Based on a comparison of Mr. Beckley’s plea agreement with Mr. Franzen’s plea agreement, I’m even more convinced that Mr. Beckley is not a co-operator.

First, let’s look at Mr. Franzen’s agreement. It contains the caveat that the sentence to be imposed is within the sole discretion of the US District Court and is careful to note that the USAO is not making any promise or representation about the sentence that Mr. Franzen will receive. (Mr. Beckley’s agreement has substantially the same language.) However, read the third paragraph on page 2 of Mr. Franzen’s plea. This paragraph sets out that Mr. Franzen is to do a number of things for the US Attorney further to this transaction. For example, he is to “truthfully and completely disclose all information with respect to the activities of himself and others concerning all matters about which this Office inquires of him, which information can be used for any purpose.” He is to attend all meetings at which the USAO requests his presence. Mr. Franzen is to bring to the Department of Justice’s attention “all crimes which he has committed, and all administrative, civil, or criminal proceedings, investigations, or prosecutions in which he has been or is a subject, target, party, or witness.” He is to provide truthful testimony at any trial—including, presumably, at the trial of John Campos and Chad Elie next March, if it goes forward—and at “any other court proceeding with respect to any matters about which this Office may request his testimony.” The essence of what this paragraph is after is in (b): that Mr. Franzen is to “cooperate fully with this Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and any other law enforcement agency designated by this Office.” In return for his co-operation, and notwithstanding that his sentence will be up to the court, the USAO will (at page 3) inform the probation department and the court, among other things, of Mr. Franzen’s plea agreement and “the nature and extent of Mr. Franzen’s co-operation with this Office.” This is why Mr. Franzen doesn’t yet have a sentencing date. The government is waiting to see how he performs as a co-operator first; that will be one of the factors affecting his sentence.

Now read Mr. Beckley’s plea agreement. It sets out the counts to which he pleaded guilty, stipulates that he agrees to forfeit $300,000, and establishes a schedule related to that forfeiture. It also contains stipulations related to the sentencing guidelines and (as discussed above) it leaves any term of incarceration up to the court. (The parties also agreed that Mr. Beckley’s stipulated guidelines sentencing range is 12-18 months.) But none of the extensive co-operating language in Mr. Franzen’s deal is in Mr. Beckley’s plea agreement. According to Mr. Beckley’s plea, he doesn’t need to testify before a grand jury or at trial or at any other proceedings. He need not give information about any other party in response to any queries put to him by the USAO. He doesn’t have to attend any meeting at the USAO’s request. In short, he doesn’t have to co-operate with the USAO, the FBI, or any other law enforcement agency under the terms of his deal.

It looks like all Brent Beckley has to do is show up to be sentenced on April 19, 2012.

Let’s see what happens in the spring. But based on the publicly-available documents, it appears that Mr. Beckley does not need to do anything to help the government in order to move ahead with his sentencing, and I’m even more confident that he’s not a co-operator. He also presently appears to have more of a final date for getting out of this case than any other Black Friday defendant.

And while in some ways this graph looks like the inverse of Party Gaming’s graph in ’06 come the UIGEA and their subsequent, calculated US pullout. But zoom out and you’ll see today’s rise for Party (now officially Bwin.Party Digital Entertainment) is merely a token blip in their long-term efforts to get back atop the online gaming world.

Click here to see for yourself.

The “bull case” they make, interestingly, is a scenario where both Stars and Tilt end up in full collapse.

Rep. John Campbell (R-CA) intends to take the lead in a Republican-controlled US House of Representatives on the internet gambling debate by bringing forth legislation similar to what Barney Frank (D-MA) has been pushing for years, according to Gambling Compliance.

Frank has reportedly signed on as the lead Democratic co-sponsor.

You may remember Campbell from his efforts to remove sports betting from last year’s Frank bill.

Campbell will be on hand in San Francisco in May as a keynote speaker for GIGSE 2011. The Global iGaming Summit and Expo was once one of the pre-eminent “annual” gaming conferences in the world, but went on a two-year hiatus after a move from Montreal to Malta. Returning to North America, and specifically US soil (California, no less!) seems to be a big deal for the conference and the gambling industry overall.

