LOS ANGELES, Feb 3 — A high-rolling Malaysian poker player accused of running an illegal World Cup betting operation out of his luxury villa at Caesars Palace may get the evidence the FBI collected against him thrown out of court.
A federal magistrate judge in Las Vegas on January 30 agreed with Phua Wei Seng and his son Darren that the Federal Bureau of Investigation used false and misleading information to obtain a search warrant for their villa and recommended that the US be barred from using contraband found during a July raid.
“The investigators’ suspicions that Phua was engaged in illegal sports betting at Caesars Palace may be borne out by the evidence recovered in the execution of the warrant,” US Magistrate Judge Peggy Leen said in a non-binding recommendation to a district judge. “However, a search warrant is never validated by what its execution recovers.”
The FBI failed to disclose in its request for a warrant that agents intentionally cut off the villa’s Internet connection and gained entry to look for evidence while posing as technical support staff, according to the recommendation.
Misleading warrant
In addition, Leen said the warrant application also misleadingly linked Phua to the occupants of another villa at Caesars who had asked for an unusually large number of computers and other equipment. Hotel employees first became suspicious that those occupants were operating an illegal gambling hub, which led to the FBI’s investigation.
In a separate report yesterday, Leen said the FBI’s ruse to gain entry to the villa by disrupting the DSL connection wasn’t illegal, even though an agent and a technician shouldn’t have entered the unit’s interior when they had been told by a butler to wait in the pantry area.
“We are currently reviewing Magistrate Judge Leen’s reports of findings and recommendations,” US Attorney Daniel Bogden in Nevada said in an e-mailed statement.
Phua, who also goes by Paul Phua, and his son are the only remaining defendants after five others from Hong Kong, China and Malaysia agreed to plead guilty.
Phua, a regular at million-dollar poker games, and the others were arrested after technicians at Caesars Palace discovered a villa set up as an apparent gambling hub, with banks of computers and monitors and three TVs switched to World Cup games.
Phua had been arrested in Macau a month earlier for allegedly operating an illegal sports gambling business there.
The case is US v. Phua 14-cr-00249, US District Court, District of Nevada (Las Vegas). — Bloomberg
