Poker Players Alliance and director John Pappas linked to lobbying effort for SunFirst Bank on behalf of Pokerstars/Full Tilt

[haleylh]

Been catching up this morning, after driving through that Midwest blizzard most of yesterday.

Druff, the reference to "Dan Druff" in a Toilet Bowl post wasn't the greatest idea. I concur, however, that Muny's outing of you might have had a personal element to it, and it sort of works in his favor. Now he's got grounds to refuse to return to one of your podcasts and deal with any of those questions you might ask.

One more of those I'd ask references those frequent claims about their million-plus membership. I'd then ask:

"Okay, how many of those million members actually pay dues?" I have genuine interest in knowing how many of those people are real PPA donors, and not just random names scraped via a series of Stars online freerolls. I get that it was an effective way to boost some empty numbers, but the "dues paying" count would provide an accurate indication of the PPA's real size.

Based on donfairplay's find, I'd guess it to be somewhere under 10,000. Note that that's not necessarily bad. I'm just curious about what the PPA's real size is.

[Rollo Tomasi]

Been catching up this morning, after driving through that Midwest blizzard most of yesterday.

Druff, the reference to "Dan Druff" in a Toilet Bowl post wasn't the greatest idea. I concur, however, that Muny's outing of you might have had a personal element to it, and it sort of works in his favor. Now he's got grounds to refuse to return to one of your podcasts and deal with any of those questions you might ask.

One more of those I'd ask references those frequent claims about their million-plus membership. I'd then ask:

"Okay, how many of those million members actually pay dues?" I have genuine interest in knowing how many of those people are real PPA donors, and not just random names scraped via a series of Stars online freerolls. I get that it was an effective way to boost some empty numbers, but the "dues paying" count would provide an accurate indication of the PPA's real size.

Based on donfairplay's find, I'd guess it to be somewhere under 10,000. Note that that's not necessarily bad. I'm just curious about what the PPA's real size is.

did Papas and Muny ever answer the financial and other questions they were dodging

[haleylh]

Bump for advanced advertising purposes. More info coming out, including excerpts from a State of Utah investigation into resigned AG John Swallow. Stay tuned.

[Dan Druff]

[chinamaniac]

Bump for advanced advertising purposes. More info coming out, including excerpts from a State of Utah investigation into resigned AG John Swallow. Stay tuned.

John Swallow IS GOD

[haleylh]

Bump for advanced advertising purposes. More info coming out, including excerpts from a State of Utah investigation into resigned AG John Swallow. Stay tuned.

John Swallow IS GOD

LOLS. If by "IS GOD," you mean, "is one of the slimiest fucking crooks ever to rise to a state attorney's general position," then py jingo, I agree with you!
Let's see, there's... :

a) the secret push-poll paid for by Swallow's benefactors, the payday-loan industry, to discredit one of that industry's opponents. Included stuff like, "If you knew Daw once referred to Mexicans as little brown people, would you vote for him?" Swallow's campaign manager ran the secret op.

b) the hundreds of thousands in laundered campaign contributions funneled through Swallow's shell entities;

c) the manual deletion of thousands of e-mails by Swallow himself from as many as eight different electronic devices, many of which were state property;

d) the multiple weekends spent on private trips paid for by political benefactors, which went unreported as "in kind" political contributions; several vacations on Jeremy Johnson's houseboat were among them;

e) the creation of false consulting-work timelines (while he was Utah AG) to try to cover the tracks of about $23,000 in bribe money he got from Johnson;

f) the intervention by Swallow and prior AG Mark Shurtleff into a banking-mortgage case -- the case against BOA was dismissed in exchange for a redone deal for the plaintiffs, who gave tens of thousands in contributions to Swallow, but the flip side is that the state dropped its class-against BOA and stiffed thousands of possible Utah homeowners who were battling illegal foreclosures.

There's lots, lots, lots more just like that. Report said he hung a virtual "For Sale" sign on the Utah AG office door. A separate story I found last night says that of the 70 largest corporate defendants in Utah civil actions in recent years, Swallow accepted large contributions from 26 of them in a practice called "fire insurance".