GIGSE says it has no political agenda — though its 2011 lineup of speakers suggests licensed and regulated online gaming in the US really is a matter of when not if. In addition to Campbell and likely supporters of his bills such as the PPA, conference speakers will include representatives from the Department of Justice, California Indians, other Native American gaming interests, Caesars Interactive, iMEGA, the Kentucky horse racing industry, various lottery interests, Jeffery Pollack’s Federated Sports+Gaming … and several others who have long found themselves at opposing ends of mutual interests.

Sounds to me like this could be the biggest think-tank confab of people shaping our lives ever. Or, at a minimum, if they can’t all put their heads together to reach the same overall endgame, it could turn into a massively awesome battle royale that could include the throwing of chairs.

The Las Vegas Sun reports that the name change is now official, citing chairman and president Gary Loveman as the source. The Sun gives no context, however, as to why this time he really means it, other than to provide a rather generic summary:

“The new name can open new opportunities for the company in the future.”

Hmm, a name leading to new opportunities? Harrah’s has been talking about the name change for more than a year — pretty much ever since they opened up their non-poker online gambling opportunities at CaesarsCasino and CaesarsBingo dots-com — but have never gone through with it, at least in any marketable or taxable way. But sure enough, a form filed with the SEC yesterday confirms that Harrah’s Entertainment Incorporated would now, finally and officially, like to be called Caesars Entertainment Corporation. At least in the eyes of Uncle Sam.

And while the new monicker may lend itself to illustrations of Loveman in a toga eating grapes and future mockery should Harrah’s-cum-Caesars ever wanna deny its imperialistic nature … some of us can’t help but wonder if there isn’t even more to it than that. Why now for such a bold move? Surely it will cost a few million bucks to get everyone new business cards and change the labels on bottled water … so what relation, if any, might it have to seemingly accelerated online gambling pursuits and/or, most recently, a (suddenly) delayed IPO — both specifically addressed in the same document as the name change.

Whatever you wanna call them, the parent company to poker’s beloved WSOP filed a fourth amended S-1 with the SEC yesterday — this one kinda a monster, weighing in at more than 300 pages of corporate bullshit high finance mixed with legalese. Click here to read it all, and here to see all of Harrah’s filings since September … when they first seemed to have a new interest in going public, only to tell the Wall Street Journal no that wasn’t it at all, only to then say oh yeah, we are going public … and then just last week, no never mind!

It’s possible I just missed something in all these publicly trackable documents, and/or that this level of big business is simply beyond my ken. But what stood out to me, beyond the name change, is the first line of the whole thing, which says they’ll get back on track with the IPO “as soon as practicable after this Registration Statement becomes effective” … and the last line of a section discussing company prospects, titled “Our business strategy”:

Continue to grow our online business. Our globally recognized World Series of Poker, or WSOP, and Caesars brands and our strong online gaming management team position us to take advantage of opportunities in the global online gaming market and to continue to develop the infrastructure to support larger scale real money online gaming as it becomes legalized and licensed in new jurisdictions. In late 2009, we launched our real money WSOP and Caesars-branded poker, bingo and casino online sites in the United Kingdom. As part of our online strategy, we will continue to expand our online real money gaming offerings in legally compliant jurisdictions and offer for fun online gaming options in other jurisdictions. In addition, we will continue to expand our WSOP tournaments to international jurisdictions where we believe there is a likelihood of legalization of online gaming. We believe that the expansion of online gaming offerings will benefit our land-based portfolio due to further brand enhancement, customer acquisition in new channels, and marketing arrangements including incorporating our Total Rewards and cash-back for points programs into our online gaming sites.

