We first saw reports of an investigation back in October and on Friday two former White Sox employees were charged after being involved in a massive ticket scheme from 2016-19.
And to make this story even more ridiculous the ticket broker, who is also facing charges, is named Bruce Lee!
Who says you can’t make money selling tickets to games of a rebuilding team? Well, illegally anyway.
Here’s how the two former employees, James Castillo and William O’Neil, worked with Lee to cost the White Sox nearly $1 million.
Via the Chicago Sun-Times.
The indictment alleges Costello and O’Neil generated thousands of complementary and discount White Sox tickets — without required vouchers — and gave them to Lee in exchange for unspecified amounts of cash.
Costello allegedly generated the tickets for Lee while using other employees’ ID codes to access White Sox computers. He allegedly did so to avoid any detection by management of the large number of tickets he created. In 2017, he allegedly recruited O’Neil to help.
So, Lee would get the tickets and then sell them on StubHub at below face value to try and conceal the scheme. However, these dudes got way too greedy and that’s how Lee was eventually caught. The White Sox noticed that Lee sold nearly 100x more tickets on StubHub in 2018 compared to the next highest total from an individual ticket broker on the site.
Pointing to the 11,000 tickets Lee allegedly sold during the 2018 season, the agent noted that the next most successful three sellers on StubHub sold just 129, 113 and 108 tickets, respectively.
And in a way Michael Kopech’s MLB debut in August 2018, at Guaranteed Rate Field in Chicago played a part in the team catching on to Lee’s scam. Lee allegedly sold 500 tickets for Kopech’s debut, which the team said wouldn’t be possible without help from within the White Sox.
