Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from “Over/Under: An Unexpected History of Sports Betting,” by David Bockino. (Pegasus Books, June 2, 2026)

This chapter begins and ends in a Costa Rican villa. It’s just not the same villa. Actually, the first villa might not even be real. There’s a chance it’s just a regular house. Maybe even a small apartment. But the second one is definitely real. In fact it’s one of the most luxurious villas in the world. Fancy enough for the Kardashians. Literally — they’ve stayed there. And the two villas, even if one of them isn’t exactly a villa, do have at least one thing in common: They were both built with money from American sports bettors.

Let’s start in the first villa, a supposed “ten-thousand-square-foot hacienda in the rolling green hills of Escazú” owned by an American named Steve Budin. Why the skepticism? Because everybody who knows him says that Steve Budin likes to exaggerate, embellish, stretch the truth. In his memoir “Bets, Drugs and Rock and Roll,” Budin claimed that he became the “biggest bookmaker in the world” and “forever change[d] the way people bet on sports.” Neither of those things are true. But the story told in Budin’s memoir provides a path to an even more interesting tale, one in which offshore bookmakers help launch one of the........

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