To make a long story short, a local bookie here in SC killed his wife and friend a little over a year ago to collect his wife's life insurance. He attempted to stage it as it if his friend killed his wife and he then killed his friend in self defense, but he was convicted of murdering both. It will be on an episode 48 hours in the future. You can google Brett Parker Trial if you are interested in it. But at the end of this article it talks about a federal gambling stamp. Any body heard of these?
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[h=2]BRETT PARKER TRIAL[/h][h=1]Brett Parker trial fallout: The anatomy of a sports betting operation[/h]Published: June 16, 2013 Updated 3 hours ago
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By NOELLE PHILLIPS — nophillips@thestate.com
RICHLAND COUNTY, SC — In the early days of the double-murder investigation against Brett Parker last year, someone anonymously dropped off a list of area sports bookies at the Irmo Police Department.
The list led US Secret Service agents to knock on the doors of bookies across Richland and Lexington counties.
Pat Pruitt, a Secret Service agent in Columbia, testified during Parker’s murder trial last month that bookies quickly began destroying evidence of their operations. He arrived at one bookie’s house to find him deleting bets from his computer’s hard drive, he said.
Until Parker killed his wife, Tammy Jo Parker, and his gambling clerk, Bryan Capnerhurst, on April 13, 2012, sports betting operated in the shadows in the Midlands.
Parker’s arrest broke open the doors to the secretive and illegal world of sports gambling, as Parker and other area bookies were forced to testify in court about their operations. It also offered a peek into how Parker, who was convicted on both counts of murder, ran his lucrative business.
Parker kept an upstairs office in his Ascot Estates home near Irmo, where he and Capnerhurst took wagers over two toll-free phone lines. Those phones rang off the hook on football and basketball game days as Parker’s clients placed bets worth hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars.
Police are not so naive as to think sports gambling doesn’t happen. But it was never a priority, in part because few in the public ever complain about it, said Maj. Stan Smith, the lead investigator on the Parker case for the Richland County Sheriff’s Department.
Bookies do not admit their professions. And they only accept bets from clients who have been referred by other customers. Gamblers who lose money don’t report their bookies to police. After all, it was their decision to gamble. Plus, it’s illegal to place or accept bets under state law, so anyone reporting their own participation puts himself or herself at risk.
“If you lost, you lost at your own risk,” Smith said. “We never had anyone tell us they were cheated.”
Since the killings, federal and state authorities have prosecuted dozens of gamblers. And three bookies have been convicted on federal gambling charges.
Scheduled to go to court next, in July, are Parker, his father, Jack Parker, and a third alleged bookie, Douglas E. Taylor. A pre-trial hearing in the case is scheduled for Tuesday.
A family affair
Brett Parker learned the bookie business from his father, Jack Parker, according to court testimony.
Jack Parker had been in the video poker business before it was outlawed in South Carolina. He then made his living working as a bookie, Lanny Gunter, a Lexington County bookie serving time in federal prison on a gambling charge, told the court.
Brett Parker admitted he was a bookie on the day of the shootings. But it didn’t take long for investigators to learn that his father also was in the business, Smith said. “The fact that Jack Parker was a bookie was the best non-kept secret around.”
In 2006, Brett Parker split from his father’s operation. He borrowed $5,000 from Gunter to get started and hired Capnerhurst to work as his partner.
Capnerhurst, a former college baseball player, had been a gambler in his younger days. He knew the Parkers because he had placed bets with them over the years. But he had quit gambling after his daughter, Hagan, now 17, was born, according to testimony from his wife, Cindy Capnerhurst.
Mostly, Capnerhurst answered the phones in Parker’s home office and recorded which customers were placing bets on which games and how much they were wagering. He and Parker also accepted bets through text messages.
James Morgan, a Greensboro, N.C., man who was one of Capnerhurst’s closest friends, said Capnerhurst did not handle the money.
“He was a little bit better than a clerk at the parimutuel window at the race track,” Morgan said. “He took the bets, but he didn’t take the money.”
During football season, Capnerhurst went to the Parker home around 5:30 p.m. every Thursday to take bets on college games that typically are broadcast on ESPN. They rarely took bets on Fridays because there are no college games then, Parker said during his trial.
On Saturdays, Capnerhurst would arrive around 10:30 a.m. and work until about 8 p.m., when games on the West Coast got under way.
On Sundays, Capnerhurst would be at Parker’s house from 10:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. to answer calls from gamblers who wanted to bet on NFL football games, Parker said.
Football a local favorite
Football season is the busiest time for Midlands bookies. They also do well during the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament.
Parker also took bets on Major League Baseball, which is less popular for gamblers.