He even refused to resign until the day after his pension became vested, and then he tried to bill the state another $23,000 for his claimed efforts in recovering the e-mails that he himself deleted, thousands of which he still refuses to release to investigators. He and his lawyer's latest ploy is to wave the HIPAA flag and contend that there might be confidential medical information from Utahns who contacted him, distributed among all those e-mails.

Gonna be fun watching this guy go to trial, and you can bet it's coming.

[haleylh]

A good warmup feature for this latest batch of info -- Jeremy Johnson's other bribery attempt that was directed toward Harry Reid. The story features plenty of poker tie-ins as well, plus details that $23.5K I mentioned that ended up in Utah AG John Swallow's pocket.

http://www.flushdraw.net/news/utah-c...bribe-stories/

[haleylh]

And... this report ought to shake up the old Black Friday cobwebs:

Utah Corruption Investigation: SunFirst Processing Threatened a Year Prior to Black Friday

Forewarning: This rabbit hole goes deeper still.

[haleylh]

And, as I flatly predicted in my lengthy reply to Rich yesterday over in the Lock thread, Sheldon's paid hired guns have already found the ABC News piece about the alleged Reid bribes and the online-poker backstory.

That took them what, five days? And I'm a bit surprised it took that long.

Absolutely.

Inevitable.

[Dan Druff]

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/1...into-reid-lee/

DOJ blocking the probe into Reid because... well, the DOJ is a partisan office, and Eric Holder doesn't want to go after his own party's Senate Majority Leader.

While a Republican Senator is also involved, he is a much smaller fish than Reid. Obviously this will be a disaster for the Democrats if this is proven, so Holder's office is refusing to help.

Great.

[haleylh]

The greater details of the misbegotten PPA lobbying effort, in indirect support of the SunFirst processing operation. Or not so indirect; you be the judge. I just provide the excerpts.

[BeerAndPoker]

A bit off topic but The PPA is back at it again sending emails out trying to get donations. I got this one just a bit ago which I had to screen shop clip in two parts so that is why it looks a bit weird but anyways:





I could unsubscribe my email address but I like to see when they send out this trash.

[Sanlmar]

Be funny if they took Bitcoin.

[Sanlmar]

Pappas could probably use a bowl of warm soup.

PPA is DD

Laterfag

[Dan Druff]

Yeah, looks like they're pretty much done.

I wonder what the salaries of guys like Muny look like today.

The PPA was on the online poker gravy train for over 10 years.

Was a pretty sweet job to both get paid well AND have the respect of tons of online poker players who believed you were fighting for them.

I think guys like Muny even believed they were honestly doing it to help online poker become legalized, and that might actually be true, but the money coming in was from the most special of special interests. You can't get 99% of your funding from online poker sites, and claim you're working for the people.

Now it seems Pokerstars, who was basically the sugar daddy for the last several years, has decided it's not worth the money anymore.

[Erin Micunt]

I don't know if this is even a fair criticism. But it always annoyed me how this organization had been around for over a decade and was unable to get any legislation passed but when the issues arose over the past year or so with DFS, they were able to get a signed bill in to legalize it. Maybe it has nothing to do with the PPA's ability. but to look at how fast another industry was able to get legalized while poker has been unable to for a decade speaks poorly to how effective they are/were run.

[Sanlmar]

I don't know if this is even a fair criticism. But it always annoyed me how this organization had been around for over a decade and was unable to get any legislation passed but when the issues arose over the past year or so with DFS, they were able to get a signed bill in to legalize it. Maybe it has nothing to do with the PPA's ability. but to look at how fast another industry was able to get legalized while poker has been unable to for a decade speaks poorly to how effective they are/were run.

A lot of folks cashed in some way from the poker industry. God bless.

PPW identified a gig as paid lobbyists. Were they looking out for the players who contributed? Lock Poker was the most outrageous example of their lack of evangelism and such. Not a fucking peep until PPA was challenged about their silence. Doubt they were taking Lock money but they might as well have been.

Ability? There were posts (maybe in this thread) of the PPA testifying in Congressional hearings. Cringeworthy fail. No charisma, leadership or saleslike persuasion. My recollection was of someone else blowing Muny & Pappas away - it was someone totally unexpected as I recall.

PPA just suckled at the teat of the poker sites. Nothing more.