Cigars, Colleges, Booze and Blitzes: Investigating the Sports Betting Boom

So we began to dig by way of his marketing campaign contributions and located six donations, all on the identical day for the utmost quantity allowed underneath Kansas regulation, from corporations {that a} distinguished Kansas actual property developer owned. This identical actual property developer, Robb Heineman, later confirmed to The Occasions that he had pushed for the stadium provision. Thriller solved.

Our investigation of the lobbying efforts in Kansas and different states was simply one of many articles that made up the sequence.

Rebecca Ruiz performed a survey of states with authorized sports activities betting. Can prospects use bank cards to wager? The reply was sure in a majority of locations. Did regulators assessment and approve commercials? Most didn’t. Had playing corporations gotten into authorized hassle once they broke the principles? Not at all times, it turned out. State regulatory watchdogs have been inconsistent in implementing their very own requirements, and a few had little urge for food for punishing corporations that broke the regulation. Rebecca, Ken and Joe Drape explored these questions in one other article for the sequence.

In search of to indicate the potential human penalties, Rebecca and Ken additionally talked to folks in numerous components of the nation who had develop into hooked on sports activities betting after it grew to become authorized.

Our colleague Walt Bogdanich labored with a gaggle of Columbia College journalism college students to dig into offers that universities had signed with playing corporations to advertise on-line sports activities betting on their campuses, together with Michigan State College, the College of Colorado Boulder and Louisiana State College. When the colleges refused to supply granular particulars on these profitable partnerships, the reporting group used legal guidelines permitting public entry to data to request copies of college paperwork, studying for the primary time how deeply the playing corporations had burrowed into college life.

For one more article, Emily Metal targeted on one on line casino firm, Penn Leisure, and its partnership with David Portnoy, the founding father of the media firm Barstool Sports activities. Emily discovered that whilst Mr. Portnoy promoted playing to his tens of millions of followers, he hardly ever, if ever, talked about that he had beforehand gone bankrupt after racking up money owed and $30,000 in playing losses.

Emily, too, despatched a sequence of requests for public data. Among the many 1000’s of pages of paperwork she acquired have been particulars confirming how Penn executives had mentioned their deal to take over Barstool with regulators. She additionally discovered that in 12 of the 13 states the place Barstool or Penn had been licensed, Mr. Portnoy — who has a historical past of misogynist and racist conduct — wasn’t required to bear a proper licensing assessment, a course of regulators use to make sure that playing companies function with good character, honesty and integrity. He now reigns as one of many business’s loudest cheerleaders.