The Wretched Case of Glen Cobb

In his excellent book, “The Law for Gamblers”, Las Vegas attorney Bob Nersesian mentions briefly at the end of the book the case of a sports bettor named Glen Cobb. I was unfamiliar with this case as I do not live in Vegas. But I’m hoping some here may have the scoop on it.

Nersesian paints a scene of a sports bettor who ostensibly can’t get enough action down in town. So he resorts to placing supplementary bets with offshore sites, who are unlicensed in the states they face and are therefore in violation of the Wire Act.

Here swoop in the .gov jackboots like sick vultures, stealing $13.5M in cash and investments, including inside a trust¹. It looks like the thugs attempted to clean out everything the family had, including the property of Cobb's retired elderly parents. This is despite the fact that it apparently wasn't even contested by any of the fedpigs that the majority of the Cobb family's life savings didn't come from transactions involving putative Wire Act violations. The three-letter pigs also used a secret seal forfeiture proceeding (designed to combat — wait for it — drug trafficking and terrorism) where they stole all the Cobbs' earthly possessions, and the only way the family discovered it is when they tried to log into Schwab and got "There's no account registered under that username".

The worst part is, at least the way Nersesian phrases it, Cobb was involved exclusively in placing bets as a customer. This was the "Wire Act violation" and the predicate "crime" that USDA MacGyver engineered from legal tin foil.

So we have a professional gambler who places a few bets with our Costa Rican friends, the Three Letter Pigs smell a fist-stretched technical violation of a decrepit law meant to jail the Gemini Lounge crew, and they reach in and steal the fruits of an entire family's lifelong labor, including as far as we can tell the retirement accounts of octogenarian parents, perhaps leaving them in ruinous destitution.

I'll word this carefully, but where I'm from, that's WAY past red lines that serious men, many of them ex-mil, have set in stone. Any "law enforcement" agency outside utterly corrupt jurisdictions where "even the cops aren't afraid to bury you in the desert out here" should be cautioned in the extreme about that level of igniting the Constitution and dragging it through the mud at the all-consuming expense of an innocent man's family.

And I know a few readers here might feel their hackles raising as the above story unfolds, reminding them perhaps of someone they might know. I sometimes bet with our compadres in the real San Jose. Is that grounds for the local IRS striver to zero out my 401k?

These are ire-inspiring questions of the kind that can no-sht impel former taxpayers to buy a one-way ticket to Switzerland and throw their passport in the circle fireplace on the last ski run.

But is that what really happened? Nersesian, with excellent cause, has a jaded eye when examining casino security and the bungling juristic incompetence of local law enforcement. But was Cobb really just another gambler who, like probably half of readers here, made offshore wagers using means that everything's-illegal laws like structuring could be used to paint as criminal activity? A few things give doubt.

First, from the crumbs of the actual proceedings available online, it appears Cobb was picked up talking on wiretaps to a "known illegal gambler" in NY. That could easily be an innocuous friendship. But the courts allowed the wiretaps as evidence, which purportedly involved the settling of gambling debts. That wouldn't be normal activity for a mere customer.

Second, Cobb had an LLC called Lycur that was somehow involved in the operation to an extent that the company itself was indicted and subject to forfeiture. Many gamblers use LLCs. But this one was indicted for "transmission of illegal wagering information". But that could just be a greedhead DA with a 50-foot wingspan reaching for the moon.

Third, and most substantively, one of the transcripts documents an apparently uncontested episode where a large sum of cash was placed into a public trashcan on the street in view of investigating agents. The cash was later extricated from the trash and taken to who knows where. I'm no fan of structuring or other carte-blanche financial crimes. But normal taxpaying citizens don't usually dump a milly in cash into a sidewalk trashcan and walk away. I doubt anyone here has done so either.

Fourth, his parents were indicted. That could again be DA Chimp Arms reaching 25 feet into the poisoned tree as leverage for the steal — "we'll keep $4m and you and grandma avoid 20 years in Bloody Beaumont", which is what actually happened — but you don't hear about even grandstanding federal prosecutors pretext charging totally innocent seniors who they know full well will probably leave jail in a body bag 10 days after booking.

So WTF happened here? Was Glen Cobb just a gambler who got highway robbed like a Wells Fargo coach? Is Nevada so congenitally mule-fked that it hasn't progressed since the days when outlaws ran the mining camps? Or was Cobb dancing on lines that everyone in this business should know not to cross without a heavyweight exit strategy?

Any info would be greatly appreciated as there's very little of substance online about this case. Thanks.

1) This is bad stuff as nonrevocable trusts have evolved over centuries in facilitation of capitalism as we know it. Nuking faith in basic protective elements of the financial system is a very bad idea, as the smoldering remnants of countless third-world economies have shown