In sports betting, gamblers don’t just bet on a team because they think that team can win. The bettors must take into consideration odds that usually are set by bookmakers in Las Vegas. Parker and Capnerhurst set their lines, which is the amount of points one team must win by, after studying Las Vegas websites and talking to other sports bookies in town.
The lines assure bookies that “the house” will usually win.
“The only ones that win in gambling are the bookies,” said Ben Staples, a Lexington businessman and friend of Tammy Parker after he testified during the trial about her life insurance policy and 401(k) plan and acknowledged that she knew about the gambling operation.
Bookies meet their clients through word-of-mouth and through their jobs. Capnerhurst and Parker each had co-workers who testified that they had placed bets with them. No one knows exactly how many clients bet with Parker. At one point, Parker showed investigators a list of 15 to 20 regular clients, Smith said.
During the murder investigation, deputies had the list the tipster had given them. But Smith said he and his detectives also called all of the contacts in Parker’s cell phone, which led to conversations with several clients. All were honest about their betting, Smith said.
One man told them he bet hundreds of dollars every week and blamed gambling for ruining his family, Smith said.
“He was sick that two people had been killed,” Smith said.
Another man told investigators that he was retired and enjoyed making $15 or $20 bets on games. “He did it for fun,” Smith said.
Some clients only bet on specific sports.
“They would bet on college football and wouldn’t bet on pro,” Smith said. “I think it was whether a person was a fan of it or not.”
Making payments
After bets were settled, Capnerhurst would take the paper betting forms to his house, in the more rural Batesburg-Leesville, and burn them in a trash pile. Evidence of those burned receipts was found by Secret Service agents.
Capnerhurst earned a percentage of the operation’s proceeds, although no one ever said in open court what that percentage was. At the time of the shootings, in April 2012, Parker owed Capnerhurst $21,300. Of that, $15,300 was from the 2011 football season and the 2012 basketball season. The remaining $6,000 was outstanding from a previous season, according to court testimony.
Capnerhurst’s friends and family said he was expecting to receive that money, possibly in $10 and $20 bills, when he went to Parker’s house on the day of the killings.
While Brett Parker and Capnerhurst continued to record bets on paper, other Midlands bookies had moved into the online gambling world.
Gunter started using an online service about three years ago.
Gunter and his right-hand man, Harry Benenhaley, would assign two-digit codes and passwords to their clients, who would log onto a website to place bets. People could not open an account without their recommendation.
The website, betcc.com, continues to operate. But a man who answered the phone recently would not answer questions until he was provided a password. And when the man learned he was speaking to a newspaper reporter, he hung up. Investigators said the online betting site most likely is operated overseas.
Gunter and Benenhaley used a liquor store on St. Andrews Road to collect and pay out bets. Clients would drop off and pick up envelopes of cash with only their two-digit codes written on them.
Big bucks for bookies
Those who investigated the sports-betting businesses have said it is almost impossible to figure out exactly how much money the bookies were earning.
“It was virtually impossible to come up with a paper trail,” Smith said.
But it is certain bookies make big money.
To convict someone in a federal gambling case, prosecutors must prove the sports book was earning at least $2,000 on any given day of operation. If college football’s regular season lasts 14 weeks, that would be at least $27,000 in one season.
During the investigation, Parker said he had two clients that, combined, owed him more than $20,000 in lost basketball bets. He described that money as “floating,” meaning he did not have it but considered it part of his total assets.
And Parker’s own gambling debt is an example of how much people can blow on gambling.
He owed $176,000 to Gunter in lost bets. Already, Parker had paid Gunter somewhere between $80,000 to $100,000 and was making payments of $5,000 to $10,000 every couple of weeks, according to testimony.
Even if Parker never fully repaid the $176,000, Gunter still was bringing in thousands a month from a single client. Multiply that by dozens of clients, and the dollars add up.
When it comes to collecting debts, area bookies don’t have hit men who break knees and fingers until someone pays.
Instead, they spread the word among their fellow bookmakers that someone is not paying. That person is then blackballed by the community, Smith said, denied what they want most: to place a bet.
Bookies rarely expected someone with a large debt to pay it all back, Staples said. Parker was allowed to continue betting with Gunter because he was making regular payments.
“It’s money the bookie never really had in the first place,” Staples said. “As long as you’re getting some money, who cares? It’s funny money.”
Games go on
Smith and others involved in the case believe sports betting in the Midlands took a hit in the early days of the investigation.
The shootings happened after the NCAA basketball tournament, so it already would have been a slow period for most.
Another lucrative football season has come and gone since Tammy Jo Parker and Bryan Capnerhurst were killed. And there’s too much money involved for bookies to pass up.
