The Rise and Fall of the Biggest Illegal Sports-Betting Ring in Dallas History
Though he possessed a degree from SMU, investigators believe Al Reed chose to spend most of his adult life doing what they believe his father did: bookmaking. And it fit him: Reed, a husband and father of three, was a man who seemed to cherish hanging out at country clubs and watching sports.
U.S. Attorney's Office One bookie in the Global betting ring brought his $1 million forfeiture to court in cash.
Like most bookies, his business was, through the 1980s and much of the 1990s, built on paper and handshakes. But in the late 1990s, poker, casino gambling and sports betting sites had begun popping up on the Internet, virtual competitors to Las Vegas action stashed on Caribbean islands to keep the feds at a distance. Reed, intelligent and good with numbers, saw a chance to take his metroplex bookmaking operation to a bigger level, so he contacted a few fellow bookies to partner up and devise a plan.
One of the men Reed contacted was Houston businessman Dean Maddox. Through his company, the Maddox Interests, Maddox had years of experience in investments and banking, and he knew just where they should operate: the tropical paradise of Curacao, located in the southern Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela. It was one of the first jurisdictions in the world to license online gaming in 1993, and by 2001 online gambling was an important industry on the island. Maddox set off to their fledgling business' new HQ and incorporated their new company, giving it a strategically vague name: Global International Corporation. They set up a phone bank and servers, secured URLs like HotandCold.net and FunPlay.com, and opened an account with a Panama bank to help funnel money to the island. They even had a lawyer, who, as they tell it, assured them what they were doing was legal. By 2002 they were up and running.
Back home, gamblers long accustomed to laying points over the phone were given log-ins, passwords and credit limits. The setup made for easy betting for players and easy record-keeping for agents. But there was one major difference between Global and other Caribbean-based betting sites: Global's bookies still paid and collected in cash, usually face-to-face.
Business boomed, and Reed grew it like a multi-level marketing scheme, with the owners finding agents underneath them to accept wagers. Those agents would find sub-agents, who would find more sub-agents to find even more bettors, passing all the way up through the pyramid to the owners, each agent and sub-agent getting a slice along the way. Soon the phone bank operation was receiving an average of 20,000 calls per month, even higher during football season and March Madness. As the cash started to stack up, they wired what they could through Panama to Curacao, structuring their deposits to avoid alerting the feds. When a trip was in order, they packed suitcases full of cash to help cover expenses -- $9,000 each so they didn't have to declare the money.
On the island they were met by Curtis Wayne Higgins, a 45-year-old bookie from Prosper familiar with the online-gambling world. Higgins was managing a Dallas-area restaurant, but Reed moved him to Curacao to run the offices there. He eventually moved back and slid into a role as betting agent, but Global's presence there kept growing. By 2006 it had as many as 40 people working at the Curacao office during the off-season, and twice that during the football season. Back home, agents were pulling in six figures and even seven, working a couple half-days a week making payouts on golf courses, restaurants and bars.
Among those lured into the business: Larry Coralli and his son Brent. The elder Coralli, 79, was no stranger to bookmaking or organized crime. In his 2002 autobiography, The Vulture's Wisdom: The Larry Coralli Story, he described a life of living among mobsters, making his living as a pool hustler, dealing cards for the mob and interstate bookmaking. He was known as a top-notch "card mechanic" -- someone who could manipulate a deck without anyone knowing -- and was employed by the mob to do this subtle magic. His son, Brent Coralli, appeared to have chosen a straighter path: He owned a sports apparel company in Richardson and was the CEO of the Dallas Sting girls soccer club, one of the biggest and best-known youth clubs in the country. Both became agents for Global.
The easy money made for large lifestyles for those involved -- big houses, nice cars and more money than they knew what to do with. Reed made $3 to $4 million a year, the feds eventually calculated, and spent $2 million of it on a three-story condo in the exclusive Centrium Tower in the Turtle Creek area of Dallas, with neighbors like Stephen Jones and the late Kidd Craddick. The 5,100-square-foot condo spanned the entire top floor, and he spent another $1 million to finish out the home -- complete with interior waterfall, Italian marble and a large balcony with one of the best views in the metroplex of the Dallas skyline.
The Global crew was at the top of their game: Their online and phone system structure was flawless, their hierarchy of agents was stable and the number of bettors ready to plunk down wagers seemed endless. While there were some headaches involved with moving money each month to Curacao for business expenses, the effort was worth it. Huge sums of cash kept flowing into the owners' pockets. By early 2011, when the Super Bowl arrived at Jerry Jones' new Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Global International processed more than $1 billion in wagers -- about a third of the amount bet on sports legally in Nevada that entire year. While other underground bookies were using the Internet to manage and expand their operations, investigators believed Global, with its thousands of bookies across the country, was one of the largest and most profitable, and that Super Bowl didn't hurt: When the Green Bay Packers finished off the Pittsburgh Steelers at Cowboys Stadium, Global's profits for football season alone hit $50 million.
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