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Former North Toronto HAMC President, Billy Miller, Gets 15 Months For Bookmaking For A Criminal Organization
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Greg Carr
Oct 1, 2017, 9:35:45 PM10/1/17
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017 09:02 PM EDT
Billy Miller
Billy Miller, 54, a former Hells Angels biker, has been sentenced to 15 months imprisonment for participating in the bookmaking operations of a criminal organization, a sophisticated sports-betting enterprise known as Platinum Sports Book. (Sun files)
A former Hells Angels biker was sentenced to 15 months behind bars for his “leadership role” in the “huge” criminal gambling organization that prompted a massive police raid on a lavish 2013 Super Bowl party.
“Platinum is a large and sophisticated criminal organization that had as its main purpose...bookmaking,” Justice Michael Brown said as he passed sentence Thursday on Billy Miller.
The 54-year-old former head of the North Toronto chapter of the Hells Angels was convicted earlier this year of participating in the bookmaking operations of a criminal organization, Platinum Sports Book. Platinum is a sophisticated sports-betting enterprise police had alleged was linked to biker gangs and the Italian Mafia.
Platinum ran a website off servers in Costa Rica that took bets from thousands of gamblers or “players” across Southern Ontario on sports ranging from horse racing, to college football, to the NFL.
Miller, who wasn’t the head of Platinum, helped organize that huge Super Bowl party with more than 2,300 guests, court heard.
“There’s no direct evidence that Miller received cash or made any profit from Platinum, but it was an organization engaged in bookmaking involving extremely large sums of money,” said Brown.
Miller wasn’t involved in any violence or threats of violence in his six-month stint at Platinum, which ended in March 2013, said Brown.
Police executed a raid with hundreds of officers at the 2013 Super Bowl party inside a banquet hall north of Toronto. Miller and five others were arrested as the 2,300 party guests watched.
Ultimately, dozens more people were charged and officers seized $4.6 million in cash, claiming Platinum had revenues of more than $100 million.
Miller, 54, was acquitted on an extortion charge on March 17 but convicted of bookmaking for the benefit of criminal organization.
Crown attorney Matthew Bloch asked Brown to impose a sentence of two years less a day against Miller, who now mostly lives in the Dominican Republic.
Miller’s lawyer Paula Rochman said his client should receive a suspended sentence, a substantial fine or, at the most, six months in jail.
Miller, who has an extensive but dated criminal record for weapons and gaming-related charges, hasn’t had a conviction since 2002, said Brown.
There was no evidence at Miller’s trial to tie him or Platinum to either the Mafia or the Hells Angels.
spaz...@postmedia.com
http://www.torontosun.com/2017/09/30/former-outlaw-biker-jailed-for-bookmaking
============================================================================Hell's Angels are frequently gamblers themselves and often very superstitious. They have been involved in gambling operations before including paying twice the value to scratch ticket winners in order to launder their illegal profits in Quebec. CW Agencies and Starnet were both engaged in shady quasi legal gambling and both had links to Red And White.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ICW Agencies is a company claimed to be owned by the Mafia and the Hell's
Angels. Mike Hillman, a former federal Liberal vice-president and still
active with the party in BC was linked to it and was forced to leave the
Hedy Fry campaign because the company was being investigated for money
laundering in the US.
ompany Profile
Updated: 30-APR-07
C-W Agencies Inc.
<http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/merc-compint-0001317512-C-W-Agencies-Inc.html>
International Private company
2020 Yukon St., Vancouver, BC, Canada
(604)8713400, (604)8713434 fax,
Primary SIC: Mail Order Houses, Primary NAICS: Mail-Order Houses
ebsite: www.lotteries.com <http://www.lotteries.com/>
in...@lotteries.com
dchamb...@c-wgroup.com <mailto:dchamb...@c-wgroup.com>
========================================================= Path:
g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!not-for-mail From:
yardle...@yahoo.ca (Michael Yardley) Newsgroups: rec.gambling.craps
Subject: Re: Credit card issuers for online gaming deposits? Date: 5 Dec
2004 12:38:43 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Lines: 10
Message-ID: <858bd3a9.04120...@posting.google.com> References:
<9sWdnXmQVp0...@comcast.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.53.189.3
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding:
8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1102279123 7030 127.0.0.1 (5 Dec 2004
20:38:43 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups...@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date:
Sun, 5 Dec 2004 20:38:43 +0000 (UTC) I work telemarketing selling lottery
tickets for sometime at CW Agencies in Vancouver Canada and we got credit
cards all the time over the phone. You have to be careful on the net as
many of the Casino's on line are in-fact run by criminals, it is not a go
idea to use one on the net. On the phone you are surprising OK. When I
found out that CW Agencies was funded by the Italian Mafia to lauder money
I quit. It has been in business for 20 years and you pay six time's what
the lottery tickets are worth. The winners they always paid though. El
Gordo is the best one. Back to craps. They operate Right next to the Police