“I bet for some of these guys that weren’t brought in and questioned, it’s business as usual,” Smith said. “They probably laid low for awhile. They’re probably back in business. It’s difficult to know for sure.”
Sheriff Leon Lott said there will always be plenty of gamblers willing to take a chance.
Parker himself admitted to being addicted to gambling.
A few acquaintances who attended the trial said Parker and some friends would bet $1,000 a hole while playing a round of golf. If three men played, the $54,000 being wagered was more than the average South Carolinian earns in a year.
Lott said he had heard the same stories about those high-stakes golf games.
“This is an addiction,” he said. “These people will bet on anything. They’ll bet if the sun is going to shine tomorrow.”
Parker’s tools of the trade
• 2 phone lines so clients could call in bets
• Cell phones, for bets sent via text
• A safe, for keeping cash
• A clerk for busy Saturdays and Sundays
• Computers, to check Las Vegas websites that help set his “lines”
• A place to burn receipts, since the operation wasn’t computerized
What is a federal gambling stamp?
When police arrived at Brett Parker’s home on the afternoon of April 13, 2012, Parker quickly admitted that he was a bookie and that he had a federal gambling stamp.
For many people, including Richland County sheriff’s investigators, it was the first time they had heard of the stamp.
The Federal Wagering Occupational Tax Stamp is issued by the IRS to people who accept wagers on sports and other competitive events. The stamp costs $500 per year, and those who have it also are required to pay a 2 percent tax on every bet placed with their operations.
The IRS issues the stamp to bookies whether or not gambling is legal in their home states. However, federal law says that buying the stamp does not protect sports books from violations of federal and state gambling laws.
Ben Staples, a Lexington County accountant who testified about the Parker family’s finances, said the IRS issues the stamp because it wants to collect taxes from all possible sources.
“Regardless of whether it’s legal or not, they want a piece of the pie,” Staples said.
Bookies purchase the stamp to keep the appearance of running a legal gambling operation.
“They do it because in their minds if they keep the IRS happy, everybody else will look away,” Staples said.
During testimony in the trial, Parker explained his views on purchasing the stamp.
“I knew it was illegal in the state but if the federal government allows you to do it as long as you pay your taxes I think that kind of overrides it,” he said.
More
Click here for photos and stories about the murders of Bryan Capnerhurst and Tammy Parker, and Brett Parker’s trial
Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2013/06/16/2821942/brett-parker-trial-fallout-the.html#storylink=cpy
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[h=2]BRETT PARKER TRIAL[/h][h=1]Brett Parker trial fallout: The anatomy of a sports betting operation[/h]Published: June 16, 2013 Updated 3 hours ago
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By NOELLE PHILLIPS — nophillips@thestate.com
RICHLAND COUNTY, SC — In the early days of the double-murder investigation against Brett Parker last year, someone anonymously dropped off a list of area sports bookies at the Irmo Police Department.
The list led US Secret Service agents to knock on the doors of bookies across Richland and Lexington counties.
Pat Pruitt, a Secret Service agent in Columbia, testified during Parker’s murder trial last month that bookies quickly began destroying evidence of their operations. He arrived at one bookie’s house to find him deleting bets from his computer’s hard drive, he said.
Until Parker killed his wife, Tammy Jo Parker, and his gambling clerk, Bryan Capnerhurst, on April 13, 2012, sports betting operated in the shadows in the Midlands.
Parker’s arrest broke open the doors to the secretive and illegal world of sports gambling, as Parker and other area bookies were forced to testify in court about their operations. It also offered a peek into how Parker, who was convicted on both counts of murder, ran his lucrative business.
Parker kept an upstairs office in his Ascot Estates home near Irmo, where he and Capnerhurst took wagers over two toll-free phone lines. Those phones rang off the hook on football and basketball game days as Parker’s clients placed bets worth hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars.
Police are not so naive as to think sports gambling doesn’t happen. But it was never a priority, in part because few in the public ever complain about it, said Maj. Stan Smith, the lead investigator on the Parker case for the Richland County Sheriff’s Department.
Bookies do not admit their professions. And they only accept bets from clients who have been referred by other customers. Gamblers who lose money don’t report their bookies to police. After all, it was their decision to gamble. Plus, it’s illegal to place or accept bets under state law, so anyone reporting their own participation puts himself or herself at risk.
“If you lost, you lost at your own risk,” Smith said. “We never had anyone tell us they were cheated.”
Since the killings, federal and state authorities have prosecuted dozens of gamblers. And three bookies have been convicted on federal gambling charges.
