradley Franzen, 41, also signed a cooperation agreement, agreeing to testify if necessary at any trial to result from a government prosecution that has already caused the three largest online poker companies to shut down their U.S. operations.”
Franzen was known as a “payment processor.”
From an April press release from the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, accompanying the indictment:
“Because U.S. banks and credit card issuers were largely unwilling to process their payments, the Poker Companies allegedly used fraudulent methods to circumvent federal law and trick these institutions into processing payments on their behalf.
“For example, defendants Isai Scheinberg and Paul Tate of PokerStars, Raymond Bitar and Nelson Burtnick of Full Tilt Poker, and Scott Tom and Brent Beckley of Absolute Poker, arranged for the money received from U.S. gamblers to be disguised as payments to hundreds of non-existent online merchants purporting to sell merchandise such as jewelry and golf balls.
“Of the billions of dollars in payment transactions that the Poker Companies tricked U.S. banks into processing, approximately one-third or more of the funds went directly to the Poker Companies as revenue through the ‘rake’ charged to players on almost every poker hand played online.
“As alleged in the indictment, to accomplish their fraud, the Poker Companies were with an array of highly compensated ‘payment processors’ – including defendants Ryan Lang, Ira Rubin, Bradley Franzen and Chad Elie – who obtained accounts at U.S. banks for the Poker Companies. The payment processors lied to banks about the nature of the financial transactions they were processing, and covered up those lies by, among other things, creating phony corporations and websites to disguise payments to the Poker Companies.”
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See also Economists Find Evidence Of Skill In Poker.
Outside Sox Park
Alien vs. Predator.
Programming Note
That’s all for today, folks. I was up for 24 hours yesterday and just got a few hours of sleep this morning. More tomorrow.
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The Beachwood Tip Line: Like a bench mob.
Posted on May 24, 2011