US Attorney Overseeing Online Poker Investigation Among Time’s Most Influential People

The man who is in charge of the investigation that took down three of the world’s largest online poker rooms last April 2011, US Attorney in the Southern District of New York, Preetinder S. Bharara, has been named among Time.com’s “Most Influential People”.

Bharara’s office froze more than a dozen bank accounts tied to Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and UB.com last spring, resulting in all three online poker rooms leaving the US market.  Executives from all three firms were charged with bank fraud and money laundering.  Five of those individuals charged remain on the lam. 

From Time.com:

For prosecutors, Olympus is SDNY — the Southern (or, some would say, Sovereign) District of New York. And Preet Bharara is its Zeus. Without drama, his Manhattan team has battled terrorism, convicting the Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad; crippled international criminal networks run by Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, Jamaican drug trafficker Christopher Coke and Colombian rebel group FARC; and in March secured a half-billion-dollar forfeiture from computer contractor SAIC in the biggest fraud ever against New York City. Those are good cases well prosecuted.

Time.com also noted that “his 58-0 record for insider-trading cases bodes ill for the bankers whom his office has charged with reckless lending practices or inflating mortgage values”.

All the more reason why it is plain to see that, once captured, the indicted executives of Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars will be looking at some prison time.  UB.com boss, Brent Beckley, was due to be sentenced hours from the time this piece was going to press (April 19, 2012).  He is expected to serve under a year. 

Preet takes his job seriously, proclaiming that being U.S. Attorney for SDNY "is certainly the greatest privilege I will ever have, no matter how long I live."

- Jagajeet Chiba, Gambling911.com