station.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
(They have sinced moved to the Yukon St address.) Michael Yardley
is a typical failed immigrant fraudster. An alcoholic meth head and a
ABOMINATION who supplements his welfare with prostitution. Fired from
London Drugs and a coffee shop of all places. He lives in BC Housing and
should be deported. Has been known to be involved in fraud and is a
racist. He is a liar and criminal and a total idiot who refuses to work. He
was born in England and after failing there moved to Canada. He is
frequently cyberbullied and posts off-topic nonsense to ngs then complains
about being cyberbullied and trolls. He will then announce he is leaving
the ng for good only to return even dumber and out of touch as ever. He
sometimes gets pimped out as a ticket scalper
<http://www.jlaforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=7824303>. Since he is involved
in fraud anyone interested in hockey tickets or lottery tickets should buy
elsewhere. I wonder if he reports his scalping income to the housing
authorities? Last known address: MICHAEL YARDLEY #123-5895 Kincaid
Street Burnaby BC V5G 4H9 Phone Number: 604-294-6071 This housing
project is run by the New Chelsea Society. Yardley should be deported and
his unit given to a nice old lady or perhaps a senior couple looking for a
better neighbourhood to live in. Let the New Chelsea Society 101-3640
Victoria Drive Vancouver, BC V5N 5P1 604-874-6255 Fax:
604-874-6250 ad...@newchelsea.ca Web: www.newchelsea.ca
<http://www.newchelsea.ca/> know what you think of Michael Yardley. He is
wasting tax payer money. He has claimed to have drank beer at the Hell's
Angels clubhouse and other ppl have claimed that HA has an ownership stake
in CW Agencies. Mike Hillman was connected to C-W Agencies when it
was investigated by US authorities. He was forced to resign as Dr. Hedy
Fry's campaign manager a decade ago when the Vancouver Sun revealed his
criminal associations. She denied any knowledge as per usual and is
currently the Liberal MP for Vancouver-Centre. Hillman is still active with
the Liberals most recently with the attempt by Wendy Yuan to win the
Liberal nomination for Vancouver-Kingsway. Two women of colour with high
profiles in the Liberal Party both with close links to ppl known to do
business dealings with organized crime. No wonder David Emerson thinks he
has a chance of getting re-elected. I didn't think he had any hope of it.
Hillman has a history of political dirty tricks and associations with
organized crime so why the Liberal Party and Wendy Yuan don't get rid of
him is beyond me. Why hasn't the BCLC shut down CW Agencies and others
like it. Lottery scamming and proper procedures not being followed by the
British Columbia Lottery Corporation was revealed by the Vancouver Sun and
other media outlets recently. John Les the Solicitor-General has promised
to restore public confidence in the lottery system and he should go after
companies like CW Agencies. Anyone have any info about CW
agencies? Room 236
Parliament Buildings
Victoria, BC V8V 1X4
Tel: (250) 356-7717
Fax: (250) 356-8270
Email: john.l...@leg.bc.ca <mailto:john.l...@leg.bc.ca>
Mike Yardley moved back to England after I moved into the building next to his in Burnaby. Last I heard he was proud of himself for working 7 days a week as a cab driver in London.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/CW$20Agencies/rec.gambling.lottery/sv8mfkJdni0/DyMHmHKEUwAJ
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Court settles estate of Vancouver man who made $100 million a year
reselling lottery tickets
By NEAL HALL, Vancouver SunMay 6, 2012
8
Almost four years after his death, the $20-million estate of Vancouver
businessman Randy Thiemer has finally been wrapped up in court.
Thiemer started a company named Can Win, which resold Canadian lottery
tickets to foreigners.
He got the idea after seeing an ad in a Vancouver newspaper offering
Irish Sweepstakes tickets.
“It started at his kitchen table and progressed to a $100-million-a-
year business,” recalled Vito Nardulli, who worked for almost 25 years
for Thiemer and was former vice-president of operations of the
company, C-W Agencies.
In the company’s early days, Vancouver police officers who showed up
at Can Win’s offices, then located at 319 West Pender, found a bag of
cash they were planning to seize.
“The bag was just sitting there while police were looking around,”
recalled Nardulli.
Thiemer whispered something to his business partner at the time, Ray
Ginnetti, who quickly left the office, he said.
“Randy opened the window and dropped the bag out the window, and
Ginnetti was waiting on the street below and caught it,” Nardulli
recalled.
“Back when I started, there were only four employees,” he added.
C-W Agencies now employs about 250 people and is almost across the
street from the police station on Cambie St.
The operation also has a related company in Europe called the European
Lottery Guild.
Nardulli eventually became vice-president of operations and was making
$150,000 a year but was fired in 2009 after Thiemer’s death.
He filed a wrongful dismissal suit, which remains unresolved; he is
seeking more than $1 million, including profit sharing he claims he is
owed.
Thiemer, who died Aug. 7, 2008, founded the company in 1981. He had
bought out his former business partner, Ginnetti, for $5 million in
1989.
Ginnetti, a former Vancouver stockbroker who was buddies with some
Hells Angels members, was shot to death in 1990.
The man who arranged the $30,000 contract killing, a former Hells
Angels enforcer named Roger Daggitt, was shot three times in the head
in 1992 while having a beer in the Turf Hotel in Surrey.