We believe that additional jurisdictions will legalize online gaming due to consumer demand, a broader understanding of the need to regulate the industry and to generate income through taxes on gaming revenue. As such, we support efforts to regulate the online gaming industry to ensure that consumers are protected. We believe that the potential for online gaming is substantial and believe that we will command, at a minimum, our fair share in any legal jurisdiction. A recent H2 Gaming Capital study projects that the global online gaming market will grow to $36 billion in revenues by 2012. We believe that the largest opportunity in online gaming in the near term is the legalization of online poker in the United States.

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1. Netherlands I-Gaming Attitudes - Probably the most interesting international story of the past week is the ruminations from the Netherlands that the new government may be interested in liberalizing the country’s Internet gambling laws. It’s not clear how far this process would go and what games or betting would be included, but a lot could happen in what has been a very restricted online market in the EU thus far. [eGaming Review]

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2. Nova Scotia Says No (That’s in Canada, Folks) - Another international piece is the recent pronouncement of the premier of Nova Scotia that that province will not pursue a government-sanctioned Internet gaming offering. Nova Scotia’s finance minister added that any estimate of the revenues associated with Internet gaming would be “a wild guess.”(That’s an interesting comment given that the province of Ontario has publicly estimated that it could turn a profit of at least C$100 million/year; many have questioned the basis for such a projection.) The CEO of the Nova Scotia Gaming Corp. (rightly) pointed out recently that Internet gambling will continue to grow whether the government is involved or not. [Globe and Mail]

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3. Betfair Move - Hot on the heels of the Betfair IPO announcement, there is speculation that Betfair may move out of the UK to a jurisdiction with a lower tax rate. William Hill and Ladbrokes recently moved to Gibraltar because they perceived that UK taxes were too high. Some are saying Betfair may make a similar play. With competition increasing among Internet gaming jurisdictions, more and more operators are paying attention to applicable taxes. [CasinoGamblingWeb]
   

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4. Station Casinos Trademark Infringement/Cybersquatting Suit - Station Casinos Inc. has sued two website operators in Federal Court in Nevada: SL Enterprises (www.vegasstationcasino.com) and Ryan Murphy (www.stationcasinos.org). If the Station marks have sufficient rights attached to them through use and/or registration, they should have a good case. This kind of thing happens in i-gaming all the time and it’s a big problem for operators; it’s tremendously time-consuming and potentially expensive to vigilantly prosecute misappropriation of property rights. [Las Vegas Sun]
   

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5. PartyGaming in Venezuela - PartyGaming plc has set up an online poker offering in Venezuela. This continues two trends: Party’s continuing march around the world into new markets and the increased interest in South America as a lucrative and growing market for interactive gaming. [Gambling Zion]

We’ve been saying for awhile how critical Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is for any regulated online gambling legislation to stand a chance at making its way into law. And despite non-denial denials from his office regarding plans for a forthcoming poker-only Senate bill, the Reno Gazette-Journal is reporting that Reid is now saying something more directly suggestive of his online poker intentions:

[Gaming] executives said Reid, D-Nev., told them he would support the legalization of online poker in the United States but drew the line there — he would not support any other form of online gaming — during an Aug. 16 meeting at the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa [in Reno].

This falls in line with what Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-NV) told the same paper earlier this month — that Reid’s position against online gambling had “softened dramatically” — after she and Nevada’s two other representatives made a serious push on Reid to support Barney Frank’s HR 2267. Berkley and Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) are Frank bill co-sponsors, and Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV) “cautiously supports” it.

The problem Reid’s supposedly running into now are non-Harrah’s B/M casinos in northern Nevada asserting online gambling is a threat to business and Nevada tourism … thereby costing the state jobs. And as outdated and arguably inaccurate as that argument is — we’ve heard it before, from the same Vegas ops and Indian tribes that now support online gambling — anything that opponents can spin against Reid as anti-jobs probably isn’t something the senator would want to risk heading into November, as he faces a statewide election in the state with the highest unemployment in the nation. At a minimum, wading into such waters would require a lot more money for internet ads to smear Sharron Angle out of contention.

