Cigars, Colleges, Booze and Blitzes: Investigating the Sports Betting Boom

So we started to dig through his campaign contributions and found six donations, all on the same day for the maximum amount allowed under Kansas law, from companies that a prominent Kansas real estate developer owned. This same real estate developer, Robb Heineman, later confirmed to The Times that he had pushed for the stadium provision. Mystery solved.

Our investigation of the lobbying efforts in Kansas and other states was just one of the articles that made up the series.

Rebecca Ruiz conducted a survey of states with legal sports betting. Can customers use credit cards to bet? The answer was yes in a majority of places. Did regulators review and approve advertisements? Most did not. Had gambling companies gotten into legal trouble when they broke the rules? Not always, it turned out. State regulatory watchdogs were inconsistent in enforcing their own standards, and some had little appetite for punishing companies that broke the law. Rebecca, Ken and Joe Drape explored these questions in another article for the series.

Seeking to show the potential human consequences, Rebecca and Ken also talked to people in different parts of the country who had become addicted to sports betting after it became legal.

Our colleague Walt Bogdanich worked with a group of Columbia University journalism students to dig into deals that universities had signed with gambling companies to promote online sports betting on their campuses, including Michigan State University, the University of Colorado Boulder and Louisiana State University. When the universities refused to provide granular details on these lucrative partnerships, the reporting team used laws allowing public access to records to request copies of university documents, learning for the first time how deeply the gambling companies had burrowed into university life.

For another article, Emily Steel focused on one casino company, Penn Entertainment, and its partnership with David Portnoy, the founder of the media company Barstool Sports. Emily learned that even as Mr. Portnoy promoted gambling to his millions of followers, he rarely, if ever, mentioned that he had previously gone bankrupt after racking up debts and $30,000 in gambling losses.

Emily, too, sent a series of requests for public records. Among the thousands of pages of documents she received were details confirming how Penn executives had discussed their deal to take over Barstool with regulators. She also learned that in 12 of the 13 states where Barstool or Penn had been licensed, Mr. Portnoy — who has a history of misogynist and racist behavior — wasn’t required to undergo a formal licensing review, a process regulators use to ensure that gambling businesses operate with good character, honesty and integrity. He now reigns as one of the industry’s loudest cheerleaders.