Crime & Safety

FL Man's Guilty Plea Connected to Stamford Gambling Ring

The US Attorney's Office Thursday announced the guilty plea of a Florida man in connection to his involvement in an illegal gambling business based in Stamford and being operated throughout Southern Connecticut and parts of metropolitan New York.

According to Deirdre M. Daly, Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut, Craig Caffro, 48, pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering and one count of operating an illegal gambling business and agreed to forfeit $50,000 in connection to the crimes.

Caffro was part of a 20-member group busted by the cooperative efforts of the FBI Fairfield County Organized Crime Task Force, the IRS–Criminal Investigations unit and the Stamford Police Department. The group was charged with operating a gambling business that included large-scale, Internet-based sports bookmaking and was being controlled by the Gambino organized crime family.

An investigation led authorities to an operation in which gamblers would place bets with the operation through offshore Internet sports-gambling websites, particularly through www.44wager.com, based in Costa Rica, Daly said.

Caffro was charged with serving as the operation's bookmaking point person for 44wager and received regular payments from the head of the operation, Dean DePreta, and co-defendant Richard Uva, according to Daly, who noted one of these payments was laundered through the bank account of an elderly mother of one of Caffro's associates living in New Jersey.

It was determined by FBI analysis that the Stamford-based sports-betting website had generated total gross revenues of nearly $1.7 million between October 2010 and June 2011. 19 defendants have agreed to forfeit approximately $1.5 million in illegal proceeds so far, she said.

A number of other guilty pleas and sentences have been handed down already in the case, including a guilty plea from New Canaan resident Joseph Borea, the sentencing of Norwalk's Frank Potolicchio Jr., the sentencing of Stamford's Victor Amereno, Thomas "Little T" Uva IV, and John Colello, and the sentencing of operational leaders DePreta and Uva, to 71 months in federal prison on October 9, 2013, and 46 months in federal prison on October 24, 2013, respectively.

Caffre is scheduled to be sentenced on February 26, 2014, and faces a maximum of 20 years imprisonment.



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