JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Amit Patel was reeling as he sat in a South Florida casino in 2014.
The then 21-year-old had just lost 80% of his chip stack during a $560 buy-in No Limit Hold’em tournament at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood.
On the very next hand, apparently not willing to wait around for premium cards, Patel went all in and pushed nearly $1 million in chips to the center.
When all the cards were laid on the table, Patel only had about a 30% chance of winning with his ace of hearts and 8 of diamonds. He eventually lost and was eliminated from the tournament in 15th place. He went home with nearly $7,500 in prize money while the player who beat him on the hand went on to pocket more than $62,000.
Nearly a decade later, Patel’s gambling spiraled out of control, according to his attorney, but this time the stakes were much bigger — and he wasn’t playing with his own money.
MORE: Former Jaguars employee accused of stealing millions from team used most of the money to gamble on sports, attorney says | ‘Should have had oversight’: UNF experts analyze how ex-Jaguars employee got away with stealing millions for years | Ohio couple in town for MNF game say they got Uber ride from former Jaguars employee accused of stealing $22M from team
After getting a master’s degree in business and landing a job with his hometown Jacksonville Jaguars, Patel used his mid-level position in the team’s finance department to steal more than $22.2 million, according to federal prosecutors.
Patel admitted in federal court that he then used that money to fuel his online sports gambling addiction and buy luxury goods, including a $95,000 Patek Philippe Nautilus watch that he bought from an online luxury consignment store based in San Francisco.
Despite years of experience, Patel wasn’t a very good gambler.
One veteran daily fantasy sports gambler who was familiar with Patel’s betting habits online told ESPN he was known as “the biggest loser ever on FanDuel.”
For years, Patel’s scheme went undetected by the team thanks to a lack of oversight and a short-staffed finance department.
Patel, 31, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and illegal monetary transactions in December.
Using reports from multiple media outlets, along with interviews with people who met him and the information inside federal charging documents, News4JAX unraveled how Patel pulled off the huge heist and the price he could pay.
How did he do it?
So, how did a former lacrosse player at Paxon School for Advanced Studies pull off one of the biggest-ever heists involving an NFL team all by himself?
Patel was no mastermind, just someone who was in the right place at the right time and daring enough to take advantage of a finance department that didn’t have enough people, according to a story from The Athletic reporters Katie Strang and Kalyn Kahler who did some deep digging into Patel’s history with the Jaguars.
“I know people won’t believe it. But he was super basic,” one person who knew Patel during his time working for the Jaguars told The Athletic.
People who crossed paths with Patel at various stages in his life told News4JAX he was viewed as handsome and charismatic.
“He seemed like a guy who just had it all together,” said one person who met him during a group outing.
The evidence of his lifestyle — which prosecutors said was extravagant and included trips with his friends on private jets — and his work history have been wiped from the internet. News4JAX was not able to find an Instagram or LinkedIn page for Patel, but people he worked with told The Athletic he didn’t flash his money, wear expensive clothes or sport the watch he bought with the stolen money, and he made no mention of the trips.
Patel did share some of his travels, which included trips to the Hamptons and Miami, on his social media accounts, but one former co-worker told ESPN they assumed Patel’s family was wealthy.
“Aside from the fact that he drove a Tesla, if you were to see Amit, you wouldn’t assume like, ‘Oh, here’s a dude that is siphoning millions of dollars from his job,’” a source told The Athletic.
He had a good reputation in the Jaguars’ front office, sources told The Athletic, and had connections with everyone around the office.
Federal prosecutors said Patel held a critical role in the Jaguars’ finance department. He prepared the team’s monthly financial statements, oversaw department budgets and acted as the administrator of the Jaguars’ virtual credit card program, or VCC.
A corporate VCC program is a payment method that acts like a traditional credit card account but doesn’t require a physical corporate credit card. Certain employees could get VCCs to be used for business-related purchases. Then each month, the balances due to the financial institutions that supplied the associated credit for the program were debited from the Jaguars’ bank accounts automatically.
Starting in October 2019, Patel became the sole administrator of the program and could create user accounts, approve new VCCs and request changes to available credit, prosecutors said. The Athletic reported that was around the time Patel’s direct supervisor moved to a role in a different department and was not replaced and two other staffers also left the finance department. That meant others had to pick up their work.
