LOS ANGELES (Feb 3): A high-rolling Malaysian poker player accused of running an illegal World Cup betting operation out of his luxury villa at Caesars Palace may get the evidence the FBI collected against him thrown out of court.

A federal magistrate judge in Las Vegas on Jan. 30 agreed with Wei Seng Phua and his son Darren that the Federal Bureau of Investigation used false and misleading information to obtain a search warrant for their villa and recommended that the government not be allowed to use evidence gained from the July raid.

“The investigators’ suspicions that Phua was engaged in illegal sports betting at Caesars Palace may be borne out by the evidence recovered in the execution of the warrant,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Peggy Leen said in her recommendation. “However, a search warrant is never validated by what its execution recovers.”

The FBI had failed to disclose in their request for a search warrant that agents had intentionally cut off the Internet connection to the villa to gain entry posing as technical support staff and look for evidence of illegal gambling before obtaining a warrant, according to the recommendation.

Misleading Warrant

In addition, Leen said, the warrant application misleadingly linked Phua to the occupants of another villa at Caesars who had asked for an unusual number of computers and other pieces of equipment. Hotel employees first became suspicious that those occupants were operating an illegal gambling hub, which led to the FBI’s investigation.

Natalie Collins, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Las Vegas, didn’t immediately return a call for comment on the recommendation. A final ruling on the request to suppress the evidence will be made by a district judge.

Wei Seng Phua, who also goes by Paul Phua, and his son are the only two remaining defendants after five other people from Hong Kong, China and Malaysia who were charged with them agreed to plead guilty.

Phua, a regular at million-dollar poker games, and the others were arrested after technicians at Caesars Palace discovered that a villa occupied by people who the FBI said were part of Phua’s group was set up as a gambling hub, with banks of computers and monitors and three TVs switched to World Cup games.

Phua had been arrested in Macau a month earlier for allegedly operating an illegal sports gambling business there.

The case is U.S. v. Phua 14-CR-00249, U.S. District Court, District of Nevada (Las Vegas).