Big Crime Wave in a Little Pool? Yeah, You Betcha

Things must be a little slow around the Newport Beach Police Department.

As part of its “Let’s Squeeze the Last Little Bit of Fun Out of Life” policy, the department has swooped in and broken up a nest of vipers at the Alley, a Pacific Coast Highway bar where (are you sitting down for this one?) they apparently have a weekly football pool.

The cops got wind of it and assigned some undercover officers to smoke it out. During a four-week investigation in which they dressed like customers and placed bets as high as $10 (!), the cops soon had the net drawn tight.

Last week, bartender Timothy Cooper was trapped like a fly in a web. He was arrested and faces arraignment. His biggest problem is being laughed out of the business.

This is enough to make me rethink my support for putting 100,000 more cops on the streets. Imagine the havoc they could cause.

When I tried to talk to the Alley manager late Friday night, she refused, saying she had no way of knowing who I was. Can’t say that I blame her. Apparently, you can’t trust anybody anymore.

Illegal Sex Acts Too!

Bars ain’t what they used to be. The next thing you know, it’ll be illegal to bum a cigarette off the guy next to you or ask a waitress for her phone number.

(Psst, detectives. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I happen to know of bars where guys encourage women to leave with them, and I think they intend to have sex with them later that night. And in exchange for that, these guys pay for these women’s drinks. That sounds like prostitution to me.)

I’m always willing to laud the police for fine work, but they didn’t even have to break a sweat in this one. I hope they didn’t waste real officers on it.

The Alley was so nefarious that, according to a police spokesman, it didn’t even try to conceal the pool. It didn’t even have the panache to run the pool after hours in a private room out back.

I’m tempted to say the cops are trying to turn bars into white-collar offices, except that the last two I’ve worked in both had football pools. I only quit playing ours last year because I never won.

Come to think of it, though, I haven’t seen our “sheet” circulate in quite a while. Maybe we got religion. Or maybe we were secretly busted, and nobody told me about it.

In a town where Dennis Rodman should be under 24-hour surveillance, was this really a wise deployment of Newport Beach’s resources? Especially when another bartender at the Alley had an idea that could have short-circuited everything: If the cops were shocked to find gambling on the premises, why not just tell the bar to stop?

A Line on Police Pools

Perhaps there’s more here than meets the eye. From time to time, police conduct sweeps in which they break up major crime rings. Maybe this operation is part of a larger sting. Perhaps the feds are in on it, but Newport Beach cops aren’t allowed to discuss it.

The only thing wrong with that theory is that one of our reporters stopped in a few other bars in the vicinity and asked patrons and employees if they had football pools. Their answers could best be summed up as, “Of course, we do.”

Kind of makes you wonder how the department missed them.

Still, the city has sent out a clear message: “If you want to get in a football pool, bud, better move on down the line to Laguna Beach. We don’t want your kind around here.”

What’s that? Betting on football is illegal? The police have a duty to enforce the law?

Spare me. Anybody who knows cops knows these guys memorize point spreads like they do the department manual. If they really wanted to put a dent in NFL pools, they could head for the detective bureau of most police departments.

Maybe I should snoop around, see what I can find out about our office pool.

Just one question for the police:

What’s the going rate for informants?

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers can reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.