Adam Meyer, once the self-proclaimed ‘sports consultant to your stars,’ happens to be sentenced to eight years in prison for costs including fraud, extortion, racketeering and brandishing a firearm.

Meyer’s case ended up being bizarre. Here was a high-rolling handicapper, who once boasted that his customer list ‘reads like the front web page of Variety,’ accused of impersonating a shadowy fictional gangster of his very own innovation to be able to perpetrate a $45 million fraud that ended in the violent assault of a Wisconsin liquor magnate.

In his defense, Meyer stated insanity, drug addiction, and which he had been an undercover agent. Also more bizarrely, the claim that is latter actually be true.

Bogus Bookies

Meyer had been the CEO of betting consultancy site Real Money Sports, which charged clients up to $250,000 for his recreations betting advice.

A slick, media-savvy operator, he made regular TV and radio appearances as a tipster, billing himself as the person who had won over $1 million betting on the Green Bay Packers at Super Bowl XLV.

He told their clients he had a highly improbable 64.8 % edge over the bookies.

One particular client had been Gary Sadoff, 64, the aforementioned liquor magnate; the master, in reality, of the Badger Liquor Company of Wisconsin, the biggest booze distributor in the state.

In line with the court documents, Sadoff started tips that are buying Meyer back in 2007 therefore the pair were friends. As well as providing tips, Meyer would also hook his clients up with offshore bookmakers, who would accept their very large bets, no concerns asked.

Meyer claimed, falsely, he had no relationship that is commercial these bookmakers, whereas, in reality, client money had been often wired to reports he actually controlled.

Wong Number

When Sadoff made a decision to quit their gambling that is expensive habit Meyer concocted a tale. Meyer’s life is at risk him liable for Meyer’s debt, and was coming for him because he owed money to a fictional bookie gangster named Kent Wong, and because Wong believed that Sadoff and Meyer were partners, Wong held.

Meyer would even telephone Sadoff, pretending to to be Wong, complete with a Chinese accent, threatening and demanding money from the businessman.

When Sadoff declined to send more income, the situation escalated. Meyer plus an associate flew to Wisconsin and threatened Sadoff with a gun, until he was coerced into providing an additional $9.8 million.

Meyer, and their associate, Ray Batista, were arrested shortly after the incident, in December 2014, as well as the second sentenced to four years in January.

Insanity Plea

Meyer’s attorneys advertised their client was addicted to drugs and had mental health dilemmas in which ‘a different identity, or personality, sporadically surfaces to Meyer’s detriment.’

Meyer additionally reported the ‘public authority’ protection, and that his crimes were committed at the behest of several US government and police agencies for whom he was an agent that is undercover. He said he was utilized by authorities to root out unlawful sports operations that are betting.

The appropriate authorities deny this, but documents unsealed in June, and kept secret through the public on the behest of Meyer’s lawyers, suggest, at the least in a conspiracy-theory type of way, that there could be a modicum of truth into the claim.

Working for the Feds?

In 2007, the year he advertised he started employed by the feds as an undercover agent, Meyer was arrested for scamming $6 million from casinos in Nevada and Connecticut. Considering he already had a conviction that is criminal this time, he had been staring down the nose at a probably nine years imprisonment. Instead, he received two years probation.

‘That’s perhaps not a big departure [from sentencing guidelines],’ Jeffrey Cramer, a previous federal prosecutor in ny and Chicago, told the Milwaulkee Journal-Sentinal with the facts after it presented him. That is huge. That’s absolutely huge.’

Did the activities consultant to the stars cut a deal with the feds in return for leniency? Suddenly Meyer’s assertion that the FBI was helped by him seize $750 million from offshore bookies doesn’t seem quite so angry after all.