Raids Smash Huge Sports Betting Ring; Authorities Arrest 8 : Gambling: The operation took in $2 million a week and was the second broken up in Southland recently.

A $100-million-a-year sports betting ring has been broken up after a series of police raids in Los Angeles and Riverside counties ended with the arrests of eight people and the confiscation of a variety of gambling paraphernalia, authorities said Monday.

Officers served search warrants at 13 locations early Sunday morning, capping a yearlong investigation into the illegal betting ring apparently centered in Hawthorne, Long Beach Police Sgt. Jim Sutton said.

The eight suspects were booked for investigation of bookmaking and conspiracy. All were released on $2,500 bail, police said.

The raids Sunday netted about $17,000 in cash, plus telephones, paper shredders, tape recorders, calculators, weapons and electronic fax machines, which police believe were used to transmit odds and take bets from gamblers.

“It looks like a big one,” Sutton said of the operation. “It’s hard to say how big, but it looks pretty significant. We think they were taking bets from far beyond the area.”

Based on recovered betting markers, detectives estimated the operation was taking in $2 million a week, Sutton said.

The breakup of the betting ring comes just a month after authorities dismantled a similar $1-million-a-week operation that covered Los Angeles, Orange and Santa Barbara counties. Four people were arrested.

Sutton said the flurry of arrests is partly because of the heavy betting during football season, which is typically the year’s most lucrative and intense gambling period.

For example, for 20 minutes after detectives raided the Hawthorne operation, officers continued to take bets over the phone, recording nearly $40,000 in wagers. Sutton said most of the bets were for between $1,000 and $10,000.

“We just kept taking in the action,” he said. “The phones were ringing continuously.”

Long Beach police began their investigation a year ago with a tip on small-scale neighborhood betting in the local area, Sutton said. But through surveillance of local betting sites and a review of phone records, detectives focused on two apartments in Hawthorne, which seemed to be the center of a broader operation.

Sutton said detectives had no idea how much money was being wagered until an undercover officer walked past an open window several months ago and overheard a $1,000 bet being placed.

“That was a lot bigger than we expected,” the sergeant said.

Using telephone records of the Hawthorne apartments, detectives were led to the Riverside County home of 73-year-old David Di Donato, who police believe may have headed the operation.

A search of Di Donato’s Hemet residence on Sunday turned up about $15,000 in cash and several utility bills for the Hawthorne apartments issued in Di Donato’s name, authorities said.

Inside the Hawthorne apartments, detectives arrested Donald Jacobelly, 33; Carmine Scuteri, 32; Patrick Froncillo, 30; Mark Fedderly, 21, and Mervin Brewer, 41. Donald Lavigne, 59, and Robert Thompson, 76, were arrested in Long Beach.

Sutton said the betting ring had been operating for at least five months, although he said the network was so well organized that he suspected it had been run from different areas for years.

“It looks like this operation has been around for quite a while,” the sergeant said.