“Parlay Patz” Pleads Guilty in Threatened Athletes Case

07:18
21 Mar

Benjamin Tucker Patz, a high-stakes sports bettor widely known as “Parley Patz”, has pled guilty to a felony charge involving his sending violent threats to professional athletes performing in games on which he bet.

Patz, 24, filed his guilty plea on Wednesday, March 10 in a federal courtroom in Florida to a single felony count of transmitting threats in interstate or foreign commerce. According to a press release from US Middle District of Florida prosecutors, Patz faces up to five years in prison when sentenced at a future date.

Patz, a resident of Napa, California, rose to fame in the sports-betting world in late 2019 after connecting on multiple parlay (or as known in Europe, accumulator) bets that rewarded him six-figure payouts and some feature coverage. He spent his winnings in grandiose fashion, though his winning streak ultimately didn’t last, and according to prosecutors, he soon began threatening violence against pro and college players in games where he’d bet and lost.

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Patz was discovered to have sent hundreds of threats to players -- and in once case, to an athlete’s wife -- though the charges resulting in his guilty plea resulted from a single episode in 2019. Following a July 20 Tampa Bay Rays baseball game where they lost at home to the visiting Chicago White Sox, Patz sent threats to at least four Rays and one White Sox player.

One message sent to a Tampa Bay player included this string of threats:

“I will sever your neck open you pathetic c**tbag”
“I will enter your home while you sleep”
“And sever your neck open”
“I will kill your entire family”
“Everyone you love will soon cease”
“I will cut up your family” and “Dismember the[m] alive.”

These threats actually came before Patz’s brief hot wagering streak in late 2019 that brought him his moment of media fame, but federal investigators, including the FBI, learned that he had a lengthy history of threatening athletes, sending at least 300 such threats via email to the various athletes. Patz, who also lived in New York and made many of his bets via East Coast sportsbooks, made his guilty plea roughly one year after the charges against him were first announced in March 2020.

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