Home / Poker News September 2013 / Abe Mosseri Allowed to Play Poker in Vegas
Abe Mosseri Allowed to Play Poker in Vegas
Posted by: James Carter. - Sun, 2013-09-15 06:47
Poker professional Abe Mosseri isn’t in a particularly enviable spot right now. Involved in a massive money-laundering case, Mosseri is currently out on bail. He is being accused of having taken part in an organized crime ring, which had two Russian-US organized crime syndicates launder around $100 million, money originally obtained from illegal online sports gambling. Although Mosseri and a handful of other poker players have made headlines back when the indictments were handed out, they slowly faded away from the media spotlight. Not much could be heard about the case for a while, until the other day when Mosseri filed a request to a federal judge, seeking permission to
play poker in Las Vegas. He is in fact not the only one involved in the case to have made such a request. Lawyers representing the indicted players have argued that their clients needed to make regular trips to various brick and mortar casinos through the country to exercise their profession and to make a living.
According to Michael Bachner, Mosseri’s attorney, his client is only seeking to be allowed to engage in a completely legal activity, which he has been doing for years and years. There was little opposition on the part of the prosecutors, so Mosseri was eventually allowed to travel to Vegas to make money the way he could. The decision wasn’t without a precedent either: about a month ago, Justin Smith, another high-profile poker professional, decided to plead guilty, forfeiting some $500k to the Government, he was allowed to continue his poker playing ways until his sentencing.
According to specialists, the relatively surprising decisions (which they were indeed, considering the circumstances) can be attributed to long-decried ambiguities in the gambling laws. The bottom line is that currently there doesn’t appear to be any federal law against playing poker.
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