| What is Bloc BC Chairman Patrick Tyrone Roberts thinking? |
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| Written by Thomas Jensen | ||||||
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Thursday, 19 April 2007
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 I can barely remember a time when the online gambling industry did not talk about Bodog.com or Calvin Ayre. When Ayre rolled out Bodog.com, the entire industry laughed in his face. Back then, none of the old school bookies believed that Bodog would become the powerhouse it has grown into. Everyone dismissed it as a really bad marketing gimmick and Ayre was completely underestimated by all of his competitors.“What the hell is a Bodog anyways?” stated one old time bookmaker to me on one of my trips down to Costa Rica. Over time, the old timers began to wise up. I would visit several online sportsbooks on each of my four yearly trips down to CR and at one point or another either Calvin or Bodog would come up in conversation. This time, everyone wanted to know how to copy Ayre’s product. One company even presented me their new marketing/branding strategy and it had Bodog listed in their business plan as the company it hoped to emulate. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but it was getting out of hand. Because everyone knew I was close to Calvin, I was constantly asked about the inner workings of the Bodog Nation. I would laugh to myself how funny it was that the same people that were now trying to jack Ayre’s successful business model were the same ones laughing at Ayre two years earlier. As everyone already knows, Bodog blew up. But what is the true price of success, fame and notoriety? Stalkers. Just ask Tom Cruise, Hillary Duff and now, Calvin Ayre. The outspoken founder Bloc British Columbia Party Chairman (A Canadian Separatist Movement) and multiple conviction pot smuggler/drug dealer Patrick "Paddy" Tyrone Roberts of British Columbia, Canada has been stalking Canadian billionaire Calvin Ayre for years. It all stems back to a dispute between Calvin’s older sister and her ex-boyfriend. Paddy happens to be the brother of the ex-boyfriend. The couple had a brief relationship which resulted in Calvin’s sister realizing she was having twins after the breakup. Calvin filed a petition with the court in support of his sister in her custody battle. The end result, she was awarded full custody of the twins. The twins are now adults living on their own at an undisclosed University in the United States. This gives you some idea of how long this has been going on. Calvin’s efforts on behalf of his sister did not sit well with the Roberts family and is the focal point of rage Paddy Roberts has for him to this day. To put the craziness of this into perspective, Calvin has not seen or spoken to anyone in this guys family for over two decades. Besides flying airplanes, Patrick "Paddy" Roberts has a love of marijuana. It is widely rumored that this has been his sole source of income over his entire 60 or so years on this planet and many believe its how he supports himself to this day. His love of both has made him a lightning rod for the DEA and RCMP over the last several years. Roberts was arrested for drug violations and spent some hard time in a Dutch prison while in the midst of his own Canadian drug trial. It is alleged that the Canadian DA ratted Paddy Roberts out to the US Feds which caused the Dutch to hold him pending extradition by the United States. Roberts was somehow able to avoid extradition to the United States. Point-Spreads.com has spoken to several sources that have speculated Paddy might have given the US feds information about other competing drug cartels. On gambling, mixed martial arts and music forums Paddy Roberts goes by the posting handles Pauly Ponzi, ColdEyeMe, Shuswapper, Mortey, Brunhuber, Bill Roberts, BiffsNaked, Cued and several others. Patrick Roberts is notorious for talking to his multiple user names (himself), references himself in the third person and hijacking any thread about Bodog or Calvin. Paddy even tries to hijack thread topics not even remotely close to being associated with his nemesis such as threads about “Paddy Power closes to Canadians” or “The biggest beneficiary of the Kaplan arrest could be”. Though he is 60 year old confined to Canada for legal reasons, Point-Spreads.com has learned that Pat Roberts has gone so far as to threaten bodily harm to a gambling forum website owner for taking down his rants about Ayre. Roberts has also threaten others in various posting forums that post information pointing out the logical holes in his stories. Several charities that the Calvin Ayre Foundation support have been contacted in an attempt to block funds from Calvin being distributed to help worthy causes. Paddy even contacts all the suppliers and regulators that Bodog deals with to try to convince them to stop. International media outlets have fallen victim to Paddy’s efforts as well. Pushing his agenda, his name and past drug deals, Roberts has been successful in getting mentioned in articles about Bodog and Ayre. In an effort to infiltrate the online gambling industry, Paddy Roberts even set up the fake online poker news website called PokerBiz411.com and tried to get the Bodog Press team to schedule an interview with Ayre. Pretty hilarious considering the ill conceived website was already bashing Calvin with Paddy’s self written and multi-personality propaganda at the time of the interview request. Just like his many failed pot smuggling and drug dealing endeavors, Pat Roberts did not think his online gambling site’s plan through. Perhaps he was high on some of his product when he concocted such an idea to impersonate a reporter from the online gambling community. His sole and well stated objective is to bring down Calvin at any cost. He devotes his entire life to this now even as his audience is rapidly drying up. Paddy Roberts tells anyone that will listen that he is trying to protect the online gambling industry from a serial fraudster though there is no evidence of Ayre ever even being accused of the criminal offense of Fraud. He tells a wild two decade ago tale that a twenty something university student named Calvin was the mastermind behind a international drug cartel. In Paddy’s version of the story, he was just the pilot and since he is Irish, would not rat on his fellow co-conspirators to law enforcement. Ayre’s father Ken was charged as a minor co-conspirator and served a few months. Calvin, however, was never charged with a crime of any sort ever and to this day has no criminal record in