Titus, meanwhile, is making the argument to counter the smaller B/M casinos point of opposition. Her office’s spokesman told the RJG: “This legislation will not detract from our first-rate casinos and an industry that is vital to the livelihood of so many Nevadans, but will benefit Nevada’s casinos, many of which are interested in building an online presence in the United States.”

We’ll have to reserve judgment for now on what it all means … too many possibilities with so much money, power, and potential backstabbings in play. But it does reveal for certain that somebody’s Full Tilt checks arrived! federal bills ushering in a new era of online poker are moving forward, with or without casino games.

If you’re a registered voter in Nevada, visit the PPA for contact info to voice your position semi-directly to the Senate Majority Leader.

For a preview:

Teenage Poker Players Go ‘All In’ Online
Before They’re Old Enough To Set Foot in Casinos, Teenagers Rake in Thousands

Stossel outs himself as a recreational poker player in an episode of his namesake show on Fox Business that aired Thursday: Bans on Betting.

The show re-aired throughout the weekend, and will be on one more time tonight, Sunday, at 10 PM ET.

His efforts to bring the online gambling issue to the fore last week extended far beyond his own show. Here he is on The O’Reilly Factor:

While Stossel makes quite the issue of state lottery hypocrisies, O’Reilly seems to have little clue about the prominence of internet gambling, and thus presumably how big and evolved the industry has become. However, the speed in which someone can go broke seems to be important to people who don’t get the awesomeness of Rush Poker.

Also check out his latest syndicated column, which ran in newspapers across the country last week: Leave the Gamblers Alone!

In it he speaks to Chad Hills of Focus on the Family and Andy Bloch representing the online gambling side. I’d typically include a blockquote here, but almost every paragraf leads to another one worthy of cut-and-paste, so just click and read the whole thing. (Kinda cool that he ledes with a bit about police raiding a VFW hall — hey, I know where he learned about that!)

You’ll likely see more of this debate moving forward. Mix the timing of the main event with the UIGEA deadline, some criminal investigations, and legislation … and suddenly media who don’t rely on online-poker-site press releases have a storyline with some teeth. And if any players regularly seen on TV end up in handcuffs — “Perp Walk with the Pros” — then they’ve really got a few hedlines, for better or for worse. In some respects, the attention that would bring could be huge for ESPN ratings! actually help the online poker industry finally get what they’ve long wanted, albeit probably not the way they wanted.

Of course, with the mainstream media trying to get a handle on poker issues, they’ll undoubtedly get a few things wrong. But in bringing our issues to light, Stossel’s recent TV appearances provide a pretty good read on where things currently stand for online gambling … and where poker interests may have fallen short in getting the message out that we all practically know by heart.

A few examples become obvious on Megyn Kelly’s daytime show, America Live:

* Kelly claims 2/3 of American public want internet gambling to stay illegal. I’m pretty sure there are studies out there that say exactly the opposite, but for some reason she didn’t get word of those, and pretty much dismisses Stossel when he questions the veracity of her numbers.

* Stossel brings up odds, and why the lottery preys on poor people. This woulda been a good time for him to explain how poker is different from other forms of gambling … apparently not everyone understands that.

* Stossel is a string-bettor.

* Barney Frank wouldn’t appear on Stossel’s show. WTF? Supposedly because Stossel offended him with a joke, but I’m wondering if we won’t be seeing Barney for some reason or another until after June 1.

And then on Varney & Co. on Fox Business:

* He explains the crackdown on payment processors.

* Again, more lottery talk.

* They discuss setting up a poker operation online … at which point Stossel jumps on the personal freedom issues, but doesn’t clarify that the example given couldn’t apply, because poker isn’t played against a house.

* Tax revenue shouldn’t be the big reason for legalizing online gambling?

* Gambling a better vice than marijuana? Hmm, that’s a tough call …

Much credit to @RichMuny and @TheEngineer2008 for making these videos easy to find.

Sentencing for Rennick is scheduled for sentencing on September 15th, with a prison term of six to twelve months expected.

(Just a little deeper … the 96-page report itself, which was written in February and updated a week ago, costs $1,200.)

Click here for a detailed summary.

