A businessman from Indiana who tried to bet $100,000 last year on a college baseball match between Alabama and LSU was sentenced to prison on Monday, 28 July. He will serve eight months and must undergo three-and-a-half years of probation.
Bert Neff, after receiving a text message from Brad Bohanan, former Alabama baseball head coach, saying that Alabama pulled their starting pitcher on April 28, 2023, entered an MGM Casino in Ohio and tried to make a $100k bet on this information.
MGM employees rejected the wager, but permitted Neff’s $15,000 bet on LSU winning. MGM employees deemed the $100,000 bet and subsequent $15,000 wager suspicious. These bets quickly were flagged, and within a few days the markets for LSU-Alabama Baseball were suspended. Bohanan’s firing took place within a week.
Bohanan is not charged. The NCAA has sanctioned Bohanan for 15 years.
Neff’s son was playing baseball in Cincinnati at the time of placing the wager, but he wasn’t prosecuted for betting with insider information. After he tried to delete the Alabama baseball data from his phone, federal authorities accused him of obstruction. A federal affidavit states that he passed on that information to other bettors. Four of them placed wagers that LSU would win the 8-6 game.
Neff is a professional gambler
In a memorandum on sentencing, US Assistant Attorney Edward Canter called Neff “a professional gambler”. Neff could have faced up to 10 year in prison after pleading guilty earlier this year.
Canter wrote: “Neff, facing a federal grand juries investigation, tried to manipulate the system.” The defendant tampered witnesses, destroyed evidence and made false statements to Federal Bureau of Investigation. This was not done just once. “He did this on many occasions, and for a period of more than a year.”
The US District Court of the Northern District of Alabama handed down the sentences.
LSU had the highest ranking in the country at the time of the wager. The Tigers won the College World Series after sweeping Alabama in three games of a SEC series. Alabama had scratched Luke Holman, its projected starting pitcher for the match in question about an hour prior to first pitch.
