Untitled

Three San Francisco traders became internet gambling pioneers after launching the first truly online sports books, but the fix is in as the professional sports leagues flex their muscle to game the system and turn its founders into fugitives, proving that no bet’s a sure thing.

Jay Cohen had never placed or taken a bet in his life when he came up with the idea for a futures sport betting site. He was working on the Pacific Stock Exchange Options Floor and found inspiration watching Steve Schillinger turn the fever of the biggest event of a generation—the OJ Simpson trial—into a wildly popular futures market. Jay, Steve, and Jay’s twenty-one-year-old clerk, Haden Ware, headed to the pristine beaches of Antigua where sports betting operations were legal, licensed, and regulated.

There they would build a revolutionary site that would become the envy of the sports betting industry, but just over a year after launching, Cohen, Ware, and Schillinger were charged in the first federal prosecution of internet sports betting. Cohen returned to the US to face the charges, convinced he had done nothing wrong. It was a bad bet. He was found guilty and was sent to a prison in North Las Vegas. His partners stayed behind to run the business, which would flourish and grow while simultaneously fighting the DOJ, the professional sports leagues, its powerful law firm Debevoise, and an army of lobbyists.

Were Cohen and his partners criminals or just early to the game? Goliath may have prevailed, but the story of World Sports Exchange lays bare the NFL’s (and other professional sports leagues) brute strength and how it weaponized its power to pursue him, the site, change legislation and then pivoted, following the money and ultimately embracing the industry it vilified.

This is the true and tragic story of World Sports Exchange.