You’ll see that the online gambling lobbying spend is actually down from Q4 2009, but mostly because of cuts from the US Chamber of Commerce. (Had no idea they were even on our side … nor that they were allowed to lobby, lol! Go jobs?)

Also, a breakdown of who’s dropping the dough:

Harrah’s topped the list of spenders at $1.22 million followed by Poker Players Alliance ($785,000), UC Group ($717,239), USCC ($664,442) and the Interactive Gaming Council ($412,580).

UC Group, interestingly enough, is a voice for European payment processors — and boast of making it possible via the internet to get fresh flowers from Holland to the US. Gotta think they’d really like to handle all the PokerStars buyins, cashouts, and transfers to the WSOP somewhere down the line. Not sure who the USCC is … best I can tell is it’s either the United States-China Economic Security Review Commission, US Cellular, or the United States Composting Council — all of which seem like plausible backers of online gambling special interests when you think about it.

Oh, wait … USCC, that’s the Chamber of Commerce. I was thinking China or cell phones, and just hoping we had an ally in composting.

And a special rookie of the year award goes to a company we know well, who seems to be playing a bigger and bigger role in the American game:

The most significant new party to join the mix was Betfair US.

The report also points out that the Indians, surprisingly, have been financially inactive in all this. The casino tribes not causing as much trouble as it mighta seemed, I suppose.

And while you don’t wanna judge a report by its cover, you can tell a little more by looking at the table of contents. The title itself caught my eye:

INTERNET GAMBLING ON CAPITOL HILL: An Ongoing Struggle for Political Relevance

Interesting. Didn’t think “relevance” was still the issue.

After giving a breakdown where current legislation stands — and how the Frank, Menendez, and McDermott bills all fit together — it runs down a list of the most relevant players in Washington:

§4. Analysis of, And Electoral Prospects for, Legislative Players

SENATOR HARRY REID
REPRESENTATIVE BARNEY FRANK
REPRESENTATIVE SHELLEY BERKLEY
REPRESENTATIVE JAMES MCDERMOTT
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN CONYERS
REPRESENTATIVE PETER SESSIONS
REPRESENTATIVE SPENCER BACHUS
REPRESENTATIVE ROBERT GOODLATTE

Interesting to see Harry Reid up top … And of course we know about Goodlatte and Bachus. But I would so love to see what they’ve got to say about Pete Sessions (R-TX).

Sessions, of course, was the congressman who Pokerati played a role in wooing over to the poker side back in 2007. The following year he held a fundraiser in Las Vegas, where he received some nice money from Andy Beal, Doyle Brunson, Linda Johnson, and the usual Full Tilt Politicos.

However, when he eventually introduced his anti-UIGEA bill, the PPA was pissed! Because while setting up a poker carveout that he coulda sold to his rightwing buddies, he included some language in there that implied online poker (and thus the operations enjoyed by some of his donors) was an illegal activity.

To make matters worse, he got a lot of flack from his anti-poker supporters at Family Reseach Council and Focus on the Family for holding Vegas fundraisers, particularly the one held at the near-naked 40-Deuce Club in Mandalay Bay.

Really wonder where he fits in to all of this now … woulda thought he had been too burned (from both sides) on the issue to make the short list of online gambling’s major legislative players.

Lastly, take a look at the obstacles we still face:

§7. Political Barriers to Regulation

THE POLITICAL PERIPHERY
THE TALK
THE ELECTION YEAR
THE AGE OF CONGRESS
THE LACK OF CONSENSUS AMONG SPECIAL INTERESTS
THE LACK OF UNIFORM SUPPORT FROM THE AMERICAN GAMING ASSOCIATION
THE COMPETITION FROM BIG-SPENDING SPECIAL INTERESTS
THE ABSENCE OF CLARITY FROM THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

Second to last — the absence of clarity from the Obama administration. See … just because the President “plays” poker has never meant he’s been on our side.

That’s why the recent study saying online gambling leads to jobs was important … because it’s a necessary step toward bringing him over to our side, by attaching our issue to something that matters to him.

