America’s Last Bookie Goes Down

Tim Pughsley built a sports-betting website that moved billions, then the I.R.S. got involved. In the age of FanDuel and DraftKings, where is the line between legal and illegal gambling?

The New Yorker

June 25, 2026

By Keith O'Brien

Tim Pughsley always believed that he was more than just a bookie. Long before the ubiquity of FanDuel and DraftKings, he imagined himself as a C.E.O. of a major sports-gambling company, and the role seemed to suit him. At the peak of his business, in 2022, Pughsley had three hundred bookies reporting to him, twenty-five thousand people betting through his offshore website, and millions of dollars to be divided among the collective every month. Pughsley, a tall man in his early fifties, with two ex-wives, three children, a booming voice, and kind eyes, had it made. Every morning, in a gated community near Birmingham, Alabama, he would wake up, put on a polo shirt—“my uniform,” Pughsley said—open his laptop, and make money by doing almost nothing.

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