With his office already locked in a showdown with hedge fund high-roller Raj Rajaratnam, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, is going after some lower-rollers as well.
“Preet Bharara is the reason you can’t play online poker right now.”
So began a Daily Intel report on New York magazine’s website just after the Department of Justice moved on Friday to block online players in the United States from accessing Full Tilt Poker and other online poker sites. The DOJ accused 11 people of bank fraud and of illegally operating gambling websites and it seized the accounts run by the sites that held money stored by players.
“The crackdown came after years of tension between the sites and the U.S. government, which long held that online gambling is illegal,” The Wall Street Journal noted. “The case could test the claim by the poker site operators that operating a poker site online isn’t illegal because, they say, as a game that involves skill, poker is not gambling.”
The SDNY has been fighting online poker for a couple years now (see Main Justice’s report from June 2009), so Friday’s assault by the DOJ was not a huge surprise.
“Foreign firms that choose to operate in the United States are not free to flout the laws they don’t like simply because they can’t bear to be parted from their profits,” Bharara said, according to New York magazine, which observed that the prosecutor “better not have any skeletons in his closet.”
Some of the reaction of pokers players is not printable on a family website. One of the calmer responses urged poker devotees to “call this jerk to complain” and offers a phone number. “You will get a guy on the line who will try to intimidate you. Let him know how we feel.”
Ah, well. Not everyone liked Elliot Ness in his time either.
