St. Louis cops seized tickets from scalpers for friends to attend World Series games

A group of St. Louis police officers were involved in a scam to seize tickets from scalpers so their friends and family could attend World Series games in 2006, recently released documents show.

The ACLU posted documents Thursday that they had been seeking to obtain since 2007 regarding the case of corruption. Vice Sports wrote about the scam on Friday and says that the St. Louis Police Department created a World Series Scalping Detail of 22 employees to stop people from scalping tickets during the ’06 World Series between the Cardinals and Detroit Tigers. The problem is the cops flipped the seized tickets to friends and family after busting the scalpers.

Vice Sports provides the details:

The detail seized 98 tickets from 44 arrests. Of those 98 tickets, 34 of them—or 35 percent—were given by the arresting officers to family or friends, who then used the tickets themselves. Eight of the 18 detectives on the detail re-appropriated tickets. Confiscated scalped tickets were used for all three home games, often mere hours after the arrests and seizures.

Now that is some serious corruption.

The scam was discovered when an arrested scalper heard a cop who seized his tickets call his wife to ask her if she wanted to attend the game using the tickets in question. The tickets were used to attend the game and then given back to the alleged scalper afterwards. The arrested man claims $2,500 was seized from him and only $539 was returned to him.

Officers were punished with demotions, reductions in pay and two-week suspensions.

Between this story and the hacking story involving the Cardinals, we’re finding out that not everything involving baseball in St. Louis is quite so pure.

Forearm bash to Hardball Talk