Billy Walters in a screen shot from Youtube of a 60 Minutes interview from 2011
Lexington, KY – William ‘Billy’ Walters, a famed Las Vegas bettor and chairman of the company that recently acquired the Glenn Auto Group, is facing FBI and SEC scrutiny for alleged insider trading involving billionaire and Wall Street raider Carl Icahn and superstar golfer Phil Mickelson according to a report Walters rebuffs that first appeared in the Wall Street Journal late Friday.
The Journal's report states Walters, Mickelson and Icahn were being investigated for stock deals made by Walters and Mickelson in the days before Icahn attempted to take control of Clorox in a stock deal in mid-2011.
That was news to Walters, he said in an interview Saturday morning with Business Lexington.
"It’s real simple, I haven’t been notified by anybody I’m under any kind of investigation either with a letter, a contact, a phone call, an attempted interview, nothing," he said in a phone interview. "I’m not involved in any insider trading, I’ve never been involved in any insider trading."
"It’s obvious what this is, it’s Carl Icahn and Phil Mickelson and Billy Walters and they wrote a story that a lot of people are going to read," he said.
Walters’ Las Vegas-based Walters Group incorporated in Kentucky in 2004 in a venture that went on to own what has most recently been known as Wildcat Ford on Nicholasville Rd. and Freedom Dodge and added the Glenn Auto Group earlier this year. The May edition of Business Lexington featured an article on the group’s purchase of the Glenn name and its associated dealerships.
The local auto dealerships have leadership in Lexington operating the lots, including the long time owners of Glenn Cyrus Dicken, Sr. and Cyrus Dicken, Jr. who are both still invested and board members of the Lexington branch of the ownership group.
"My business in Lexington is extremely important to me, my reputation is even more important to me," said Walters who is involved in many lines of business including a total of 21 car dealerships as well as golf courses.
"I have a partner [in Lexington] who runs everything," he said.
"They manage the day-to-day aspects of the dealerships 365 days a year; I don’t manage the day-to-day stuff in those dealerships," he said.
In a January 2011 report, CBS’s 60 Minutes profiled Walters, a Munfordville, Ky. native stating: “It’s hard to find anyone better at winning than Billy Walters,” in reference to his proclivity to take the Las Vegas sports books for millions on any given day.
The show quoted Las Vegas odds-maker Kenny White as calling Walters “the most dangerous sports bettor in the history of Nevada, the history of the world.”
The report stated that in addition to betting upwards of $2 million on NFL Sundays, Walters owned multiple golf courses in Las Vegas, a city CBS stated he moved to in 1980 following a bookmaking conviction in Kentucky.
The Lara Logan 60 Minutes report was capped with a discussion of Walters’ fear and distrust of Wall Street.
“His distain for Wall Street is one of the reasons Billy Walters decided to talk to us. A chance, he said, to make the point that the gambling world is not as shady as most people think,” CBS’s Logan said in her report.
“I ran into a lot of bad guys, a lot of thieves, they’d steal the Lord’s Supper. But I can tell you percentage-wise, I ran into many more with suits and ties on than I have with the gamblers,” Walters told 60 Minutes.
Logan followed Walters’ statement by asking: “So you would say the hustler from Vegas got hustled by Wall Street?”
“No doubt about it,” Walters replied.