Gamblers losing £6million a day
Britain’s biggest bookie ‘cashing in on coronavirus’
BRITAIN’S biggest bookmaker has been accused of ‘cashing in on coronavirus’ after its punters lost £6million per day in the first three months of this year.
Flutter – the giant which controls Paddy Power and Betfair – gained 600,000 UK customers during the pandemic, taking the total number of regular punters to 3.2million.
The figures alarmed MPs and campaigners who fear tens of thousands are being enticed to bet more than they can afford, driving them into ‘debt and destitution’.
They claim vulnerable players are turning to online gambling to cope with boredom and the stress of the pandemic.
Those who lose often played more intensively while in lockdown and devoted more time to gambling during the first set of curbs, the Gambling Commission found.
Flutter, which also owns Sky Betting and Gaming, including Sky Casino, said its online customers lost a third more – £6million per day – between January and March than they did in the same period last year.
And the pandemic has driven 593,000 new customers to its website. Chief executive Peter Jackson saw his pay triple to £7.5million last year, while shares jumped two-thirds.
Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said: ‘ These figures from the country’s biggest firm should send a chill down the spine of ministers dragging their feet over the tough regulation we need. Especially as we know the biggest losers are more likely to come from our poorest communities.’ Carolyn Harris MP, chairman of the parliamentary group on gambling, said: ‘The third lockdown has been brutal for the legion of gambling addicts.
‘These massive losses show that gambling companies are cashing in on coronavirus as families are driven into debt and destitution.’ There are around 400,000 gambling addicts in the UK, including 55,000 children.
A Lords committee last year found that up to 60 per cent of gambling companies’ profits come from just 5 per cent of vulnerable customers who lose the most. The Mail has led calls for tighter laws to protect addicts with its Stop the Gambling Predators campaign.
Ministers have launched a wide-ranging review into gambling laws, which is set to lead to the biggest shake-up in the legislation governing the industry in 15 years.
The items under consideration, dubbed a ‘reformer’s shopping list’, include maximum stakes online and tough checks on whether or not players can afford their losses.
Tory MP Richard Holden, of the Commons public accounts committee, said the review must look at the rise in ‘gambling and the damage it can have’.
Paddy Power’s shops were closed from January to March but Flutter’s takings still rose by 16 per cent compared to last year. Flutter said it was booming due to ‘recreational’ customers.
Mr Jackson said: ‘Safer gambling continues to be a key priority across our markets.’
The Betting and Gaming Council, which represents the industry, said its members had doubled the number of ‘ safer gambling’ messages online since the start of the pandemic and were intervening to protect customers more often.
The ‘line of duty’ almost cost Frank Serpico his life. In February 1971 he and three other plain-clothes police colleagues went to an address in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, after being tipped off that a drug dealer was selling heroin there.
As the only Spanish speaker, Serpico was assigned the hazardous task of pretending to be a junkie to persuade the Latino dealer and his cronies to let them in.
As two other officers waited behind him, he knocked and said he’d come to buy. The door opened a few inches, the chain still on, and Serpico wedged himself into the gap, pushing as he shouted to his colleagues to help him.
They didn’t, instead watching on as their fellow officer was shot in the face with a pistol. The bullet, fired from about 18 inches away, entered under his eye and lodged in his jaw.
As he lay bleeding on the floor, his partners arrested the suspects rather than try to save ve him. It fell instead to an elderly tenant in the he building to dial the emergency services, kneeling beside Serpico and squeezing his hand as he reassured him he would live.
The officer’s fate, dramatised in the riveting 1973 film Serpico starring Al Pacino, just may have been a consequence of his decision to expose the rampant corruption within the New York Police Department.
Viewers glued to Line Of Duty, the BBC drama about the work of AC-12, a fictional anti-police corruption unit, might raise an eyebrow at the sheer number of bent coppers in the series, the latest of which finishes on Sunday night. But Serpico — who turned 85 last week — wouldn’t be surprised.
Surrounded by officers either taking bribes from criminals or turning a blind eye to it, he was the archetypal lone voice, the courageous whistleblower who nearly lost his life exposing the truth.
Born in Brooklyn to Italian immigrants, Francis — the son of a Neapolitan shoemaker — dreamed of joining the police as a child. he did so aged 23 in 1959, after a few years in the army. Serpico earned a reputation as a zealous and hardworking officer who was never off duty.
he was always unconventional, destined to work in plain clothes as he didn’t look remotely like a cop. Short and muscular, he had long hair and sported a beard. he dressed flamboyantly: off duty he was a hippy, wearing beads, flares and earrings, while on duty he had a passion for elaborate disguises. he dressed as vagrants, rabbis and doctors, even posing as a London barrister called ‘Llewellyn’.
he had a bohemian lifestyle — a hedonistic ladies’ man, he had a passion for opera and ballet, and lived in New York’s counterculture capital of Greenwich Village.
