Tommy along with Chuck were two owners that appreciated my work, paid me with regularity and planned on having me around for years to come. I also really liked Tommy's family as his daughter and sons were both a joy to be around socially.
A couple other offices included MVP and Jaguar. Jaguar was interesting because they had considerable success in radio in San Diego County during 2000. I noticed it was the excitement of Arnie Spandier the afternoon host on Los Angeles 1150. Sonny the owner of Jaguar a social gentleman in his late 50’s was very nice but let me know that he was happy with his current agency, Bob Elkington out of Sherman Oaks, CA. It turned out that Bob would be one of my greatest allies in working with all the Mall San Pablo companies in 2001. Sonny would be the first of Claude’s partners to leave and he did so before the 2001 season. Turns out Claude accused Sonny of stealing which was the norm for Claude, who accused everyone of stealing as a way to establish fault on someone else before allegedly stealing their company. Rumor has it Claude locked Sonny out of his offices and took over the offices hiring a young guy named Tim Bradley out of Providence, Rhode Island.
Brad as I referred to him seemed to be a nice guy but then again I thought that about everyone. Some would disappoint me some would please me to know them. As great as it is to know Chuck it’s equally as disappointing to know Brad. Brad would later end up running a questionable online pharmacy out of the Dominican Republic for the Ripners and later be the head guy at another current gaming company. Rumor has it Claude stole the database from BOS after the company went public, tore up his non-compete agreement and opened up the doors to another gaming company. I approached the company as a prospective client and thought I would speak with Brad over the phone but he refused to take any of my phone calls or return any of my emails. I guess I must have upset him along the way in life. I am like any other human being and usually I tend to piss off women and authority figures. I never would have figured this with Brad. After he just moved from Providence down to Costa Rica I invited him out drinking more than a few times to help him get acquainted with Costa Rican social life. I also set him up on live interviews with WSKO sports talk radio in his hometown where he would talk sports betting on the air with the show’s hosts. This would prove to be great for his business partnership as the head of Jaguar sports with a heavy influx of new customers from the Rhode Island area. It also established a trend of utilizing contests to get complimentary programming time on the air in exchange for services which included betting account prizes from the sports books.
One of the ongoing list of problems with being a partner of Claude was his company, BOS was stealing from you. I was aware that the phone systems were set up to intercept calls going into the sales offices for all of the partners. People would call in for the partner companies of Infinity, Millennium and Gibraltar to the BOS sales office to sign up, instead of transferring the call the word was to sign them up. Jaguar usually avoided this since Claude owned 100% of Jaguar. When I informed Shaun of this he just gave me the keep quiet sign with the finger to the mouth and ssshhhhh. Other forms of deception would include charging for media and not paying the media company or the agent that was responsible for the media placement. This made the partners of Claude look bad and he would use bad performances against the other partners to squeeze them out of money. I have to assume this one on Shaun because one of his numerous excuses for not paying me included the partners were not paying which I doubted because the partners were always prompt on payments with me before Shaun force them to filter the payments through BOS.
More tough work was to come when I returned to Los Angeles. ABC/ESPN, Citadel, and Jefferson-Pilot were easy accounts to handle. The companies felt at ease accepting the business based on the contracts with Fox Sports Radio and the Jim Rome Show. There was some caution on the part of Clear Channel stations especially with XTRA Sports 690 and 1150 in southern California. Claude didn’t want to be on those stations considering he had knowingly stiffed them in 2000 and the stations had hesitation with taking the business from other online gaming companies closely related to BOS. XTRA 690 San Diego was in my opinion the best sports radio station in the country with great personalities that included Lee “Hacksaw” Hamilton and Steve Hartman of today’s XTRA Sports 570 in Los Angeles which is a combination of the old 1150 and 690. Hartman also co-hosts for a Los Angeles television network with the esteemed Jim Hill. XTRA 690 was the station the late Chet Forte from Monday Night football built and the station that put Jim Rome on the map en route to be the top sports program in the country. And I cannot pass up XTRA 690 without mentioning Bill Werndel, the best local on air product endorser I dealt with. I could not leave these stations out because I wanted to get my clients results and this would be a nice media platform for Infinity and Millennium to get out from under the shadow of BOS.
When I proposed Southern California during the first weeks of the 2001 football season, Chuck Bauer and Tommy Miller jumped all over the idea. They spent around $30,000 a week between the two southern California stations and the results were very positive.
Claude’s perception of California was a huge underestimation that was mind boggling considering the history of California and gambling. I proposed Southern California stations to the Claude and his response was, “The stations do not work, southern Californians are not gamblers, they play at the beach instead of betting on football”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Southern Californians built the gambling capital of the world, Las Vegas. I-15 was the original bloodline for money into Las Vegas and even today nearly 30% of the revenue generated in Las Vegas is from California. For many years it was more than 50%. Southern Californians gamble. Folks forget that there is more to Southern California than the beach bums in San Diego, Orange, and Los Angeles counties. Riverside County, San Bernadino County and San Fernando Valley are not beach adjacent communities so filling up a sports bar with avid football fans is a common sight on Sundays in Southern California. Furthermore working in the beach adjacent southern California sports bar system during my early twenties it was standing room only on NFL Sundays and there were plenty of sports bar customers making phone calls on the payphone before cell phones became common.
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