A Montreal hitman was later convicted of Daggitt’s murder.
“Randy was brilliant,” Nardulli said. “He was also a workaholic.
Sometimes he worked up to 20 hours a day.”
He said the company had a few setbacks, including a decision by the
B.C. government in 1993 that C-W Agencies and other lottery ticket
resellers couldn’t buy and sell B.C. lottery tickets.
“We stopped selling Canadian tickets altogether,” Nardulli said. “The
operation shifted to Europe.”
The company opened offices in London, Liverpool and Amsterdam, which
still exist today.
Another setback was a $500,000 fine imposed in 1999 by a U.S. Federal
Court.
C-W Agencies pleaded guilty during the court proceedings in Seattle
and Thiemer agreed to never again market lottery products to U.S.
residents, and not participate for five years in any kind of marketing
aimed at Americans through the mail or Internet.
“We stopped selling to Americans after that,” Nardulli said.
C-W Agencies had about 3.5-million customers when he left the company.
Nardulli said the operations are a lot more automated now than the
early days, when Thiemer employed people to stuff tickets in envelopes
and get them to the post office and mailed before each lottery draw.
“Some days you would get 1,000 pieces of mail, but some days it was
10,000,” Nardulli recalled. “He believed in a 24-hour turnaround.”
He recalled Thiemer led the jet-set lifestyle and had a beautiful home
in Shaughnessy, which was decorated with $100,000 Persian rugs,
Japanese art and Asian jade.
Thiemer spent his final years travelling the world looking for a liver
replacement, which never came.
He tried the U.S., then a private clinic in London, England, where he
spent a year waiting. “He had a 5,000 square foot apartment at
Regent’s Park,” that cost about $35,000 Cdn a week.
Thiemer eventually got fed up waiting and returned home to Vancouver.
A replacement liver was eventually found in Monterrey, Mexico, for $1
million.
But by the time Thiemer flew to Mexico, he wasn’t in good enough shape
to survive the operation, his friend recalled. Thiemer died in Mexico.
The court judgment sorted out the complexities of Thiemer’s bequests,
which divided his $20-million estate into 16 parts and left a portion
to his parents, Phil and Arlene Thiemer; his brother, Reid Phillip
Thiemer; his sister, Denny Shelley Byers; his niece and three nephews.
He left $500,00 to his accountant, Brian Gardiner, and also bequeathed
money to Doctors Without Borders.
The rest of his estate was left in a spousal trust to his common-law
wife, Gigi Christine Schlappner, with the instruction to “maintain
Christie according to her station in life and in the style to which
she has been accustomed ...”
The full judgment in online: http://bit.ly/IMppVu
nh...@vancouversun.com
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
Read more:
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Court+settles+estate+Vancouver+made+million+year+reselling+lottery+tickets/6575746/story.html#ixzz1uFAbySBM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Yardley used to work for CW Agencies
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/CW$20Agencies/van.general/lSp68zGEqqM/AaNqR-E_KCQJ
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A telemarketing company in Vancouver that has sold foreign and Canadian lotteries for more than 20 years shut down abruptly Thursday, leaving up to 200 people unemployed.
Telemarketers showing up at the doors of Telco Management on Yukon Street found their electronic passes disabled and the building shuttered. Employees told reporters that no one warned them the operation was shutting down or to not come to work.
Telco is connected to CW Agencies, one of the only resellers of European, Australian and Atlantic Canada lottery tickets to have escaped significant penalties from U.S. investigators, who in the 1990s were battling an entrenched illegal lottery ticket industry in B.C. that targeted elderly Americans.
The employees have already turned to the provincial Labour Standards Branch for help in getting severance and holiday backpay.
Thursday’s shutdown is the latest wrinkle in a conglomerate of companies that Randy Thiemer started in the 1980s under the name Can Win with Ray Ginetti, a former stockbroker and Hells Angel associate. Thiemer bought out Ginetti in 1989. A year later Ginetti was murdered in a dramatic case that wasn’t solved for years.
Thiemer went on to build CW Agencies into a multinational conglomerate that included Telco Management, European Lottery Guild, Canadian Overseas Marketing, Continental Mail Processing and other subsidiaries that controlled the sale and distribution of lottery chances to many countries. He died in 2008 of liver failure.
Telco operated out of a nondescript two-storey building at 2215 Yukon St., two blocks from where CW Agencies was located at 2020 Yukon for many years. After Thiemer’s death the directors of the company amalgamated the operations at the Telco site. According to a 2012 wrongful dismissal lawsuit, the company’s main asset was a database of 800,000 client names and their credit card numbers.
Both Telco Management and CW Agencies are run by Frank Cerney, whose father Frank W. Cerney was a stockbroker who once worked with Ginetti. Calls to Telco for comment were not returned. Attempts to contact Cerney through the company’s litigation lawyers were unsuccessful.
It is unclear who today owns Telco and CW Agencies; corporate records show Cerney, 60, as the president and CEO, and he is listed on a number of Internet management-tracking sites as the principal operator.