I agree with just about everything he says in his analysis here. If all stories have a beginning, middle, and end, you can see why he believes (as do I) that we are clearly in Part 3 … and that the law we’ve long bawked about really is on its way out by no later than October 2011.

Specifically, more than $5 million already spent lobbying in 2010 is a big sign that efforts to undo the UIGEA have some serious juice behind them. That and Harrah’s — originally a Bill Frist supporter that helped fund the UIGEA — switching teams to push online gambling efforts … but only after June 1!

To put $5 million of lobbying bones in perspective, you can see that it hardly makes the Casino/Gambling industry a top spender. And if you equate dollars to influence, we’re just a fraction of the health care industry; but about 1/5 of what Education and Hollywood are, and 1/6 of how big the “computers/internet” industry is. (Hmm, might be nice to get some help from those guys.) But still, the casino/gambling industry is on pace to surpass spending in 2008, and blow away 2006 and even 2004, where they had to spend so little with the anti-gambling moralists doing the American casino industry’s dirty work.

Of course the wildcard in all this is Harry Reid, who may or may not be on borrowed time in Bill Frist’s former position.

Getting Away With Poker
How is helping people play a card game like murder?

I find this article particularly interesting because of how it pairs politically with the recent story in The Hill about legalized online gambling creating jobs, according to a new study. Though jobs are appealing on both sides of the aisle, it’s clearly an issue the Dems are looking to own in coming months.

Meanwhile, Reason, a Libertarian magazine, speaks more to the Tea Party set. So regardless of what happens to Tzvetkoff, you gotta like the plausibly bipartisan sales pitch taking shape in the Beltway for whatever online poker bills may or may not come to fruition later this year.

I haven’t quite figured out why the poker world hasn’t jumped on the significance of the first-ever UIGEA criminal indictment. Pussies! Oh well, so be it … if you pretend it isn’t there, maybe it will go away, right?

But for those who care about accuracy and relevance, just an fyi, I found these landmark more-than-just-regular-ole-money-laundering accusations in the Department of Justice’s publicly available criminal complaint:

The Indictment charges TZVETKOFF with four counts, including bank fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy to operate and finance an illegal gambling business and to process electronic funds transfers in violation of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006.

This is the same document, of course, where the DOJ reveals how they see the people Tzvetkoff did business with as “illegal internet gambling companies” … and says that investigations are ongoing.

When these guidelines will be finalized is unknown, they could have a huge effect on the World Series of Poker, North American Poker Tour, and televised poker programming such as Face the Ace and Poker After Dark if .net sites were also not allowed.

@BigRussPoker was unavailable for comment on whether or not he would be considering a move should the measure make it to law. But it’s an interesting concept, if this intrastate thing starts to take hold and spread … might you see some old-fashioned rounders traversing the country looking for the best action?

This week J Todd keeps us abreast of California and New Jersey’ desires to get in on the online gambling game from a state-size perspective, updates us on the online gambling fund-transfer cat-and-mouse game with MasterCard and Visa getting more serious (just three months before they are legally required to do exactly what they are trying to do), fingers the Eldorado Casino as a potentially shady site to avoid, and tease me with some affiliate business stuff that I don’t really care about but am interested to watch because of the hidden-camera + foreign-accent nature of the upcoming interview.

Here are a few other semi-related newsy links about how things are going elsewhere in the poker world:

The Mayor of Baltimore is pushing for poker+table games despite the governor of Maryland having less of an interest in making expanded gambling a priority.

Michael Barnier, the newly appointed EU Internal Markets Commissioner, promises to straighten out inconsistencies in European online gambling laws.

Police in suburban Alabama are cracking down on / raiding the real-money tournament scene there.

But with Sega opening up a real-money poker room (and casino), you gotta wonder if the likes of Microsoft wouldn’t try to get in on the real-money gaming/gambling action if the UIGEA were suddenly to go away. ** (You also gotta wonder how the guy in the picture even saw the flop. Can you imagine how soft these Xbox games must be?!)