Patel saw an opportunity.
When he first started managing the program, an employee from accounting checked Patel’s submitted sheets, but when that employee left, that layer of security also went away. So Patel, with limited oversight, kept track of all VCC transactions and filed the Jaguars’ expenditures each month, then sent the files along to the accounting department.
According to charging documents, Patel used his position over the VCC program to charge more than $22,220,000 in fraudulent transactions from September 2019 until he was fired in February 2023. He did it by creating files that had multiple false and fraudulent entries and sending them to the accounting department.
He hid his scheme by finding legitimate recurring VCC transactions — like the team’s catering, airfare and hotel charges — and then duplicating those transactions and inflating the amounts, according to prosecutors. He also entered fake transactions that might sound plausible but that never happened and moved legitimate VCC charges from upcoming months into the month of the file that was immediately due to the accounting department.
In November 2022, a month after he bought that luxury watch, Patel said he made fraudulent transactions of about $5.6 million, which nearly exceeded the credit limit of the VCC program, which had traditionally been $4.75 million. To avoid going over, Patel requested a credit limit increase from the bank, and the limit was raised to $7.25 million.
So, how did it go undetected for so long?
The NFL monitors each team for salary cap compliance, but according to reporting from The Athletic, auditing of the non-football aspect of the team wasn’t scrutinized to the same level.
Officials from other NFL teams told The Athletic they were shocked that one person had so much control over the VCC program.
News4JAX spoke to multiple UNF business professors who said the team should have caught on to the scheme sooner.
“One of the things that they could have done is, they could have been doing a trend analysis on their major categories of expenses. Not to say that the [VCC] transactions would have been considered a major category, but it would have fallen in some other bucket of expenses if it wasn’t on its own,” said UNF professor Mark Dawkins. “A major category and a trend analysis should have picked up on a large increase from year to year when this started, and so they may have been able to catch it sooner. And that’s not to say they didn’t do a trend analysis, but it went on for four years, which leads me to question whether they were doing a trend analysis on their expenses.”
The extent of Patel’s theft wasn’t truly revealed until October 2023, when he was interviewed by federal investigators at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Jacksonville. Accompanied by his lawyer, Patel admitted he spent between $20 million and $22 million using the team’s VCC program.
The Jaguars said the team has since made changes to its finance department.
“With the assistance of external experts, it has extensively reviewed its own policies and procedures, added staff to its finance department, and taken other measures to ensure the integrity of its financial controls,” the Jaguars told News4JAX in a statement following Patel’s arrest.
To put the money that Patel stole into perspective, Jaguars franchise quarterback and former No. 1 pick Trevor Lawrence is currently under a four-year, $36 million contract. He earns about $9 million per year, so $22 million would cover more than two years of his annual salary from the team.
Gambling his life away
Aside from lavish trips, investigators said Patel spent the money he stole from the Jaguars on a $265,000 Ponte Vedra Beach condo, luxury hotels, cryptocurrency, a country club membership, spa treatments, sports memorabilia, a Nissan pickup truck and a Tesla Model 3 sedan.
However, according to Patel’s attorney, his home and car were bought with family money or earned money and 99% of the misappropriated money went to cover his gambling losses. The attorney said Patel was trying to win back money “with the anticipation he would repay the funds with the winnings and make the Jaguars whole.”
Patel was deep into daily fantasy sports (DFS) games and had the username “ParlayPicker” on FanDuel and DraftKings, multiple sources with direct knowledge of his account told ESPN.
But according to sources who spoke to ESPN, he was “legendarily bad.”
The profile for ParlayPicker shows they started betting in 2016 and the most recent bet was a $29,000 wager on a PGA Tour event on July 6, 2023, months after Patel was fired by the Jaguars. ParlayPicker finished in 129th place out of 150 participants.
Since 2017, Patel bet nearly $500,000 on fantasy sports tournaments, but sources told ESPN his biggest losses came from the high-stakes three-man contests they said he regularly entered. The contests had buy-ins of over $20,000.
“He came out of nowhere,” Drew Crawford, an avid DFS player, told ESPN. “Usually in our circle of DFS guys, we kind of know the identities of the guys who were playing at extreme volume. They’ve been around for a while. But with this guy, I remember having side conversations with some of my friends, who were like, ‘Who is this guy? And what is he doing?’”