Employee records obtained by The Vancouver Sun indicate Telco operated departments that sold to Indian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and English residents. A list of 96 employees also show that almost all used telephone aliases to disguise their identities. Only a handful of employees used their real names.
By all accounts Telco Management appeared to have no recent dealings with law enforcement agencies about the reselling of lottery tickets. The Vancouver Police Department, whose headquarters are a block away, said the shutdown of the company was not triggered by any investigation by it. The Lower Mainland Better Business Bureau also says Telco had an “A-plus” rating, meaning it had no outstanding complaints.
But its parent company CW Agencies was part of an industry of lottery ticket telemarketing companies that in the 1990s used high-pressure sales tactics and capitalized on loopholes in Canadian and U.S. laws to market tickets or lottery “chances” to unsuspecting Americans.
It was the subject of a series of investigative stories by The Vancouver Sun, which went on to expose serious legal and multi-jurisdictional problems among other lottery ticket resellers, some of whom went on to serve time in U.S. prisons. In the early years, CW Agencies’ predecessor, Can Win was raided by police for operating a boiler room, but it re-emerged as a quasi-legal company that tried to stay on the right side of Canadian laws while sometimes running into trouble with U.S. authorities.
At one point Thiemer unsuccessfully lobbied the B.C. government to legitimize the reselling of B.C. lottery tickets. At the time several other shady lottery ticket resellers, including James Blair Down and Alvin Moss, quickly built companies that targeted elderly Americans and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit sales.
Both Down and Moss were later jailed in the U.S. after their extensive operations in Barbados and elsewhere were raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Thiemer stopped selling into the U.S., which has strict laws governing the sale, transport and mail of lottery materials. Instead, he concentrated on efforts to legitimize the resale of lotteries and the selling of syndicate lottery chances to any country where it wasn’t expressly illegal.
In 2008 Thiemer restarted selling European Lottery Guild products in the United Kingdom after he was granted permission to sell certain products.
In 2012, after Thiemer’s estate was settled for $20 million, the company lost a wrongful dismissal suit against a former vice-president, Vito Nardulli. It was ordered to pay more than $1 million to Nardulli.
jef...@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/sunciviclee
http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/vancouver-lottery-telemarketing-company-shuts-leaving-hundreds-out-of-work-just-before-christmas
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vancouver’s starnet communications
Hosenball, M. (1999, October 18). Sex, bets, and bikers: Vancouver’s starnet communications was a high-flier until a police raid spooked investors. Newsweek, pp. 50-51.
OVERVIEW
In the early 1990s, Ken Lelek and friend Lloyd Robinson ran an agency which booked strippers for nightclubs. As they talked with Paul Giles and some other friends, they realized they could make a whole lot of money "selling sex on the Internet." Their new Web sites included Sizzle.com, Chisel.com and Redlight.com—featuring "live strip shows and all manner of hardcore pornography." Soon it bragged of customers "in more than 60 countries."
These entrepreneurs realized how much money betting could bring in.
By 1997…online customers could enter the cybercasino and play blackjacks or craps, or put down wagers on college and professional sports. The company enlisted sports celebrities, including former heavy-weight boxing champion Larry Holmes, to endorse its gambling sites.
Profits soared. Starnet’s reveneus for fiscal 1999 totaled $9.7 million. (Its stock soared) from 37.5 cents November (1998) to $29. by July (1999). At its peak, Starnet’s paper value neared $900 million.
But just as its success was being heralded in Vancouver, Canada and elsewhere—and as the company was applying for membership in the Nasdaq stock market—Canadian police swooped into its offices. It happened at dawn in August 1999, after an 18-month investigation.
Pornography on the Internet is not illegal. But it was the role of the Canadian Hell’s Angels, a biker group considered the area’s worst criminal gang, that turned the police in this direction. Although Lloyd Johnson was never an official part of Starnet, he is a leader in the bikers and has provided strippers for Starnet’s live Internet shows. More important, Project Enigma, as the police probe was termed was searching out illegal gambling. In both Canada and the U.S. providing gambling services without a license is illegal. And Starnet did not have a license. Moreover, graphic depictions of sado-masochism violates Canadian anti-obscenity laws.
News of the police raid caused Starnet’s stock to crash to single digits:
(Starnet’s) president, Paul Giles, has moved the company’s headquarters to the Caribbean haven of Antigua, outside the reach of Canadian and American regulators. That may give Starnet a brief respite from the prying eyes of the law, but the stakes for the mushrooming Internet gambling industry just got a lot higher.
http://www.urbanministry.org/wiki/vancouver%E2%80%99s-starnet-communications
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://www.google.ca/search?source=hp&q=Lloyd+Robinson+Hell%27s+Angels&oq=Lloyd+Robinson+Hell%27s+Angels&gs_l=psy-ab.3...2642.18773.0.19303.30.29.0.0.0.0.177.3060.8j19.28.0.dummy_maps_web_fallback...0...1.1.64.psy-ab..2.15.1771.6..0j35i39k1j0i67k1j0i131k1j0i10k1.109.3ElufaWPMLg for more info about Lloyd Robinson and the HAMC.