I don’t mean to overstate anything here — because poker is just a game, after all, that we know plenty of people enjoy playing for free.net — but the new Hoyle Texas Hold’em for Xbox Live leaves you wondering if they aren’t preparing themselves for a future where they stand to make more than $10 per download.

And looking at the key features of this new release …

Gamers can play as their Microsoft Avatar.
* Single player games against up to 9 AI players.
* Mixed Multiplayer games with any combination of up to 9 AI and/or human players.
* Fully customizable games let the player decide game type, table minimums, mix of AI vs. human players and much more.
* Ability to reserve seats for private custom games.
* Deep statistic tracking covers over 50 key stats categories found to be the most important to professional poker players.

You gotta wonder if any new players stepping onto the online poker landscape might not have a different outlook on things like bots and datamining than current industry leaders.

** The makers of Hoyle Texas Hold’em have slot machine games, and handheld iPhone versions, too.

ALT HED: Hoyle Sounds a Lot like Doyle

More new players trying to get in on the online poker game … SEGA, the what-happened-to-them video gaming pioneer just opened its interactive online gaming/gambling sites … SegaCasino and SegaPoker … with more TK in 2010 they say.

At least we think the sites are live. With players from the US and Japan forbidden to play, I get a 403-Forbidden error when trying to access SegaPoker.com.

And here’s the CNBC press release:

CNBC Original Reported by CNBC’s Melissa Francis to Premiere on Wednesday, December 16th at 9PM ET/PT on CNBC

ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J., December 10, 2009-Beyond the Las Vegas strip there’s a thriving underworld of illegal gambling. It’s a multi-billion dollar business and millions of Americans are in on the action…

On Wednesday, December 16th at 9PM ET/PT, CNBC presents “CNBC Investigates: The Big Business of Illegal Gambling,” a CNBC Original reported by CNBC’s Melissa Francis that takes viewers inside this high-stakes business that brings some people immense wealth, while others pay the ultimate price.

The one-hour program delivers an in-depth look at just how mainstream illegal gambling has become. From sports betting to online casinos to high-stakes poker, a high percentage of the betting is placed illegally. Interviews with “Paul,” an illegal sports bookmaker who knows each bet he takes can land him in jail; professional gambler “Vegas Runner” who takes his job as a gambler as serious as any Wall Street trader takes his job; and the dangerous case of Nick Sarillo, a restaurant owner who freelances as a bookie, crosses the Mob and pays a heavy price; shed light on this lucrative, but risky activity.

CNBC also looks at how illegal gambling is moving out of the basement and onto the Internet where it’s more difficult for law enforcement to stop. Technology has made illegal gambling much more accessible and the same computer used for work or to connect with family and friends can also be used to wager outside the law. CNBC speaks with Jay Cohen, an Internet entrepreneur who starts a 200 million dollar offshore gambling website and becomes the first American prosecuted for running an online bookmaking operation.

The program concludes with the debate over legalizing gambling. It’s an argument that is gaining traction in Washington and CNBC speaks with congressmen from both sides of the argument-Congressman Jim McDermott, a Democrat from Washington State and the sponsor of a bill that would regulate and tax online card games and Congressman Bob Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia and author of “The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act.”

For more information including video clips and slideshows log onto illegalgambling.cnbc.com.

Melissa Francis is co-anchor of CNBC’s “The Call” (M-F; 11AM-12PM ET).

“CNBC Investigates: The Big Business of Illegal Gambling” is produced by Kurtis Productions. Sharon Barrett is the Executive Producer and Mike West is the Senior Producer for Kurtis Productions. Charles Schaeffer is the Executive Producer for CNBC. Ray Borelli is the Vice President of Strategic Research, Scheduling and Long Form Programming.

“CNBC Investigates: The Big Business of Illegal Gambling” will re-air on Wednesday, December 16th at 10PM & 1AM ET; Friday, December 18th at 9PM & 12AM ET; Saturday, December 19th at 7PM ET; and Sunday, December 20th at 10PM ET.