In total, Patel lost about $1 million on DraftKings, sources told ESPN, and about $20 million on FanDuel.
His lawyer, Alex King, said in a news release following Patel’s arrest that Patel “suffers from a serious gambling addiction.”
It was that addiction that ultimately led to his undoing.
Two sources told the News4JAX I-TEAM that the Jaguars weren’t aware of the missing money until FanDuel reached out to the NFL and the NFL alerted the team.
FanDuel put the NFL onto Patel’s betting in January 2023 after he placed traditional sports bets in Tennessee, according to ESPN.
In the spring of 2023, King said Patel checked himself into extensive, inpatient rehabilitation to address his addiction.
King said Patel’s addiction “provides an uncontrollable urge to keep gambling despite the toll it takes on one’s life, and creates a willingness to risk more and more, despite the impact it has.”
Patel remains in treatment and recovery for his gambling addiction, his attorney said, and he intends to seek ongoing treatment for the foreseeable future. Patel also founded Round Robin Recovery LLC to assist others struggling with gambling addiction and continues to be active in the treatment community, though it’s unclear what work he has done with the organization so far.
“Mr. Patel apologizes to the team with whom he enjoyed working so much, to his former colleagues, as well as to his family and the Jacksonville community,” King said in a statement.
What’s Next?
Just before news of Patel’s arrest broke, a couple from Ohio landed at Jacksonville International Airport and ordered an Uber.
A shiny black Tesla pulled up to the curb — with Patel behind the wheel. Chris Chaney told News4JAX he only learned Patel’s true backstory after the news of his arrest broke.
“He didn’t seem like somebody who had the feds on his tail or had something coming this way. He seemed very nice, helpful and a little chatty, to be honest,” Chaney said. “It’s crazy in hindsight to think about what this guy had going on in his life.”
Chaney said Patel told him he was recently laid off from his job with the Jacksonville Jaguars as part of the team’s financial restructuring. Patel never mentioned that he was accused of stealing.
It will take a lot more passenger pickups to get right with the Jaguars.
As part of his plea agreement, Patel said he would repay the Jaguars the more than $20 million he stole. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice asked the judge for an order of forfeiture and said the government couldn’t find the money. The Department of Justice said it wants to seize Patel’s condo, the Tesla and the designer watch, an estimated value of $387,000. He could also face an additional fine of up to $500,000.
Meanwhile, the Jaguars are apparently trying to get their money back from at least one gambling website.
ABC News reported that the Jaguars have asked FanDuel to reimburse them for some or all of the money Patel lost on the site. It’s not clear if that is going to happen.
ESPN reported that FanDuel has an obligation under federal law to make sure funds used for sports betting were legally obtained, but the regulations and the fact that the money was used on daily fantasy betting make the issue tricky, one expert said.
Now, disgraced from his “dream job” and out on bail, Patel will face the music next week.
He is set to be sentenced on March 12 and could spend the next 30 years of his life in federal prison, a far cry from the luxury hotels he once frequented.
“Anybody [who] struggles with that kind of stuff, you hope [they] get it figured out,” Chaney said. “But I mean, that kind of behavior has to be reckoned for.”
On Wednesday, Patel’s lawyer filed a motion to allow Dr. Scott Teitelbaum to testify remotely at Patel’s sentencing. Teitelbaum is the Division Chief of Addiction Medicine and Vice Chair of the Psychiatry Department at the University of Florida Health and Recovery Center and treated Patel during his in-patient treatment. Teitelbaum is also an expert on gambling addiction.
Patel’s lawyer said his testimony will not only provide insight into Patel’s progress in treatment but also expand on the mental impact of gambling addiction.
How to get help
The Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling is the statewide-designated authority on problem gambling. Services offered by this organization include: Florida’s 24/7 multilingual helpline; referrals to free supports including: self-help, professional treatment (available to everyone regardless of ability to pay), financial and legal resources, literature and resources for at-home use and use in a therapeutic setting, and opportunities to speak with other recovering compulsive gamblers by phone or through the agency’s online forums.
If you or anyone you know needs up, there is a 24 Hour Helpline: 1-888-236-4848.
