The Latest from the Poker Crime Blotter

Admit it. Deep down inside, where secrets lurk, there's a bit of the "ambulance chaser" in all of us. We thrill to the noise and the excitement, because, consarn it all, we're just curious.

So here's the first brief installment of an occasionally occurring feature, where we'll look at some of the strangest poker-related news and "crime" tidbits that cross our screens. And of course, the timing is fine, too --- with this being April Fools' weekend, it's hard to do any ultra-serious reporting and have it believed, not that we'd stoop to that sort of hilarity ourselves...

Here's a gem we uncovered recently over at Online Poker News, detailing the curious case of poker lover Lincy Santos. Santos, a denizen of the Pacific island of Saipan, is also a young mother and an obvious poker fan, if not necessarily in that order. Seems that Santos --- who's also pregnant, by the way --- was recently arrested for abandoning her children while she went to play poker. That must be a sweet game. After all, she'd already been arrested for the same thing on four previous occasions.

Moving right along.

A perennial fave when it comes to crimes and poker is a story about a home game or small public event that's been subjected to an over-the-top raid from da fuzz. (We know --- no one uses the phrase "da fuzz" anymore, which is why we just did.) It's hard to top the raid on Bodog chairman Calvin Ayre's palatial Costa Rica estate that we detailed here some two weeks back, but we don't really need to leave the Land of the Free to see police power run amok.

For instance, clicking here takes you to a news report of a central Ohio game busted just a couple of days ago, where --- heaven forbid --- the participating players ponied up $15 each to play. That's fine work, ossifers!! (Photo credit: NBC4i of Columbus, OH)

But a favorite among these recent tales has to be this one, where a massive raid on a restaurant in Palmer Lake, Co, netted 24 more hardened poker criminals. This one's special in that the powers that be decided that the $10-$15 buy-in of the tourney's participants merited the attention of the Colorado Springs Metro Vice Unit, who came in with weapons drawn and lasers trained. Chances are good that colostomy-bag sales are going to see an uptick in the near future in the general Palmer Lake area.

Such silliness, though it naturally gives deeper meaning to the classic phrase "going bust." Whenever one of these games is raided, the root cause is always the same --- a public official with lots of power and not a scat of common sense. In the Palmer Lake instance, it appears to be traceable to one of those self-righteous, letter-of-the-law cops we thought we'd left behind when Dragnet and Adam-12 went off the air... but the truth is, they still exist.

Sad to say. As for this loyal blogger, I don't even know what "poker" means...