Scheduled to go to court next, in July, are Parker, his father, Jack Parker, and a third alleged bookie, Douglas E. Taylor. A pre-trial hearing in the case is scheduled for Tuesday.
A family affair
Brett Parker learned the bookie business from his father, Jack Parker, according to court testimony.
Jack Parker had been in the video poker business before it was outlawed in South Carolina. He then made his living working as a bookie, Lanny Gunter, a Lexington County bookie serving time in federal prison on a gambling charge, told the court.
Brett Parker admitted he was a bookie on the day of the shootings. But it didn’t take long for investigators to learn that his father also was in the business, Smith said. “The fact that Jack Parker was a bookie was the best non-kept secret around.”
In 2006, Brett Parker split from his father’s operation. He borrowed $5,000 from Gunter to get started and hired Capnerhurst to work as his partner.
Capnerhurst, a former college baseball player, had been a gambler in his younger days. He knew the Parkers because he had placed bets with them over the years. But he had quit gambling after his daughter, Hagan, now 17, was born, according to testimony from his wife, Cindy Capnerhurst.
Mostly, Capnerhurst answered the phones in Parker’s home office and recorded which customers were placing bets on which games and how much they were wagering. He and Parker also accepted bets through text messages.
James Morgan, a Greensboro, N.C., man who was one of Capnerhurst’s closest friends, said Capnerhurst did not handle the money.
“He was a little bit better than a clerk at the parimutuel window at the race track,” Morgan said. “He took the bets, but he didn’t take the money.”
During football season, Capnerhurst went to the Parker home around 5:30 p.m. every Thursday to take bets on college games that typically are broadcast on ESPN. They rarely took bets on Fridays because there are no college games then, Parker said during his trial.
On Saturdays, Capnerhurst would arrive around 10:30 a.m. and work until about 8 p.m., when games on the West Coast got under way.
On Sundays, Capnerhurst would be at Parker’s house from 10:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. to answer calls from gamblers who wanted to bet on NFL football games, Parker said.
Football a local favorite
Football season is the busiest time for Midlands bookies. They also do well during the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament.
Parker also took bets on Major League Baseball, which is less popular for gamblers.
In sports betting, gamblers don’t just bet on a team because they think that team can win. The bettors must take into consideration odds that usually are set by bookmakers in Las Vegas. Parker and Capnerhurst set their lines, which is the amount of points one team must win by, after studying Las Vegas websites and talking to other sports bookies in town.
The lines assure bookies that “the house” will usually win.
“The only ones that win in gambling are the bookies,” said Ben Staples, a Lexington businessman and friend of Tammy Parker after he testified during the trial about her life insurance policy and 401(k) plan and acknowledged that she knew about the gambling operation.
Bookies meet their clients through word-of-mouth and through their jobs. Capnerhurst and Parker each had co-workers who testified that they had placed bets with them. No one knows exactly how many clients bet with Parker. At one point, Parker showed investigators a list of 15 to 20 regular clients, Smith said.
During the murder investigation, deputies had the list the tipster had given them. But Smith said he and his detectives also called all of the contacts in Parker’s cell phone, which led to conversations with several clients. All were honest about their betting, Smith said.
One man told them he bet hundreds of dollars every week and blamed gambling for ruining his family, Smith said.
“He was sick that two people had been killed,” Smith said.
Another man told investigators that he was retired and enjoyed making $15 or $20 bets on games. “He did it for fun,” Smith said.
Some clients only bet on specific sports.
“They would bet on college football and wouldn’t bet on pro,” Smith said. “I think it was whether a person was a fan of it or not.”
Making payments
After bets were settled, Capnerhurst would take the paper betting forms to his house, in the more rural Batesburg-Leesville, and burn them in a trash pile. Evidence of those burned receipts was found by Secret Service agents.
Capnerhurst earned a percentage of the operation’s proceeds, although no one ever said in open court what that percentage was. At the time of the shootings, in April 2012, Parker owed Capnerhurst $21,300. Of that, $15,300 was from the 2011 football season and the 2012 basketball season. The remaining $6,000 was outstanding from a previous season, according to court testimony.
Capnerhurst’s friends and family said he was expecting to receive that money, possibly in $10 and $20 bills, when he went to Parker’s house on the day of the killings.
While Brett Parker and Capnerhurst continued to record bets on paper, other Midlands bookies had moved into the online gambling world.
Gunter started using an online service about three years ago.
Gunter and his right-hand man, Harry Benenhaley, would assign two-digit codes and passwords to their clients, who would log onto a website to place bets. People could not open an account without their recommendation.
