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Several months ago I suggested that LVA do a retrospective on Billy Walters. I thought it would be very interesting, especially to those who are not familiar with his history. Any movement on that suggestion or is Billy no longer worthy of a retrospective?
Billy Walters is one of the more colorful and controversial characters who’s inhabited the Vegas scene over the past several decades. Here’s a brief bio (for those who don’t live in the Bluegrass State).
William T. Walters was born in Munfordville, Kentucky (population 1,400 at the time), in July 1946; he's now 76 years old.
Billy’s father died when he was a baby and his mother walked out shortly thereafter, leaving him and two sisters to be raised by their grandmother in a house with no running water. On her way to work as a cleaning lady, she dropped him off at a pool room owned by his uncle. At age four, Billy began shooting pool. "More skullduggery goes on in a pool room than anywhere," he says. "It’s the greatest place in the world to learn what life is all about." His grandmother died when Billy was 13 and he went back to live with his mother, an alcoholic, who charged him $10 a week to live in the basement of her
After high school, Billy went to work as a used-car salesman, in which he was highly successful. But at the time, he was a degenerate gambler, blowing through all his (and that of his second wife, Susan) money several times; he'd started betting on sports before turning 10. He also tried his hand at illegal bookmaking, for which he was arrested in the early ’80s.
Shortly thereafter, Billy made the inevitable pilgrimage to Las Vegas in his mid-30s. Here, he made the difficult transition from degenerate to advantage player. His biggest early score was $3.8 million at a roulette table in Atlantic City, after he and a partner noticed a biased wheel.
He was an original member of the famed Computer Group, the first organized gamblers to successfully use computers to analyze football. They bankrupted bookmakers from coast to coast and Walters, who earned a reputation as "the most dangerous sports bettor in history" by oddsmakers, claims he’s had only one losing year betting sports and at the peak of his activity, could make $50 million a year in winnings.
In his early days, Billy was a self-described degenerate gambler. Also, Walters and other Computer Group members were indicted for running what prosecutors called an illegal bookmaking operation, though all were acquitted in 1987. He was also indicted three times on money-laundering and conspiracy charges between 1986 and 1999, but all charges were dismissed and the $2.8 million confiscated from his safety-deposit box was returned.
Since 1988, Billy has spent most of his time developing and operating his company, the Walters Group.
As is fairly well known, investigations into Walters from 2008 to 2015 culminated in a conviction in a jury trail for for insider trading in which the government convinced the jury of nearly $50 million in profits from "illegal profits, making massive perfectly timed trades." For his part, Walters told the Review-Journal, "I've studied and invested in the stock market for many years and no one says anything when I lose money."
Walters was sentenced to five years in prison in July 2017 and was initially incarcerated at the Federal Prison Camp in Pensacola, Florida. He was released to home confinement in May 2020 due to the pandemic. His sentence was scheduled to be completed in January 2022, but it was commuted by Donald Trump a year early as Trump was leaving office.
Today, Walters continues to run the Walters Group, which owns golf courses, auto dealerships, and commercial real estate. He also, reportedly, continues to trade stocks and bet on sports, though we couldn't confirm that. A book on Walters's life by author and network-TV correspondent Armen Keteyian, titled Chicken or Feathers, is due out soon.