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Once again, shady goings on at 2+2 caught the eye of its impressive cadre of amateur detectives who again succeeded in exposing fraud on 2+2.

This time, the fraudster was Marisa McNee, a principal at the public relations firm Middle Coast LLC.

With a decent amount of fanfare, Marisa McNee launched a non-existent legal entity called FairPlay USA, claiming that her organization was a “new coalition of law enforcement officials, consumer protection experts, poker players, companies in the commercial gaming industry and other Americans concerned about Internet gambling.

As it turns out, this description of FairPlay USA, and even the existence of a legal entity, is basically completely false, and is, at best, an absurd exaggeration. I’m a little handicapped by FairPlay USA’s refusal to answer questions I posed to them on this subject, but here is what seems to be the case:

FairPlay USA is not a coalition as it claims. It claims to have law enforcement members, poker players and consumer safety experts among its ranks. Please note the use of the plural on each of these groups. In fact, FairPlay USA has NO MEMBERS AT ALL. It has a board of advisors.

So look at FairPlay USA’s claim to be a coalition. They say they have plural law enforcement officers, poker players and consumer safety experts. What they actually have is one of each of those classes of peope on their board of advisors:

Law Enforcement: Tom Ridge, former director of Homeland security.

Poker players: Greg Raymer

Consumer Safety Expert: Parry Aftab

That’s it. FairPlay USA, meaning specifically Marisa McNee, refused to answer my direct request for evidence that there were more people involved from these categories than these three people. I take this refusal to answer as a tacit admission that my assumption that there is no coalition of people in FairPlay USA is correct. As Marisa McNee said in the thread on 2+2, “we don’t have members, we have supporters.”

Why would a group conducting a self-described “grassroots campaign” not have members? That makes no sense. A truly grassroots campaign would want as many members as it could possibly have.

The simple answer turns out to be that FairPlay USA is not a grassroots organization, movement or campaign. Its executive director, Marisa McNee, is a media consultant at Middle Coast LLC in the employ of Caesars and MGM. There are no members of FairPlay USA who are not employees of Middle Coast LLC.

All of this information was deduced yesterday by a group of 2+2ers working together. Poster Troveur was the first that I saw to recognize that FairPlay USA was an astroturf operation of Caesars and MGM. LetsGambool, SBA9630, me, and a few others piled on with tough questions designed to flesh out the relationship between FairPlay USA and Caesars/MGM. We learned a lot from which questions Marisa McNee chose to answer and which she chose to ignore.

PokerXanadu, a legislation forum moderator, and Florida state director for the Poker Players Alliance, was in the thread yesterday asking similarly tough questions. But, as it turns out, he did not need to be deducing that FairPlay USA was an astroturf operation of Caesars and MGM–He knew it because Marisa McNee had already told him that was the case.

In an explosive revelation in the FairPlay USA thread on 2+2, PokerXanadu admitted that he had been tentatively approached by Greg Raymer on behalf of FairPlay USA to be its spokesman on 2+2, and that in the course of that and subsequent conversations it became clear that the so-called coalition was a sham:

My interactions with FPU began last week, starting with a phone call I received from Greg Raymer. He told me of his involvement as a member of their Advisory Board, and wanted to find out if I’d be interested in doing work for them in a similar manner to what TE does for the PPA. I said I could be interested but had a lot of questions (which would have largely revolved around whether or not FPU would be truly grassroots, i.e. input from players would matter). The next step according to Greg was supposed to be a phone call from David Satz of Ceasars (Vice President of Government Relations and Development), but that call never came.

As I found out later, what actually happened after my discussion with Greg was an e-mail from Greg to Marisa about me, including a suggestion that I receive compensation (pay) for my work (something Greg & I discussed). This, according to Marisa, “sparked an internal conversation about having a paid person from the PPA/2+2″, and it didn’t go any further. (Note: Means “paid person” for FPU, not that I am paid by PPA or 2+2 – I am just a volunteer for both.)

So here is my take on this part of it (speculation): David Satz, a senior lobbyist for Ceasars, came up with the idea of funding a new organization to muster public advocacy support from interests groups that could be aligned with Ceasers federal online poker legislation goals. The money was put up by Ceasars and MGM to start (others have been approached, according to Greg) and Middle Coast LLC was selected to staff it.

So here we have clear evidence of what the 2+2 detectives had deduced: That FairPlay USA is a sham; that it owes its existence solely to the (not very bright) idea of a Caesar’s lobbying executive, and that Caesars hired Marisa McNee and Middle Coast LLC to staff the fictional coalition called FairPlay USA.

A lot of people in the FairPlay USA thread on 2+2 are shrugging their shoulders at this and saying, in essence, “so what? We know FairPlay USA is a sham, but they are a sham that supports legalized online poker, and we are cool with that.”

I think this thinking is a mistake. As I have said in the thread:

Now, this may seem to be making a big deal out of a trivial issue, but it’s not. When you lie to someone, it is disrespectful. When it is bought and paid for representatives of Caesar’s that are doing the lying, it becomes a big deal because it is Caesar’s. Caesar’s has a long history (of which I am sure you are unaware) of treating poker players like something brown and stinky stuck to the bottom of Loveman’s shoe.

So basically, Caesar’s came into this forum under false pretenses and tried to put a con job on 2+2 posters. It is indicative of the more things change, the more they stay the same. Even now that caesar’s is putatively on our side, all we can expect from it is lies, deception and to be treated disrespectfully, as is standard for Caesar’s.

And that is the bottom line. While we will need Caesars to do the heavy lifting on getting legalized online poker, we should recognize that Caesars is our enemy. It consistently treats players with contempt, and its use of a PR shill to talk to players is just another bit of evidence that this is true.

If Caesars respected players, it would have come to 2+2 to deal with us face to face. If it does so in the future, that will go a long way toward building respect and trust for a brand that players should have neither for right now.

In the meantime, mad props to Troveur, LetsGambool, SBA9630, DonkeyQuixote, and everybody else who had a hand in exposing FairPlay USA as a sham astroturf operation of Caesars and MGM.