Serpico was so unlike the average cop, his fellow officers were naturally suspicious. But what most alarmed them was his refusal to accept the culture of bribery.
he rejected even the lowest level of corruption, the police tradition of accepting free meals in restaurants, and was gobsmacked when his patrol partner let a motorist pay $35 to overlook a traffic offence.
however when he moved to a unit policing the lucrative industries of illegal gambling and prostitution, he discovered the graft amounted to serious money.
One day, an officer passed him an envelope, saying simply it was from ‘Jewish Max’. Inside was $300 (about $2,500 now).
Jewish Max ran an illegal gambling operation and this was Serpico’s share of his monthly payment to be left alone. Serpico could no longer keep quiet and, through a friend, contacted the Department of Investigation — a secretive New York equivalent to Line Of Duty’s AC-12 that tackled fraud and corruption among city employees.
When even a senior officer told him to forget it, Serpico began to realise even his supposedly ‘honest’ colleagues were willing to see corruption in the force persist.
Serpico was transferred to the Bronx, assured his new colleagues there were scrupulously honest.
In fact, they were even more corrupt. One officer blithely informed him he could make at least $800 a month from kickbacks from criminals paying for immunity.
The payouts, he revealed, were routinely collected in a system known as the ‘ pad’ because payers’ names were efficiently recorded on a pad of paper.
Serpico was sometimes partnered with a ‘bag man’ who collected the cash. The money-grubbing cops were so proficient at tracking down non-payers that Serpico concluded they could have cleaned the city up in a week had they devoted the same energy to fighting crime.
In 1967, he started telling everything he knew to senior officials at police headquarters and City hall.
Although he had all they needed to prosecute, they dragged their feet. Serpico’s position was becoming more dangerous by the day, as he rubbed shoulders with the colleagues he was implicating.
There were other honest officers but they were never brave enough to come forward. Serpico refused to be cowed, arresting suspects he knew were bribing his colleagues.
Word spread — allegedly, senior officers leaked it — that he was spilling the beans and Serpico became a pariah. Colleagues patted him down to ensure he wasn’t wearing a recording device. One officer pulled a knife on him, snarling: ‘I ought to cut your tongue out.’
When Serpico arrested an illegal gambler who’d been protected, the suspect ominously pointed his finger at him as if he were pulling a trigger. Serpico’s ‘own kind’ would ‘do’ him, he said.
eventually, Serpico gave up waiting for officialdom to do anything and went to the Press. In April 1970, the New York Times ran a front-page expose.
The mayor was forced to set up an independent public inquiry, the Knapp Commission. Serpico was its star witness, ending his lonely crusade as he testified that ‘the atmosphere does not yet exist in which an honest police officer can act without fear or ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers’.
The police commissioner abruptly resigned, scores of senior officers were cleared out and investigators exposed a culture of wholesale corruption in which individual bribes were as high as $25,000 ($170,000 now) and annual backhanders in a single police department amounted to $ 4 million ($27 million now). It emerged corrupt officers divided themselves into ‘grass eaters’ and ‘ meat eaters’: the former simply turned a blind eye to illicit operations while the ‘carnivores’ strong- armed drug users, prostitutes and pimps into giving them money. And, just as Line Of Duty’s writer Jed Mercurio shows the mortal risk to police officers investigating bad apples within the force, Serpico himself became a target after he blew the whistle on NYPD corruption. After Serpico was shot in the face, it became clear some of his colleagues wouldn’t be happy until he was dead. The first ‘get well’ cards he received in hospital contained anonymous notes regretting that he’d survived. his superiors accepted the claims of his partners in the drugs raid that they’d done their best to help him — and even decorated them.
Serpico took the hint and retired aged 36. he moved to Switzerland and then to the Netherlands where he married a Dutch woman. When she died of cancer and her parents took custody of their two children, he returned to the U.S. and moved to a one-room cabin deep in the woods in upstate New York.
There are still bullet fragments in his head, he remains deaf in one ear and blames post-traumatic stress disorder for leaving him with a short fuse. The shooting left him lame in one leg — his antique english walking stick conceals a sword inside.
Serpico remains bitter about his treatment, outspoken that police corruption remains a problem and paranoid about his safety.
‘I protect myself,’ he said in February. ‘ But if my time has come, there’s no better way than taking out some crooked cops.’
Superintendent Ted hastings, scourge of bent coppers in Line Of Duty, would surely agree.