any country. Even though Patrick Roberts brags about not turning Calvin in for masterminding the international drug cartel (he himself is the sole source of these allegations in every single Ayre interview that he now references to give them more legitimacy), the Bloc BC Chairman has contacted law enforcement on several occasions. He has posted on several online gambling forums that he has reached out to Canadian, American, Antiguan & Costa Rican law enforcement agencies against Ayre and in many posts on his own blogs he rails against the evils of online gaming in general. In some copies of his correspondance with US authorities that have been obtained by Point-Spreads.com, he is clearly advocating that he wants the entire industry stopped. He is basically willing to wipe out everyone just to take a jealous shot at his object of fetish, Ayre. Some of Calvin’s critics from within the online gambling industry have stated that Ayre’s comments on the cover of the best selling Forbes Billionaire Issue is the reason the United States is cracking down on the industry. The same critics have even gone on to say that his comments put a “bull’s eye on his back”. Neither could be further from the truth in my opinion. Ayre did not know he was going to be on the cover until three days before the Forbes issue came out and did not make the "Catch Me If You Can" title statement. Forbes editors did so to sell Forbes magazines. They were in fact very successful with this as it was the largest selling issue of its time. But there is more to this. First nothing that Ayre said was not already known from the many IPOs and quarterly statement filings of the companies that went public. We all remember the US $10 Billion dollar Party Gaming IPO. As proof of this all documents in the BoS case only seriously reference other public companies and Arizona Senator Jon Kyl was recently bragging in a letter to President George W. Bush about the $7 Billion in market capitalization he wiped out from public companies with his misnamed anti online gaming law . It’s really more of an Anti-Gaming Financing law as oppose to Anti-Internet Gambling and UIGEA clearly states that it does not change the law as relates to gambling in the US. Nothing has ever been mentioned of any of the private companies. Ayre himself was on the record for years predicting this would be the attack method if the US Government wanted high media return for its efforts, media is something Ayre clearly knows a thing or two about. Second, credit bookies are the people that the United States government has traditionally been after as well as any sportsbook that has some sort of connection to the mafia. BetonSports PLC for example rented office space to several sportsbook operations that were allegedly run by factions of the New York Mafia and it is widely believed BoS was still in the credit business even after they went public. It is rumored among industry insiders that the directors found this out after BetonSports CEO David Carruthers was arrested and that this was one of the reasons why they closed the company so fast. Thirdly, the BetonSports investigation started in 2002, well before the 2006 Forbes article came out. Bad management decisions brought down BoS after the DoJ arrested David Carruthers. Management made a number of decisions that caused them to be in the spot they were in. One of which was that they clearly did not have the players money available in cash when they were chose to close the doors and were therefore over leveraged. Back in January, Point-Spreads.com reported that BoS had a $30 million dollar line of credit pulled after the a US federal magistrate ordered a temporary restraining order against the company. It can be argued that BetonSports would still be functioning today if the company was not publicly traded. You cannot place blame on Antigua & Barbuda’s licensing procedures for the BetonSports collapse either. Antigua clearly mandates that their licensees should be adequately capitalized and specifically state that they should not be in the credit side of the sports betting business. If one needs an example of failures in regulated industries, they should do some research on the highly regulated United States banking industry's Savings & Loan scandal in the 1980’s. Regulations are only as good as the companies management is at actually complying with them. In both examples one in the US and one in Antigua, bad management decisions, likely based on greed were the real culprits. Anyone who tries to attack Antigua for BoS's bad decision making is doing the entire industry a huge disservice and this in particular applies to any self proclaimed industry pundits who definitely should know better. Why should I care about the fact that some rich billionaire playboy has a stalker? Normally, I would not care at all however, Patrick Tyrone Roberts (Paddy) is an extremely unscrupulous and highly vocal advocate against the entire online gambling industry. At a time when our community should be banding together, we have someone with a non-gaming agenda attacking one of the most successful pioneers of the industry and the country of Antigua & Barbuda for licensing him. This same rogue is getting some support for this from those who have a huge benefit in both Bodog and Antigua staying strong. This makes no sense and is just wrong. Whether his competitors like it or not, Calvin has been proven right time after time in the online gambling industry and has a reputation for integrity in his dealings with suppliers and customers dating back over a decade. I have never heard any complaints from any one in this area. I also think he is a fine ambassador for our industry I might add. While other operators choose to hide in the shadows in fear of persecution, Ayre has made it a mission to put a legitimate and articulate face to the industry and take it out of the shadows. Not just for himself, but all of his competitors. Anyone jumping on crazy Paddy Robert's bandwagon just to feel good in the short run by taking a shot at Ayre or Bodog is in my opinion just shooting themselves in the foot. Patrick Tyrone Roberts needs to stay out of the online gaming industry. He has no reason to be in it other than to cause further harm to the gaming operators worldwide and our communal effort for legitimacy and regulation. It should be noted that Bodog has actually significantly pulled out of the US market at this time and is now focused on Europe and Asia and its nongaming entertainment divisions.                         |
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 13 July 2007 ) | ||||||