Friday, July 12, 2002 | 4:49 a.m.
BILLY WALTERS has been a betting man most of his life.
In the past two decades his prolific sports wagering has intrigued the gambling world. It also has attracted the attention of law enforcement authorities.
Walters, 55, who grew up in a Louisville, Ky., hustling pool, has parlayed his betting instincts into a Las Vegas golf course empire and become a wealthy mover and shaker who contributes regularly to local charities and political campaigns.
He has built a comfortable life here. But his comfort is about to be disturbed by the Nevada attorney general's office, which wants to revive a 4-year-old money-laundering indictment against him stemming from his gambling activities.
FBI agents first noticed Walters in 1985 when they got wind of his "Computer Group" gambling operation, which used computer programs and phone banks to place wagers on football games in Las Vegas and all over the country. Sometimes the group would bet so heavily at local sports books that the betting line would change.
Agents spent five years trying to figure out whether Walters was a bookmaker. Eventually they concluded he wasn't. But they still indicted him in 1990 under federal gambling statutes created for bookmakers. They charged him with running an illegal gambling operation across state lines.
A year later, however, Walters was acquitted, and agents moved on to other cases.
In 1996 New York detectives learned through wiretaps on illegal bookmakers there that the bookmakers were doing business with Walters and some of his associates. The detectives surmised that the bookmakers were laying off bets with Walters to balance their books. They informed Metro Police of the development, and local detectives gathered enough evidence to conduct a court-approved raid on Walters' operation, seizing computers, phone banks and $2.7 million in cash.
Local intelligence cops later decided that Walters wasn't doing any bookmaking himself, but they indicted him in April 1998 on charges of laundering money that was bet illegally with the New York bookmakers.
Several months after the indictment was returned, District Judge Donald Mosley dismissed it, saying prosecutors did not give Walters a chance to refute some of the evidence presented to the grand jury. The indictment, however, was reinstated by the Nevada Supreme Court in February 1999.
In the meantime the attorney general's office had obtained a second money-laundering indictment against Walters, in October 1998. That indictment was dismissed by Mosley two months later.
Mosley found that prosecutors did not present sufficient evidence in the indictment that Walters had committed the crime of money laundering. The judge concluded that prosecutors merely had shown that Walters was depositing proceeds from his wagers into safety deposit boxes at local casinos, a perfectly legal act that most sports bettors do.
Prosecutors appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court.
In November 1999 they filed a third indictment against Walters correcting the defective wording from the second indictment to make it conform better to the money-laundering statutes.
But in October 2000 Chief District Judge Mark Gibbons tossed out the third indictment after concluding the evidence against Walters was "marginal" at best. Gibbons also found that prosecutors had inflamed the indicting grand jury by allowing a New York police detective to wrongly imply that Walters was linked to the mob.
The Supreme Court in the meantime had dismissed the appeal of the second indictment, saying it didn't need to hear the case because prosecutors had changed the defective language in the third indictment. The high court later upheld the dismissal of the third indictment.
Now the attorney general's office, in an effort that Walters believes has the smell of obsession, wants to press ahead with the first indictment.
But the office may have a tough road ahead preserving the legality of the case.
The same defective wording Mosley found fault with in the second indictment remains in the first indictment.
Mosley dismissed the first indictment in 1998 on the grand jury deficiencies before defense lawyers had a chance to cite the troubles with the wording of the indictment. So the Supreme Court never considered that issue when it reversed the judge and reinstated the case.
Defense lawyers plan to raise the issue this time when they challenge the first indictment.
Gerald Gardner, the attorney general's top criminal deputy, says his office is ready to tangle with Walters, who has fought the charges every step of the way. He says the office just wants a chance to take the case to trial.
So do intelligence detectives.
"We can't give up on something we know we're right on," says one cop associated with the case. "We can't send a message to people that if you have enough money and connections, and you wait long enough, you're going to win."
But Walters, as he has said before, counters: "I don't think it's going to be much trouble to prove to people there's vindictiveness on the part of the attorney general."
He's betting he'll prevail in the end -- again.
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