Billy Miller
Billy Miller, 54, a former Hells Angels biker, has been sentenced to 15 months imprisonment for participating in the bookmaking operations of a criminal organization, a sophisticated sports-betting enterprise known as Platinum Sports Book. (Sun files)
A former Hells Angels biker was sentenced to 15 months behind bars for his “leadership role” in the “huge” criminal gambling organization that prompted a massive police raid on a lavish 2013 Super Bowl party.
“Platinum is a large and sophisticated criminal organization that had as its main purpose...bookmaking,” Justice Michael Brown said as he passed sentence Thursday on Billy Miller.
The 54-year-old former head of the North Toronto chapter of the Hells Angels was convicted earlier this year of participating in the bookmaking operations of a criminal organization, Platinum Sports Book. Platinum is a sophisticated sports-betting enterprise police had alleged was linked to biker gangs and the Italian Mafia.
Platinum ran a website off servers in Costa Rica that took bets from thousands of gamblers or “players” across Southern Ontario on sports ranging from horse racing, to college football, to the NFL.
Miller, who wasn’t the head of Platinum, helped organize that huge Super Bowl party with more than 2,300 guests, court heard.
“There’s no direct evidence that Miller received cash or made any profit from Platinum, but it was an organization engaged in bookmaking involving extremely large sums of money,” said Brown.
Miller wasn’t involved in any violence or threats of violence in his six-month stint at Platinum, which ended in March 2013, said Brown.
Police executed a raid with hundreds of officers at the 2013 Super Bowl party inside a banquet hall north of Toronto. Miller and five others were arrested as the 2,300 party guests watched.
Ultimately, dozens more people were charged and officers seized $4.6 million in cash, claiming Platinum had revenues of more than $100 million.
Miller, 54, was acquitted on an extortion charge on March 17 but convicted of bookmaking for the benefit of criminal organization.
Crown attorney Matthew Bloch asked Brown to impose a sentence of two years less a day against Miller, who now mostly lives in the Dominican Republic.
Miller’s lawyer Paula Rochman said his client should receive a suspended sentence, a substantial fine or, at the most, six months in jail.
Miller, who has an extensive but dated criminal record for weapons and gaming-related charges, hasn’t had a conviction since 2002, said Brown.
There was no evidence at Miller’s trial to tie him or Platinum to either the Mafia or the Hells Angels.
spaz...@postmedia.com
http://www.torontosun.com/2017/09/30/former-outlaw-biker-jailed-for-bookmaking
============================================================================Hell's Angels are frequently gamblers themselves and often very superstitious. They have been involved in gambling operations before including paying twice the value to scratch ticket winners in order to launder their illegal profits in Quebec. CW Agencies and Starnet were both engaged in shady quasi legal gambling and both had links to Red And White.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ICW Agencies is a company claimed to be owned by the Mafia and the Hell's
Angels. Mike Hillman, a former federal Liberal vice-president and still
active with the party in BC was linked to it and was forced to leave the
Hedy Fry campaign because the company was being investigated for money
laundering in the US.
ompany Profile
Updated: 30-APR-07
C-W Agencies Inc.
<http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/merc-compint-0001317512-C-W-Agencies-Inc.html>
International Private company
2020 Yukon St., Vancouver, BC, Canada
(604)8713400, (604)8713434 fax,
Primary SIC: Mail Order Houses, Primary NAICS: Mail-Order Houses
ebsite: www.lotteries.com <http://www.lotteries.com/>
in...@lotteries.com
dchamb...@c-wgroup.com <mailto:dchamb...@c-wgroup.com>
========================================================= Path:
g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!not-for-mail From:
yardle...@yahoo.ca (Michael Yardley) Newsgroups: rec.gambling.craps
Subject: Re: Credit card issuers for online gaming deposits? Date: 5 Dec
2004 12:38:43 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Lines: 10
Message-ID: <858bd3a9.04120...@posting.google.com> References:
<9sWdnXmQVp0...@comcast.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.53.189.3
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding:
8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1102279123 7030 127.0.0.1 (5 Dec 2004
20:38:43 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups...@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date:
Sun, 5 Dec 2004 20:38:43 +0000 (UTC) I work telemarketing selling lottery
tickets for sometime at CW Agencies in Vancouver Canada and we got credit
cards all the time over the phone. You have to be careful on the net as
many of the Casino's on line are in-fact run by criminals, it is not a go
idea to use one on the net. On the phone you are surprising OK. When I
found out that CW Agencies was funded by the Italian Mafia to lauder money
I quit. It has been in business for 20 years and you pay six time's what
the lottery tickets are worth. The winners they always paid though. El
Gordo is the best one. Back to craps. They operate Right next to the Police
station.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
(They have sinced moved to the Yukon St address.) Michael Yardley
