Football pool has surprise loser

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By ELIJAH GOSIER

© St. Petersburg Times, published March 6, 2001

Fans of the National Football League are going through withdrawal. The old season is months behind, the new one is months ahead, and the XFL is hardly worth watching. So why is Jacqueline Neff worried about a football pool?

She's worried that a football pool might win her a trip to Canada. One way.

In December, Neff was a bartender at Bernie's Sports Bar in Largo. Every week, she would collect $5 and the sheet of paper with patrons' picks for the weekend's slate of football games. It's the same sheet you see floating around many offices, the one where you pick the winners and the person who has the most correct selections wins. In case of a tie, the person who comes closest to the total score for the Monday night game wins.

Maybe you've even played the game. All it takes is a sports buff with enough time and enthusiasm to make copies.

If you're like most people who have plunked down their dollar or two, you probably didn't know you were breaking the law.

Jacqueline Neff didn't either. She thought she was just doing her job.

She didn't know the $5 game that had been going on at the bar since before she started working there was anything but a harmless diversion for the patrons. For one of them each week, it meant winning a few dollars. The bar made no profit from the pool.

In February, Neff got a visit from agents of the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office and the enforcement arm of the Division of Alcoholic Beverage and Tobacco.

Their discussion reached that traumatic, numbing point where they were telling her she had the right to remain silent. Was she being arrested? Was she going to jail?

Five of the football pool sheets she had collected during the season were from undercover law enforcement officers. She was being charged with five misdemeanor counts of illegal gaming.

Once the immediate worry about jail time was dismissed -- the charges are usually handled with a notice to appear and a fine -- another concern, however remote, creeped into her head and still lingers.

"I could be deported. I'm Canadian," Neff said.

Greg Tita, a spokesman for the Sheriff's Office, said Neff probably shouldn't worry too much about deportation. He doesn't think the Immigration and Naturalization Service will get involved in her case.

When Neff, a 34-year-old with a clean record, told me about the charges, my reaction was initial disbelief that innocent, innocuous football pools -- which, of course I haven't played more than 100 times -- are against the law. That was quickly followed by disbelief that the state and county would waste money and time sending undercover agents out to bust football pools. Wouldn't their time be better spent preventing rapes, catching bank robbers, even pulling over drunk drivers?

The answer to all of that is, of course, yes, but. . . .

Tita has heard that whole "Don't you have more important things to do" argument many times and agrees that deputies do have more important things to do. That's why the Sheriff's Office doesn't go undercover to ferret out football pools -- unless someone complains. The complaint may come from a disgruntled winner who figures he didn't get the money he was due, or from a jealous competitor, Tita said.

Neither Tita nor an agent at ABT could determine the genesis of the undercover operation at Bernie's.

But, says Tita, there is a law making the pools illegal, and if someone complains that the law is being broken, the Sheriff's Office has to enforce it.

An ABT agent said undercover investigations of football pools by his agency are not unusual, though ABT gets involved only when pools are in places where alcohol is served. The Tampa Bay area has had several notable cases. In 1997, a bartender and the owners of a restaurant in Spring Hill were arrested for running a Super Bowl pool. After much media attention and mixed sentiment from the community, much of it in favor of those arrested, the case was resolved with no-contest pleas and $500 fines.

Neff should expect a less severe penalty if the charges hold; she faces misdemeanor charges, compared to the more severe felonies the Spring Hill trio faced.

The difference in the offense, investigators said, can be as simple as the form the pool takes. The version where participants buy squares that correspond to scores at the end of each quarter is a lottery and carries felony charges.

If the case follows the path such cases usually take, Neff, as a first offender, won't be deported but may have to pay a fine.

Neff's little nightmare will have served as a wake-up call for the rest of us: Football pools are illegal.

Don't run them. Don't play them. If you do, you're breaking the law.

But investigators say they are not likely to know unless somebody complains.

So if your football fanaticism overrides your civic duty to obey the law, and you give in to the desire to run one, do it among friends -- and be nice to them.

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