The website, betcc.com, continues to operate. But a man who answered the phone recently would not answer questions until he was provided a password. And when the man learned he was speaking to a newspaper reporter, he hung up. Investigators said the online betting site most likely is operated overseas.
Gunter and Benenhaley used a liquor store on St. Andrews Road to collect and pay out bets. Clients would drop off and pick up envelopes of cash with only their two-digit codes written on them.
Big bucks for bookies
Those who investigated the sports-betting businesses have said it is almost impossible to figure out exactly how much money the bookies were earning.
“It was virtually impossible to come up with a paper trail,” Smith said.
But it is certain bookies make big money.
To convict someone in a federal gambling case, prosecutors must prove the sports book was earning at least $2,000 on any given day of operation. If college football’s regular season lasts 14 weeks, that would be at least $27,000 in one season.
During the investigation, Parker said he had two clients that, combined, owed him more than $20,000 in lost basketball bets. He described that money as “floating,” meaning he did not have it but considered it part of his total assets.
And Parker’s own gambling debt is an example of how much people can blow on gambling.
He owed $176,000 to Gunter in lost bets. Already, Parker had paid Gunter somewhere between $80,000 to $100,000 and was making payments of $5,000 to $10,000 every couple of weeks, according to testimony.
Even if Parker never fully repaid the $176,000, Gunter still was bringing in thousands a month from a single client. Multiply that by dozens of clients, and the dollars add up.
When it comes to collecting debts, area bookies don’t have hit men who break knees and fingers until someone pays.
Instead, they spread the word among their fellow bookmakers that someone is not paying. That person is then blackballed by the community, Smith said, denied what they want most: to place a bet.
Bookies rarely expected someone with a large debt to pay it all back, Staples said. Parker was allowed to continue betting with Gunter because he was making regular payments.
“It’s money the bookie never really had in the first place,” Staples said. “As long as you’re getting some money, who cares? It’s funny money.”
Games go on
Smith and others involved in the case believe sports betting in the Midlands took a hit in the early days of the investigation.
The shootings happened after the NCAA basketball tournament, so it already would have been a slow period for most.
Another lucrative football season has come and gone since Tammy Jo Parker and Bryan Capnerhurst were killed. And there’s too much money involved for bookies to pass up.
“I bet for some of these guys that weren’t brought in and questioned, it’s business as usual,” Smith said. “They probably laid low for awhile. They’re probably back in business. It’s difficult to know for sure.”
Sheriff Leon Lott said there will always be plenty of gamblers willing to take a chance.
Parker himself admitted to being addicted to gambling.
A few acquaintances who attended the trial said Parker and some friends would bet $1,000 a hole while playing a round of golf. If three men played, the $54,000 being wagered was more than the average South Carolinian earns in a year.
Lott said he had heard the same stories about those high-stakes golf games.
“This is an addiction,” he said. “These people will bet on anything. They’ll bet if the sun is going to shine tomorrow.”
Parker’s tools of the trade
• 2 phone lines so clients could call in bets
• Cell phones, for bets sent via text
• A safe, for keeping cash
• A clerk for busy Saturdays and Sundays
• Computers, to check Las Vegas websites that help set his “lines”
• A place to burn receipts, since the operation wasn’t computerized
What is a federal gambling stamp?
When police arrived at Brett Parker’s home on the afternoon of April 13, 2012, Parker quickly admitted that he was a bookie and that he had a federal gambling stamp.
For many people, including Richland County sheriff’s investigators, it was the first time they had heard of the stamp.
The Federal Wagering Occupational Tax Stamp is issued by the IRS to people who accept wagers on sports and other competitive events. The stamp costs $500 per year, and those who have it also are required to pay a 2 percent tax on every bet placed with their operations.
The IRS issues the stamp to bookies whether or not gambling is legal in their home states. However, federal law says that buying the stamp does not protect sports books from violations of federal and state gambling laws.
Ben Staples, a Lexington County accountant who testified about the Parker family’s finances, said the IRS issues the stamp because it wants to collect taxes from all possible sources.
“Regardless of whether it’s legal or not, they want a piece of the pie,” Staples said.
Bookies purchase the stamp to keep the appearance of running a legal gambling operation.
“They do it because in their minds if they keep the IRS happy, everybody else will look away,” Staples said.
During testimony in the trial, Parker explained his views on purchasing the stamp.
“I knew it was illegal in the state but if the federal government allows you to do it as long as you pay your taxes I think that kind of overrides it,” he said.
More
Click here for photos and stories about the murders of Bryan Capnerhurst and Tammy Parker, and Brett Parker’s trial
Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2013/06/16/2821942/brett-parker-trial-fallout-the.html#storylink=cpy