is a typical failed immigrant fraudster. An alcoholic meth head and a
ABOMINATION who supplements his welfare with prostitution. Fired from
London Drugs and a coffee shop of all places. He lives in BC Housing and
should be deported. Has been known to be involved in fraud and is a
racist. He is a liar and criminal and a total idiot who refuses to work. He
was born in England and after failing there moved to Canada. He is
frequently cyberbullied and posts off-topic nonsense to ngs then complains
about being cyberbullied and trolls. He will then announce he is leaving
the ng for good only to return even dumber and out of touch as ever. He
sometimes gets pimped out as a ticket scalper
<http://www.jlaforums.com/viewtopic.php?p=7824303>. Since he is involved
in fraud anyone interested in hockey tickets or lottery tickets should buy
elsewhere. I wonder if he reports his scalping income to the housing
authorities? Last known address: MICHAEL YARDLEY #123-5895 Kincaid
Street Burnaby BC V5G 4H9 Phone Number: 604-294-6071 This housing
project is run by the New Chelsea Society. Yardley should be deported and
his unit given to a nice old lady or perhaps a senior couple looking for a
better neighbourhood to live in. Let the New Chelsea Society 101-3640
Victoria Drive Vancouver, BC V5N 5P1 604-874-6255 Fax:
604-874-6250 ad...@newchelsea.ca Web: www.newchelsea.ca
<http://www.newchelsea.ca/> know what you think of Michael Yardley. He is
wasting tax payer money. He has claimed to have drank beer at the Hell's
Angels clubhouse and other ppl have claimed that HA has an ownership stake
in CW Agencies. Mike Hillman was connected to C-W Agencies when it
was investigated by US authorities. He was forced to resign as Dr. Hedy
Fry's campaign manager a decade ago when the Vancouver Sun revealed his
criminal associations. She denied any knowledge as per usual and is
currently the Liberal MP for Vancouver-Centre. Hillman is still active with
the Liberals most recently with the attempt by Wendy Yuan to win the
Liberal nomination for Vancouver-Kingsway. Two women of colour with high
profiles in the Liberal Party both with close links to ppl known to do
business dealings with organized crime. No wonder David Emerson thinks he
has a chance of getting re-elected. I didn't think he had any hope of it.
Hillman has a history of political dirty tricks and associations with
organized crime so why the Liberal Party and Wendy Yuan don't get rid of
him is beyond me. Why hasn't the BCLC shut down CW Agencies and others
like it. Lottery scamming and proper procedures not being followed by the
British Columbia Lottery Corporation was revealed by the Vancouver Sun and
other media outlets recently. John Les the Solicitor-General has promised
to restore public confidence in the lottery system and he should go after
companies like CW Agencies. Anyone have any info about CW
agencies? Room 236
Parliament Buildings
Victoria, BC V8V 1X4
Tel: (250) 356-7717
Fax: (250) 356-8270
Email: john.l...@leg.bc.ca <mailto:john.l...@leg.bc.ca>
Mike Yardley moved back to England after I moved into the building next to his in Burnaby. Last I heard he was proud of himself for working 7 days a week as a cab driver in London.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/CW$20Agencies/rec.gambling.lottery/sv8mfkJdni0/DyMHmHKEUwAJ
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Court settles estate of Vancouver man who made $100 million a year
reselling lottery tickets
By NEAL HALL, Vancouver SunMay 6, 2012
8
Almost four years after his death, the $20-million estate of Vancouver
businessman Randy Thiemer has finally been wrapped up in court.
Thiemer started a company named Can Win, which resold Canadian lottery
tickets to foreigners.
He got the idea after seeing an ad in a Vancouver newspaper offering
Irish Sweepstakes tickets.
“It started at his kitchen table and progressed to a $100-million-a-
year business,” recalled Vito Nardulli, who worked for almost 25 years
for Thiemer and was former vice-president of operations of the
company, C-W Agencies.
In the company’s early days, Vancouver police officers who showed up
at Can Win’s offices, then located at 319 West Pender, found a bag of
cash they were planning to seize.
“The bag was just sitting there while police were looking around,”
recalled Nardulli.
Thiemer whispered something to his business partner at the time, Ray
Ginnetti, who quickly left the office, he said.
“Randy opened the window and dropped the bag out the window, and
Ginnetti was waiting on the street below and caught it,” Nardulli
recalled.
“Back when I started, there were only four employees,” he added.
C-W Agencies now employs about 250 people and is almost across the
street from the police station on Cambie St.
The operation also has a related company in Europe called the European
Lottery Guild.
Nardulli eventually became vice-president of operations and was making
$150,000 a year but was fired in 2009 after Thiemer’s death.
He filed a wrongful dismissal suit, which remains unresolved; he is
seeking more than $1 million, including profit sharing he claims he is
owed.
Thiemer, who died Aug. 7, 2008, founded the company in 1981. He had
bought out his former business partner, Ginnetti, for $5 million in
1989.
Ginnetti, a former Vancouver stockbroker who was buddies with some
Hells Angels members, was shot to death in 1990.
The man who arranged the $30,000 contract killing, a former Hells
Angels enforcer named Roger Daggitt, was shot three times in the head
in 1992 while having a beer in the Turf Hotel in Surrey.
