In 2008, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission, or KGC, released a report outlining its findings in the Ultimate Bet super user scandal. The agency explained that former World Series of Poker Main Event winner and UB founder Russ Hamilton was the “main person responsible for and benefiting from the multiple cheating incidents.” However, according to Scott ElevenGrover Bell, the story doesn’t end there.

Later this year, Bell will release a documentary entitled Ultimate Beat: Too Much to Lose, which examines several unanswered questions from the scandal. Among the outstanding issues, according to Bell, are the involvement of current bwin.party executive Jim Ryan, the participation of four other individuals with inside knowledge, and whether Hamilton is actually the man who should be blamed. PocketFives caught up with Bell to talk about his project.

PocketFives: The UB super user scandal appears to be largely wrapped up. Why release this documentary now and what new information can viewers expect to find?

Scott Bell: Because UB was only caught due to the ineptness of Absolute Poker fraudsters, the investigation went slowly, causing bits and pieces of evidence to come out. It isn’t easy to understand up close, but with the benefit of time and distance, we are able to line up the evidence and allow folks to draw a conclusion.

PocketFives: Can you talk about the involvement of Jim Ryan (pictured) in the UB scandal? Ryan is currently with bwin.party.

Scott Bell: Ryan is an accountant by trade and he came to Excapsaas Cryptologic’s CFO. It seems clear that Excapsa was a vessel built to monetize UB with an IPO. You can make the case that Excapsa did very little, that Uri Kozai and John Kemp were straw men who collected checks and stock shares for nothing, but that doesn’t appear to be correct. Kozai continued to support the code base after the sale and Kemp presided over a sophisticated network with hiring capability.

They may have shopped out work to the original founders within the security spin-off iovation, but in the end, they held a responsibility to shareholders who purchased when the shares opened at close to $2 each. It’s fair to say that cheating didn’t wreck the stock value, but it did wreck the value after the owners took it private.

It is the sale where Ryan is most vulnerable. You can also look at his conduct during the investigation and remuneration of players. He had a responsibility to call for a public audit, to not surrender Excapsa’s assets until a legitimate quantum of cheating was determined by an independent agency. In turn, he should have called for authorities to arrest the founding compatriots involved in a conspiracy to defraud the company, its shareholders, and the poker playing community.

It’s key that Ryan had some high-powered Board of Directors members, an aboriginal grand chief, an old business acquaintance for a liquidator, and a stooge named Paul Leggett to put a sheen on things until the storm passed. So, if he is running the underlying software for MGM and there is someone inside his company who is dirty, what does Ryan’s track record say he will do? Clean it up? Call the Nevada Gaming Commission? Or cover it up long enough to extricate himself?

PocketFives: Russ Hamilton (pictured) was ultimately singled out as the main man responsible for the UB scandal. What role do you think he actually had in cheating players?

Scott Bell: I think Russ is fairly pinned as the pointy end of the cheating spear. He had the history, the knowledge of hustling, and the ability to understand how to cheat humbly. He had confidantes whom he trusted to run money, funnel money, and buy property and sell it back at depreciated prices when the market was still strong.

But, in addition to all of Russ’ team, you had to have folks in the software arena, the fraud management section, and in other areas of the technology side that would have spotted the problems very early on, unless of course they were told not to or participated in hiding the tracks. We will cover the fraud management tools, the developers, and the way the company was put together to show who would have been involved.

PocketFives: On your documentary’s website, you refer to “at least four individuals [who] appear to have used inside knowledge of the crimes to enrich themselves after the cheating was discovered.” Can you elaborate?

Scott Bell: Everyone should understand that brainwashdododidn’t really bring much to the case and, in fact, was clearly some kind of extortion attempt. If anything, he or she bought time for Nat Arem and Mike Fosco and the others to uncover the real damning stuff. For various reasons, it became necessary to name Zoltan Rozsa as this individual, but that story has a lot of holes. We will go into the actual identify of brainwashdodo. We also cover three other situations where folks appear to have gone the wrong way.

