Over the past several years student gambling has been on the rise, specifically athlete gambling, which has led the NCAA to provide funding for speakers like former New York mob boss Michael Franzese to talk to athletes, said Athena Argyropoulos, the associate director of Athletics at American University.
Franzese, who spent almost 10 years in prison, was once a "captain" with La Cosa Nostra, the proper name for the Italian-organized crime families in the U.S., which means "this little thing of ours."
Franzese now tours the country speaking to colleges, sports teams and inner-city youth about the dangers of gambling and last week spoke to AU students.
Franzese said he knows how the gambling industry works and that it is out to make money in anyway it can. He said the industry especially targets collegiate athletes because it is easy for them to manipulate the athletes.
"If I have 200 of you in here, [about 50] of you are gambling," Franzese said to the students at Bender, many of whom were athletes who were required to attend the speech.
There were many instances where we would force college athletes to throw games in order to pay off debts they owed to us, Franzese said, speaking about his past in the gambling industry.
Franzese highlighted the importance of gambling in reminding the audience that they are educated about alcohol, drugs, sex and violence, but they don't hear about gambling, even though there are laws in 48 of the 50 states that legalize it in some form.
"I heard one FBI agent at a conference say baseball isn't the national pastime anymore; gambling is," Franzese said.
Franzese said he has seen more people become addicted to gambling than drugs since speking about gambling for 10 years. He said in most cases gamblers don't want to admit they are addicted. He said he can tell when someone is hooked because they don't want to say how much they lost in a night; instead they will just say things like "it was an okay night."
He said it is staggering how much gambling actually goes on at the collegiate level of sports. He said when he goes home at the end of the night and checks his e-mail he will have at least 50 from just American University students alone about gambling and related issues.
Franzese told the audience every form of gambling - no matter how legitimate it is - is run at some level by people with a street background.
"You don't get away with a gambling debt in this country - legally or illegally," he said.
Franzese said the NCAA estimates one third of male athletes and one tenth of female athletes engage in gambling, which is in violation of NCAA rules. He said 4.5 percent of men's basketball players and five percent of men's football players admitted in an anonymous survey to taking money to fix a game in some way.
He pointed out these numbers were low number, that these were "only the people that admitted it." He told the audience that during the NCAA tournament this year, some of the games they saw and thought were genuine had been fixed in some way by athletes who owed gambling debts.
Argyropoulos and Associate Dean of Students Sara Waldron co-planned bringing Franzese to speak. The athletics department secured a grant from the NCAA and Waldron's office funded travel expenses and housing costs for Franzese.