A Montreal hitman was later convicted of Daggitt’s murder.
“Randy was brilliant,” Nardulli said. “He was also a workaholic.
Sometimes he worked up to 20 hours a day.”
He said the company had a few setbacks, including a decision by the
B.C. government in 1993 that C-W Agencies and other lottery ticket
resellers couldn’t buy and sell B.C. lottery tickets.
“We stopped selling Canadian tickets altogether,” Nardulli said. “The
operation shifted to Europe.”
The company opened offices in London, Liverpool and Amsterdam, which
still exist today.
Another setback was a $500,000 fine imposed in 1999 by a U.S. Federal
Court.
C-W Agencies pleaded guilty during the court proceedings in Seattle
and Thiemer agreed to never again market lottery products to U.S.
residents, and not participate for five years in any kind of marketing
aimed at Americans through the mail or Internet.
“We stopped selling to Americans after that,” Nardulli said.
C-W Agencies had about 3.5-million customers when he left the company.
Nardulli said the operations are a lot more automated now than the
early days, when Thiemer employed people to stuff tickets in envelopes
and get them to the post office and mailed before each lottery draw.
“Some days you would get 1,000 pieces of mail, but some days it was
10,000,” Nardulli recalled. “He believed in a 24-hour turnaround.”
He recalled Thiemer led the jet-set lifestyle and had a beautiful home
in Shaughnessy, which was decorated with $100,000 Persian rugs,
Japanese art and Asian jade.
Thiemer spent his final years travelling the world looking for a liver
replacement, which never came.
He tried the U.S., then a private clinic in London, England, where he
spent a year waiting. “He had a 5,000 square foot apartment at
Regent’s Park,” that cost about $35,000 Cdn a week.
Thiemer eventually got fed up waiting and returned home to Vancouver.
A replacement liver was eventually found in Monterrey, Mexico, for $1
million.
But by the time Thiemer flew to Mexico, he wasn’t in good enough shape
to survive the operation, his friend recalled. Thiemer died in Mexico.
The court judgment sorted out the complexities of Thiemer’s bequests,
which divided his $20-million estate into 16 parts and left a portion
to his parents, Phil and Arlene Thiemer; his brother, Reid Phillip
Thiemer; his sister, Denny Shelley Byers; his niece and three nephews.
He left $500,00 to his accountant, Brian Gardiner, and also bequeathed
money to Doctors Without Borders.
The rest of his estate was left in a spousal trust to his common-law
wife, Gigi Christine Schlappner, with the instruction to “maintain
Christie according to her station in life and in the style to which
she has been accustomed ...”
The full judgment in online: http://bit.ly/IMppVu
nh...@vancouversun.com
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
Read more:
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Court+settles+estate+Vancouver+made+million+year+reselling+lottery+tickets/6575746/story.html#ixzz1uFAbySBM
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Michael Yardley used to work for CW Agencies
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/CW$20Agencies/van.general/lSp68zGEqqM/AaNqR-E_KCQJ
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A telemarketing company in Vancouver that has sold foreign and Canadian lotteries for more than 20 years shut down abruptly Thursday, leaving up to 200 people unemployed.
Telemarketers showing up at the doors of Telco Management on Yukon Street found their electronic passes disabled and the building shuttered. Employees told reporters that no one warned them the operation was shutting down or to not come to work.
Telco is connected to CW Agencies, one of the only resellers of European, Australian and Atlantic Canada lottery tickets to have escaped significant penalties from U.S. investigators, who in the 1990s were battling an entrenched illegal lottery ticket industry in B.C. that targeted elderly Americans.
The employees have already turned to the provincial Labour Standards Branch for help in getting severance and holiday backpay.
Thursday’s shutdown is the latest wrinkle in a conglomerate of companies that Randy Thiemer started in the 1980s under the name Can Win with Ray Ginetti, a former stockbroker and Hells Angel associate. Thiemer bought out Ginetti in 1989. A year later Ginetti was murdered in a dramatic case that wasn’t solved for years.
Thiemer went on to build CW Agencies into a multinational conglomerate that included Telco Management, European Lottery Guild, Canadian Overseas Marketing, Continental Mail Processing and other subsidiaries that controlled the sale and distribution of lottery chances to many countries. He died in 2008 of liver failure.
Telco operated out of a nondescript two-storey building at 2215 Yukon St., two blocks from where CW Agencies was located at 2020 Yukon for many years. After Thiemer’s death the directors of the company amalgamated the operations at the Telco site. According to a 2012 wrongful dismissal lawsuit, the company’s main asset was a database of 800,000 client names and their credit card numbers.
Both Telco Management and CW Agencies are run by Frank Cerney, whose father Frank W. Cerney was a stockbroker who once worked with Ginetti. Calls to Telco for comment were not returned. Attempts to contact Cerney through the company’s litigation lawyers were unsuccessful.
It is unclear who today owns Telco and CW Agencies; corporate records show Cerney, 60, as the president and CEO, and he is listed on a number of Internet management-tracking sites as the principal operator.
