The Arrests

He was in the bed sleeping when the two men walked into his bedroom. Billy Walters sleeps in a big clean bed in Las Vegas, in a small but elaborate home renovated to his liking, with palm trees and white flowerpots and two satellite dishes in the yard, and four large televisions in the den, and a security guard who sits just out of sight behind the shrubs across the street. This environment was disrupted early last Jan. 5, when the two strangers introduced themselves to Billy Walters with all the subtlety of an alarm clock. He greeted them by sitting up in the bed, blinking. His wife wasn't in the bed with him. They already had her, probably.

"You're going to have to get dressed," one man said.

Billy Walters reached down for the pile of wrinkled clothes he had worn the night before. The room was quiet. The men watched him dress.

"We don't like to have to do this to do," the other man said.

His wife, Susan, was downstairs with a third man in the kitchen. There was not a lot of chit-chat. Susan and Billy Walters were led across their fine, trimmed yard in handcuffs. The path to law and order wended past a copy of the daily newspaper, which lay on their driveway like an upturned headstone. As Billy Walters glanced down at the headline, he realized that he was the front-page news: INDICTMENTS TARGET BETTING GROUP IN LAS VEGAS.

As he tells it, what steams Billy Walters most of all was the sight later that day of his pretty wife in leg irons, chains scraping the floor as she staggered toward him. Afterward, when they had been released without bail, she revealed how the manacles had eaten through her stockings.

Seventeen days later, Billy Walters and 16 associates held the first meeting of the legendary Computer Group. This was a celebrated occasion in gambling history, and long overdue. The men and women of the Computer Group had been pioneers in their field. All the Computer Group did, apparently, was wager money on college football and basketball games, but for five hysterical years, they did it better than anyone else ever had. It was almost as if they had invented junk bonds. Every season, the cash arrived by the millions; all because their computer told them which teams should be favored to win everything from the mammoth Ohio State-Michigan football game to the basketball game pitting Monmouth against Fairleigh Dickinson. The Computer Group did not fix games. It simply understood them.

The group began to assert its mastery of sports betting in 1980, when the computer as an everyday machine had no firm place in sports. Most of the big Las Vegas players of 1980 were still relying on their own good sense and whatever trends they could pick up. A computer seemed to them a gimmick from the future, a big blinking queenbee serviced by men in white coats. There were relatively few of these "personal computers" that are everywhere today. As a matter of fact, the Computer Group didn't even own its own computer. Until 1983, the group settled for renting time on a computer 2,400 miles away in Rockville, Md. As for the group's invaluable program, it was maintained on thousands of clumsy old "batch" cards, kept in shoeboxes, then fed to the computer like hay into a thrasher.

Although dozens of workers served the Computer Group, only one man communicated with the machine itself. He was Michael Kent, a 34-year-old mathematician who had spent 11 years helping to develop nuclear submarines for Westinghouse. He found such work boring. In 1979, he quit his job and moved to Las Vegas, to bet on football games. In 1980, he became partners with a man he hardly knew, an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Ivan Mindlin, who Kent says agreed to place bets for them on a 50-50 basis, in accordance with his computerized forecasts. In the 1980 season the computer wizard and the doctor shared winnings of $100,000 playing college football. By 1983, they were winning almost $1 million in one week of college football - or, at least, that's what Michael Kent was told. He never bothered to check the books.

By then, Dr. Mindlin had built their little corner business into something resembling a national conglomerate, which had opened betting offices staffed by a dozen employees in New York and Las Vegas.

Check back for Part II