words: David hill

art: ben marra

It was a balmy, rainy September night in San Pedro, Costa Rica in 2018 when 43-year-old William Sean Crieighton left his office and headed home for the night. On his way, he was pulled over by two police officers near San Francisco of San Isidro in Heredia.

The police knew Creighton. At least, they knew him as “Tony,” the name everybody in Costa Rica knew him by. Creighton, the owner of the enormous online sportsbook 5dimes, was one of the most powerful and wealthy people in Costa Rica. His business, while legal in Costa Rica, was against the law in the United States, where Creighton was a citizen. So he had spent much of his adult life in Costa Rica, marrying a local and fathering two children along the way. He had also grown rich beyond his wildest dreams.

Creighton wasn’t pulled over because he was speeding or breaking any other law. The cops had been waiting for him. They were dirty. And they were after his money. A grey pickup truck soon pulled up alongside of Creighton’s Porsche Cayenne. Four men got out and forced Creighton into the truck. One of the kidnappers took off in the Porsche in one direction, and the truck took off in another.

Creighton had always kept a low profile in Costa Rica. Despite his fabulous wealth, he dressed casually, t-shirts and sandals were a standard uniform. He drove himself. He rarely used security guards. He took great pains to not be photographed. He kept his name off of his company’s records. And he never let anyone in Costa Rica know his real name. His colleagues and customers only knew him as “Tony.” And for nearly two decades this had served him well, kept him under the radar and safe from both the law and the outlaws alike. On this night, however, a coalition of both had caught up to him. “5dimes Tony” had been kidnapped.

II

Creighton was part of a generation of sports bettors who came up in the early days of the internet, when American bookies were taking their operations offshore to avoid prosecution. By 1998, there were several dozen sports betting websites operating from places like Curacao, Malta, and Costa Rica. Players like Creighton would scour the various betting lines on offer across this bevy of sportsbooks and look for discrepancies in the odds between different sites. Creighton created his own models for handicapping games using Microsoft Excel and could find lines he believed were wrong. And he took advantage of a marketing spree by online sportsbooks to attract new customers by offering them bonus money for opening new accounts. “Tony would deposit $10,000 in a sportsbook and in three weeks the account would be over six figures,” says one of Creighton’s colleagues from that era. “He devastated bookies.”

One of the early pioneers in the offshore, online sports betting market was an American bookmaker named Al Ross. Ross ran a number of online sportsbooks and casinos including a group of sites under the banner of sportsbook.com. Creighton was winning a fortune from Ross’s sites. In 1998, Ross was one of 21 offshore sportsbook operators to be charged by the US government in the first-ever federal prosecution for online gambling. Because his legal fees were mounting, Ross decided to cut his losses with Creighton. He offered Creighton his own sportsbook as payment. Creighton accepted the offer, and by 1999 he was in Costa Rica setting up shop with two of his childhood friends and five other Americans he had hired. Creighton’s sportsbook was named “5dimes,” gambler-speak for $5,000. The name itself was a message to the world of gamblers that Creighton was willing to book big action. Creighton had plenty of experience beating sportsbooks, so he had some inkling of how to avoid getting beat when he was on the other side of the counter.

“Tony was always a gambler first,” says Mark Howard, one of those first employees who helped Creighton start 5dimes. “He’d take any bet, and if it was too big, he’d either lay off or play the action.” What this meant was that when Creighton accepted a wager that was larger than he wanted to have to pay off if he lost, he’d have a decision to make.He could either bet the other side with another bookie, thereby “laying off” most of his exposure, or he could make the same bet with another bookie for even more money, and then root for his customer to win the bet. Where a lot of bookies were content to try to balance action on a game and live off the “vig,” the baked-in advantage the house had when the same amount of bets were made on both sides of a game, Creighton was always gambling. Even as a bookmaker he was still leveraging his money, looking for edges and weaknesses in the market. Because of this, he wasn’t afraid to take larger bets from professional players. “We’d take action from Billy Walters,” said Howard, referring to the notorious American sports gambler, who was so good at gambling most Las Vegas sportsbooks refused to book his action. Creighton, however, wanted to know what Billy Walters was betting. That was information he could use. Creighton could copy Walters bets at other bookmakers. Because he ran his own sportsbook, Creighton rarely had any trouble getting his own bets down. “They all took Tony’s bets,” says Howard. “And all of them got their asses handed to them.”

Within a couple of years, Creighton had put a number of other offshore bookmakers out of business, including all of the other sportsbooks that rented office space in the same building as 5dimes headquarters in San Pedro. 5dimes would absorb many of the shuttered shops, and Creighton steadily grew his empire. By 2003, according to Howard, 5dimes was taking in a million dollars a day.

III

When Creighton was finally removed from the truck, he found himself in a strange place. It wasn’t a dank and dark basement with a swinging lightbulb. It was the modest and well-appointed home of an old woman in La Trinidad de Morovia, about 6 miles from where he had been pulled over by police and abducted. His Porsche was driven to another location in Heredia, far from where he was taken, and crashed into a barrier to make it look like there had been an accident.

At around 3AM, Creighton’s wife, Laura Varela Fallas, received a phone call from someone she didn’t know. The caller told her they had her husband and demanded $5,000,000 in ransom. She was going to need time to figure out how to get the money. It was late. And how would she even know they were telling the truth? The caller put Creighton on the line with her so she would know they had him and that Creighton was still alive. And they let her know they weren’t going to wait until morning for her to get the money. How, she wondered, would she get five million dollars to them before morning? Simple, the caller answered. Bitcoin.

Unable to secure the full five million, she agreed to send nearly one million in bitcoin immediately. After a series of clicks, it was done, and the kidnapper had the money in his bitcoin wallet. He and his conspirators began to pack.

When morning broke across Costa Rica a few hours later, Varela Fallas had already hired two private security consultants, both former FBI agents from the United States, to help her locate Creighton. At 9:00am she contacted the Costa Rican Judiciary Investigative Police (OIJ), but it was clear that she wasn’t willing to put her faith in the local authorities alone. The Americans and the OIJ each conducted their own separate investigations, racing to see who could find Creighton first.

The Americans suspected they were up against some dark forces. They reached out to a connection in the Costa Rican underworld and arranged to purchase illegal firearms to protect themselves. Then, once they were sufficiently armed, they set out looking for Creighton. The Americans struck gold first, locating Creighton’s crashed Porsche. They immediately suspected the crash was staged. They went to the OIJ to let them know about their suspicions. The OIJ weren’t grateful or looking to cooperate. They kicked the Americans off of the investigation after learning about their illicit gun purchases.

For their part, the OIJ were able to trace the bitcoin transaction to three separate bitcoin wallets and discovered they belonged to a 25-year-old computer engineer named Jorduan Morales Vega. Despite being a computer engineer, Morales Vega must have misunderstood how cryptocurrency worked and assumed it was anonymous. According to the OIJ, the bitcoin wallet the ransom was transferred to was opened from Morales Vega’s residence in Cartago. By viewing the blockchain, they were able to eventually ascertain Morales Vega’s name and address. But it wouldn’t matter. By the time the OIJ had Morales Vega’s name, he was already gone, having crossed the Panamanian border on his way to Cuba. Morales Vega, as well as “5dimes Tony,” had disappeared.