John Campos (pictured), one of 11 people charged in the Black Friday indictments, was sentenced to three months in jail Wednesday. Campos, who was Vice Chairman of the Board and part-owner of SunFirst Bank in Utah, was originally charged six felony counts which included unlawful gambling and money laundering charges, but eventually pleaded guilty to just a single misdemeanor.In his position at SunFirst, Campos, 59, allowed his bank to be used as a payment processor for online gambling transactions. While the prosecution believed that he knew this was illegal, part of the reason why they agreed to let Campos face just one misdemeanor charge is that the defense was going to argue that Campos had received legal advice that what he was doing was not against the law.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Arlo Devlin-Brown told U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in March, “There would be a risk that a jury on that basis could have a problem.”
Kaplan was originally strongly against the plea agreement, asking the prosecution at the time, “You’re basically walking away?” A projected sentence of just six months was, in Kaplan’s opinion, too light for what Campos did. Part of the reason why he eventually accepted the deal was because the sentencing guidelines for the felonies would have been about the same as for the single misdemeanor.A Forbes article back in March concerning Campos' plea bargain put the deal in context: "The fact that Federal prosecutors agreed to let Campos plead to a misdemeanor indicates that they wanted to avoid a trial that could have had wide-reaching consequences and impacted the Government's case against the indicted founders of PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker."
Campos is also forbidden from working for financial institutions for the rest of his life.
The news of the sentencing has so far gone largely unnoticed in the poker community. With the World Series of Poker in full swing, most of the attention of the industry is focused on Las Vegas, not the halls of justice. The poker community is much more interested in the likes of Full Tilt's Chris Ferguson (pictured), Ray Bitar, and Howard Lederer and is much more concerned about the status of a possible purchase of that site along with the possibility of seeing millions of dollars returned to players.On Two Plus Two, poster “Grasshopp3r” opined simply, “Harsh sentence for [Campos] after he pled down from the felonies to a misdemeanor.”
But fellow Two Plus Two member “sba9630” had the opposite opinion: “I get what you're saying, but I think most people would consider doing three months' time on a misdemeanor when originally charged with six felonies that carried up to a maximum of 45 years to be a very good deal.”
“I'd also like to take this moment to applaud the DOJ/SDNY,” "sba9630" wrote. “Millions of dollars, thousands of man hours over the course of the better part of a decade, agents investigating online poker instead of minor issues like terrorism and billions of dollars in white collar crimes.”
We'll keep you posted on the latest fallout from Black Friday.
