Sports bookie Jeffrey Wayne Bzroska, a onetime manager at PIMCO, got great news this month when a federal judge in Santa Ana sentenced him to probation for two years in proceedings that were partly conducted in secret.
Bzroska had managed an illegal sports betting operation in Newport Beach for at least four years until December 2008, when two law enforcement officers exited a local restaurant, saw Bzroska hand another man an envelope in the parking, tailed him in his vehicle on suspicion of narcotics activity, stopped him and unraveled the scheme.
]
Federal agents seized more than $105,000 from Bzroska's operation that
used an offshore account located in Costa Rica, according to records
reviewed by the Weekly.
Bzroska, who was born in 1972, pleaded guilty late last year.
Claiming he is “ashamed and
devastated” by his conduct, Bzroska–who now lives in Utah, works in
real estate and enjoys coaching youth sports–sought leniency from U.S.
District Court Judge David O. Carter and got it.
Federal prosecutor Todd Tristan
sealed his pre-sentencing report.
However, I learned that Bzroska
took some sort of action for the government that pleased them enough to
approve in secret a significant downward departure in his liability.
It
probably also helped that Bzroska received numerous glowing letters of
character support from individuals in Salt Lake City, but we''ll never
know for certain because Carter sealed the reasoning for his leniency.
Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.