Nevada gaming regulators have dropped criminal charges against William West Roberts, the Las Vegas handicapper known as Wild Bill, ending for now a case that accused him of running a multimillion-dollar bookmaking operation.
The dismissal came on 13 August, according to the Review-Journal, but the reason the Gaming Control Board withdrew the case was not clear. Clark County prosecutors served Roberts with a Marcum notice the same day, and prosecutor Austin Beaumont said he intends to take the matter to a grand jury.
Roberts had been arrested in April after what officials described as a long investigation that began with an email from Catrina Andrino, the mother of his child, in April 2022. He was charged with operating a gaming establishment without a valid license, receiving compensation for bets without a gaming license and receiving unlawful wagers from someone in Nevada.
Investigators said Roberts accepted bets through a website based in Costa Rica and mixed the proceeds with money tied to Ace’s Family Fitness and his sports consulting business. They also said casino records showed he wagered about $8 million at Nevada sportsbooks, which the board believed was part of a strategy to hedge risk from the alleged illegal operation.
The board said Roberts appeared in 334 cash transaction reports between January 2022 and January 2026, with more than $7 million in cash transactions. It also said multiple financial institutions closed his accounts because of suspicious banking activity. In a separate phase of the inquiry, an informant placed 23 wagers with Roberts through the offshore platform from September 2025 through January 2026, while undercover officers posed as gamblers.
Roberts has denied that he was acting as a bookmaker. He has said he is a frequent gambler and runs a sports information business that sells betting picks for a fee, and has argued that his use of offshore websites was only to track moving betting lines. His attorney, Chris Rasmussen, has also said the allegations are false and that the FBI had investigated Roberts for years and closed the matter. Roberts himself called the case a witch hunt and said the FBI wanted nothing to do with it.