PocketFives: Phil Hellmuth (pictured) appears to be largely insulated from attacks regarding UB, whereas Annie Duke has been the brunt of them. Should they be treated equally? Talk about what roles they played in UB besides publicly representing the brand.

Scott Bell: It’s always hard to say someone should get more derision than Annie Duke, but yeah, for my money, Phil probably deserves it. It’s important to understand the first few months of the UB investigation and Phil handling conversations with Mike Fosco.

As that progressed, it was clear to the Two Plus Two guys that UB was slow-walking the investigation and Phil even agreed that things didn’t seem right. As 2008 wore on, the company continued to revise upward its tally of cheating names and amounts. Their own internal audit is on file with the Canadian court, but is not public and it can’t even agree with the final KGC report. As with all great crimes, the cover-up is usually worse than the crime itself and that appears to be the case here. People were screaming about the issues from almost the beginning.

Phil as a founding owner should have asserted himself as the face of the brand and said, “Here and no further.” He should have sat down with Greg and Russ and had a “come to Jesus” talk with them. If they told him, “We will do the right thing,” then he should have brought the hammer down in 2010 when it was clear that full hand histories were never going to be released by Greg, whether via Kozai, Norton, or whomever.

Hellmuth should have demanded a public audit by KPMG or PWC or someone who could prove the payouts were legit. And he should have quit repping the company and we damn sure should not have been forced to endure Joe Sebok looking for the hand histories in all the wrong places.

PocketFives: In your teaser video about the documentary, you talk about balances in idle accounts defaulting back to UB. Talk about how those come into play and the effect that policy could have had.

Scott Bell: Well, we know it happened. The guy Paul Leggett talks about in the video received $24,000 in 2011 from one of these closed accounts. We also know that UB was very lax about allowing people to play on relatives’ accounts, change accounts, and change screen names. It is another clarion call to why they didn’t release a public audit of screen names, account names, and real names. It is a very intriguing part of the story and we will detail it clearly.

PocketFives: What effect do you want the video to have? When and how will it be released and how can interested people obtain copies?

Scott Bell: I think it is about closure and to hold folks accountable whose avarice was way over the top for no good reason. We will explain many of the reasons they employed cheating at such a crazy level. Maybe on the surface, to old school hustlers aiming to join the 1%, it seemed to be the correct strategy. But the worst part is they got away with it. Release is planned for the end of the year probably using a Video on Demand model.

PocketFives: How was the researchfor the video done and over what time period? Who contributed and how will the poker community know if the information portrayed in the video is unbiased?

Scott Bell: It has been ongoing since 2008 with several different folks. Mike Corriveau and myself are co-producers, but a lot of other folks explicitly helped us. And of course, a lot of our investigation was drawn from the crowd-sourcing investigation done by the forums like PocketFives and Two Plus Two. There was a post by Brett Jungblut on PocketFives that is very critical to what happened, for instance.

Is there bias in how we have pieced it together? Maybe. I take pride in the investigative journalistic stuff. Fact checking is always a challenge, but you have to make calls, so folks will have to determine if we are making good ones or not. I am very vocal when others have made less-than-solid evaluations of this case, so I can really expect nothing but a rigorous evaluation.

PocketFives: Talk about the current status of AP/UB cashouts and what the likelihood is that players will see any of their money back. PocketFives posted a feature article last week about the DOJ requesting a settlement.

Scott Bell: It is still a bit confused because we don’t know which individuals inside the company are willing to settle, who turned over the assets, and who is still fighting. We do know that a fairly major hurdle may be overcome if the court dispatches the Absolute Poker shareholding entities that are still asserting a claim to the assets. At that point, players may have a legitimate shot at reclaiming some or all of their balances depending on what kind of deal the DOJ can cut with a prospective buyer.

Some folks are publicly saying there is almost zero value and even if there were, the legal challenges will continue. Maybe, but it doesn’t appear to be so. There are a lot of moving parts and most of it we cannot see. What does seem clear is that the DOJ is trying to clean this situation up to the benefit of the players, and that has to be good.