Cigars, College, Booze and the Blitz: Examining the Sports Betting Boom
So we began scouring his campaign contributions and found six donations in a single day for the maximum amount allowed under Kansas law, all from companies owned by a major Kansas real estate developer. The same real estate developer, Rob Henman, later confirmed to The Times that he had pushed for stadium provision. Mystery solved.
Our investigation of lobbying efforts in Kansas and other states was one of the articles that made up the series.
Rebecca Ruiz conducted a survey of states with legal sports betting. Can customers use credit cards to place bets? In most places the answer was yes. Have regulators reviewed and approved the ads? Most did not. Did gambling companies get into legal trouble for breaking the rules? Not always, it turns out. State regulatory watchdogs were inconsistent in enforcing their own standards, and some had no desire to punish companies that broke the law. Rebecca, Ken and Joe Drapp explore these questions in another article for the series.
Seeking to show the possible human consequences, Rebecca and Ken also spoke to people in different parts of the country who became addicted to sports betting after it was legal.
Our colleague Walt Bogdanich joined a group of journalism students from Columbia University to investigate deals made with gambling companies to promote online sports betting on their campuses, including Michigan State University, the University of Colorado Boulder and Louisiana State University Worked. When universities declined to provide finer details on these lucrative partnerships, the reporting team used laws allowing public access to records to request copies of university documents, learning firsthand that gambling how deeply the companies had entered the life of the university.
For another article, Emily Steele focused on her partnership with David Portnoy, founder of Penn Entertainment and media company Barstool Sports, a casino company. Emily learns that even though Mr. Portnoy promoted gambling to millions of his followers, he rarely, if ever, mentioned that he had previously gone bankrupt after losing $30,000 in debt and gambling.
Emily also sent a series of requests for public records. Among the thousands of pages of documents they obtained were details corroborating how Penn executives discussed their deal to take over Barstool with regulators. They also learned that in 12 of the 13 states where barstools or pens were licensed, Mr. Portnoy — who has a history of misogynistic and racist behavior — was not required to undergo a formal licensing review, a process regulatory Use it to ensure the gambling business is conducted with good character, honesty and integrity. She now reigns as one of the loudest cheerleaders in the industry.