Employee records obtained by The Vancouver Sun indicate Telco operated departments that sold to Indian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and English residents. A list of 96 employees also show that almost all used telephone aliases to disguise their identities. Only a handful of employees used their real names.
By all accounts Telco Management appeared to have no recent dealings with law enforcement agencies about the reselling of lottery tickets. The Vancouver Police Department, whose headquarters are a block away, said the shutdown of the company was not triggered by any investigation by it. The Lower Mainland Better Business Bureau also says Telco had an “A-plus” rating, meaning it had no outstanding complaints.
But its parent company CW Agencies was part of an industry of lottery ticket telemarketing companies that in the 1990s used high-pressure sales tactics and capitalized on loopholes in Canadian and U.S. laws to market tickets or lottery “chances” to unsuspecting Americans.
It was the subject of a series of investigative stories by The Vancouver Sun, which went on to expose serious legal and multi-jurisdictional problems among other lottery ticket resellers, some of whom went on to serve time in U.S. prisons. In the early years, CW Agencies’ predecessor, Can Win was raided by police for operating a boiler room, but it re-emerged as a quasi-legal company that tried to stay on the right side of Canadian laws while sometimes running into trouble with U.S. authorities.
At one point Thiemer unsuccessfully lobbied the B.C. government to legitimize the reselling of B.C. lottery tickets. At the time several other shady lottery ticket resellers, including James Blair Down and Alvin Moss, quickly built companies that targeted elderly Americans and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit sales.
Both Down and Moss were later jailed in the U.S. after their extensive operations in Barbados and elsewhere were raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Thiemer stopped selling into the U.S., which has strict laws governing the sale, transport and mail of lottery materials. Instead, he concentrated on efforts to legitimize the resale of lotteries and the selling of syndicate lottery chances to any country where it wasn’t expressly illegal.
In 2008 Thiemer restarted selling European Lottery Guild products in the United Kingdom after he was granted permission to sell certain products.
In 2012, after Thiemer’s estate was settled for $20 million, the company lost a wrongful dismissal suit against a former vice-president, Vito Nardulli. It was ordered to pay more than $1 million to Nardulli.
jef...@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/sunciviclee
http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/vancouver-lottery-telemarketing-company-shuts-leaving-hundreds-out-of-work-just-before-christmas
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Vancouver’s starnet communications
Hosenball, M. (1999, October 18). Sex, bets, and bikers: Vancouver’s starnet communications was a high-flier until a police raid spooked investors. Newsweek, pp. 50-51.
OVERVIEW
In the early 1990s, Ken Lelek and friend Lloyd Robinson ran an agency which booked strippers for nightclubs. As they talked with Paul Giles and some other friends, they realized they could make a whole lot of money "selling sex on the Internet." Their new Web sites included Sizzle.com, Chisel.com and Redlight.com—featuring "live strip shows and all manner of hardcore pornography." Soon it bragged of customers "in more than 60 countries."
These entrepreneurs realized how much money betting could bring in.
By 1997…online customers could enter the cybercasino and play blackjacks or craps, or put down wagers on college and professional sports. The company enlisted sports celebrities, including former heavy-weight boxing champion Larry Holmes, to endorse its gambling sites.
Profits soared. Starnet’s reveneus for fiscal 1999 totaled $9.7 million. (Its stock soared) from 37.5 cents November (1998) to $29. by July (1999). At its peak, Starnet’s paper value neared $900 million.
But just as its success was being heralded in Vancouver, Canada and elsewhere—and as the company was applying for membership in the Nasdaq stock market—Canadian police swooped into its offices. It happened at dawn in August 1999, after an 18-month investigation.
Pornography on the Internet is not illegal. But it was the role of the Canadian Hell’s Angels, a biker group considered the area’s worst criminal gang, that turned the police in this direction. Although Lloyd Johnson was never an official part of Starnet, he is a leader in the bikers and has provided strippers for Starnet’s live Internet shows. More important, Project Enigma, as the police probe was termed was searching out illegal gambling. In both Canada and the U.S. providing gambling services without a license is illegal. And Starnet did not have a license. Moreover, graphic depictions of sado-masochism violates Canadian anti-obscenity laws.
News of the police raid caused Starnet’s stock to crash to single digits:
(Starnet’s) president, Paul Giles, has moved the company’s headquarters to the Caribbean haven of Antigua, outside the reach of Canadian and American regulators. That may give Starnet a brief respite from the prying eyes of the law, but the stakes for the mushrooming Internet gambling industry just got a lot higher.
http://www.urbanministry.org/wiki/vancouver%E2%80%99s-starnet-communications
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https://www.google.ca/search?source=hp&q=Lloyd+Robinson+Hell%27s+Angels&oq=Lloyd+Robinson+Hell%27s+Angels&gs_l=psy-ab.3...2642.18773.0.19303.30.29.0.0.0.0.177.3060.8j19.28.0.dummy_maps_web_fallback...0...1.1.64.psy-ab..2.15.1771.6..0j35i39k1j0i67k1j0i131k1j0i10k1.109.3ElufaWPMLg for more info about Lloyd Robinson and the HAMC.
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