Ticketing Organized Crime

This may come as a complete surprise to you, but those tickets you bought from a scalper outside the football stadium? Well, the scalper may well have had ties to organized crime and you were scammed.

Most people tend to think of organized crime as being the Mafia and usually then trot out all the old Don Corleone movies featuring Marlon Brando as the Don. You know, the famous Godfather series. While those movies were indeed a glimpse of what organized crime may actually be, it didn't touch on the other "not so well known" ventures in which organized crime may have their hands.

One of those ventures happens to be the scalping of tickets to many major events. There have been instances of people being harassed, threatened and assaulted when dealing with scalpers. Are they associated with a criminal element? The chances are highly likely that they are criminals. However, this isn't to say that every Tom, Dick and Don selling tickets outside a stadium for outrageous prices is a member of the Mafia.

The other interesting thing is that people tend to view this type of crime as being victimless, which is rather odd since there is a victim - the person who got soaked for a high-priced ticket in a lousy location. Many of the groups hustling outside major sporting events are members of a very organized group of pro ticket scalpers. There's something to put on your resume.

The perpetrators make sure they get their tickets from a variety of sources that include season's ticket holders, ticket agencies and yes, even the team box office. You have to understand that this type of crime, by necessity, is incestuous. There are even cases where the scalpers work team employees to get a constant source of tickets. Even fans selling extra tickets at a discount have been approached by enterprising scalpers.

Regular fans have a dickens of a time getting decently priced tickets the normal route and often find themselves, if they want to go to a game badly enough, forking over way more cash than they wanted. Is this kind of scenario illegal? Yes, however having said that, scalpers are entitled to a full-fledged and well thought out criminal defense. That is the law and their right under the U.S. Constitution.

Just because someone was accused of scalping tickets and also having connections to the world of organized crime, does not mean they are guilty. Each case is different, and every scenario happens for reasons we may not see on the surface. We need to be very cautious about making assumptions about someone's guilt or innocence based on just what we see or hear.

Daniel Wannamaker is a board certified criminal law specialist and has 24 years of criminal trial experience with proven results as a Dallas criminal defense lawyer practicing in Austin criminal defense and Houston Texas. To learn more, visit http://www.wannamakerlaw.com.