Part III

The Operation

In a room alone, just he and his computer, Michael Kent was simply another technology dweeb. But plug him into a network of bettors, and now, with the flick of a switch, Kent was utterly brilliant, a mastermind. These dozens of betting agents, or beards, as they are called, were as essential to Michael Kent as the electrical juice that drove his computer. He could not begin to succeed without them. And so, each day, without equivocation, he turned over his forecasts of the upcoming games to Dr. Ivan Mindlin, who then passed them on to his New York partners, Stanley Tomchin and Jimmy Evart, who, until 1984, were responsible for placing the majority of wagers for the Computer Group.

Dr. Mindlin had been making personal bets through Tomchin and Evart long before the Computer Group was formed. According to a partner in the group, Mindlin had built up a debt of some $100,000 to Tomchin and Evart when Michael Kent came along in 1980. By offering Kent's computer information to them, Mindlin was able to work off his debt quickly.

Tomchin and Evart were so impressed with the accuracy of Dr. Mindlin's information that they agreed to move money for him on a regular basis. Their colleagues describe Tomchin and Evart as a pair of Ivy Leaguers, more erudite than the normal gamblers. Tomchin, a Cornell alumnus, was a world-class backgammon and poker player; his friend Jimmy (Sneakers) Evart was said to have attended Harvard. Tomchin and Evart were well known in New York gambling circles as the "Computer Kids."

In 1983, when Billy Walters began making bets for the Computer Group, he often received his orders from Tomchin and Evart. The Group's main betting pool was wagering $40 million per year, but all the action in the world could not sustain Evart's interest. His newlywed wife insisted that he stop gambling, and so, in 1984, he walked away from the money and moved to Spain. According to a former partner, Tomchin moved to San Francisco and eventually left the group . His former partners say he is now an options trader in Santa Barbara. Tomchin declined to answer questions in connection with this story.

The Computer Group foundered in Evart's absence until October 1984, when Dr. Mindlin offered Billy Walters a percentage of the group's winnings and placed him in charge of moving the weekly millions. At that time Walters worked out of a lovely three-bedroom home overlooking the eighth fairway at the Las Vegas Country Club, Indeed, Billy Walters wore clothes suggesting that he had been called in from the golf course. His gray speckled hair was styled straight back. away from his thin face. its expression creased by the transitions of gambling, from sadness to happiness and then back again. His face was older than his body. He was always thinking about work. He had been assigned (he enormous responsibility of exploiting the weakest betting lines, and it did not matter where they were. Billy Walters was supposed to find them. and where they failed to exist, he was expected to create them.

He was a powerful broker in an unregulated industry. Walters blanketed the country with bets, taking action wherever it was available, which was at times in as many as 45 states. In 44 of them he dealt exclusively with illegal bookmakers. To help bear that burden he hired six people to work for him in Las Vegas, at a salary of no more than $700 per week, plus the occasional bonus. His wife served as an accountant, but he depended most upon his young assistant, Glen Walker, who had quit his job in the publicity department at NBC Sports in New York and relocated to Las Vegas, so enthralled was he by a 1980 story in Sports Illustrated about Las Vegas gambler Gary Austin. "That copy of Sports Illustrated changed my life," Walker says today.

Part I

Part II