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The man who shot up the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., USA, earlier this week and killed a security guard is involved in the online gambling business, PokerHelper.com can report in a world exclusive.
James W. von Brunn, an 88-year-old U.S. military veteran and white supremacist, was arrested after the Wednesday shooting, which killed Steven Johns and injured two others.
Von Brunn, of Annapolis, Maryland, USA, ran a website that contained, among other things, racist and anti-semitic ravings.
The website, called Holy Western Empire and available on the Internet at www.holywesternempire.org, had an advertisement on it for an online casino called Casino Tropez, which is available on the Internet at www.casinotropez.com.
According to the Casino Tropez website, the online casino offers various forms of online gambling, including video poker, roulette, keno, blackjack and slot machines. ? A notice on the casino website states: "Casino Tropez is a world-leading online casino with a long-established reputation for providing players with the ultimate online gambling experience. Casino Tropez prides itself with a software delivering over 100 state-of-the-art Las Vegas-style casino games."
The notice goes on to say: "Find out why we are awarded as the best Internet casino with better odds than any land-based casino. Casino Tropez is committed to each player's security and safety and absolute fair gaming practices, as well as providing round-the-clock professional customer support."
Elsewhere on the website it says that Casino Tropez is operated from the Phillipines and licensed in Antigua and Barbuda.
It is unclear exactly what type of business relationship von Brunn has with the online casino.
Normally, when a website carries ads for online casinos, online poker rooms or online sports betting operations, the website owner receives a fee from the online gambling entity for driving traffic to the entity.
Sometime it's a flat fee, such as x number of dollars a month or year.
Sometimes it's a set fee for each "click-through" or person who visits the gambling site by clicking on the ad.
And sometimes it's a kickback or commission-if an online casino, for example, picks up a new customer through another website's ad, that website's owner may earn or get kicked back a percentage of the customer's gambling losses at the casino.
The third type or arrangement is specifically illegal for Americans.
As of Thursday, von Brunn's website was taken offline, but what it looked like can still be seen at cache sites, such as www.archives.org.
A cache of the page on von Brunn's now-removed website where the ad was can still be viewed at http://web.archive.org/web/20071010131040/www.holywesternempire.org/page2.html
