First Look: Gambling 911 Reviews New Memoir By Ex-Con Jay Cohen of WSEX
Also known as WSEX, the sportsbook was started by three former stock market employees from the Pacific Exchange in San Francisco—Jay Cohen, Steve Schillinger and Haden Ware.
The trio were famously busted by the FBI in 1998 for illegal gambling, with Cohen returning to the U.S. to face the charges in court while the other two stayed behind.
Cohen was convicted and served a year and a half in Federal prison.
WSEX went out of business in 2013, stiffing all customers who had moneys in betting accounts.
Cohen fled to Eastern Europe and has kept a relatively low profile ever since.
But now he’s back, at least in the form of his new memoir, titled “Odds Man Out” and available from Post Hill Press publishers.
Gambling 911 has read the new Cohen book (available here) and offers this review:
Anyone reading Jay Cohen’s new memoir “Odds Man Out” who was expecting an apology from him for stiffing hundreds of WSEX customers out of millions of dollars when the sportsbook went under will be sadly disappointed.
Not only does he fail to apologize in the book, he also refuses to accept any responsibility for the sportsbook’s demise and blames his troubles on the Federal judge who presided over his trial, Thomas P. Griesa.
He also bashes Debevoise & Plimpton, the New York law firm that went after him on behalf of the four major pro sports leagues who didn’t like betting on their sports and who he says helped the Federal government with its prosecution of him.
He also has harsh criticism for the leagues themselves.
Cohen spends a few chapters in the book on his upbringing in a broken home on Long Island, his college career at the University of California at Berkeley and his stint at the Pacific Exchange.
He also spends a few chapters on his life after WSEX.
But the bulk of the tome is a tedious, play-by-play re-creation of his trial, mostly lifted from trial transcripts and frequently bashing the judge.
How does Cohen really feel about Griesa, who is long dead?
At various times in the book, Cohen takes his shots, calling the judge a “clown” and an “old coot” and a “bastard,” among other niceties.
In fact, much of the book is an outright screed against Griesa, who Cohen claims knew nothing about computers or the Internet and was a staunch opponent of gambling and who directed the jury to find him guilty even though it did not want to.
What ever happened to do not speak ill of the dead?
Cohen’s trial was widely covered by the media at the time.
His conviction was even the lead story that day on the daily “Paul Harvey News and Comment” broadcast which aired on 1,600 radio stations around the world.
So not much new about the trial was revealed in the book.
But there were some other revelations about other matters.
The key revelation by Cohen was that as WSEX was cratering in 2012, he moved to Eastern Europe and renounced his U.S. citizenship.
He recounts how he walked into the U.S. embassy in Montenegro and told them he wanted to give up his U.S. citizenship and how did he go about it?
Cohen then recounts the long bureaucratic process and red tape he faced before ultimately achieving his goal of kicking Uncle Sam to the curb and becoming a foreign citizen.
He writes that he gave up his U.S. citizenship and moved to an unnamed Eastern European country because he feared the U.S. government would come after him again with more gambling charges.
He had reason to fear.
After he got out of prison, he writes, he returned to Antigua and WSEX.
He also revealed that after he was released from Federal prison in Las Vegas and before he returned to the Caribbean, he was subject to random drug tests.
While home in San Francisco during that period, he writes, he once ate a poppy seed bagel which caused him to flunk a drug test because it showed up as positive for opiates.
Among other revelations:
* He owned a motorcycle and was in a crash.
* He owned a boat and was in two crashes.
* As a condition of his release from prison, he was required to get a job or go to school, so he went to flight school and got a pilot’s license.
* He bought his own airplane and does not report ever crashing it.
* He is now married and has a child.
* He keeps in touch with Haden Ware, his former partner.
(His other former partner, Steve Schillinger, committed suicide in 2013.)
Cohen also details his effort after his conviction to get the World Trade Organization (WTO) to force the United States to allow Internet gambling, under WTO rules.
The effort failed.
All in all, this book may be of interest to those in the sports betting community or even the gambling community at large.
But for the general public, it will be a snorefest.
Too much legal jargon, too much rehashing of an old case without new detail and too much blame the judge b.s.
Don’t look for the story to be turned into a movie any time soon.
By Tom Somach
Gambling 911 Chief Correspondent
