FEBRUARY 2020 51
a restitution component; last summer he refunded
most of the pool participants their entry fees, re-
paying some winners fully and cutting smaller
take-it-or-leave-it settlements with others. He made
the dropoffs personally and collected signatures
on notebook paper, returning the receipts to his
parole officer. His lawyer, Paul Buerger, figured
restitution, plus a $1,000 fine and 100 hours of
community service were worth it to avoid jail
time. Then a judge sentenced Brandel to 15 days
(of which he served seven last August.)ONE YEAR LATER,
the question remains: What, exactly, was Robert
Brandel’s scheme? Despite sporadically respond-
ing to text messages, he did not provide SI with
any details regarding the pool or his fake kidnap-
ping. SI spoke to two pool participants, who said
they recognized roughly 40 of the 100 names on
Brandel’s pool sheet, suggesting that Brandel had
made up more than half of the field.
It doesn’t appear, though, that Brandel was any
kind of spreadsheet jockey with a cutting-edge sys-
tem for tipping the odds in his favor. He took no fee
off the top for running the pool, which would have
been the easiest way to guarantee cash. And the
entrants who spoke to SI still believe he randomized
the numbers (one coworker claims to have second-
hand information verifying this). They don’t think
he fixed the game in what would seem the most
obvious way: assigning himself statistically supe-
rior numbers, of which 3–3 would surely be one.
As far as anyone can tell, Brandel simply allot-
ted himself the majority of the squares, perhaps
anticipating that even if he didn’t turn a profit, he
wouldn’t go too far into the red. Zuerlein’s wide-left
kick cemented a worst-case scenario: one big-time
winning box, purchased by a real participant.
Brandel’s coworkers are left wondering whether
he’d been scamming his pool for years. Some insist
he’s a con man. Others see him as reckless, caring
little that he put everyone at the factory in the
crosshairs of management for workplace gambling,
blind to the emotional drain of, say, winning a
five-figure prize, only to learn the money isn’t real.
Looking back, Moscato and Spero say they feel
sympathy for Brandel. They’ve spent their careers
arresting bad guys, and from where they sit Brandel
doesn’t fit the bill. Rather, they see someone who
went to exceptional lengths to cover up a mistake.
Spero thinks back to the day he met Brandel,
and how, as Brandel waited to get picked up from
the police station, the investigator couldn’t help
but ask one more time: Why?
“Once I was in, I was in,” Brandel told him,
“there was no turning back.” ±uh, silver. How did you manage
to sleep in that stash house? Um,
they fed me NyQuil.
Brandel checked off nearly all
of the indicating body language
for someone who wasn’t telling
the truth: slumping, looking
down at the floor, avoiding di-
rect eye contact. At one point
Spero asked Brandel about his
phone, which might contain
GPS data that could corrobo-pers, but Brandel said his abductors had tossed it
along the south shore of Lake Ontario. To which
Spero suggested they drive up and get it.
He joked that in order to find the phone in this
weather, the kidnappers may have needed to put
an ice scraper in the ground to mark the location
underneath the fresh snowfall. That was a plot
point in another kidnapping scheme gone wrong,
when a bloodied Steve Buscemi ambled out of
his car on the side of a deserted highway to bury
a briefcase full of ransom money under a drift of
ice and snow in the 1996 film Fargo.
“He didn’t get that,” Spero says of the movie
reference. “But it was more for me.”WHO SAYS THE
longest day of your life can’t last just an hour or
two? It took barely 15 minutes in the interview
room for Brandel to admit he’d arrived at Tops
alone, tied himself to the headrest and duct-taped
his own arms and legs. He told Spero that some of
the names in the pool were fake—there were no
entrants from a bar. All those squares with names
that no one recognized? They would pay Brandel
if they won. (The owner of the bar Brandel based
his scam around told Sports Illustrated that
no such pool ever existed; SI found no evidence
to the contrary.)
Finally exposed, Brandel asked through tears,
“Am I getting arrested?”
“Unfortunately,” Spero answered, “You are.”
In the end, Brandel was formally charged with
scheming to defraud and filing a false police report.
(He pled guilty to falsely reporting an incident, a
misdemeanor offense.) His punishment includedCHAMPIONS
Brandel’s rules
(top) boasted
$12,000 in
prizes paid
out to factory
workers the
previous
year. His
manipulated
pool ended up
evidence.