A California man who survived an assassination attempt outside an Escazú café more than a decade ago has been sentenced to federal prison for running an illegal gambling and money laundering operation out of Costa Rica. Jason Noah Feinman, 52, of Calabasas, received 27 months on June 9 in federal court in Los Angeles after pleading guilty in January to one count each of tax evasion, operating an illegal gambling business, and money laundering. A federal judge also ordered him to pay more than $1.3 million (about ₡589 million) in restitution and a $150,000 (₡68 million) fine, plus interest.
According to the Justice Department, Feinman operated a Costa Rica–based business that ran a website unlicensed bookmakers used to take wagers, including from bettors living in California, in violation of both state and federal law. The platform was a service layer for other operators rather than a consumer-facing sportsbook, and court filings do not name the business. Prosecutors say Feinman then laundered the cash the operation generated by converting it into checks made out to himself or his companies.
The mechanics were straightforward and repetitive. Between May 18, 2018 and January 2, 2024, the Justice Department says, Feinman handed a single customer more than $1.5 million (â‚¡680 million) in cash and received 18 checks payable to him or his businesses for the equivalent amount, one of them for $200,000. Court filings identify that customer only by the initials C.K. and describe checks whose memo lines frequently referenced loans. Across the life of the operation, prosecutors say Feinman exchanged between $1.5 million and $3.5 million (â‚¡680 million to â‚¡1.59 billion) in cash for checks.
The tax case ran alongside it. Feinman reported no taxable income to the Internal Revenue Service on his 2020 return and paid nothing that year, despite earning roughly $1.8 million (â‚¡815 million), according to the Justice Department. Between 2018 and 2022 he evaded taxes on approximately $4.2 million (â‚¡1.9 billion) in income, a loss to the United States that prosecutors put at about $1.52 million (â‚¡689 million).
Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald of the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division and First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bilal A. Essayli for the Central District of California announced the sentence. IRS Criminal Investigation and Homeland Security Investigations conducted the investigation, and Trial Attorneys John C. Gerardi and Charles A. O’Reilly of the Criminal Division’s Tax Section prosecuted the case. The Fraud Division was created on April 7 and counts the case among its early results.
Feinman’s history in Costa Rica predates the gambling charges and includes a considerably more violent episode. In 2015 he was ambushed by gunmen on a motorcycle as he left a parking lot in Escazú, struck by nine rounds, and survived. Two men, Ricardo Francisco SolÃs Méndez and Steven Javier Calvo Sánchez, were tried at the Pavas courts for attempted homicide in a case that rested heavily on Feinman’s own identification of his attackers, which his attorney Miguel Jiménez Cerros said the American made on three separate occasions.
During the trial, two parking attendants who witnessed the shooting testified they had heard gunfire but could offer nothing further, with one telling the court he had a family. Jiménez Cerros said at the time that his client’s next objective was helping investigators identify whoever ordered the attack, a question the proceedings never resolved.
The case is not an outlier. In October 2025, Christopher Scott King, 51, of Santa Monica was sentenced to 21 months after admitting he ran an unlicensed bookmaking operation from Los Angeles County using a Costa Rica–based sports betting website to take wagers from California bettors. Prosecutors said King concealed $13.6 million (₡6.16 billion) in income from the IRS between 2019 and 2022 and laundered proceeds through real estate development and gold purchases.
He was ordered to forfeit $10 million (â‚¡4.53 billion) and pay $3.8 million (â‚¡1.72 billion) in restitution. A year earlier, Matthew Bowyer of Orange County pleaded guilty to running a betting ring that moved wagers through Costa Rican websites and casino agents, an operation whose clients included Ippei Mizuhara, the former interpreter for Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, who placed roughly 19,000 bets through it.
The pattern that emerges from these prosecutions is consistent enough to be a template. American operators establish the technical and administrative side of a bookmaking business in Costa Rica, where offering online betting services to customers abroad occupies a permissive regulatory space and has supported a substantial data-processing sector for years, then use that infrastructure to reach bettors in states where the activity is plainly illegal.
What repeatedly ends these operations is not the betting itself but what happens to the cash afterward. In Feinman’s case it was checks. In King’s it was property and gold. In each, the proceeds eventually had to enter a banking system, and that is where IRS Criminal Investigation found them.
For the thousands of foreign residents working in or around Costa Rica’s online gaming and call center industry, the distinction that matters is jurisdictional rather than technical. Costa Rica does not license offshore sportsbooks in the way Curaçao or Malta do, and companies here have historically operated under ordinary commercial registration on the understanding that no bets are accepted from within the country.
That arrangement offers no protection whatsoever from United States law when American customers are on the other end of the transaction, and the last three years of federal sentencings suggest prosecutors have become considerably more systematic about following the money back to its source.
