America’s Last Bookie Goes Down

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.