March 21 2012, Brett Collson

Daniel Tzvetkoff, the Australian businessman who processed more than $1 billion in illegal online poker transactions in the U.S., is set to appear as a witness in the trial of Black Friday defendants John Campos and Chad Elie on April 9 in New York.

Tzvetkoff, 29, facing up to 75 years in prison after his arrest in Las Vegas in 2010, struck a plea bargain with prosecutors and provided vital evidence incriminating PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker. He has been living in hiding under FBI protection as the star informant in the case.

Campos was the vice chairman of a Utah Bank that processed payments for online poker sites and is charged with six offenses and faces up to 35 years in prison. Elie, a payment processor, was charged on nine counts in the DOJ indictment, which included violation of the UIGEA, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, and money laundering. He could spend up to 85 years in jail.

The Australian Associated Press reports that Tzvetkoff has handed more than 90,000 documents over to prosecutors, including confidential emails to and from Elie, a former business partner. This week, Elie’s lawyers complained to the judge handling the case that prosecutors dumped a “mountain of documents” on them with little time to prepare, according to the report.

“Although the government had previously produced emails for Daniel Tzvetkoff, one of the government’s main witnesses in this case, the material we recently received revealed that Mr. Tzvetkoff had deleted his emails from the Intabill server, which had previously been made available to the defense, & that the Tzvetkoff emails that were included in prior productions were therefore ones that Mr. Tzvetkoff had cherry-picked for the government,” Monday’s filing from Elie’s lawyers stated, according to the AAP.

“Only after we pointed this out to the government did we receive a full set of Mr. Tzvetkoff’s materials, which included more than 90,000 documents and which we were able to access for the first time only yesterday.”

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March 16 2012, Matthew Kredell

Although legislation to license and regulate Internet gambling did not pass through the state legislature Thursday as he had projected, New Jersey State Sen. Raymond Lesniak said that he still expects Internet poker to be up and running in the Garden State by September.

Lesniak said the reason for the delay was that technical amendments from Gov. Chris Christie’s office on issues such as licensing procedure weren’t finished until Wednesday. He said that would have been enough time for him to push the bill through in the state senate Thursday but was not enough time to get it through the state assembly.

“We’re going to have to work harder and faster to get the regulations and licenses issued, that’s all,” Lesniak said Thursday in a phone interview. “We’ll still have it done by September. That can still be reached for sure. I was being conservative in saying it would be done by September.”

Lesniak, who sponsors the bill that would allow Atlantic City casinos to host online poker sites within the state, was hoping to get the legislation passed before the New Jersey legislature spends the next week focusing on the state budget.

He said that he will get the amended bill released from senate budget committee on March 27 and expects the legislation to pass through both houses of the state legislature in the first half of April.

Lesniak told PokerNews last week that Gov. Christie, who vetoed a similar bill last year, would sign it this time around.

While the previous legislation would have allowed for Internet gambling only within state borders, Lesniak expects that the Justice Department’s opinion that the Wire Act does not apply to online poker will allow for New Jersey to form compacts with other states. These states would be interested in receiving revenue from their residents playing online poker while leaving the regulatory duties to a state experienced in gambling regulation.

Nevada, which has already approved regulations and begun taking applications for licenses, has a head start on New Jersey to become the first state with regulated online poker.

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